Hackers pillaged US files to sell secrets to Saddam
By Tim Reid

HUNDREDS of military secrets, including troop movements and missile capability, were stolen from American government computers and offered to Saddam Hussein during the Gulf war, a former US security expert has admitted.

Computer hackers in the Netherlands used the Internet to steal enough top-secret information potentially to change the course of the war. Luckily for the Allies, the Iraqis ignored the data, probably fearing a hoax, according to intelligence experts.

Dr Eugene Schultz, former head of computer security at the US Department of Energy, has disclosed for the first time how he and colleagues sat helpless as the Dutch hackers pillaged the files across 34 US military sites in the months leading up to the 1991 conflict.

His revelations, to be screened on BBC 2’s Sci Files programme tomorrow, come after the conviction on Friday of a London Teenager for gaining unauthorised access to American defence and missile secrets. Using equipment that cost £750 from local shops, Richard Pryce, 19, broke into computer files of the US Air Force and the Lockheed aerospace company. US military intelligence officials claimed he had caused “more harm than the KGB”. Pryce, of Colindale, north London, who was 16 at the time, was fined £1,200.

Dr Schultz, who was also responsible for protecting the computers of US nuclear weapons sites, told the BBC that the Americans learnt for certain in October 1990 that the information was being offered to Baghdad. Working with the FBI, he pinpointed the source of the attacks to Eindhoven.

The leakage of data was certainly alarming. The Dutch hackers learnt about the exact locations of US troops and the types of weapons they had. They gained information about the Patriot missile’s capability and the movement of American warships in the region.

“We realised that these files should not have been stored on Internet-capable machines,” Dr Schultz said. “They related to our military systems, they related to Operation Desert Shield at the time, and later Operation Desert Storm. This was a huge mistake.”

Once the Dutch hackers had gained access to a military computer site, they simply kept guessing different passwords until the system let them in. Once inside, they could pick and choose the exact information they wanted. The attacks lasted for months.

“We couldn’t do anything about it,” Dr Schultz said. “If we had shut down one machine that they had been getting into, they would have found others to launch the attacks from.”

The full story of Iraqi involvement in this episode is still classified. The CIA will neither confirm nor deny that the hackers tried to sell military secrets to Iraq.