July 1988
Tony
The early evening view from the balcony of the safe house was like a picture postcard. Rising high on the horizon to the north was the great Ferris wheel of the Prater amusement park, an icon of Vienna if ever there was one, known for its cameo role in the movie The Third Man. Nearby, to the south, rose the spires of the Stephensdom, the cathedral of Vienna and the heart of the city with its brightly tiled roofs and gothic intensity.
I walked back into the apartment, wondering about the American woman who had rented this place, then allowed the CIA to use it by appointment for meetings too sensitive to take place anywhere else. I had been told that she was a professional astrologer. She obviously had money—the apartment was furnished lavishly in the baroque style of old world Vienna. The crystal chandelier alone would have consumed half of my annual salary. The apartment exuded an air of comfort, charm, and privacy.
I had taken my time on the surveillance detection run this afternoon, spending several hours moving across the city to this very sensitive piece of real estate that we wished to protect from inquiring eyes. Starting out beyond the Opera Ring, part of the road system that girdled the inner city, I had proceeded down the Kaerntnerstrasse, one of the main shopping streets. I made a point not to go into the area of the U.S. Embassy for fear I might run into another American who would recognize me. Having made this trip often, I knew it was best to keep a distance.
In a foreign country, usually the only member of our embassy who knew our true affiliation was the ambassador. But other embassy employees—who often took delight in trying to “spot the spook”—had the potential, through casual recognition and inquisitiveness, of endangering an operation.
Following Jonna’s suggestion, I had strolled down Mariahilferstrasse and then over to Demel’s, a well-known café, to grab a light lunch. The café had been dazzling—a fantasy of butterscotch walls and mirrored rooms filled with cases of pastries and chocolates. Lunch had not been light, but it had been wonderful. From her travels, Jonna obviously knew the city well.
As I stood at the open balcony doors of the borrowed apartment, Gerald Swazie appeared with a scotch for each of us. We moved inside to a sitting area on the other side of the room. Settling into the tapestry-covered sofa, we were silent for a moment, each of us composing our thoughts and our priorities.
Swazie looked up suddenly, startling me with his blue eyes, pale and penetrating, set deep under a prominent brow. Of Scandinavian descent, he had light skin and close-cropped hair that were unblemished and intact, and his tall, wiry frame looked as fit as ever. I knew his physical mannerisms and profile like I would those of a close friend or family member. I had spent hours with him in 1978 examining his traits from every angle and coaching him in altering them in subtle ways. Swazie had been the first officer to deploy the highly secret disguise technique I had created after Mary Peters had been ambushed in Moscow. We had named that technique DAGGER. I had watched Swazie become a highly successful ZEPHYR after I had spent many months prepping him for his Moscow assignment.
Back then, ten years ago, three of us had worked closely on perfecting the DAGGER technique: Jacques Dumas, then head of SE Moscow operations, Swazie, and me. As part of my final demonstration of the technique to them, I had transformed myself from a businessman into a Russian babushka, complete with shawl and shopping cart. They had been amazed, and had quickly adopted the technique as a proprietary tool, issued to Moscow-bound case officers only. Even before then, Dumas had been a true believer in the power of disguise, especially when it went hand in hand with deception and illusion.
During our long, shared experience in Moscow operations, Swazie, Dumas, and I became friends. Although it had been years since Swazie and I had crossed paths, it felt as comfortable as ever; we spoke the same language. Swazie had risen to become the chief of Vienna, and I was here because Dumas, chief of Moscow, needed help. It was like a reunion of the Three Musketeers.
Swazie, always one to get to the point, asked how he could assist me.
I told him I was here to see him on a courtesy call, since I was using his good offices to help “cleanse” myself en route to Moscow and back. Vienna was a perfect town for a spy to get lost in, without bothersome surveillance. Despite the fact that it had been a center of intrigue from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, neutral Austria was not considered a hostile arena in which to work. I planned to switch identities while here and become Robert J. Violante, an old identity I had used in previous travels. On my return, I would park Violante in Vienna, and pick up my true-name documents to travel back to Washington.
I explained that Dumas had asked for my assistance in Moscow again. “He took the Moscow job at the personal request of the DCI,” I said, “following all the disasters caused by the Edward Lee Howard defection.”
“Jacques has his hands full,” Swazie acknowledged.
“Sure does,” I said. “I just did a quick trip with him to the West Coast, like I did for you before you went to Moscow.”
“We visited your Hollywood consultant—the master of makeup and disguise. What’s his name?” Swazie asked.
“Jerome Calloway.”
“Right. Great guy, and what fun going around to those studio lots and meeting the stars of Mission: Impossible.” With a grin in place, Swazie hummed part of the popular theme tune.
I chuckled. “Art imitating life, huh?” If only the TV writers and producers knew how close they sometimes came with their disguises to what we really did.
I told Swazie I’d done the same drill with Jacques so he could see the latest stuff coming out of Calloway’s Academy Award–winning special effects laboratory. “You’d be amazed with what’s been developed in the past ten years. Too bad you don’t need any of the sexy stuff here in Vienna.”
I grinned at Swazie, knowing that he would be itching to play with some of our new techniques if only he knew what they were.
I assured him that Dumas was still the same crisp, no-nonsense professional with the intensity and bearing of a former Marine officer and the mind of a Harvard graduate. A talented officer, Dumas had highly refined language capabilities in both Russian and Chinese and had already served in both countries. Besides that he was always an introspective, thinking-feeling sort of person, quite unlike the stereotypical case officer profile of the highly extrovert man’s man.
