…in the belly of the beast…
—“Jacob Jordan”
Moscow, February 1976
• Jacob and I crunched across the rutted snow through swirls of bus exhaust, following the herd of Air France passengers into the Sheremetyevo Airport terminal and down the stairs to passport control. Outside, it was a bright, frigid Russian morning. In the immigration lines, the atmosphere was stifling, the lighting dim, and the atmosphere tense. Returning Soviet citizens were probably wondering how they would talk their way through Customs with their carry-on bags stuffed with whiskey and cigarettes from the duty-free counters of Paris.
I had my own share of anxieties. Although I’d conducted dozens of operations using alias documents, this was my very first trip into the Soviet Union, and I was worried that the alias legend in my burgundy official passport might not be convincing enough.
The previous summer, I had been sitting in my Foggy Bottom office when an officer on the Agency’s Counterintelligence Staff called.
“Bad news, Tony,” he’d said. “North Vietnamese intelligence has your true name and technical specialty, and they’ve passed it on to the KGB.”
I felt the proverbial chill race down my back and let out an angry, frustrated sigh. When Saigon had fallen that April, someone with whom I’d worked had obviously been left behind; under interrogation, that person had revealed his knowledge of the CIA. Now my name, description, and professional capabilities were on the list of “enemies of the state” on file at the KGB’s Moscow Center on Dzerzhinsky Square and in every residentura in Soviet diplomatic missions worldwide. The risk of being identified immediately by skillful Soviet counterintelligence officers, especially when applying for a visa or trying to operate here in Moscow, was high. Such knowledge was certain to give heartburn to any operations officer, and I was no exception. My alias and the minimal disguise I wore certainly wouldn’t conceal the fact that I was CIA, but hopefully it would keep the KGB in the dark about my true identity and specialty.
The lines shuffled toward the smeared Plexiglas cubicles, where young uniformed KGB Border Guards carefully inspected each passenger’s documents with a slow, detached interest. I knew their apparent apathy concealed intense professional scrutiny. Just before stamping an entry cachet, I noticed, each Border Guard stared directly into the eyes of the traveler, the usual ploy meant to detect undue anxiety at an especially vulnerable moment. Between every two booths, an older KGB officer, wearing the standard dark baggy suit of his caste, stood like a mute sentinel, his eyes sweeping the passengers. Occasionally, a plainclothes man would nod, and his uniformed colleague would politely “invite” someone into a screened examination area to the right of the echoing hall.
I watched a rotund Russian in a horse-blanket overcoat and well-worn fox shapka nervously shepherd his henna-haired wife into a cubicle. The man had enough clout to travel to the West with his wife, unescorted and on a foreign carrier, yet he was not a high-ranking member of the nomenklatura, who would have been quickly ushered through the VIP formalities in a separate terminal. So who was he? If this Russian was actually a KGB officer working under TASS or trade mission cover, his legend would have required he run this gauntlet like any other returning citizen. Good tradecraft required that he live that legend fully, even here in Moscow, in the event that Western intelligence had been resourceful enough to keep surveillance on him aboard the plane from Paris. Was the woman really his wife? I wondered. Maybe she was the intelligence officer, and he was simply window dressing.
Welcome to Moscow, I mused, where appearance often masked sinister reality, a city that defined the well-known wilderness of mirrors.
I would never find out if the man was an authentic worker bee of the vast Soviet bureaucracy or a highly competent spy. At that moment, Jacob passed through immigration control ahead of me, and then I entered the booth. The young inspector’s uniform was well pressed, his collar and fingernails clean. He took his time flipping through my passport, pausing to study the multicolored foldout “service” visa issued by the Soviet embassy in Washington with my photo attached. Then he examined my airline tickets, which had come from the State Department’s travel office. I was sweating profusely, as much from the steamy heat as I was from the pressure of the situation. This was exactly where our expertise was tested and enhanced—the chokepoint of airport security controls. We could absorb any strength or weakness in the systems that we had spent our entire careers probing and challenging.
“What is purpose of visit?” he recited, using a standard phrase he might not have even understood.
Was there a hidden microphone underneath the counter to record a telltale voice print of “suspicious” characters like myself? That notion did not stem from simple paranoia. The KGB’s Seventh Chief Directorate, responsible for surveillance throughout the Soviet Union, managed an incredibly elaborate and innovative eavesdropping apparatus. This Directorate and its counterintelligence analog, the Second Chief Directorate, had virtually unlimited personnel and funding resources available to thwart foreign intelligence efforts, especially here in Moscow, the “Center.”
“Temporary duty at the American embassy, sir,” I replied. Jacob and I were working under the cover of one of the minor alphabet soup agencies that had burgeoned in Washington since the 1950s. Our legends had us pinned as low-level administrative types, on par with bookkeepers or motor-pool inventory specialists. Adopting the protective coloration of such drones, we hoped, would free us from the intense surveillance endured by some American officials who were permanently assigned here under diplomatic cover.
The inspector removed part of the foldout visa and sat poised, with his rubber cachet stamp raised, then shot me a quick, searching stare. I tried my best not to flinch.
“Have good visit in Soviet Union,” he said woodenly, hammering down the stamp.
THE EMBASSY VEHICLE was a salt-rimed Chevy station wagon that looked as if it had lost the war against Moscow’s potholes and ice ruts. The driver, a Russian in his thirties with a middleweight’s body turning soft, drove the car as if it were a tank, slamming on his horn and weaving through the lines of trucks and rust-pocked little Zhigulis, the Soviet equivalent of Fiat econo-boxes. He accepted a pack of Marlboro 100s with a grunt and chain-smoked all the way into the city along Lenin-gradskoye Highway. Occasionally, he’d point a finger at some fleeting, snow-covered point of interest. “…Khimki…Ring Road…”
Our low status as Temporary Duty (TDY) nondiplomats had obviously not sparked his interest. This suited us fine. The man belonged to the embassy’s Miscellaneous Services Section, officially a branch of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s service arm, the UPDK. In reality, the UPDK was controlled by the KGB’s surveillance and counterintelligence directorates. If he had been suspicious, he probably would have drawn us into conversation, no doubt revealing in the process an unusual fluency in English.
We arrived at the American embassy on Tchaikovsky Street along the Garden Ring just before the lunch hour. My initial reaction to the 1950s-vintage, former apartment block was one of foreboding. Maybe it was my critical painter’s eye, but I thought the place looked grimly misshapen, and even the ocher stucco facade seemed poorly constructed, discolored in places with mismatched patches. The station wagon lurched over an icy hump of unswept sand choking the entrance, then past a guard booth with a stern “mili-man,” a member of the Interior Ministry’s Militia civil police. We passed under an archway and emerged into a long, narrow courtyard.
When we entered the warren of the chancery building, I saw that my negative first impression had been justified. Even though the State Department had worked hard to transform the original apartment house into a working embassy, people assigned here still had to contend with cramped, low-ceilinged rooms, narrow, musty halls, and dim staircases that resembled rickety ships’ ladders. The floors sagged and rippled in places because the planks had been laid on freshly felled tree trunks—one of the few commodities in abundant supply in the Gulag-haunted Soviet capital of the 1950s. The electricity was primitive, and when American specialists had been imported to renovate the offices, they were disgusted to find the insulation between walls was a gritty mixture of coal ash and sawdust, making the entire compound a potentially deadly firetrap.
But the Tchaikovsky Street embassy was an ideal site for electronic eavesdropping. Embassy and Agency security officers estimated that the KGB’s ubiquitous local employees had seeded the entire building with hard-wire and wireless bugs. The windows were silently scanned with microwaves that could reproduce the vibration of conversations into usable recordings at the numerous KGB listening posts ringing the embassy. Between the overtly inquisitive UPDK local employees and the hidden bugs, Americans, from the ambassador to the lowest-ranking Marine security guard, were subject to audio surveillance during every moment they spent in the U.S. Mission, including in their apartments.
But there were important exceptions.
Because American officials in many embassies needed a secure area to discuss sensitive cases, they usually went to “the Bubble”—the generic term for a clear plastic-walled enclosure, raised from the floor on transparent Plexiglas blocks and meticulously cleaned only by American hands, so that none of the local staff, no matter how ingenious they were, could attach miniature listening devices to the structure without being detected.
Eventually, Jacob and I were expected at a meeting with the local CIA chief, “Bill Fuller,” a man with whom we had served in the Far East and whom we knew as a very imaginative and progressive case officer. His deputy, “Jacques Dumas,” a feisty Marine Corps veteran, with a Harvard degree and excellent Chinese and Russian language skills, would also be with him. But before we could attend that meeting, Jacob and I had to display our deceptive cover through the dim corridors of the chancery, where the KGB snoops could have a good look at us. UPDK had assigned us a shared room in the Peking Hotel, located up the Garden Ring from the embassy, a rather spartan establishment befitting our low rank.
That afternoon, after a greasy daily special lunch at the embassy cafeteria, Jacob and I unpacked our briefcases bulging with authentic, unclassified paperwork, and settled down to our separate drudge jobs. As the tedious afternoon passed, several Russian local employees found excuses to visit the two offices assigned to us. As I carefully reviewed monotonous files through a pair of “plano”-lensed (uncorrected) horn-rimmed spectacles, I sensed with satisfaction that my change of appearance was subtle but effective, and that we’d passed initial muster. I was also wickedly amused that my debonair former mentor, Jacob, had been obliged to surrender his tailored Bond Street wardrobe for Sears’s finest polyester. I had myself opted for striped, pointed-collar dress shirts and flamboyant, wide ties at least a couple years out of fashion to match my older, seedy appearance, complete with graying temples and a dental appliance that included a gold-trimmed incisor.
Scanning the meaningless columns of budget figures, I thought about the circumstances that had brought the two of us here. I’d been hard at work as Chief of Disguise at Headquarters a few weeks earlier, pushing to expand my program, when a cable had come from Moscow requesting OTS experts to conduct a thorough disguise survey in the Soviet capital. Jacob had been back in the field for more than a year, leading a contingent of technical operations officers responsible for disguise and alias documentation support in the Soviet bloc. Based in the West, he’d been up to his old tricks, facilitating some of the more daring infiltrations and exfiltrations, this time through the Iron Curtain. We’d both shot cables back to Moscow volunteering our services. After a flurry of subsequent cables from the field and Headquarters, it was agreed that we would go as a team.
The Soviet Union was the ultimate professional destination for any CIA operations officer. Even though we’d been friends and colleagues for many years, Jacob had not been thrilled when I’d appeared on the scene of this inaugural OTS disguise survey in Moscow. But when we met in Paris and spent an evening catching up, enjoying a memorable meal of goose, sausage, and cheese at a bistro on the Île St.-Louis, accompanied by several bottles of Cahors wine and snifters of Armagnac, we both agreed that it was “obvious” our operational skills made us an ideal match, and it was silly to engage in turf wars.
“We’re actually going to Moscow, Tony,” Jacob said, hoisting his brandy snifter in the air. “The belly of the beast.”
