Map: The USSR’s Electronic Spy Posts Are Still Active, Eavesdropping on You
View Old USSR Listening Posts in a larger map The world has been somewhat surprised by recent reports of the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying operations around the globe. But they’re not the only ones with their ears to the proverbial ground. Just about every nation is engaged in some sort of electronic espionage. ...
View Old USSR Listening Posts in a larger map
View Old USSR Listening Posts in a larger map
The world has been somewhat surprised by recent reports of the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying operations around the globe. But they’re not the only ones with their ears to the proverbial ground. Just about every nation is engaged in some sort of electronic espionage. Russia, for example, still has an array of massive listening stations, ready to snoop on whoever’s talking.
It’s a legacy of the Soviet Union, which ran one of the largest of those electronic eavesdropping networks as it tried to gain any intel it could on the U.S. and its allies. Those old Soviet eavesdropping stations still exist. Some are rusting away in former Soviet countries. Others are still operational.
Intelligence historian Matthew Aid just got ahold of a recently declassified CIA document listing the locations of 11 KGB strategic radio interception stations throughout Russia and the rest of the old Soviet Union.
These stations "were a small but very important part of the massive [signals intelligence] intercept and processing complexes operated not only by the KGB but also by the Soviet military intelligence service, the GRU," writes Aid.
But these posts are hardly Cold War relics. Most of them are still "monitoring the communications of the U.S., Europe and virtually every other country of any significance or size around the world," he adds.
Killer Apps thought it would be fun to make it easy for you to explore these sites scattered across the old Soviet Empire by mapping them out. Click on each satellite dish for Aid’s description of each site and its current status. Zoom in on each site on the map to explore its current physical state.
John Reed is a national security reporter for Foreign Policy. He comes to FP after editing Military.com’s publication Defense Tech and working as the associate editor of DoDBuzz. Between 2007 and 2010, he covered major trends in military aviation and the defense industry around the world for Defense News and Inside the Air Force. Before moving to Washington in August 2007, Reed worked in corporate sales and business development for a Swedish IT firm, The Meltwater Group in Mountain View CA, and Philadelphia, PA. Prior to that, he worked as a reporter at the Tracy Press and the Scotts Valley Press-Banner newspapers in California. His first story as a professional reporter involved chasing escaped emus around California’s central valley with Mexican cowboys armed with lassos and local police armed with shotguns. Luckily for the giant birds, the cowboys caught them first and the emus were ok. A New England native, Reed graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a dual degree in international affairs and history.
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