Cyberspies by Gordon Corera

Author:Gordon Corera
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Pegasus Books

CHAPTER TWELVE

BRITAIN AND THE CYBER SPIES

There was ‘jubilation’ as the message winged its way from northern India to New York. It was short and simple: ‘Hello from Dharamsala’ was all it said. It was the early 1990s and the Tibetan community had hooked up to the outside world.1 The Dalai Lama had fled Tibet in 1959 and set up a government in exile in this remote town, taking refuge in a suburb high up in the hills named after a British colonial governor. From the upper parts of the town, which spread up the hillside, he and his followers campaigned for Tibetan autonomy, making them a constant irritant to the Chinese who have sought to integrate Tibet into China. That also made them a prime target for Chinese spies. Dharamsala – a community surrounded by forests and monkeys – would become the front line in computer espionage.

Thubten Samdup, a Tibetan who spent some of his time in Canada, had seen the advantages that going online offered at the start of the 1990s. Technology in Dharamsala at that time consisted of an old Gutenberg-style movable press down in the basement. A wide diaspora of Tibetans and their supporters scattered around the world were hungry for news. But by the time a message reached them, informing them that a monk had been arrested in China and asking them to pressure their governments, it was often too late. Speeches by the Dalai Lama would have to be faxed individually to offices around the world – perhaps repeatedly when one page came out blurred – and then refaxed on to dozens more offices, a laborious process. So when a friendly professor at the University of Montreal told Samdup that something new called email might solve some of the communication problems, it seemed a blessing. The professor even lent him an account to use for the Tibet Support Group, a body of supporters around the world who tried to get the message out. Speeches and news could reach them in moments.

By the mid 1990s, sending an email from Dharamsala was still time-consuming. It involved going up to the roof of a building and sitting down on a machine to perform what one user called a ‘mystical process’.2 In 1997 Dan Haig, along with a group of other computer experts mainly from the Bay Area of San Francisco, paid their own way to make the long journey to India to expand the Tibetans’ internet operations. They carried 165 pounds of cables and routers in backpacks on the forty-hour journey. After an audience with the Dalai Lama they set about wiring up his government by pulling cables through walls to create a local network in the Himalayas. This would help connect the monks to the nascent internet by opening up a presence on the web. The Tibetans had been used to having their post intercepted, but had hoped that computers might be safer terrain on which to communicate and organise. They had no idea they would be subjected to one of the most sustained electronic espionage campaigns the world has ever been seen.

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