In August 2014, two Norwegian scientists set off with
21 tons of supplies—food, equipment to measure ocean depth, an instrument to
clock water currents, computers, and a specially designed hovercraft named
Sabvabaa (Inuit for “flows swiftly over it”)—loaded onto a jagged-edged slab of
ice about 200 miles from the North Pole. Unlike their cargo, the researchers’
plan was simple: For the upcoming months, the frozen island would float aimlessly,
ferrying a then 72-year-old Yngve Kristoffersen and his younger colleague,
Audun Tholfsen, around the Arctic, taking them where even icebreakers could not
go.
They were there to drill hydroholes through the ice,
film the ocean floor, and collect sediment cores that are millions of years
old. After weeks adrift, their ice floe eventually led them into an Arctic no
man’s land where temperatures can drop to minus 45 degrees Celsius and trigger
powerful gales. The two men were alone but for the occasional white fox. That’s
why, in October 2014, the hardy researchers were stunned to spot something
unmistakable about two miles from their base: visitors.
As the scientists approached lights they had spotted
in the distance, they made out the hulking black bow and sail of a submarine
poking up through the ice. But before they reached the site, it quickly
disappeared. Based on photographs taken by the scientists, the Norwegian team
later determined that the vessel was likely the Orenburg, a Russian sub—which carries
with it a nuclear-powered mini-sub—used for deep-dive intelligence missions.
The scientists, it turned out, were being watched.
The run-in was anything but coincidental. Like
Kristoffersen and Tholfsen, the Orenburg was there to drill into undersea ranges
in order to collect geological samples from the Lomonosov Ridge, a little-known
underwater mountain chain that rises about 12,000 feet above the seabed and
stretches for more than 1,000 miles. Under and around this formation lies
nearly a quarter of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel resources. The U.S.
Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic holds a staggering 13 percent of
the world’s undiscovered oil, approximately 90 billion barrels, as well as 30
percent of its natural gas, or about 1,669 trillion cubic feet.
Worth an estimated $17.2 trillion, an amount roughly
equivalent to the entire U.S. economy, these resources have been trapped for
eons under a dome of ice and snow. But now, with the Arctic warming faster than
anywhere else on the planet, that dome is getting smaller and smaller.
According to scientists at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center,
about 65 percent of the ice layer above the Lomonosov Ridge melted between 1975
and 2012. In layman’s terms, says Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics
at Cambridge University, this means one thing: The ice cap is in a “death
spiral.”
For the countries that border the Arctic Ocean—
Russia,
the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark (through its territory of
Greenland)—an accessible ocean means new
opportunities. And for the states that have their sights set on the Lomonosov
Ridge—possibly all five Arctic Ocean neighbors
but the United States—an open ocean means access to much of the North Pole’s
largesse. First, though, they must prove to the United Nations that the access
is rightfully theirs. Because that process could take years, if not decades,
these countries could clash in the meantime, especially as they quietly send in
soldiers, spies, and scientists to collect information on one of the planet’s
most hostile pieces of real estate.
While the world’s attention today is focused largely
on the Middle East and other obvious trouble spots, few people seem to be
monitoring what’s happening in the Arctic. Over the past few years, in fact,
the Arctic Ocean countries have been busy building up their espionage armories
with imaging satellites, reconnaissance drones, eavesdropping bases, spy
planes, and stealthy subs. Denmark and Canada have described a clear uptick in
Arctic spies operating on their territories, with Canada reporting levels
comparable to those at the height of the Cold War. As of October, NATO had
recorded a threefold jump in 2014 over the previous year in the number of
Russian spy aircraft it had intercepted in the region. Meanwhile, the United
States is sending satellites over the icy region about every 30 minutes,
averaging more than 17,000 passes every year, and is developing a new
generation of unmanned intelligence sensors to monitor everything above, on,
and below the ice and water.
If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage
during the Cold War, a hub of safe houses where spies for the East and the West
debriefed agents and eyed each other in cafes, it’s fair to say that the Arctic
has become the crossroads of technical espionage today. According to an old
Inuit proverb, “Only when the ice breaks will you truly know who is your friend
and who is your enemy.”
Thousands of miles from the frigid north, the actual
decision on which country gets what slice of the Arctic will be made in midtown
Manhattan by 21 geologists, geophysicists, and hydrographers who compose the
U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, established under the Convention on the Law of the Sea. This treaty is a sort of
international constitution establishing the rights and responsibilities for the
use of the world’s oceans.
