Kissinger was inhibited in pursuing his protest by the knowledge that NSA also ran SIGINT operations from the US embassy in Moscow. In 1971 columnist Jack Anderson had revealed in the Washington Post that the embassy had succeeded in intercepting the microwave radio and telephone communications exchanged between the large black ZIL limousines of Politburo members as they sped around Moscow.52 Kissinger seems, however, to have been genuinely alarmed by the electronic countermeasures taken to frustrate SIGINT operations run from the Moscow embassy. In November 1975 he told Dobrynin that it was believed that the American ambassador, Walter Stoessel, had developed leukemia as a result of prolonged exposure to electromagnetic radiation directed against the embassy. On instructions from Moscow, Dobrynin replied that the electromagnetic field around the embassy did not exceed Soviet health standards. Dobrynin claims that he was privately informed by the State Department during the Carter administration that a study had concluded that there was, in fact, no evidence of damage to the health of embassy personnel.53
Kissinger’s protests failed to halt the continued expansion of POCHIN and PROBA operations. Summaries and transcripts of POCHIN intercepts grew from 2,600 pages in 1975 to 7,000 in 1976. During these two years 800 reports based on the intercepts were cabled to the Centre from the Washington residency. Among the communications to and from Andrews Airforce Base intercepted during 1976 were important messages dealing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s visits to the NATO Nuclear Planning Group in January and June, and to US armed forces headquarters in Europe in February; and on Kissinger’s meetings with British, French, West German and South African leaders.54 In 1977 POCHIN summaries and transcripts increased again to over 10,500 pages,55 covering foreign visits by, among others, Vice-President Walter Mondale and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.56 For much of the Carter administration the POCHIN posts also intercepted a substantial amount of State Department material; the KGB kept a card file on all the officials mentioned in it.57
Given the KGB’s lack of high-level penetration agents in Washington during the 1970s, it seems likely that POCHIN and other SIGINT operations were the Centre’s most important source of intelligence on the foreign and defense policies of the Ford and Carter administrations. The general effect of this intelligence was probably benign—to limit the natural predisposition of the Centre to conspiracy theories about American policy. During the 1979 crisis caused by American protests at the presence of a Soviet “combat brigade” in Cuba, for example, POCHIN intercepts of Pentagon telephone discussions and other communications enabled the Washington residency to reassure Moscow that the United States had no plans for military intervention. 58
The most important intelligence provided by the POCHIN stations during the 1970s and early 1980s, however, was probably military. The intercepts provided highly classified information on the Trident, MX, Pershing-2, Cruise and surface-toair missile systems; the F-15, F-16, F-18, B-52 and B-1 aircraft; and the AWACS early warning system. From 1973 onwards the main priority of the New York PROBA stations was also scientific and technical intelligence, particularly in the military field. Its most striking success during the remainder of the decade was the interception of fax communications from the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and a series of major companies, among them Boeing, Fairchild, General Dynamics, Grumman, Hughes, IBM, Lockheed and Sperry Rand. Fax intercepts on military projects included important material on the design and development of the A-10, B-1, EF-111A and F-14 aircraft; the anti-missile defense program; and the anti-submarine defense system. By 1976 an intercept post, codenamed VESNA (“Spring”), was operating in the San Francisco residency, successfully intercepting fax and telephone communications of defense contractors and other high-tech companies on the West Coast.59
The KGB residencies in New York, Washington and San Francisco also had radio-intercept posts (codenamed, respectively, RAKETA, ZEFIR and RUBIN) which monitored FBI (codenamed FIRMA) communications in order to keep track of surveillance of its operations. In New York during the 1970s the RAKETA post monitored continuously six FBI shortwave radio communications channels.60 Its eavesdroppers quickly became used to Bureau jargon. According to a report in KGB files:
FBI look-out posts and surveillance teams communicate using simple codes, slang expressions and pre-arranged phrases which are easily deciphered by the RAKETA operator. Conversations between the look-out posts and a surveillance team consist of short dialogues in which the post informs the team of the target’s number and the direction he is moving in up to an intersection and beyond.
