Wrong numbers on hot-line

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32775, 27 November 1971, Page 13

Wrong numbers on hot-line

(By

ROSS MADDEN)

A few weeks ago, President Nixon was awakened in the early hours by the shrill ringing of a telephone in his White House bedroom.

Of all the seven telephones and intercoms by his bed this' was the most ominous: it links the President with the Pentagon Command Centre, the United States end of the American-Russian “hot-line.” It was a chilling moment. “This is the President,” he said. An incredulous voice on the other end replied: “I must have the wrong number. I’m trying to reach a French laundry.” The fact that someone wanting a clean shirt could innocently be connected to what is supposed to be the most secure communications link in the world has filled American security men with alarm. What makes it worse is that it’s not the first time such a thing has happened. Last word In the 10 years this Christmas since Russia and America agreed to be linked 24 hours a day by an instantaneous teletype circuit, there are said to have been at least six occasions when traffic on the line has been interrupted by people sending cables or making telephone calls. Usually the interruptions come after the messages have come off the teleprinter section and are being telephoned to their recipients. The interrupters have included airport controllers, operators of ship-to-shore telephone systems, and a man trying to book a taxi in Chicago. But the hotdine itself linking Washington and Moscow, with “branch lines” to London and Paris—is said to be the ultimate in security. The messages are prepared on paper tapes with coded perforations and transmitted at 66 words a minute. Anybody eavesdropping the transmissions would hear only gibberish. Hourly tests America transmits in English and the U.S.S.R. in Russian. A routine message takes about three minutes to transmit and about five minutes to translate. Thus, a message from President Nixon to the Russian party chief, Leonid Brezhnev, can be delivered within 10 minutes. Before the hot-line, a similar communicatibn could take up to 18 hours to get through. It took over six months from the time of the agreement before the first historic message chattered across the world from Washington to Moscow. It was the traditional: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” which was gravely translated into Russian. The Russians replied with some Pushkin poetry, which was followed by American baseball scores. -- Ever since then, every hour of the day and night, the hot-line is tested to ensure that it will be there if needed. Busy line In fact it is used by the world’s most powerful men on many occasions that never find their way into the newspapers.

President Johnson is said to have several times advised the Kremlin of critical Vietnam developments and sought Soviet help in seeking a settlement. The line was also busy in June, 1967, ■ during the sixday Arab-Israeli war when the Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Kosygin, told President Johnson that Russia did not want a major war in the Middle East.

Two days later, when an American ship was accidentally attacked by Israeli aircraft, planes began to swarm from nearby United States aircraft carriers. America immediately rushed a hot-line message to Kosygin explaining that the aircraft were being used only to protest the ship under attack. Considerable cost In pre-hot-line days, such an action, if misunderstood, could have caused a world crisis. President Nixon has got into the hot-line habit, too. One of the first occasions he used it was to ask Mr Brezhnev if he knew anything about an attack by North Korean fighters on an American reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan. The Russians immediately sent ships to join in the search for survivors and, during the course of 11 hotline messages, agreed to pass on President Nixon’s warning to North Korea that any future attack would bring United States retaliation.

The technicians, security men and translators manning the teletype in the Pentagon Command Centre are in direct contact with the President at all times—whether he is at the White House, at his home in California, or even in his plane. The cost of the hot.-line oyer the last decade is considerable. The initial price of teleprinter equipment and installation was about £70,000 and each year both America and Russia pay around £50,000 to lease their halves of the cable, plus additional costs of about £40,000 a year. Today, the main hot-line cable runs from Washington to New York, then across the Atlantic via London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki to Moscow. Unwitting Aculprit What happens if anything should go wrong with the cable m time of crisis? In that case, a secondary radiotelegraph circuit, routed through Tangier, comes into operation. Throughout almost a decade of hot-line communication, international cable engineers have.been checking the world’s most vital communications link every second of the day. But that does not always stop things going wrong. A fire in a manhole in Maryland burned out a circuit which put the main cable out of commission for an hour in 1965, and more recently the secondary circuit had to be used again for a special message concerning Vietnam prisoners.

This lime the unwitting culprit was a man who had never even heard of the hotline. He was a farmer ploughing a field in Finland.

His plough had broken the East-West link in a manner worthy of Krushchev in his heyday.