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.
Copyright © 2019 by Eric Haseltine
