What follows is Crypt Newsletter's transcript of Robert Schweitzer's testimony on radio frequency weapons before the House Joint Economic Committee. Schweitzer makes reference to -- although not by name -- to live fire testing with low and high power microwave broadcasts at China Lake in California in the summer of 1997. Links to the originals are included at the base of the document. It is interesting to note that months after the testimony, no one has yet produced for inspection a working radio frequency weapon as described by Schweitzer.


OPENING STATEMENT OF LIEUTENANT GENERAL ROBERT L. SCHWEITZER, UNITED STATES ARMY (RET) TO THE JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE OF THE ONE HUNDRED FIFTH CONGRESS: From "Economic Espionage, Technology Transfers and National Security" (June 17, 1997, ISBN 0-16-055880-8)

Mr. Schweitzer: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to try to put in just a few minutes, the work of a year and to summarize, in a little bit short fashion, what will be the white paper that will be offered to the Dept. of Defense on this whole subject.

What I want to concentrate on, because of the nature and character of your Committee and the work of it, is the impact of these new weapons of which I will be speaking on the infrastructure, because that is totally missing from consideration right now. I'm going to talk today about a radical, new class of weapons, radio frequency weapons, which, as you said, Mr. Chairman, have been wrapped in mystery and secrecy for many years. This should not be the case.

The Internet has literally tens of thousands of documents on radio frequency. Articles and books are written on it. There are many unclassified statements in the public record by Department of Defense officials.

I find, in that regard, some 90 to 100 references to this threat -- and that's really what it is -- in the _Quadrennial Review_, although nowhere is the term "radio frequency weapons" used. But, asymmetric threats, discontinuous threats, the new technologies, the way we will have to deal with them.

For the military, if I can illustrate the whole thing by putting you all on the deck of the Forrestal in July 1967, F-4s were loaded in the Gulf of Tonkin with armament ready to go out on their missions. Radar sweeping the deck, scanning it, found some faulty shielding in one of the F-4s.

And, in a second, a missile was loose, rolling across the deck and within just moments we had an absolute conflagration and which took about seven months for the Forrestal to be repaired. And, 134 officers and sailors lost their lives all because of a demonstration of quantum physics and electrical engineering which can and have been applied to create weapons.

And, this history goes back before anything -- any accident of electronic interference on the Forrestal. It goes back to Japan and World War II where they created the first radio frequency weapon that was used and didn't even know they had done it. Their work began in 1927.

Their are many scholars and scientists who have worked on this. In fact, one of our problems with technology transfer on this, as I say in my written statement, the horse is out of the barn. The transfers have been going on in this area, at least since 1949 when the first international conference in Frascati, Italy, took place where these ideas were shared. And, the work then synthesized and came forward.

Anyone can attend these conferences. The Russians were at the first one. They are vigorous participants in all of them.

There is a BEAMS conference that has gone on for 20 years, a EUROEM conference that has gone on for over 20 years under different names.

In its 1994 meeting in Bordeaux, France, the Russians laid out fruits of their own work up until then, which included a very detailed description of a whole series of radio frequency weapons and papers that gave the strategy, doctrine, tactics and techniques as to how they would be used. Now, I am not a "the Russians are coming" speaker today. This is not the threat.

They are our friends, and they are working with us at least for now. And, we hope that will continue.

In fact, one way to do it, in my belief, is to engage in joint ventures with them on these very weapons, because they are engaged in proliferating them. At the Bordeaux conference, Iran and Iraq attending, picking up the papers, they were -- the Russians were in the business of negotiating transfers and sales of the technology and the weapons.

Our own work here in the United States is really noteworthy. I have been down to the laboratories in Senator Bingaman's state. I am very impressed with the brilliance of the quality and the dedication of the scientists at both Sandia and Los Alamos.

At Los Alamos, this month, they are taking a Russian design, fabricating the weapon themselves, but it's a Russian weapon they are fabricating. They are convinced it will perform to the standards and capabilities of the -- that the Russians are claiming.

There is a lot of dispute about what the Russians claim. After a year of work on this, I am convinced, along with the famous Dr. Max Fowler, who invented the first RF weapon in the United States at Los Alamos, that what the Russians say they do, they have proven; what they have promised, they have tested out at Los Alamos.

There are other tests that will be taking place, one out at another national lab in the west where young engineers accepting a challenge that we, at least, made in part to them, went out to a RadioShack and bought components to make a RF weapon, mounted it on top of a minivan. I had suggested a pickup truck and they didn't have a pickup truck, so it went on top of a minivan.

And, this device will be tested also this month. I am convinced that this will work.

And the cost is about $800 to do this. These weapons, therefore, at low power have an enormous impact on the infrastructure.

