The KGB colonel had settled into something of a routine, and the debriefings had eased into the steady pace known in the trade as “counterintelligence production.” Yurchenko was living up to his early promise. The flurry of activity over his identification of Edward Lee Howard as a probable KGB agent had calmed after the FBI was finally brought in on the case. Though the bureau had still not arrested—or even interviewed—the troubled former CIA officer, he was now under surveillance.
The second KGB agent Yurchenko had mentioned, an NSA employee who had volunteered to the KGB in Washington in 1980, was still unidentified. But it was clear that the NSA source had betrayed the U.S. Navy’s supersensitive undersea cable tap of Soviet submarine command communications—Operation Ivy Bells, an enormously expensive operation. The revelation that Ivy Bells had been compromised prompted an intensive and exhaustive effort to find the spy. Yurchenko underwent a series of debriefings and also pored through mug books of NSA employees in order to help. He’d been in on the initial meeting with the NSA volunteer—he thought it had taken place between 1977 and 1979—and had helped smuggle the man out of the Soviet embassy disguised as a Soviet worker after shaving his beard. But he still hadn’t seen his photo in any of the mug books.
Meanwhile, Yurchenko had backpedaled from his initial reporting on Navy chief Thomas Hayden, the supposed American spy he’d met on a secluded beach south of Rome. He was now telling his debriefers that he had known Hayden was a provocation all along. Sensing the CIA’s lack of urgency in pursuing the lead, he concluded, correctly, that Hayden had been a dangle. Yurchenko shifted gears smoothly and began saying he had smelled a bad operation even before he left Moscow. But, he explained to his debriefers, he had needed a reason to travel out of the Soviet Union. The loss of the John Walker spy ring, and the possibility that Hayden represented a replacement for Walker, meant that the Soviets couldn’t pass up the Navy communications specialist. He shrugged off as a joke his earlier admonition to the FBI not to shoot Hayden, whom he described as a dangerous spy but still a good man.
The debriefings eventually moved away from the CIA’s immediate interest in identifying American traitors and shifted into the esoteric world of KGB counterintelligence efforts in Moscow. Yurchenko then began to talk about the chemicals that the KGB used to try to track CIA officers in Moscow.
Since the late 1950s, the CIA had known that KGB technical laboratories had been developing a variety of synthesized chemical agents that would enable them to track CIA officers and their Soviet agents inside the USSR. The stories ranged from the ingenious to the ribald, including rumors of KGB experiments with chemical substances—pheromones—associated with female dogs in heat. The procedure was simple. The KGB sprayed the pheromones where they might be transferred to a Moscow case officer’s shoes—the floor mats of a car, for example. When the case officer was known to have “gone operational,” the KGB would set male dogs on his trail. Bingo! One had no difficulty conjuring the image of the hapless CIA case officer in Gorky Park with a pack of amorous hounds in ardent pursuit.
Stories of KGB tracking techniques had come from a variety of sources and defectors, and in the early 1980s one CIA case officer, a young woman assigned to Leningrad, had found the inside of her gloves coated with a yellowish chemical. A year after the Leningrad discovery, CIA covertly received another sample of the chemical substance directly from GTCOWL—the anonymous KGB officer in Moscow who had handed over a sample of the substance to his Moscow case officer. COWL had warned that the KGB was using the substance to “keep track of your people.”
Laboratory tests of the glove from the female officer in Leningrad had revealed the presence of a compound identified as nitrophenylpentadienal, NPPD for short. The second sample, provided by COWL, was also the odorless organic compound NPPD. U.S. government scientists examining the chemical could find no NPPD in lists of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals. A review of journals by the American Chemical Society turned up seven articles on NPPD and related compounds, six of which had been written by Soviet scientists. Using a screening method developed by Bruce Ames, a Berkeley biochemist, researchers determined that NPPD could be mutagenic—that is, if absorbed by humans in an unaltered form, it could cause alterations in cell structure. In humans, mutagens can be carcinogenic but are not always so. But the early tests set off alarm bells at the CIA.