Daily radio intercept of the operation of the FBI dispatch center provides a picture of the operational environment and the FBI’s conduct of operations in the city. Whenever the [KGB] residency is conducting an operation in the city, the RAKETA operator monitors the operation of the FBI’s radio center; if necessary, an operations officer can be given a danger signal prior to his going out to the site where an operation is to be conducted, [or told] to back off from an operation if he has been detected by surveillance. The RAKETA post makes note of local citizens who have come to the attention of the FBI, and they are put on file in the KONTAKT system [the FCD’s computerized name-trace system].
For several years the New York residency deluded itself into believing that it was able to detect every instance of street surveillance of KGB personnel by the FBI.61 In 1973, however, it realized that it had been taken in. Having discovered that the FBI was aware of the activities of some of its operations officers, as well as of three “developmental” agents, it finally grasped that the apparent simplicity of FBI surveillance techniques was actually a means of diverting the residency’s attention from far more sophisticated methods which it had failed to detect. The residency’s operations were temporarily disrupted as it tried to come to terms with methods of surveillance it did not fully understand.62
THE RUNNING COSTS for the main intercept posts in KGB residencies around the world in 1979 show that the Washington and New York operations were by far the most expensive.63 The SIGINT post in the Havana residency, the third most expensive, was also focused chiefly on the United States. All other intercept posts were also instructed to give priority, when possible, to the communications of the Main Adversary. The most important of the KGB’s foreign intercept posts targeted on the United States from outside, however, was located not in a residency but in the large SIGINT base set up by the GRU at Lourdes in Cuba in the mid-1960s to monitor US navy communications and other high-frequency transmissions.64 On April 25, 1975 a secret Soviet government decree (no. 342—115) authorized the establishment of a new KGB SIGINT station (codenamed TERMIT-P) within the Lourdes base, which began operations in December 1976. Run by the Sixteenth Directorate, TERMIT-P had a fixed 12-meter dish antenna and a mobile 7-meter dish antenna mounted on a covered lorry, which enabled it to intercept microwave communications “downlinked” from US satellites or transmitted between microwave towers.65 Other large GRU/Sixteenth Directorate SIGINT stations established in the late 1970s included those in South Yemen and at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. The biggest, however, remained the Lourdes complex, which continued to grow steadily over the next decade. President Reagan declared in 1983:
The Soviet intelligence collection facility less than 100 miles from our coast is the largest of its kind in the world. The acres and acres of antennae fields and intelligence monitors are targeted on key US military installations and sensitive activities. The installation, in Lourdes, Cuba, is manned by 1,500 Soviet technicians, and the satellite ground station allows instant communication with Moscow. This 28-square-mile facility has grown by more than 60 percent in size during the past decade.
A joint report by the Departments of State and Defense in 1985 estimated that the total personnel at the Lourdes SIGINT base had increased further to 2,100.66
By the early 1980s all KGB residencies possessed an intercept post.67 Each post was required to submit an annual report to the Centre in November, giving details of encrypted
and plain text material intercepted over the past year; the proportion of operationally significant intercepts; newly discovered communications channels of intelligence value; characteristics of the “radio-intelligence environment” in the country concerned; the handling and fulfillment by the intercept post of its SIGINT assignments; measures taken to protect the security and secrecy of its operations; conclusions about past performance and proposals for the future.68
In 1980 the Washington area POCHIN posts reported that, as a result of new security precautions, it had become much more difficult to intercept the communications of the federal government.69 The residency there, however, reported one major new SIGINT success. In September 1980, after two years’ planning, in an operation codenamed FLAMINGO, the residency succeeded in bugging the conference room of System Planning Corporation (SPC), a private company in Arlington, Virginia, which did research for the Pentagon. Viktor Vasilyevich Lozenko (code-named MARVIN), a Line X (scientific and technological intelligence) officer under diplomatic cover at the Washington residency, had noticed that the SPC conference room was also used for meetings of the Society for Operational Research, of which he was a member. The day before he left Washington at the end of his tour of duty, he succeeded in fixing the listening device—a battery-powered rod a quarter of a meter long—underneath a table in the room. The signal from the bug was monitored from a command post in a car with diplomatic number plates, fitted with a T-shaped antenna built into the front windshield, which took up position at one of nine locations situated at distances of 300-500 meters from the SPC offices.