“During our flight to L.A., Jacques reflected on the fact that we’d been knocking the socks off the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate and Seventh Directorate for about seven years until Howard went over. Those Moscow rules of engagement we created back in the seventies held up well.”
I related how for weeks before our trip Dumas had been quietly seething. That day on the transcontinental flight, he contemplated the turn of events once more over Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, then declared suddenly, “I’m going to issue every officer in Moscow a Browning nine millimeter, and whoever sees Howard first will take him out!”
Swazie laughed heartily. “I can just hear him saying that.”
Although the KGB would never hesitate to execute a traitor, we both knew that Dumas had only been speaking from frustration. But we understood his sentiment. The turn of affairs in Moscow, thanks to Howard, was that devastating.
While assassination was never part of our CIA bailiwick, there had been a couple of botched attempts in the early part of the Cold War because of pressure from the White House. Since then, President Gerald Ford had signed an executive order that explicitly prohibited us from planning assassinations of heads of states, and we were now subject to intense scrutiny from four oversight committees of Congress. Nobody at the helm these days would seriously suggest assassination as an operational tool, but we knew this could change if the U.S. found itself fighting a global war and it became politically palatable.*
Swazie and I agreed that the box score for the intelligence wars between the KGB and the CIA had been changing in favor of the Soviets. The year that Howard defected to the Soviets, 1985—dubbed by Time magazine as “The Year of the Spy”—had been, for both sides, a year unlike any other in the intelligence game.
“Many of those cases that year had a Vienna connection,” Swazie pointed out. “The Soviets staged meetings here so often with their western agents that the FBI called the routine the ‘Vienna Procedure.’ It was in Vienna that Howard walked in to volunteer to the Soviets, and he came back here at least once for meetings.”
Swazie went on to enumerate the events of 1985 in his soft clipped way of speaking, pointing up the Vienna connections to many of those unprecedented counterintelligence episodes.
First, in May, the FBI had arrested John Walker, who had had at least six meetings with his KGB handlers here. After his capture, Walker described to the FBI the “Vienna procedure” he had gone through. He was told by his KGB handler to rent a specific vehicle from a certain car rental agency and, after driving around town for hours, to park in a designated spot. Then he was to walk a corkscrew route that spiraled him through at least twenty double turns. He had to time his route so he arrived at the “brush pass” site at the right moment to meet his contact. They brushed by each other and exchanged camera cases. Walker’s surreptitiously contained the Navy’s latest code machine settings.
Next, in August, KGB Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko, head of its foreign counterintelligence, defected to the CIA in Rome. One of my alias documentation specialists from OTS had helped him leave Italy and accompanied him back to Washington. SE Division had assigned CIA officer Aldrich Ames to debrief Yurchenko, who told us about two spies in our midst. Ironically, as we discovered years later, Ames began selling secrets to the Soviets that very same year. The fact that a disillusioned Yurchenko re-defected the following year did not diminish the value of much of his information.
According to Yurchenko, one spy, Ron Pelton, had worked for fourteen years for NSA. Three years after retiring in 1979 from the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Pelton had had two meetings with the enemy in Vienna and came back for a third, but when he walked around his meeting site, the gardens of the Schonbrunn Palace, he was not contacted.
Another spy, whom the KGB code-named “Robert,” was identified by Yurchenko as “a former CIA officer trained to serve in Moscow but who was fired before he departed for the field.” We now knew “Robert” to be Edward Lee Howard.
In an almost inexplicable set of circumstances, in June of 1985 there had been another KGB coup. One of the CIA’s most valuable assets in the Soviet Union, Adolf Tolkachev, code-named GTSPHERE, who had provided some of the most detailed information on Soviet aerospace and weapons, was arrested by the KGB. He had first volunteered to work for U.S. intelligence in the late 1970s by passing a note to an American diplomat in Moscow. As an engineer, he had access to some of the Soviet Union’s most important technical secrets. Over approximately eight years, he had provided some of the most important intelligence on Soviet aerospace and tactical radar. He was usually met by a CIA handler using the silver-bullet disguise technique GAMBIT to elude KGB surveillance. GTSPHERE would typically hand over many rolls of exposed film. Just one of the scores of meetings with Tolkachev was later judged to be worth $4 billion in savings to the U.S. taxpayer in defense research and development. It was believed Howard had identified him at an early meeting with the KGB here in Vienna. Before his firing from the CIA, Howard had been trained to take over as GTSPHERE’s handler in Moscow. Following a yearlong interrogation by the KGB at Lefortovo Prison, Tolkachev was executed.
In July and August, the balance shifted slightly as western intelligence scored two successes of its own. Our British counterparts successfully exfiltrated their agent Oleg Gordievsky from Moscow. Gordievsky had been the KGB rezident in London and had been called back to Moscow under suspicious circumstances. It was believed that Howard had not been privy to the Gordievsky operation, but he may have been digging around in the SE files before he was fired. Then came the arrest of a longtime CIA officer, Larry Wu-tai Chin, who had been spying for Communist China for years.