By the time Yurchenko confirmed the use of tracking agents, the CIA was facing a growing problem. At what point would the agency have to tell its employees, the State Department, and the rest of the world what it knew about NPPD? By the third week of August 1985, it was clear that the time for hedging on NPPD had run out. Gerber assigned me the task of coordinating how the CIA should go public with its concerns about NPPD, now known within the agency as “spy dust.”
Moscow, 1830 Hours, August 21, 1985
I was sitting alone at the back of the auditorium in Spaso House, the prerevolution mansion that served as the residence of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. The American community of Moscow had gathered for a briefing by a State Department team on the potential health effects of spy dust, a subject of intense controversy in the international media over the last few days. James Brodine, a State Department medical officer, was on the stage explaining to a skeptical audience that it had been known for some time that the Soviets were employing chemical agents. Until recently, the United States believed the Soviets used them only sporadically. But during the spring and summer of 1985, Brodine explained, the Soviets had apparently increased their use. What’s more, recent laboratory tests had tentatively classified the spy dust as a mutagenic compound, prompting the State Department to inform the American community about it and to protest its use to the Soviet authorities.
The reaction in the Spaso House auditorium was a mixture of resignation and irritation. Embassy employees had little comment; there was nothing new about aggressive Soviet actions against U.S. personnel in Moscow. Some in the audience remembered how the KGB had flooded the U.S. embassy with microwave transmissions, for reasons that were never completely clear. At least a few Americans were still being monitored for possible long-term health effects from the exposure.
But the press corps was more alarmed, and American reporters based in Moscow began to grill Brodine about the health threats stemming from the spy dust. Their questions suggested that they felt like innocent victims in a U.S.-Soviet spy game.
As Brodine fielded questions from reporters, the CIA’s Moscow chief took a seat in the empty row behind me. “Welcome to Moscow,” he said quietly.
I glanced over my shoulder and nodded without comment. Both of us listened as Brodine and other members of the team tried to maintain a delicate balance between their duty to alert the assembled Americans to a potential health hazard and the need to avoid generating panic. Mutagens, Brodine explained, are not always carcinogenic and include some of the most common compounds people expose themselves to on a daily basis, such as coffee. The team ended its formal presentation with the announcement that an expanded technical team from Washington would arrive in Moscow within days to begin collecting environmental samples in the homes, offices, and automobiles of all Americans wishing to be sampled, including private citizens residing in Moscow.
As the crowd filed out of the auditorium, the CIA officer fell in step with me long enough to whisper a brief message. “Nine o’clock tomorrow at Post One. You’ll be met.”
The next morning, I sat with the Moscow chief in the cramped quarters of the “yellow submarine,” the custom-built enclosure that served as the CIA work area. It was a three-hundred-square-foot, hermetically sealed metallic box floating on cushions of air with a self-contained power supply. No electronic devices were allowed inside. Even manual typewriters had been forbidden, ever since a successful KGB attack on thirteen IBM Selectric typewriters in the Moscow embassy. In an ingenious operation discovered by the CIA in 1984, the KGB had managed to place the typewriters in secure areas of the embassy used by State Dep
artment personnel. The typewriters had fallen into Soviet hands while being shipped to the U.S. embassy, and tiny transmitters had been installed by the KGB, sending every word typed on the machines to a KGB electronic listening post outside the embassy. Typewriters used in the CIA area had not been compromised, but Burton Gerber didn’t want to take any chances.
Even inside the secure enclosure, we spoke in whispers and half sentences as we discussed the anomalies Moscow had been experiencing over the past year. In the midst of our conversation, he paused and wrote out a message on a single sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad. He pushed it across to me.
“Sometimes I think they’re in here with me,” the note read.
I took his pencil and scribbled out a reply: “How long?”
“All of 1985.”
I left Moscow the next day.
