La Grande Fauche: La Fuite des Technologies ver l'Est

(English title: Gorbachev's Technology Wars)

Introduction

The Soviet Union has always been stealing secrets from the West. But over the past ten years, Soviet-inspired high tech smuggling rings have become so effective that the Pentagon estimates they have helped the USSR save billions of dollars in research and development work. The fruits of their campaign to beg, borrow or steal the best the West can offer in high technology can be found in nearly every major Soviet military program. Ballistic missiles, tanks, nuclear submarines, jet fighters and anti-aircraft missiles: all owe a large part of their deadly might to technological secrets stolen from the West. At times, new weapons systems have been designed on Western-built computers, crafted with Western-built machine-tools, and tested with software designed to run to Pentagon specifications. Entire factories have been procured through parallel networks, especially for the production of embargoed high-quality computer chips.

The thirst of the Soviet military for Western high tech has received substantial publicity over the past few years from both within the Reagan administration and without. The word "technobandit" has become a household term. And yet, the high tech rings continue to spread, like a virus feeding off of capitalist greed.

New smuggling rings, which will be exposed in this book, have sprung up in the past few years in France, West Germany, Sweden, and Great Britain. Major companies have consciously violated COCOM rules in a dozen more countries, including the United States. In recent months, Western governments belonging to COCOM have been seeking a large number of national "exceptions" to the rules, on the pretext that the USSR is managing to obtain the same technology elsewhere, especially in the Far East.

With the election of President Bush, many U.S. officials previously involved in the struggle to maintain the West's high technology lead over the USSR are preparing to throw in the towel. Trade wars among Western Allies seem to have taken precedence over the Technology War with the USSR.

But despite Gorbachev's smiles and the siren songs of perestroika and glasnost, the USSR is becoming increasingly backward. For instance, this text is being written on a Macintosh computer with 1 MB of live memory, available from any serious computer retail store in the West. But thanks to its economic deficiencies, the Soviet Union is still incapable of manufacturing a personal computer with one-tenth the memory capacity. And the KGB has recently made it illegal for Soviet citizens to possess a personal computer and a printer at the same time.

"Computers are the future," says Under Secretary of Commerce Paul Freedenberg, "and the Soviets are a good ten years behind." This is why Soviet high tech rings continue to focus on micro-electronics manufacturing technology.

And they are stealing everything. A pair of Polish brothers flies back and forth between California, Stockholm, and the Eastern block with their suitcases full of computer chips and circuit boards. A French physicist contracts with a Soviet Foreign Trade Organization to set up a bubble memory production line in the USSR. A U.S. machine-tool maker tries to undercut European competitors in selling embargoed milling machines to Soviet military factories. And of course, a Japanese trading company sells machine-tools with Norwegian computers which allow Soviet shipyards to build quieter nuclear submarines. The Toshiba/Kongsberg case, revealed in 1987, led to a fierce public debate over COCOM and its desirability which has yet to make its final effects felt.

These are some of the stories which will be told in this book in a journalistic style, by a professional journalist. Written for the non-specialist, with detailed notes for interested readers, Technology Wars portrays men and their motivations; but also the secret mechanisms at work behind their actions, and the Soviet agents whose primary job is to run the COCOM embargo. It includes extensive new reporting on the Toshiba/Kongsberg affair, and a host of newer cases which will be making tomorrow's headlines.