Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  “Yeah, I know how it is.”

  “Would there be a way to arrange an appointment for our SAC [special agent in charge] to speak to you?” the agent persisted.

  “Sure, have him come by the embassy anytime,” Yakushkin said, smiling.

  “Well, actually, I was hoping for a less formal environment, if that would be okay.”

  “I don’t really think I’d be interested in that.”

  It was clear the conversation was going nowhere, so the agent decided to take a chance and make the offer on the spot. He offered Yakushkin $20 million to work for the U.S.

  “Young man, I appreciate the offer,” Yakushkin said. “If I were twenty years younger, I’d give it serious consideration.

  “It was nice meeting you,” the KGB officer said, then adjusted his beret and walked off toward the meat section to find his wife.

  It was a CIA officer assigned to the Foreign Resources Branch who first spotted the KGB officer later recruited by COURTSHIP in late 1982. The man was attending a professional conference in Washington. To the CIA officer, he seemed susceptible to recruitment. The CIA officer had a hunch that the man was more interested in American life than other KGB officers. For one thing, he spoke English better than others. He was also more eager to please the Americans he met than other Soviets. All reports of contacts by FR officers are seen by COURTSHIP, which decided to single him out for recruitment.

  Pretending to be a private consultant, a member of the COURTSHIP squad befriended the KGB officer, taking him to dinner and letting him know that he had access to military secrets. Once satisfied that the man would likely agree to work for the American side, the COURTSHIP officer revealed his true affiliation. For a number of years, squad members met with the KGB officer at least once a week.

  The meetings with the KGB officer were alternately held in two safe houses, both apartments in the Washington area. To give the KGB officer an alibi for taking time away from his regular duties, the squad passed him information obtained from a man who was in the defense consulting business. Acting as a double agent, the man pretended to work for the Soviets but really was working for COURTSHIP. Occasionally, the squad members let the KGB officer meet with the man himself. Anything the man told the KGB officer or the Soviets was cleared by the U.S. government first.

  The squad members instructed the KGB officer to engage in elaborate “dry cleaning”—driving into dead ends, speeding up to seventy miles per hour, then slowing to twenty miles per hour—before he met with them. They wanted to make sure he was not being followed. Because it is a precaution the man should have taken anyway in the normal course of his spy work, the “dry cleaning” would not raise any suspicions if the Soviets noticed it.

  Even before they asked him for any information, the squad members asked the KGB officer what he had been doing for the past several hours. They wanted to make sure he had protected himself. The next order of business was to agree on the location for the next meeting—one of the two safe houses rented just for meeting with the KGB man. Then the squad members debriefed him on the latest developments within the embassy and the KGB’s plans. Without his knowledge, the squad members videotaped the sessions, which lasted an hour to an hour and a half.

  To make sure he was genuine, the squad members asked the KGB officer a series of questions the answers to which they already knew. He passed with flying colors.

  It was the first recruitment of a KGB officer from the Soviet embassy in Washington. In the view of CIA and FBI officials, that one recruitment alone justified the existence of COURTSHIP.*

  The COURTSHIP squad paid the KGB officer $200 for each meeting, plus $1,000 a month placed directly in a special bank account in his name. Because the squad members were worried that the man would call attention to himself, they asked him near the beginning of each meeting what he had done with the money he’d previously received.

  Only a few months after the man had been recruited, an FBI squad succeeded in recruiting a second KGB officer within the embassy. Besides this source, the FBI had previously recruited a KGB officer assigned to the Soviet United Nations delegation in New York. With the help of the CIA, the FBI had also recruited another KGB officer assigned to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. However, the two recruitments in Washington were by far the most important.

  The KGB man recruited by COURTSHIP provided the CIA and FBI with a road map to how the KGB worked in Washington. He gave away identities and duties of KGB and GRU officers, biographical data on Soviet diplomats, and plans for recruiting Americans as spies. The KGB officer knew the locations of listening devices the KGB had planted and the details of how other electronic devices operated. For example, he revealed that the KGB supplies its agents with devices that propel themselves underwater. When they surface, they send coded messages in bursts to satellites for transmission to Moscow. They thus conceal the location of the agent using the transmitter.

  From the KGB officer, the CIA and FBI learned how the KGB protects itself just before its officers pick up classified documents from dead drops in tree stumps in the Washington area. A KGB officer drives around the area with a monitor that picks up FBI radio transmissions. If everything is safe, he switches on a green light visible through his windshield. If FBI transmissions are detected, he switches on a red light and the pickup is called off.

  The KGB officer revealed how the Soviets intercepted microwave calls to and from U.S. government offices from a secret listening post at Mount Alto, their new compound in Washington. Thanks to gross bureaucratic ineptitude, the State Department had allowed the Soviets to build the compound on the second-highest elevation in Washington.

  “They were trying to isolate CIA recruiting offices,” an American intelligence officer said. “They intercepted a call from someone in North Carolina who was calling a recruiting office. If the Soviets got their names and they showed up somewhere, they would conclude they are CIA. . . . The KGB officer said the Soviets targeted Langley, the White House, and State, but he never knew of anything good that came out.”

