Starting in the late 1950s, Soviet spies who operated from the TASS bureau in the National Press Building engaged in a tense, high-stakes version of cat and mouse with the FBI. Both sides viewed their interactions as a kind of game, but their rivalry wasn't playful. The men Moscow sent to the Press Building were determined to obtain secrets that could give them an edge in the geopolitical conflicts that defined the latter half of the twentieth century—and potentially in the nuclear war that Kremlin leaders believed could break out at any moment.

Unlike its Soviet counterparts, who tracked American spies in Moscow around the clock, the FBI lacked the manpower required to maintain continuous surveillance of all of the known or suspected hostile intelligence operatives in Washington. The bureau compensated by exploiting its home-court advantage: bugging the TASS office, tapping its phones, sifting through its trash—and enlisting volunteers from all walks of life, from Press Club presidents to maintenance workers, to keep an eye on Soviet intelligence officers.

The KGB had its own challenges to overcome. Its American intelligence networks were decimated in the 1950s by the revelations of defectors, the US Army's decryption of KGB World War II intelligence cables, and an increase in American security awareness. Starting in the late 1940s the FBI and the US military instituted background checks on personnel with access to classified information and systematically weeded communists out of sensitive positions. The Soviets had to assume that every one of the assets had been compromised. The chances of a KGB officer finding someone like the true believers who had worked for Soviet intelligence in the past was slim. The FBI had thoroughly infiltrated the Communist Party of the United States, draining a favored Soviet recruiting pool, and following revelations of Stalin's crimes and the death of over 30,000 GIs in the Korean War, almost no Americans outside the party were willing to put their lives on the line to advance the interests of communism. In the absence of ideologically motivated spies, the KGB had to find people with access to secrets who were willing to betray their country for money or, less commonly, who could be entranced through romance or entrapped by blackmail.

The war might have been cold, but in the 1950s and ’60s it didn't feel that way for Americans, who lived in fear of nuclear annihilation. The Soviet Union dominated the public imagination. School children were drilled on how to “duck and cover” as if their desks would protect them from a nuclear attack. Newspapers and television were filled with stories that painted Russians as dangerous and duplicitous. In this environment, Soviet reporters and diplomats were widely, and correctly, assumed to be spies. Nonetheless, they were objects of mostly friendly curiosity at the National Press Club, one of the few places in Washington where Americans and Soviets mingled freely.

Valentin Ivanov, a short, pudgy Russian who sported a bushy mustache and thick glasses, didn't cause a stir when he started hanging around the Press Club in the summer of 1957. He was entitled to membership as press attaché at the Soviet embassy. Ivanov's visibility increased in the spring of 1958, when he demolished a series of competitors in preliminary rounds of the club's chess championship and easily won the first two games in the final. He would have taken first prize if he hadn't thrown the last three games; someone in Moscow likely ordered him to avoid the scrutiny that would have been generated by a Soviet victory. Spies are supposed to use activities like playing chess to meet and size up potential recruits, not to call attention to themselves.1

Ivanov was less reticent on the evening of May 7, 1960. At 6:18 p.m. Press Club members watched in astonishment as he dashed out of the club crying, “Admitted! Admitted! Admitted! Admitted!”2 Ivanov had been aroused by an official State Department statement acknowledging that the Eisenhower administration had lied when it claimed that an American weather plane had accidentally strayed into Soviet territory and crashed. In fact, as the government confessed, it had been a U-2 spy plane on an espionage mission.

It was a remarkable moment. The U-2 statement was perhaps the last time journalists and the public were stunned to learn that a US president had been caught perpetrating a bald-faced lie. And it was the first time that the American government publicly acknowledged that it violated borders and sovereignty during peacetime to conduct espionage.

Press Club members were surprised by Ivanov again on August 12, 1960, when they woke up to find a story describing his extracurricular activities on the front page of the Washington Post. It wasn't about the Russian's prowess on the chessboard. Instead it was an account of a sleazy and inept attempt at espionage.³

Ivanov had befriended a sometime merchant seaman and part-time cook named Roger Foss, whom he had persuaded to move from New York to Washington and to apply for a government job. Ivanov's goal, Foss told the Post, was to “infiltrate the Government and society.”⁴ The story didn't explicitly state that Ivanov was a spy, but it provided details that left little doubt. For example, Foss described how his Russian benefactor set up secret meetings: Foss was instructed to leave a chalk mark on a lamppost near Ivanov's home as a signal that he wanted to meet—a classic technique the KGB used in Washington for decades. They met about fifteen times over the course of a year, usually in Chinatown. “He loved Chinese food; I got so sick of it,” Foss moaned. “I'll never touch another bite.” Ivanov paid Foss $500 to cover tuition at a business school, plus living expenses to tide him over until a government job opened up.⁵

One hot day in August, while he was waiting for the results of his civil service exam, Foss wandered into the offices of the American Nazi Party in Arlington, Virginia, across the bridge from Washington. After speaking with its leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, he decided fascism suited him better than communism. At Rockwell's urging, Foss told the FBI and later the Post about Ivanov's attempts to set him up as a sleeper agent.

