For anyone tired of life, the thrilling life of a spy should be the very finest recuperator.
—Sir Robert Baden-Powell, British intelligence officer and founder of the Boy Scouts
Washington, November 1982
• The street disguise exercise had gone well. My special OTS team had played the role of KGB bloodhounds, and the graduate career trainees from the Directorate of Operations had been eager to display the skills they had acquired in the IO (Internal Operations) Course. Even the Mitteleuropa weather—a nasty night of freezing rain that had cleared the streets of Georgetown and Foggy Bottom—had added to the realism of the experience.
The IO “pipeliners” had survived intense months of instruction, which had led seamlessly from the paramilitary discipline at the Farm to the more cerebral challenges of the advanced training, focusing on their areas of assignment. They were bright, high achievers, earmarked for important Soviet bloc jobs in their initial overseas tours. While “reading in” on the agent cases they would help manage, they were honing the tradecraft skills needed to operate effectively on hostile streets.
Although I had moved up to become Chief of Authentication in 1979, I remained personally involved in the disguise tradecraft training of these new officers and their spouses, and I took a special interest in those assigned to Moscow because I had helped refine the CLOAK-Silver Bullet procedures.
Transforming well-adjusted, law-abiding citizens into successful case officers was always a challenging, delicate process. By definition, the candidates had to be able to adapt to demanding overseas assignments. They had to be cunning and devious while working against the enemy, yet still retain their personal and professional integrity. Above all, they had to demonstrate an unwavering loyalty to their country and their colleagues, in that order. Beyond these seemingly inconsistent attributes, a case officer had to have that intangible flair, the ability to orchestrate complex exercises in deception tradecraft with ease.
When the pipeliners were cycled over to OTS for their postgraduate disguise training, I always stressed to our team that we had a serious obligation to fulfill in screening these new officers. Just because they had already passed muster for assignment to the Soviet Union didn’t automatically qualify them to use the most sensitive Silver Bullet procedures on the streets of Moscow. These techniques were absolutely essential to our operations and highly vulnerable if misused.
Although we did not have formal veto power over a probationary officer’s future, our colleagues in the DO’s Soviet-East European (SE) Division, most of whom had been our comrades in the field, were certainly anxious for our opinions. Much of our evaluation of the new officers was visceral, based on an evolving doctrine and years of operational experience. Our instincts could tell us that one candidate would excel in the more specialized world of Soviet bloc espionage, while another, despite an impressive academic background, high language aptitude, and an engaging personality, simply would not. It was similar to the informal peer assessment soldiers had used for millennia, which boiled down to a simple question: “Would I trust my life (or an agent’s) to this person?”
That night during the debriefing, one of the pipeliners, an attractive young woman who had been considered borderline because of her less proficient language skills, had used the CLOAK technique and completely eluded the surveillance team, disguising herself as a pitiful bag lady huddled on a steam grate near the Mall by adding a rain-soaked blanket and a tangled gray Halloween witch’s wig she’d bought at a costume store.
“Way to go, Helen,” I said, raising my can of Miller Lite.
My bloodhounds were taken aback but acknowledged that she had executed her escape flawlessly while still playing by strict “Moscow” rules of engagement.
Helen smiled radiantly, pleased by the first unqualified praise she’d received in weeks.
We moved on to the next officer, who had ignored the rules of engagement and was well aware of it. The man’s name was “Darrell,” one of the brightest of Soviet-East European Division’s pipeliners. In fact, Darrell had been slated for a Moscow assignment early in his training process.
But I was disturbed by the report on his actions that night. One of the OTS surveillance specialists, “Jerry,” who had been team leader on the exercise, had taken me aside just before the debrief. “The guy really became provocative between Washington Circle and Connecticut Avenue,” Jerry had complained. “Then he doubled back toward the GW campus through a building in his DAGGER rig in order to make his next timing point.”
Jerry’s concerns were valid. That night’s modified Moscow rules were a refined version of the specialized disguise materials employed in the CLOAK procedure, the new technique we’d code-named “DAGGER.”
The DAGGER technique is still classified, so I cannot describe it in detail. But I can say that the disguise is so effective, it can be successfully employed while maintaining the flow of normal street travel.
Darrell knew this; we all did. Yet he had chosen to break the rules. Why? He already had his coveted Moscow assignment. Was his competitive drive too strong to control?
I studied Jerry’s handwritten surveillance notes, then turned to Darrell, a dark-eyed, calm, and self-assured man who looked younger than thirty-one.
Maybe tonight’s breach was an aberration. Or perhaps he hadn’t fully understood the rules of the exercise. I handed the report to the Soviet-East European control officer, “Martin.”
“Darrell,” Martin said, looking him directly in the eye, searching for any sign of deceit, “Jerry saw you duck into a building when you doubled back up L Street and then into that alley near the Washingtonian office. That was against the exercise parameters. Why did you do it?”
Darrell hardly blinked. “I didn’t. Once I lost surveillance, I just kept moving toward Connecticut until I hit my timing point and changed into the DAGGER rig.”
“We saw you,” Jerry said harshly.
“If you ran out of time,” Martin said, trying to control the palpable animosity building around the table, “just admit it, and we’ll repeat the exercise another night.”
Darrell coolly looked each of us in the face before speaking, then returned his gaze to Jerry. “You’re wrong.”
He’s trying to “case officer” us, I thought. Lying was bad enough. But trying to outwit us through this transparent deception with his colleagues was a worse offense. Suddenly, I remembered that painful morning in 1967 when Lynn, my Flaps and Seals instructor, had caught me in my lie about using the forbidden French opening to unseal her test envelopes. Then, I had been humiliated and condemned to clean her lab for a week, but I had also learned a valuable lesson about mutual honesty among colleagues in this strange business.
“Okay,” Martin said flatly to Darrell, then turned to the next trainee. Perhaps the embarrassment we all felt for Darrell would shame him into admitting his deceit. But he sat serenely at the table and even managed to eat a slice of pizza as if nothing had happened.