“The Year of the Spy” concluded with the insult of the Sharon Scrange affair, in which a young CIA secretary had been caught providing intelligence information to her Ghanaian boyfriend. Scrange, a young, lonely black American, found herself a long way from home in Ghana, an isolated outpost under the best of circumstances. A handsome and charming Ghanaian intelligence officer was targeted against her, and she fell for it. After some sort of seduction scenario, she began providing him with the secrets of our local operations. This was a classic setup, and the CIA makes a point of cautioning its women who are going abroad to be on the lookout for this type of approach. Sexual entrapment, of course, worked in both directions.
Swazie rose and went to the lavishly stocked bar on a Biedermeier chest at the side of the room. “Something more than mere coincidence is going on here, Tony.”
The clink of the glasses and ice had a comfortable, familiar sound to it. He handed me my refilled glass and made a slight adjustment to the radio. Oesterreich Drei, the Austrian national radio station, was playing the soft waltzes and polkas of the Strauss family, beloved by all Viennese. The radio was on to mask our conversation, of course, but the music was quite soothing.
The long-standing Cold War espionage battles between the CIA and the KGB had definitely heated up. In 1986, only a few months after Dumas had been put in charge of Moscow operations, a Soviet scientist, Gennady Zakharov, who did not have diplomatic immunity, although he was working for the United Nations in New York, was arrested after being drawn into an FBI sting.
In retaliation, the KGB arrested a nonaccredited American newsman in Moscow, Nicholas Daniloff, who had been unwittingly implicated in a local spy case. Although Daniloff was not a spy, the Soviets had a case against him.
Later that year, Zakharov, who was a spy, and Daniloff were swapped; each released to their respective ambassadors on the same day.
“That poor bastard, Daniloff,” Swazie said.
“He was just caught in the crossfire.”
After the exchange of volleys from U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Reagan and Gorbachev took turns firing broadsides. Reagan soon ordered, by name, twenty-five KGB officers from the Soviet Mission at the United Nations in New York to leave the country.
The Soviet response was to declare five Americans from our Moscow embassy persona non grata. The initial U.S. reaction was to expel first five, then fifty, Soviets from theirs. The U.S.S.R. followed by expelling five more Americans, and then pulling out the hundreds of Soviets supporting the U.S. Embassy staff.
“It was a pretty robust tit for tat, wasn’t it?” Swazie smiled wanly.
In December 1986, as Dumas was still catching his breath in his new assignment in Moscow, Corporal Clayton J. Lonetree, one of the previous U.S. Marine Corps guards at the U.S. Embassy there, who was by then serving in Vienna, confessed to having been entrapped by a KGB “swallow”—a female KGB officer who used sex as a tool. He had been turning over classified information to his KGB handlers for more than a year, and there was some question about whether he and other Marines caught in the honey trap had allowed KGB teams into the embassy’s secure areas, including the communications rooms.
And now, I pointed out, Dumas found himself saddled with a constant flow of counterintelligence technical teams from Washington hoping to sort out these problems.
“Enough!” Swazie protested. “I know Jacques has had a hell of a ride in Moscow so far, but this place has been no picnic either, let me tell you.”
Swazie was finishing his second scotch as we completed our review, and I was keeping up with him. We had both loosened our ties and rolled up our sleeves. The light outside was fading on the winding narrow street below us. The sunset was glancing off the tiled roof of the cathedral in an exquisite series of reflections and shadows and dancing into this secret space, gilding the room in a warm, golden glow. I wondered if the astrologer had realized there was this wonderful bonus when she rented the place. I wished we could go out and enjoy one of the sumptuous restaurants the city was known for, but my alternate-identity status and need to drop out of circulation complicated social engagements with my colleagues for the time being.
“I’ve been up to my eyebrows in the Felix Bloch case since I arrived here,” said Swazie through tight lips. “For several years he has been the number two State Department guy here in the U.S. Embassy and is briefed on everything we have going on. The ambassador is a political appointee and doesn’t want to dirty his hands. We are sure Bloch has been reporting to the KGB, but he appears to have been warned off. We have had hordes of FBI and CIA surveillance on him but to no avail. It is getting so blatant that the press has taken to following us following him.”
It would be seventeen years before we discovered that it had been Robert Hanssen, the FBI mole, who compromised the investigation by warning the KGB, which subsequently passed word to Bloch, who, without being charged with any crimes, was allowed to retire with a minimal pension.
I smiled a pained acknowledgment of Swazie’s difficulties.
“In a way, I wish I were going with you,” he admitted.
“Back to the belly of the beast in Moscow?”
“It’d be like the old days.”
I understood his feelings. Moscow was where the action was; the center of the universe for Cold War field operations in the arena of intelligence work.
Swazie’s comment was a perfect opening for me to bring up the most important reason I came to see him. “Remember that survey of yours in the Moscow netherworld?”
“How can I forget? Nasty job that turned out pretty well, thanks to your help.”
“I need to talk to you about that, Gerry—in detail. I could use some diagrams, too, of what to expect down there.”
Before leaving Washington, I had debriefed an OTS technical officer I had sent to Moscow for a week. I had some inkling as to what requirements awaited me at my destination, and knew that Swazie was the perfect guy to pump for information.
Swazie sat forward in his chair. He knew better than to ask what I was planning. “Let’s refill these empty glasses and get to work.”
Moscow
Two days later
Jacques Dumas was already seated in the Bubble when I arrived. I could see him through the Plexiglas walls as I entered the airlock and climbed up the three steps to the elevated room within a room.
I noticed that his closely cropped hair had gotten grayer since I had seen him in the summer, but the sparkle in his eye had not diminished, and his boyish grin was firmly in place.