The day after Foss's story appeared in the Post, the State Department declared Ivanov persona non grata, and he was never again seen in the Press Club.

Ivanov's name reappeared in the newspapers a month later, after two National Security Agency codebreakers, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, denounced the United States at a dramatic press conference in Moscow. They were the first employees to defect from an organization that was so secret at the time that its initials were said to be short for “No Such Agency.” Congressional investigators told reporters that Ivanov had recruited Martin and Mitchell at a Washington area chess club. If true, from the KGB's perspective this would have more than mitigated Ivanov's botched attempt to insinuate a fascist loser into a government job.6

With the exception of Martin and Mitchell, and an Army Colonel named William Henry Whalen who sold military secrets to the Soviets, the KGB didn't have much success in Washington in the first half of the ’60s. Khrushchev, who had great faith in his own ability to assess international affairs, was far less enthusiastic about foreign intelligence than his predecessors.⁷ The KGB's Washington station became a backwater. Its fortunes changed in 1964, when Leonid Brezhnev, who had a more traditional Soviet veneration for espionage and respect for intelligence services, toppled Khrushchev and took over the Soviet government.

The KGB sent a new station chief, Boris Solomatin, to Washington in 1965 to turn things around. He selected a rising star, Oleg Kalugin, as his deputy. Kalugin had studied journalism in New York at Columbia University a decade earlier as part of the first Cold War student exchange program. Like most of the “students” Moscow sent to Ivy League universities, he was a professional intelligence officer. Kalugin had returned to New York in 1960, working undercover in the guise of a correspondent for Radio Moscow.

In his third posting to the “main adversary,” as Soviet intelligence agencies called the United States, Colonel Kalugin's cover was as second secretary and press attaché in the Soviet embassy. He was actually in charge of political intelligence, with half of the KGB's forty Washington-based officers reporting to him.8

Cultured and quick-witted, Kalugin easily formed bonds with intelligent men and attractive women. In addition to trying to recruit agents with access to the White House, Congress, and the State Department, he focused his considerable charm on journalists. The leading liberal columnists of the day, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft, and Drew Pearson, regularly and openly met with Kalugin, as did reporters like Chalmers Roberts and Murray Marder of the Washington Post. Kalugin's circle of friends included the unofficial dean of foreign correspondents, Henry Brandon of the London Times. Kalugin was a familiar presence at the Press Club and other watering holes, where prominent journalists exchanged their perspectives on American policy and politics for the insights he provided about the USSR.⁹

Kalugin was far too smooth to try to recruit most American reporters as agents, but he did pitch at least one. Over a series of lunches, Kalugin tried to bring I. F. Stone, who had been a Soviet intelligence operative in the 1930s, back into the fold. Infuriated by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Stone broke off contact with Kalugin in the summer of 1969.¹⁰

Kalugin had more luck with the foreign reporters. His paid recruits in the Press Building included the Washington correspondent for a major European newspaper—as late as 2014 Kalugin refused to identify the journalist or his country—and reporters from developing countries.¹¹

In addition to recruiting agents and informants in the Press Building and directing the operations of KGB officers in the TASS bureau, Kalugin found that the building was a perfect spot for evading surveillance and meeting agents. The FBI didn't hide the fact that it was watching Kalugin. He and other KGB officers, however, were convinced that they could detect FBI tails and that intense observation was sporadic, usually lasting a week or two followed by breaks of several weeks.

National Press Club Bar, circa 1965. Women were not permitted to join the National Press Club until 1971. Prior to 1971 women were allowed to enter parts of the club when accompanied by members, but were strictly excluded from the bar, card room, and other male sanctuaries.

Credit: National Press Club archives

According to the FBI's unwritten rules of engagement, its agents might tail Kalugin to the lobby of the Press Building, but they wouldn't get on the elevator with him and they couldn't easily follow him into the Press Club. Once he was in the club, Kalugin could take advantage of stairwells to descend to lower floors. There, long corridors arranged in a rectangle with uninterrupted sightlines were perfect for covert meetings.

