by Howard Blum
The club’s shared covert language was numerical. Words, as well as symbols and punctuation, and often entire phrases, were reduced to four digits. If a word was not in the KGB’s dictionary—an American family name or some abstruse scientific term, for example—then there was a prearranged way to handle that, too: a specific four-digit number was employed to announce to anyone in the club receiving the message, “Here’s where we’re going to begin spelling an untranslatable word.” Next, the word would be spelled out in Roman letters, with two-digit designations for each letter taken from a “spell table” that was an appendix to the secret dictionary. And, finally, to indicate that this strange (at least to a Russian reader) word was completed, there’d be another specific two-digit number—the “end spell” code.
Working carefully, checking and rechecking each word in the codebook, the code clerk would soon have come up with a translation:
Silversmith
reports
Islanders
coming
8522
7349
0763
6729
Next was another small but crucial security measure. The four-digit dictionary words were transformed into unique five-digit numbers by a simple bit of hocus-pocus: the initial digit of the second four-digit group was tacked on to the end of the first group, and so on, the immediately subsequent digits moving forward until each group was now five numbers. However, for the final unit, the remaining digit would become the first number of the original last word. The clerk’s work sheet would now read like this:
Silversmith
reports
Islanders
coming
85227
34907
63672
96729
And with this, the first lock on the door had been turned: the message had been encoded.
But the turning of the second lock—the enciphering—was the precaution that ensured the door would be impossible for a thief to open. The clerk now consulted another secret codebook stored in his safe—the “one-time pad.” It was about the size of a pocket diary, and each dense page was lined with columns of sixty-five-digit numbers. The numbers had been randomly spewed out by a primitive computer at KGB headquarters. And—this was the sly tradecraft that rendered the final encoded and enciphered message unbreakable—only two copies of each one-time pad existed; one in Moscow Center, as the warren of offices belonging to the KGB’s espionage and foreign counterintelligence sections were uniformly known, and the other in the cipher clerk’s safe.
Swiftly, he went to work to put his encoded message into the protective shell of this new cipher. The procedure was quirky, but not very complex. The numbers on his work sheet would be combined with the random numbers on a specific page of his one-time pad (and in this example, the one-time pad numbers are as imagined as the hypothetical message). However, there was one catch. The rules for addition were not as normally taught in grade school, but, rather, followed what mathematicians call the Fibonacci series, a nonadditive system; any number larger than nine was not carried forward. So, the clerk would go back to his work sheet and do the math:
Silversmith
reports
Islanders
coming
85227
34907
63672
96729
71148
36564
56340
32468
56365
60461
19912
28187
With the creation of these new five-digit numbers, the second lock would be firmly turned: the message had been enciphered.
But there still remained one more essential step. The clerk would copy the first five-digit group at the top left-hand corner of the page of the one-time pad he had used and stick it at the beginning of the cable. This would tell the recipient: Turn to this page in your one-time pad to unbutton this message. If, say, the group of numbers at the top corner of the page were 67832, the message would look like this:
(67832)
56365
60461
19912
28187
Then—and this was crucial—he’d burn the page from the pad he’d just used. And he would count on the recipient, after deciphering the message, to likewise destroy the corresponding page in his copy of the one-time pad. This would ensure that the random code numbers could never be repeated, and without repetition the opposition wranglers would never have the advantage they’d need to untangle the code. The key would, in effect, have been thrown away.
There was one further task necessary, more a routine business procedure than a security measure. Since the cable would be sent to Moscow through the circuits of a commercial telegraphic concern, the companies, such as RCA, required numbers to be converted into letters for transmission by Morse code. There was a standard conversion table:
0=O, 1=I, 2=U, 3=Z, 4=T, 5=R, 6=E, 7=W, 8=A, 9=P
Once this simple transposition was completed, the message would be sent. Within hours the field agent’s original breathless warning that “the British are coming” would arrive on a desk in the cipher room in Moscow. It would look like this:
REZER EOTEI IPPIU UAIAW
The Moscow Center clerk would immediately roll up his sleeves and begin to reverse the encoding process, diligently converting letters into numbers, cipher into code, and code into words.
