The destruction of the underwater system coincided with the unexplained movements of a fishing vessel, the author of an article for Bloomberg writes. Traditionally, suspicion immediately fell on Russia. However, after a thorough check, the investigation came to disappointing conclusions.
Norway has always relied on the sea. Fish has long dominated the country's diet, and in the 19th century, the bloody extraction of Norwegian whalers provided most of the world's lighting oil. Then an even more lucrative source of energy was discovered in the depths: huge deposits of oil and natural gas in Norway's sovereign waters, which turned it into the most progressive oil-producing country in the world. All this has led to the fact that the country is very interested in understanding what is happening off its famous rugged coast.
That is why the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research exists. The headquarters is located in the city of Bergen on the southwestern coast of Norway. About 1,100 employees of this state institute monitor the state of salmon and cod stocks in the country, measure the environmental impact of deep-sea drilling platforms and offshore wind farms, and map climate change in the northern seas. One of the acoustic engineers, Guosong Zhang, works in an office cluttered with cables, instruments and computers from different years, or on one of the eight ships of the institute, spending several weeks at sea.
Born in Norway and educated in China, Zhang is gruffly pragmatic, which corresponds to both cultures: he does not fill the silence in conversation. Much of his work involves a set of five powerful microphones installed along a 31-mile cable at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea called the Lofoten-Vesterålen Ocean Observatory. Known to the researchers serving it as LoVe, it is mainly a scientific tool, but is also used by the Norwegian military, which deletes confidential data before providing information to the public. The government does not specify how it uses this data, but recognizes that it can serve to identify specific ships in the area, whether they are military vessels of Norway, its NATO allies or opponents. This also makes him an extraordinary part of the surveillance apparatus monitoring the increasingly provocative activities of Norway's neighbor to the east, Russia.
The cable that carries data from microphones to shore is a capillary in the global circulation system. Hundreds of underwater communication cables encircle the planet. Fiber optic cables, coated with steel and plastic sheaths to protect against tearing and corrosion, often barely reach an inch in diameter. They penetrate coastlines, cross oceans and carry 99% of international information. They are vital and at the same time vulnerable.
In April 2021, Zhang had just returned from the Easter holidays when he noticed that the LoVe Observatory had gone silent. Problems with the cable were not unusual - in the isolated northern area, where it is remote from the coast, there are frequent power outages. But when Zhang remotely rebooted the computers, the data was still not coming in. When he contacted the technicians from the IT company that was installing the equipment, they also failed.
This meant that the problem most likely lay in the sea. Zhang hired engineering firms to conduct various tests of the cable's electrical and optical systems; they eventually settled on a site located 27 kilometers offshore. He passed by one of the cable repeaters, which serve to amplify light pulses carrying information so that the signal does not fade. To learn more, it was necessary to get access to the equipment itself, and this is an expensive and time-consuming process that requires specialized vessels and trained operators of underwater drones, which are in short supply in the Arctic from spring to early autumn, when oil and gas companies use the thaw to repair their equipment, and the institute's own research vessels are involved in research on fish populations and other expeditions. Therefore, Zhang's investigation has stalled.
Finally, five months after the shutdown, Equinor ASA, the Norwegian state oil company and partner in the observatory, informed the institute that it would sponsor a cable survey mission. The company offered Zhang and his colleagues to use the hundred-meter supply vessel Havila Subsea, which Equinor chartered for other work.
And so on September 10, researchers gathered at a computer in Bergen, watching a live video broadcast from one of the drones — a squat robot weighing three and a half tons and measuring 1.82 by 1.82 meters, a little over three meters long with a pair of "hands" similar to the claws of hermit crabs. As it descended, the glare of its headlights illuminated krill whizzing past the camera lens. Soon, a yellow observatory data cable emerged from the blue-green haze, then a repeater: a metal cage the size of a van, also yellow, to protect the equipment inside. As the underwater vehicle approached, the fish hiding in the cage lazily swam out.
Then the drone circled the cage, and Zhang could hardly believe what he saw. The output side had to be identical to the input side — the same mechanisms, the same cable running north to the next relay unit. But none of this happened. The equipment on this side had been ripped out, and the twelve-ton length of cable attached to it was missing.
"He lay there for three years and suddenly disappeared," he recalls. The cable was not faulty, it was gone. Under the influence of someone or something.
