Dead Drop: November 10

DANISH GRAYMAIL?  Two top former Danish officials who had been facing trial for leaking classified information got good news last week, when officials in Copenhagen dropped the charges against them. Former minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen and former head of the Danish Defence Intelligence Service Lards Findsen had been charged with leaking highly-classified information but the Supreme Court of Denmark said if they went to trial – the case would have to have been laid out in public – and according to Reuters, the prosecutors didn’t want to do more damage – by revealing in public whatever the two men supposedly leaked.  So, what did they leak?  We don’t know – although some media reports suggest it had something to do with a secret surveillance agreement between Denmark and the U.S. National Security Agency.

SUBTWEET: The U.S. military is notoriously tight lipped about certain things – among the most closely guarded secrets is the movement of Navy submarines.  That’s why it was more than a little eyebrow raising when U.S. Central Command put out a tweet (or whatever you call tweets on “X” these days) announcing that an Ohio-class guided missile submarine had arrived in their area of responsibility.  Clearly, a not-so-subtle subtle message was being sent to the Ayatollahs in Iran to tread lightly or the boat could give them a lot of headaches.  Originally, this class of submarine carried ICBMs…but four are now designated as guided missile carrying subs and they sport 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Each of those missiles has a thousand-pound warhead.  While announcing the deployment, the silent service (as the submarine force is sometimes called) has not completely changed their ways – they did not name WHICH Ohio-class sub is now lurking in range of Iran – but just knowing that some Ohio-class boat is there should be enough to focus minds Tehran’s attention. Not wanting to come in second in un-subtle sub news, Moscow announced this that their new strategic missile carrying submarine named the “Imperator Alexander III” (which must sound better in Russian) launched a “Bulava” ICBM. The Russian defense ministry said the missile was launched from underwater in the White Sea off Russia’s northern coast and hit a target thousands of miles away on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. If you crave more palaver about the Bulava, check out The Cipher Brief’s Open Source Report from Monday morning.