In 1967 ZOLUSHKA was rewarded for her work as a KGB agent with the secret granting of Soviet citizenship. For the next four years she continued to provide classified documents and other intelligence from the British embassy and the SIS station in Beirut. In 1971, after she had been questioned about the discovery of the radio microphones, she was hurriedly exfiltrated to the Soviet Union, settled in Armenia and given a modest pension of 120 roubles. In 1978, after the Armenian KGB reported to the Centre that the pension was insufficient, Andropov approved an increase to 180 roubles.
BECAUSE OF THE closeness of Anglo-American intelligence cooperation, eavesdropping on the SIS Beirut station also produced intelligence on the CIA. The KGB discovered plans for, and was able to forestall, a joint CIA/SIS operation to bug the Beirut bureau of Novosti.25 In 1969 the KGB residency began an operation which, it was hoped, would penetrate the CIA station (codenamed OMUT (“Whirlpool”))26 as successfully as ZOLUSHKA had penetrated that of SIS. On KGB instructions, one of its Lebanese agents, a hotel owner codenamed MARAT, founded an employment agency designed to attract maids and domestic servants who could be used in operations against the Main Adversary. The most promising applicant to the agency was Mary Matrosian (codenamed VERA), a Lebanese maid from an Armenian family living in Syria. Until 1967 she had worked in the American ambassador’s residence in Beirut, but had taken refuge with her family in Syria after the outbreak of the Arab—Israeli Six Day War. On her return to Beirut in 1969, MARAT’s agency found her domestic work with a series of American diplomatic families. VERA was recruited by MARAT under a false flag to provide information on her employers and remove papers from their homes. MARAT told her the information was needed by Armenian community and church leaders in order to keep them informed of potential threats to the security of the Armenian people. In 1971 MARAT handed her over to a controller from the Beirut residency, who posed as a fellow Armenian. With VERA’s (possibly unwitting) help, the KGB succeeded in bugging the apartment of the CIA officer for whom she worked.27
KGB files record a number of other KGB attempts to bug CIA stations, though none seems to have been as successful as operation RUBIN. Among the most vulnerable US embassies was that in Conakry, the capital of Guinea. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin contains a brief reference to the successful bugging of an American diplomat’s apartment in Conakry in 1965.28 Much fuller details are available on the bugging of the Conakry embassy during the 1970s, when sub-Saharan Africa became for the first time a priority area for both Soviet foreign policy and KGB operations.29 In December 1972 a Guinean employee of the embassy recruited by the KGB (code-named successively RUM and SANCHO) succeeded in installing a radio-operated eavesdropping device in the office of the ambassador, Terence Todman (succeeded in May 1975 by William Harrop). RUM/SANCHO was instructed that, if detected, he was to tell his interrogators that he had been paid to place the bug by a Chinese diplomat whose visiting card he was given. The bug (replaced by an improved version in January 1974) was so well concealed, however, that it went undetected during three annual checks on embassy security. The KGB monitoring post which recorded Todman’s dictation and conversations with embassy and CIA staff (operation REBUS) was situated in an apartment only thirty meters from the ambassador’s office.
