U.S. AGENTS GAVE IRAQI AIR DEFENSES A COMPUTER VIRUS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 11, 1992                   TAG: 9201110193
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
U.S. AGENTS GAVE IRAQI AIR DEFENSES A COMPUTER VIRUS
Several weeks before the start of the Persian Gulf War, U.S. intelligence agents inserted a computer virus into a network of Iraqi computers tied to that country's air defense system, a news magazine reports in next week's issue.
U.S. News and World Report said the virus was designed by the supersecret National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., and was intended to disable a mainframe computer.
The report, citing two unidentified senior U.S. officials, said the virus appeared to have worked, but it gave no details. It said the operation may have been irrelevant, though, because the allies' overwhelming air superiority would have ensured the same result of rendering the air defense radars and missiles ineffective.
The secret operation began when American intelligence agents identified a French-made computer printer that was to be smuggled from Amman, Jordan, to a military facility in Baghdad.
The agents in Amman replaced a computer microchip in the printer with another microchip that contained the virus in its electronic circuits. By attacking the Iraqi computer through the printer, the virus was able to avoid detection by normal electronic security measures.
"Once the virus was in the system, the U.S. officials explained, each time an Iraqi technician opened a `window' on his computer screen to access information, the contents of the screen simply vanished," U.S. News reported.
The report is part of a book, based on 12 months of research by U.S. News reporters, called "Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War," to be published next month.
In a series of adaptions from the book, U.S. News also reported that two 5,000-pound bombs developed by the Air Force during the Gulf War, called GBU-28s, were dropped on a command bunker on the second-to-last day of the war with the explicit purpose of killing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The fact that the bombs were dropped Feb. 27 has been reported previously, but U.S. officials have repeatedly denied that Saddam was the intended target.
Gen. Ronald Yates, commander of Air Force Systems Command, told reporters last year that the bombs were aimed at "senior staff" of the Iraqi military.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB