From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here. One of the things I love about reporting is that every once in a while you meet someone whose job you didn't even know existed. Not because their job is secret exactly, just because it never occurred to you that someone had to do it. Earlier this year, the Trump administration suggested that Russia was stockpiling weapons. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. Most of us wouldn't even know where to start to check that out. But a while back, we met someone whose job is to do exactly that. He doesn't work from satellite photos. He doesn't recruit spies. His specialty is wreckage, specifically scraps from a missile strike. And somehow, those scraps can tell him whether Russia is actually getting stronger or just getting better at looking like it is. I'm Dina Temple-Ruston, and this is Click Here. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And today, we're revisiting one of our favorite shows. Karen Duffin introduces us to a man who reads the history of war from the pieces everyone else leaves behind. We'll be right back with that story. If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, The Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to therecord.media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox. I'm Karen Duffin, and you're listening to Click Here. When you think about war, you think of total destruction, things getting obliterated, erased. But inside that wreckage, there's often something else. There's evidence. And that's where our tech detective works. inside the rubble of the war in Ukraine. Air raid alerts rang across the country as Ukraine came under a wave of drones and missiles. Let's start with this morning's drone attack on Kyiv. What can you tell us? Well, lots of loud bangs in the skies above. Watching the attacks night after night, Damien Spleeters began to wonder if he could do something to slow down the attacks using, well, bureaucracy, international sanctions. He wondered if he could shut off the supply of weapons, not at the end of the line, but component by component. And this was not a fanciful aspiration because Damien is a weapons investigator, though that's not where he started. I started as a journalist, actually, getting interested in weapons and how they are used and how they get into conflict areas. That reporting led him to arms dealers and then to supply chains and eventually to conflict armament research, which is where he works now, alongside other tech detectives. People who governments call when they're trying to separate battlefield reality from battlefield theater. When movies tell stories about the global arms trade, it usually involves glamorous weapons dealers, shadowy brokers, deals in dim hotel bars. I supplied every army but the Salvation Army. This is the Hollywood vision, you know, of how it works. Weapon diversion is much more mundane than that. Instead, weapons investigation, well, it looks something a bit more like this. Okay so we are walking in this room and in front of us is a Shahad 131 that was recovered by Ukrainian forces Damien and his team had collected pieces of a downed drone. It had landed beside a building in Kharkiv, largely intact, and we asked him to record the team as they investigated. It's this kind of thing that weapons inspectors actually do. They pull fragments like these out of the wreckage of an attack and piece them together to reveal what actually happened, not just on the battlefield, but leading up to it. So we see only a little substrate of what is being used, but it's a good example of what's going on. What he's looking at here is the Shahid 131 drone. You can picture a paper plane made of fiberglass, no bigger than a kayak. And this one is missing a wing. We can see the carcass right there. Its engine is small, like lawnmower-sized, so it's pretty slow-moving, and it's easy to hear coming. So a lot of them, like this one, end up getting shot down. All right. That's good. It's a Weller 9. All right. So let's take a few shots here. Damien photographs each of its components individually. It's a meticulous, almost forensic process, something he's been doing in Ukraine since 2018. Each component carries clues. If you understand them well enough, they can tell you where the pieces came from, almost like fingerprints. Take semiconductors. The way it usually works with the semiconductor industry is that the type of marking you'll have on some chips denotes the week and year of manufacture. And through that information, usually they can find records of, you know, a list of distributors that got the parts. From there, Damien identifies who bought those components and who bought them after that, eventually taking this whole chain of evidence and tracing from the battlefield where the bomb dropped all the way back to its origin, almost like a crime scene investigator, except he's not trying to solve a murder case. He's trying to slow a war. My main interest in looking at weapons is that it functions to me as a physical document. It's a whole chain of custody and, you know, all the hands it went through and where it was made and how it arrived there and how it was used and all that. And I think through that, you can then tell a story about the conflict you're looking at, about the war you're looking at. And the way Damien works to slow the war he's looking at is by investigating the supply chain. Supply chains are the big guns in his line of work because of sanctions. Russia might not care about sanctions, but the companies who make these components, they often do because they can face heavy fines, blacklists, even criminal charges. We can say, look, it looks like this customer of yours, we found them repeatedly. and you may want to look into it. We don't provide any legal or business advice. We're not doing that. We provide information. Information the government can't always provide because it could be considered a military secret. But the thing is, a lot of the components Damien is finding, they aren't military-grade. They're commercial, parts like those semiconductors. They find their way into not just weapons, but also phones, computers, TVs. 99.9% of the components we found in Russian, Iranian, and North Korean missiles are commercial in nature. They're not even up to military standard. So, you know, you cannot really expect a manufacturer to control