It was cold in the room, and I felt a sudden shiver.
With Dumas were his wife, Suzette, a pretty, petite brunette who worked for the U.S. Mission as a personnel officer while handling occasional assignments for the CIA, and two others. The large, fair Slavic type I recognized as his deputy, Mikhail Skalov, a cherubic man of about thirty-five. The darker, more compact fellow was Luke Swisher, an OTS engineer with infectious energy and enthusiasm. He had been assigned here at Dumas’s request as a “new concepts” guy. The four all sat quietly at a large table and looked rather serious.
Once I secured the thick transparent door with the two latches and turned toward them, they immediately stood to greet me warmly with smiles and handshakes.
Suzette and I gave each other a hug and a peck on the cheek. She and Jacques were the same attractive athletic couple I remembered. Her dark hair and shy smile complemented his quietly forceful and penetrating demeanor. It had been twelve years since we had first met here in Moscow, and we had seen and experienced a lot in our respective careers and travels since then.
I vividly remembered one night in August 1976 when he had gone out to meet the CIA Soviet agent TRINITY. Suzette and I were part of a small team that nervously remained behind at a safe site after playing certain supporting roles in the landmark CLOAK deception that allowed Jacques to elude his KGB surveillance. Since her husband would be “in the black”—free of surveillance—for several hours before he returned safely, it was tough for Suzette to wait quietly, not knowing whether he was safe. It would have been foolish not to acknowledge the danger of these operations.
I had filled some of those anxious moments by chatting with her, learning a lot more about Dumas and his highly disciplined approach to his craft. I had witnessed his many hours of preparation getting ready for the meeting with TRINITY, so I knew how precise he was. Suzette told me that, when studying Russian for the assignment to Moscow, Jacques took no time off—even for holidays. Even now, if he couldn’t find someone to speak Russian with during the day here in Moscow, he would call a wrong number on the telephone just so he could speak Russian for a few minutes.
When he returned to Washington after a two-year tour in Moscow, he was tested by the CIA’s language school and scored a “five,” which was native proficiency. There were very few foreigners who qualified as a native speaker in the Agency’s very tough language program. It was like being awarded a medal.
“I’m only here briefly to welcome you once again to Moscow,” said Suzette. “This is the only time I can act like I know you, even though you’re going to be around the American community for a couple of weeks.”
Suzette was gently reminding me of the rules of engagement here, where members of the CIA contingent weren’t able to acknowledge one another outside a secure facility like the Bubble. Since they all had different overt affiliations in order to keep the enemy guessing as to who the real intelligence officers were, they had to play the cover game even inside their offices and residences. Virtually every location was considered to be bugged with audio and sometimes visual surveillance devices. Suzette excused herself, and then went out through the door and through the airlock.
Dumas answered my question before I asked it.
“Since you’ll be here for the Fourth of July, as an American you are invited to the celebration at the U.S. Embassy dacha. We can speak to one another casually there as we move outside about the grounds,” he explained. “Otherwise, conversations with any officers or their spouses, or Suzette and myself, will take place here in the Bubble. Luke will be the exception. Since he is single and has a different set of cover and operational duties, and you’re here conducting your ostensible admin review of the facilities, you and he can meet and move about as if you have some common interests. You should use that time sparingly, though. You’ll want to reacquaint yourself with the populace and the environment, as well as hear our stories. I’m sure, as in the past, you’ll spend much of your time on the streets and you’ll visit the various attractions. Best you do that on your own, Tony. However, I do want you to go out with Luke so you can see how the KGB is treating him. He has established a rather quirky pattern and profile.”
I was exchanging looks with Swisher and Skalov as Dumas spoke. As with every ZEPHYR, I had spent considerable time working together with the two of them in the final days before they had launched on their assignments here. I could sense we were all anxious to catch up on experiences and compare notes on how the reality of their operational life here matched the postgraduate simulations we had done in Washington against the SST.
I could also tell that Dumas had some other matters to discuss with me. He looked as if he was about to open the red-striped file on the table in front of him. He fixed the other men with his no-nonsense gaze, and they both stood to leave.
There were handshakes again with the two; we made arrangements for our next meetings, and they excused themselves.
All field officers typically held down two jobs wherever they served. Their cover job had to be a real job with real hours, or the local counterintelligence service would see right through it. Their operational job had to be worked into an already full office and social schedule, so they more than earned their government pay.
After the two had cleared the airlock, Dumas opened the folder and took out a manila envelope marked “Top Secret/Special Compartmented Information.” He laid this to one side and proceeded to remove another sheaf of forms from the folder. Each had an ID-sized, black-and-white photograph attached to it on the upper right-hand corner.
Dumas rested his hand on this stack of papers. “Each of these represents the bio data sheet out of an agent 201 file,” he said gravely. “There are ten agents here who have gone missing sometime in the last three years. The fate of some of them we now know because the KGB has seen fit to announce their executions publicly. For the others, we fear the worst. You have to know that some of those we have lost, like GTSPHERE, are among the best we’ve ever had—as good as TRINITY, or even Penkovsky.”
