Now hear this

The eavesdropping war is a military-industrial complex all by itself. World-wide, hundreds of thousands of U.S. and Soviet agents man embassy listening posts, run naval vessels bristling with antennas or pilot aircraft and launch satellites. Their mission: to make sense of the voluminous amount of data that ricochets around the world, particularly within the city limits of Washington, D.C., and Moscow.

The very magnitude of the effort ensures protection for each superpower from what may seem to be major intelligence coups by the other. Even a series of disclosures or defections cannot begin to cripple the intelligence networks, for neither superpower has the resources to neutralize the other's vast listening machinery or the inclination to stop listening in on our politically noisy world.

Bugs: Agents of the CIA often place listening devices--bugs--in the embassies, residencies, trade missions and other offices of the Soviet Union. The K.G.B. attempts to do the same in U.S. offices. The most up-to-date bugs are no bigger than a tie tack and can be placed anywhere in a wall, a ceiling, a chair or clothing. They can be--and have been--placed in embassies under construction; so complete is the bugging of the unoccupied U.S. embassy in Moscow that it has been deemed useless.

The bugs can be turned on and off by remote control or be set to be activated by heat, radiation, voice vibrations or pressure. A bug in a chair may operate only when someone sits in the chair. Some bugs can record and transmit data in a microsecond burst, making detection difficult. The most expensive bugs cost thousands of dollars each--a minute fraction of the cost of a listening satellite.

The phone lines of Soviet and U.S. facilities throughout the world are also targets of bugs by the CIA, the FBI and the K.G.B. The first contact of former National Security Agency employee Ronald Pelton with Soviet intelligence officers was recorded by the FBI and later used to help convict Pelton of espionage. Among the phone lines tapped by the CIA during agent Philip Agee's days in Uruguay were those of the Soviet embassy, consulates and commercial offices.

Overall, bugging and phone tapping represent a very small part of the listening war. The risk and effort involved in bugging a single office or tapping a single phone mean that such attempts must be conducted selectively. As a result, it's the ground stations, ships, submarines, planes and satellites with antennas that do the lion's share of spy work.

On the sea: U.S. Holystone submarines--attack submarines equipped with intercept gear--have been operating near, and sometimes in, Soviet territorial waters since 1959. By 1975, the program had come up with vital information on the Soviet submarine fleet--its configuration, capabilities, noise patterns, missiles and missile-firing capabilities. One mission involved obtaining the voice autographs of Soviet subs--tape recordings of submarine noises that could be used to identify and monitor subs throughout their active duty. Holystone subs have also detected signals from Soviet missile tests and have listened to high-level military conversations by tapping Soviet communications cables on the ocean floor.

The majority of the Soviets' mobile listening forces are A.G.I.s (auxiliary general intelligence)--floating antenna farms. First disguised by the Soviets as fishing trawlers, the A.G.I.s now keep their antennas in open view as they loiter off strategic locations in the United States, Western Europe and Asia. In 1984, A.G.I.s spent 62 days within a 100-mile radius of Norfolk, Virginia--the home of the U.S. Atlantic fleet--monitoring the communications flowing in and out of the base. A.G.I.s have also been stationed off Cape Canaveral, Florida, to monitor space-shuttle (continued on page 155)Now hear this(continued from page 71) blast-offs, early-warning communications-satellite launches and Strategic Defense Initiative tests. In January 1982, a ballistic-missile test from the first operational Trident submarine was delayed for 41 minutes as an Air Force helicopter repeatedly requested an A.G.I. to withdraw from its 1500-foot proximity of the Trident sub. Ultimately, the A.G.I. moved to a more respectable distance of 6000 feet.

In the air: Several times a month, SR-71 aircraft barrel down the runways of Mildenhall Air Force Base in England and roar off to the Soviet Union. Looking like a manta ray with its flat-black radar-resistant epoxy finish and tapering nose cone, the SR-71 carries no weapons, only cameras and electronic-interception equipment.

