Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'All the power and intrigue of a cinematic thriller ... immersive, dramatic, and historically edifying' Kirkus Moscow in the late 1970s: one by one, CIA assets are disappearing. The perils of American arrogance, mixed with bureaucratic infighting, had left the country unspeakably vulnerable to ultra-sophisticated Russian electronic surveillance.. The Spy in Moscow Station tells of a time when-much like today-Russian spycraft was proving itself far ahead of the best technology the U.S. had to offer. This is the true story of unorthodox, underdog intelligence officers who fought an uphill battle against their government to prove that the KGB had pulled off the most devastating and breathtakingly thorough penetration of U.S. national security in history. Incorporating declassified internal CIA memos and diplomatic cables, this suspenseful narrative reads like a thriller-but real lives were at stake, and every twist is true as the US and USSR attempt to wrongfoot each other in eavesdropping technology and tradecraft. The book also carries a chilling warning for the present: like the State and CIA officers who were certain their "sweeps" could detect any threat in Moscow, we don't know what we don't know.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 404
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
To my wife and soul mate, Chris … and to Charles Gandy’s wife and soul mate, Freda
Contents
Foreword
When I assumed command of NSA in March 1999, I quickly realized that, although the intelligence agency was a national treasure, it needed to be shaken up to meet the daunting challenges of the new millennium.
9/11 made the need to reenergize NSA even more acute, so I reached outside of the government for top industry talent to help me accelerate the agency’s transformation.
Eric Haseltine, who came from Walt Disney Imagineering, of all places, was perhaps my riskiest and most audacious hire. I brought Eric into the agency to lead and to shake up NSA’s Research Directorate, whose mission, in turn, was to shake up and modernize the entire enterprise.
Although parachuting a Disney executive with no intelligence experience into a leadership post at NSA raised a lot of eyebrows and generated hallway snickers about “General Hayden’s Mickey Mouse hire,” Eric immediately met—and surpassed—my expectations for helping to transform the agency.
Perhaps his most important accomplishment was to quickly shift NSA’s research focus from “cool science projects” to technologies that made an immediate, substantial, and practical improvement to NSA’s core signals intelligence and information assurance missions.
The transformation of NSA research that Eric began in mid-2002 proved very timely when the Iraq war erupted early the following year. Rather than sit at his desk in our Fort Meade headquarters, Eric traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times to get a firsthand look at the needs of NSA officers directly supporting combat operations in the two theaters of war. These trips were the first time in NSA’s history a director of research had traveled to “the pointy end of the spear” in order to establish research priorities.
Each time Eric returned from one of these trips, I valued his candid take on the effectiveness of NSA’s combat support activities. I especially appreciated it when Eric spoke truth to power, as when, in early 2004, he informed me that a good number of NSA’s military “customers” were less than thrilled with the timeliness and effectiveness of NSA support. Based on Eric’s input, I ordered immediate changes to the way NSA supported war fighters, shipping several hundred cryptologic support elements to the battlefield and integrating them with war fighters to improve NSA’s responsiveness.
Getting into the spirit of combat support, Eric also directly engaged NSA research in important challenges, such as reducing casualties from roadside IEDs. For his contributions in this vital area, Eric was awarded the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal.
In 2005, when President George W. Bush appointed me the first principal deputy director of national intelligence, I brought Eric with me as associate director of national intelligence to lead science and technology for the entire U.S. intelligence community (IC). My hope was that Eric would do for the entire U.S. intelligence enterprise—comprised of no fewer than sixteen different intelligence agencies—what he had done at NSA: shake things up.
And shake things up he did. Eric moved swiftly to weave the disparate threads of science and technology efforts across the IC into a coherent whole, even when the threads strenuously resisted being woven. Both I, and the IC’s overall boss—John Negroponte, director of national intelligence—fielded multiple calls from agencies across the community complaining of Eric’s aggressive moves to unify and rationalize science and technology pursuits across America’s far-flung intelligence enterprise.
Perhaps Eric’s most controversial, and important, move was to work with his deputy and successor, Steve Nixon, to create the IC’s own version of DARPA, IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity). IARPA filled a glaring and dangerous hole in the IC’s science and technology portfolio: high-risk, high-reward endeavors that brought about revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary, advances in mission capability.
Creating IARPA was a gutsy move, because in order to fund it, Eric and Steve had to take large sums of money away from individual agencies, most notably the CIA (where I was then director!).
We naturally butted heads a few times, but we never stopped engaging constructively or respecting each other, and when Eric left the government in 2007, we were still good friends and now enjoy serving on a corporate board together.
Reading through a draft of this book, I realize that Eric has not stopped shaking things up. His candid but accurate description of the way our intelligence agencies sometimes underestimate the Russians—badly—will not sit well in many quarters, nor will his descriptions of interagency turf fights that give the Russians an added edge against us.
The actors have changed in the forty years since the events described here, but many of the key issues and challenges have not. The Russians continue to surprise us with their audacious, innovative tradecraft, and we sometimes disappoint, even responding to Russian moves with denials and finger-pointing rather than purposeful action. Russian efforts to change the outcome of our 2016 presidential election come to mind.