Now, here we were, perched at our Bob Cratchit desks, when the last of the local employee snoops pulled on her galoshes and departed. After waiting another fifteen minutes, Jacob tore a single piece of paper from a legal pad, laid it on a glass-topped table, and scrawled a message: “Time to go to work.”
We took a circuitous route to the Bubble, mumbling that we were searching for the back stairs to the rear courtyard community center, site of the evening happy hour. Jacques met us at the outer door and punched in the keypad lock code. Only when we were all inside the chilly, air-conditioned plastic box could we speak freely.
“Welcome to Moscow,” Fuller exclaimed, “Wimbledon Center Court.”
Jacob grinned at our surroundings. “The ‘Cone of Silence,’” he quipped, referring to the fanciful antisurveillance technology in the Get Smart TV series.
“We use it here all the time,” Jacques said, “especially for meetings like this. Otherwise, we’d have to pass notes at the water fountain.”
Bill gave us a one-page, EYES ONLY memo outlining the CIA’s Moscow rules of engagement with the KGB. “For the moment,” he said, “this is our Bible. We’ll ask you to follow these rules to the letter when you’re out there on the street.”
The Moscow rules, Bill explained, had evolved over almost twenty-five years, subsequent to the Stalinist deep freeze, when the Soviet dictator had decreed that Western embassies move several kilometers from the Kremlin. Most had clustered here in prerevolution villas, on quiet streets leading like spokes from the Kremlin to the wheel of the Garden Ring. This concentration of target embassies, Fuller added, had allowed the KGB’s Seventh Chief Directorate to marshal their surveillance forces in a relatively small sector of the sprawling Soviet capital, just as Washington’s “Embassy Row” along the 16th Street-Massachusetts Avenue corridors provided a similar advantage to the FBI. To increase the effectiveness of their surveillance net, the Soviets imposed rigid travel restrictions on foreign diplomats, journalists, and business people. Americans could not travel outside Moscow or Leningrad without written permission. The State Department placed reciprocal constraints on the Soviets working in America, but KGB officers working under United Nations, trade mission, or TASS cover managed to move around the United States with relative freedom.
“Rule One,” Jacques said, tapping the memo. “Assume every Soviet you encounter is connected to a larger surveillance apparatus. This includes the women shoveling snow in the winter and the guy selling ice cream in Gorky Park. The ticket-taker at the zoo reports to the KGB. The bartenders in every hard-currency bar and restaurant are on the payroll of the Seventh Chief Directorate. Half the taxis in this part of the city are driven by their men.”
“In short,” Bill added, “we assume constant surveillance.”
This saturation level of surveillance, which far surpassed anything Western intelligence services attempted in their own democratic societies, had greatly constrained CIA operations in Moscow for decades. The KGB always made a concerted effort to identify any Agency case officer assigned to Moscow, then kept him and his family under tight surveillance throughout their entire tour. This extreme level of hostile scrutiny was unique, even for the Soviet bloc. A skilled officer operating in Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw, for example, might use clever tradecraft to slip his surveillance periodically for secure meetings with important assets. But conditions were so tight in Moscow, Bill and Jacques explained, that such meetings were rare; an officer might never hold one during his entire two-year tour.
However, Agency case officers in Moscow were still expected to perform the most important duty of clandestine espionage operations: secure and timely communication with agents-in-place. The two station officers reviewed for us the clandestine agent communications plans they had devised to keep channels open to their assets in such a hostile area.
“We have to spend every waking moment working on these problems,” Jacques said. “Everything we do outside our apartments and, these offices is geared toward agent communication.”
“I haven’t taken an unplanned stroll on the street or had a friendly tennis match for almost two years,” Bill conceded. Whenever he was outside the “sanctuary” of the American mission, he was constantly at work, trying to overcome inevitable threats to our agent pipelines by playing mind games with the far superior forces of the KGB.
Turning back to the memo, Jacques described the basic structure and reputed modus operandi of the Seventh Chief Directorate’s street surveillance teams. Once assigned to a suspected foreign intelligence officer, a dedicated team focused their entire attention on that person, twenty-four hours a day. Identifying senior CIA officers was sometimes made easier by the Agency and State Department’s practice of giving them fairly senior diplomatic cover jobs so that they had plausible reasons to visit a variety of Soviet government offices, meeting and assessing potential Soviet official targets on the diplomatic social circuit as well. Devoting around-the-clock surveillance to an officer who was merely suspected of espionage was not simply an extravagance for the KGB: They understood the immeasurable harm to the Soviet Union that an effective spy could inflict.
When Jacob and I reached Moscow in 1976, an uneasy equilibrium existed in the spy-versus-spy power struggle. The KGB could not be certain of how many foreign intelligence officers were working in the capital, nor were they sure of exactly who they all were. To protect themselves, the Seventh Chief Directorate tended to overestimate the numbers of the opposition, and to saturate people they considered obvious candidates with grossly inflated surveillance teams. The dubious distinction of being targeted for concentrated surveillance arose from several factors. It was important for us to identify what they were in order to avoid coming under suspicion as we conducted our disguise survey.
“We know from our reporting and defectors that they study our overt behavior patterns, overall demeanor, and daily profiles,” Jacques explained. “So you’ll have to be very careful about your actions in this regard.”
Bill added that the sheer size of the KGB surveillance operation often made it cumbersome and less flexible than it had been perhaps fifteen years earlier. This deterioration was due to several factors. By 1976, both the foreign diplomatic presence and business community had grown considerably since the darkest days of the Cold War. Our closest NATO allies, Great Britain and West Germany, also had large embassies in Moscow and were subject to the same level of scrutiny and suspicion. Then there were the Chinese, hardly the stalwart allies of the Soviet Union they had once been. Finally, Moscow’s population had steadily increased, year by year, despite official Soviet efforts to restrain migration to the coveted Center.
To meet these challenges, the KGB had played its hand like a gutsy table-stakes poker player, raising each of the opposition’s bets. As the CIA and the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) intelligence service expanded their Moscow operations, for example, KGB surveillance teams proliferated. The Soviets were good but not “ten feet tall.” The increasing density of surveillance trailing foreign suspects from the Western diplomatic district west of the Kremlin occasionally led to one team tripping over another in pursuit of their quarry.
“That can be damned funny,” Bill said. “But it doesn’t happen very often. These guys are generally invisible.”
“And that’s the problem,” Jacques admitted. “Your average Soviet citizen can somehow sense the KGB in the Metro or the queue for the trolley, but they just look away. You grow up in this country, you acquire a set of antennae to detect KGB vibrations two blocks away. I wish we could do it that easily.”
“Let’s look at how we think the bad guys operate,” Bill suggested, giving us another single sheet showing a schematic diagram. “This is the estimated size and MO of a typical KGB surveillance team.” Inside the circle at the center of the page was “the rabbit,” a suspected CIA officer. Depending on his cover—diplomatic, lower embassy rank, or nongovernmental—the officer might routinely have a sizable team of surveillance specialists serving in shifts around the clock, with a rotating stable of cars at their disposal. The team’s function was to keep the suspected officer in direct sight, or to be confident that the rabbit was safely ensconced in his office or otherwise accounted for at all other times.
“By the way,” Bill said with a wry grin, “we’re pretty sure our Soviet friends have augmented their audio bugs with hidden audio and video in the apartment blocks, probably trying to acquire some spicy ‘Peyton Place’ tape for potential blackmail.”
“Not only do the walls have ears,” Jacques added with a chuckle, “they also have beady, bloodshot eyes.”
For a moment, I considered the staggering logistics load involved in such a surveillance operation. Beyond the large contingent of fulltime members of the team dedicated to a single suspect, you also had all the language-qualified listening-post monitors, along with the analysts, who examined all this information.
At the pavement level, the multiple surveillance teams, each targeted on their individual rabbit, had to stay hidden nearby—especially important in the near-arctic Moscow winter, when nocturnal Fahrenheit temperatures often fell to thirty below zero.
“They’ve got to have ‘warming rooms’ the size of a large police barracks in buildings up and down the street,” Bill explained. In fact, we suspected the closest one was in the apartment block abutting the chancery building to the south.
When the night shift was reasonably confident that their target rabbit was either still working or had turned in, they took their own breaks, but someone always maintained observation on the arched entrances leading into the embassy courtyard or the diplomatic ghetto, a complex of high-rise apartments on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.
Beyond the surveillance teams dedicated to an individual officer, there could be mobile supplemental to enhance coverage if a suspect seemed to be going “operational.” These additional teams could be marshaled by radio, especially if a suspected intelligence officer suddenly made a “provocative” move, such as running a red light or bolting on foot across lanes of traffic to dash into a Metro tunnel. This type of action was absolutely against Moscow rules, unless it became necessary for officers near the end of their tours to try to break surveillance this way.
“We’re up against a helluva opposition here,” Bill admitted. His ranks were thin and had to hide in the greater numbers of the American community. In order not to tip their hand, CIA officers tried to maintain a seemingly innocuous cover-job pattern and demeanor, sticking to it over months and years. But they also had to be flexible enough to meet a variety of operational problems. For example, a hypothetical officer whose official cover job involved trade and agricultural commodities may have to spend soul-deadening months in the drab, overheated offices of his Soviet counterparts, driving to and from these meetings each day and seldom deviating from his route. His social life and recreation also had to fall into established patterns, perhaps consisting of weekly bridge games at another embassy and cross-country skiing on winter weekends.
Once this officer was reasonably confident that he had dulled the edge of potential surveillance, he might engage in several unalarming operational activities, such as servicing dead drops on a single, well-planned cover outing, Jacques noted. “But these have to be carefully considered and rehearsed,” he warned.
A good officer could perform some of these tasks in full view of surveillance, but others required a fleeting moment of privacy. Monahan had taught me years earlier that a spy could be out of sight momentarily but still not alarm the surveillants tailing him. There was a very subtle and complex psychology at work in such deception. The operational act might be as simple as dropping an empty cigarette package into a trash can in the spotless Belorusskaya Metro station, or chalking a tiny Cyrillic “D” in a phone kiosk along Gorky Street. Performing these bland acts was not a major challenge, but accomplishing them in a manner that would not raise suspicion through an obvious shift in demeanor required a level of tradecraft only the best case officers possessed.
However, it was one thing to practice sound countersurveillance techniques in the face of the clumsy Gendarmerie in Dakar, or even their more sophisticated counterparts in Damascus, and quite another to attempt to escape from the relentless coverage of the Seventh Chief Directorate on the streets of Moscow. As the four of us in this plastic cubicle understood all too clearly, the stakes were immeasurably higher here. If a case officer’s behavior on the street was obviously “provocative” and included blatant surveillance detection runs, quick detours into multiexit establishments like the GUM department store, or sudden backtracking on the Metro, the KGB would conclude that they’d just confirmed the officer’s CIA identity and would intensify surveillance to identify any Soviet citizen he might contact.