Oleg Penkovsky, known as “The Spy Who Saved the World” during the Cold War, was a legend in western intelligence circles. A GRU colonel, he had high-level access to Soviet strategic intentions as well as weapons capabilities. He first volunteered to work with British and U.S. intelligence in April 1961 in Moscow, through a British businessman. He provided MI6 and the CIA with more than four thousand pages of secret documents over the next eighteen months. When the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted in October 1962, the U.S. was able to recognize the SS-4 missiles being installed in Cuba because of information provided by Penkovsky. More important, President Kennedy knew, thanks to Penkovsky, that the Soviets had no capability to stage an all-out nuclear war owing to the fact that the U.S. missiles far outnumbered the Soviet ones. On November 2, 1962, a CIA case officer in Moscow was ambushed unloading a dead drop from Penkovksy, and Penkovsky was arrested that same day. The CIA officer was expelled from the country. Penkovksy’s execution was announced on May 17, 1963.
“Howard could have burned one or two of them, particularly Tolkachev, but not all ten,” Dumas said. “We are under siege by the KGB. We don’t know what they are doing to us or how exactly they are going about it.”
Dumas went on to explain the countermeasures they were taking. “We’re going to extraordinary lengths with our communications and are altering our M.O. every time we suspect a new potential threat. This Soviet program, METKA, has everyone acting more paranoid than ever. We’re trying to understand how their surveillance is operating, and we need your help.”
Dumas had always been one to get to the point; identify a problem and move to a solution. He was a good choice to run our operations in this time and place.
“We need to invent some new illusionary disguise techniques so we can operate effectively—new silver bullets for use only in Moscow. We need some of your best and brightest ideas. There may even be a traitor at headquarters, but there’s nothing I can do about that out here. All I can deal with is the here and now. We have to continue operations, and we have to protect our agents. These bastards are not ten feet tall, and you and I know it!”
He reached for the manila envelope and slid it over in front of him.
“I want you to know we are by no means out of business. We’re experiencing a flood of new volunteers, and some of them might be dangles, but others are clearly not. We are taking all precautions. However, there is one agent above all others who must not be caught before we can get him out. And before we can do that, we have a final piece of important work to accomplish with him.”
Dumas reached into the manila envelope and exposed another file of papers. As he slid it around in front of me, I caught sight of the ID photograph attached to the top sheet of the thick 201 personnel file.
I caught my breath.
I knew him! I had disguised that face in Indochina in 1973 when his code name was SAPPHIRE. I remembered he had been a KGB specialist in the local Soviet Mission, and I had provided him with a disguise that he could put on for nighttime meetings with his CIA handler. I had also begun planning for his and his wife’s exfiltration from the host country, should that have become necessary. When I transferred back to headquarters in 1974, I lost contact with the case, and never knew what became of him.
I explained to Dumas my history with SAPPHIRE.
“He’s still working for us,” Dumas said. “He’s now a major in the KGB’s KAPELLE program and has worldwide cognizance of their collection and security practices. Once he resurfaced here in Moscow, his cryptonym was changed to ORB for security purposes. He took a long time to recontact us, and then he demanded that nothing about his case be put into staff communications channels. Since his expertise is in technical security, we decided to listen. This guy can get us the crown jewels if we can keep him alive and in place, especially given the events of late.”
Dumas admitted ORB was still alive probably only because he took charge of his own case and laid down the security plan. “He initiates his own meetings. We have no control of his commo plan, and he will accept no spooky spy gear or any other potentially compromising materials. His instinct for clandestine tradecraft is uncanny, and his product is fantastic, as you might imagine given his access. The bad news is we could still screw up and lead the KGB to him. Headquarters almost let the cat out of the bag last year by sharing his information too widely in the intel community.”
I asked what kind of operational plan was needed for ORB.
“To keep him safe a while longer,” Dumas said. “His time has about run out, and we need a current exfiltration plan. But before he leaves our good services, he’s willing to do one more chore for us. Believe me when I say it’s worth the effort. Well worth it. We have to find a way to meet with him safely and put together what we need to carry off this last operation—then, get him, his wife, and their boy the hell out.”
As I heard more details about ORB’s idea for his last operation, my pulse quickened. It was daring, and it had the potential to be a masterpiece of spy work that would make up for a lot of our recent failings in Moscow.
But was it possible to do something so complex and dangerous in the current environment here, where the KGB seemed to know our every move in advance? If we couldn’t shake them through skill, cunning, and misdirection, it would end disastrously, not only for ORB and his wife and son, but for the rest of the ops team as well.
I was standing at the corner of Kalinin Prospekt and Prospekt Marksa, just one block from the Alexander Gardens and the Kremlin, looking across the eight lanes of traffic on Kalinin toward the Lenin Library. It was seven o’clock and the evening summer sunlight, always more intense this close to the Arctic Circle, was glancing off the three-story-high, blazing red banner with a stark black-and-white portrait of Lenin in its center, hanging above the entrance to the library.
On two sides of the library there were four Metro entrances at street level and two lines and four platforms directly below. Also, I knew of four underground intersecting pedestrian transfer tunnels leading from the two lines to two more lines, and four more platforms from which there were eight ways back to the street. This entire underground warren was stacked four stories deep below the street and the library.
At this hour the foot traffic of Muscovites and foreigners on the street and in the Metro was turbocharged by the world’s longest escalators leading up from and down into the Metro. Below all this snarled anthill of rush-hour humanity, we in the CIA believed, the Soviets had for many years been burrowing even deeper, bolstering and expanding the underground bunkers that had been dug during Stalin’s times. They had plans for survival if the Cold War suddenly became hot.