So although this book describes a devastating Russian attack on our national security at the height of the Cold War, its lesson is extremely timely and important for today, and that lesson is this: we can never afford to underestimate the inventiveness and determination of highly motivated adversaries, nor can we underestimate the damage we do to ourselves when we fight each other responding to such adversaries.
To modify a phrase coined by The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, “Russia cannot destroy America. Only we can do that.”
—General Michael V. Hayden USAF (retired), former director of NSA and former director of CIA, and author of The Assault on Intelligence and theNew York Times bestseller Playing to the Edge
Preface
NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland, February 2003
The gleaming glass-fronted structure that serves as NSA’s main headquarters building doesn’t look much like a government facility on the outside. With its clean lines and tinted sides that reflect the eastern Maryland sky, OPS2, as the building is called (OPS standing for “operations”), would be more at home in the financial district of any large American city than on the campus of a large army base.
The inside of OPS2 is another matter. Where a commercial building would have carpeted floors, potted plants, and stylish prints adorning the walls, the raised floors of NSA headquarters are simple computer-floor tiles, which allow power and data cables to pass unmolested underneath. The walls are almost entirely devoid of decoration, save an occasional security reminder every few hundred feet or so. The overhead fluorescent lighting is bright and harsh.
In a commercial building, coworkers would be gathered in hallways, drinking coffee and engaging in informal shoptalk or gossip, but in OPS2, as in other NSA buildings, employees seldom congregate for hallway chitchat.
In fact, employees at the Fort don’t talk much even inside their cipher lock–protected office spaces. NSA, whose job is to collect and analyze electronic information from around the globe, is a place for listening, not talking.
Coming from the gregarious entertainment business in Hollywood, and being overly talkative, I never got used to the muted, introverted culture of NSA during my three years there, and it certainly never got used to me.
Seldom was this clash of styles more evident than at my first meeting with the outside board of experts who advised my new boss, NSA director Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, on the performance of the NSA’s Research Directorate, which I had taken over as chief in August 2002.
The NSA advisory board was—with a few exceptions—comprised of sober, thoughtful former senior executives at NSA, the Pentagon, or CIA along with top executives at technology companies. These were serious men on a serious mission: to make sure that I didn’t screw up what they considered to be a national treasure, NSA’s research-and-development group, whose mission was to invent the future of stealing and protecting electronic secrets.
The influential members of NSA’s advisory board (NSAAB), which included a former DARPA director and assistant secretary of defense, had a hand in the premature and abrupt removal of my immediate predecessor, so I was eager to impress them during my first NSAAB engagement, whose purpose was to review the Research Directorate’s progress over the first six months of my tenure.
At the conclusion of the grueling day-and-a-half meeting, I was exhausted and hoarse from talking almost nonstop about the directorate’s new direction—and more than a little worried. While a few of the board members were engaged and offered critiques and helpful comments, most simply listened and jotted down notes, giving scant indication of their reactions to my presentation or those of my research team members.
The meeting had been civil, with a constructive atmosphere, but at its conclusion, I hadn’t the slightest clue what they were going to tell General Hayden about the Research Directorate and my performance. An hour before the meeting ended, I was asked to leave so that the board could deliberate in private and prepare their conclusions for the director.
Instead of slogging through the fresh snow to my office in the research and engineering building a quarter mile away, I chose to wait in a small NSAAB conference room for the board to adjourn so that I could say goodbye to the board members as they left and to try to get a sense of how the meeting had gone. I would get the board’s conclusions in writing a few days later, but was hoping to get an early read from comments and body language of different board members as they departed.
I was disappointed. Most members simply shook my hand and left immediately, while those that lingered talked among themselves. None offered encouragement or seemed eager to talk with me.
The exception was a slender, white-haired man, a couple of inches taller than I was, who had interviewed me a year earlier when I had applied for the job. In a slow, Deep Southern drawl, the man asked, “Can I grab you for a moment?”
“Sure,” I answered, apprehension growing. The man, a retired NSA executive, had sat quietly, listening and making eye contact during the meeting, but had only offered an occasional comment. He had provided few clues about his thoughts during the meeting, except to briefly mention a particular area of NSA technical tradecraft that he thought deserved greater focus.
“Charles Gandy, isn’t it?” I asked, dredging up his name from my encounter with him twelve months earlier.
“Yes. Gandy. We actually met at Disney about five years ago.”
Oh, crap, I thought. I had forgotten that. When my boss at Disney, Bran Ferren, the president of research and development, had brought him in to consult, Gandy had hardly said a word, and my only impression of him was that he was what we techno-geeks called a diode, meaning that, like a semiconductor diode, information travels in only one direction. In Gandy’s case, that direction had been outside–in. I didn’t recall a single thing he had said at Disney, if indeed he had said anything at all. A conversation with a Disney coworker who’d sat in the meeting with Gandy came back to me. The colleague had pointed to Charles’s back as he left our building and whispered, “Roach motel” (meaning, like roaches in the famous TV commercial, information checked in but didn’t check out).
No wonder I had completely forgotten meeting Gandy.