This grim reality lay at the core of the problem facing our Moscow operation. Unable to conduct clandestine personal meetings with our important agents-in-place, we had instead to rely on “impersonal communications” contact, which could be skillfully manipulated by the KGB and packed with misinformation if our putative agent-in-place had long since been rolled up.
“We just have to find some way to securely conduct personal meetings right here in Moscow,” Jacques said, summarizing the nub of the problem. “That’s where your OTS disguise technique might play a role.”
I was afraid that Bill and his deputy were expecting a single, magical solution, whereas I knew from experience that physical disguise was only one element in a complex tradecraft problem. “We’ll be happy to conduct a good disguise survey,” I told them. “But to do so, we’re going to have to carefully analyze your entire operation, everyone’s positions and profiles, and also dissect the opposition’s techniques.”
Bill and Jacques exchanged glances. After all, Jacob and I were from OTS, and we were not graduates of the Internal Operations course, the DO’s elite training for assignments like this. But both Moscow officers understood we had unique expertise and experiences to offer—tradecraft they desperately needed to meet the challenge.
“Well,” Jacques said with a grin that broke the tension. “If you weren’t making this sacrifice to save freedom, democracy, and motherhood, you’d probably be out robbing banks. Have at it.”
It was old Vietnam gallows humor and we all laughed. It was good to know we had a solid crew in Moscow, because Jacob and I would be in and out of this grim city for months, helping to overcome one of the toughest operational problems the Clandestine Service had ever faced.
ON OUR LAST day in Moscow several weeks later, we celebrated by leaving our dingy cover office early and strolling along the Arbat among the street vendors, then all the way to Karl Marx Prospekt on the northwest corner of the Kremlin. The clear early afternoon light quickly faded into the violet dusk of winter, reminding us that Moscow lay on the same latitude as Alaska. By now, we were equipped with fox shapkas and thick mittens. Reaching the snowbound Alexander Gardens, we decided to take a final “tourism” stroll, ambling counterclockwise around the medieval fortress, down to the Kremlin embankment and along the high, two-kilometer russet perimeter walls back up Borovitsky Hill from the river. We headed toward the candy-striped onion domes and spires of St. Basil’s Cathedral, now emerging from a sudden snow squall. As we entered Red Square, the enormous clock on the Spasskaya Tower inside the Kremlin walls announced that it was five P.M., and another horizontal band of snow almost swallowed the ruby star atop the spire. The honor guard came goose-stepping out of the archway and proceeded to Lenin’s tomb in their hourly ritual.
Despite the harsh weather, there were lines of reverent visitors snaking toward the dark granite monolith of Lenin’s mausoleum, pressed up against the Kremlin’s outer walls and dominating the center of Red Square. But aside from the soldiers and the faithful throngs waiting in the snow to pay homage to Lenin’s waxy cadaver, the vast square seemed deserted.
“They must be hanging back this afternoon,” Jacob muttered from inside his muffler, now drawn up to his nose.
I hazarded a couple of clicks with my Spotmatic, confirming the blue Zhiguli we’d sighted twice on the walk had disappeared. That could mean almost anything. Perhaps our unusual early departure from the embassy had tripped a half-hearted response, with a small, low-priority team tailing us simply to confirm if we were indeed “persons of little interest.” According to a KGB defector, that was the term his Seventh Chief Directorate colleagues used to describe the clerks, secretaries, assorted bean-counters, and “admin types” responsible for the daily housekeeping of the U.S. Mission. If so, that was good news, indicating our weeks of living an exceptionally dull cover had paid off.
Crossing Karl Marx Prospekt through the pedestrian tunnel, I casually scanned the faces of people moving toward us from the Metro stations beyond. Instinctively, I was trying to determine if any of these people appeared familiar from earlier encounters. I knew Jacob was doing the same, although he managed to keep up a lively commentary on the performance of Giselle we had seen the night before at the Bolshoi Ballet. True to our established pattern, we entered the cozy mahogany-and-brass “dollar bar” on the second floor of the old National Hotel and hung our topcoats and shapkas at a nearby booth. Vladimir, the barman, was a jovial fellow who sported a borsht-flecked necktie, emblazoned with the Courvoisier logo, probably a gift from a French salesman? or perhaps it was a French case officer from the SDECE intelligence service working undercover as a booze-peddling salesman. Had I been infected by Moscow’s paranoia? You bet. Paranoia became a part of you in a society like this. I grew accustomed to it, as if it were a second skin.
“Vodka juice!” Vladimir exclaimed, flashing his dazzling stainless steel teeth. Only uncultured American technicians would think of diluting 180-proof Siberian vodka with sour, canned Moroccan orange juice. But he accepted our five-dollar bill for the drink and a refill with hearty good humor. “Tonight, be-yoo-tiful Russian music,” he announced, pointing toward the dining room where a balalaika trio had launched into a twanging set.
Jacob downed his first screwdriver and grabbed the second. “Tonight,” he replied, handing Vlad our printed American embassy reservation card, “we’re eating dinner at the Praga.”
This restaurant was one of Moscow’s finest, housed in the mansion of a prerevolutionary duke, and reputedly owned, or at least controlled, by the KGB’s counterintelligence Directorate. While a Muscovite had to have blat (“pull”) to land a reservation, embassy employees were encouraged to dine there.
“Very nice,” Vlad commented, fluttering his fingers over the invitation card as if it were a hot ticket. “Celebration?”
“We’re going home.” I smiled. “Our work’s all finished. Tonight we take the Red Arrow to Leningrad for a few days duty at the consulate, then it’s back to the land of the big PX.”
Vladimir chortled. “I know big PX from Marine Guards. All my friends. All bring Vladimir Winston cigarettes and Ronson lighters. When you come back?”
He was making a convincing show of being a minor black marketeer, which, of course, made for excellent cover. “Whenever they need us,” Jacob answered as we grabbed our coats.
Leaving the National Hotel, we were confident some faceless clerk in the Lubyanka would type yet another entry into our dossiers that night, confirming what the UPDK snoops had already reported about our Praga restaurant dinner reservations and our scheduled trip to Leningrad.
JACOB AND I followed the haughty uniformed doorman of the Praga, who led us into the elegant restaurant’s main foyer, replete with a glowing crystal chandelier, gilt-framed mirrors, and a curving white marble staircase. He escorted us up the gleaming steps to the office of the Administrator, then motioned for us to take chairs along the wall.
The Administrator, a woman in her forties with lacquered hair and tobacco-stained teeth, sat behind her huge desk, energetically scolding an offending employee. The man stared at the floor, visibly trembling, and I wondered what his crime had been. When the “Red Queen” finally finished with him, she allowed him to leave with his head still on his shoulders. Only then did she turn to us and briefly inspect the invitation card the doorman had left on her desk. She snatched up a heavy telephone that looked like an artillery radio transmitter from the Battle of Stalingrad, and spoke brusquely into the receiver. Seconds later, a maître d’ stood at attention in front of her desk, and she issued curt instructions.
The maître d’ then guided us along palatial corridors past large private dining rooms echoing with the voices of rowdy patrons. I caught glimpses of burly nomenklatura, wearing the inevitable ill-fitting Brezhnev Special suits and uniforms sprinkled with medals. There were also a number of attractive young women in evening dress dining with these old crocodiles, an overt sign of decadence I hadn’t expected. In several rooms, raucous New Orleans hot jazz or 1930s swing combos added to the cacophony.
We mounted another set of marble stairs and emerged into a tasteful winter garden, where an attentive waiter led us to a ringside table on the dance floor. The band played a fair imitation of Woody Herman, much to the delight of the gyrating Russians, many dancing wildly with no one in particular but having the time of their lives.
“Would the gentlemen like drinks?” our waiter asked courteously in fluent English. I had a sinking feeling that we were receiving special treatment, that we had indeed been expected and were right now under active surveillance.
Playing the unsophisticated bumpkins, Jacob turned to the waiter with a helpless grin. “What do you suggest?”
Moments later, we were spreading Beluga caviar on thinly sliced, well-buttered black bread and sipping icy Stolichnaya vodka, poured from a crystal flask into thimble glasses. As the waiter removed our borsht bowls and laid out the platter of flaky cheese tort and chicken Kiev, I pondered the serious operational problems we had identified during this initial survey.
SOON AFTER OUR arrival, Jacques had emphasized the fundamental element of operational life in Moscow and told us never to forget it: “By their very nature, Russians are distrustful.” He reminded us that there were centuries of autocratic Russian history preceding the six decades of Communist dictatorship. “Lenin and Dzherzhinsky didn’t invent the Secret Police,” Jacques said. The tsar had maintained a dreaded security service, the Okhrana. But the Bolsheviks had quickly eliminated its officers, rather than incorporate them into the new Cheka. Under the tsar, the Bolsheviks had survived only because their clandestine skills and early tradecraft enabled them to escape the Okhrana. They turned these skills to advantage when establishing their own security police and espionage service.
Russians had been practicing the art of surveillance for hundreds of years. Their imaginations were rich with possibilities, and if they were traditionally distrustful of each other, they were doubly so of foreigners. Add to that the reality of life in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, in which trafficking in contraband and bribery were rampant, and you had a huge pool of well-qualified potential candidates from which to draw recruits to the surveillance Directorates.
And our Soviet opposition knew how vulnerable they were to high-level espionage. In the early 1960s, the KGB had been badly burned by the Penkovsky case. Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, an experienced officer in the Soviet GRU military intelligence, was a “walk-in” agent-in-place, with an ax to grind against his superiors, who had thwarted his career due to the fact that his father had been a Tsarist army officer who fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war. On a warm August night in 1960, he accosted a startled American tourist near Red Square and passed him a message for the American embassy, stating Penkovsky had information of “exceptionally great interest” that he wished to deliver to the CIA. The tiny Agency operation in Moscow that existed at the time was unable to contact Penkovsky, so he approached the British, who completed the recruitment. Within months, Penkovsky was delivering some of the highest quality intelligence that either the CIA or British MI6 had ever received in the Soviet Union.
Dispatched to London on a Soviet “research committee,” Penkovsky underwent vigorous CIA-MI6 debriefing and agent training. He then revealed that Nikita Krushchev’s Politburo planned on installing intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Castro’s Cuba. Almost as an afterthought, Penkovsky turned over reams of detailed information on advanced Soviet weaponry.
Back in Moscow, this flood of high-grade intelligence continued, creating a classic case officer-agent liaison problem. If either CIA or MI6 officers operating under diplomatic cover regularly maintained contact with Penkovsky through dead drops or brush passes, they would eventually expose him to disclosure, yet both governments refused to stop or even slow the flow of secret intelligence Penkovsky was prepared to deliver in exchange for seemingly minor trinkets, such as gold watches, vintage cognac, and stylish fountain pens—all status symbols in austere, post-Stalinist Moscow.