Jerry looked at me quizzically, but read my expression correctly. I would consult with Soviet-East European management about this situation later, an unpleasant but necessary obligation.
But I didn’t have to make a special trip to give my report. Mary Peters, the Moscow case officer who had been arrested by the Seventh Chief Directorate and PNG’d from the Soviet Union following TRINITY’s roll-up, had been overseeing Darrell and other pipeliners in their advanced tradecraft. She came to see me to voice her own concerns.
“We’re getting some unusual reports on Darrell,” Mary confided. “Nothing earth-shaking, but still disturbing.”
“The only definite thing I have is a lie he told last week in the after-action session,” I explained. “But the guy just stuck by the lie, even when Martin nailed him with it. I don’t like that, Mary.”
“Neither do I,” she agreed.
It didn’t take long for cocky Darrell to step down from his high horse. As all the older, more experienced case officers recognized, the pressure and stress of this intense training, as well as the unnerving prospect of a pending assignment to the big league of a Soviet bloc station, had caused the young pipeliner to falter in his basic integrity. When he was again confronted with his performance in rigorous tradecraft exercises, Darrell came clean and asked to be given another chance.
He had learned a painful but precious lesson: Espionage was an extremely stressful business, a profession that combined elements of being a street cop with those of a salesman working on commission. In Darrell’s case, his progress through the pipeline was somewhat slowed, and he was given a couple of extra months to prepare himself for the field. This grace period allowed him to mature enough to handle the stress under which he had almost buckled that rainy November night.
Blue Ridge Mountains, May 28, 1986
• I stood on the rutted track between the house and the cabin in a natural alcove formed by black locust trees whose branches were overgrown with wild climbing roses and honeysuckle vines. The fragrance was almost overwhelming. I had come here this bright spring Saturday morning just after sunrise to pick a bouquet of wild flowers from our forty acres to be placed on the altar of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church at Karen’s memorial service.
Suddenly, I sensed that I was not alone, that there was some intangible presence surrounding me in the trees and vines. As I stood there motionless and listened, all my senses sharpened. Then I walked slowly back toward the house, taking measured steps—I didn’t want to look as if I was fleeing that unknown observer.
Almost as quickly as the feeling had come it disappeared.
Grasping the bouquet, I reflected on the series of near-mystical events that had occurred during the week since Karen’s death. I had visited that wooded alcove several times and had always been aware of that inexplicable presence. The night before, I had invited my son Toby, and his sister Amanda, to join me there. Toby had returned from school in Chicago two days earlier and Amanda had just arrived from Seattle. Neither had been with Karen in her final days.
Karen had been diagnosed with lung cancer in January and received radiation treatments at Johns Hopkins Hospital until April, when she appeared to be in remission. Her sudden relapse and death had come so unexpectedly that there had not been time for the two oldest kids to return home. But I had brought Ian, our youngest, from Washington to be with Karen the day she died. The trauma of her disease and death had left all of us reeling with grief.
On Karen’s fortieth birthday, I had surprised her with a hot-air balloon flight over our valley, something she had wanted to experience for years. This small extravagance hardly compensated for countless missed birthdays and anniversaries, when professional assignments had pulled me away from her and the children. When I had been in the mountains of Laos, on extended duty in South Asia, or in the Soviet bloc, I had often thought of our life together in this Blue Ridge retreat after retirement, when I would finally have the chance to paint full time, which had been one of our naive dreams as a young couple in Denver.
Two years after her fortieth birthday, when she could hardly bear the pain of her cancer, Karen’s memory of that balloon flight lifted her from the agony she faced, and now, on the afternoon of her memorial celebration, we had asked the same balloonist to take up her ashes and scatter them over the wooded hillsides she had loved so deeply. The balloon was launched from behind the house at sunset with a hissing roar and the brilliant glare of its propane burners. A crowd of family and friends watched from the deepening shadows on the ground as the multicolored balloon rose into the sky. When the balloonist finally threw open the urn, the ashes showered across the land in sparkling pink clouds of sun-kissed rain.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, May 1986
• Two weeks before Karen’s death, a case officer named Aldridge “Rick” Ames, serving as the DO’s Chief of Soviet and East European Counterintelligence, faced the prospect of a polygraph examination before leaving on assignment to the Rome station. Although the test was routine, Rick Ames was worried about being “boxed.”
Ames, the son of an Agency officer, had served with the CIA since 1962. Rick Ames’s assignments had included Ankara, Turkey; Mexico City; New York (where he attempted without success to recruit his Soviet counterparts at the United Nations); and several years at Head quarters.
In all his jobs, Ames had turned in a mediocre performance. He had also become an alcoholic; suffered through a costly, acrimonious divorce; and fallen hopelessly into debt. But his second wife, Rosario, a junior Colombian diplomat he had courted in Mexico, had extravagant tastes and was devoid of any loyalty to the United States.
A tall man with sloping shoulders and thick glasses, and an acerbic arrogance, Ames soon succumbed to Rosario’s desire for the “good life” they had known living under embassy cover in Mexico.
In April 1985, Ames had simply walked into the Soviet embassy two blocks from the White House on 16th Street NW and volunteered to sell his services to the KGB. By way of bona fides, he presented his Agency ID card and Headquarters pass, as well as copies of several sensitive Soviet-East European Division cables.
In the months following Ames’s brazen walk-in defection, he sold the KGB the names of every important CIA asset in the Soviet bloc. During those months, the KGB relentlessly pursued our agents-in-place, rolling up over forty assets.
One of the cruelest losses was the arrest and execution of GRU Lieutenant General Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov, who had served as a vital agent-in-place since being recruited in New York in 1962. Polyakov was the most senior Soviet military intelligence officer to provide information to the CIA. Following his arrest in Moscow and brutal interrogation, he was executed in 1986.
