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by joshuajill 1366 days ago
US also has a precedent (from the other thread):

> We actually did do this 40 years ago. Reagan covertly blew up a Soviet gas pipeline supplying Europe in 1982, which was publicized in 2004 when the former Secretary of the Air Force boasted about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/02/27/r... ("Reagan Approved Plan to Sabotage Soviets" (2004))

- "At the time, the United States was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas. There were also signs that the Soviets were trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology. Then, a KGB insider revealed the specific shopping list and the CIA slipped the flawed software to the Soviets in a way they would not detect it."

- "In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes."

Possibly the first software supply-chain attack in history? Before the term even existed.

2 comments

Yup, at the time it was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.

Also note that this was not a kinetic/physical attack, and this sabotage almost surely was kinetic/physical.

The key factors in thinking about is so are are that 1) it's much more important for the US to maintain stable/low prices, and 2) Norway is already investigating drone activity over it's oil/gas fields, and this happens the same day as Norway announces their new pipeline opening.

[0] https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Norway-In...

Note that these boasts from the Secretaries autobiography are also the only source suggesting that this happened.
Quoting the Washington Post:

> Portions of the operation have been disclosed earlier, including in a 1996 paper in Studies in Intelligence, a CIA journal.

The Wikipedia article quotes V. D. Zakhmatov to say this kind of attack was never possible in the first place because the control systems were either manual or analog, not digital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Abyss

He says it wasn't likely because most systems were analogically controlled. Emphasis in most.