Including the ancient sewers, some of which dated back to medieval times, there were probably as many as fifteen stories of tunnels radiating out from the Kremlin. Some of these tunnels extended as far as Ring Road, several miles away, on the outskirts of Moscow and beyond, probably all the way to the dachas of the leaders of the Supreme Soviet. The city aboveground was larger than New York and had a population of twelve million. Underground there was no telling how large it was.
I was on my way to an off-season performance of Giselle by the Kirov Ballet Company at the Palace of Congresses, located inside the walls of the Kremlin. But for the moment, I stood watching the intense foot and vehicular traffic on this “million-dollar mile” of Kalinin Prospekt, the so-called economic showcase section of the city.
A light gray Russian-made Zhiguli Lada, the Soviet version of the boxlike small Fiat, sped down Kalinin Prospekt from the right. It skidded to a stop at the curb directly across the street, as the driver violently threw his door open, seemingly oblivious of the rear-end collision he had narrowly escaped with the car behind him, which also screeched and lurched to a stop.
While the irate citizen driving the car in back shook his fist and yelled obscenities, the driver of the Lada bailed out and began running just as another burly type came dashing up the middle of the street from the rear of the car and quickly jumped into the Lada’s driver’s seat. In the same motion, like in an Olympic relay, the first man was passed a brick-sized radio transceiver from the hand of the second as the first man continued forward and dashed around the front of the Lada.
Now up on the sidewalk he quickly made his way to the Metro escalator just in front of the library entrance and disappeared like a rat down a hole.
In another blink of the eye, a third tough-looking man came chugging up the sidewalk. I could see he was frantically keying a transceiver-sized lump slung below his right armpit and hidden underneath the thin cloth of his short-sleeved white cotton shirt. He was shouting into a radio mike concealed under the corner of his shirt collar as he disappeared down the escalator on the heels of the first man.
In the meantime, the man who had assumed the role of the wheelman had sped off in the Lada. He made the first right down the side street, which led down the Kremlin side of the behemoth, block-sized library to where I knew there was another Metro entrance.
The crush of the evening rush hour seemed to part naturally to allow this spectacle to take place, and then, just as easily closed in behind it. It was as if such a chase were a normal part of everyday life; no one seemed to notice or care.
To me it was a rare opportunity to witness the KGB’s Seventh Directorate (surveillance division) in action from a front-row seat. It was clear that a prized target had gotten away down in the Metro’s rabbit warren. The man who had taken over the wheel of the Lada must have been too close to the target for too long. He had probably been in front, in the point position, had made eye contact, and felt he could have been identified as hostile surveillance if he had continued into the Metro with the target.
The problem the first and third man were now facing was staying with the target so he didn’t get lost in the crowded Metro underground and end up being whisked away on a train without them.
I knew the trains came like clockwork every two minutes. The Moscow system transported more than two billion people a year through several hundred kilometers of tunnels punctuated with stations that were each an architectural marvel decorated with a different motif and style—another tribute to Russian abilities to create an underground world.
In three trips to Moscow through the years, each lasting several weeks, I had spent considerable time on the streets. I had ridden hundreds of hours on the multifaceted transportation system and had a fair idea of the problems that a surveillance team would have keeping track of a target while still remaining discreet. This was especially true in the Metro.
But circumstances seemed different now, which was why it was valuable for me to scout them in the same way a football coach takes a look at his team’s next opponent.
We were going to face off against each other very soon, and it would be a case of winner takes all.
Luke Swisher and I sat on our haunches in the dark.
We were in a storeroom on the back lot of the new U.S. Embassy compound. The embassy facility was being constructed on a large plot of low-lying land. It was poorly situated in a location that fronted on Bolshoi Devyatinsky Pereulok, a side street off Chaikovskoga, one of the broad thoroughfares that formed concentric rings radiating out from the Kremlin and Red Square. The building was down the street from the much higher ground where the old, seven-story U.S. Embassy commanded a view of the eight-lane boulevard. There, at least, we had a half-decent chance of intercepting local Soviet communications and telephone traffic. At the site of the new embassy, this far down the Moskva River embankment, there would be a much-impaired opportunity to receive any radio intelligence. By contrast, the new Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., commanded the highest ground in our nation’s capital and their compound bristled with antennae.
The U.S. State Department had been outmaneuvered by the Soviet Foreign Ministry when each party had sought to negotiate for a location for a new embassy in the other’s capital. The Soviets got the high piece of ground, good for intelligence purposes, and the Americans got a low site. This was attributable to the difference in the relationship between the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the KGB on the one hand, and the U.S. State Department and U.S. intelligence on the other. Because the Soviet Foreign Ministry understood the importance of spying, the KGB were consulted on many matters, including the prospective sites for foreign embassies in Moscow. The U.S. State Department, however, looked upon spying with a certain disdain, so U.S. intelligence had no such influence.
We had crept in here hours before, using an infrared point light source and infrared goggles to see our way. We avoided making noise in the pitch darkness.
I had liked Swisher as soon as I met him. He had a slight build and a quick mind that was constantly in high gear. His size gave him an almost boyish profile, but his longish brown hair and unkempt look let him blend uncannily into any street scene. He could pass for a Russian without any additional work. Swisher had worked for a week with my group before he left headquarters, and I knew a lot about his ways. I was told to expect from him expert proficiency wrapped in an easygoing personality, and had found that description to be very accurate.