By the end of his first year of espionage, Ames had cleared his debts, and he and Rosario embarked on an outrageous spending spree. He was soon making recklessly large deposits, often transporting paper bags of cash directly from Washington-area dead drops, where the KGB had stashed them, to the drive-through window of his bank.
Fortunately for Rick Ames, as the catastrophe in the Soviet bloc unfolded, the natural supposition at both the Moscow station and Head quarters was that this string of betrayals could be attributed to a known traitor, Edward Howard. A disgruntled former pipeliner who failed a polygraph about drugs and alcohol abuse on the eve of his departure for Moscow, Howard was fired by the CIA in May 1983. Within one year he had volunteered his services to the KGB and sold the Soviets the names of several agents he had been trained to work with in Moscow. Finally, tracked by the FBI, Howard had defected to the Soviet bloc in 1985. Equally devastating, he sold the Soviets the details of our Silver Bullet disguise techniques.
Counterintelligence assumed that Howard, as a gung-ho career trainee, had managed to become more knowledgeable about the Soviet bloc cases than anyone had ever imagined.
That false conjecture had protected Rick Ames throughout his first hedonistic months of treason. Now he had to face the polygraph.
His KGB case officer, Washington resident Stanislav Androsov, tried to ease Rick Ames’s mounting panic. “Try to get a good night’s sleep, and relax,” he urged.
Ames followed this advice and used disassociation techniques to evade standard questions about contact with foreign intelligence services and the divulging of classified information. The fact that he felt no remorse over the Soviet bloc agents’ deaths undoubtedly helped him to survive this examination, as well as another routine polygraph in 1991.
Although Ames’s May 1986 polygraph did reveal possible signs of deception, his long tenure in sensitive CIA positions served to protect his squandered integrity. Unlike Edward Howard, Rick Ames was old-line Agency family. No one in Counterintelligence would believe that he had sold out either his country or the CIA. In addition, because Rosario came from a prestigious Colombian family, Rick used his case officer skills in deception to his advantage, convincing colleagues that he had converted a nest egg from her parents into a small fortune, benefiting from stock market tips given by an unnamed old college buddy.
With luck on his side, Rick Ames continued his treachery unabated throughout his Rome tour and on his return to Headquarters. He had become the nightmarish “mole” that the Agency’s archetypal cold warrior Chief of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, had hunted in vain for almost two decades.
Eventually, the KGB paid Ames almost $3 million, making him by far the most expensive agent in history on the Soviet payroll. Ames and Rosario paid $540,000 in cash for a lavish home in an exclusive northern Virginia suburb, and he brazenly parked his $41,000 fire-engine-red Jaguar XJ6 in the Langley parking lot.
By the time the FBI finally arrested Ames in 1994, the Cold War had ended. He pleaded guilty to espionage under the National Security Act and offered to cooperate fully, provided that Rosario received a lighter sentence. A federal judge sentenced Ames to life in prison without parole; Rosario received less than six years. At least $100,000 of the KGB payroll had disappeared into Latin American banks and to this day has not been retrieved.
Besides General Polyakov, nine other major Soviet bloc agents-in-place were executed and dozens were sent to the Gulag. Equally devastating, from the perspective of American intelligence collection, was that the KGB “doubled-back” an unknown number of the other compromised agents, who became sources of tainted information. Ironically, the disaster of the Rick Ames betrayal led the CIA to shift its operational emphasis in the Soviet bloc from clandestine agent intelligence collection to covert actions in order to bolster the mounting political resistance movements in Eastern Europe. During this endgame of the Cold War, I would be called upon to play an important role, which drew on the same artistic background that had originally led to my Agency recruitment.
In July 1986, I was promoted to the Agency’s Senior Intelligence Service (SIS-1), the equivalent of a military general, and one of the federal government’s elite Executive Rank employees.
Foggy Bottom, October 1986
• “Go see Casey.” Peter Marino, the Director of OTS, stood in the door of my Central Building office, having just come from a meeting with his boss, Evan Hineman, Deputy Director for Science and Technology.
“When?” I asked, wondering what urgent task or sudden operation would require my meeting with Bill Casey, Ronald Reagan’s mercurial and controversial Director of Central Intelligence.
“Now,” Peter said. “Today. Casey wants to see Agency officers with promising ideas.”
Jesus, I thought, here was the chance of a lifetime for an old Pinball player like me to rack up some points, but Casey wasn’t giving me time to put on a carefully rehearsed dog-and-pony show.
“I’ll take the next Bluebird,” I told Peter.
“Take your car. He wants you there ASAP.”
Fighting through the midday traffic on the northbound George Washington Parkway, I considered what might lie behind Casey’s urgent request for a meeting. The recent debacle of agent betrayals in the Soviet bloc had been a successful KGB counter to our string of Silver Bullet victories, but the Agency had not yet unraveled the secret behind those betrayals. Speculation ran the gamut from Edward Howard’s treason, to the possible compromise of our global communications network, to the physical penetration of the Moscow embassy’s inner sanctums (perhaps with the compliance of two corrupt Marine guards, corporals Clayton Lonetree and Arnold Bracy, who had been ensnared in a KGB sexual “honey pot”), to the existence of a high-level mole in the CIA Headquarters, and, finally, to a nearly complete breakdown of our carefully established Moscow tradecraft. A Special Task Force had been established to investigate each of these possibilities.
The Task Force’s inquiries slowly proceeded with the harsh knowledge that the Soviet-East European Division’s clandestine intelligence, collected through recruited agents, would be suspect until the Agency found answers, meaning that our efforts in the Soviet bloc would have to shift toward other operational means. Many of us had definite ideas about what those means should be and the technical methods we should employ to achieve our ends.
As the new Chief of the Graphics and Authentication Division, one of my most pressing objectives was to modernize the Operational Graphics side of OTS, which I felt was a substantially underused resource. Graphics, like the disguise capability twelve years earlier, had seen better days. Not only had much of the Agency’s old talent retired, outside, overt graphics technology had progressed remarkably in that period and passed the Agency by.