Gandy and I found an empty conference room nearby and made ourselves comfortable in the stuffed chairs. Anxious, and never long on tact, I got right to the point. “What did you think about the ideas I gave the board for changing NSA’s research priorities?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “I was pleasantly surprised by most of it.” He paused, evidently choosing his words with care. “Honestly, I didn’t think you were up to the job, and I recommended against your being hired. But your presentation today showed that in this short period of time, you have really grasped what’s going on and what’s needed.”
I swallowed hard, realizing my nervousness about the meeting had been on target. Despite his comment about there being some hope for me, I concluded that this was not a casual meeting. Perhaps in the final hour of the meeting, the board had anointed Gandy to deliver a message.
That was the way NSA worked: never confront someone in an open meeting, but send a messenger to deliver the bad news in a secluded office or empty SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility).
“What part of my pitch didn’t pleasantly surprise you?” I asked.
“It wasn’t what you said but what you didn’t say. That was the reason I wanted to chat with you.”
I was expecting him to go on, but he just sat there, regarding me carefully through rimless glasses, wearing a neutral expression—one that I called “the NSA face.” I dreaded and loathed that face, which I had seen on countless agency employees in the six months I’d been at Fort Meade. It seemed that everyone at the agency put on that same blank look when they wanted me to shut up or generally thought I was clueless.
I wondered if Gandy thought I was clueless.
Perhaps I was being tested. I thought out loud. “I left out the surveillance technique you mentioned in the meeting.”
A slow smile spread on his face. “Yes, for sure. But that particular technology is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole universe of exploits you didn’t mention in your plans—ideas that are old but as important today as they were in my time.” Gathering steam, he continued, “You really need to beef up these types of things; they’ve fallen out of favor and could cause us major, major problems.”
He proceeded for the next thirty minutes to give me a tutorial on classic NSA tradecraft that he and his team had perfected when he’d headed the legendary R9 group* in the ’70s and ’80s.
But R9, part of the Research Directorate, no longer existed.
Which was Gandy’s point. He wanted R9, or at least the work it had been doing, to be resurrected.
As Gandy spoke, a transformation came over him, from placid diode who only took things in to an animated, energized teacher explaining a topic he loved. A distinct gleam showed up in his eyes, and his normally slow way of talking accelerated. Gandy’s hands rose and fell like those of an orchestra conductor as he drew imaginary traces of radio frequency (RF) signals on the imaginary screen of a spectrum analyzer, an NSA tool of choice for their work.
The more he went into the physics of R9 old techniques, the more I found myself thinking, Jesus, some of this stuff is older than I am! I had no idea how sophisticated early ’50s technology had been. Listening to Gandy and NSA’s accomplishments from so many years ago felt like discovering that the ancient Egyptians had used gasoline engines or that the Romans had the telegraph.
Despite being in awe of the magic of the technology Gandy had just shared—not to mention the man himself—I had a problem doing as he asked.
I said, “General Hayden [NSA’s director] just came back from the White House yesterday and told me and his other direct reports to get ready for war in Iraq. And we can’t forget al-Qaeda. This technology you’re talking about seems geared for big nation-states, not our current crop of hard-to-find targets.”
He nodded. “Sure, but you’ve got plenty of money after 9/11. Why not inject new life into the things I’ve been talking about? Targets like Russia haven’t gone away just because terrorists currently occupy our attention.”
I could see Gandy wasn’t going to give up easily. I didn’t want to alienate him, but at the same time, I’d just finished six months of careful budgeting, and there was no extra money lying around, especially considering that the Research Directorate now had to gear up to support wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trying a different angle, I asked, “Would it really hurt that much if we put off the R9 stuff for a bit, at least until next fiscal year, when I can try to find the extra money? After all, NSA must be ahead of countries like Russia. Russia’s entire economy is smaller than Texas’s, and they’re in a downward spiral. They have to be years, if not decades, behind us.”
Gandy’s white eyebrows raised abruptly, then he leaned forward in his overstuffed armchair. “Now you’ve really got me upset.” His northern Louisiana accent, already thick, got thicker. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that same line of reasoning. It’s technology arrogance, pure and simple. Don’t ever”—which he pronounced eva—“underestimate the Russians. I could tell you stories about them that would curl your toes.”
Alarmed that I had upset an NSA legend, one who would soon be elevated to the rarified ranks of NSA’s equivalent to the Hall of Fame, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Uh, why don’t you tell me a toe-curling story? I’ve got time if you do.”
This seemed to calm Gandy down. He collected his thoughts, then began to tell me a story that lasted over two hours.
“Okay,” Gandy said, exhaling a deep breath. “Here’s one.”
He cleared his throat. “In the spring of 1978, NSA director Bobby Inman called me to convey a request from CIA’s chief of station in Moscow, asking for me by name and urging me to get to Moscow as soon as possible. Here’s what was happening …”
* Even at the supersecret NSA, R9 had enjoyed a reputation for being especially “black,” specializing in “truly spooky stuff.”
