Peace Activist Who Trashed AF Computer Gives Self Up

SAN FRANCISCO —  An anti-war protester who said she slipped into a storage building on a remote section of Vandenberg Air Force Base, destroyed an out-of-service computer and then left behind flowers, cookies and a poem surrendered here Wednesday to federal authorities.

Katya Komisaruk, 28, was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of destruction of government property. The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, which has jurisdiction over Vandenberg, is preparing to prosecute her.

Air Force officials at Vandenberg confirmed the break-in and acknowledged that a computer had been sabotaged. They said the action had no effect on activity at the base.

Walked Through Unlocked Gate

Komisaruk showed up at the pressroom Wednesday at the Federal Building in San Francisco and told reporters that she had broken into the base to make a safer world for the children she hopes to have one day. She walked through an unlocked gate at the base at about 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, she said, and broke into a building through a window in the door. For two hours she smashed equipment with a crowbar and emptied two base fire extinguishers on a computer.

“I used a crowbar,” she told reporters. “I took out all the (computer) chip boards and danced on them.”

She spray-painted the word Nuremberg and other slogans on walls outside the building. Then she left behind a box of Mrs. Fields cookies and a poem that she concluded: “Have a cookie and a nice day,” and signed, “In peace, Katya.”

“You’re a party to mass murder if you don’t get out there and try to stop it,” she said in explaining her reference to the Nuremberg Nazi war crimes trials. “It’s better to destroy a few machines than to let those machines destroy millions of people.

“I’m anxious to start a family sometime, and I need a safe place to bring my child up. It came to me the most responsible thing I could do would be to help our country disarm.”

She said the building had Navstar marked on the outside and she believed she was sabotaging the Navstar Global Positioning System, a sophisticated international military navigation system based on a computer-linked network of satellites.

But Vandenberg officials said the attack was useless because the computer, which had once been used to test the Navstar system, a sophisticated military navigation system, had been inactive for 18 months. The Navstar system operates out of Colorado, they said.

“The computer was simply in storage . . . and has no effect on any activity on the base,” Sgt. Fred Bolinger said.

Komisaruk said she never expected to leave Vandenberg without being arrested, but when no guards appeared after she vandalized the equipment, she walked to a roadway and hitchhiked to San Francisco, where she delivered news releases to media offices announcing her plan to surrender and then held her press conference.

While FBI agents led her from reporters, security guards at the Federal Building, concerned that she was able to get a bolt-cutter and drill into the building past metal detectors, demanded that news photographers not take pictures of them.

The break-in, discovered later Tuesday morning, is under investigation by a special team of Air Force officers, Bolinger said. Bolinger said the Air Force “does not discuss security measures” and declined to answer in detail questions about how the woman was able to enter the base and spend two hours inside a building, demolishing equipment undetected.

He noted, however that the storage building holding the computer is in a fenced compound on the north end of the base, about a mile from San Antonio Road West, a public road on the outskirts of Lompoc in northern Santa Barbara County, Bolinger said. And, he said, several public roads pass through the base’s 98,000 acres, “so you could reach this facility without going through any of the gates.”

The total amount of damage “has yet to be determined,” he added.

Lt. Col. Richard Hill said the building that formerly housed Navstar satellite tracking operations has been used by Lockheed Space Operations Co. for storage since last June.

Vandenberg, the third-largest Air Force base in the United States, is the only military installation in the Western World where intercontinental ballistic missiles and polar-orbiting space satellites are launched on a regular basis.

The computer, an IBM 3033, had been used to test the Navstar Global Positioning System, said Air Force Sgt. Eugene Ogg of the Falcon Air Force Station in Colorado. Navstar operations were moved to Falcon Air Force Station 18 months ago. The system still is being tested and will be fully operational in 1988, he said.

Navstar relies on 18 orbiting satellites to broadcast navigation signals to users on Earth. Ultimately, the Air Force will buy as many as 26,000 terminals for use aboard ships, airplanes, submarines, helicopters and tanks and with troops in the field.

Komisaruk told reporters she was first arrested and spent two months in jail in 1983 stemming from a protest at Vandenberg over an MX missile launching.

Dan Morain reported from San Francisco and Miles Corwin from Santa Barbara.