About once a month for several years, a diplomat from a Western European country slipped unnoticed through the Press Building lobby. He got off on one of the middle floors and walked down the corridor at a prearranged time. Just as he rounded one of the corners, he would see Kalugin walking toward him. If anyone else was in sight, they would walk past each other and wait for another day to rendezvous. If the coast was clear, they would duck into a stairwell, where the diplomat passed Kalugin a package. The contents ranged from copies of diplomatic cables and top-secret reports to recordings of the diplomat's ambassador's conversations. Kalugin handed his agent an envelope with cash and a note indicating the date, time, and floor number for their next assignation. Following an exchange that took less than a minute, Kalugin jogged back upstairs to the Press Club bar for a drink with a reporter. He'd been absent from the bar for about the amount of time it would have taken to visit the bathroom.12

While Kalugin had recruited a handful of foreign reporters and was on friendly terms with scores of American journalists, his closest collaborators were KGB subordinates who worked from the cramped TASS office on the third floor of the Press Building. The TASS bureau chief, Mikhail Sagatelyan, and most of his staff were KGB officers. There were also a few military intelligence (GRU) officers at TASS who worked completely independently of the KGB. Like every foreign TASS bureau, the Press Building office had a couple of “clean” staff, real reporters who had to carry the load for the spooks, who did as little work for the news agency as they could get away with. In addition to KGB officers working undercover at TASS, all Soviet journalists in Washington, including those working for Izvestia, the Novosti news agency, and Soviet radio and television networks, were obliged to cooperate with and obey instructions from the KGB. The sole exception was employees of Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, which was completely off-limits to the intelligence services. In the Soviet hierarchy the only body more privileged than the intelligence services was the party.13

In 1967 Kalugin hatched a plot with Viktor Kopytin, a KGB officer working under TASS cover, which reflected the Washington station's appetite for risk. The idea was to plant a bug in a congressional hearing room and listen in on closed sessions where classified and sensitive military information was discussed. Kopytin cased the Senate Armed Services Committee room, decided that security was too tight, and advised Kalugin that the House Armed Services Committee room would be a better target.¹⁴

A KGB unit in Moscow that specialized in spy tech—like poison dart guns camouflaged in umbrellas—created a custom bug. The battery-powered microphone and transmitter were concealed in a piece of wood that matched a table in the committee room. There were metal spikes on one side so it could be stuck onto the table.

On a summer afternoon, Kopytin lingered in the room after a hearing, waited until he believed that no one was watching, and casually slipped his hand under the table and firmly attached the bug. KGB officers in a car parked on Capitol Hill huddled anxiously over a receiver, but they never heard a peep from the bug. It turned out that Kopytin was overly confident in his ability to detect surveillance. He'd been seen planting the microphone. The FBI neutralized the device and kept the room under observation, hoping to catch a KGB officer attempting to retrieve it. The Soviets, however, didn't take the bait.¹⁵

Kopytin's congressional caper had probably been seen by a member of an FBI unit that specialized in counterintelligence against the KGB. It operated from the FBI's Washington Field Office, three blocks from the Press Building in the Old Post Office building. (The building was renovated and repurposed as a Trump Hotel in 2017.) Once the FBI suspected that someone was a KGB spy, an agent from the unit was assigned to keep track of him.

An FBI agent named W. Peyton George was assigned to Kopytin in 1968. He learned that his target, like most TASS reporters, gave a high priority to establishing relationships with American journalists. George was eager to find out what Kopytin was discussing with reporters because learning what kind of information the KGB was fishing for could shed light on its priorities. This wasn't a straightforward task because FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, obsessed with preventing negative publicity, had laid down strict rules governing his agents’ contacts with the media. Prior to contacting a reporter, an FBI agent had to conduct a background investigation and receive approval from FBI headquarters, a process that could take a month.16

Under Hoover's rules, there were no restrictions on agents speaking with reporters who volunteered to help the FBI. This loophole led George to come up with a pragmatic solution. When he learned through FBI electronic surveillance of the TASS office that Kopytin was planning to have lunch with a reporter, George would call Alan Cromley, Washington bureau chief of the Daily Oklahoman and, in 1968, president of the National Press Club. In some cases, Cromley would tell George to steer clear of a reporter who was a “leftist” and therefore unlikely to cooperate with the FBI. In other cases, Cromley would make a discreet telephone call, and ten minutes later one of Kopytin's sources would call George to offer to keep the FBI informed about their conversations. In addition to consulting Cromley about his own cases, George called Cromley on behalf of other FBI counterintelligence agents. After Cromley's term was over, the FBI agent established a similar working arrangement with another Press Club president, Michael Hudoba, an editor at Sports Afield Magazine.¹⁷