For the next ten and a half months operation FLAMINGO provided what the Centre considered “highly important” intelligence on the current and future deployment of US nuclear weapons in Europe, on American chemical weapons, on the US navy’s chances of survival in a nuclear conflict, and on the US position on the SALT-2 talks. On January 27, 1981 a senior Pentagon official presented a classified report at a meeting entitled “Current Status and Trends in the Advancement of the US Nuclear Forces in the Central European Theater of War.” Among the issues discussed at the meeting were: American mobilization capabilities; the effectiveness of laser guidance systems; plans for the destruction of 730 tons of chemical weapons which were now unusable; and the extent of US intelligence on, and requirements concerning, Soviet chemical weapons. Other meetings in the bugged conference room, also attended by senior Pentagon officials, discussed the current status and proposed reforms of the US armed forces. The operation came to an end not because the listening device was discovered but because its power supply gradually ran out.70
Four of the KGB officers involved in operation FLAMINGO received the Order of the Red Star: Lozenko, who selected the location and placed the bug; V. I. Shokin, who supervised the operation; the head of the POCHIN station Yuri Nikolayevich Marakhovsky, who played a leading role in collecting and processing the intelligence collected from the SPC conference room; and Yuri Vasilyevich Gratsiansky, head of the residency’s Operational—Technical Support section, who was responsible for the technical side of the operation. Three other residency officers received lesser awards.71
SOVIET SIGINT OPERATIONS, like those of the United States, were assisted by allied agencies. The UKUSA Security Agreement concluded in 1948 between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand provided for the division of collection tasks and the sharing of the product between their SIGINT services.72 The KGB, however, was determined to give its allies only limited access to its cryptanalytic secrets. In January 1975 Andropov approved “Regulations on the Principles and Directions of Co-operation with the Security Agencies of the Socialist Countries in Decryption Operations,” drafted by the Sixteenth Directorate. Its two guiding principles were, first, that joint operations with the “friends” (allied agencies) were to be under KGB control; second, that cryptographic information supplied to allied agencies “should not disclose the level of the latest [Soviet] achievements in the field of cryptanalysis:”
Bearing in mind that at the present time the related services of our friends have acquired a certain experience of working on and exploiting [SIGINT] targets by the methods of electronic [computer-based] cryptanalysis, there is some possibility that in future our friends may try to apply these methods independently against other targets as well. In these conditions, it is essential to strengthen further the co-operation between the Sixteenth Directorate and the related services of our friends with a view to exclude uncontrolled operations which could cause irreparable harm to the Sixteenth Directorate with regard to the application of the methods of electronic cryptanalysis.
