{"id":13315,"date":"2009-06-22T19:42:49","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T17:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=13315"},"modified":"2017-11-28T17:22:05","modified_gmt":"2017-11-28T14:22:05","slug":"us-navys-secret-intelligence-service-at-the-bosphorus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/06\/22\/us-navys-secret-intelligence-service-at-the-bosphorus\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Navy\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service at the Bosphorus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\"\"<\/span>Big Smoke alongside a Soviet Warship in the Bosphorus<\/strong><\/p>\n

Photo of Big Smoke,\u00a0a motor yacht used by the U.S. Navy\u2019s Task Force 157, for intelligence collection operations in the Mediterranean. Photo from Jeffrey Richelson, “Task Force 157: The U.S. Navy\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service, 1966-77,” Intelligence and National Security<\/em> 11 (1996), 118; used with permission of the author and the journal.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Central Intelligence Agency (?), \u201cSoviet Nuclear Weapons in Egypt?\u201d, 30 October 1973, Top Secret, Excised copy
\nArchival source: Nixon NSC, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, box 132, Egypt-Ismail Vol. VII Oct. 1973<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the weeks after the October War, U.S. government officials leaked to the media information about intelligence gleanings of possible shipments of Scud missiles and nuclear weapons to Soviet bases in Egypt during the conflict.\u00a0 While officials were more certain about the deployment of the missiles, it was more debatable whether Moscow had actually deployed nuclear weapons to foreign territory because of the great risks involved.\u00a0\u00a0 According to the press reports, defense officials saw a \u201creasonable possibility\u201d that nuclear weapons were shipped, but members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John C. Stennis and Stuart Symington, \u201csaid the evidence did not convince them.\u201d (Note 8<\/span><\/span>)<\/p>\n

For the first time, the U.S. government has released one of the intelligence reports that may have been the basis for the leaks.\u00a0 While intelligence agencies exempted this document in its entirety after the first request to the Nixon Library and also after an appeal, ISCAP agreed to release much of it, suggesting that the much of the information had been overclassified.<\/p>\n

\u201cSoviet Nuclear Weapons in Egypt?\u201d draws back from definite conclusions, suggesting why some U.S. officials believed that the evidence was not good enough.\u00a0 Interestingly, the report indicates which Soviet cargo ship\u2014the Mezhdurechensk<\/em>\u2014was one of the objects of suspicion, and that U.S. intelligence photographed the ship at Alexandria on 25 October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While much of the evidence concerning the alleged deployment has been redacted from the report, probably on sources and methods grounds, a prize-winning article by Archive senior research fellow, Jeffrey Richelson, \u201cTask Force 157: The U.S. Navy\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service, 1966-1977,\u201d published in Intelligence and National Security<\/em>, clarifies the issue. According to Richelson\u2019s account, Task Force 157 included a yacht equipped with a special nuclear intelligence sensor that operated in the Bosphurus and shadowed Soviet ships. The problem was that the sensor was \u201cprone to giving positive false alarms,\u201d and could not determine whether the \u201ctype of radiation in question\u201d indicated the presence of nuclear weapons.\u00a0 This makes it all the more understandable why the authors of the 30 October report were unwilling to draw firm conclusions about the presence of nuclear weapons on the Mezhdurechensk<\/em>: \u201cThe evidence should not yet be regarded as though it creates a strong presumption that the Soviets dispatched nuclear weapons to Egypt.\u201d (<\/span>Note 9<\/span><\/span>)<\/span><\/p>\n

\"nsa\"<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Big Smoke alongside a Soviet Warship in the Bosphorus Photo of Big Smoke,\u00a0a motor yacht used by the U.S. Navy\u2019s Task Force 157, for intelligence collection operations in the Mediterranean. Photo from Jeffrey Richelson, “Task Force 157: The U.S. Navy\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service, 1966-77,” Intelligence and National Security 11 (1996), 118; used with permission of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":13324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[393,89,34],"tags":[1712,1710,1709,1711],"class_list":["post-13315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-egypt","category-turkey","category-usa","tag-big-smoke","tag-central-intelligence-agency","tag-us-navy","tag-us-navys-task-force"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}