  According to the KGB officer, the KGB supplies its officers with a wish list of technology or other information it would like to obtain. The list ranges from plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars, to inside information on who would most likely win the next presidential election. The KGB officer relayed these lists to the COURTSHIP squad members. In addition, when he returned to Moscow periodically, the officer reported back on the latest changes in the leadership of the Soviet intelligence organization and the KGB’s plans worldwide.

  At one point, the KGB man handed over copies of the formal plans of the KGB in Washington for the next year, including specific plans to sow disinformation by distributing fraudulent documents.

  As an example of how the KGB worked, the officer related that KGB headquarters—known as the center—periodically sent a tasking document that instructed each officer to mention the same piece of information to every American with whom they met. The information might relate to Soviet plans for arms reduction talks, for example, or how many missiles the Soviets had.

  “So you had a hundred guys saying the same sentence. Everyone agrees it must be true. In fact, it’s a lie,” the KGB officer involved in the operation said.

  From the officer’s account, the squad gathered that the KGB was not having quite as much success as the FBI and CIA had thought. Often, KGB officers sent reports to Moscow claiming to have obtained secret information that they actually got from the newspapers.

  “One guy wrote a ten-page report on a conversation he allegedly had with Caspar Weinberger [when he was secretary of defense],” a former officer involved in the operation said. “Actually, all he did was shake his hand in a receiving line.”

  Understandably, there was much that the KGB man did not have access to. For example, he did not know of any recruitments of Americans in Washington, even though former Navy warrant officer John A. Walker, Jr., was then working for the Soviets there. But the in
formation he did provide enabled the CIA and FBI to anticipate KGB moves and, where possible, counteract the KGB’s schemes. He also identified Americans who were working for the Soviets but not necessarily providing them with classified information that would result in prosecution for espionage.

  It was a counterintelligence officer’s dream—to be able to find out from the inside what the opposition was planning to do before it did it.

  “We knew everything,” said an individual who read the material from the debriefings. “Stuff wouldn’t happen unless we knew about it.”

  The fact that the recruitment occurred in Washington, where numerous sensitive agencies are prime KGB targets, made it even more important. The recruitment is but one of hundreds of similar CIA successes, most of them still secret. In some cases, KGB officers recruited by the CIA have retired in place without their country’s ever knowing that for most of their careers, they were traitors. Nearly all of them were recruited not in Washington but in the CIA’s stations overseas.

  4

  Falling in Love

  THE CIA HAS STATIONS IN 130 COUNTRIES. THEY RANGE IN size from one-person stations in some African countries to sixty-person posts—including support employees—in such cities as Tokyo and Rome. About 15 percent of the CIA’s employees are stationed overseas.

  Depending on their size, CIA stations may have a chief of support, a finance officer, a communications officer, a logistics officer, and a personnel officer. Large stations may have branches that focus on internal political affairs, Soviet matters, terrorism, narcotics, nuclear weapons, and liaison with local intelligence and internal-security services.

  Through liaison, the CIA obtains information on people of interest to the agency. In exchange, the CIA usually gives the host country information it wants—perhaps the location of a fugitive. Besides providing useful intelligence, the CIA may supply the host intelligence service with funds to help it combat a local communist or terrorist problem. But the CIA plays it both ways. The agency recruits members of the local intelligence service to find out what that country is trying to do to penetrate or thwart the CIA, and to obtain other information the local security services do not want to share with the CIA. Often, the CIA’s liaison with local services is a pretext to enable CIA officers to get close to individuals in the local services and recruit them. In a reversal of that, Ghana recruited Sharon M. Scranage, a CIA support employee, to find out what the agency was doing in that country.

  The primary role of the stations is to recruit agents to tell the CIA what the host government is doing and to report on the activities of diplomats from other countries—such as the Soviet Union or Communist China—that are of interest to the CIA. Depending on how sensitive he or she is, a CIA officer may choose to receive information from an agent over lunch or in microfilm left in dead drops in tree stumps or holes in telephone poles. To further protect the agent, a seemingly chance encounter known as a brush pass may be arranged. The agent passes documents or film to a CIA officer inside a briefcase or some other article as they pass each other. Coded transmissions by radio or by satellite are commonly used. Laser beams aimed at office buildings are used to carry messages as well. The only way a laser communication can be intercepted is if a receiver is placed in the path of the laser beam.

  Since most have official cover, CIA officers must perform their normal State Department or military duties on weekdays and then carry out CIA operations evenings and weekends.

  “If you wanted to know who was CIA, look at the embassy sign-in log on Sunday. With the possible exception of the ambassador, only CIA people showed up on Sunday,” Herbert F. Saunders, a former CIA officer, said.

  The CIA officers are paid through the State Department or military, with funds secretly provided by the CIA. If a letter is sent to an undercover officer at Langley, it is returned. Likewise, the CIA switchboard operator, if asked, would say there is no listing for the employee.

  A CIA officer may fill any State Department position overseas except that of ambassador or deputy chief of mission, the second-in-command at an embassy. Thus when former CIA director Richard Helms became ambassador to Iran, he could not serve as a CIA officer. In practice, the rank of counselor—used for higher-ranking diplomats who are often in charge of a section—is never used either.

