It was an opportunistic intelligence-gathering operation. The Soviet hacker gang had quite literally walked through the KGB's front door, offering to sell military secrets. Given that the agency paid $68,000 for the data, it must be assumed they were satisfied with what they had received.
Espionage is a curious trade. Those who claim to know how intelligence agencies work say that computer penetration has become a new and useful tool for latter-day spies. The Americans are said to be involved, through the NSA, as are the British, through GCHQ, the General Communications Headquarters, which gathers intelligence from diverse sources. Hacking, at this rarefied level, becomes a matter of national security.
Of course the Americans and the British aren't the only ones suspected of involvement. Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is said to have penetrated the computer systems of French defense contractors who had sold weapons to its enemies in the Middle East. The Israeli service then altered some of the data for the weaponry, rendering it vulnerable to their own defense systems. In this case, the Israelis may have been merely copying the French. During the Gulf War it was widely reported that certain French missiles--the Exocets, which had previously been sold to the Iraqis--included back doors to their computer guidance sys- tems. These back doors would allow the French military to send a radio signal to the Exocets' on-board computers, rendering the weapons harmless.
The scheme, neat as it appears, was never put to the test. The Iraqis never used their Exocets during the conflict--perhaps because they, too, had heard the stories. On the other hand, the entire scenario could well have been French disinformation.
It was in this murky world of spying and double-cross that the Soviet hacker gang found itself. In the wider sphere of international and industrial espionage the Germans were ultimately only minor irritants. The technology now exists to access the computer systems of competitors and rivals, and it would be naive to presume that these methods are not being used. It is possible, for instance, to read a computer screen with a radio signal from a site hundreds of feet away. And, during the Cold War, a small truck believed to be equipped with such a device was shipped from Czechoslovakia to Canada. It entered the United States under the guise of diplomatic immunity and traveled, in a curious and indirect way, to the Mexican border. The route took the van close to a sizable number of American defense installations, where the driver would stop, often for days. It was assumed by the small army of federal agents following the truck that it was homing in on computer screens on the bases and sending the material on to the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
It's not known if the Czechs and the Soviets found any information of real value, but with the increased use of technology, and the vulnerability of networked computer systems, it is probable that corporations and governments will be tempted to subvert or steal data from rivals. And, under these circumstances, there is inevitably another explanation for the break-in at Philips-France and SGS-Thomson. In 1986 and 1987 Mossad was becoming increasingly worried about deliveries of French weaponry to Iraq and other Arab states. Some of the electronic components for these weapons were designed at the two companies. The Israelis wanted to destroy or steal the data for these components, and to do so, hacked into the companies' computers, using the same techniques being used by the Germans. Mossad knew that the German hackers would get the blame. Indeed, they knew that Pengo and Koch were wandering about the same computers. But the two Germans wouldn't have destroyed information--that would have drawn attention to their activities; nor did they ever manage to steal anything worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That was Mossad.
Koch, with his love of conspiracies, would have appreciated such a theory. The Illuminati--the French police, the KGB, the Stasi and Mossad--were real after all.
CRACKDOWN