When the plaintext message finally made its way down the long corridors of Moscow Center to the appropriate KGB desk officer, he could read it—and, more important, act on it—confident that the secret it contained had never been revealed.
CERTAINLY, THE SECRETS CONTAINED IN the rows of filing cabinets perused with daily frustration by Lieutenant Zubko and Gene Grabeel remained inviolable. They had no idea how to penetrate the code. The best they could do was follow one of the leads that the intercepted Japanese message had revealed. Looking at the cable addresses, a shorthand used by the commercial companies, they were able to divide the traffic into two distinct groups: commercial messages coming and going from the Russian Ministry of Trade, and diplomatic messages with the Foreign Ministry address.
Two piles—the stack of trade messages, though, decidedly higher—soon rose on the wooden table in their office. It was a start, and this activity offered a small sense that they were beginning to make some progress. Perhaps, they both wanted to believe, familiarity would in time result in deeper insights. And they received another burst of encouragement when Colonel Clarke promised he would provide more manpower. Further, in a world where code names were an imprimatur of institutional importance, the brass at Arlington Hall, taking their lead from an ongoing classified Navy investigation of Russian radio networks known as “Blue Caesar,” now referred to the cracking of the Russian code with a cover name: “the Blue Problem.”
But then, without either warning or explanation, two months after the Blue Problem had been launched, it was ended. Both Zubko and Grabeel were ordered to report to new assignments.
7
BOB LAMPHERE, MEANWHILE, WAS DEALING with his own Russian problem. And in his world the results were no less frustrating than at Arlington Hall. For reasons he couldn’t understand—just trying to work out the Bureau’s logic left him livid—he’d been, as he sourly put it, “shoved out to grass” in the Soviet Espionage squad. The work, he felt, was not merely dull, it was pointless.
There were just a handful of agents, about fifty men from the thousand or so in the New York office, assigned to SE, and their job was to keep track of an even smaller cadre of suspected Soviet spies, operatives working under dodgy diplomatic or trade covers. It was watcher’s work, and the experience, day after miserable day, had left Bob with a list of ardent reasons why it wasn’t for him. He’d reel them off like the counts in an indictment. One: physical surveillance work was the time-honored stomping ground of the unambitious, FBI agents who were eager to stay out of the office since out of sight meant out of the supervisors’ demandin
g minds. Two: it was passive duty, long days and nights literally just sitting around. Three: the mission was a waste of good manpower. It didn’t take long for the target to get an inkling that it was more than just coincidence that whenever he looked over his shoulder, there was a stolid hulk in a suit and fedora trailing behind. What secret agent who knows he’s being followed, Bob wanted to shout at his unimaginative bosses, will meet up with his contacts? And a resolute Number Four: there was nothing to uncover. The Soviets—and here his logic was shared by many, including several of the G-2 strategists working at Arlington Hall—were on our side. The Russian Bear and Uncle Sam were both fighting the good fight against the Nazis. Allies don’t spy on each other.
Bob looked back with a precocious nostalgia at his days making criminal cases, when he was on the front lines in Chinatown doing consequential work. Each wasted day sitting interminably in a car, or standing with a contrived casualness in a doorway, his eyes all the time searching for a glimpse of some inconsequential Russian, grated against his ambition. “When you get rid of one spy, another would take his place,” he reasoned, his trip-wire temper growing hot at the absurdity that had taken over his life. His days and nights of surveillance “just went on and on. Little was breaking.” While, he might have added, his career was petering away.