The voice-activated bug was sometimes activated by Todman’s engaging habit of bursting into song or whistling cheerfully to himself. In general, however, operation REBUS provided what the Centre considered information “of great operational value” on US policy to African liberation movements as well as on State Department assessments of Soviet-American relations and Soviet policy in Africa. The volume of intelligence was so large that two English-speaking operations officers, Anatoli Mikhaylovich Zheleznoy and Yuri Yefimovich Tatuzov, were seconded from the KGB residency in Addis Ababa to process it. In July 1975 bugged conversations in the ambassador’s office revealed that the embassy was aware there had been a leak in its communications with Washington and had asked the State Department for help in reviewing embassy security. Though strongly tempted to remove the bug, the Conakry residency decided not to do so for fear of compromising RUM/SANCHO. According to a KGB damage assessment, when the bug in the ambassador’s office was discovered in September, “suspicion fell entirely on the Guinean Special [Intelligence] Services.” RUM/SANCHO went undetected and remained on the embassy staff.30
The KGB’s most ambitious bugging operation against a US diplomatic mission during the later Cold War was the bugging of a new eight-storey Soviet-built embassy building in Moscow on which construction began in 1979. The CIA was warned in 1980 by a defector from the Eighth Chief Directorate, Viktor Sheymov, that “the KGB was going to make the building itself a giant system of sensors that could pick up virtually anything.” Officials in Washington, however, rashly concluded that any sensor installed by the KGB could be detected and removed before it was used. Five years later they discovered they had made an expensive mistake. Further investigation revealed a series of highly sophisticated bugs built into the fabric of the building which made it, according to a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “an eight-storey microphone plugged into the Politburo.” Steel-reinforcing rods set into the concrete were designed to serve as antennae. A power source, codenamed BATWING by the CIA, which was discovered embedded in a concrete wall, was estimated to be able to last for a century. One US official, interviewed by the Washington Post, commented, “Our technical people were astounded at the level of sophistication. One man from the CIA said, ‘These are the kind of things that are only on the drawing boards here.’” For the KGB as well as the State Department, however, the operation ended in expensive failure. The new embassy building was never occupied.31
MOST EAVESDROPPING OPERATIONS using bugs planted in foreign embassies or overseas targets were short-term, unlikely to last more than a few years. By the late 1960s the FCD’s most important and long-term SIGINT operations were run by specialized posts within its residencies in foreign capitals which intercepted local telephone and radio communications. The earliest such intercept post appears to have been that set up in the Mexico City residency in 1963. Codenamed RADAR, it was given the task of intercepting the communications of the US embassy and CIA station, but had only limited success.32 The most successful of the residency posts created to intercept the communications of the Main Adversary were those set up in the United States itself. The first, codenamed POCHIN (“Start” or “Initiative”), started life in 1966 on the top floor of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street in Washington, a few blocks from the White House. In 1967 a similar post, codenamed PROBA (“Test” or “Trial”), was established by the New York residency. There were eventually five POCHIN intercept posts in various Soviet establishments in and around Washington and four PROBA posts in the New York region.33
By 1970 POCHIN-1 (at the embassy) and POCHIN-2 (in the embassy residential complex) had transformed intelligence collection by the Washington residency.34 According to Oleg Kalugin, head of Line PR:
We were able to overhear the communications of the Pentagon, the FBI, the State Department, the White House, the local police, and a host of other agencies. These communications all were broadcast on open, non-secure channels, but nevertheless a surprising amount of useful material was relayed over the airways.35
Among the intelligence which most impressed the Centre was secret data on the vetting of ninety candidates for posts in the first Nixon administration. In 1969-70 twenty-three POCHIN intercepts were considered sufficiently important to be shown to leading members of the Politburo.
