EP-3 Hainan Incident 2001

[ORAC]

Interesting read.

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/10/snowden-documents-reveal-scope-of-secrets-exposed-to-china-in-2001-spy-plane-incident/

[Pontius Navigator]

Interesting indeed. One item drew my attention; the Chinese did not immediately change the comma procedures.

That could be a subtle ploy and a method of letting false data being collected. This ploy was used in WW 2 though should have been less effective in this case as the Chinese would know the US knew they knew.

[West Coast]

Another good find ORAC.

[barnstormer1968]

I remember reading about this at the time. I was surprised to hear just how little effect the axe could have made to prevent data being read from the hard drives after they were retrieved.

[Avtur]

“If I would have put it in the water, it would have killed us all,” he told The Intercept. “I had no flaps [to slow the plane],

Interestingly, when Nimrod R1 XW666 ditched in the Moray Firth in May 1995, it did so with zero flap, contrary to the FRC Ditching Drill that required 40 degrees flap. This was because of a sound airmanship decision by the fantastic Flt Deck crew (Art, Pat and Dave), due to the rapid failure of the primary and secondary (flap) hydraulic systems, and the potential (unknown) failure of the flap servodyne interconnecting cable, which could have led to an asymmetric flap condition.

I always wondered whether zero flap was the way to go given that it had been proven empirically to work (albeit once on type), rather than theoretically.

[PTR 175]

Certainly an interesting read. I see the US has not learn t from the USS Pueblo (AGER-2) report about the amounts of unnecessary documents and code keys carried.

They also had a similar problem because they were carrying keys for Crypto that was not only compromised to the N Vietnamese and thus the soviets but they had lots of it inc KY28s so could read the mail for potentially months. They got the kit when they overran a store containing lots of it,

Whilst at a St Mawgan we had a go at destroying some old kit with a fire axe and we were well up for it. But we soon found out even with a lump of concrete to work on and not an aircraft deck or equipment rack it was slow work and not particulary effective. Lots of damaged cases but many PCBs intact

The same time we tried burning a pile of old obsolete un-classified documents in a bin with the approved destruction equipment. (1 Jerry can of waste fuel and a box of matches) to see how effective it was. It took ages and also was not effective, lots of document pages could still be read after we raked out the ashes. This was an experiment to see how long it would take us to destroy 1 cabinets worth of documents and spare kit. The conclusion was It took longer that we were allowed and was wholly ineffective. I see nothing has really changed.

I see that vehicle denial has moved up a bit though. I was reading that the recommended denial process for specialised vehicles is grenades inside.

Now that would be fun to have a go at !

[Pontius Navigator]

The Vulcan had a panel, front left near the radome labelled Destructor. Never found out if it could be activated or how it would work though one rumour was explosive charges in the fuel tanks. It could not be reached unless the undercarriage was retracted. A similar device would not havevy worked in the P3 case.

Wonder why stuff was not just jettisoned. It might have been recoverable but not easily.

[thunderbird7]

Apparently wind affects the success rate of secret document burning as well. Ask the airport fire service in Tangier... 😀

[ORAC]

At the subsequent Courts Martial.

"Did you attempt to destroy the Top Secret documents in accordance with your standing instructions."

"No sir - we just threw them out the door intact".

You attempt to destroy them IAW SOPs and it doesn't work - not your problem.

You attempt to destroy them any other way and it doesn't work - definitely your problem.

[Pontius Navigator]

ORAC, as it happens, during training our paper work was shredded out of the window.

We would write out the airways crossing requests on a proforma and pass this to the pilot 10 minutes in advance. This was the duty of the 2nd nav. Once finished the pilot would crack the side window open and feed the paper into the air flow where it would be shredded.

[ORAC]

As an aside we used large ledger type books as diaries and log books at the CRCs. Impossible to destroy locally so we shipped them off regularly to the RN at Faslane who apparently had an industrial scale shredder.

When it came to be replaced after many years and was removed it was found to have broken somewhere inside allowing some items inserted to fall through; and in the foundations beneath were found a very large quantity of intact diaries and log books dating about 10 years....

[KenV]

A quick and sure method of destroying paper documents is to fill a large trash can half full with water, drop in the documents, and then use a paint stirring attachment on an electric drill to stir the mess. Job done in 1 to 2 minutes. Dump out the pulp and repeat as necessary.

[Pontius Navigator]

KenV, look forward to seeing your YouTube clip.

[Pontius Navigator]

On burning, I used to use an incinerator. After burning one particular document to returned to my office to find a large carbonised sheet, about 6x4 inches and perfectly legible, that had blown 100 yards and entered my office through the ventilation fan.

[KenV]

KenV, look forward to seeing your YouTube clip.Happy to oblige. Not my videos, but they do demonstrate the principle.

This version uses bleach, but bleach is not necessary.
LINK (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1CZC0TgvNI)

This one uses no bleach:
LINK (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZr1iEYaNkI)

[Pontius Navigator]

Thant you but definitely messy.