In our crouching positions, we were leaning our right shoulders against a masonry wall located behind one of the embassy air handlers. Swisher was listening to the wall with a stethoscope. He handed the earpieces of the stethoscope to me and continued to hold the contact probe against the wall where he had it placed it earlier.
I listened for several minutes before I picked up the stirrings that could have been rats moving on the other side—or men in cloth-covered shoes moving quietly?
I nodded and handed the earpieces back to him.
Swisher motioned to the bottom of the wall above his head and traced a rectangle on it with his point light source. While I could see nothing remarkable about that particular part of the wall, I knew he was indicating the spot where there was a hidden hatch he had discovered with a portable sonar device.
We had been spending the past few days together while he familiarized me with his activities inside and outside of the compound, trying to characterize the types of threats being mounted by the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate (internal security division) against the Americans. One of the threats was a network of tunnels near the embassy compound that Luke had discovered using his portable sonar and by special tasking of our national security satellites. He believed these tunnels were being constructed by the KGB to burrow into the foundation of our new embassy chancery so they could access the various listening devices already precast into the building elements.
He believed, as did several other members of our counterintelligence force, that our embassy was monitored by the KGB from an abandoned Russian Orthodox church, which was directly across the street from the front gates of the U.S. Embassy compound, and on higher ground. They had dubbed that church “Our Lady of the Antennae.” The church steeple had a dusty round glass window, which would make a convenient observation post (OP). Next to the church was the multistory Mir Hotel, suspected of being another OP and a place for a rapid-response mobile surveillance team to be positioned.
Between the old U.S. Embassy grounds and the new U.S. Embassy grounds was a tract of land occupied by a multistory apartment building. On the ground floor of this apartment house were rooms used by the construction workers to change clothes and shower. This would be a good place from which to stage special penetration operations, since the KGB would have the natural cover of the other construction workers. The building had convenient windows that looked down into the new embassy compound and potential OPs as well. We suspected that this building also contained the Seventh Chief Directorate’s “warming rooms” to house on cold, wintry days the various surveillance teams covering the members of the American community assigned to work and live on embassy grounds.
Presumably, Swisher and I had happened along when a KGB team was moving about in the tunnels. He had explained before we came here that the hidden hatch in the wall was there to allow them to come out under the cover of darkness. If they were to gain access to the embassy this way, they might be able to enter other hidden passageways precast into the walls of the chancery, which is an eavesdropping technique centuries old. Theoretically, they could stand in any wall and listen to and perhaps see what was going on in each of the rooms. All this was in addition to whatever they had done to the structure of the building itself.
State Department security people were also working after hours every night to try to figure out what the Soviet construction workers were installing during the day. Using many special devices, they probed for evidence of new eavesdropping technology and reported back to headquarters daily, where there was a full-time team of scientists modeling the countless threats by computer.
Early on we had intelligence information warning us that the Soviets had penetrated the architectural firm in San Francisco that was designing the building, long before construction had been started. American authorities, headed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (discussions on the new embassies began in 1969), chose not to take the threat seriously because of detente and a somewhat arrogant attitude that we could find and remove anything the Soviets did to our embassy anyway. So while the precast structural members for the Soviet Embassy were made in the Soviet Union and shipped to Washington, D.C., and assembled there under heavy guard, we allowed the Soviets to cast the structural members unsupervised in Moscow and to erect our building by themselves; the whole structure was one big microphone and the foundation a perpetual battery.
As part of the search for the new procedures—the new silver bullets that would work in Moscow against our very formidable foes in the KGB—I had been with Swisher at all hours making probes in and out of the compound. Among other places, we had visited the U.S. Embassy’s two dachas—two recreational sites on the outskirts of Moscow in the woods.
When I was out on the streets riding with Swisher, I could see he was subject to the conventional discreet surveillance, three or four cars with three or four people to a car. The trailing cars would hand off the point position now and then. The car on point typically hung back a block or more and would hide behind a bus or other large vehicle when possible. Meanwhile, their other cars would run parallel on the side streets and on occasion come out in front or in back of us. Sometimes, there were several persons visible in each car, but other times only the driver was—the passengers, or “foots,” were probably lying down on the seats out of sight.
If we tried walking at a place like the Saturday flea market, where there were miles of paths through the grounds of a monastery and great crowds of people, the foot soldiers would come in close. Each of them carried something like a briefcase or a shoulder bag with a hidden camera, hoping to get a picture of us making a brush-pass contact with a Soviet citizen.
Alternatively, when I was on my own on the street at all hours, including late at night or early in the morning, I generally saw nothing. Either I was without surveillance or they were always over the horizon. As in my previous trips to Moscow, or anywhere else in the world, my routes were varied and well traveled. After several weeks of using all forms of mass transit and making long, wide-ranging solo walks, I had established a dynamic but predictable pattern. I tried to make sure my trips made some sense from a cover standpoint. But I endeavored to provide enough variety in my movements to provoke and sometimes erode surveillance if it was there.
Quite often, I was conveniently the last one aboard an evening’s final excursion boat departing from the landing on the Moskva River by Borodinskiy, ostensibly headed for the landing at Gorky Park and the amusement arcade. Sometimes, I would wait until I’d made sure everyone had left the boat at Gorky, then decide to go on to the next stop, thus allowing for a long walk back on the other side of the river through narrow winding streets before I chose to find a Metro to take me downtown to a favorite “dollar bar,” where Americans congregated.