1. Our Spies Are Dying
CIA Station, U.S. Embassy, Moscow, March 1978
Gus Hathaway sat in his cramped, windowless office on the seventh floor of the chancery building at 21 Tchaikovsky, gazing at some documents on his desktop as he toyed with a radical idea that probably wouldn’t make him any friends in CIA’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations (DO). In Moscow, March was like deep winter everywhere else, so the room’s heat was turned up, contributing to the stuffiness and claustrophobic feel of the place. Hathaway knew that uninformed civilians thought of him and his brethren in the DO as spies, but that was a term he and the other intelligence officers who ran espionage operations in foreign countries never ever used to describe themselves. Hathaway and his DO colleagues were case officers who didn’t spy at all, but rather spotted, assessed, recruited, vetted, and operated foreign “human assets” (actual spies) who stole vital secrets from “targets,” such as the USSR, on behalf of CIA.
Case officers were the agency elite—whereas other CIA officers, such as technologists in the Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) or the academic types that comprised the Directorate of Intelligence (DI)—were lesser beings who could only dream of becoming case officers one day.
Which was precisely the problem that Hathaway had with the idea he was kicking around; he had an urge to go outside of CIA for help with a vexing problem in Moscow that had just become urgent.
The culture of the elite DO was to keep their mouths firmly shut to all outsiders and to tough out gnarly problems among themselves. Sure, every now and then a case officer needed a surveillance gadget or disguise from the nerds at DS&T, or even some advice on a target from one of the ivory-tower eggheads at the DI, but to wander outside of CIA for help?
Not good form. Not good form at all, especially when the outside agency that Hathaway was considering asking for help was the National Security Agency (NSA). NSA had become CIA’s bureaucratic archenemy over the past few years because of turf fights over which agency had authority to collect signals intelligence (electronic intercepts also known as SIGINT). CIA wanted to continue its long-standing practice of collecting foreign communications, while NSA argued that gathering such SIGINT should be placed under NSA authority.
Also, NSA, which had quickly grown in power and prestige under Admiral Bobby Inman, had gotten into the habit of withholding raw SIGINT from CIA—instead, feeding CIA NSA’s sanitized and summarized interpretation of the raw intelligence—on grounds that revealing raw SIGINT would compromise NSA’s covert sources and methods.1 NSA had also been resisting CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner’s play with President Carter to take direct control of NSA on the grounds that the director of central intelligence was the titular head of the entire intelligence community.2
In U.S. national security circles, the bitter feud between NSA’s Inman and CIA’s Turner was dubbed “the war of admirals.”3
But Hathaway was not nearly as allergic to NSA as others at CIA and was truly desperate, and it was unlikely that anyone from the DO—or CIA writ large—could solve his life-or-death problem.
Which truly was a life-or-death crisis. The previous year, the KGB—Russia’s formidable intelligence service—had arrested two CIA assets in Moscow. One asset, a Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs staffer named Aleksandr Ogorodnik, had committed suicide during his interrogation at Lubyanka prison with the cyanide “L pill” his CIA case officer, Martha Peterson, had supplied him,4 while the other asset, Colonel Anatoly Filatov of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), had just been sentenced to death after being caught handing over state secrets to CIA case officer Vincent Crockett.5
Both Peterson and Crockett had been arrested and then “PNG’d” (declared persona non grata) and booted out of Russia shortly after their respective assets had been “rolled up.”
According to a source familiar with Hathaway’s thinking in early 1978, Hathaway was also concerned about compromises that had led directly to execution of U.S. assets.
For certain, there was a leak—or leaks—in the ultratight security that protected the identities of case officers and their assets.
But where?
Perhaps a mole at Langley (CIA headquarters) was tipping off the KGB about identities of case officers and their Soviet assets. Such horrors did occur—if rarely—such as when senior British intelligence official and KGB asset Kim Philby betrayed numerous assets of Her Majesty’s Secret Service to the Soviets.
Or maybe the KGB was intercepting and deciphering encrypted communications somewhere between Langley and Moscow Station.
Flawed espionage tradecraft by DO case officers was another troubling possibility. Had Peterson or Crockett, for instance, failed to run countersurveillance routes (elaborate street maneuvers designed to confuse and shake off KGB tails) properly before executing brush passes or servicing dead drops (covert means of exchanging information with assets)?
Peterson and Crockett both vehemently denied making any such mistakes, but even elite DO case officers were, at the end of the day, human and therefore prone to committing errors every now and then.
Martha Peterson, for instance, was not only a novice but the very first female case officer assigned to Moscow.6 Hathaway was an old-school gentleman from southern Virginia who did not like involving women in the dangerous, manly, meticulous work of the DO. He’d made his views known, but to no avail, as his masters at Langley, concerned about the safety of Ogorodnik, had hoped that a female case officer would escape KGB suspicion.
That ploy had obviously failed. But despite Hathaway’s misgivings about female case officers there was no evidence, that Peterson—or Crockett, for that matter—had screwed up. Which raised yet another possibility: the KGB might have compromised security at the Moscow embassy itself.
Of all the possible sources of leakage, the embassy seemed like the best bet.
First and foremost, the facility was in the heart of Moscow, where the KGB could bring every tool in its vast espionage arsenal to bear. A large number of embassy staffers—including guards, switchboard operators, travel coordinators, cooks, maids, and drivers—were Soviet citizens who were guaranteed to be either KGB informants or outright KGB officers. Although CIA officers knew how to behave around such obvious threats, the same could not be said of State Department diplomats. State employees—whose job, after all, was to mingle with Russians in order to collect and exchange information to improve relations between America and Russia—were not all that security conscious and had a well-deserved reputation for being “information sieves.”
