Did A Computer Virus Bring Down The Soviet Union?

Did software, deliberately programmed by the CIA to fail, hasten the end of the Soviet Union?

The Washington Post reports (registration required) that “President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline.”

It quotes a new memoir by Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time (At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War, to be published next month by Ballantine Books) as saying the pipeline explosion was just one example of “cold-eyed economic warfare” that made the Soviet Union eventually “understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the entire operation.”

Aspects of this operation have been revealed before, but it’s still a pretty extraordinary tale, and makes one realise the power that software holds over us. And given that all this happened in 1982 or even earlier, does that make the CIA the first successful virus writers? The record is presently held by Fred Cohen, who created his first virus when studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California and presented his results to a security seminar on 10 November, 1983, according to the BBC website.