11
Santa Fe, New Mexico, August 25, 1985
Edward Lee Howard had been trained to spot surveillance in the CIA’s operational pressure cooker—the Internal Operations course—and by the end of August he was convinced he was being followed. Howard began to notice every jogger and repairman on his isolated street. He was convinced that he had been tracked by a circling aircraft while driving into the desert.
Howard was right that he was being followed, but he was also seeing ghosts, believing the surveillance to be far more extensive than it was. Of course, he had good reason to be paranoid. Howard knew this was not a game. It wasn’t going to end in a friendly after-action critique. He began to review his options.
Lisbon, 1630 Hours, August 27, 1985
Like most of the CIA’s clandestine meetings with GRU Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Smetanin, this one was rushed. Smetanin had called the out-of-sequence meeting on the outskirts of Lisbon to advise his CIA case officer that he had been asked to begin his home leave in the next two days, so he could be back on the job in Lisbon in late September. As the meeting ended, it was agreed that the next scheduled meeting would take place on October 4, at another prearranged meeting site on the outskirts of Lisbon. Smetanin told his case officer he didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary about the accelerated vacation schedule. In fact, he and his wife were looking forward to getting back to Moscow and taking care of personal matters, including their purchase of an apartment.
CIA Headquarters, 1530 Hours, August 27, 1985
“He’s been compromised.” Paul Redmond was matter-of-fact as he read the Lisbon cable in my office.
“What makes you think that?” I asked, looking for some sign of bad news in the routine cable from Portugal advising that GTMILLION was returning to Moscow early on home leave.
“I just know. It’s like Bokhan.”
“How’d he get compromised?” I was trying to understand whether Redmond actually knew something or his darkening view of counterintelligence had taken over.
“Somebody told them about him. Maybe someone in here.”
“You think the problem’s in here?” I waved my hand to indicate the inner sanctum of SE Division.
Redmond nodded. “Either they’re reading our cables or they’ve got someone talking to them. One or the other. Take your choice.”
“What can we do about MILLION?”
“It’s too late. He’s gone. I’m just saying we’ll never see him again, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. I’ll be happy if I’m wrong. But I’m not.”
Redmond left my office, and then, under the watchful eye of Gerber’s secretary, I went to Gerber’s four-drawer safe in his outer office and retrieved a small two-ring notebook with a thick red stripe running diagonally across the black cover. I was one of five people in the division with access to the notebook, which contained the case histories of all SE Division operations going back more than a dozen years. Turning to the page for GTMILLION, I found in cold summary language the story of Gennady Smetanin.
In 1983, GRU officer Gennady Smetanin had secretly sent a letter to an officer in the Defense Attaché’s office of the U.S. embassy in Lisbon. Smetanin offered his services to American intelligence, in return for which he said he would expect certain considerations. If there was interest, he wrote, a personal ad should be placed in a certain Lisbon paper. I flipped the page but couldn’t find the language of the ad in the summary.
The CIA chief in Lisbon reported that same day that he was convinced the volunteer was a provocation. He suggested that the package from Smetanin be turned over to Portuguese counterintelligence. But the SE Division chief at the time was a survivor of the Angleton era and had fought such paranoid fears throughout his entire career. He strongly believed that if CIA officers didn’t pursue potential recruits, there was no reason for them to be in the field. He sent a cable back to Lisbon not to do anything until they received instructions from SE Division on how to handle the volunteer.
In the summary of the operation in the notebook, there were references to the first clandestine meetings with Smetanin. He said he had stolen almost $400,000 from his GRU Rezidentura and needed immediate help in replacing it before an upcoming audit that could expose him. He said that was why he had approached the Americans.
My eyes ran to the next entry in the notebook, one summarizing a grueling polygraph examination that had been administered to Smetanin in Lisbon. It showed that he had not been truthful about embezzling the funds. I recognized the name of the polygraph operator, an old German American professional most in the DO knew simply as “Hans.” During the interrogation, Smetanin had admitted to lying about the money. He figured the CIA would give him the money if they wanted the operation to continue. Smetanin was actually proud of the way he had handled his business dealings with the CIA. In the end, he got a good part of his money, and the CIA got its penetration of Soviet military intelligence.