Although approved in 1982, after nearly a decade of
meetings and conferences, the convention did not go into force until 1994;
since then, it has been what sets limits on offshore mining. The treaty also
regulates a country’s exclusive economic zone—how far from its shoreline a
nation can legally fish and tap the minerals under the seabed. Thus, beyond the
200-nautical-mile limit of this zone, none of the five Arctic Ocean countries
has the right to touch the enormous body of mineral wealth below the ice. The
treaty, however, allows any nation to lobby for up to 350 additional nautical
miles, and sometimes more, if it can prove that an underwater formation is an
extension of its dry landmass.
Today, nearly 170 countries have ratified or acceded
to the treaty, but the United States has yet to do so. In fact, out of the five
Arctic Ocean nations, the United States is the only outlier. Upon the
convention’s inception, President Ronald Reagan’s administration, with its
free-enterprise philosophy, could not “as a matter of principle” sign on to
something that encouraged a “mixed economic system for the regulation and
production of deep seabed minerals,” wrote Leigh Ratiner, one of the U.S. negotiators for the
treaty, in a 1982 Foreign Affairs article. One of Reagan’s attorneys
general, Edwin Meese, later went so far as to call the treaty “a direct threat
to American sovereignty.” Despite its being signed later by President Bill
Clinton and having the backing of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama—as
well as the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Navy leaders,
environmental groups, and the oil and shipping industries—conservative
Republican senators continue to argue that the agreement would somehow
subjugate the U.S. military and business interests to U.N. control.
If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage
during the Cold War, it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads
of technical espionage today.
Each Arctic Ocean country, upon ratifying the
convention, is allowed 10 years to present scientific proof to the commission
that its continental shelf extends beyond its exclusive economic zone. In
December 2014, when it became the latest to submit bathymetric, seismic, and
geophysical data to the United Nations, Denmark joined Russia and Canada in the
fight for a piece of the Lomonosov Ridge. And though this has been an expensive
contest for all involved, costing each country millions of dollars, the tactics
at times have been cheap, if not utterly bizarre.
The first to approach the U.N., in 2001, Russia
asserted that it had ownership not only of the North Pole, but also of an area
amounting to about half the Arctic. To symbolically emphasize this point six
years later, a Russian submersible carrying Artur Chilingarov, an avid explorer
and then deputy speaker of the Duma, planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag on the ocean floor 14,000 feet beneath
the North Pole. The event triggered an outcry from Canadian Foreign Minister
Peter MacKay. “This isn’t the 15th century,” he said. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags
and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’” Chilingarov shot back: “If someone doesn’t like this, let them go down
themselves … and then try to put something there. Russia must win. Russia has
what it takes to win. The Arctic has always been Russian.” Adding to the
political theater, soon after the flag-planting ceremony, the Russian air force
launched cruise missiles over the Arctic as part of a military exercise.
Not to be upstaged by Moscow’s flag stunt, in
December 2013, the government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
declared that Santa Claus is a Canadian citizen and announced plans to claim
ownership of the North Pole. “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending
our sovereignty over the Arctic,” Harper had said in a 2007 speech at a naval
base outside Victoria, British Columbia. “We either use it or lose it. And make
no mistake, this government intends to use it.” The idea, according to Harper’s
“Northern
Strategy,” is to assert Canadian presence in the Arctic by “putting more
boots on the Arctic tundra, more ships in the icy water and a better
eye-in-the-sky.” But some Canadians think the prime minister has gone too far.
“[N]ow Harper has become the Putin of the Arctic,” chided Heather Exner-Pirot,
managing editor of Arctic Yearbook, in a 2013 blog post.
To meet its 10-year deadline, Norway filed its
arguments to the U.N. in 2006, claiming that its seabed extends into both the
Atlantic and the Arctic oceans in three places: the Loop Hole in the Barents Sea, the Western
Nansen Basin in the Arctic Ocean, and the Banana Hole in the Norwegian Sea. But
depending on the outcomes of various expeditions underway, including
Kristoffersen and Tholfsen’s work on the ice floe, the country might return for
a piece of the Lomonosov Ridge. It’s banking on some flexibility baked into the
treaty: As long as a nation meets its 10-year deadline, it isn’t penalized for
follow-up submissions.
When Denmark presented claims to the U.N. that the
Lomonosov Ridge is the natural extension of Greenland—a self-governing Danish
territory with the nearest coastline to the North Pole—it also offered the
commission evidence that now overlaps with studies presented by Russia and
Canada. And this could prove to be drastically more complicated than it first
might seem.
Given that the commission generally meets but twice a
year, the pace at which it moves is anything but fast. For example, at the
30-year anniversary of the Law of the Sea treaty, the U.N. published a progress
report stating that since the commission was formed in 1997, various countries
around the globe, including those that border the Arctic, had submitted 61
claims to define new borders in the world’s oceans. However, in that same time,
the commission had only managed to issue 18 sets of responses. In recent years,
the 2012 report highlighted, the commission’s workload had
“increased considerably,” and member countries had indicated plans for 46
future submissions.
