He cleared his throat. “In the spring of 1978, NSA director Bobby Inman called me to convey a request from CIA’s chief of station in Moscow, asking for me by name and urging me to get to Moscow as soon as possible. Here’s what was happening…”
1. Our Spies Are Dying
CIA Station, U.S. Embassy, Moscow, March 1978
Gus Hathaway sat in his cramped, windowless office on the seventh floor of the chancery building at 21 Tchaikovsky, gazing at some documents on his desktop as he toyed with a radical idea that probably wouldn’t make him any friends in CIA’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations (DO). In Moscow, March was like deep winter everywhere else, so the room’s heat was turned up, contributing to the stuffiness and claustrophobic feel of the place. Hathaway knew that uninformed civilians thought of him and his brethren in the DO as spies, but that was a term he and the other intelligence officers who ran espionage operations in foreign countries never ever used to describe themselves. Hathaway and his DO colleagues were case officers who didn’t spy at all, but rather spotted, assessed, recruited, vetted, and operated foreign “human assets” (actual spies) who stole vital secrets from “targets,” such as the USSR, on behalf of CIA.
Case officers were the agency elite—whereas other CIA officers, such as technologists in the Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) or the academic types that comprised the Directorate of Intelligence (DI)—were lesser beings who could only dream of becoming case officers one day.
Which was precisely the problem that Hathaway had with the idea he was kicking around; he had an urge to go outside of CIA for help with a vexing problem in Moscow that had just become urgent.
The culture of the elite DO was to keep their mouths firmly shut to all outsiders and to tough out gnarly problems among themselves. Sure, every now and then a case officer needed a surveillance gadget or disguise from the nerds at DS&T, or even some advice on a target from one of the ivory-tower eggheads at the DI, but to wander outside of CIA for help?
Not good form. Not good form at all, especially when the outside agency that Hathaway was considering asking for help was the National Security Agency (NSA). NSA had become CIA’s bureaucratic archenemy over the past few years because of turf fights over which agency had authority to collect signals intelligence (electronic intercepts also known as SIGINT). CIA wanted to continue its long-standing practice of collecting foreign communications, while NSA argued that gathering such SIGINT should be placed under NSA authority.
Also, NSA, which had quickly grown in power and prestige under Admiral Bobby Inman, had gotten into the habit of withholding raw SIGINT from CIA—instead, feeding CIA NSA’s sanitized and summarized interpretation of the raw intelligence—on grounds that revealing raw SIGINT would compromise NSA’s covert sources and methods.1 NSA had also been resisting CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner’s play with President Carter to take direct control of NSA on the grounds that the director of central intelligence was the titular head of the entire intelligence community.2
In U.S. national security circles, the bitter feud between NSA’s Inman and CIA’s Turner was dubbed “the war of admirals.”3
But Hathaway was not nearly as allergic to NSA as others at CIA and was truly desperate, and it was unlikely that anyone from the DO—or CIA writ large—could solve his life-or-death problem.
Which truly was a life-or-death crisis. The previous year, the KGB—Russia’s formidable intelligence service—had arrested two CIA assets in Moscow. One asset, a Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs staffer named Aleksandr Ogorodnik, had committed suicide during his interrogation at Lubyanka prison with the cyanide “L pill” his CIA case officer, Martha Peterson, had supplied him,4 while the other asset, Colonel Anatoly Filatov of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), had just been sentenced to death after being caught handing over state secrets to CIA case officer Vincent Crockett.5
Both Peterson and Crockett had been arrested and then “PNG’d” (declared persona non grata) and booted out of Russia shortly after their respective assets had been “rolled up.”
According to a source familiar with Hathaway’s thinking in early 1978, Hathaway was also concerned about compromises that had led directly to execution of U.S. assets.
For certain, there was a leak—or leaks—in the ultratight security that protected the identities of case officers and their assets.
But where?
Perhaps a mole at Langley (CIA headquarters) was tipping off the KGB about identities of case officers and their Soviet assets. Such horrors did occur—if rarely—such as when senior British intelligence official and KGB asset Kim Philby betrayed numerous assets of Her Majesty’s Secret Service to the Soviets.
Or maybe the KGB was intercepting and deciphering encrypted communications somewhere between Langley and Moscow Station.
Flawed espionage tradecraft by DO case officers was another troubling possibility. Had Peterson or Crockett, for instance, failed to run countersurveillance routes (elaborate street maneuvers designed to confuse and shake off KGB tails) properly before executing brush passes or servicing dead drops (covert means of exchanging information with assets)?
Peterson and Crockett both vehemently denied making any such mistakes, but even elite DO case officers were, at the end of the day, human and therefore prone to committing errors every now and then.
Martha Peterson, for instance, was not only a novice but the very first female case officer assigned to Moscow.6 Hathaway was an old-school gentleman from southern Virginia who did not like involving women in the dangerous, manly, meticulous work of the DO. He’d made his views known, but to no avail, as his masters at Langley, concerned about the safety of Ogorodnik, had hoped that a female case officer would escape KGB suspicion.
That ploy had obviously failed. But despite Hathaway’s misgivings about female case officers there was no evidence, that Peterson—or Crockett, for that matter—had screwed up. Which raised yet another possibility: the KGB might have compromised security at the Moscow embassy itself.
Of all the possible sources of leakage, the embassy seemed like the best bet.
First and foremost, the facility was in the heart of Moscow, where the KGB could bring every tool in its vast espionage arsenal to bear. A large number of embassy staffers—including guards, switchboard operators, travel coordinators, cooks, maids, and drivers—were Soviet citizens who were guaranteed to be either KGB informants or outright KGB officers. Although CIA officers knew how to behave around such obvious threats, the same could not be said of State Department diplomats. State employees—whose job, after all, was to mingle with Russians in order to collect and exchange information to improve relations between America and Russia—were not all that security conscious and had a well-deserved reputation for being “information sieves.”