These advances presented us with both amazing opportunities and daunting challenges. The use of computers to digitally reproduce both text and image meant that my Division could more effectively support alias document and covert action propaganda operations throughout the Soviet bloc. These operations ranged from agent rescues to supporting the banned Solidarity trade union’s underground newspapers and similar anti-Communist material that the Czechoslovak resistance group Charter 77 circulated. Such operations were a natural extension of the decades-long GIDEON program, in which OTS/Graphics had produced miniature Bibles, which were then smuggled into Eastern Europe by the DO. This clandestine campaign had also included publishing miniaturized copies of works by Soviet and East European dissident writers such as Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Czech playwright Vaclav Havel.
When I was a young trainee in the Graphics bullpens working on covert action propaganda, producing some of these materials would have taken months using traditional design and printing techniques, and would have presented major logistical problems for their secret placement in Eastern Europe. But by the mid-1980s, a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk carried in a “mule’s” hidden pocket could hold all the digital data an underground operator needed for a job. Using a basic computerized printer and a copy machine, the operator could produce anti-Communist flyers in Hungary or posters announcing Solidarity rallies in Warsaw.
The digital revolution clearly offered the CIA the opportunity to transform its propaganda effort in the Soviet bloc from a relatively marginal operation to a major campaign—if Casey and the Seventh Floor continued to back us. But the challenges inherent in computerized graphics could not be ignored. Around 1980, foreign national identity cards and travel documents began to incorporate new security technology in both the printed material and the computerized scanners at airports and border crossings.
The growing use of such digital security controls in the West would soon spread to the Soviet bloc, led by the Czechs and the East Germans, and would threaten CIA alias document operations across international borders. My predecessor had recognized both the opportunity and challenge that information-age computerized graphics represented and had launched an initiative to secure expensive, high-powered computers and the innovative digital scanning equipment needed to produce major document reproductions.
But this revolution had met with stubborn resistance among the old hands of Central Building. Invention of the digitalized reproduction techniques was in the care of one bright individual, whom the old guys in the art bullpen, the photo/plate lab, and the pressroom considered a threat to their craft and their jobs.
After I took over the Division, I saw this dispute as a cultural resistance to change, a bottleneck in the inevitable route to technical progress. I bombarded my superiors with program plans describing a broad-based effort that would draw on the power of new technology to create a separate digital graphics section, dedicated to both the opportunities and the challenges that the information-age revolution had given us. In putting forward my plans, I drew on the eighteen months I’d just completed as Chief of the Clandestine Imaging Division, in which we’d revitalized the electro-imaging program. Our boldest initiative had been a planned technical penetration operation directed against the Kremlin and several Soviet ministries in Moscow, using innovative new technology to gain entry into Soviet information systems.
We held a series of short briefings on that program for key CIA leaders in the EXCOM (a handful of Agency officials of the highest level, chaired by CIA’s Executive Director). The outcome of these briefings was many millions of dollars in D&E (Development and Engineering) funds, which would be used to build the systems needed to complete the technical penetration operation.
Pulling into the main gate of CIA Headquarters off Route 123, which I had first entered as an apprentice artist in 1965, I hoped that the notoriously irascible William Casey would find enough merit in our achievements and plans to continue funding the computer revolution under way in my Division.
“PLEASE SIT DOWN, Tony,” Bill Casey said. He spoke with dry precision and refrained from the incomprehensible mumbling that so often marked his congressional testimony.
Casey, a bald, shuffling bear of a man in an expensive pin-striped suit, motioned my two branch chiefs, “Daniel Morgan” and “Dennis Norman,” whom I’d invited to the meeting, to sit on a plaid sofa in the corner of the suite. When I turned to join them on the sofa, Casey gripped me by the elbow and eased me into the wing chair beside his desk. He moved forward in his swivel chair so that our knees almost touched.
“I’m here to listen,” he said, his intelligent, lively blue eyes probing me from behind wide designer glasses.
Although I’d faced more than my share of hostile surveillance, Casey’s benevolent scrutiny was surprisingly unnerving. My apprehension was no doubt due to his legendary reputation. As General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s closest OSS subordinate in Europe during World War II, Casey had wielded incredible power, mounting covert operations and dispatching Allied officers and recruited German agents to carry them out. In the four decades since, he had become a millionaire Wall Street lawyer, served as president of the Export-Import Bank, and kept his hand in espionage as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Carter and Ford administrations. After successfully running Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, Casey had been a natural choice for DCI.
What most impressed Agency officers early in Casey’s tenure at Langley was his virtually unlimited access to the president. In my two-week Senior Intelligence Service “executive charm school,” which I at tended after being promoted, I was told informally that Casey was “the best DCI since Allen Dulles. He’s elevated the position to cabinet rank.”
However, patience was not Bill Casey’s strong suit. He believed in results, and he believed in delivering success to his president.
But in the eleven years since the fall of Saigon, success had been conspicuously absent for the West in the Cold War struggle. Soviet surrogates had flourished in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and Portugal’s decayed African empire. At the time of my meeting with Casey, the Soviets had established a firm beachhead in Nicaragua, and the Marxist guerrilla army in El Salvador was resolved to overthrow the corrupt military-dominated government of the oligarchs, whom we had been forced to embrace as our allies.
Congress, through the Boland Amendment, had effectively prevented the CIA from directly arming and training the Contra peasant rebels in their battle against the Soviets’ Nicaraguan surrogates, the Sandinista government. But as the world would soon discover, Casey had bulled his way ahead, helping evolve the Iran-Contra arms supply scheme, one of the most convoluted, and ultimately wrong-headed, covert operations of the Cold War. In an elaborate deception operation, the CIA sold TOW antitank missiles and other munitions to Iran, embroiled in an endless war with Iraq, which then prevailed on its Shiite allies in Lebanon to free American hostages on a piecemeal basis. Casey’s National Security Council protégé, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, then used the proceeds from the missile sales to buy arms for the Contras.