Yes, diplomats, with the occasional exception of the ambassador himself, were not privy to the identities of CIA’s human assets. But senior diplomats, such as the ambassador and deputy chief of mission (DCM), did know which of their employees actually worked for CIA. A careless word from a diplomat in the wrong place at the wrong time could tip off the KGB about a case officer’s true function at the embassy and ultimately lead to the unmasking of that case officer’s assets.
Ambassador Malcolm Toon, for instance, who knew Martha Peterson’s real job and had made a comment while riding in the embassy’s unsecured elevator the year before, clearly acknowledged that Peterson was CIA. The elevator, like most of the embassy outside of highly secured areas on the top three floors, which were constantly swept for surveillance devices, was probably bugged. State Department staffers often had dangerously cavalier attitudes about such bugging. The current number-two diplomat in Moscow, for instance, DCM Jack Matlock, frequently said of the presumed embassy bugs, “If they [the Soviets] want my opinion, they’re welcome to it.”7
In other words, KGB bugging of the embassy was an accepted fact of life. A decade earlier, more than one hundred microphones had been discovered behind radiators in the chancery.8 And even before the United States moved into its current embassy in 1953, numerous electronic surveillance devices had been discovered in Spaso House, the de facto embassy and U.S. ambassador’s residence as early as the 1930s.9 U.S. ambassador Joseph Davies’s wife said in 1936, for example, “We found them [microphones] in the fireplaces, we found them in the little vents, in the inner walls.”10 Then, in 1951, a truly ingenious listening device called “the Thing” had been discovered in a wooden Great Seal of the United States in Ambassador Kirk’s office, a gift to the ambassador from a troop of Russian girls.
The Thing, a carefully machined acoustic cavity attached to a special antenna, consumed no electrical power whatsoever but reflected radio waves that the Soviets beamed at the embassy in such a way that voices, even at a whisper, could be clearly picked up at a nearby Russian intelligence listening post.11
That such sophisticated tradecraft was way beyond CIA’s own surveillance technology was deeply troubling in 1951 and even more troubling in 1978, because the KGB continued to beam radio waves—in the form of microwaves—at the upper, highly sensitive floors of the embassy that housed both the ambassador’s office and offices of CIA and other U.S. intelligence services.
Although the original function of radio frequency (RF) reflections off the Thing had been discovered, the current purpose of the microwave bombardment, alternately called TUMS (the unidentified Moscow signal) or MUTS (Moscow unidentified technical signal), was, as the “unidentified” term in TUMS and MUTS implied, a mystery, at least to CIA and State Department surveillance countermeasures technologists.12
To Hathaway, it was unacceptable that CIA and State Department technologists did not understand what the microwaves were about. Why would the KGB devote considerable resources to continuing the microwave attacks if they were not yielding productive intelligence in some way, especially after one U.S. ambassador to Russia, Walter Stoessel, had complained so bitterly to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the health hazards of the microwave radiation a few years before? Stoessel, a leukemia victim, suspected that his disease, and the ailments of other embassy staffers, were directly attributed to the microwaves.13
But despite the diplomatic problems the microwave radiation caused for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the United States, the KGB persisted with their mysterious bombardment.
Why? And were the microwaves somehow responsible for the devastating leaks?
As if the constant, mysterious microwave bombardment weren’t troubling enough, there was the baffling case of “the chimney to nowhere” to keep Hathaway up at night.
In the summer of 1977, a secretary for the State Department’s Regional Security Office (RSO), which maintained security in portions of the embassy that were the State Department’s responsibility (not including CIA’s or NSA’s spaces on the top floors), started hearing strange scraping noises in a chimney outside her apartment on the fifth floor of the south annex of the embassy. Worried that birds might have somehow flown into and gotten trapped inside the chimney, and concerned for the animals’ welfare, the secretary, GH, had asked the Marine guards at the embassy to investigate.
When the Marines aimed their flashlights down the shaft from the roof, they couldn’t see very far into the gloom but heard no sign of trapped birds or any other animals.
But the soldiers did discover, while attempting to find a fireplace from which to look up the chimney shaft, that no fireplaces anywhere in the south annex fed into the long chimney shaft that hugged the west outer wall of the annex.
The chimney shaft, it turned out, wasn’t a chimney at all but a vacant space that had been built by the Russians before the Americans took possession of the building in 1953, for some other purpose. Was that purpose to house a covert KGB observation or listening post? Were the mysterious scraping noises made by Soviet surveillance technicians installing or moving around microphones of some kind?
With the Soviets’ forty-year history of eavesdropping on embassy conversations, it was a reasonable assumption that the Russians had not constructed the so-called chimney simply as an architectural ornament.
Thus, when Hathaway learned of the non-chimney chimney, he asked CIA technology operations (TOPS) officer NP to take his State Department counterpart, RSO officer FB, aside in the open courtyard behind the embassy—away from KGB microphones—to quietly suggest that the RSO break into the brick shaft to see what security threats it might house.
Although the apartments adjoining the false chimney contained no sensitive operations—apart from the private lives of embassy staffers—there was some urgency to NP’s request because GH’s apartment was soon to be converted into a top-secret secure space.