  CIA officers recruit agents the same way salesmen or lawyers go looking for business or journalists go looking for sources. If an officer in Mexico City, for example, is interested in recruiting a military officer, he might ask for recommendations from the U.S. military attachés stationed at the embassy, attend functions and conferences where military personnel show up, go to bars where they might hang out, and take advantage of other opportunities to meet the sort of person he is after. If an officer is interested in recruiting diplomats, he might attend diplomatic functions or go to diplomatic clubs, many of which were started by the CIA for that purpose.

  Once the officer has spotted a likely prospect, he cables CIA headquarters for “traces”—a search of CIA files for information on the person. Most of the information is stored in computers. He may also call for help from the Office of Technical Service, which provides the tools of the spy trade, such as radio transmitters and secret-writing papers.

  CIA headquarters may provide information on the individual’s interests, such as tennis, and the CIA officer may suggest that they play. Or the CIA officer may learn that the prospect has a health problem.

  In the case of a key Soviet ambassador in Africa, CIA officer Howard Bane knew that he had a heart problem. In the days when the machines were still new, Bane arranged to lend him an EKG machine. When it came time to pick up the machine, Bane picked it up himself. Then Bane made his pitch. He showed the ambassador a Time magazine article about some recent developments in treating heart problems in the U.S.

  “We could arrange for you to have all of this,” he said. “Nobody would know about it.”

  In this case, the pitch didn’t work, but often it does. After the CIA officer has struck up a friendship, he usually offers money to become a CIA agent and spy for the U.S. After each meeting with a “developmental”—an individual targeted for recruitment—or an agent already recruited, the CIA officer writes a contact report. It says where and when the meeting took place, whether any money was exchanged, whether documents were received, and what was discussed. Any security problems are also noted. A reports officer in the station decides if the contact report is worth sending to Washington.

  If the case officer believes he has learned valuable intelligence that should be relayed to Washington, he writes it up as an intelligence report. The reports officer decides how it is to be sent and to whom. When transmitted to Washington, the report has two parts. The first page includes the cryptonym of the source and is for internal CIA use only. Depending on the information it conveys, the rest of the report is sent to such other agencies as State, the FBI, or NSA within the intelligence community. It gives a general idea of the source of the information and an indication of his reliability. If the information in the report is extremely sensitive, the general description may be altered to further conceal the source.

  The real name of the agent is kept at the Mexico City station in a safe. Next to the agent’s name is a number. Another safe contains a list that links each number to a cryptonym. To find out the real name behind a cryptonym, an officer in Mexico City would have to have the combinations to both safes and match both lists, or he would have to obtain it from the agent’s case officer. Headquarters has his real name as well.

  Every report from Mexico City and each of the CIA’s 129 other stations carries an addressee line that gives its destination, followed by a slug line. The slug line directs the way the report is to be disseminated within the CIA and to outside agencies. One code means the report should not be disseminated to other agencies without first consulting the division responsible for that area of the world—in this case, Latin America.

  In nearly all cases, the material is t
ransmitted electronically and stored in computers. Each communication has a designated level of importance. The most important level is critic, followed by flash, immediate, priority, and routine. The first two designations, while rarely used, give a cable precedence over other cables and require immediate transmittal.

  Most intelligence reports go to the Directorate of Intelligence, which prepares estimates and other memos through the National Intelligence Council on the likely shape of future events in the world—the possibility that a given country will develop nuclear weapons or that Iraq will invade Kuwait. These go to the president, often in the President’s Daily Brief.

  The value of the reports from the stations is later graded by a reports staff within the appropriate area division at headquarters. In some cases, the grades are influenced by reactions of other agencies such as State or Defense that read the reports as well. Twenty is the best and ten is very good. A minus five means it should never have been sent. At the end of the month, each station gets a score. The more reports with high grades, the better the score for the station. Most operations officers think the average grades are meaningless.

  The Evaluation and Plans Staff within the Directorate of Operations assesses the effectiveness of the operations, keeps track of the money for budgeting purposes, and tries to assign dollar values to the information obtained after consulting with those who use it.

  Meanwhile, an elaborate financial accounting system keeps track of the money being spent by each station. The CIA has a rigid system of financial controls that has made theft and fraud rare. The most common form of fraud is when CIA officers claim they have paid a local agent and actually kept the money themselves. While agents are required to sign receipts, it is easy to forge such documents. Yet CIA officers in Vietnam routinely paid out $100,000 in cash each month to local officials to distribute to their men, and there were few allegations of internal theft.

  “I think that the CIA has the tightest control over every dollar spent of any government agency,” Dr. John M. Clarke, a former comptroller and associate deputy director of the CIA, said. “While attending the Harvard Advanced Management Program, I had occasion to compare the financial practices of fifty of America’s largest corporations and financial firms. None had tighter controls than the CIA. That isn’t to say an agent in the field never stole any money. The auditors in the finance department uncovered fraud or theft perhaps a dozen times a year. Once in a while there was a large one.”14