The Americans and British reached a compromise: Janet Anne Chisholm, the wife of an MI6 officer operating under diplomatic cover in Moscow, became Penkovsky’s action officer. The young mother of three, herself familiar with security procedures, often pushing a stroller, had brief encounters with Penkovsky in parks and crowded public buildings, where they exchanged rolls of film for his Minox spy camera, and she received handwritten copies of secret documents. By August 1961, Penkovsky had delivered so much material that the CIA had established a separate analysis shop, employing twenty translators.
This bonanza abruptly ended on November 2, 1961, just over a year after Penkovsky’s recruitment. A phone emitted a prearranged number of rings in a Moscow CIA office, but there was no one on the line. Such a “dead telephone” signal meant that Penkovsky was loading a dead drop with critical information, perhaps indicating impending war. A case officer was dispatched directly to the drop. The moment he retrieved the matchbox drop container, four burly street operatives of the KGB wrestled him to the ground and forcibly searched him, ignoring his lame protests of diplomatic immunity. The officer was expelled within days.
Penkovsky’s cover had been blown. TASS announced “the traitor Penkovsky’s” execution on May 17, 1963. Although the terse bulletin did not specify the means, the Agency had ominous reports that GRU spies were generally chained to an iron cradle and fed alive, feet first, into a crematorium at Khodinka Airport near the Dynamo soccer stadium. With Penkovsky’s capture, the elaborate Janet Chisholm agent-handling apparatus, run jointly by the British and the Americans, had been rolled up. The hemorrhage of critical intelligence information had also galvanized the KGB into building the unprecedented surveillance juggernaut that Jacob and I had observed over the previous two weeks.
In the fourteen years since Penkovsky’s downfall, the KGB had become absolute masters of the operational tradecraft of deceptive surveillance in Moscow. They employed both static and mobile surveillance, and could call on a reserve force of MVD militia and alert Party member volunteers spread throughout the city in parks and Metro stations generally favored by spies. We also knew the KGB sometimes resorted to facial and clothing disguise in order to alter their patterns and profiles as they moved along the streets.
But in general, as Jacob and I had learned from Jacques’s files and two weeks of active street work, the Seventh Chief Directorate teams preferred to maintain a discreet distance from their targets. We realized that this tendency might present an opening for our own relatively sophisticated disguise techniques, if their use was carefully planned.
After all, the KGB teams assigned to a suspected case officer might seem to have disappeared in the bustling traffic of the city streets, but they were never far away, and the sudden appearance of a strange “face” could be just as alarming as the disappearance of a target rabbit.
During relatively warm weather ten days into our stay, Jacob and I had spent the weekend exploring firsthand the surveillance techniques of the teams tailing Jacques and one of his colleagues, who were attending social events at nearby Western embassies. We did so in order to firmly establish the “macro” operational template—bureaucratese for the opposition’s MO—on which any disguise program would either fail or succeed. Theirs was elaborate. The surveillance teams combined both mobile units and “foots,” who rode as passengers in the cars and would bail out to move as pedestrians when required.
We had no trouble identifying the actual KGB cars, even though they did a good job of rotating from an impressively large pool. In Moscow at this time, most cars did not drive around with windshield wipers, which were hard to come by, expensive if available, and subject to theft. Most Russian car owners kept their wipers locked in the glove compartment and only snapped them on in the heaviest rain or snow. It was common to observe cars stopped at a red light, with their drivers hanging out from the doors to wipe slush from their windshields with rags. In a steady rain or snow, however, drivers pulled over and installed their precious wipers. A surveillance car, on the other hand, had to keep the rabbit in view. It could not afford to stop.
Jacob and I saw telltale wipers on a Zhiguli and a Volga rounding the corner of Karmanits Pereulok, a full block behind Jacques’s sedan as he stopped to attend a cocktail party at the Philippine embassy.
“Observe the tires,” Jacob said in his driest English manner. He pointed in the opposite direction as we ostensibly searched for the New Zealand embassy several blocks away. Both cars had new tires with well-chiseled treads, and each carried a driver and three passengers. Two of the men wore overcoats, shapkas, and ties, while the other two wore nylon parkas and wool ski caps—an unlikely mix in class-conscious Moscow.
Following form, the two vehicles circled the block, then split. When they returned, each had unloaded its parka-clad foots, who had taken up stations at opposite ends of the narrow side street that Jacques would have to use himself if he tried to move on foot to break surveillance. Although we had not seen any communications devices as obvious as “brick” radios, we did notice one of the foots talking into the lapel of his parka.
At our debriefing session that night, Jacob and I described to Jacques and his staff what we had observed, and the Moscow case officers responded with their own experiences. To our chagrin, these observations confirmed the validity of the current Moscow rules.
“Sometimes it seems they’re working just over the horizon,” a veteran female case officer noted. “It’s like they’re moving along parallel lines to your route. You can pick them out occasionally, but not very often.”
“But you always know they’re there,” Jacques added. “They rotate around you as you travel, like a bicycle chain.”
Given this hovering presence, the rules of engagement had evolved to condemn even seemingly innocent deviations from normal demeanor such as stopping to tie a shoelace or pausing to check a reflection in a store window. These actions were considered “peeking” and were forbidden to all case officers, as were more blatant acts such as jumping traffic lights, jaywalking, or driving against traffic on one-way streets.
“What happens if you try to buck surveillance?” I asked.
“They’re on you like flies on cow manure,” a gruff younger officer said.
“We’re pretty sure a surveillance team gets punished if they lose track of one of us for any significant time,” Jacques said. “If an American target just slips from sight for a couple of minutes, there’s no problem. But if a target actually disappears out there on the streets, there’s hell to pay. The entire surveillance group from the commanding officer down probably gets its pay docked and risks losing this cushy Moscow assignment unless they pull their socks up.”
“The few times I’ve broken free,” Bill Fuller commented, “I’ve had to pay for it. They were practically stepping on my heels for weeks afterward.”
“It’s essential that case officers allow the surveillance teams to maintain their ‘zone of comfort,’” I agreed. “They have to preserve the cozy feeling that they know the target’s whereabouts at all times, but remain unobserved themselves. If that comfort level is eroded, they’ll close in so tight that even the simplest impersonal communication procedures will be impossible.”
“But while we’re keeping them comfortable,” Jacques quipped bitterly, “they’re effectively shutting us out of the action.”
For the next few minutes, we carefully reviewed the clandestine impersonal commo procedures the Moscow officers employed. We needed to determine if these approaches could be expanded without breaking Moscow rules.
Using the telephone system for clandestine contacts was always risky in Moscow. Although there were automatic switching exchanges, all lines into the offices and apartments of foreigners were tapped and monitored around the clock by a virtual army of eavesdroppers. The “private” telephones of any Soviet citizen in a sensitive position were also tapped.
One-way radio was a much safer method of delivering instructions to a Soviet agent-in-place. Spy services had used this technique since the earliest days of long-range wireless broadcast. After World War II, many agents in the Soviet bloc were either recruited in the West, where they were trained and equipped, or by bridge agents among their own countrymen. Many Soviet assets had access to the one-time code pads needed to decipher encrypted one-way messages. Contrary to public perceptions of spies hunched with earphones in garrets deciphering messages, in real time one-way radio contacts could involve messages which the agent could tape on a commercial recorder and “break” when he felt absolutely secure. By the 1970s, when the Soviets were no longer regularly jamming foreign short-wave broadcasts, using these frequencies for one-way signals was considered both clandestine and secure, since the agent was the passive recipient of information.
Within the Soviet Union, radio broadcasts from, rather than to, an agent-in-place had fallen out of favor by the 1970s, and had, in fact, never been considered truly clandestine. Any spurious radio signal, no matter how brief, could be monitored by counterintelligence radio direction-finding units. If the agent continued sending radio messages, his transmitter could be pinpointed by DF triangulation. To thwart detection, agent transmissions had to be extremely brief and short-range, originating from continually shifting locations. But all agent radio communications entailed heightened risk because they required transmitters, code pads, site diagrams, and other compromising spy gear.
Secret writing and microdots were also very secure agent commo techniques with long pedigrees. The use of invisible ink, starting with goat’s milk on parchment and lemon juice on paper dated back hundreds of years. By the 1970s, all major intelligence services had developed cameras that could photograph a full page of text and reduce it to the size of the dot on a fine-type letter “i,” using negative techniques so that the dot itself appeared white against a white paper background. Microdots could be glued to the flap of an envelope or pasted inside the edge of a postcard. Although this form of communication was extremely secure, being caught with a microdot camera or other secret writing equipment was basically an admission of espionage, a capital crime in the Soviet Union.
All intelligence services used both dead drops and hand and vehicle “tosses” to pass physical objects without making direct contact between case officer and agent. In a “timed drop,” the material stayed down only for a designated period before it was retrieved in order to prevent inadvertent discovery. Although seemingly secure, dead drops actually threatened extreme peril if hostile surveillance was both subtle and vigilant. If the drop or toss was detected and the site staked out, the agent would almost certainly be compromised, rolled up, and interrogated.
To be effective, dead drops also required complex and changing sets of signals. To alert an agent that “the drop is loaded,” an officer might make a simple chalk mark on a light post along the route normally traveled by the agent. If the post was chosen well, the officer could place his signal while in full view of surveillance. Such signals themselves could be a form of impersonal communication, perhaps an answer to a certain question delivered by one-way shortwave radio.
In Moscow as elsewhere, it was part of the case officer’s daily work load and discipline to be constantly on the alert for good drop and signal sites because of the need to change sites frequently and to rotate the inventory. Overuse of sites could establish a suspicious pattern. Case officers spent a lot of time on the street, not only locating likely sites but carefully surveying them for angles of approach and visibility from different perspectives.
Once signal and drop sites were chosen, a good deal of thought went into the type of containers to use in making drops and tosses. It was vital that they be fashioned to blend into the environment and survive the elements. But we simply could not use the beer can (or its local equivalent), which was ubiquitous in the West—in most parts of the world, scrap aluminum was scavenged almost as soon as it was dropped. In any case, there was not much solid trash on the streets of Moscow at that time because beer and soft drinks were sold in returnable bottles or straight from a tap.
OTS design engineers and craftsmen were constantly creating a variety of synthetic “environmental” drop containers, ranging from chunks of fiberglass masonry to variants of the plastic dog feces. The quest for the perfect drop device sometimes reached extremes. In one East European city, an enterprising case officer began using dead rats as receptacles for message capsules to his agents. Then he discovered that the city’s hungry cats—hardly as picky as their better-fed counterparts in the West—were devouring all of his literally dead drops. He had to make other arrangements.
“That’s pretty much our bag of tricks,” Jacques concluded, after listing the last items in his station’s tradecraft inventory.
“What about equipment delivery and refresher training?” Jacob asked.
The female officer shook her head in frustration, speaking for her colleagues. “That’s the problem in Moscow, isn’t it?”
We all knew a case officer often had to break free of surveillance for several minutes to several hours, so that he could safely hand over a new camera, for example, and train the agent in its use. On other occasions, the espionage equipment might simply be too large to toss or drop while under tight surveillance. In any case, agents working under the stress of spying against their own countries at such terrible risk could not remain isolated from their Western handlers forever. They needed human contact with the people they were working with in order to share experiences, voice concerns, and be assured that exfiltration was a real possibility if they sensed the net closing around them.