Unfortunately, in August of 1977, just as RSO was arranging to bring in a crew of Seabees from Frankfurt, Germany, to get into the chimney, a fire broke out on the embassy’s eighth floor.
In addition to destroying much of the embassy’s sensitive spaces on the upper floors, the devastating fire caused RSO to postpone their chimney investigation, as more urgent issues, such as determining the cause of the fire and rebuilding destroyed portions of the building, occupied their attention.14
Hathaway and others at the embassy put a high priority on discovering the cause of the blaze, because the timing of the fire, coming right after RSO had set in motion an investigation of the chimney, was suspicious. It was entirely possible that the KGB, either through one of their hundred-plus employees or informants in the embassy, or bugs in State Department spaces, had learned of RSO’s plans to investigate the chimney.
Moreover, the presence of KGB agents—wearing clean, brand-new fire gear—among the ranks of legitimate Moscow firefighters who fought the blaze (some of whom even offered Hathaway oxygen) also suggested the Russians may have caused the fire, especially considering that KGB “firefighters” had broken into—and in some cases, stolen—classified information in State Department offices.15 Although Soviet citizens weren’t supposed to have access to the eighth floor where the fire erupted, both CIA’s TOPS and State Department’s RSO officers knew that the Soviets had several ingenious ways of remotely igniting such a conflagration. For instance, when the Soviets wanted to harass Americans in the embassy, they sometimes created overvoltages on the external power lines feeding the embassy, blowing out electronic equipment in the embassy, melting electronic equipment, and generating acrid smoke.
When, months after the fire, U.S. fire investigators ultimately discovered that a frayed electrical cord on the eighth floor had ignited the blaze,16 the KGB-triggered overvoltage theory took on more weight, because the electrical cord in question had old-style flammable cloth insulation instead of the more fire-resistant rubber or plastic insulation that Americans used in modern construction.
(The final conclusion of the months-long fire investigation was that the fire started accidentally, but KGB defector Victor Sheymov testified before the U.S. Congress in 1998 that the KGB had, in fact, intentionally caused the fire.17)
But on the positive side, if the fire had indeed been a smoke screen, as it were, to protect KGB secrets in the chimney, that clearly suggested the chimney might hold a clue to the recent rash of asset roll-ups and case officer PNGs.
In order to keep CIA assets alive and his case officers safe, Hathaway had to know what was in that false chimney, so, in early 1978, he pushed RSO to restart the chimney investigation as soon as fire repairs would allow.
But there was another urgent reason Hathaway needed to solve the chimney mystery, get to the bottom of the microwave threat, and to generally button up embassy security: Admiral Stansfield Turner, CIA’s new director, had, as a result of the recent intelligence compromises in Moscow, shut down all human intelligence (HUMINT) operations in Russia the year before as being too risky.18
Many officers in the DO thought Turner was a real piece of work and a real pain in the ass. A U.S. Naval Academy classmate of the current president, Jimmy Carter, Turner was a career military officer with no intelligence experience whatsoever, who favored technical intelligence collection from overhead (spy satellite imagery, called IMINT) and NSA SIGINT over HUMINT. Turner was smitten by high-tech gadgets and mistrusted the dirty business of human espionage as inherently fraught with messy ethical and moral dilemmas.19
President Carter had campaigned in 1976 on a promise to restore trust in government after the Watergate scandal and revelations of CIA’s occasional practice of opening American citizens’ mail and assassinating (or attempting to assassinate) foreign leaders. Turner understood that part of his job was to restore ethics and morals to CIA clandestine operations.20
Not an easy task with espionage, which routinely involved emotionally manipulating Russian nationals to betray their country and to risk both their lives and those of their closest relatives. Just how do you persuade, cajole, bribe, or even seduce people (and CIA has done that, with Anatoly Filatov) ethically?
Easier to rely on spy satellites, communication intercepts, and other morally pure technical means than to dirty your hands with messy HUMINT, where people can, and do, get killed.
Acting on his disdain for HUMINT, Turner had instigated the Halloween Massacre on October 31, 1977, abruptly dismissing over two hundred DO officers as unnecessary after the conclusion of the war in Vietnam.21
Hathaway, like other case officers, wasn’t pleased with the massacre and was unhappy that HUMINT operations on his turf had been curtailed.
Hathaway was a cold warrior from way back who believed that HUMINT against the Soviet target was essential. An army veteran who had been wounded in the leg and awarded a Purple Heart while serving in France and Germany during World War II, Hathaway went right into CIA in its third year of existence after graduating from the University of Virginia in 1950. Stints as a case officer in Frankfurt, Berlin, and most recently South America had taught him that some kinds of intelligence simply couldn’t be gathered through technical means.22 Hard intelligence targets—such as Soviet officials, for instance, who’d grown up under the tyranny of Stalin and took security extremely seriously—rarely made mistakes that would allow SIGINT or IMINT to capture their deepest secrets. The really good stuff, such as what policies the ruling Soviet politburo had just approved or what new technical capabilities Soviet fighter planes were slated to get, was best obtained, in most case officers’ opinions, through HUMINT.