This existing backlog does not bode well for settling
matters quickly in the Arctic, especially now that those claims are becoming
even more complex. Denmark seemingly attempted to reduce some of this wait time
by petitioning the commission to recognize only the scientific merits of each
of the country’s claims. Once these are established, according to Denmark’s
submission, the Arctic nations will determine for themselves where the final
boundaries will be drawn—a right allowed under the treaty.
In some ways, this tangled, bureaucratic system has
worked out for the polar countries, perhaps even enabled them. Over the past
few decades, they have happily assumed something akin to Arctic squatters’
rights, taking special liberties to explore the ocean’s bounty while simultaneously
expanding control, both mechanical and human, as the ice continues to shrink.
With or without a U.N. decision, the Arctic countries likely aren’t budging
anytime soon.
Today, woven tightly into the very fabric of Arctic
life is espionage: Technicians eavesdrop on civilian, government, and military
communications, radar signals, and missile tests. They also conduct
surveillance photography of any military equipment, ports, or bases. In
December 2014, during a news conference in Moscow, Col. Gen. Viktor Bondarev,
the head of Russia’s air force, noted that there had been a dramatic increase
in foreign spy flights, including ones in the Arctic. “In 2014, more than 140
RC-135 flights have taken place, compared to 22 flights in 2013,” he
said. But the same goes for the Russians, according to defense officials:
NATO intercepted more than 100 Russian aircraft in 2014, three times more than
the year before.
Russian President Vladimir Putin views the far north
in a vehemently nationalist light. “The Arctic is, unconditionally, an integral
part of the Russian Federation that has been under our sovereignty for several
centuries,” he said in 2013. To put muscle behind this statement, in March 2015
the Russian military launched a massive five-day show of force in the Arctic
involving 38,000 servicemen and special forces troops, more than 50 surface
ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft. Two months earlier, the first of about
7,000 Russian troops began arriving at a recently reopened military air base at
Alakurtti, north of the Arctic Circle; 3,000 of them will be assigned to an
enormous signals intelligence listening post designed to eavesdrop on the West
across the frozen ice cap.
More than a dozen additional bases are slated for
construction. In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National
Defense Management Center, told the Russian Defense Ministry’s public council
that Moscow plans to build 13 airfields, an air-to-ground firing range, and 10
radar posts. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed
the council, “In 2015 we will be almost fully prepared to meet unwelcome guests
from east and north.”
Eavesdropping on the Russians across the North Pole
is a Canadian listening post so high in the Arctic that it’s closer to Moscow
than to Ottawa. Known as Alert
and located on the northeast tip of Ellesmere Island in the territory of
Nunavut, it is just 500 miles from the pole and is the northernmost permanently
inhabited location in the world. A welcome sign declares, “Proudly Serving
Canada’s ‘Frozen Chosen.’”
There, in some of the harshest weather on Earth,
staffers maintain critical antenna networks used to intercept key Russian
signals containing Arctic troop movements, aircraft and submarine
communications, and critical telemetry from missile tests and space shots. In
recent years, as technology advanced and the Russian buildup began, Canada
moved hundreds of earphone-clad operators to Leitrim, a listening post near
Ottawa; at this base, several satellite dishes eavesdrop on military and
commercial communications satellites.
Canada shares its intelligence from Alert and Leitrim
with its close partner, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and the United
States reciprocates through its Thule Air
Base in western Greenland. More than 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle
and more than 60 miles from the nearest Inuit village, Thule is not just one of
the world’s most isolated facilities, but also one of the most highly classified.
With a trio of bulbous igloo-like radomes on a wind-swept cliff about three
miles from the base, personnel in a gray, windowless operations building send
operational commands to more than 140 satellites in orbits from 120 miles to
24,800 miles above the planet.
Among the satellites the station controls are those
that fly over Russia and its Arctic bases every 90 minutes, taking detailed
photographs with cameras capable of spotting objects on Earth only a few inches
long. Technicians feed directions to satellites about 20,000 times a year on
average, said unit commander Austin Hood in a 2012
article in Airman, a U.S. Air Force publication. In addition, the
station sends commands to many of the NSA’s eavesdropping satellites with
instructions on which frequencies to monitor, such as those for telephone
communications and Internet data.
In 2013, concerned about the possibility of Russian
drones in the Arctic, the Canadian government produced a classified study that
explored the possibilities and limitations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Unless “UAVs gain aerial refueling capabilities,” it reported, Russia could not
spy in Canadian Arctic territory. And though Canada has orbited Radarsat-2, a
synthetic-aperture radar surveillance satellite capable of seeing through
clouds, in order to keep track of events and military movements (including in
the Arctic), this technology apparently wasn’t stealthy enough for the country:
In August 2014, defense employees began carrying out experiments to test the
feasibility of developing drones for use in the Arctic.