“But we haven’t had much luck slipping their leash,” Jacques admitted. On rare occasions, he said, there would be a chance break in the ring of surveillance when an officer could simply walk out of it.
“And when we’re desperate,” Bill Fuller added, “we give them a sacrificial lamb.”
The previous summer, a case officer near the end of his tour had managed to escape for a few hours to deliver a piece of equipment to a remote dead drop in the outer suburbs. But he had been forced to engage in a provocative action when he realized he was being followed, bailing out of his vehicle, ducking into a nearby Metro station, and losing himself in the crowd.
“He made his drop,” Jacques said. “But we couldn’t use him for any street work after that.”
“That’s too high a price to pay to conduct routine operations,” Jacob said, speaking for all of us.
“Well, gentlemen,” Jacques said with a grin, “that’s why we’ve invited you OTS geniuses here to help solve our problems.”
Jacob laid out the key points of our survey to date, which had focused not so much on disguises as on the predictable behavior of the KGB surveillance teams. “Once a rabbit goes missing, they must have an established time limit to find him before sounding an all-points bulletin.”
“Whatever that grace period is,” I continued, “it’s a vital piece of information for us. If we can help you slip free of surveillance without the KGB knowing you’re gone, we’ll have found the Silver Bullet.”
Jacques raised his coffee mug. “Here’s to the Silver Bullet.”
JACOB AND I were at our table on the edge of the Praga dance floor, pondering Jacques’s words over Armenian cognac and Cuban cigars as the band charged through Glenn Miller to Count Basie and the nomenklatura continued to bop and jive.
I was startled by our waiter, who was seating someone else at our table, a common practice in Eastern Europe. A quick side glance revealed a rather striking man taking a chair across from me. As he turned to face the dancers, another waiter served him a decanter of cognac and a snifter.
Although the man seemed totally absorbed in the music, there was something about him that made me uneasy. I leaned toward Jacob and nodded toward a dancer far to our right, but cast my eyes left toward the new man at our table and spoke softly. “Have you looked at this guy?”
Jacob glanced toward the dance floor, dipped his head in a brief nod, and drew back his lips in a forced smile.
Everything about the new arrival was too refined, which made him all the more menacing. His gunmetal-gray suit was hand tailored and obviously from the West. His tie was of tasteful Italian silk, his shoes gleaming kidskin. The lapel pin on his suit jacket was a familiar patriotic Soviet symbol. But I noticed that the rim, instead of being the normal brass and enamel found in tourist kiosk pins, was thin gold, surrounding a convex crystal circle etched with a portrait of Lenin against red metallic foil. The pin, like the man, was somehow alarming. They were both too finely honed to be wholesome.
After placing a box of Dunhill cigarettes and a solid-gold Dunhill lighter on the table, the man glanced at his gold Rolex Oyster watch, then reached over to shift the position of an ashtray. He knocked over my glass of cognac, but almost in the same motion, set the glass upright and refilled it from his own decanter. As the band broke into a frenetic rendition of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” I realized that not once since sitting at the table had the man even glanced in our direction.
Now I was in a quandary. I was all too aware of incidents where Western embassy staff had been drugged in Moscow bars and restaurants to be placed in compromising positions with Soviet prostitutes or “treated” for food poisoning at specialized clinics. If I drank the cognac, became violently ill, and found myself in some isolated KGB hospital, what might I reveal under additional drug therapy? On the other hand, if I conspicuously avoided touching the refilled glass, I would practically be admitting I was a trained operations officer, not a naive, oblivious technician.
Without even moving his head, Jacob had observed the entire drama. I knew he was ready to help me in any way he could. I cradled the snifter in my right hand, grasped the big cigar with my left, and turned in my chair to speak to Jacob over the blaring music. For a moment, my right hand was shielded by Jacob’s torso and he jostled the snifter, spilling the contents onto the carpet. I exhaled a cloud of smoke, raised the empty glass, still hidden by my fingers, and made what I hoped was a convincing show of downing the contents.
Then Jacob took over, speaking loudly that we had to hurry to catch the midnight Red Arrow departing from the Leningradskaya station. With lightning speed, he paid the bill, retrieved our coats and shapkas, and ventured out into the frosty night.
Just after two that morning, as the train lunged north through the frozen swamps and taiga, Jacob made an urgent call on the burly matron of our comfortable first-class car to report his friend was sick. She offered tea, apparently heartfelt sympathy, but little practical help. “Auf Leningrad,” she said in broken German, “viele guten Doktor sind.”
We settled back into our seats, content that we had played our part well in the masquerade. We hoped the matron would dutifully pass the message up the KGB pipeline that the American embassy lackey dining at Praga had been sick as a goat all night on the train ride to Leningrad.
My first operational excursion to the Soviet Union had come to a satisfying conclusion. But the real challenge would be that summer, when Jacob and I returned to test the boundaries of the Moscow rules in search of that elusive Silver Bullet.
Moscow, July 1976
• Jacques Dumas had not been idle in our absence. As the chill Moscow spring turned to summer, Jacques began to challenge the Moscow rules. His ultimate goal was to find a way to break free of surveillance at will, without jeopardizing agents or having to face retribution from the Seventh Chief Directorate.
As we had all agreed in February, adhering to nonthreatening behavior patterns was the key to finding the Silver Bullet. Because he was a runner, Jacques could enjoy the distance and limited freedom of discreet surveillance, as long as his pace and route were designed so as not to arouse suspicion. He was able to develop a number of sites in parks and along the Moskva River embankments suitable for placing signals and emptying one-time drops. Still, he was not comfortable making a drop while out on a run.
Once he’d established a pattern of running earlier in the morning to greet the summer dawn, he decided to push the envelope. He rose before daylight on a clear Sunday morning, pulled on his lightweight running suit over slacks and a polo shirt, and put on his ancient running shoes. Then he taped a pair of loafers under his armpits and donned a loose windbreaker.
The mili-man in the guard kiosk hardly glanced at Jacques as he trotted out of the diplomatic compound and down the sloping boulevard toward the river. No one followed him through the empty streets, and by the time he reached the Smolenskaya Embankment, Jacques was reasonably certain he was alone. Just to be sure, he’d chosen this route, knowing the pavement was blocked by the excavation trench around a broken sewer, forcing him to take narrow, meandering side streets en route to Skver Devich’ye Park.
Confident that he was indeed alone, Jacques crouched in an alley, took off his sweat-soaked running suit and shoes, and put on his loafers. He threw the running gear into a trash can and emerged onto the awakening street to embark on the second phase of his operation.
“What a feeling!” Jacques told us later that summer, when we were summoned back to Moscow. “I immediately understood the enormous potential of breaking free. I was invisible.”
On his return to the apartment that morning, Jacques made a point of strolling down Kutuzovsky Prospekt from the north, not from the direction of the river, clutching a string bag with a bottle of fresh milk and a loaf of bread from the state gastronom on Kalinina Prospekt. The KGB knew our commissary was closed on Sundays, so his sudden appearance on the sidewalk with these groceries was plausible.
The Moscow office also grappled with an urgent need to free an officer from surveillance long enough to meet a potential volunteer. While this was always a tricky situation, it was even more complicated in Moscow. The volunteer could easily be a KGB provocateur, sent to ensnare the officer who came to the meeting. Even if the volunteer was legitimate, he or she could be under intense surveillance.
Since Jacques was nearing the end of his tour, he was assigned to be the action officer and offered a bold suggestion. There were members of the foreign community in Moscow whose work rarely took them into the city—and were therefore subjected to much less rigorous surveillance than suspected case officers—such as the “persons of little interest” Jacob and I had become in February. It had been established that this group, and their counterparts from other allied governments’ communities, could attend social functions such as sports tournaments, picnics, and the occasional night on the town, without arousing KGB suspicion.
Jacques saw an opportunity to develop a novel variation on Moscow tradecraft. If he could somehow imitate the pattern and profile of the “little interest” group, surveillance teams might let him slip through their net. It was a radical notion, but worth a try.
The operation, which would eventually be referred to as “CLOAK,” began with the open discussion of dinner plans at the Ukrania Hotel’s hard-currency restaurant. To make sure that they would be seated at a booth with a window overlooking the river in the towering Stalinist building, the cover group had relied on the UPDK to call for reservations, thus making the KGB privy to the plans. In conversations certain to be picked up by hidden microphones, they spoke of the upcoming dinner on their office phones and in their apartments.
When one of the dinner group, “Len,” drove his car into the courtyard on the night of the operation, the snoops lingering nearby paid scant attention. As the passengers left the apartment complex to enter the car, another of them, “Niles,” patted his suit jacket, mumbled that he’d forgotten his “damn glasses” and disappeared into the apartment doorway, creating a brief diversion, during which Jacques, ostensibly an unexpected fifth member of the group, and wearing a disguise, slipped into the backseat of the big Olds sedan. Moments later, Niles returned sheepishly, brandishing his eyeglass case. The surveillance team in the outer courtyard and the street did not notice that there were now five low-ranking Americans in the car, not just four.
Len drove a fairly provocative SDR (surveillance detection route), turning sharply off Smolensky Bul’var onto Shchukina, then getting “lost” in a side street near the Mexican embassy. Confident that no one was following, Jacques removed the disguise, and when Len stopped near a Metro station, he left the car dressed as a Russian worker in a cloth cap and rust-stained overalls.
While the others headed to their dinner, Jacques kept his personal meeting with the volunteer. Once again, he had been virtually invisible to the Committee for State Security. Resuming his previous identity as one of the members of the dinner party, Jacques rejoined the other four at a pickup spot. He returned as he had left, undetected by his surveillance team, who assumed he was simply working late at the embassy.
In his postaction report cable, Jacques requested that I return to Moscow to help refine disguise methods. When I arrived that summer, he exclaimed with characteristic enthusiasm, “We’ve almost got our hands on the Silver Bullet, Tony.”
As he described it, CLOAK closely paralleled a tactic I had been developing for an Agency office in Eastern Europe, so I was aware of the potential in this type of deception operation. But I cautioned Jacques and the other officers not to expect too much from techniques that simply altered physical appearance. “It’s not the quality of the disguise that matters, but the quality of the operation,” I said.
They were grateful for any help I could provide. Their optimism happened to coincide with the sudden reappearance of a potentially valuable agent, “TRINITY.”
This Russian official had been recruited while serving at a large Soviet embassy in the West. Like the famous Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, TRINITY had acted from mixed motives: fervent anti-Communism, personal grievances against his corrupt superiors, and more practical considerations. He knew that if he delivered valuable intelligence to the CIA, he’d be paid well and eventually exfiltrated to live in secure and comfortable retirement in America. Therefore, he worked hard in his intense training to master the demanding subtleties of tradecraft before he was reassigned to an important ministry job in Moscow. He understood the relentless scrutiny he would be under while trying to conduct clandestine espionage close to the Kremlin walls. Once he went operational in Moscow, his survival would depend on how well he had grasped the essentials of the training.
