By Count Friedrich von Olsen
For most of my readers who are too young to remember – and I will wager the title to my palatial Lake Arrowhead chalet against the title to the house of anyone foolish enough to take this bet that those too young to remember include 90 percent of the readers of this column – let me offer a brief history lesson. President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the July 1955 Geneva summit meeting with representatives of France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union first floated his “Open Skies” proposal. I recall this development with crystal clarity, as if it were yesterday. Ike, who was there to discuss the future of Germany and arms control, ran this idea past British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, French Premier Edgar Faure and Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin, who was sitting in for an at-that-time ailing Nikita Khrushchev: How about all four countries agreeing to exchange maps showing the exact location of every military installation in their respective nations and allow all parties to conduct aerial surveillance of the installations in order to assure that the other nations were in compliance with any arms control agreements that might be reached? The French and British embraced the idea but Khrushchev said Open Skies was nothing more than an espionage plot, and refused to go along…
Instead, for years the United States played a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with countries in the communist sphere, rigging Air Force and Navy planes full of electronic surveillance gear and skirting and sometimes crossing over the borders of those countries, getting a profile of the radar systems and communications systems their respective militaries used. Many of those planes were shot down by the communists, leading to the loss of more than 150 American lives during the Cod War. More and more sophisticated, faster and higher flying aircraft were designed to carry out these missions, such as the U2 and the SR-71. In time, satellites took over this reconnaissance and electronic probing duty…
Six decades after President Eisenhower first broached the concept of Open Skies, it has become something of a reality. The question is whether the way it is being applied is a boon or hindrance to U.S Security…
Back in 1989, during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, the concept of Open Skies was reintroduced. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1992, an early version of the treaty was signed by 34 countries. Things languished for a while but in 2002 another version of the treaty came into being. In the meantime, the means of surveillance, optical, thermal, infra red, ultraviolet, electronic and otherwise have undergone about five generational shifts, so that the methods of keeping tabs on others are unbelievably sophisticated today. For example, our own FBI is constantly operating above nearly every current American metropolis on a 24-hour per day basis aircraft that are capable of monitoring the whereabouts and communications from cell phones, allowing it to not only hear what is being said but track the comings and goings of every one of the users of those cell phones in those areas…
If what the FBI is doing is alarming to civil libertarians, they can torture their already restive souls even more by considering that within a few short months, the Russian government, courtesy of the Open Skies Treaty, will likewise be tracing and eavesdropping on American citizens, corporations, its governmental offices and functionaries and its military…
Under the 2002 Open Skies Treaty, Russia has announced its intention to actuate its right to conduct aerial surveillance across the United States. Under the treaty’s protocol, a participant must disclose to the host country the model of aircraft and the nature, type, model and extent of the surveillance equipment it will use, initiating what is called a “certification period.” That certification period lasts for 120 days, at which point the operation of the surveillance flights can commence, with the aircraft based at the host country’s airports, flying between those aerodromes and over all cities in their paths…
On February 22, Russia announced to the Vienna-based Open Skies Consultative Commission, which facilitates the implementation of the treaty, that it intends to use Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft with digital electro-optical sensors to serve as that country’s eyes and ears in the skies over America. United States officials are now, according to Open Skies protocol, being permitted to inspect the planes to be used, look at the sensory and electronic monitoring gear aboard those craft and actually witness the Russians’ demonstrations of that sensory equipment and its capabilities…
Those planes will serve as visual surveillance platforms as well electronic vacuum cleaners, sucking up every scintilla of transmitted voice, videographic, photographic and text data we Americans transmit through all of our modern devices of convenience and communication…
This means that on the last day of spring this year or the first day of summer or thereabouts, dear reader, some Russian, or more likely some Russian computer with state-of-the-art voice recognition capability, is going to be listening in to your phone calls…
Of a sudden, the civil libertarians have a new and unanticipated ally in the form of Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. While Stewart’s concern is more over the Russian government’s surveillance of Americans and civil libertarians are worried about governmental surveillance in general, the level of shared concern remains and remains high. Last week, Stewart said he and other senior intelligence and military officers are gravely concerned Russia is on the cusp of taking advantage of the Open Skies Treaty in a way the other 33 signatories to the treaty, including the United States, are not…
The State Department, which ushered the treaty through, is sanguine about the treaty and its possible effects and threats. Vincent made clear the military and his office are at odds with the State Department on the issue…
At a House Armed Services’ Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee hearing, Mike Turner, a Republican congressman from Ohio who is the chairman of the AirLand Subcommittee, sought from Stewart his assessment of as whether the U.S. is learning as much from its participation in the treaty as Russia is getting out of the deal. Stewart told Turner that if he could he would have U.S. participation in the treaty rescinded, saying he would “love to deny” Russia the opportunity to engage in the overflights of the U.S. Mainland. “The things that you can see, the amount of data you can collect, the things you can do with post-processing, allows Russia, in my opinion, to get incredible foundational intelligence on critical infrastructure, bases, ports, all of our facilities,” Stewart told the subcommittee. “From my perspective, it gives them a significant advantage.”
The State Department is more nonchalant.
“The Open Skies Treaty enhances confidence and transparency by allowing the 34 countries that are parties to it to obtain information on the military forces and activities of other treaty partners,” according to the State Department. “It contributes to European security by providing images and information on military forces, including information to verify compliance with arms control agreements.”
As a naturalized U.S. citizen who is a European native, I am all for maintaining European security. I am not, necessarily, opposed to the Open Skies Treaty. But in my view, as Americans we should adhere to the spirit originally set forth by President Eisenhower more than fifty years ago and ensure that the U.S. surveillance program carried out in Russia under the Open Skies arrangement is every bit as robust as the surveillance Russia is engaging in above us…