"There is a perception that the ocean is pacific," says Geir Pedersen, physicist and head of the LoVe Observatory. He notes that Jacques-Yves Cousteau named his groundbreaking 1956 underwater documentary "The Quiet World." But in fact, the ocean is noisy. "When you start to get into it," Pedersen says, "you see that everything makes sounds, and sound is crucial for the survival of everything that lives in the ocean." It is also crucial for how we begin to understand this world. "One of the features of the ocean is that light does not travel far underwater," he says. "Using cameras, you won't be able to see very much around you. But if you listen or send sound pulses, you can really see what's going on underwater." An increasing and destructive proportion of this noise comes from human activity.
The five microphones of the LoVe Observatory are located along a bend that stretches northwest along the seabed from a tiny fishing village in northwestern Norway called Hovden. Because sound waves can travel hundreds and thousands of miles underwater, these sensitive hydrophone microphones can technically detect sounds in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In his office in Bergen, Pedersen plays back samples of the cacophony that LoVe picks up: the shrill glissandos of humpback whales, the clatter of a tanker's propeller, the hoarse, rhythmic roar of seismic cannons used to detect oil and gas deposits under the seabed. From above, on the side of the polar ice cap, hydrophones record the steady drumbeat of icebergs as they collapse into the water during melting.
Usually, damage to an underwater cable occurs as a result of an accident or natural disaster. The ship anchors in the wrong place; an underwater earthquake breaks the cable. Fishing trawlers that tighten bottom nets are often to blame. In February 2024, Internet traffic in Africa slowed down when Houthi rebels in Yemen fired missiles at a cargo ship, causing it to drift at anchor through three cables and sink.
However, sometimes the cables themselves become a target. In the early 1970s, the U.S. Navy and intelligence agencies successfully attached a giant recording device to an underwater Soviet cable in the Sea of Okhotsk - divers had to go down every month to change cassettes. And more recently, cables and other elements of the underwater infrastructure were damaged in the waters along the NATO border.
It turns out that the modern world largely depends on unprotected pieces of equipment in remote locations. "We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe, the United States and Asia," says Katarzyna Zysk, professor of international relations and modern history at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies in Oslo. "This is a network that is very difficult to control, monitor and protect. This is an infrastructure that is very vulnerable to sabotage."
The cable of the LoVe Observatory, which cost $ 10 million to build in 2018, goes into the ocean under the tidal band almost 1,000 kilometers north of Bergen on the Lofoten Islands (Norway). It is a wild, exhilarating landscape of rocky peaks and fjords. In the fishing villages that dot the coast, colorful houses alternate with wooden racks called hjell, where cod wilts in the open air. The local caretakers of LoVe, brothers Jan-Tore and Wilhelm Enoksen, are engaged in shark fishing along with less than a dozen other fishermen in nearby Hovden. During a recent visit, 58-year-old Jan-Tore showed Bloomberg Businessweek a red wooden hut located above the shoreline. Inside, computer servers and several desktop PCs are displayed in a row, processing data from cable sensors. According to Jan-Tore, the job of caring for the cable is mainly to turn on the electricity after winter storms. He and his brother, who is a year younger, have never seen anyone suspicious, but if someone tries to break into the house, they will not be confused: "We will shoot them," he says, "with harpoons."
From the shore, the cable runs along the shallow coastal shelf, and then descends into the depths of the Norwegian Sea. There, the Gulf Stream, mixing with the cold, nutrient-rich currents from the Arctic, creates a rich spawning ground and a favorite migration route for fish and whales. The hydrophones placed along the route are located in their own protective cages and are about the size of a handheld microphone. The sounds they pick up are complemented by other instruments: echo sounders that pick up passing fish, profilographs for measuring wave height, sensors that measure acidity, transparency and carbon dioxide levels. All this information is sent back to shore, becoming the basis for a continuous stream of scientific work.
Other sounds picked up by hydrophones receive much less publicity. Norway and Russia share a land border and rich fishing waters of the Barents Sea. In recent years, Norwegian officials have accused Russia of using its submarine fleet — one of the largest in the world — to monitor and threaten critical NATO underwater infrastructure facilities. Last year, the Norwegian military released videos showing Russian nuclear submarines patrolling off the coast of Norway and following the routes of underwater gas pipelines and telecommunications cables.