With TRINITY’s overseas tour coming to an end, his CIA handlers suggested an introduction to an American “friend” soon to be stationed in Moscow. Jacques was dispatched from Washington to meet the Russian agent and was presented as his new case officer—in effect, a living, breathing recognition signal that the KGB could never replicate to entrap TRINITY. Both men could then travel to the Soviet Union, expecting to reestablish contact safely and easily.
Jacques had been gratified when the agent had followed instructions, laying down several clandestine signals indicating that he had in fact returned to Moscow. Then, nothing happened. Six months passed with no more signals from TRINITY. He did not respond to one-way radio instructions. A full year went by.
“We were convinced we’d lost him,” Jacques later told me.
By the summer of 1976, he feared that this seemingly well-motivated and potentially important agent had either been compromised by KGB counterintelligence or had become too frightened to resume communication with the Americans. For security reasons, it was too late to respond to any signals that might now be sent; they had “expired,” and would have to be considered KGB entrapment if they suddenly appeared. The Moscow office wrote TRINITY off as just another source who had found the environment back home too hostile for comfort or had been rolled up.
One warm June afternoon in Krymskaya Square, Jacques spotted a man bearing an unusually strong resemblance to TRINITY among the throng of office workers trudging toward the Metro escalators. In spite of the presence of discreet foot surveillance around him, Jacques moved closer to the other man. It was TRINITY, he thought with a start, certain that the other man had also recognized him.
With Headquarters’ permission, the Moscow office reactivated TRINITY’s original signals. Two days later, confirmation signals appeared at the prearranged sites. Tenuous two-way communications were reestablished, leading to the construction of a risky plan for picking up a drop from TRINITY. Everyone in the Moscow CIA office was involved in one way or another in the complex operation to service this drop. Again, Jacques, within weeks of his scheduled departure date, was sent to pick it up. The package—the crust of a sandwich wrapped in newspaper—turned out to harbor a roll of Russian 35mm film.
The Moscow office did not want to risk the possibility that the film might require special processing, so one of our officers, Nikolai, was told to hand carry it to Washington to be developed by OTS experts. Although he was not privy to the final results, he did see the first photo prints floating in the washing tray of a secure Technical Services darkroom. They were, apparently, official Soviet documents.
Washington kept silent on the value of TRINITY’s initial product, but there was now a decided urgency in the tone of communications from Langley, which Bill and Jacques had never witnessed before.
“We knew something very big was happening,” Jacques recalled.
On the day Jacob and I returned to Moscow, still under our former cover, Jacques gave us a draft cable that he’d prepared for IMMEDIATE transmission to Headquarters. He was due to leave on his reassignment to Washington within weeks, but he had one essential piece of business to tend to: He proposed to use the CLOAK technique, with the help of Jacob and myself, to break free of KGB surveillance for an extended personal meeting with TRINITY. CIA Moscow had never attempted such a meeting with a key asset. Jacques was suggesting that he slip through the surveillance net, meet with TRINITY for several hours, then return without leaving any trace of having been gone from the compound.
Jacob and I faced a vexing problem. Since February, my Technical Services disguise team, supported by Jerome Calloway and other contractors, had been slaving away to prepare materials that would alter the appearances of the Moscow contingent, should the CLOAK technique become a viable tradecraft option. However, we had nothing ready for Jacques himself because of his imminent departure date. I promptly wrote my own IMMEDIATE cable to follow Jacques’s message, requesting the OTS disguise team to get to work right away on disguise materials that would allow Jacques to negotiate the streets of Moscow unrecognized. Time was limited, and there was already an almost unmanageable list of tasks to accomplish while in Moscow. We welcomed the prospect of using the time while waiting for Headquarters and TRINITY to respond.
We knew that we’d need something more sophisticated than Jacques’s earlier rudimentary disguise. Three members of the original dinner party had either been reassigned or were on summer vacation, so we had to bring plausible substitutes on board. One of the new members, “Roy,” was already rehearsing for his role as Niles’s replacement. Len was still available, along with his hulking Olds 88. A third viable candidate, “Jerry,” volunteered for the operation, as did several other brave souls from the nondiplomatic contingent.
We held our first “lineup” two nights later to compare the physical appearance of these volunteers, discuss their recent surveillance patterns, and consider possible covers for the action. Roy and Jerry emerged as the best candidates for the diversion. While keeping options open for a variety of contingencies, we immediately started to develop distinctive patterns for the two new volunteers to follow outside the compound. We wanted the KGB to easily recognize them from a distance, while concluding with some certainty that they were not interesting from an operational standpoint.
In my cable to Headquarters, I requested priority delivery of an entirely new wardrobe for Roy that would make him more visible, both in the compound and on the street. Jerry already had suitable clothes that helped form part of his naturally distinctive profile.
It was essential to contact TRINITY without risking signal marks, drops, or tosses. A shortwave voice message was broadcast from outside the Soviet Union on a secret schedule in encrypted number groups, keyed to TRINITY’s original one-time pads and proposing the landmark meeting with Jacques. TRINITY was instructed to make a timed drop at a secure site—a message in secret writing, stating his response to the proposal.
Bill, Jacques, and their CIA contingent worked tirelessly over the next week preparing for the operation. They selected backup signal and drop sites, then scoured the city to find an ideal secure meeting location. The materials for Jacques’s street disguise arrived, and Jacob and I practically had to chase him through the more secure sections of the Station for a fitting, he was so frantic with activity. Meanwhile, we had to supervise the profile training for the other volunteers.
Roy wore a “cowboy” outfit to an embassy barbecue, the Friday night happy hour, poker games, and on short walks to shops along the Garden Ring. OTS had provided him with a creamy white Stetson hat, western shirts covered with mother-of-pearl buttons, russet jeans, and Tony Lama lizard-skin boots. To this outlandish costume, he added a pair of wide, mod-Italian sunglasses.
Jerry, aka “Big Jer,” who weighed nearly 250 pounds and stood over six feet, sported stylish long hair and a neatly trimmed beard. We added a sky-blue linen sportscoat and beige linen trousers, rakish sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed Panama hat, appropriate for the midsummer heat wave gripping the city. We also backed up our wardrobe with bright pastel leisure suits that looked like Saturday Night Fever costumes which most Russian males over the age of sixteen secretly coveted at the time.
We decided that Jerry and his wife, “Laura,” an attractive young woman with blue eyes and long blond hair, should take a weekend shopping trip to Helsinki, so that they could appear in Moscow with their dazzling new “disco” clothes. We also needed a plausible reason for Laura to engage in a new pattern of driving their car through Moscow’s fast, confusing traffic in case we needed her immediate assistance at the last minute.
“Twisted your knee playing tennis up in Helsinki,” Jacob suggested to Jerry. “You can start using a cane when you come back. That’ll give Laura a good reason to drive you around town.”
The use of the cane prop would also create a visual memory of Jerry hobbling around the courtyard even before any CLOAK outing took place. We figured that the nearby surveillance teams, being human, might appreciate watching a sexy woman like Laura fetching the family car from the parking-area in front of the compound, then driving into the courtyard to pick up her crippled husband.
We were all working diligently on setting the stage with appropriate illusions that would seduce our KGB audience into “seeing” what we wanted them to see as CLOAK went into effect. First, we had to develop a safe cover action for the drop pickup. A home screening of Jaws was deemed ideal, since movies were a popular way of breaking the monotony of social life in Moscow. Several couples planned to watch the film at the apartment of a young case officer. The snoops were also drawn seamlessly into this event, with the host insisting that the 16mm projector and a spare projector lamp be delivered to his apartment and tested.
The evening began with an abundance of drinks and lively commentary on the realism of the great white shark. Suddenly the film broke. While one of the less technophobic husbands lugged the reel over to the audiovisual tech shop in the embassy, the host announced he was dashing out to pick up a pack of his favorite Russian cigarettes, the “stinkpots” that his wife found difficult to tolerate.
“Smoke them before you get home,” she chided as he left.
The officer strode out of the courtyard archway and wandered south down Tchaikovsky Street, confident he was not being followed, since he had often been observed heading toward the tobacco kiosk, standing on a corner of Kalinina Prospekt. He was well aware that KGB surveillance teams could observe him, both coming from and going to his apartment, except for a crucial thirty-second period, when he disappeared into a pedestrian underpass.
Here was the site where TRINITY would make his timed drop. With a casual sweep of his hand, the officer reached into a trash can, retrieved the message container, and placed it in a dark cloth bag. Two minutes later, he was poised in front of the kiosk, chatting amicably with the vendor in broken Russian. He puffed merrily on his cigarette as he strolled back to the American compound.
The next morning he came to the office with a crushed can, still dripping with used engine oil—the concealment device for TRINITY’s drop. Anyone who happened to pick up the can would have to immediately drop it or risk ruining his clothes.
When we gingerly cut the can open, we found a knotted condom enclosing three small objects and a scrap of paper. The objects turned out to be test cassettes from an advanced subminiature spy camera, which had been delivered earlier to TRINITY so he could photograph documents in his ministry and avoid the risk of smuggling classified material to his apartment. Nikolai immediately prepared the cassettes for delivery to Headquarters.
We then turned our attention to the scrap of paper. It was ragged, covered with colored-pencil scrawls. If it was found, most people would assume the paper was the product of some child playing at the kitchen table. But we understood that secret writing lay under the colored scribbles. What was TRINITY’s message? we wondered. Would there be a meeting? We held our breath as Nikolai carefully carried the sheet into his tiny darkroom.
Twenty minutes later, he emerged, holding the scrap of paper. But his tightly drawn lips and pallor revealed his profound distress. “Some of that oil from the can leaked onto the paper,” he said. “The message is just a bunch of dark smudges.”
TRINITY’s answer, which we had worked so hard to obtain, had been obliterated. We were all horrified, but Jacques looked particularly devastated. After all that meticulous labor, Murphy’s Law had gone into effect.
“Let me take a look at the original message,” I asked Nikolai.
Using forceps, I held the paper up against a lab lamp. The smudges were indeed illegible. But I could see that there were other problems: The paper was clay-coated, the type often used for color separations in quality periodicals but a poor choice for secret writing—the microscopic clay particles tended to bleed into the invisible ink during the development process. It also appeared that he had used his own lowercase, cursive Cyrillic instead of the block letters we preferred.
But I had a hunch we might be able to salvage something: The dark blotches reminded me of similar secret writing messages in Asian languages I had encountered in the Far East that had also been distorted. I had been able to enhance those “ruined” messages enough for our translators to distinguish the complex characters.
“Let me have a sheet of transparent filter material,” I asked Nikolai.
I slid the material between the secret message and the glass plate of the office Xerox machine. To my dismay, the blotches on the resulting copy were still indecipherable.
I turned to Jacques. “Do we have any examples of TRINITY’s handwriting around?”