George ran a classic operation against Kopytin. As in the best counterintelligence operations, the KGB had no idea it had been snared and, in fact, believed it was scooping up valuable secrets under the FBI's nose. Appropriately, it all began in a bar, when Kopytin overheard two men talking about “multiple reentry vehicles” and other bits of arcane defense terminology. It turned out that they were analysts at a think tank that worked for the Department of Defense. Kopytin joined in the conversation, telling the Americans that he was a Soviet journalist. Before long the Russian found a common interest with one of his new acquaintances—the man's grandfather had emigrated from Russia.18

The American, who has not been publicly identified, reported his contact with Kopytin to the FBI, and George encouraged him to develop the relationship under the FBI's direction, as a double agent. Kopytin ran the recruitment according to the standard KGB playbook. He started by asking the American for innocuous information, gradually upping the ante until he was requesting and paying for classified information. To the intense irritation of the American intelligence community, Senator J. William Fulbright had publicly released a list of classified projects that the Defense Department was funding. The list gave Kopytin and other KGB officers a carryout menu to order secret documents from. The FBI and the National Security Council set up a process to vet Kopytin's requests and determine which reports could be given to him without damaging national security.¹⁹

Kopytin met with the American about once every six weeks to receive the classified reports, usually over dinner. The KGB officer would punch his finger in the double agent's chest and say, “We want to know what your President is thinking!” Between courses, he slipped his informant an envelope with three to six thousand dollars in crisp twenty-dollar bills. When the defense analyst moved to Massachusetts, the FBI paid for his travel back to DC for the meetings and put him up at the Hilton or the Watergate Hotel, covering the expenses with the KGB's twenty-dollar bills.²⁰

Based on the information Kopytin was requesting, it became clear to Pentagon officials that the Soviet government had obtained the complete US negotiating strategy for nuclear disarmament talks that were being conducted in Geneva. Kopytin “even had the United States’ Position Points in chronological order,” George recalled.²¹

The State Department expelled Kopytin in May 1969, ostensibly in retaliation for the Soviet Union's expulsion of a Washington Post reporter. The FBI was proud of the way it had handled the TASS reporter and KGB officer. The bureau didn't discover for another eighteen years that even as it was playing Kopytin it had failed to detect one of the KGB's most successful espionage operations.

One of the worst security leaks in American history started on a cold day in October 1967 at the Soviet embassy, an old mansion that had a quirk that made it especially easy for the FBI's surveillance teams: there was a single front entrance and no back door. Nonetheless, the FBI didn't notice when John Anthony Walker, a chief warrant officer in the US Navy, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. He stepped inside and asked to speak with “someone connected with intelligence.” Walker told a KGB officer that he wanted to strike up a business relationship with the USSR, and he handed over a sheaf of Xeroxed papers to prove that he had access to valuable information. The documents were brought to Kalugin and his boss Solomatin, who quickly realized they were real—and that they were extraordinary. Walker had handed over information that could help the Soviets decrypt the most secret American Navy communications.22

Kalugin spent hundreds of hours over the following months scouting “dead drops,” sites where Walker could deposit documents and pick up money and instructions without meeting face-to-face with a KGB officer, and poring over the material Walker sold the KGB. Walker was one of the most effective Soviet Cold War spies, providing high-level intelligence about American Navy codes, technology, strategy, and tactics. Information he supplied allowed the USSR to track American ships, submarines, and war planes in real time, and to know in advance where they were going.

In addition to giving Moscow secrets that could have provided it a decisive military advantage in a war with the United States, Walker gave a career boost to Kalugin, who left Washington in December 1969 to start a new job in Moscow as the KGB's deputy chief of foreign counterintelligence.

Besides stealing secrets, while in Washington Kalugin had engaged in what the KGB called “active measures,” intelligence operations designed to advance Soviet objectives and influence events in foreign countries. Active-measures techniques included creating forged documents, disseminating disinformation, recruiting “agents of influence,” as the KGB called individuals who could shape policy or public opinion, organizing political influence operations, and creating and funding front groups.23 Soviet propaganda thrived on “whataboutism,” pointing to supposed moral equivalencies between the Soviet Union and its adversaries. When there was no real evidence, the KGB was tasked with using active measures to create it.