[KenV]

If you think that's messy, try burning documents in your kitchen or garage. Even burning on a patio or back yard is messier than the water method. And if you do the job in a 5 gallon bucket, you can safely flush the pulp slurry down the toilet. No more mess.

[Rossian]

.....there were thermite grenades. Had we ever had to evacuate the trick was to slam all the drawers shut and pull the red T-handle and run away. Thankfully we never had to do it.
And if you think that having to account for missing crypto is a PITA, try finding it two months later, exactly where it SHOULD have been (after five fingertip searches). Don't ask me how I know.

The Ancient Mariner

[Pontius Navigator]

Rosarian, or where the custodian issued only 2 days at a time but crews who needed day 3 would get a photocopy from another unit. The custodian tore out what little hair he had left when we returned photocopies.

[ORAC]

When I were a Fg Off at 280SU in Cyprus I were OIC Docs. We had quite a few cabinets; when during the Turkish kerfuffle they shut down Gata they shipped everything the had up the hill - there was no proper check and the then OIC refused to sign for them - but they left them anyway.

4 years later CENTO was folding and a signal arrived saying all such docs had to be treated at one level above their face classification - which meant I now had a cabinet of TS docs. Problem - we had nowhere to store them and I wasn't cleared to read or check them.

After intense discussion with Episcopi - decision, destroy them all and date the day before signal. Result! So start page checking and find dozens of missing pages and amendments. Pull out drawers and find lots of additional bits and pieces at back - Stn Cdr 's eyes-only*, etc etc.

I had weekly visits by the plods from Episkopi over the following weeks and months as I checked more and more of the documents - they trying to pin everything on me because I should have picked everything up in the one day I signed for them and me pointing out where many of the errors had occurred years before.

It was eventually all swept under the carpet - but they did come back for me years later on other more personal matters - but that's another story.

*Such as a book of lists of prohibited organisations of which serving personnel had to be reported as being members.

[Compass Call]

Why does 'secret' equipment not have destructor charges fitted these days?
In my day they were fitted to anything you didn't want 'them' to know about if your aircraft went down. They could be set off by the crew if they had to land in the 'wrong' place, or automatically after ejection.

[barnstormer1968]

Compass call.
Depending when your day was there could be several reasons why charges wouldnt work.
Some kit is very hard to out beyond data recovery and simply, shooting, burning or exploding the kit won't do the job. There are of course still many very low tech ways to completely destroy hard drives etc.

[Ogre]

On the subject of shredders,back in the early 90's we regularly used to have to destroy reams of A3 fanfold paper that had computer code on it that was mostly classified. The usual method of doing this was to feed the first page into the shredder, then at it "self fed" the rest of the document you stood back and occasionally added some oil to the paper to keep the blades lubricated.

The whole process took hours, and as the code was classified it required the presence of the responsible officer who had to sign that it had indeed been destroyed. So after a whole day you had a signed off sheet of destroyed documents, and several backs of classified hamster bedding.

Then it came to light that the Ops building had just received a new type of shredder that could do the whole thing in a fraction of the time. So we booked a slot, threw all the documents into the back of a sherpa and me and the responsible officer went off to dispose.

We were warned that we needed to bring denims with us, so once we had arrived and were properly attired we were led into the broom cupboard that held a large metal box with a slot in the top covered by a swinging cover.

The internal workings of this shredder were not a set of teeth that tore the paper apart, but a large drum with a number of very wide and very sharp blades mounted on it. This spun at a great speed, and when it was up to speed you picked up a wadge of paper (we were advised to use no more than half an inch of A3 fanfold at a time), opened the swinging arm in the top, deposited the paper inside the machine and closed the swinging arm to keep the dust down.

Less than a minute later the noise died down and you could repeat the task with the next wadge of paper, end result was that we destroyed about a three foot high pile of computer code in less than an hour, including clean up.

Seems the new shredder reduced the paper to something akin to a fine powder (hence the denims) which was transported to a skip outside the building by a hose down which air (and the dust was blown. No more hamster bedding...

In a chat with the machine custodian after we had finished, it turned out this was the little brother of a bigger shredder of the same design that the manufacturers produced. While the purchasing process was underway the manufacturer had asked if we needed to shred anything other than paper and the response was "Yes, wet film and 1 inch magnetic tape". "Send us down some examples and we'll see how it handles it" stated the manufacturer, and soon after responded that both examples had been successfully destroyed. "Good job" said we, "well can we have the film canister and tape reel back please". At this point the manufacturer admitted that they had just lobbed the examples into the shredder, film canister and tape reel included and there were no ill effects as far as the machine was concerned.....

[Fonsini]

After the Iranian Revolution hundreds of students were employed in the task of sticking together the millions of strips of shredded documents at the American Embassy. They were quite successful.

[Pontius Navigator]

Ogre, that was the volumetric disintegrator.

Remember the red file disposal slips? The job of witnessing officer usually went to a holding officer if available. After one session "where are the red disposal sheets?"