Should the CIA have been involved in such a wild scheme without direct congressional approval and the formal authorization of a presidential “finding”? Of course not. Could anyone at Langley have stopped Bill Casey once he had made up his mind? I doubt it.
Now I had to convince this unpredictable genius to continue backing the efforts to modernize our clandestine graphics operations.
As succinctly as I could, I explained my “proactive” plan to prepare the Agency for the worldwide proliferation of computerized border controls and the threat of more sophisticated personal identity and travel documents, which were beginning to appear in both the East and the West.
“I think we can make inroads against these threats by helping to lead the industry in the right direction,” I said. “State and INS want to include us in open symposia. This research activity would be in the public domain. We have friends in academia who can help lead our efforts.”
Casey’s nimble mind immediately grasped the implication of my proposal. Once the United States helped lead the world’s experts on computerized security controls and high-tech documents, Soviet bloc spies and terrorists would find operating across borders more challenging. If the Agency acted swiftly, we wouldn’t be caught out in the cold when a new generation of technology quickly emerged, as it always did, and we wouldn’t have to reverse-engineer in order to catch up.
“What do you need from me?” Casey asked calmly, giving his implicit backing to the project.
I knew if I asked the DCI for ten million dollars, he’d probably offer fifteen. But I wasn’t greedy.
“Nothing for the moment, sir,” I said. Then I pointed to Dan Morgan, a bright photo scientist I had made Chief of Graphics Production, and Dennis Norman, who I had just named Chief of Operations for my Division. “But as soon as we have something concrete, we’d like to come back and see you.”
“Any time,” Casey answered.
But time was something Casey did not have. In two months, he was embroiled in the unraveling Iran-Contra scandal. Stricken with a brain tumor in January 1987, he died within weeks.
However, we eventually received adequate funding for our ambitious plans.
“WELCOME TO THE Magic Kingdom, Mr. Vice President.” “Roger,” the chief of our computerized graphics “crew,” wearing Mouseketeer ears, pinned a commemorative badge on Vice President George Bush when he entered the new Central Building operation in April 1987.
A former Director of the CIA, Bush was still fascinated with intelligence and was engrossed in our briefing on Graphics Modernization.
His eye was caught by a modem scanner imaging device that allowed us to inspect suspected terrorist passports remotely over telephone circuits from around the world. Cooperating security services could simply scan the passport at an airport station, and the image would be instantly received for analysis at the CIA’s new counterterrorism center at Langley. This new technology would be deployed at the forthcoming Olympic Games in Seoul.
“What are the other applications of this system?” Bush asked.
Roger explained that we were working on a secure digital imaging network of high-resolution images and exemplars of documents for our analysts at Headquarters and our case officers in the field. In the past, such materials would have been hand carried by courier.
Roger held up a “music” cassette, indistinguishable from millions of others found worldwide. But when he inserted it into a computerized playback deck of the type we had installed at several locations behind the Iron Curtain, images of foreign text scrolled across the monitor.
“We also send material on floppy disks and the hard drives of PCs,” Roger explained.
“The more personal computers proliferate in the world, sir,” I told Bush, “the more porous borders have become. Within a couple of years, my guys tell me, we’re going to have computers that fit on your lap but can hold the entire text of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
“Really?” Bush said politely, but he did not seem convinced.
Moscow, July 1988
• The predawn glow was faint through the soot-covered window of the apartment compound garret. I slipped out of bed and dressed quickly, finding my clothes in the gloom where I had put them the night before. Less than two minutes later, I was stealing down the three flights of stairs, avoiding the elevator, which would alert the KGB that someone might be about to leave the building.
To my amazement, there was no militia man in the guard shack at the archway entrance on this Sunday morning. Things had certainly changed in the twelve years since 1976.
I moved down the tree-lined sidewalk, turned onto Kalinina Prospekt, and across the Kalininsky Bridge. At this early hour, the streets were absolutely empty. Where’s surveillance? I wondered. I had chosen this time and route, a provocative variation from my usual morning jaunt, hoping to stimulate some KGB activity. But if anyone was following me on foot or vehicle, they truly had mastered the art of being in visible, as some officers in the Moscow station were beginning to believe.
On the other side of the bridge, I lengthened my stride, skirting the grotesque spires of the Ukrania Hotel and entering a side street that led toward the Kiev railway station and the Kievskaya Metro stop. If there was distant surveillance on me this morning, the team would not want me to enter the train station or Metro unaccompanied. Approaching a wider street, I descended the stairs to a pedestrian underpass. Now I was sure I had complete privacy because no one could see me for several minutes.
Off the sidewalk beyond the underpass, a gate opened to the right through an evergreen hedge. Passing by the night before, I confirmed that the hedge surrounded a small, secluded playground reserved for the children of the nomenklatura, living in the high-rise apartments that dominated this exclusive neighborhood near the embankment. This postage-stamp playground was not at all like the muddy, rubble-strewn lots near the Khruschoba prefab apartments, thrown together in the 1970s in the industrial districts of Moscow. Here, the grandchildren of the Party elite enjoyed brightly painted swings, slides, and a well-varnished teeter-totter.
I turned into the playground, closed the gate behind me, and waited. Standing close to the hedge, I could not be seen from any high-rise window with a view of the playground. I waited five minutes, but no one walked by the gate. Then I waited five minutes longer. Still, I had no company. I sat down on a cast-iron bench shielded by the hedge and reviewed the events of the past ten days in Moscow.
Jacques had requested I join him here, where he had been reassigned by the Deputy Director of Operations, Clair George, to see if he could restore CIA operations, which had been practically shut down after the Howard defection and the still puzzling 1985 mass roll-up of our agent network. The cause of the debacle still remained a controversial mystery, with some factions willing to assign blame to ill-defined “sloppy tradecraft” on the part of the Station or our agents-in-place.