The response? Three months later, in November, a
Russian government spokesman announced that Moscow will build a drone base
slightly south of the Arctic Circle and just 420 miles away from mainland
Alaska. When completed, this base will make Russia the only country to have
this technology in the Arctic skies.
Norway is also becoming nervous about Russia. In
March 2015, around the same time that Moscow showed off its 38,000 troops,
Norway acted similarly, dragging out 5,000 soldiers and 400 vehicles for its
own Arctic military exercise. But rather than spying on Russia with satellites,
Norway is putting its spies to sea. In December 2014, Prime Minister Erna
Solberg christened the $250 million Marjata. Built for the Norwegian
Intelligence Service and expected to become operational in 2016, the vessel
will be among the world’s most advanced surveillance ships, according to information
released by the Norwegian military.
“The new Marjata will be an important piece in the
continuation of the Intelligence Service’s assignments in the High North,” Lt.
Gen. Kjell Grandhagen, head of the service, said in a statement. He also told a Norwegian newspaper that the Marjata’s task “will be to systematically
map all military and some civilian activity in areas close to Norway.” Designed
largely for eavesdropping on Russian communications and other signals,
according to the Norwegian government-owned news service NRK, it will also
identify things like the frequencies of Moscow’s radar systems—information that
is critical in order to jam them should hostilities break out.
Beneath the Arctic ice, the United States and Russia
remain adversaries, vestiges of the Cold War. Since the USS Nautilus first slid
under the North Pole in 1958 and the USS Skate became the first to surface
there less than a year later, U.S. submarines have completed more than 120
Arctic exercises.
With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in
numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new
generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S.
defense systems to detect. According to an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings
magazine, the “alarmingly sophisticated” Russian fleet “will likely
dramatically alter the world’s future geopolitical landscape.” The author,
veteran submariner Lt. Cmdr. Tom Spahn, said the armament on the Yasen,
Russia’s new fast-
attack
submarine, includes supercavitating torpedoes that can speed through the water
in excess of 200 knots, about the equivalent of 230 miles per hour. This “makes
her truly terrifying,” Spahn wrote. The new Russian subs, that is, will be
stealthier and far deadlier than any ever known.
One evening in November 2014, U.S. radar operators
spotted six Russian aircraft—two Tu-95 “Bear” long-range bombers, two Il-78
refueling tankers, and two MiG-31 fighters—heading toward the Alaskan coast.
They had entered a U.S. air defense identification zone, airspace approaching
the American border where aircraft must identify themselves, and they were
getting closer when two U.S. F-22 fighter jets were dispatched to intercept
them. About six hours later, Canada detected two more Russian Bear bombers
approaching its Arctic airspace. Like the United States, Canada scrambled two
CF-18 fighter jets to divert the bombers within about 40 nautical miles off the
Canadian coast.
Although the Bears are designed to drop bombs, they
are also used to collect intelligence and eavesdrop on military communications.
This was most likely their purpose in flying close to the U.S. and Canadian
Arctic coasts. To be clear, Moscow wasn’t doing anything Washington doesn’t do
itself: The United States regularly flies its RC-135 aircraft—a variant of a
Boeing 707 that sucks signals, from radar beeps to military conversations to
civilian email, from the air like a vacuum cleaner—near Russia’s northern
territory.
As the planes get closer, spying becomes bolder. And
though this strategy might be necessary for Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway
as they vie for supremacy in the new Great Game, this isn’t a strategy that is
necessarily logical for the United States, a country not party to the
Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Even if the Senate were to ratify the treaty, it is
likely that, by the time it submits its claim to the commission, much of the
icy region will be accounted for. And given the rightward turn in Congress, the
odds that the treaty will be ratified during the Obama administration are
slimmer than ever. In the words of one U.S. Coast Guard admiral quoted about the Arctic in a 2010 Politics Daily
article, “If this were a ball game … the U.S. wouldn’t be on the field or even
in the stadium.”
In the next few years, as the Arctic Ocean opens for
business, American spies will still be busy feeding directions to satellites
that spin over the North Pole, while the United States’ polar neighbors will be
busy exploiting the resources beneath it and leading convoys through the ice in
new shipping channels above it. With this kind of Arctic strategy, in other
words, the United States will remain frozen in another era.
James Bamford (@WashAuthor) is a
columnist for Foreign Policy and the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11
to the Eavesdropping on America. He also writes and produces
documentaries for PBS.
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