Happens to `best' of them

[whitfield.diffie@Eng.Sun.COM]

    The following delicious item appeared at the bottom of page 4 in
the National Edition of The New York Times on Saturday, 3 July 1993.

		The Iraq Raid: Snoop Gets Scoop
		 Special to The New York Times

   Washington, July 2 --- An electronic hacker was able to listen in
as top aides to Secretary of State Warren Christopher helped him to
alert world leaders about the missile strike against Baghdad last
Saturday.

   The conversations were intercepted beginning nearly an hour before
the raid was made public.  But the first calls were apparently not
overheard until after Tomahawk missiles from Navy ships struck the
headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service.

   The calls, placed from a Government plane as Mr. Christopher
returned to Washington from Maine, provided a sense of the hurried
efforts made by officials in midair and in Washington to spread news
of the attack.  At one point, they indicate, a State Department
official awakened Chancellor Helmut Kohl of of Germany only to
discover that President Clinton had spoken with the German leader
earlier in the day.

   The eavesdropping was first reported in the current issue of
Business Week, which obtained a tape recording of the conversations
from an electronic hacker who specializes in monitoring unsecured
calls.  The magazine made available a transcript of the recording.

   The State Department refused to comment on what is said were
private conversations among Mr.  Christopher's aides, but a senior
official there said the transcript was essentially accurate.  None of
the calls made by Mr. Christopher himself was recorded, apparently
because they were placed through secure channels.

   Any uncoded call that travels through the airwaves rather than
along a wire can be intercepted, and electronic eavesdroppers have
become skilled at using scanners to monitor the communications.