On Christmas Day 2024, six weeks before Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were due to disconnect themselves from Russia’s power grid, a Finnish engineer was just about to sit down to lunch when his phone rang. He was responsible for the Finnish side of the undersea cables that keep Finland and the Baltic states supplied with electricity, and one was malfunctioning. Within a couple of hours, authorities knew that a Cook Islands-registered tanker called the Eagle S, part of the shadow fleet carrying sanctioned Russian oil, in this case to Egypt, had sailed over the cable at the moment and location at which it had stopped working.
The coastguard hailed the Eagle S. Yes, they replied – though they did not seem to check – and sailed on. Three hours later the ship hit another four cables in quick succession, nearly hobbling internet provision in Finland and Estonia – and was minutes away from a major electricity cable and the Balticconnector, which supplies the two countries with gas.
Finland scrambled the border guard, which pulled up alongside the tanker and demanded the crew take up its anchor. But the Eagle S was not in Finnish territorial waters: the authorities could not force the captain to comply, and they did not know who or what might come to his aid. She has spent the last couple of years talking to undersea engineers and coastguards about this and other similar incidents, rootling through accident investigation documents and court transcripts and Zoom-calling the small, specialised crews who have to go out and repair the damaged cables, often under extremely challenging conditions, asking them to show her what they are doing out there at sea.
Now she has written it all up into a book bristling with enough incident to supply several action movies. No trained seafarer would do that. And they can say, ‘Well, I had no idea.
We didn’t notice a thing.’ And how can you prove that that’s not the case?” The Undersea War paints an extraordinary picture of the bottom of the ocean, of fish and plant life threading through shipwrecks and junk thrown overboard – and especially of the “undersea spaghetti bowl” made of miles and miles of gas and oil pipes and electricity, telegraph and fibreoptic cables, the longest of which is 45,000km long and some of which are so delicate “even an inquisitive fish could damage them”. Vast amounts of electricity and oil, 95-99% of global internet traffic and $10tn (£7.75tn) of financial transactions travel through this system every day. Braw, who has a direct, unfussy confidence and a dry sense of humour, began as a journalist before retraining in national security and specifically in so-called “grey zone” or sub-threshold threats (disinformation, election interference, cyber-attacks, cable sabotage).
A government adviser (she won’t say which governments, only that they’re in Nato), and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, she traces her interest back to watching Polish lorries loitering with intent around a cold war airbase near her childhood home in southern Sweden. The first newspaper article she remembers – she had just learned to read – was about a Soviet submarine that ran aground off the nearby city of Karlskrona in 1981, “the Soviet captain standing on top of the submarine” – she raises her arms as if in surrender. A couple of years ago she was called as an expert witness to a House of Commons Defence Committee inquiry into grey-zone threats and was struck that while the parliamentarians were serious, and knowledgable about the subject, they were “taken aback by the realisation that it’s very hard to protect undersea infrastructure.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
