CHAPTER SIX EARS

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As Nate Gerson's plane approached Churchill, a windy, desolate icebox on the western shore of Canada's Hudson Bay, he may have looked out and had the same thought as another visitor: "Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles." In 1957, NSA asked the physicist to find a way to capture valuable but elusive Soviet whispers as they drifted over the North Pole and into Canada. For a number of years, Canada had maintained a bizarre listening post near Churchill—a ship on stilts. Like a steel ark, it sat high above a sea of giant rhombic eavesdropping antennas planted in the tundra and pointing in every direction.

But rather than listening to Soviet bomber pilots, Gerson and an NSA colleague ended up spending two days and nights in the wardroom of the landed ship playing liar's dice with the intercept operators. As a result of unique atmospheric conditions, no signals of any type could get through. They had been absorbed like a sponge by the auroral sky. Gerson knew that the only way to get around the problem was to move farther north— way north—as close to Russia as they could get. His idea was to build a listening post north of all human habitation on the planet, on a speck of land less than five hundred miles from the North Pole: Alert. Like a beacon, it sits on the northern tip of desolate Ellesmere, an Arctic island nearly the size of England and Scotland combined but with a population of less than a hundred permanent residents. It was hell in reverse, a place of six-month nights where marrow freezes in the bone. The nearest tree is more than fifteen hundred miles south.

Unknown, even today, is the spy war that raged at the top of the world—the true Cold War. Here, the two superpowers came closest together—and were even joined, during the bitter winter, when America's Little Diomede Island and Russia's Big Diomede Island were linked by an ice bridge. It was also each nation's Achilles' heel, where the distances were too great and the living conditions too intolerable to maintain an effective manned defense. "Study your globe," warned General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, the former chief of the Army Air Force, "and you will see the most direct routes [between the United States and Russia] are not across the Atlantic or Pacific, but through the Arctic." If a third world war were to break out, Arnold cautioned, "its strategic center will be the North Pole." The Arctic was also the perfect place for both sides to engage in a wizard war of electronic eavesdropping.

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