A rapid search through the files yielded over one hundred pages of handwritten Russian narrative, which TRINITY had produced for an autobiography while he was still in the West.
“I’m going to need a quiet place to work,” I said, gathering all the materials together.
For the next two days, my skills as a forger came into play. Working in a tiny cubicle, I forged sample phrases in Cyrillic by comparing the letter formations on TRINITY’s handwritten pages to the shapes of the blotches on the message. Every hour or two, Jacques came to check my progress and coached me on the nuances of cursive Cyrillic.
I had almost completed my fair copy of these phrases, which, like the diary entries I had forged in Vientiane, were totally meaningless to me, when Jacques entered the office and peered over my shoulder.
“My God,” he whispered, “I can read it: ‘I accept your proposal for a meeting…if you feel it is safe to do this…Wish us good luck…’”
After Headquarters authorized a personal meeting, the newly formed CLOAK team erupted in a quiet celebration. We were back in business and the operation would go forward.
We conducted a final dress rehearsal late on a Thursday afternoon in August. The real outing was scheduled for the next afternoon, with the cover action as another dinner. This feast would be held at the National Hotel, where Roy, Big Jerry, and Laura had become regulars on weekends. By sheer coincidence, the embassy had scheduled a large reception at the same time, so we knew the courtyard would be teeming with other diplomats and official Soviet guests. With so many high-ranking foreigners arriving that Friday night, the surveillance near the embassy would be under a great deal of stress trying to keep track of priority targets, almost certain to dismiss “persons of little interest” such as ourselves.
Just after six P.M. on Friday, Jacques and his wife, Suzette, crossed the courtyard and headed for the community center, where they frequently enjoyed the happy hour. In the apartment block, Roy dressed for the dinner, then called Jerry and Laura to remind them to stop by his place for a drink before they all went to the restaurant. I was stashed in the tiny maid’s room of Roy’s apartment, an airless box off an inner hall, relatively safe from KGB technical surveillance.
Jacques and Suzette worked their way slowly through the happy hour crowds, chatting with friends as they approached the door at the back of the room. In a flash they were gone, climbing the dim, narrow staircase that led to the apartment block. Suzette continued to a secure area, while Jacques tiptoed through Roy’s door and into the maid’s room, where I waited anxiously.
All my materials were spread out on a table so that I could outfit Jacques in a matter of minutes without saying a word. He was to assume an ordinary Muscovite working-class persona so he could move freely on the street once he had broken surveillance and bailed out of Jerry’s car. He donned a faded, zipper-front sweater and a pair of frayed, “high-water” slacks. Laura would carry Jacques’s drab, mismatched suit jacket and scuffed shoes in the purse she’d brought back from Helsinki. I helped Jacques slip into a detachable, muted pastel leisure suit that would pass almost unnoticed amidst the flashier colors of the dinner group, then focused on the facial attributes of his Russian persona. Working quickly with some of Jerome Calloway’s best FINESSE material, I widened the tip of Jacques’s nose, placed a light brown wig over his darker brown hair and finally managed to apply a blond mustache on his face, slippery with sweat.
As we made our final adjustments, I could hear the dinner party chatting pleasantly in Roy’s living room. We were minutes away from the deadline, when a diversion group would drive into the courtyard, partially obscuring Jerry and Laura’s car. Laura departed on cue to fetch the car, quickly followed by Roy and Jerry. Jacques stared tensely at the second hand of his Russian watch before squeezing my shoulder gratefully and slipping out the door to take the staircase down to the courtyard.
I sat down to wait again, knowing I had to remain completely silent. Only when I gasped for air did I realize that I had been holding my breath as the CLOAK team departed. Meanwhile, Jacob was sweating out the operation in a secure area, wearing headphones as he tweaked an advanced radio scanner. He logged KGB transmissions as Jacques and the dinner party piled into Jerry’s car in the courtyard and drove out through the archway. The surveillance channels had been alive with staccato bursts for an hour as guests arrived for the reception, trailing their own dedicated teams of observers, who were now installed in hidden posts throughout the neighborhood.
Much to our relief, Jacques and the dinner trio returned on schedule, just before midnight. When Jacob and I joined the Saturday morning debriefing, the office was quietly buzzing.
“Everything worked exactly as planned,” Jacques said, beaming with enthusiasm. “It was a textbook operation.”
He had spent almost two hours with TRINITY, walking along the dark paths of Fili Park, southwest of central Moscow, and across the river. The other three had proceeded to the restaurant for a luxuriously long and festive dinner, then picked up Jacques without incident at the predetermined spot. As Laura had driven up the Rostovskaya Embankment, Jacques had maneuvered the Velcro tabs so that he was enveloped once more in the oversize leisure suit.
“We had a lot of catching up to do,” Jacques said. “TRINITY needed to look into a human face, hear a real voice, and know we were still standing behind him.”
A vexing mystery had also been solved: TRINITY had been very ill in the hospital for most of that silent one-year period. Jacques had assured the agent that the CIA would continue to meet its obligations and had in fact deposited monthly salary checks toward TRINITY’s retirement in the West in an Agency escrow account, which had already yielded a tantalizing sum. In return, TRINITY demonstrated his good faith by passing Jacques thirty-four pages of photocopied documents and a staggering nine rolls of 35mm film.
Jacob and I immediately pitched in to help Nikolai develop the film. With the prints processed and hanging on the drying line, Bill Fuller inspected the evening’s “take” and concluded that we had in TRINITY the equivalent of a highly placed penetration agent in our own National Security Council. Without arousing suspicion, TRINITY could delve into the most sensitive areas of Soviet policy.
Jacob and I knew we had participated in a watershed operational success. We had supported the CIA station as it rewrote its Moscow modus operandi, employed against the omnipresent KGB security forces. Within weeks, the CIA began to mine the Soviet Union’s most confidential vaults in an intelligence haul that produced priceless information about Soviet intentions in the SALT I (strategic arms limitations) talks and secret parallel weapons development programs.
Our disguise team soon became very adept at preparing and deploying a quick-reaction Silver Bullet system for a fast-breaking outing. Disguise officers now rotated regularly between Headquarters and Moscow to exploit these opportunities. We also trained case officers and other Agency employees assigned to the Soviet Union in these new techniques, pitting case officers against the best CIA surveillance teams in realistic war games. What had begun as Jacques’s desperate attempt to break free for a few moments to meet a volunteer on the street had evolved into one of the Agency’s most guarded secrets, a critical technique reserved exclusively for key operations in Moscow.
TEN MONTHS LATER, on July 15, 1977, Jacques called me. He had been reassigned to Headquarters late the previous year.
“Can you come to my office at once?” he asked, his voice strained.
Inviting me to have a seat beside his desk, Jacques was pale and obviously shaken. He slid his chair close to mine and spoke painfully. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, Tony, but TRINITY is probably dead.”
I was stunned for a moment, but soon recovered. “What happened?” I asked.
“We’re not sure yet. One of our case officers was ambushed last night servicing a drop to TRINITY.”
The case officer was “Mary Peters,” one of the best and most elusive operatives under cover of the “little interest” group. For almost a year, she had serviced TRINITY’s signal and drop sites without raising the slightest suspicion.
“Is she all right?”
“She’s shaken,” Jacques said angrily. “They roughed her up pretty bad, and she fought back, apparently hurting a couple of those thugs. Then they threw her in Lubyanka and made all sorts of threats. But the embassy consul finally sprung her. The Sovs have PNG’d her.”
I sagged in my chair at this terrible news, which was the last thing any of us wanted to hear about an agent-in-place. Beyond the obvious tragedy of the situation, we were now mired in uncertainty. Had a tradecraft mistake led to TRINITY’s exposure? In every case, we had tried to err on the side of caution, keeping an agent operational only as long as it seemed safe. Our exfiltration ops plan for TRINITY was already well advanced, but now it was no use.
Because the KGB had ambushed Mary Peters at a drop site, it was clear that they had managed to extract information from TRINITY. How long had they been controlling him? How much of his product was valid? Such questions could not easily be answered. But I did know from the Directorate of Operations that most of TRINITY’s remarkable flood of intelligence had been of unprecedented sterling quality, so his compromise must have been recent.
Over the coming weeks, we all watched tensely for Soviet government reaction. The KGB was always very careful about making a plausible espionage case against a government official. Once they had enough evidence for a convincing public trial, however, they proceeded quickly with the process, followed by a death sentence.
While waiting for TRINITY’s trial and inevitable sentence, the DO and OTS performed an urgent damage control assessment. What tradecraft secrets had been compromised? Exactly what could TRINITY have told the KGB about our people and methods? What sensitive materials and equipment had we given him? Jacques and I both agreed that TRINITY did not know that we had been using the CLOAK technique, so the Silver Bullet was still intact.
But now the KGB probably understood that Mary Peters had led a very disciplined lifestyle, with a low profile and nonthreatening behavior pattern. Her only operational task had been to maintain impersonal commo with TRINITY when she was confident no surveillance was present, and she had always conducted a long, complex cleansing run to be certain that she was alone. Now we had to dissect everything about her persona, patterns, and outings to make certain we hadn’t neglected some aspect of tradecraft that might have compromised TRINITY. It was time for a Blue Ribbon internal panel to fully review Moscow rules.
“GORE HARRINGTON,” the new chief in Moscow who replaced Bill Fuller that fall, was plainly no fan of the Silver Bullet option in Moscow tradecraft. Pushing Moscow rules beyond the limits, he grumbled, might have been what had led to the failure of the TRINITY case and the death of one of our most courageous and effective penetration agents.
As winter set in, a parallel chill gripped the Soviet-East European Division. Over the coming months seven of their agents-in-place in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were compromised. And then a suspicious fire broke out in the American embassy in Moscow; it seemed to have been rigged to give the KGB access to our most sensitive offices. Was our string of good luck in Moscow ending?
The Carter administration had been in the White House for almost a year, and the patience of the new Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Stansfield Turner, was wearing thin when it came to Soviet operations. Because we suddenly seemed incapable of working effecttively against KGB opposition, Turner considered the withdrawal of our entire contingent from Moscow.
A few months later, the panel of inquiry on the 1977 compromises released their classified findings. According to unconfirmed information provided by a KGB agent still in place, TRINITY had been seen photographing secret documents at his ministry. Knowing that he faced brutal interrogation, he had agreed to write a full confession. But instead, he commited suicide, using a cyanide capsule (“L” pill) he had obtained from Jacques.
The panel also found breaches in operational security by the other compromised agents. DCI Turner now seemed somewhat less likely to pull the plug on Moscow.
To me, the account of TRINITY’s compromise seemed plausible. But the panel’s report did not explain how the KGB counterintelligence teams had managed to ambush Mary Peters the night she went to service TRINITY’s drop site. For years, I simply assumed that he had folded under interrogation and revealed his tradecraft repertoire before killing himself.
I was wrong.
In 1998, a Russian writer named Sergei Gorlenko published a somewhat questionable account of the TRINITY case on an Internet website (www.intelligence.ru/english/public/n0001). Gorlenko apparently had access to detailed files on TRINITY’s arrest and Mary Peters’s subsequent unmasking.