Most of the people I worked with, however, understood that the failure of street operations in the Soviet Union could not have triggered all of the agent roll-ups of the mid-1980s. Several of our assets had not even been inside the Soviet bloc when they were compromised but rather had been operating at Soviet embassies in the West and had suddenly received orders to return to Moscow for “consultations.” Wisely, they had defected.
Nevertheless, the Agency wanted someone like Jacques to sift through the confusion, to find a new way of doing business, and to invent new Moscow rules. My involvement in developing the original Silver Bullet led Jacques to ask me to help his station invent another.
Over the past ten days, I had sat listening to each case officer relate how the KGB had counterattacked with a vengeance, exacting a heavy price for the damage we had inflicted on them during the eight years the Silver Bullet went unchallenged.
“They’re intent on closing down every damn one of our operations,” one officer complained. “But they also want to humiliate the CIA whenever they can.”
Many of the officers newly assigned to Moscow didn’t know whether such retaliation was simply meant to unnerve them. Others thought the KGB was luring us into complacency through phony breaks in surveillance, in which the Seventh Chief Directorate teams stayed back over the visual horizon for hours on end but could still converge the moment an officer decided he was clean and went operational.
“They’ve got some kind of new ‘ghost’ surveillance,” one officer whispered to me, even though we were in the secure confines of the Bubble. “They’re flaunting it too, Tony, which has everybody demoralized. They couldn’t keep shutting us down like this unless they had some kind of unseen advantage.”
I had never felt such an unsettling atmosphere in Moscow. It only got worse with the sudden redefection of KGB Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko in November 1985, when he had slipped away from his inexperienced CIA security guard at a Georgetown restaurant and walked up Wisconsin Avenue to the new Soviet embassy compound. Many in the Agency were convinced that Yurchenko had never been a true defector, but simply a brazen plant meant to dangle Howard’s name as a deceptive lure in order to mask the true source of the disastrous betrayals, maybe even to cover the tracks of a KGB mole operating at a much higher level in the CIA.
So I was back on Moscow’s streets as an operative trying to make sense of this new environment. But, even though I had only ten days to consider the problem, certain facts did not add up. If anything, the overall operational situation had actually loosened in Moscow. Glasnost was obviously real, not mere propaganda. I’d seen people sitting in Gorky Park reading the new independent investigative journals such as Argumenti i Facti, which were dedicated to exposing both official corruption and the Soviet Union’s dark past, ultra-taboo topics when I had last been in Moscow. A newly organized private organization, “Memorial,” documented the fates of millions of innocent Soviet citizens, who had been swallowed by the abyss of the Gulag. The Kremlin had even stopped jamming the Agency-funded Radio Liberty’s broadcasts.
Although perestroika had not brought the miraculous economic changes Gorbachev had hoped for, Moscow itself had lost much of its gray veneer and acquired a more prosperous appearance. I had seen a fair number of Volkswagens and even some Volvos on the streets. People were dressed in more vibrant colors, and they seemed hopeful. There were now privately owned restaurants where one didn’t have to have the blat of Party connections or hard currency to get a table.
After one Sunday afternoon promenade down the Arbat pedestrian mall, where I’d encountered thousands of Muscovites dressed as fashionably as their counterparts in Frankfurt or Stockholm moving among the vendors hawking jewelry, leather goods, and tourist kitsch, I had stood on the corner near the Foreign Ministry and counted cars with diplomatic or foreign commercial plates at five-minute intervals. It was impossible for the KGB’s mobile surveillance to cover all these vehicles as it had in the past. At the Intourist Hotel, I counted twenty-three Mercedes, Peugeots, and Opels with West European plates, proof that Westerners were taking motor vacations in the Soviet Union. The campgrounds dotting the wooded suburbs were full of German, Dutch, and Belgian vans.
Perestroika, and the desperate need for hard currency these tourists carried, had almost completely undercut the KGB’s ability to effectively seal off the streets of Soviet cities. But surveillance still existed. The day before, Jacques asked me to accompany a CIA communicator in his car and on foot during an extended shopping outing. It took us a couple of hours, but I finally identified a discreet mobile surveillance team of six or eight men and women in a variety of clothing styles who hung back while maintaining full coverage. Then, the night before, I stood across from the Lenin Library on the crowded sidewalk of Kalinina Prospekt and observed the intricate ballet of a crack surveillance team scrambling to catch up to a bolting rabbit, who had apparently disappeared down one of the numerous Metro escalators.
On my first trip to Moscow, I had wondered if the widespread resentment over the Soviet Union’s corrupt and stagnant economy would one day undermine the KGB’s greatest strength—a submissive, even fearful, population. Now I realized that glasnost and perestroika had eroded the resignation and apprehension of the Soviet people. They wanted a better life. They wanted honest leaders. They wanted the freedom and opportunities we had in the West.
Had I been a betting man, I would never have laid money on the KGB’s ability to keep holding down the lid on Soviet society, as it had for so many decades. Times had changed.
Where is their surveillance now? I wondered, glancing around the empty playground. Had my alias legend held up, despite the previous day’s outing with the CIA communicator? Could we still create elaborate deceptions based on an expanded “persons of little interest” group?
These were hotly debated issues within the Station. Some officers believed that even a very discreet stand-off surveillance was merely the Soviets’ “B Team,” while there was always an invisible “A Team” out there who would only appear at the most compromising moment for officer and agent. But was this physically possible?
Despite the spreading thaw in the Soviet bloc, that question remained vital to our future operations. The Cold War had taught us that détente could quickly give way to a deep freeze and military confrontation. I deeply wanted to believe that the end of the struggle was in sight, but I had to fulfill my professional responsibilities.