The Norwegian Defense Research Institution (Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt, or FFI), which is the chief adviser to the Ministry of Defense and the Norwegian Armed Forces on defense-related scientific and technical research, has been involved in the LoVe project since the first days of its implementation, Pedersen says. And although he says he doesn't know how the military uses the information received from LoVe, he notes that all ships have unique acoustic signals that can be used to identify and track them. Naval mines can even be programmed to detonate when ships with certain acoustic characteristics pass by.
In a statement, FFI confirmed its participation in the observatory's work, while stressing that its efforts are not aimed at detecting Russian vessels, but at masking the movements and acoustic signatures of its own military vessels and those of NATO allies. FFI removes any such revealing information before LoVe's data becomes public. "If exercises with Norwegian or NATO ships took place nearby, we also do not publish data for the period when the ships were there," the institute clarifies on its website.
In the fall of 2021, after discovering that LoVe had lost a cable segment, Zhang wondered: where was he? At that time, he still believed that everything that happened was most likely an accident. A fishing trawler's net is often framed by heavy metal "doors" that keep it open while it is being dragged through the water. If one of them had accidentally hooked a cable and tore it off, the team might not even have noticed. However, if Zhang could identify the vessel and trace its path, he could figure out where to look for the missing equipment.
To do this, he contacted the Norwegian Coastal Administration and requested the data of the automatic identification System (AIS) of all vessels that were over this section of the cable when it ceased to function on April 3, 2021. (According to international law, fishing vessels and other large ships must have special transmitters that constantly transmit their speed, location and other information). Zhang entered the AIS results into a program that allowed him to create interactive maps showing the course of each vessel on the morning of the incident.
There were about a dozen ships on the maps. Most of them did this on April 3, passing long arcs through a fishing area slightly southwest of the two relay nodes supporting the missing segment. But one vessel, the 60—meter-long Sami trawler under the Russian flag— behaved differently. Moving at a speed of about 10 knots, it passed over the LoVe cable back and forth at least four times. "I saw this vessel, this one vessel only, crossing the cable location at that time," Zhang says. "I have focused my suspicions on this vessel." As soon as he narrowed his parameters to the time interval when the cable disappeared, the paths of other ships disappeared from the computer screen, leaving only clear scribbles drawn by "Sami". At the very moment when the cable broke, the ship was directly above him.
At the end of November, Zhang had the opportunity to personally trace the route of the Sami. With the onset of the Arctic winter and the slowdown in oil and gas production, he was able to order a drone operator and reserve time on one of the institute's own vessels, G.O. Sars. He and his colleagues left Tromso, a city of 78,000 people located above the Arctic Circle, and headed for the coordinates marked on the map by the AIS "Sami" track a few months earlier.
The G.O. Sars team was ready for a long search. However, as soon as they reached the first group of coordinates and launched the ship's drone, it almost immediately discovered the missing cable six miles from the original location. Watching over the cameraman's shoulder, Zhang saw a yellow line on the gloomy ocean floor just 18 minutes after the ship sank into the water. At the end of the cable was the torn-out equipment of the relay unit.
The next day, the ship's crew deployed the drone again to extract the cable. Using remote-controlled manipulators, the operator tied a large chain around the cable, attaching it to a powerful pulley, which slowly lifted it and secured it in a large collector on the G.O. Sars vessel.
The police joined Zhang a week after the extraction at the warehouse that the institute uses in Bergen. For the first time, he carefully examined the end where the cable was separated from the relay unit, and noticed something significant. If the cable had been torn apart or cut by the trawl door, the fracture would have been uneven and jagged. But instead, it was cut cleanly, with some kind of electric saw. It was hard to write it off as an accident.
At this point, the police officially took over the investigation. Sissel Rogne, who was the managing director of the Maritime Institute at the time, also notified the Norwegian Internal Intelligence and Security Service about the incident. In an interview with the Norwegian business magazine DN Magasinet, the publication that initially spread the news about the cable break, she stressed the importance of information for the Norwegian military and intelligence services: "We have nothing to do with submarines. But they are concerned about this incident."
As a result, to Rogne's disappointment, the incident was treated as a criminal case and not as a matter of national security. It fell under the jurisdiction of the Troms Police District, which covers a vast sparsely populated area of Northern Norway and territorial waters stretching north to the Arctic. The assignment was given to a local police prosecutor named Ronny Jørgensen. He works in Tromsø, and most of the cases he investigates are related to suspicions of overfishing. He didn't know much about underwater cables, except that they were marked on nautical charts so that fishermen could avoid them. "You usually want to stay away from any object that might interfere with fishing," he dryly remarks.