This version paralleled known events: Gorlenko confirmed that TRINITY had served at a large Soviet embassy in the West in the mid-1970s. The KGB’s First Chief Directorate reportedly received information from an agent that someone in the Soviet embassy who used the sports club at the local Hilton Hotel had been recruited by the CIA. The KGB initially identified twelve possible suspects who were quickly narrowed down to three, including TRINITY. Coinciding with TRINITY’s return to Moscow, Second Chief Directorate (Counterintelligence) technicians noted new clandestine coded radio broadcasts originating in Western Europe, suggesting that an agent-in-place had just been activated in the Soviet Union. Further, Gorlenko stated that “laborious analysis” determined this agent was either unmarried or divorced and maintained his own bachelor apartment.
TRINITY was the only one of the original suspects who fit this category. And his behavior gave further weight to the evidence against him. TRINITY turned down a prestigious academic position to take a lower paid, dead-end job as a clerk in his ministry. But this clerical assignment provided him access to highly sensitive Soviet national security information.
Despite this suspicion, however, Gorlenko stated that the KGB allowed TRINITY—now assigned the Russian cryptonym “AGRONOM” (Market Gardener)—to continue in his ministry position while they slowly developed their investigation. Surveillance teams discovered he was probably using his Volga sedan, often parked on certain side streets following an apparent schedule, as a signal to American case officers. He would then visit Pobedy Park in west central Moscow late in the evening, walking paths taken by known CIA officers from the Moscow station.
Based on this now overwhelming evidence, a KGB counterintelligence/surveillance team searched TRINITY’s apartment while he was away on a trip in mid-1976 and installed a hidden mini-video camera. Although they were unable to unearth any obvious spy gear, TRINITY did have a transistor shortwave radio with a built-in cassette recorder, ideal for receiving coded broadcasts.
It was not until June 1977—according to Gorlenko, almost two and a half years after TRINITY had returned from abroad—that the surveillance camera revealed him removing a transparent plastic fiche of communication instructions (including coded references to the sites and schedules of timed drops), hidden in a dummy flashlight battery.
On the evening of June 21, 1977, the “capture group” from the Second and Seventh Chief Directorates arrested TRINITY in the courtyard of his apartment house. He led his captors to a garage where he had hidden his other espionage equipment. The most damning was a dead-drop container, an OTS-produced artificial cobblestone with a hollow interior.
According to Gorlenko, TRINITY “expressed a desire to write with his own hand the testimony about his spying activities.” His captors granted him this wish. TRINITY picked up his Waterman fountain pen, wrote a few lines, then jammed the pen into his mouth, bit through the barrel, and fell to the floor. The KGB team was shocked. Their effort to pry the pen and its cyanide capsule from TRINITY’s mouth with a wooden ruler failed. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
In this version of events, the KGB had clearly blundered in managing the investigation. They now tried to redeem themselves by capturing TRINITY’s case officer. Using his cryptographic instructions, they decoded radio instructions suggesting a meeting at the “Forest” site, which they decided was Pobedy Park. They disguised a KGB surveillance officer as TRINITY and had him drive the agent’s Volga to a signal site, thus agreeing to a meeting in the park. But the surveillance teams located no American officer in the park on the night of the meeting.
(They were unaware that Mary Peters, TRINITY’s street contact officer, had in fact been in the park that night.)
Undaunted, the KGB pressed ahead, trying to trap TRINITY’s case officer. Another broadcast recommended a dead-drop exchange at a site bearing the code word “Setun,” the Krasnokaluzhsky railway bridge across the Moscow River west of the city’s center. Once more, the agent had to confirm the meeting at a separate signal site, this time by placing a lipstick smear on a lamp pole bearing a triangular children-crossing sign on Krupskaya Street.
But the KGB were surprised when Mary Peters was observed slowly cruising by the lamp pole. Her cover, deep in the “other” group of uninteresting drudges in the embassy, had been so effective that she had never been assigned a street surveillance team. That changed immediately.
Saturation surveillance on Mary observed her reading the lamp pole signal on the evening of July 14. The meeting on the railway bridge was scheduled for the next night. The KGB had prepared a rough welcome for her. The bridge, a prerevolutionary construction of rusty trestles and sooty stone towers carried double railway tracks across the river, as well as a narrow steel-plate walkway. It was not a pleasant place for a stroll on a dark night, but it did provide good visibility to detect close-in surveillance and also a convenient dumping ground for incriminating material: the Moscow River.
To ambush Mary, the KGB cut a hatch in the warped steel plates of the walkway and connected it to the catwalk below with a ladder. A small surveillance team would be lurking there when Mary made her way overhead on the pedestrian passage.
The night of July 15, Mary was observed leaving the American housing compound in her car “with her hair carefully styled and with a fashionable dress on.” But when she reached the cinema at the Rossiya Hotel, she climbed from her car wearing a dark blouse and slacks, and her hair was down. She reached the railway bridge by Metro, scanned the area for surveillance, and then paused, making certain she was alone. Although the hidden surveillance teams had no way of knowing, she was listening carefully for their scrambled voice-code radio messages, using an Agency-adapted earpiece and a special receiver strapped beneath her blouse.
Hearing none of the usual cryptic chatter of the “foot” and car teams, Mary mounted the echoing steel staircase to the bridge and made her way along the narrow walkway beside the tracks. Just as she entered the arched passage through the stone-block tower, the hatch on the walkway clanged open and the KGB arrest team sprang out to seize her. While she screamed loudly in Russian that this was a “provocation,” reinforcements pounded toward her from either end of the bridge.
Mary knew, of course, that they had her cold when they wrested from her grip the dummy cobblestone containing cash, mini-cameras, microfilm, and coded messages for TRINITY. But she resisted vigorously, hoping to alert the agent if somehow he might still be approaching the bridge.
Her effort cost her some bruised ribs, a wrenched arm, and a black eye. By the next morning, the American consul had arranged her release from the Lubyanka Prison. She was declared persona non grata and expelled a day later.
Reading Gorlenko’s account, I detected a mix of previously secret fact and likely falsehood. First, the revisionism: The case history was written by the KGB, which had the unenviable task of publicizing their success in capturing Mary Peters, while simultaneously trying to deflect attention from TRINITY’s considerable success as an espionage agent. Further, the former KGB also had to explain how one of the Soviet government’s most promising young officials had been recruited at a large embassy in the West well-staffed by counterintelligence experts.
Gorlenko’s version of the truth reflects these difficulties. To overcome them, the account all but ignores the year between the summers of 1976 and 1977, after Jacques reactivated TRINITY and the agent delivered his trove of extremely valuable intelligence.
So, while the step-by-step record of Mary’s surveillance and capture on the bridge is completely accurate, I find it hard to believe that the Second Chief Directorate had narrowed down the list of suspected American agents to TRINITY alone by the time he returned to Moscow, then simply allowed him to continue in his sensitive position for two and a half years. And it is just not plausible that they would have given him completely free rein for the first eighteen months of this period before installing video surveillance in his small apartment. It is more likely that our agent made a tradecraft mistake, as the Agency’s investigative panel indicated, and that this error led to his subsequent surveillance and capture.
In short, I think the Internet account of TRINITY’s demise and Mary Peters’s arrest represents an overstated historical account, diluted with some good old-fashioned bureaucratic Cover Your Ass revisionism that has survived the collapse of Communism and the Soviet empire.
BUT THE COLD WAR was still a reality in 1978 when a situation in Moscow fully restored both Turner’s and Gore Harrington’s confidence in our Silver Bullet techniques.
CIA had received word that an internationally prominent, English-language magazine published in the United States was about to print a story that would inadvertently cast suspicion on a retired senior Soviet official as a former secret asset of the FBI and CIA. The Chief of the Soviet-East European Division appealed to the magazine’s editor to kill the story, but this was impossible: The issue was already printed. Publication of the article, however, would place our loyal former agent in extreme jeopardy.
Since the retired agent was no longer in contact with the Moscow office, it was imperative that one of our officers slip free of surveillance to warn the Russian and offer him the option of emergency exfiltration before the story broke. But those who knew this old official, whose health was failing, feared he would refuse the offer, for he loved his Russian homeland as passionately as he despised the ruling Soviet system.
On the chance that the former agent would accept the offer, my Technical Services group went ahead with preparations for the very first clandestine exfiltration from Moscow. Gore Harrington, still disdainful of CLOAK, opted to be the action officer who would contact the agent. He was confident that he could elude his watchers without resorting to the Silver Bullet option.
But I had other problems to worry about. Since I had been promoted from Chief of Disguise to Deputy of Authentication the year before, it was my responsibility to oversee and plan every detail of the risky exfiltration, including all the document and disguise options for the subject and the American team. Because he was well known, transporting the agent through any airport in Moscow or elsewhere in the Soviet Union was not feasible, but we had a fair chance of exfiltrating him by land or sea to another Soviet bloc country, where we could disguise and move him safely to the West. I marshaled my troops, both at Headquarters and in Europe, urgently mounting parallel probes along train and ferry routes, so that we could update our information on controls, with a focus on how the Soviet bloc security system treated a traveler with a particular third-country alias and cover. Jacob’s capable team responded immediately, and the first probes were dispatched. When I found that we had no recent passport photo of the agent, my shop produced a suitable stand-in. We disguised him to closely resemble our subject and photographed him in a variety of poses for his exfiltration passport and other documents. The project consumed us as we worked mind-numbing eighteen-hour days.
Early one morning several days later, my secretary brought me a restricted-handling Secret cable from Gore Harrington. Despite a concerted effort, he had been unable to break free of KGB surveillance. As a last-ditch attempt, however, he had turned to the Moscow CLOAK team we had trained and reluctantly chose an “off-the-shelf” Silver Bullet option, which we had prepared for him despite his earlier resistance. On that successful outing, Gore Harrington, like his colleagues before him, had discovered the intoxicating power of invisibility.
Unfortunately, his clandestine meeting with the retired agent was less productive. The old man’s emotional bond to his native Russian soil was too powerful for him to flee into exile. He thanked Gore for all we had done, but bravely chose to accept his fate.
“I will die here as I have tried to live,” he told Gore, “with dignity.”
Reviewing this entire episode, DCI Turner declared the use of the Silver Bullet technique “a fine piece of work.” Gore went even further, stating that the CLOAK-Silver Bullet combination was his “most valuable capability” and should be maintained in Moscow as a fail-safe tradecraft option.
What had begun as an exercise in frustration had ended with one of the most innovative espionage tradecraft systems in our history. The widespread acceptance of these techniques ushered in an unusually productive period for the Moscow station, with one success after another. These fruitful years would last well into the next decade, until we suffered betrayal at the hands of one of our own, an embittered former career trainee in the Directorate of Operations named Edward L. Howard.
But before I would confront internal treachery, I found myself on another geopolitical fault line—revolutionary Iran.