Always a Sucker
Believe it or not, I am always a sucker for a good spy story. Not so much James Bond cartoon-spy crapulence, I mean "serious" stuff. There's an article on the New York Times site (I'd link to it, but it won't do you any good, you have to register [which is free]) about how the CIA figured out that the KGB was covertly buying US technology to run its own programs. The US was, essentially, in an arms race with itself. Instead of rolling up the discovered network of agents and dealers, the CIA had some geeks put Trojan Horses in the code of the chips so that they would seem to work fine, but later make things go wrong. It worked flawlessly (well, very flawed, but that was the point) in some computers that ran, I believe, a natural gas pipeline. The chips caused the wrong amounts to be pumped in critical areas which in turn caused the welds to fail and caused a MASSIVE explosion, one that could be seen from space. The Air Force geeks at NORAD thought it was a nuke. I'm sure the Russians executed dozens of suspected double-agents when they realized what had happened, but who could they complain to? The point of all this: I like spook stories (but not Alias anymore, even if Sid does go jogging in slo-mo with an iPod).


Genesis, 1993