But just as he was on the verge of surrendering, of giving up all hope of a meaningful future, a series of unexpected events began to rattle all his preconceived notions. They were seemingly unconnected, and, at least initially, in no apparent way related to his dull responsibilities. Further, Bob would later concede, as a newcomer to the SE section he was “only peripherally involved in the matters.” Yet “they impinged on many of my later cases in so many ways.” And even at the time, one after another, they woke up a vague, yet nagging, sense of alarm in his mind: he grew to realize that “the Russians were operating all around us.”
IT BEGAN WITH A LETTER. It was delivered to the Bureau headquarters in August 1943, and it was the sort of communication that, in most circumstances, would be quickly filed away and just as quickly forgotten. It was anonymous, postmarked Washington, D.C., and addressed, with an annoying presumptuousness, to “Mr. Hoover.” There was one characteristic, though, that distinguished it from the flood of crank letters that arrived regularly in the FBI post office box—it was in Russian, typed in Cyrillic letters.
When it was translated, it told a fascinating story. “Exceptional circumstances,” the unnamed writer dove in without prelude, “impel us to inform you of the activities of the so-called director of the Soviet intelligence in this country.” What followed was a compelling espionage story—a gossipy, insider’s description of a ten-member Russian spy network operating in America headed by Vassily Zubilin. Working under the banal diplomatic cover of second secretary at the Soviet embassy, this short, stocky Tweedledum of a man was, the letter claimed, the crafty deputy head of the KGB Foreign Intelligence Directorate Service and the chief KGB officer in the United States. No less startling was the assertion that his wife, Elizabeth, an unsmiling harridan who by all accounts treated her husband with undisguised contempt, was also a KGB field agent who ran her own network of well-placed agents.
It was pure intelligence gold—unless it was fool’s gold. Some SE bosses argued that the letter was a shrewd bit of disinformation by the Russians to divert attention from the real brains behind their operation; the attempt to put the spotlight on a most improbable spy (and his even more improbable shrew of a wife) was a joke that must have left them laughing in Moscow Center when they dreamed it up. Others at the Bureau suggested that poor Zubilin had probably slept with a colleague’s wife or docked an assistant’s pay and this letter was the angry man’s mischievous payback.
It fell to Bill Harvey, the resident Bureau expert on counterintelligence, to make a final judgment on the letter. Bob had worked with him, and once he’d gotten over Harvey’s disconcerting appearance, the pear-shaped body, the eyes that always seemed to be on the verge of popping out of their sockets, and, another oddity, his croaking, foghorn voice, he had come to realize that Harvey was damn smart. He had a way of looking at a situation, separating the facts from the speculations, and then doing the sort of intelligence arithmetic that made it all add up.
After much consideration, Harvey decided the letter was largely the real thing. It documented “personnel, who . . . had long been active in illegal, conspiratorial, and quasi-intelligence operations.” The letter was short on operational details, but its implicit message was disturbingly clear: the KGB was up to something in America.
THE NEXT SHOE CRASHED DOWN with a more resounding thud. But perhaps that was to be expected when Russian thugs batter down an apartment door to get their hands on a defector running for his life.
The “Corby Affair”—the code name taken from the brand of rye whiskey that fueled the interrogators during the long weeks when they were hunkered down with the defector in a lonely safe house deep in the Canadian woods—had its roots in a small moment of carelessness. Igor Gouzenko, a twenty-five-year-old cipher clerk who toiled in the imposing redbrick Soviet embassy on Charlotte Street in Ottawa, Canada, had left a piece of paper on his desk.
Access to Cipher Room 12 was only attained after navigating a daunting gauntlet—a bell artfully concealed beneath the main banister must be pressed; a spy hole in a thick steel door would slide open; and then, if the bruiser standing guard approved, one door, and then another, the second as solid as the door on a bank vault, would swing free. Inside the cipher room, the stringent KGB insisted on a litany of security precautions, and Gouzenko had broken one of the most fundamental. Eager to get home to his pregnant wife, he had rushed off before storing a top-secret cable in the room’s safe. It was still lying on his desktop the next morning when Gouzenko returned. Chagrined, the young clerk hurried to lock the evidence of his indiscretion away, but it was too late. A cleaning woman, who also doubled as a KGB informer, had already alerted the KGB rezident at the embassy. Within days, an icy cable from Moscow ordered Gouzenko home.