In my list of conclusions and recommendations for Jacques and his officers, I would describe my plan to create my own A Team in Washington, a spin-off of the OTS street-disguise training exercises. Using volunteers, I would test the most up-to-date varieties of our “portable” and adaptable disguise technology, which held the key to our future street operations. Once we were sure that we could operate against any type of ghost surveillance the KGB might have perfected, we could begin writing a new set of Moscow rules.
It was time to go. I decided to leave the playground through the only exit, the gate in the hedge. My operational senses, honed over twenty years in the field, told me that I had been alone on that silent bench. But if I had been watched, the KGB would have searched every inch of the playground for drops and staked it out for weeks or months to come.
Strolling back over the river on the Borodinsky Bridge, I thought about the challenges facing both intelligence services. As the Soviet bloc opened its doors to the West, the KGB would be stretched beyond its logistical and financial limits. But its grudging respect for the CIA would compel it to remain in no-quarter combat with us until the end of the struggle.
CIA Headquarters, October 1988
• Burton Gerber, Chief of the Soviet-East European Division, sat behind his desk in the corner suite on the fifth floor of the Original Headquarters Building, apparently listening impatiently. I was trying to make a coherent presentation of my conclusions and recommendations from my Moscow survey. I had already submitted my report by cable, but I was interested in both his insights and his attitude toward my approach. In my opinion, the problem was that Burton seemed too self-absorbed to acknowledge any operational approach other than his own. The man I remembered, preparing for a Moscow assignment several years before, had become a complete stranger now that he was back as Chief of the Division. Once very receptive to our suggestions and training, his senior assignment had transformed him.
“Things are changing in Moscow. Something new is definitely in the wind,” I told Burton. “Everything from the clothes people are wearing to the optimism you can actually see in their eyes. Moscow’s not the same city it was in 1976.”
“Ridiculous,” Burton said scornfully. “I was there this year myself and saw nothing of the sort.”
The tone of the entire meeting was unpleasant and contentious. Every argument I presented, Burton contradicted. I sensed that he and Gus Hathaway, Chief of Counterintelligence, were under tremendous strain following all the Soviet bloc betrayals. I also suspected that they were in general conflict with Jacques, since both Burton and Hathaway had recently been chiefs of station in Moscow and were probably second-guessing everything Jacques did.
One of the fundamental assessments emerging from Jacques’s Moscow station in 1988 resonated with my own evaluation: The drab predictability of post-Stalinist totalitarian existence was crumbling. Boys of eighteen from collective farms no longer marched proudly to the army recruiting stations, accompanied by their patriotic parents. Instead, draft evasion was widespread. Once in the army, young men did everything possible to avoid combat service in Afghanistan. The sons of the nomenklatura simply paid off doctors for medical exemptions.
This kind of strain was predictable enough as the Soviet empire rumbled toward an uncertain future. But glasnost was a wild card. A little freedom went a long way. State Television had recently unveiled Vzglyad (Glance), a 60 Minutes-type news magazine that seemed hell-bent on exposing every scandal hidden behind the Kremlin walls.
Burton, however, was not impressed with these developments. I let my mind wander as he held forth about Moscow in direct contradiction to my views. I felt a sudden chill listening to Burton’s rambling. It seemed to me that he had lost the most important attributes of an operational intelligence officer: practical flexibility and a neutral perspective. To succeed, we had to accept the world as it was, not as it had been or the way we wished it to be, even if an upheaval of enormous proportions had occurred, as seemed to be the case in the Soviet Union.
Yet Burton could not accept this strange reality. In my opinion, he was a man in denial.
The White House, Spring 1989
• Jonna Goeser, who had recently moved up from Deputy to Chief of Disguise, had been one of my strongest collaborators in developing the OTS Special Surveillance Team’s variant of the KGB’s “ghost” surveillance in Moscow. But we had gone one step further, incorporating into these procedures a variety of extremely refined DAGGER disguise techniques, which remain classified.
As one of our best officers, it was only fitting that she be given the honor of unveiling this disguise technique to President George Bush. The Oval Office in the White House, of course, was not a place that many Agency officers visited, aside from the DCI and very senior executives. I knew of only three OTS officers who had been there: myself after the Tehran operation in 1980; Dr. Crown, Chief of the Questioned Documents Laboratory, who briefed President Carter on Soviet disinformation; and Jonna, who accompanied our new DCI, William Webster.
Earlier that morning, Jonna had driven to Judge Webster’s suburban home to prepare for the innocent deception operation they planned to unleash in the Oval Office. On entering Webster’s front hall, she was practically attacked by a snarling little terrier. But when Jonna emerged from the ground-floor powder room in her disguise, the very latest improvement on the earlier DAGGER, the little dog wagged its tail and sat up sweetly to be petted.
When she and Webster arrived at the Oval Office anteroom, several senior National Security aides, including Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates, were waiting. The wait stretched to almost forty-five minutes, with no one guessing what was about to occur. All they saw was Judge Webster standing beside an attractive, young, and animated aide whom they did not recognize.
Once the group was seated before President Bush’s desk, Webster introduced Jonna with a pseudonym, describing her as an “Agency specialist” who had very urgent information for them.
Jonna rose and opened her briefing book. “Mr. President…” she began.
George Bush seemed intrigued, then disconcerted, as Jonna reached up to her face and pulled away something…Suddenly, the diminutive young brunette seemed to slip away. The Secret Service guard at the entrance door moved forward, but Judge Webster raised his palm to stop him.
Jonna had metamorphosed into a classy lady of forty, with untainted makeup and tasteful jewelry. As she laid down her briefing book and tossed the paper-thin disguise into the air, it hung suspended in the sunlight for a moment before she caught it.
The leaders in the room were speechless.
New Headquarters Building, Langley, Summer 1989
• “The Estonians are planning to print their own currency,” a well-placed corporate source called to tell me. The news was stunning, especially as “Steve,” my immediate OTS supervisor, soon personally verified its reliability.