As I returned the notebook to Gerber’s safe, I wondered if Redmond’s fears would mark the final entry for GTMILLION.
Back in my office, I took stock of what I had witnessed in my first five weeks as Gerber’s deputy in SE Division. By now the initial furor over Edward Howard’s betrayal had subsided. Though few discussed it openly, the outrage over Howard’s treachery was now mixed with an odd sense of relief. There was a feeling that Howard had never really been a member of the DO brotherhood; the system had culled him before he ever made it through the probationary period. To be sure, the rationalizations couldn’t bring back Adolf Tolkachev. But at least the integrity of the DO remained somehow intact, or so the thinking went.
Only Paul Redmond was having none of it.
Langley, 0815 Hours, September 16, 1985
Every time I laid eyes on the angular features of Rod Carlson, I saw the face of Abraham Lincoln. Carlson was chief of the SE Division’s counterintelligence group, a rail-thin man who had spent his career in operations against the Soviet Union. Carlson first traveled to the USSR as a student “legal traveler” under a CIA program in the late 1950s. He was a meticulous man, some thought humorless, who never displayed doubts about his life’s work against the USSR. Carlson was approaching the end of his career—he had announced plans to retire in a few months—and was planning to spend his time restoring old houses. His attention to detail would fit nicely with his new pursuit.
In Gerber’s office, Carlson briefed the SE chief, Redmond, and me on his meeting two nights earlier with a human penetration of the Washington Rezidentura, a KGB Line X officer responsible for scientific and technical intelligence in the United States. The Soviet agent was known as PIMENTA within the FBI and as GTGENTILE within the CIA.
“We met on Saturday night at a prearranged site near the walking path along the C and O Canal. The bureau provided countersurveillance. It was a clean meeting and lasted about eight minutes. The take on the Rezidentura’s activities since our last joint meeting was modest.” Carlson’s briefings were always dry and stuck to the essentials.
“At the end of the meeting, PIMENTA said that Androsov called the line chiefs separately over the last few days—he’d returne
d from Moscow earlier in the week—and briefed them on the gossip at Center. The biggest nugget was that Androsov said a First Directorate officer had been arrested unloading a dead drop in early August.” Carlson glanced down at his notes. “The officer was a little drunk at the time he was arrested . . . no name was given . . . Androsov told one of the line chiefs that would probably come later and that anyone who knew the man would be asked to write the usual report on him. Androsov said the arrest was the result of the vigilance of the Second Directorate.” Carlson paused and checked his notes again.
“Androsov made it clear it was the Second Directorate and the surveillance guys in the Seventh Directorate that caught the Americans putting the dead drop down about two weeks earlier. They ran a stake-out on the drop site until the guy came around to pick it up. The dead drop was loaded with rubles.”
“It’s WEIGH.” Gerber’s voice was soft, without drama.
“It’s WEIGH,” Paul Redmond said in agreement.
“What did he say, Rod?” Gerber asked. “The part about them catching the drop being loaded.”
Carlson repeated what PIMENTA had told him, that the American special services officer had been spotted by a surveillance team of the Seventh Directorate while laying down the dead drop, probably sometime in late July.
“It was the casuals under the bridge,” Gerber said.
Gerber had been worried ever since the July operation in Moscow, which called for Moscow to put down a rock loaded with cash for GTWEIGH in a field near a power pylon. In a follow-up report, the Moscow case officer who had left the rock had said he had seen “casuals”—men or women who seemed to be in the area on their own business—about two hundred yards from the dead drop site. The case officer had decided to go through with the operation despite the casuals, and Gerber had wondered ever since whether that had been the right decision. The casuals could have been part of a KGB surveillance team or Soviet citizens who reported what they saw to the KGB.
The Main Enemy Page 12