On no account were the “friends” to learn of the existence of the top secret training school for KGB cryptanalysts; they were to be given the impression that all training took place at the Centre. Though, on occasion, allied agencies could be given cipher communications from shortwave transmissions intercepted by the Sixteenth Directorate, they were never allowed access to SIGINT from residency intercept posts, satellite communications or telegraph lines within the Soviet Union.73
Despite the Sixteenth Directorate’s reluctance to share most SIGINT secrets with its intelligence allies, it depended on their assistance. With the growing complexity of computer-generated cipher systems, Soviet cryptanalysts were increasingly dependent on the penetration of foreign embassies to steal cipher materials and, when possible, bug cipher machines and teleprinters. During 1974 alone joint operations by the FCD Sixteenth Department and its Soviet Bloc allies succeeded in abstracting cipher material from at least seven embassies in Prague, five in Sofia, two in Budapest and two in Warsaw.74 Soviet Bloc intelligence services also shared some of their agents in Western embassies and foreign ministries with the KGB. Among those who were particularly highly rated by the KGB Sixteenth Directorate was a Bulgarian agent codenamed EPIR, a security official in the Greek foreign ministry recruited by Bulgarian intelligence in 1966. Over the next ten years he assisted in the removal of over 12,000 classified pages of documents from the ministry.75
A conference of the KGB leadership in May 1981 included in its main priorities the recruitment of agents from the cipher personnel of the United States, Britain, France, West Germany and China. Andropov reaffirmed that priority in a special directive issued after he succeeded Brezhnev as general secretary in 1982.76 He also approved the secret award of the Order of the Friendship of Peoples to the KGB’s longest-serving cipher officer agent, JOUR in the French foreign ministry, in recognition of his “long and fruitful co-operation” over the previous thirty-seven years.77 The FCD Sixteenth Department, headed by A. V. Krasavin, had plans to create another forty or fifty intercept posts in Soviet establishments around the world by the end of the decade. It calculated optimistically that the volume of intercepted communications would increase by five to eight times its present level if the current rate of expansion were maintained.78
According to Viktor Makarov, who served in the Sixteenth Directorate from 1980 to 1986, the European states whose diplomatic traffic was decrypted with varying frequency during these years included Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany. There was, he believes, no penetration of high-grade British cipher systems during that period.79 An inner circle within the Politburo—consisting, in 1980, of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko, Kirilenko, Suslov and Ustinov—were sent a daily selection of the most important intercepts. A larger selection was forwarded each day to the heads of the First and Second Chief Directorates. 80 Though neither selection is yet available for research, both will one day be sources of major importance for historians of Soviet foreign policy.
In addition to obviously important items such as Kissinger’s and Vance’s meetings with foreign leaders, the intercepts selected for the inner circle of the Politburo undoubtedly also included, whenever possible, Western responses to their public pronouncements. Vyacheslav Ivanovich Gurgenev (alias “Artemov”), deputy head of the FCD, complained publicly in 1991:
<
br /> Our service has had enough trouble in the past trying to collect responses to every “brilliant” initiative by our leaders. This kind of work tended to corrupt people who started out with the illusion of doing something useful.81
Residencies around the world were expected to provide prompt reports of favorable responses to every major speech by the Soviet leadership. When no such responses occurred, they were commonly invented to avoid the risk of offending the Politburo. 82 Since the Sixteenth Directorate was able, by the later 1960s, to decrypt at least some of the diplomatic traffic of over seventy states,83 its chances of finding some suitable response among the thousands of decrypts produced each week were much greater than those of even the most active residency.
In the pre-glasnost era controversial references to Soviet leaders were routinely edited out of translations of diplomatic decrypts. Makarov recalls seeing an intercepted cable from the Swedish ambassador in Moscow in August 1984 discussing the likely power struggle which would follow the demise of the ailing Konstantin Chernenko. Among the passages removed or doctored in the Russian translation was a disparaging reference to Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa Maximovna. On another occasion Makarov was ordered to remove from a diplomatic telegram he had decrypted the sentence, “Gorbachev is like Andropov.” Such excisions were known within the Sixteenth Directorate as “minding the words.”84
DURING THE 1980s SIGINT agencies in both East and West began to face two formidable new technological challenges: the use of fiber optics in global telecommunications and the greatly increased availability of highly sophisticated encryption systems. Neither the KGB nor any other SIGINT agency seems to have devised a system of intercepting messages which passed along fiber-optic lines as streams of light. In the late 1980s Britain installed a highly secure fiber-optic trunk system, codenamed BOXER, which linked 200 military installations. Simultaneously, the development of Public Key Cryptography by mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and subsequent refinements such as Phil Zimmermann’s PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) system, made ciphers which were difficult, if not impossible, for SIGINT agencies to crack, available to anyone with a powerful desktop computer and modem.85
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