SR-71s fly at 100,000 feet and 2800 miles per hour in what is known as a peripheral reconnaissance mode. As it travels 40 miles or so outside Soviet territory and parallel to its borders (since the 1960 U-2 incident, SR-71s no longer fly over Soviet territory), the SR-71's electronic-intercept gear records distinctive signals emitted by Soviet air defense and ballistic-missile-warning radar. One aim: to develop electronic countermeasures for U.S. bombers, allowing them to neutralize Soviet radar in the event of war.

The mainstay of the American spy-plane fleet is the RC-135. Unlike SR-71s, the lumbering RC-135s--which cruise at 560 miles per hour at 35,000 feet--can be mistaken for commercial airplanes. Such a mistake occurred in 1983, when Soviet air personnel, mistaking the off-course Korean Air Lines flight 007 for a patrolling RC-135, shot the aircraft down in the vicinity of the military installations on the Kamchatka peninsula.

RC-135s also fly from bases in Alaska, Great Britain, Greece, Japan and Central America, intercepting Soviet signals from submarine-construction yards, missile-submarine-deployment areas and Soviet air squadrons.

According to U.S. Air Force officials, the Soviet commercial airline, Aeroflot, is involved in monitoring communications along its scheduled and "unscheduled" flight paths in the United States. The favorite targets of such flights are electronic facilities in the Hudson Valley and the Groton naval yard in Connecticut, where Trident submarines are constructed. In 1981 and 1982, Aeroflot's twice-a-week flights from Moscow to Washington went off course approximately 16 times. Aeroflot aircraft have also "strayed" over Otis Air Force Base, over Cape Cod--the location of new ballistic-missile-warning radar--and over Groton at the precise moment when the first Trident submarine was being launched.

In space: Every 90 minutes, U.S. electronic-interception satellites circle the earth, detecting signals from Soviet radar systems. Code-named Brigitte, Marilyn, Raquel and Farrah by the supersecret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), these satellites represent the least important components of America's electronic ears in space. A tenth of the way to the moon--at 22,300 miles in space--resides another group of satellites that, rotating with the earth above its equator, constantly intercept communications from large sections of the world.

Since 1970, the NRO has placed at least nine of these hovering spy satellites in orbit. The first of them was Rhyolite, which could, in the words of Robert Lindsey, author of The Falcon and the Snowman, "monitor Communist microwave-radio and long-distance-telephone traffic over much of the European land mass--eavesdropping on a Soviet commissar in Moscow talking to his mistress in Yalta or on a general talking to his lieutenants across the great continent."

Rhyolite also monitored walkie-talkie chatter during Soviet military exercises, signals that would reveal the number of warheads on a missile as well as the missile's accuracy and range, and data that would determine whether or not the Soviets were abiding by the terms set forth in the SALT treaty.

Another U.S. satellite, the 5000-pound Magnum, was carried into space aboard the space shuttle Discovery on January 24, 1985. The launch--the first all-military space-shuttle mission--took place under an unprecedented blanket of security. Conversations between the astronauts and mission controllers were kept secret, scrambled by a computer aboard NASA's space-shuttle communications satellite before their transmission to earth. The satellite is reported to have two huge antennas--one intended to intercept signals from the western Soviet Union, the other to relay the signals to another communications satellite that will, in turn, transmit them to a ground station in Australia.

Another NASA project involves the unfurling of an umbrellalike antenna in space (nearly twice the size of a football field) that is so sensitive to low-powered signals that it will pick up broadcasts from radios the size of a wrist watch. This capability will be useful in the collection of data from bugs and sensors the CIA has managed to place in Soviet conference rooms and offices.

Approximately six times a year, a rocket carrying electronic-intelligence satellites lifts off from the Soviet Union. Operating 500 miles above the earth, the satellites' antennas focus on world-wide targets, the most important being American Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases and early-warning-radar locations around the periphery of the U.S.