the, you know, billions of little chips they make that are not even uniquely marked to know exactly where it's going to end up. Until Damien shows them. We know for a fact that we've avoided a lot of headaches to some of those companies because some of their customers were just like bad people and they didn't know about it. For Damien the goal isn to catch anyone out after the fact It to try to intervene while the system is still moving I remember a case where we found a new navigation system in one new variation of the Shahed and we had number four And that meant Russia was still testing it before it went into mass production. So, you know, right at the beginning, and we could identify the Hong Kong company that was the end user and certainly the diversion party. We caught it before they could actually accept that order for 10,000 items. And that one interruption forced not just a pause, but a total reset. Now they have to find another navigation system. They have to find new companies to set up, a new network to get it. This is the quiet power of supply chain investigations, because to interrupt a supply chain is to throw sand in the gears of the war machine, to basically hit pause on the war. It's the difference between Russia being able to make 10,000 drones right now and launching waves and Russia being able to do that, you know, in a year. And it makes a difference. That gap doesn't just show up on a spreadsheet. It shows up in buildings that never get bombed and people who never get attacked. But interrupting a supply chain is only half the story. Because soon, Damien would find himself looking at a different kind of evidence entirely. Evidence that could answer a much bigger question about this war. We'll get into that right after this break. How do we maintain a strong defense in a world that's rapidly changing? Join us on Strength in Numbers, a podcast from UVA's National Security Data and Policy Institute. I'm your host, Jennifer Strong. In each episode, we'll take a look at the materials powering today's most advanced technology, how it's being used on the battlefield, and ask how the United States can stay competitive against potential adversaries. Voters should be concerned about all this. We want America to be strong, but we've got to be strong and smart. That's all coming up this season of Strength in Numbers. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Late last year, Damien's investigations took a turn. When the Trump administration made an alarming claim. They said that Russia isn't just firing weapons, it's stockpiling them. And this was shocking because with a stockpile of weapons, Russia could threaten not just Ukraine, but Europe and even beyond. Some people did not buy this claim. Instead, they figured the U.S. was just bluffing, trying to pressure Ukraine to accept the peace deal. Damian, suddenly he had in his hands not just evidence that could thwart a supply chain, but evidence that could prove or disprove this alarming claim. A claim that could impact the potential end of this war. So he started looking for clues right away, this time in serial numbers. The indication of stockpiling is based on the serial number of the missiles. So we can say that based on that, we can confirm it by the date on the components. If I were to see, you know, missiles that are made using Russian components almost exclusively, I would think it's a good sign. If he saw that a lot of the missiles were being made inside Russia, it would be a sign that the claim was true, a sign that the country is self-sufficient enough to produce its own weapons, and thus strong enough to start stockpiling. But that is not what he's seeing. There is basically no change to the weapons coming through Damien's warehouse. Just as he's seen for the past few years, those weapons are not from Russia, they're from Iran and North Korea I don think you can in the same breath say that your war economy is doing great and rely on North Korea for weapons You know, it doesn't really make sense. And they're weapons that have clearly not been pulled out of a large stockpile. No. I mean, the Shahad we see are produced a month or two before they are being used. It's very, very rapid. It will take time to know for sure, even a few years, Damien said. But for now, you can count him skeptical about those stockpiling claims. More likely, they're just a bluff. President Trump initially promised to end the war in just 24 hours, so he is likely looking for leverage wherever he can get it. And this is the beauty of a scrappy tech detective like Damien. They can find powerful evidence in the most mundane of places, in serial numbers and supply chains, in components and scraps. Our adversaries are very crafty, very creative. They don't have to play by the rules. And therefore, we need to out-innovate them. We need to be more creative than them in order to be a step ahead of them and not them being a step ahead of us. You know, whether you want to be the hunter or the prey, it's up to you. And in conflict, it isn't just the missiles that make the victor. It's the facts, something that can be hard to decipher in the fog of war. One of the first things that dies in conflict is like the truth. These artifacts have and they hold in them a piece of truth that can be extracted. If you look at it, you know, long enough and well enough. And for Damien Spleeters, that truth isn't hidden. It's just scattered, waiting for someone like him, someone patient enough to collect it. That was Karen Duffin. This is Click Here. Thank you. to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and PRX. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietry, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Kavado, and fact-checked by Darren Ankrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston, with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley. Our illustrator is Megan Goff. And our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Neismacher. I'm Dena Tumple-Raston, and we'll see you next week. Support for this program comes from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future. Know what matters. Act first. Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here? Then check out our sister publication, The Record, from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kiev, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to therecord.media.