Zhang's conclusions served as a starting point for Jorgensen. Vessels such as the Sami are required to provide the Norwegian authorities with lists of crew members if they operate in the country's waters or enter its ports. Using this database, Jorgensen called for interrogations all the crew members who were on the Sami during its parking over the LoVe cable. The police managed to interview several sailors when she returned to Norwegian waters for several weeks to do work. They were all Russians and gave the same answer: they did not see or hear anything that would indicate that the ship had touched the cable.
Considering that the Sami was the only vessel in the vicinity of the cable at the time of its damage, Jorgensen was skeptical about this. The most plausible possible interpretation was that his net was entangled in the cable and that cutting the cable was the only way to free it. He believes that the crew members were not completely frank. "Fishermen would probably remember if there was a marine cable in the catch," he said. But since they were Russians, and Jorgensen had no corpus delicti to charge them with, there was little he could do except interrogate them.
Jorgensen ordered analyses of the severed cable, which confirmed that it had been cut by a power tool. "The people who cut that cable," he says, "wanted it to be cut."
And then his investigation, like Zhang's, hit a wall. Soon, however, he received another similar case. At about 5 a.m. on Friday, January 7, 2022, a communication cable with a length of almost 1,500 kilometers running from the Norwegian mainland to the far northern island of Svalbard stopped working. It was one of two cables serving the Svalbard satellite station, the world's largest ground station for collecting data from polar orbiting satellites, including meteorological and other images that are used for both civilian and intelligence purposes by American and European government agencies. Technicians from Space Norway, which maintains the cables, later found that water somehow got into one of the cables, which caused a short circuit and the electricity went out.
The incident could have been an accident. However, when laying cables in 2004, Space Norway took precautions and buried them under the seabed in shallow water, where there was a risk of damage by fishing trawlers. In other words, in order to cut the cables, it was necessary to first dig through a two-meter layer of protective silt. Three weeks after the shutdown, on January 30, 2022, when an underwater drone sank to the bottom to investigate the damage, cameras showed deep trenches in the seabed above the cables. Jorgensen says these trenches could have been dug with steel flaps of a fishing net. To find the exact coordinates of the cable and get to the cables themselves, as was the case in this case, would require many passages — a lengthy activity that suggests the deliberate nature of the actions.
Later, journalists from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation established that the Russian-flagged fishing trawler Melkart-5 crossed the cable's trajectory 130 times around the time it was damaged. One of the experts, speaking in a documentary filmed jointly by a group of Scandinavian public broadcasters, called the ship's traffic pattern "completely illogical." The Russian company Murman SeaFood Co., which owns and operates the Melkart-5 vessel, reported that the captain and crew members were interrogated twice by the Norwegian authorities and released without charges. According to Andrey Roman, the company's assistant director for legal and economic Affairs, the vessel was trawling in the permitted fishing area when the cable was damaged, and its movements that day were "absolutely normal." "We have nothing to do with this. Our ship has not violated any laws."
According to Nils Andreas Stensønes, Vice Admiral in charge of the Norwegian Intelligence Service and former commander of the Royal Norwegian Navy, Russia has long been prioritizing underwater operations. Even during the collapse of the Soviet Union, when its armed forces atrophied and funding was declining, Moscow did not stop investing in underwater confrontation and developing methods of mapping and potential sabotage of the enemy's underwater critical infrastructure. According to Stensenes, one of the main conductors of this work is a secret agency called the General Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known by the Russian acronym GUGI.
Norway has seen it all up close. Unlike land borders, sea borders, as a rule, do not have permeability: fishing trawlers and other vessels move relatively freely between Norwegian and Russian waters. This makes it possible to collect information. "We know that Russia uses civilian vessels for covert intelligence operations," says Stensenes. "We are also monitoring Russian-linked vessels with underwater capabilities to find out if they are being used for reconnaissance or more malicious activities."
These fears have only intensified after Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine in 2022. In November of the same year, journalists from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation used a speedboat to approach the Russian research vessel Admiral Vladimirsky, which was hiding in Danish waters and patrolling around wind farms off the coasts of Great Britain and Scandinavia with its transmitters turned off. Journalists tracked down the ship by listening to radio conversations that transmitted information about its location to a naval base in Russia. In the footage shown in April 2023, they approach the Admiral Vladimirsky and notice abnormally large antennas and other communication equipment on it that do not correspond to a civilian vessel. Then a man in a balaclava and a tactical vest with a military-style rifle appears on the deck. After a few tense minutes, the journalists return to the shore.