During the same period PROBA-1 (in the Soviet mission to the UN) and PROBA-2 (in the large embassy “dacha” at Glen Cove on Long Island) intercepted diplomatic traffic sent and received by the UN missions of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Portugal, Spain and Venezuela, as well as some US military cables and the communications of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. According to the PROBA files, the intelligence from these intercepts was given “a high evaluatio
n” by both Foreign Minister Gromyko and the Soviet UN representative, Yakov Malik.36
THE KGB’S SIGINT operations against the Main Adversary were greatly assisted by a series of agents and defectors—all of them walk-ins—with access to highly classified intelligence on American cryptanalysis and/or cipher systems. In 1960 two NSA employees, Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin, who had made contact with the KGB a year earlier in Mexico City, were exfiltrated by the FCD to Moscow, where they continued being debriefed for several years.37 In 1963 Staff Sergeant Jack E. Dunlap committed suicide after several years spent smuggling top secret documents out of NSA headquarters at Fort Meade for the GRU. Shortly before Dunlap’s suicide, another NSA defector, Victor Norris Hamilton, arrived in Moscow. In 1965 Robert Lipka, a young army clerk at NSA responsible for the shredding of highly classified documents, began handing many of them over to the KGB. Lipka is the last KGB agent inside the NSA identified in the files seen by Mitrokhin. (A retired NSA employee, Ronald Pelton, was, however, to provide valuable intelligence to the Washington residency in the early 1980s.) Shortly after Lipka left NSA in 1967, Chief Warrant Officer John Walker, a communications watch officer on the staff of the commander of submarine forces in the Atlantic (COMSUBLANT), began an eighteen-year career as a KGB agent, supplying detailed information on US naval ciphers.38
During the late 1960s both the New York and Washington residencies had a series of other striking SIGINT successes. Late in 1969 operation PRESSING, run by the New York residency, succeeded in concealing remote-controlled radio transmitters in UN offices used by the chairman of the Security Council. The devices, hidden in wooden boards, were fixed beneath bookcases and constructed from Western materials to conceal their Soviet origin. Simultaneously, operation KRAB, which almost certainly had to be approved by the Politburo, succeeded in bugging the secretariat of the UN secretary-general, U Thant (codenamed BROD). A radio-controlled eavesdropping device was also concealed in the offices of the Ghanaian mission to the UN.39
In 1969 the Washington residency succeeded in concealing a remote-control radio-operated bugging device in the meeting room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The device, once again constructed from Western materials, continued to function for at least four years. In February 1973 information (which may have been inaccurate) reached the residency from press sources that a bug had been found attached to the underside of the press table in the Foreign Relations Committee room. The KGB was puzzled by the report since its own listening device was fixed beneath the seat of a chair rather than under the table and still appeared to be functioning normally. Expecting its bug to be discovered, Service A prepared a story claiming that it had been placed by the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service. To the KGB’s surprise, however, the media lost interest in the episode and no report of the bug beneath the chair appeared in the press.40
EARLY IN 1968 the KGB achieved its most important penetration of British SIGINT operations since John Cairncross had entered Bletchley Park in 1942. Corporal Geoffrey Arthur Prime, then working in the RAF SIGINT station at Gatow in West Berlin, handed a message to a Russian officer at a Soviet checkpoint asking Soviet intelligence to make contact with him. Prime’s note was passed not to the FCD but to the comparatively lowly KGB Third Directorate, whose main responsibility was the surveillance and security of Soviet armed forces but which sometimes succeeded in making (usually low-level) recruits among Western troops stationed in Germany. Anxious to steal a march over the more prestigious FCD by gaining the credit for Prime’s recruitment, a Third Directorate officer left him a message, inviting him to a rendezvous in East Berlin, in a small magnetic cylinder attached to his car door. At the meeting which followed and at subsequent rendezvous, Prime agreed to work as a KGB agent but explained that his service with the RAF was due to end in August 1968. In agreement with his Third Department case officers he applied, successfully, for a job processing Russian intercepts at GCHQ, the British SIGINT agency.