He didn’t want to go. For the past fifteen months, Gouzenko, his pregnant wife, and their young daughter had been living in the nearly regal comfort of a centrally heated two-bedroom apartment on Somerset Street, shopping in stores stocked with an unimaginable bounty of goods. The prospect of a diminished life in Moscow, of raising two children in such deprivation, was too grim. Desperate, Gouzenko came up with a plan.
Full of cunning, as well as no small measure of daring, he spent weeks conscientiously assembling a wide-ranging inventory of state secrets. He held back documents marked “Burn after reading.” He copied classified cables. He discreetly turned down the corners of top-secret papers in the files so that he could grab them when the time seemed right.
Then on the evening of September 5, 1945—just three days after the end of the war—he made his move. He hastily stuffed his trove into his pants pockets, and under his shirt. He looked, he fretted, as bloated as the Michelin Man. The security thugs would certainly notice. But when he signed out, Gouzev, the hulking KGB man at the door, just gave him a perfunctory nod. Gouzenko walked down the front steps waiting to hear his name shouted, ready to feel a heavy hand on his shoulder, but he made it all the way to the street, and then to the corner. A streetcar stopped, and he boarded, heading downtown.
Gouzenko returned to his apartment on Somerset Street. He and his wife were huddled together, anxiously trying to determine what to do next, when they heard an assertive pounding on the front door. “Gouzenko!” an authoritarian voice bellowed. “Otkroite dver!” (“Open the door!”)
The family quickly escaped out the back door, which opened on to a rear balcony shared with another couple. These neighbors, a Royal Canadian Air Force sergeant and his wife, quickly appraised the frightened young couple, heard the repeated thumping on the door across the hallway and the accompanying angry growls in an incomprehensible language, and decided the Gouzenkos had better take refuge with them until thing
s were sorted out.
By the time the constables arrived, the door of the Gouzenkos’ apartment had been smashed open and a crowd of Soviet diplomats, some in military uniform, others in civilian clothes, were in the midst of systematically tearing the place apart. There was a tense confrontation, but it ended with the Soviet intruders indignantly claiming diplomatic immunity, while the Gouzenkos were led off under the watchful protection of a half-dozen broad-shouldered Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
A day later, Gouzenko was hidden away in a cabin in Camp X, a wartime training base for special operatives located deep in the snowy Canadian woods. “Corby”—as he was now identified in the secret transcripts—had only just begun spilling all he knew when two inquisitors, buddies of Bob’s from the FBI’s SE squad, arrived to claim America’s share of the spoils. They listened with stunned concern, and then hurried to send a flash cable to their superiors.
Gouzenko’s cache of documents had revealed that Russia had, as one agent put it with shivery rage, “stabbed Canada in the back.” Its secret agents were aggressively running networks of spies north of the U.S. border.
But Gouzenko’s knowledge had its limits. He couldn’t shed light on how the KGB’s activities in Canada fit into Moscow Center’s master plan. Still, his evidence, once unimaginable to many who had labored in the wartime U.S. intelligence community, now led Bob inescapably to another even more unsettling question: Was there any reason not to assume that Russia had done the same to another of its allies, the United States? Or worse?
THE ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION grew clearer to Bob a few weeks later when “the Red Queen,” as the tabloids would ultimately coronate her, came out of the shadows.
Elizabeth Bentley was the daughter of solid New England stock, a graduate of Vassar with a pert smile, shy charm, an inquisitive nature, and a very impressionable mind. She fell into espionage in stages, drifting along as circumstances, rather than a hard-driving dialectical commitment, pulled her in deeper and deeper.