There have been other suspicious cable outages over the past two years. In October 2023, two telecommunications cables and a gas pipeline were damaged in the Baltic Sea, which, according to the authorities of the affected countries, was a possible sabotage. In this case, a Hong Kong-flagged vessel called Newnew Polar Bear, which was accompanied by a Russian icebreaker and which entered Russian ports only after sailing from China a month earlier, dragged an anchor hundreds of miles along the seabed en route to St. Petersburg. Investigators in Estonia, Finland and Sweden suspect that this strange act was not accidental. Finland's National Bureau of Investigation has released photographs of the injuries, and Risto Lohi, head of the Homicide and Other Serious Crimes unit, said in a statement to Businessweek that the case was being investigated as "malicious aggravated harm."
According to Zysk, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Defense Research, the cutting of the cable of the Maritime Institute and the damage to the cable in Svalbard have signs of Russian intelligence operations. According to her, they could be a relatively simple and non-suspicious way to try to weaken part of the Norwegian and NATO intelligence-gathering infrastructure, as well as potentially serve as training for Russian operatives specializing in sabotage of underwater infrastructure. Or they could simply be Moscow's way of demonstrating to officials in Oslo that their underwater infrastructure — from data cables and power lines to oil drilling platforms and pipelines — is vulnerable. According to her, such behind—the-scenes signals and similar behavior are common for spy services, which, for example, openly monitor suspected spies to make it clear that they are being watched. In both cases, they were talking about cables of particular importance to the Norwegian military, and not about transcontinental cables, which could provoke a more decisive reaction from NATO. According to Zysk, this is a sign of a verified provocation.
According to her, the "extremely unlikely and unconventional" behavior of Russian-flagged vessels in both cases, combined with "our knowledge that Russia uses civilian trawlers for reconnaissance operations," make these incidents very suggestive. "The probability that this damage was caused intentionally is very high."
Nevertheless, the evidence remains incomplete and circumstantial. In turn, Sergey Tsyganov, the owner of the Sami vessel, denies the involvement of his vessel in cutting the cable. According to him, the Norwegian police boarded the Sami and interrogated the captain and crew for 12 hours, but did not make any arrests, and his ships still enter Norwegian waters and dock in Norwegian ports. "We are not guilty of anything, we have not committed anything illegal," he says. (Jorgensen says that the conversations with the Sami crew took about an hour.)
In June 2023, Space Norway, the cable management company at Svalbard, was able to send a ship to repair and replace the damaged section, a year and a half after the short circuit. (They found a temporary solution to the problem so that the cable would work only a couple of weeks later). Photos released by the police show that the protective coating of the damaged cable has been stripped off, like the shell during the molting of a snake, and the rods of the wound metal armor are twisted and bent, exposing the fiber optics inside.
In October 2022, Jorgensen closed the LoVe case, declaring it officially unsolved. In March of the following year, he did the same with the Svalbard case. "The investigation has been terminated," he says. Any of these cases can be reopened if new evidence is found, but he considers this unlikely." Stensenes, the head of Norwegian intelligence, declined to comment on these cases or the results of parallel investigations conducted by his office or other representatives of the Norwegian government. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to messages requesting comment on this article.
Rogne, the former head of the Institute of Marine Research, is still unhappy with the results of the investigation into the LoVe incident. She told Businessweek that a higher authority in the Norwegian government should have sued the owner of the Sami vessel and his insurance company to pay for cable repairs. According to her, by not raising this issue, officials make it clear that they do not want to be at enmity with Russia.
"The ministry and the security services should deal with this issue, but they don't," she says. "We do not consider this topic closed — there is no cable, it does not function."
In a statement, the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries said that it did not file a claim against the owner of the Sami vessel, since the police investigation failed to identify the perpetrators. At the same time, it approved the allocation of NOK 57.8 million ($5.4 million) for the renovation of LoVe.
However, Zhang and his colleagues decided not to use the money to replace the damaged section of cable. Instead, they plan to bypass it by replacing the faulty sonar posts behind this site with modules with battery-powered wireless transmitters. Much will be lost: wireless modules will be able to transmit only a small part of the data that fiber once delivered from these depths. Most of the information will have to be collected physically by sending ships to lift the devices from the seabed and connect them to a computer to download the data manually. At least there will be nothing left to cut.
The authors of the article: Jordan Robertson, Drake Bennett