The Moscow Station chief was also not nearly as risk averse as his ultimate boss, Admiral Turner.
The previous month, when a soon-to-be-released book by Ed Epstein provided enough details about an American asset in Moscow named Aleksey Isidorovich Kulak (codenamed Fedora), CIA feared for the asset’s safety. After several attempts to evade surveillance, Hathaway dressed up as his secretary and was able to securely phone Kulak to warn him.23
Before that, during the suspicious embassy fire the previous August, Hathaway had disobeyed direct orders from Ambassador Toon to evacuate and had planted himself outside CIA’s seventh-floor offices to discourage KGB officers, who were masquerading as firefighters, from entering his sanctum sanctorum.24
Hathaway’s bravery that night earned him the prestigious Intelligence Star medal along with the undying admiration of his colleagues in the DO.25
Some things, Hathaway had shown, were worth taking extreme risks to achieve.
And one of those things had definitely presented itself early the previous year—and could turn into an immense intelligence gold mine, if only Hathaway could persuade risk-averse Turner to turn HUMINT operations back on in Moscow.
The potential gold mine was a mysterious Soviet citizen who had approached Robert Fulton, Hathaway’s predecessor as Moscow Station chief, while he was getting gas in January 1977. The citizen asked Fulton if he were an American, then, after the chief said yes, dropped a note on the seat of Fulton’s car. The note, written in Russian, suggested a meeting to discuss “confidential matters” with “the appropriate American official.” The note also included suggestions for a place where a secret follow-up meeting could take place.26
Although Fulton was intrigued, he did not respond to the volunteer’s first overture, because the KGB was notorious for offering up “dangles” and double agents who professed to have access to juicy secrets, but whose real objective was to feed CIA false information or to learn the types of intelligence needs CIA had at the top of its list when CIA asked the dangle to collect a particular piece of intelligence.
In the convoluted logic of intelligence, using dangles and doubles to get a clear picture of what an adversary such as CIA didn’t know but wanted to know was incredibly useful for two reasons.
First, if an enemy such as America desperately wanted to learn the capabilities of a particular Soviet weapon, it meant that the enemy didn’t know what the weapon could do. So if a war with America or its allies ever broke out, Soviet military planners might be able to surprise the American military with the capabilities of that weapon, such as the weapon’s operating range or lethality.
Second, if CIA did not ask a double agent or dangle for a particular piece of information, say, about a Soviet weapon system, this lack of curiosity suggested that the Americans already knew what they needed to know about it … which in turn hinted that CIA had a Soviet asset who was feeding them that information. Thus, when CIA chose not to ask a dangle for specific information, the KGB would sometimes launch a counterintelligence investigation to explore the reasons for CIA’s lack of curiosity. Or, if the KGB already suspected that classified information was leaking out of some sensitive Soviet operation, such as their strategic rocket forces, they might create a dangle purporting to work in that operation in order to learn if CIA were curiously uncurious about what was going on in the suspect organization.
Fulton also knew that Soviet dangles and doubles helped the KGB learn more about American espionage tradecraft. If CIA should take the bait and accept a KGB-inspired “walk-in” as genuine, they would train that volunteer in covert communication, use of special equipment, countersurveillance techniques, photography, and so forth, thereby showing the KGB how CIA assets operated, helping the KGB spot and apprehend real CIA assets.
In addition, CIA case officers in Moscow were aware that fake walkins could unmask which Americans at the Moscow embassy were actually CIA officers, should CIA decide to accept the dangle. Equipped with this information, the Soviets could surveil that officer in order to unravel his connections to any Soviet “traitors” he had recruited. Entrapping a CIA case officer with a dangle also allowed the Soviets to score propaganda points by arresting and expelling the officer, while publicizing that imperialist spies were constantly trying to undermine the socialist revolution.
For all these reasons, Fulton ignored three more attempts by the volunteer, who refused to identify himself for many months out of fear of exposure.27
However, in December 1977, the enigmatic volunteer included two typewritten pages of highly classified technical information about Soviet airborne radar systems, so the newly arrived chief of station, Gus Hathaway, asked CIA headquarters for permission to engage the anonymous Soviet.
Despite the promising nature of the technical material the Russian had provided with his last request to meet, CIA headquarters ultimately denied Hathaway permission to proceed further with the potential asset, on grounds that the stranger’s overture could be a deliberate KGB “provocation.” Also, Admiral Turner’s order to halt all HUMINT operations in Russia was still in force.
But Hathaway got a break when the air attaché at the embassy pointed out the importance of this kind of information for the U.S. Department of Defense, which eventually made CIA headquarters consider engaging the anonymous Soviet walk-in.28
Here is the declassified CIA account of what happened next:
On 16 February 1978, the volunteer approached Hathaway and his wife at their car on the street after work and passed another note containing additional intelligence information. He wrote that he seemed to be caught in a vicious circle: “I’m afraid for security reasons to put down on paper much about myself, and, without this information, for security reasons you are afraid to contact me, fearing a provocation.” He then suggested a secure way to pass key identifying data on himself. In his note, he provided all but two of the digits in his phone number. He instructed the recipient of the note that at a certain time at a certain bus stop he would be standing in line holding two pieces of plywood, each with a single number on it. These would be the last two digits in his phone number. At the indicated time, Hathaway’s wife drove past the bus stop in question, recognized the volunteer holding the two pieces of plywood, and recorded the numbers.
