War Games

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Reported by William Dowell/Paris

A French technological thriller

While the Reagan Administration has been struggling for more than three years to deny advanced computer technology to the Soviet Union, two French authors are now suggesting fancifully how the U.S. might turn the Soviet appetite for Western computers to its own advantage. Softwar, a high-tech thriller by Thierry Breton, a Parisian computer programmer, and Denis Beneich, a New York City-based freelance writer, explores what could happen if Washington, instead of blocking high-technology sales, used them for infiltration and sabotage. With nearly 100,000 copies in print, Softwar has become a bestseller in France. The book is now being translated into Japanese and English, and its authors are negotiating a contract to sell the movie rights.

As the novel opens, the Soviets are about to buy an American supercomputer, a so-called Craig 1, from France, ostensibly to help them forecast the weather on the steppes of Siberia. In fact, the Soviets intend to use the machine, one of the world's most powerful, to get into Western data banks that contain American military and technological secrets. Rather than objecting to the supercomputer sale, U.S. intelligence officials decide to capitalize on it. They dispatch an M.I.T. scientist to Paris to plant a "softbomb," or programmed booby trap, in the computer's meteorologic software. The key to the ploy is the information relayed by the U.S. National Weather Service to meteorologic centers all over the world. When the atmospheric pressure on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands is reported to be 1,029 millibars, the trap is sprung and all the Soviet computers connected to the Craig 1 suddenly begin churning out gibberish. After an initial panic, two Soviet programmers uncover the first softbomb and manage to disarm it. But they know that there are other software traps hidden in the machine, and the search for them leads to a series of electronic cliffhangers.

Softwar's authors play skillfully with state-of-the-art technology and the intricacies of computer software. In fact, there is no technical barrier to planting soft-bombs of the type the novel describes. "Not only is it thoroughly possible," says Charles Lecht, chairman of Lecht Sciences Inc., a New York City software company, "but I know of several instances where it has been done." Some U.S. software houses routinely encode secret time-delay functions in the logic of their largest commercial programs before sending them to prospective clients for preview. For example, such a program might be set to self-destruct if it is run more than ten times in a row. An unscrupulous client who tries to make repeated use of the program without paying for it will suddenly find the software gobbling up its own data at the rate of millions of characters a second.

Computer experts have long warned that today's fastest machines can be used as formidable weapons for international sabotage. By programming a high-speed computer to dial every phone number in Japan, for instance, one could eventually reach telephone lines that tap directly into the Bank of Japan. Any disruption of the bank's computerized funds-transfer system risks wreaking havoc with the Japanese economy.

A more immediate concern to the Department of Defense is the possibility that U.S.-built technology might end up in the guidance system of a Soviet missile. But the computers the Soviets have been trying to import could also be turned against them. A machine destined to fall into hostile hands might be surreptitiously tagged with a chip wired to monitor its host's operations. Such a Manchurian Candidate computer could then send home periodic intelligence reports without ever making its presence known. But that is the subject for another novel.

With reporting by William Dowell/Paris