JIMMY CARTER: SUPER SPY?

The rumors are that the Navy’s newest nuclear sub, the USS Jimmy Carter, has been designed for spy­work, with a “spe­cial capa­bil­ity… to tap under­sea cables and eaves­drop on the com­mu­ni­ca­tions pass­ing through them,” accord­ing to the AP.
The rumors are right, Military.com’s under­sea war­fare experts believe. Here’s what retired Rear Admiral Hank McKinney, the for­mer com­man­der of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s sub­ma­rine force, had to say:

The Navy has for years car­ried out spe­cial surviel­lance mis­sions with nuclear sub­marines. Most of these mis­sions utlilized attack sub­marines that were not exten­sively mod­i­fied. Specialized com­mu­ni­ca­tions inter­cept equip­ments were installed in exist­ing spaces on board these sub­marines. A few have been mod­i­fied for spe­cial oceano­graphic mis­sions and capa­bil­i­ties. In the past, these included USS HALIBUT, USS SEAWOLF, USS RICHARD B. RUSSELL, and USS PARCHE. Each of these sub­marines was mod­i­fied to acco­mo­date these new mis­sions. In the case of USS JIMMY CARTER, all of the mod­i­fi­ca­tions were made before the sub­ma­rine was deliv­ered to the Navy. This sub­ma­rine will be uti­lized to con­duct many spe­cial­ized mis­sions, some of which will be rou­tine unclas­si­fied oceano­graphic research oper­a­tions which will advance our knowl­edge of the ocean. Some of the mis­sions will be highly clas­si­fied mis­sions which I am unable to com­ment on. (empha­sis mine)

Undersea thriller author, sub­ma­rine author­ity, and Military​.com colum­nist Joe Buff notes that a 2001 Wall Street Journal arti­cle unveiled the NSA’s desire to tap under­sea cables. “It is rea­son­able to pre­sume that [the abil­ity] to do this under­wa­ter, by prop­erly trained Navy divers, is now achiev­able,” Buff writes.

Ironically, an ear­lier nuclear sub named USS Seawolf, com­mis­sioned in the 1950s, was secretly mod­i­fied with a hull sec­tion that allowed sat­u­ra­tion divers to work on the seafloor at con­sid­er­able depths. (Saturation divers spend a long period liv­ing and rest­ing in a shirt­sleeves envi­ron­ment with a mixed-​​gas atmos­phere pres­sur­ized to equal the depth of their job site. After days or even weeks of daily work shifts, they then undergo a long period of hyper­baric decom­pres­sion to be able to return to sea-​​level air. France claimed sev­eral years ago to have had men in “soft” scuba out­fits — not hard exoskele­ton suits — per­form use­ful man­ual tasks on the bot­tom at 3,000 feet.)
In my opin­ion USS Jimmy Carter is highly likely to include such facil­i­ties, essen­tially a modern-​​era Sea Lab built into the sub­ma­rine itself.

Click here for more, as Buff goes deep into mechan­ics of lis­ten­ing in on under­sea chatter.

The issue of how to col­lect the tapped com­mu­ni­ca­tions in real-​​time also isn’t new. In addi­tion to the under­sea tap ref­er­enced in the [Journal] arti­cle, which by the way affected the Soviet Navy’s Pacific Fleet head­quar­ters and waters in the Sea of Okhotsk off the west­ern Pacific, another tap was emplaced to lis­ten in on Northern Fleet com­mu­ni­ca­tions near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula on the Barents Sea off of the North Atlantic — this tap was not betrayed by the spy men­tioned in the arti­cle, because he did not know about it. The idea was seri­ously dis­cussed in the American intel­li­gence and sub­ma­rine com­mu­nity of lay­ing an under­sea cable from that tap to Iceland, using sub­marines and divers, so that a lis­ten­ing sta­tion could mon­i­tor the cable’s mes­sage traf­fic con­tin­u­ously. Open sources state that this cable wasn’t built, partly because the Cold War ended and the cost didn’t seemed jus­ti­fied.
However, with tech­nol­ogy at least fif­teen years more advanced now, it is quite pos­si­ble that Carter can carry within her 100-​​foot long, 42-​​foot diam­e­ter spe­cial “wasp waist” hull section’s “garage space” a con­sid­er­able length of fiber optic cable. (Wasp waist refers to the nar­row inner pres­sure hull, which allows for the ocean-​​interface garage space vol­ume between the pres­sure hull and the outer hull that con­forms to the over­all stream­lined teardrop shape of the ves­sel.)
This hypo­thet­i­cal cable need not be led up onto land in friendly turf for it to be use­ful. It need only estab­lish enough “stand-​​off dis­tance” from the tap, out into neu­tral or inter­na­tional waters, where var­i­ous means of trans­mis­sion of inter­cepts are more fea­si­ble with­out enemy detec­tion or inter­fer­ence. These include a hard-​​wired or acoustic-​​link modem sta­tion that is mon­i­tored by sub­marines that deploy there in rota­tion for Indications and Warning mis­sions. Or, as the arti­cle says, var­i­ous radio buoy trans­mit­ters and other means could be used to con­tin­u­ally relay inter­cepts on to the NSA for detailed analy­sis. Spread-​​spectrum or fre­quency agile, super high fre­quency (SHF) or extremely high fre­quency (EHF) trans­mit­ters, with very low prob­a­bil­ity of inter­cep­tion, mounted on low-​​observable buoys, con­stantly “talk­ing” to U.S. spy satel­lites, are surely within cur­rent tech­ni­cal means if bud­get­ing were avail­able.
These trans­mit­ters could be pow­ered for lengthy peri­ods using the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of fuel cell or semi fuel cell tech­nol­ogy, some types of which are open to the sea and in fact use nat­u­rally cir­cu­lat­ing sea­wa­ter as their elec­trolyte. Such radio buoy band­width would be ade­quate to con­vey infor­ma­tion from a fiber optic cable, espe­cially given math­e­mat­i­cal data-​​compression tech­niques and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence rou­tines in an attached com­puter that could quickly “learn” which cable lines and which mes­sage traf­fic were truly of strate­gic inter­est to the United States. (A com­mu­ni­ca­tions laser might be used instead of a radio, just as some submarine/​satellite comms links now use laser beams.)
It is also worth not­ing that the garage space and “peo­ple tank” facil­i­ties within Carter’s added hull sec­tion are almost cer­tainly mis­sion recon­fig­urable, that is, eas­ily altered to serve dif­fer­ent mis­sion pro­files. This is the case with the USS Virginia design, and it appears likely that the same new, hyper-​​flexible approach to sub­ma­rine archi­tec­ture was applied to Carter’s spe­cial mod­i­fi­ca­tions; the design and con­struc­tion work of the two over­lapped, wit­ness both ships being com­mis­sioned into the Navy in 2004/​2005. Thus Carter is able to do many dif­fer­ent and excit­ing things with her 50 com­man­does, her garage space, and her ocean inter­face for deploy­ing and retriev­ing unmanned (and autonomous?) under­sea vehi­cles and per­haps also aer­ial vehicles.

THERE’S MORE: Two years before the Journal’s story broke, Inside Defense told the world about the secret mod­i­fi­ca­tions being made to U.S. subs.

February 21st, 2005 | Ships and Subs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.