One of Kalugin's small contributions to the KGB's massive active-measures campaigns involved creating disinformation to divert attention from entirely accurate accounts of Soviet discrimination against Jews. His first move was to flood American Jewish organizations with anonymous anti-Semitic materials. Then Kalugin found individuals who were willing, for a fee, to desecrate Jewish graves and paint swastikas on synagogues. He sent photographers to document the wave of hatred that the Soviet press claimed was sweeping across America.²⁴

After Kalugin's departure, the KGB revisited the theme. In 1971, KGB chief Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov personally approved the distribution in New York of pamphlets presented as if they had been written by the Jewish Defense League that attacked African Americans as “black mongrels.” The Jewish Defense League staged a more overt, and colorful, operation at the Press Building the same year. To protest unfair “scapegoating” of Jews in Leningrad, they chained a sedated goat to the door of the TASS office. The goat wore a sign indicating that he was a “Jewish scapegoat.” Other “gifts” left at the TASS office have included an effigy with a noose affixed to its neck and a sticker modifying the word TASS to UNITASS, which sounds like “unitaz,” or toilet in Russian.²⁵

During the Democratic primaries for the 1976 presidential campaign, the KGB forged FBI files that accused Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a hardline opponent of the Soviet Union, of being a homosexual. The documents were sent to the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers, but none of them fell for the ruse.²⁶

The KGB's Washington station, most likely including officers working in the TASS office, had more success with a provocation intended to stir up racial tensions ahead of the 1984 Olympics. The KGB printed up flyers that appeared to be products of the Ku Klux Klan and sent them to the Olympic committees of African and Asian countries. The flyers announced that the Olympics were “for whites only” and warned “African monkeys” that rewards would be paid to Americans for lynching or shooting them. Newspapers around the world ran stories about the flyers. Some of them followed up with stories noting the US State Department's assertion that they were KGB disinformation.27

KGB active-measures activities in Washington included more subtle, and more effective initiatives. For example, Yuri Shvets, a KGB officer who was posted to the TASS Press Building office in 1985, successfully targeted an influential journalist, Claudia Wright, the Washington correspondent for New Statesman, a British magazine. Wright, an Australian who was strongly pro-Soviet and vehemently anti-American, had been unwittingly serving as a vehicle for KGB fabrications for several years. In 1982 she wrote a story claiming that Jeane Kirkpatrick, the US ambassador to the United Nations, had a clandestine relationship with apartheid South Africa's military intelligence. The story was based on a letter the KGB had forged.²⁸

Shvets decided in October 1985 to kick it up a notch by meeting Wright and offering her an ongoing working relationship with the KGB. She immediately agreed and became a classic agent of influence. Rather than steal secrets for the KGB, she slipped its disinformation into her stories. After her recruitment, Wright's stories appeared regularly in New Statesman, and occasionally in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Foreign Affairs. They always favored Moscow's interpretation of events, were anti-Israeli, and expressed great confidence in the wisdom of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. For example, Wright repeated Soviet disinformation in a story printed in the Dublin, Ireland, Sunday Tribune on September 3, 1989, asserting that “the Korean Airlines jumbo jet, shot down by the Soviet Air Force six years ago today, was on a spy mission for the US.”²⁹

The KGB and GRU continued to send officers to work as TASS reporters in the National Press Building up until the final days of the Soviet Union and, according to defectors, the Russian Federation continued the practice.

One of the last Soviet intelligence officers to work in the National Press Building, Stanislav Lunev, a colonel in the GRU, arrived in Washington in 1988. He was working in the TASS Washington bureau on Christmas in 1991 when Mikhail Gorbachev turned the lights out on the Soviet Union and transferred power to the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.

Lunev met one of his most valuable agents at a press conference for the environmental advocacy group National Resources Defense Council. In a memoir published in 1998, Lunev described one adventure involving the agent, whom he did not identify. On a sunny evening in the summer of 1990 Lunev drove to Northern Virginia, and pulled over near a pay phone, lifted the hood of his Mercury Sable and waited. If the phone had rung three times, and then three times a few minutes later, he would have aborted the mission. That would have been a signal that his compatriots, who were monitoring radio frequencies used by FBI agents, had detected surveillance. Relieved by the phone's silence, Lunev drove to secluded spot, parked, and stooped down to pick up a Coca Cola can. Inside the can, which was rigged to destroy its contents if someone tried to open it improperly, Lunev's agent had placed undeveloped film. It was a transcript of a closed Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about US strategy on the disintegration of the USSR, and included sensitive details about agents and operations against the Soviet Union.30

Lunev defected in March 1992 and spent a year at a safe house in Maryland briefing American intelligence officials. Among other things, he told them that he'd spent a great deal of time scouting locations where small nuclear bombs, so-called suitcase nukes, could be pre-positioned in advance of a war between the United States and the USSR.

TASS was not the only organization in the National Press Building that carried out active measures for the KGB. Soviet intelligence backed another active-measures project based there, which seriously damaged the CIA.