Occasionally, I’d stand on a busy street corner and time the traffic while I counted the number of cars with red diplomatic license plates and yellow commercial plates that went by in a five-minute period. At the same time, I tried to pick out the surveillance cars in the traffic stream—they often followed cars driven by foreigners.
It was during this trip that it hit me that perestroika and glasnost had radically changed things here. There was something new in the wind. People were smiling more. They were wearing brighter colors. They were showing more affluence. There was more going on. Lately, there were a few small private restaurants opening up where you could actually go for a good meal, rather than stand in line at a state-operated restaurant hoping for a cancellation. There was a whole line of cars with Western European license plates parked in front of the hotels on Gorky Street and in the outlying campgrounds. None of this had been here ten years earlier.
The KGB’s Second Chief Directorate had to deal with an enormous explosion of potential foreign threats to national security. They could not possibly be doing business in the old ways. The command-and-control problem involved in watching all parties of potential interest had to be enormous. The typical Seventh Chief Directorate mobile surveillance team was not going to be effective by itself. There had to be many more people and resources at work here, and maybe we were looking at a truly “denied area” on the streets, with some sort of vastly improved monitoring system. Maybe our competition truly had become ten feet tall.
I also spent hours in Moscow talking to each of the ZEPHYRs about their experiences inside and outside of the American community. I observed the comings and goings of these intelligence officers, looking for anomalies in their patterns and profiles that would give me some clues as to our weaknesses.
We postulated about the ways surveillance could suddenly appear after a target had been in the clear—without surveillance—for many hours. It must have had something to do with the subject venturing through a chokepoint where some kind of marker or tag triggered an alarm and another team was scrambled.
Another theory we discussed was the two-surveillance-teams concept—the idea that there was a ghost team just over the horizon that you never saw. It was always there, surrounding you but always out of sight. The watcher team was the one seen as discreet surveillance—it appeared and disappeared but was actually being directed by the ghost team. I decided we should attempt to develop this concept in our SST simulations back home and experiment ourselves with these surveillance techniques.
During the Fourth of July celebration at the larger of the U.S. Embassy’s two dachas, I had the unique experience of seeing our own officers mixed in with hundreds of the other members of the community. I could now compare our overt profiles with the profiles of the larger population. It was quite common for our own operational doctrine of behavior to yield an unintended cover pattern. It was easy to lag behind the times and changes in the environment and therefore cause ourselves to stand out. This was one of the things we always looked for in our exercises with the ZEPHYRs in Washington.
Of this wider group, the most interesting were the American graduate students in Russian studies who were here on contract with the U.S. Department of State doing the menial chores formerly accomplished by Soviet employees in the embassy. They had a wide-ranging pattern and profile that gave them opportunities to move around that the more tightly controlled members of the community didn’t enjoy. That particular day a group of students had launched a rubber boat down on the Moskva River very early in the morning. They had somehow navigated their way through a series of reservoirs and canals and traveled many kilometers to a tiny canal behind the dacha. Here they boisterously announced their arrival like Vikings, counting cadence and stroking their oars in unison while propelling their seagoing dragon boat. I could just imagine how this must have driven the KGB wild, since it was outside their doctrine of operational behavior. I’m sure they had no contingency plan for rubber boat surveillance. Jonna would have loved it, and I made a mental note to tell her the whole story when I got home.
In sharp contrast, I noticed that every road intersection on the way out to the dacha that day was manned by the Soviet Militia, who make up the national police force. This heightened security was to ensure that no American car went astray, but it had not factored in a rubber raft off the security chart.
Luke Swisher was a lot like the student population in that his personal pattern was quite unlike that of an intelligence officer. A free spirit, he had all sorts of far-out ideas that still needed work but were scientifically sound. Like many of our OTS technical types, he was a blue-sky R and D guy who liked to think outside the box. In addition, he had great operational instincts. A perfect combination when you needed to reinvent the world.
We developed a mental blueprint between us, which included all the ways that the KGB could be surveilling us without being seen. A major part of what was driving our planning was the proposed project at hand: How could someone move clandestinely to a secret rendezvous point to meet a highly placed agent, continue onward through the most formidable security apparatus on earth, then perform an unprecedented technical penetration, and, finally, carry out a successful exfiltration of that agent and his family.
In order to meet these narrowly defined operational requirements, a new set of Moscow rules was needed that would allow us to carry out our mission quickly, quietly, and surreptitiously.
Careful not to tip my hand on the streets of Moscow, I planned to bounce some ideas off Jonna as soon as possible.
The thought of Jonna made me smile. How I missed her being with me, sharing these experiences and ideas. We had become close collaborators in recent months, and this had made the long hours and sometimes lonely work of intelligence much more pleasant.
The night before leaving Moscow to return to Washington and work out the final details for the upcoming Moscow operation, I had a vivid dream. Jonna and I were walking through an evening landscape somewhere out in the country. It was dark, but there was enough moonlight to make out the features of her face and the shine of her eyes. The landscape seemed to be filtered through a pale green lens, and when I looked up, we were walking toward a sky painted with the northern lights. It looked like a large velvet drapery, sheets of light falling to the dark horizon in deep folds and shades of green. It seemed to move and sway in the heavens, and we simply walked into it.
I wondered what the dream meant.
*The memorandum of notification signed by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on America overturned the earlier executive order, and gave the CIA authority to use lethal force in combating global terrorism.