Hathaway immediately sent a cable to CIA headquarters pushing for a positive response to the volunteer. This time, headquarters concurred. On 26 February, after careful planning, John Guilsher, a case officer fluent in Russian, conducted a lengthy surveillance-detection run to determine that he was free of any Soviet surveillance and then called the volunteer’s home phone from a public phone booth. The volunteer’s wife answered the call, however, forcing Guilsher to break off the conversation. Guilsher repeated this exercise on 28 February, with the same lack of success.
On 1 March 1978, [the volunteer] again approached Hathaway and his wife on the street after work. This time, he passed 11 pages of handwritten materials, the bulk of which was detailed intelligence on Soviet R&D efforts in the military aircraft field. In this note, [the volunteer] finally identified himself fully, providing his name, address, exact employment, and a great deal of personal background information. He noted that he had spent “hours and hours roaming the streets in search of [U.S.] diplomatic cars,” and, having found one, had returned “tens of times” without passing anything, because of unfavorable conditions. He said that he was now almost desperate for a positive response to his efforts, and, if he did not get one this time, he would give up.29
The walk-in had identified himself as Adolf Tolkachev, senior engineer at a Ministry of Defense R&D organization called Phazotron, where advanced Soviet airborne radars were designed. It later emerged that Tolkachev had become bitter about the Soviet system, partly due to the arrest and execution of his wife’s parents under Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s, and had resolved to help take down the Communist regime that he served.30
Despite CIA headquarters’ new openness to the possibility of working with Tolkachev, whose access to highly coveted intelligence seemed phenomenal, Hathaway knew that Admiral Turner had not formally lifted his ban on HUMINT operations and might still allow the Tolkachev opportunity to slip through Hathaway’s fingers.
It was essential that Turner’s confidence in Moscow Station’s ability to operate without leaks be restored and formal approval for the Tolkachev operation be given as soon as possible. Otherwise, in Tolkachev’s own words, he would “give up.”
But this urgent imperative put Hathaway in a tough spot.
Tightening up security at the embassy was the most likely way to plug the leaks that had compromised other assets over the past year, but CIA’s own technical security experts at the embassy, along with those from the State Department who had formal authority over embassy security, couldn’t tell Hathaway how embassy security might have been breached … by the mysterious microwave bombardment, for example.
Worse, those same State and CIA security officers argued that their frequent bug sweeps and inspections guaranteed that there was no security problem at the embassy.
An illogical assertion considering that State and CIA security officers admitted they didn’t really know the purpose of the microwave bombardment or the false chimney.
Based upon Hathaway’s entreaties to turn HUMINT back on in Moscow and to let him run Tolkachev, Turner planned to send Rusty Williams, “a Navy man he trusted,” to Moscow to assess and report back on the security situation there. It was vital, Hathaway believed, that Williams give Moscow Station a passing grade so that Turner would let him operate Tolkachev.31
What Hathaway needed in the worst possible way, before Williams arrived to do his assessment, was a technical expert who did have a good idea how the Soviets might have breached embassy security, and Hathaway knew of such a person.
For the last decade, an NSA engineer named Charles Gandy had been making the rounds at CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies, trying to raise awareness about the potent and dangerous threat posed by advanced KGB surveillance tradecraft.
Some at CIA regarded Gandy as a quixotic figure, who persisted year after year in presenting a long, highly technical, highly classified slideshow describing how, for example, microwave bombardment could allow the KGB to breach otherwise tight security.
Several CIA officers told Gandy to his face that his technologies were just a modern form of snake oil, and he acquired the moniker “snake oil salesman” at CIA’s DS&T.
Still others at Langley headquarters wondered if Gandy—a career NSAer, after all—was purposely feeding CIA bogus information in order to sucker them into ill-considered operations that would damage CIA’s reputation and elevate NSA’s own stature in the intelligence world.
But because CIA’s and the State Department’s relatively primitive countermeasure equipment at the time could detect no evidence of Russian snooping, most at CIA—based on the evidence of their equipment—regarded Gandy’s warnings as simply Chicken Little stuff. Pure science fiction. There was no way, CIA believed, the technologically backward Russians had a prayer of conducting the kinds of ultrasophisticated attacks that Gandy warned of.
In his memoir of his tenure as CIA director, Secrecy and Democracy, Admiral Turner summarized the CIA’s view of security experts such as Gandy this way:
The experts tend to see a bug under every table. Given their way, they would prescribe defensive measures that would make it impossible to carry on the business of Government.32
But Hathaway had sat in on one of Gandy’s talks a few years earlier and had found his fellow Southerner to be persuasive and credible. If anyone could get to the bottom of possible leaks at the embassy, Gandy could.
True, Gandy worked for NSA, and yes, Hathaway’s buddies at the DO and CIA leadership on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters wouldn’t like bringing in an outsider to solve an ultrasensitive HUMINT operational problem.
But the tantalizing Tolkachev opportunity, and all future HUMINT operations in Russia, hung in the balance, including the lives of future Russian assets.