Our operation had moved into the New Headquarters Building at Langley, and the explosive intelligence revelations thundering out of the Soviet bloc reached us much more quickly than when we were based in Foggy Bottom.
One of my first acts after hanging up the telephone was to visit the young officer I planned to send into Estonia on a clandestine probe operation. The Baltic republics were tinder dry, ready to flare into open defiance of Moscow as had Soviet Georgia earlier that spring, only to suffer a sickening massacre of unarmed civilian demonstrators in the capital, Tbilisi. So I had to caution this young officer.
But when I offered my information about the Estonian intentions to the Soviet-East European Division, I found that they had gone from denial to disbelief.
“The KGB will never let them dump the ruble,” the Chief of SE/Internal Operations told me. “We have no contingency plans on how to handle this kind of situation.”
Events in the Soviet bloc were moving too fast for many in the Agency to exploit. But I realized that conditions in the Baltic states represented a unique opportunity for us to lay down a network of exfiltration routes. That summer, we dispatched two bright young members of our Special Surveillance Team to do a recon.
Reporting back in September, they described three virtually independent little nations that had turned their backs on Moscow. The medieval Baltic capitals, ringed by shoddy ranks of Khruschoba prefab apartments, had become virtual enclaves of the West.
“They’ll never go back to the old system,” the young officer told me.
“No way,” her partner echoed. “The genie’s out of the bottle, big time.”
It might not have been the type of field assessment the old-school analysts in the DI liked to hear, but, despite the youthful exuberance of the two officers, their message rang true.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, November 9, 1989
• The television in my outer office was tuned to CNN’s live coverage of the incredible events in Berlin. As the camera zoomed in for a closeup, a husky young man in a rock band T-shirt swung his sledgehammer with one final blow, and a wide, graffiti-plastered section of the Wall toppled in a cloud of concrete dust.
The joyful crowd of thousands surged through the gap to meet their countrymen in East Berlin, which had been sealed off since 1961. Flares and bottle rockets exploded with a candy-pink glare. Young people sprayed the crowd with champagne. The once feared border guards of the Communist DDR stood back, bewildered at the spectacle. They had no orders to intervene, and without orders, they were immobilized, unable to act.
The scene jumped to Checkpoint Charlie, once the espionage fault line between the Soviet bloc and the West. A cavalcade of smoke-belching Trabant minicars trundled cautiously forward from East Berlin, their occupants staring with wonder at the television lights.
I was viewing the spectacle with amazement when a secretary discreetly entered my outer office and whispered, “You’re wanted over in SE Division.”
When I punched myself through the Division suite’s keypad, I found a handful of officers passing stashed bottles of bourbon and scotch around for a modest toast to this long-hoped-for, but largely unanticipated triumph. One by one, people converged from the CIA’s two massive Headquarters buildings. Someone cracked open a box of contraband Cuban cigars, and pungent smoke filled the air, in spite of the newly imposed federal ban on smoking in government offices. This afternoon, after all, was a time when exceptions could be made.
As the scene in Berlin became even more frenzied, almost two hundred guests crowded the office suite, men and women who had served on the Agency’s front lines. We represented only a tiny portion of the CIA and intelligence community who had helped fight, and win, the Cold War. But among our exclusived up were many who had served with brave, unsung agents like TRINITY who had not survived.
Opinions on the roots of our victory flowed freely. “We knew they were out of fuel for their tanks,” a case officer specializing in balance of forces stated confidently. “They just ran out of money.”
The political action and propaganda experts had another opinion. “Once we understood how to export the truth about the West directly to the people, the old system couldn’t be maintained.”
One of my Magic Kingdom wizards spoke up. “The proliferation of information technology made the Iron Curtain obsolete.”
“Nah,” a strategic conspiracy buff offered. “It was SDI that broke their back. Star Wars was the greatest damn deception in history. We suckered them into spending billions on missile defense when we knew it would never work. Reagan was a helluva poker player.”
I moved around the rooms, greeting old friends I hadn’t seen for years. Slowly, the realization that the longest, most dangerous espionage confrontation in history was coming to an end dawned on all of us.
But not everyone was convinced, including an indignant counterintelligence officer. “I don’t trust the bastards. They’ve still got twenty thousand nukes and their finger on the button. And the KGB still outnumbers us four to one.”
He had a point. No matter what the future of the Soviet Union, the KGB’s vast bureaucracy had produced an elite cadre of clandestine operators who might one day sell their services to the highest bidder. His lament, however, was the exception that afternoon. We had won the Cold War, of that I was certain.
But where did this victory take us? With the crumbling of the Soviet bloc, we had lost an evil foe which we had considered impregnable. This unexpected seismic disruption would leave the world unstable and vulnerable to dangerous aftershocks. The ability of the CIA to assess and quickly adapt to this new environment would be critical. There was no time now for a ticker-tape parade, and as the party finally broke up, we had to face the reality of returning to work the next morning and continuing to do honor to our profession—the collection of intelligence in the service of democracy.
CIA Headquarters, November 30,1990
• I pushed the dolly stacked with boxes of my personal effects across the wet leaves of the parking lot. My retirement ceremony had been brief but pleasant, and I was now ready to face the future, knowing that my twenty-five-year CIA career had coincided with the Agency’s greatest triumphs.
I deeply regretted that Karen, who had borne so much of the burden of those early years, was not here. But I was happy and confident that Jonna and I, now having decided to share our lives, faced a world much less threatening than the one gripped by the Cold War, which had cast a shadow over the previous five decades.
Another officer surprised me by pushing his own dolly toward his car. The man was an old Soviet-East European Division warhorse who had survived multiple assignments behind the Iron Curtain. He, too, had retired that day.
“What are your plans?” I asked.
“Marge and I have tickets on the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Vladivostok,” he said happily. “We’re going as tourists.”
I waited politely for the punch line. There was none. The man was serious. He and his wife would travel through the vast heart of Russia, so long hidden to Western eyes.
For some reason, I was unexpectedly moved.