Since 1967, Soviet satellites have also monitored Looking Glass, an alternative command post for the SAC. Every hour of every day, a jet carries over the Midwest an Air Force general who, under certain circumstances, would be able to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles toward the Soviet Union.

Who Listens Where

The Soviets:

San Francisco--Overlooking San Francisco from one of the city's famous hills, the seven-story Soviet consulate uses its powerful rooftop antennas to absorb communications from computer and microelectronic firms in Silicon Valley (40 miles to the south) and to hone in on U.S. Navy installations in San Francisco Bay and on international oil companies within the city.

Washington State--Soviet Victor-class submarines lurk near Whidbey Island at the entrance to Puget Sound to obtain voice autographs of U.S. Trident submarines that head out into the Pacific.

Glen Cove, Long Island--Defector Arkady Shevchenko recalls that at a Glen Cove facility, "the top floors of the building are full of sophisticated equipment ... to intercept conversations." This equipment provides the Soviets with information passed to and from military bases, defense contractors and naval yards in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Pioneer Point, Maryland--Situated in the "electronically quiet" Chesapeake Bay, intercept equipment at the Soviet recreational facilities in Pioneer Point can pick up telephone conversations from Washington to New York, which maintain strong, clear signals as they pass from one relay station to another.

Washington, D.C.--From the present Soviet embassy in downtown Washington, the Soviets--via rooftop antennas--target the communications of the CIA, the Pentagon and the Treasury, Agriculture and Justice departments. Former CIA agent Harry Rositzke theorizes that "in the early Seventies, the Soviets could monitor all of the telephone calls to and from the Department of Agriculture, and they ended up knowing more about the American grain market than we did.... That's how they got that great grain deal."

Caribbean--Sixty miles south of Havana is Lourdes, the Soviet Union's largest listening facility. Two thousand Soviet technicians man the facility, which consists of vast antenna farms, large satellite-dish receiver terminals, high-speed microwave-relay systems and 50 buildings containing equipment used for monitoring, processing and analyzing data.

Among the conversations to which Lourdes listens: field-telephone relays among Army units on maneuver at Fort Benning, Georgia; communications of B-52-bomber practice flights from Florida to Louisiana; radio traffic from U.S. Atlantic-fleet headquarters at Norfolk, Virginia; computer data and private telephone calls from Atlanta to Miami and across the entire Southeastern United States.

Mexico--When the United States tests a Patriot or Pershing II missle from the White Sands, New Mexico, proving grounds, Soviet vans pull up along the other side of the U.S.-Mexican border, and, presumably, target signals that betray the function and capability of that missile.

The Americans:

Japan--Four miles northwest of Misawa Air Base in Japan is the Hill, a facility topped by a 100-foot-tall antenna system consisting of four rings of reflector screens with a diameter of 875 feet. Almost 2000 personnel from all four branches of the Armed Services man the facility, which, according to one account, "can pick up a Russian broadcast on Sakhalin or an exchange of insults between Chinese and Soviet soldiers on the Sino-Soviet border."

Outer space--At a now-closed U.S. intercept station at Karamürsel, Turkey, Americans listened in on a final, tragic conversation between cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin after ground controllers informed Komarov that his parachutes would not open and he was doomed. A crying Kosygin told Komarov that he was a national hero, that he had made the greatest achievement in Russian history, that the Russians were proud of him and that he would be remembered. After Kosygin, Komarov's wife got on the line for a final farewell. In the last few minutes, Komarov began falling apart, saying, "I don't want to die; you've got to do something." His last plea was followed by a scream as he died.

A former National Security Agency employee recalls, "We were all pretty bummed out by the whole thing. In a lot of ways, having the sort of job we do humanizes the Russians. You study them so much and listen to them for so many hours that pretty soon, you come to feel that you know more about them than about your own people."

"Aeroflot aircraft 'strayed' over Groton when the first Trident submarine was being launched."