And, I would like to just cite some of the things that they could do to the infrastructure. They can effect the national power grid, anything that has got an electronic chip in it, a circuit board, any piece of electronic gear that is touched by one of these weapons. And, they come either as narrow beam over long distances, or ultra-high beam, ultra-wide beam, ultra-wide ban [sic] weapons that can project greater rates of power.

You don't need a lot of power to affect the infrastructure. The military has a problem -- my army, as we modernize, miniaturize and micronize all of our equipment, it becomes more vulnerable to RF weapons.

So, this whole new trend in information warfare that's so good and which we are embarked on so successfully has a back side to it. Unless you protect the systems, they are more vulnerable.

And, in the economic infrastructure, with which this Committee is so much concerned, there is no hardening at all. There is no protection against RF weapons.

So, you've got a situation on the one hand where you could put components from RadioShack inside of a van no bigger than an UPS truck with an antenna. And, that's really what an RF weapon often looks like, a radar or antenna showing, and drive it around the Dirksen Building, make a series of passes over the Pentagon or the White House, or the FAA facility out at Langley and pulse.

And, the wonderful thing about these weapons, from a scientific point of view, is they have deep magazines. They don't require any ammunition. They can fire, refire as long as there is power in that generator.

You make a number of passes around the building and emit these pulses. They go through concrete walls. Barriers are no resistence to them. And, they will either burn out or upset all of the computers or the electronic gear in the building.

The way they are designed in the work that is being done in the United States, they are absolutely safe. And, everything I am telling you, incidentally, is unclassified.

They are absolutely safe to human beings, because they meet the standards of protection for humans. So, that's an advantage. They have become a nonlethal weapon in that sense.

But, the danger to the military of these weapons appearing on the battlefield is probably somewhere off in the future, I think nearer than most people do but off in the future. But, for the infrastructure, it's here now.

Anybody -- in fact, one quote from one of the engineers was, "Any idiot can go and build one of these weapons."

You can use them against the banking system so that currency transactions and financial transactions cannot be made. They can be used with these intense pulses to attack railroad and transportation systems.

Everything depends on electronics to pass trains and shuttle them back and forth and even more so for airplanes, which is always kind of a sensational subject in the inventory target for terrorists. These weapons can interfere with the takeoff and landing of planes. They can bring an airplane down.

Indeed, there is one incident, the only one the NTSB has not ever concluded on, other than the one in New York where they have reached a provisional finding, but this was out in Colorado Springs in 1993. And, it had the earmarks of an RF weapon, other than nobody ever came forward to take the credit or the blame for having done it.

You can disrupt the pressure and flow in the petroleum pipes and in the gas and oil lines. You can interfere with traffic lights and cause gridlock.

You can cause nuclear power plants to malfunction, to go into shutdown. You can cause files and data, any digital data, to be corrupted or changed or altered.

The telecommunications we share, military and civilian. Nine percent of our military traffic goes over the civilian infrastructure, so it's hard even to define infrastructure.

There are some recommendations. We need a policy lead -- and I will conclude with this. I hope to get your questions to go into more detail.

We need a policy lead in the Pentagon and in the government to provide direction, which is now wanting, not that it can't be given and certainly not that it shouldn't be given. But, we need a strong policy lead.

And, that's one of the reasons why these matters haven't come to light sooner and been addressed better.

I would also like to conclude by saying the one thing that worries me is that as we go into an R&D phase, which the Russians are doing, increasing their budget -- one study says six-fold, another two-fold in this area. And, the one, for me, disturbing thing in the _Quadrennial Review_ was the statement that we were going to consider a base realignment and closing to include the national labs.

We are going to need those labs to come up with the inexpensive solutions -- and many of them are -- for protection with plasma limiters, surge protectors, metal covers. There are a number of things. Even paint will work in some cases.

We need, I believe, to get the labs involved in this in finding the solutions. And, the one thing that should not be displeasing to you is this is not a budget buster.

It's going to take time just to get our arms around the problem, at least a year. It's going to take time to test to get the vulnerabilities and susceptibilities and then look at the different systems to protect what we have.

Thank you, sir.

Representative Saxton: Thank you. General Schweitzer, I take it that RF (radio frequency) devises [sic] are not new technology and the use of radio frequency is not something that we have just recently discovered. As a matter of fact, we have used radio frequency to jam signals between adversaries for many, many decades.

But, what makes it unique I suppose, today is that the type of radio frequency weaponry that we can use applied to modern technology (i.e., computer chips) creates a much more intense and difficult situation for us to contemplate. To help us understand this, it occured to me, as you were testifying, that there are a variety of ways that a country can be befuddled.