Prime was a sexual and social misfit who blamed many of his problems on the capitalist system and, as he later acknowledged, developed “a misplaced idealistic view of Russian Communism.” He was, however, skillfully handled by his controllers. In September 1968, before taking up his job in GCHQ, Prime spent a week in the KGB compound at Karlshorst in the East Berlin suburbs being trained in radio transmission, cipher communications, microdots, photography of documents with a Minox camera and the use of dead letter-boxes. Before flying to Britain, he was given a briefcase containing a set of one-time cipher pads, secret writing materials and 400 pounds in banknotes. He continued working as a Soviet agent in GCHQ for almost nine years, spending most of his time transcribing and translating intercepts. Among the intelligence supplied by Prime during his final year working for GCHQ in 1976-7 were details of British successes and failures in decrypting Soviet traffic. Though his GCHQ colleagues were struck by his morose appearance, they put it down to his unhappy marriage and failure to be promoted.41
The expansion of KGB SIGINT operations during the late 1960s led to a reorganization at the Centre. Hitherto the KGB Eighth Directorate had handled SIGINT as well as ciphers and communications. Probably in 1968 Andropov established a new Sixteenth Directorate,42 headed by Nikolai Nikolayevich Andreev, to specialize exclusively in SIGINT. Its operations were among the most highly classified in the whole of the KGB. The Sixteenth Directorate worked closely with the Sixteenth Department of the FCD, founded at about the same time, which was given responsibility for residency intercept posts, operations to acquire foreign codes and ciphers and attempts to penetrate other SIGINT agencies.43 On May 15, 1970 Andropov approved a plan for radio-intercept posts (some were already functioning) in fifteen residencies: Washington, New York, Montreal, Mexico, Tokyo, Peking, Teheran, Athens, Rome, Paris, Bonn, Salzburg, London, Reykjavik and Belgrade. During 1971 these fifteen posts intercepted a total of 62,000 diplomatic and military enciphered cables from 60 countries, as well as more than 25,000 plain text messages. 44
The most important intercept posts, operated by the Sixteenth Department with the assistance of OT personnel, remained the Washington area POCHIN and New York PROBA stations. The most striking achievement of the POCHIN stations during the 1970s was the interception of many of the messages exchanged between Washington, via Andrews Air Force Base, and the aircraft taking the President, Secretary of State and other senior members of the administration on overseas trips. ANTON, one of the POCHIN operational officers, was awarded the Order of the Red Star for his success in intercepting US communications during Kissinger’s visit to London in July 1974 for talks with the British Foreign Secretary (and future prime minister), James Callaghan.45 The Centre’s particular interest in these intercepts doubtless derived from the fact that the main purpose of Kissinger’s visit was to brief Callaghan on Nixon’s recent visit to Moscow—his last foreign trip before his resignation at the height of the Watergate scandal.46 Soon afterwards the PROBA stations succeeded in intercepting Kissinger’s telephone conversations with Callaghan and the Turkish foreign minister, Professor Turan Gånes, during the crisis caused by the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus on July 21.47 The KGB was thus able to monitor the dramatic way in which, as Kissinger later recalled:
During the night of July 21-22, we forced a cease-fire by threatening Turkey that we would move [US] nuclear weapons from forward positions—especially where they might be involved in a war with Greece.48
Not all the intercepts of Kissinger’s conversations concerned affairs of state. On one occasion he was heard talking to his fiancée, Nancy Maginnes, shortly before their marriage in 1974. According to Kalugin’s somewhat censorious recollection:
He apparently had just given a speech and, in his egotistical way, was asking her what she thought of it. He was saying, in effect, “How did I look? You really thought I sounded well?” The transcript showed Kissinger to be a vain and boastful man.
Word came back from Moscow that Andropov “loved the intercepted convers
ation.” He enjoyed boasting to some of his Politburo colleagues that the KGB was able to eavesdrop on the intimate conversations of the US National Security Adviser.49
THE COMPLEX ANTENNAE sprouting on the roofs of Soviet missions gradually alerted Western SIGINT agencies to the presence of the intercept stations within.50 Though probably unaware the KGB had successfully gained access to his own communications, Kissinger protested to Ambassador Dobrynin on August 15, 1975 at the interception of radio and telephone conversations by the Soviet embassy. The Centre drafted a robust reply:
It is advisable that, when there is a meeting with Kissinger, if he again raises that issue, the Soviet ambassador should state that the antennae set up on the Soviet embassy’s roof are being used on the basis of the principle of [diplomatic] reciprocity to ensure communications with Moscow, as well as to receive general radio and television transmissions. These antennae are in no way a contradiction of the embassy’s status. It should be brought to the attention of the Secretary of State that the US government should prevent the installation of equipment, including that on buildings close to the embassy, which would impede the normal operation of the USSR embassy’s radio station.51
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