This is the continuation of a story begun on our September 2013 Home Page. To go to an archived version of that page, click here: September 2013 Home Page Archive. To return to this month's actual Home Page, click on the Signal Corps orange Home Page menu item in the upper left corner of this page.

continuing...

 

1981: Used once more… this time the discussions center around the threat of a Russian invasion of Poland.

1982: The Israeli invasion of Lebanon prompts the Hotline to be used again.

1986: While unconfirmed, it is alleged that President Reagan used the Hotline to threaten the Soviets over their arrest of the US journalist Nicholas Daniloff, on espionage charges.

1986: After President Reagan suggested in 1983 that the link be upgraded from teletype to high-speed fax, a round of discussions with the Russians took place. The first was held in Moscow in August 1983, followed by another in Washington in January 1984, and then Moscow in April 1984, and again in Washington in July of 1984. Eventually an “accord” was signed on July 17, 1984. When the work first began the Hotline consisted of two satellite circuits and one wire telegraph circuit. It took until 1986 to finish the work. Prior to then the Soviets had used Molniya II satellites. From 1986 forward these satellites were replaced with stationary Gorizont-class satellites in the Statsionar system. Among the benefits, the Gorizant was able to provide high-speed facsimile capabilities. Because of this, in 1986 the satellite terminals linked to the circuits in each country were also re-equipped with teletype and facsimile equipment. Facsimile machines permitted the heads of government to exchange messages far more rapidly than they previously could with the then teletype systems that were in use. They could also send detailed graphic material such as maps, charts, and drawings by facsimile.

1991: President George Bush Senior used the Hotline to communicate with Soviet leader Gorbachev during the Gulf War.

1990-1998: Additional modernizations were made during this period, most of which are still classified as confidential.

2003: Proving that Putin knew how to use the Hotline, he and President George W. Bush use it to discuss plans to rebuild Iraq after the Iraq War of 2003.

2008: Deciding that the world had moved on from fax to eMail, eMail capability was added in this year.

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Considering all of this excellent use of the Hotline, and especially the admirable efforts undertaken to upgrade its technology in line with advancements in communication, one can only wonder what the future will bring? Knowing how digitally connected President Obama is… will future changes look like this:

2013-early September: The White House Staff decides that eMail is to insecure for use by President Obama. Considering that the youth of today prefer Twitter, they inform the Russians that the Hotline should from this point forward by upgraded to operate off of the Twitter platform. While the public judges this somewhat controversial, both Obama and Putin agree that this move is necessary after 1) President Obama finally finishes reading the last of the more than 700,000 documents Bradley Manning released to WikiLeaks in 2010, 2) he was able to finally find time between games of golf on Martha’s Vineyard to finish reading the redacted copies of Edward Snowden’s files that Premier Putin was kind enough to send him, and 3) he was able to read and ingest the full extent of how the NSA really, really operates, thanks to an excellently written report submitted to him by Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper… a man of the utmost integrity and honesty.

2013-mid September: The first use of Twitter as a means of communicating fails, as Putin is unable to, with his Samsung Galaxy S4 smart phone, reach Obama on his 1992 LG CU400 (AT&T) cell phone. Fortunately, no one is worried as Congress is currently looking into whether this was caused because the AT&T network was down, as it usually is, or because Obama had not paid for SMS messaging as part of his service. Regardless, both sides regretted the fact that they were unable to reach each other when Putin reached out to Obama with a Tweet, as well as several since verified re-tweets, to check and see if those were really U.S. missiles on their way to President al-Assad’s palace in Damascus, Syria. Not being able to verify whether they were or not, and thinking that Obama was simply AWOL (as he had been during the Benghazi incident), Putin decided to try to get his attention by sending a similar sortie of missiles against the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey. His point was that if Obama was going to F-bomb his friends in Syria, he would F-bomb Obama's friends in Turkey. In the end it turned out to be just another State Department mix up.

2013-late September: To assure that the miscommunication that occurred in mid-September did not happen again, President Obama and Premier Putin agree to establish Facebook accounts, tie them to the Washington-Moscow Hotline’s Twitter account, and not only sign on as Followers of each other on Twitter, but also Friend each other on Facebook. When warned of the fact that both Twitter and Facebook were notoriously easy to hack, both replied that Google executives had told them “not to worry, within a few years we will own all of the means of digital communication worldwide… at which time we will give you both password control over your own, personal accounts, and promise… really, really promise not to sell your personal information for commercial gain." Reporters at the event noted that the NSA representative that sat behind the men from Google merely smiled.  

Thank God for Google. 

Additional Notes:

1) First Picture Above: On July 13, 1963, only a month after signing the agreement, the United States sent four sets of teleprinters with Latin alphabet to Moscow for their terminal. This was done via US ambassador Averell Harriman's plane. Another month later, on August 20, the Soviet equipment, four sets of teleprinters with Cyrillic alphabet, arrived in Washington. The cipher machines for encrypting the Hot Line messages came from Norway. According to the agreement, both sets of machines were to be accompanied by a year's supply of spare parts and all the necessary special tools, test equipment, operating instructions and other technical literature required to keep them working.

2) Picture of Gorizont Satellite: A typical Gorizont communications payload included six general purpose (TV, audio, facsimile) 6/4 GHz transponders (five 12.5 Watt and one 60 Watt), one Luch 14/11 GHz transponder (15 Watt), and one Volna 1.6/1.5 GHz transponder (20 Watt). Credit: Photo copyright Mark Wade

3) Additional Information: For this article some background information and photos were gathered from Electrospaces.com.

4) Additional Information: David Kahn's, "The Codebreakers", 1967, provides an excellent summary of the how the Hotline came into existence.