One of those ways would be, as you mentioned briefly -- and this is something that I think many Americans would be interested in, you talked about interrupting banking operations. What would happen if a radio frequency device was used in downtown New York on Wall Street.

Mr. Schweitzer: Yes sir. And, it's not these exotic weapons that I was talking about coming out of Russia.

This can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components. I have in my briefcase a catalog from one of the companies that is putting out these devices that says, "We will show you how to do it. Everything is included. If it isn't, we will help you get it with diagrams or other assistance." And, the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components to go and do a number on Wall Street.

The kind of scenario that one could envision would be the van with a radio frequency weapon in it and no exterior signs or indicators or signatures on it, just driving in circles or up and down the canyons of Wall Street pulsing with this almost limitless capacity to generate high power pulses through the walls of the financial and banking institutions on let's say, a Sunday morning at 2:30 a.m. And, you can make as many passes as you need.

So, if you have a weapon, as we do in our military inventory, with a certain probability of a hit -- let us say it was only 10 percent and, of course, ours are much higher than that, but if you had 10 percent probability of target effect and you made ten passes, you would greatly increase your target effect, which is not to say that that the intelligence that you would need as to where every computer is located in every bank and every financial institution would be available to the one or two people in the van doing this, the driver and one man inside generating the pulses. But, if you make enough passes and you propagate enough high-powered pulses through those walls, you are going to do considerable damage. You will either burn out or upset all the electronics.

Now if a computer goes down in one of your offices and you have the technician and the spare part, you can fix it in five minutes. But, if you put the whole system down like that, a whole series of things -- and the more damage you do, the more complicated things are to repair -- then you've done considerable damage over a period of time.

And, this is not just speculative on my part. A year ago this month, in London -- and it's disputed in the Intel community and elsewhere but I think frankly, after having gone into this in great detail, the dispute is to protect the fact it happened. But, the _London Times_, which is no tabloid, reported in June 1996 that attacks had been made on their banking and financial institutions, enough to demonstrate the capability to do the damage. And, then they extorted by blackmail an enormous sum of money, 40 million pounds Sterling.

I was told that was a hoax. A week later, there was a story saying, no, the London government was seriously investigating this and, yes, these things had happened.

And, yes, this is a good way for people who have these weapons to gain money and funds through extortion. You don't even have to do it. You can shut it down either deliberately to do the damage, as happened in Sweden by their report, an official report this month from one of their government officials, 40 times that this was done. And, they ended up paying extortion. So, you can be hurt on either side.

I would like to use this opportunity, Mr. Chairman, to say, I'm sure to the great relief of the people in the Department of Defense, that I am not speaking for them or for any service. I'm speaking for myself.

But, every statement I'm making here is not only unclassified, but I validated it. It isn't just taking rumors or drivel off of the tabloids. These are solid facts that I'm giving you.

Representative Saxton: Okay. Let me just ask a question similar to my question to Dr. Leitner and Mr. Fialka. If this is the situation, what do you see as the remedy?

Mr. Schweitzer: Well, one remedy for your Committee, because of the topic of this morning, in my humble opinion, is to review the export controls, particularly with regard to the critical military list and see if we can't apply to them the same considerations that we give to nuclear technologies.

We are the scientific powerhouse of the world. We produce, develop and are looking into and, in some cases, Senator Bingaman has a constituent in Albuquerque who exports Reltron tubes, which can be used as RF weapons, and certainly will advance the cause of this.

Representative Saxton: Let me just break in again and say, if we can -- if I can get into your briefcase and get your book and go down to RadioShack and buy the components and put one of these devices together, which can be effective in carrying out the destruction we are talking about, obviously people who are not friendly to the United States can do the same thing.

So, what I was trying to get you to say was you mentioned the notion of shielding electronics equipment and computers in your opening statement. Is that something we need to pursue as well?

Mr. Schweitzer: Of fielding it, sir?

Representative Saxton: Shielding.

Mr. Schweitzer: Sheilding, yes, sir. My keen tanker's ear pick up all these consonants.

(Laughter)

Yes, absolutely. And, I would defend what was done in the Reltron tubes case. And, I do that in the written statement.

But, we need to take the same low cost technologies and components that we are using to advance the information age in the military and use those same kind of technologies and even components to do the defensive side. That's why I think the people who say this is going to cost -- and one study does say this -- the annual defense budget to harden and protect everything, that's really nonsense.

First of all, you wouldn't want to do the whole thing. You wouldn't want to spend that kind of money.

And, you really don't need to. Some of the fixes are low cost, simple and can be applied.

Representative Saxton: Thank you.

GZC 105-240.

Relevant links":