Yes, diplomats, with the occasional exception of the ambassador himself, were not privy to the identities of CIA’s human assets. But senior diplomats, such as the ambassador and deputy chief of mission (DCM), did know which of their employees actually worked for CIA. A careless word from a diplomat in the wrong place at the wrong time could tip off the KGB about a case officer’s true function at the embassy and ultimately lead to the unmasking of that case officer’s assets.
Ambassador Malcolm Toon, for instance, who knew Martha Peterson’s real job and had made a comment while riding in the embassy’s unsecured elevator the year before, clearly acknowledged that Peterson was CIA. The elevator, like most of the embassy outside of highly secured areas on the top three floors, which were constantly swept for surveillance devices, was probably bugged. State Department staffers often had dangerously cavalier attitudes about such bugging. The current number-two diplomat in Moscow, for instance, DCM Jack Matlock, frequently said of the presumed embassy bugs, “If they [the Soviets] want my opinion, they’re welcome to it.”7
In other words, KGB bugging of the embassy was an accepted fact of life. A decade earlier, more than one hundred microphones had been
discovered behind radiators in the chancery.8 And even before the United States moved into its current embassy in 1953, numerous electronic surveillance devices had been discovered in Spaso House, the de facto embassy and U.S. ambassador’s residence as early as the 1930s.9 U.S. ambassador Joseph Davies’s wife said in 1936, for example, “We found them [microphones] in the fireplaces, we found them in the little vents, in the inner walls.”10 Then, in 1951, a truly ingenious listening device called “the Thing” had been discovered in a wooden Great Seal of the United States in Ambassador Kirk’s office, a gift to the ambassador from a troop of Russian girls.
The Thing, a carefully machined acoustic cavity attached to a special antenna, consumed no electrical power whatsoever but reflected radio waves that the Soviets beamed at the embassy in such a way that voices, even at a whisper, could be clearly picked up at a nearby Russian intelligence listening post.11
That such sophisticated tradecraft was way beyond CIA’s own surveillance technology was deeply troubling in 1951 and even more troubling in 1978, because the KGB continued to beam radio waves—in the form of microwaves—at the upper, highly sensitive floors of the embassy that housed both the ambassador’s office and offices of CIA and other U.S. intelligence services.
Although the original function of radio frequency (RF) reflections off the Thing had been discovered, the current purpose of the microwave bombardment, alternately called TUMS (the unidentified Moscow signal) or MUTS (Moscow unidentified technical signal), was, as the “unidentified” term in TUMS and MUTS implied, a mystery, at least to CIA and State Department surveillance countermeasures technologists.12
To Hathaway, it was unacceptable that CIA and State Department technologists did not understand what the microwaves were about. Why would the KGB devote considerable resources to continuing the microwave attacks if they were not yielding productive intelligence in some way, especially after one U.S. ambassador to Russia, Walter Stoessel, had complained so bitterly to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the health hazards of the microwave radiation a few years before? Stoessel, a leukemia victim, suspected that his disease, and the ailments of other embassy staffers, were directly attributed to the microwaves.13
But despite the diplomatic problems the microwave radiation caused for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the United States, the KGB persisted with their mysterious bombardment.
Why? And were the microwaves somehow responsible for the devastating leaks?
As if the constant, mysterious microwave bombardment weren’t troubling enough, there was the baffling case of “the chimney to nowhere” to keep Hathaway up at night.
In the summer of 1977, a secretary for the State Department’s Regional Security Office (RSO), which maintained security in portions of the embassy that were the State Department’s responsibility (not including CIA’s or NSA’s spaces on the top floors), started hearing strange scraping noises in a chimney outside her apartment on the fifth floor of the south annex of the embassy. Worried that birds might have somehow flown into and gotten trapped inside the chimney, and concerned for the animals’ welfare, the secretary, GH, had asked the Marine guards at the embassy to investigate.
When the Marines aimed their flashlights down the shaft from the roof, they couldn’t see very far into the gloom but heard no sign of trapped birds or any other animals.
But the soldiers did discover, while attempting to find a fireplace from which to look up the chimney shaft, that no fireplaces anywhere in the south annex fed into the long chimney shaft that hugged the west outer wall of the annex.
The chimney shaft, it turned out, wasn’t a chimney at all but a vacant space that had been built by the Russians before the Americans took possession of the building in 1953, for some other purpose. Was that purpose to house a covert KGB observation or listening post? Were the mysterious scraping noises made by Soviet surveillance technicians installing or moving around microphones of some kind?
With the Soviets’ forty-year history of eavesdropping on embassy conversations, it was a reasonable assumption that the Russians had not constructed the so-called chimney simply as an architectural ornament.
Thus, when Hathaway learned of the non-chimney chimney, he asked CIA technology operations (TOPS) officer NP to take his State Department counterpart, RSO officer FB, aside in the open courtyard behind the embassy—away from KGB microphones—to quietly suggest that the RSO break into the brick shaft to see what security threats it might house.
Although the apartments adjoining the false chimney contained no sensitive operations—apart from the private lives of embassy staffers—there was some urgency to NP’s request because GH’s apartment was soon to be converted into a top-secret secure space.
Unfortunately, in August of 1977, just as RSO was arranging to bring in a crew of Seabees from Frankfurt, Germany, to get into the chimney, a fire broke out on the embassy’s eighth floor.
In addition to destroying much of the embassy’s sensitive spaces on the upper floors, the devastating fire caused RSO to postpone their chimney investigation, as more urgent issues, such as determining the cause of the fire and rebuilding destroyed portions of the building, occupied their attention.14
Hathaway and others at the embassy put a high priority on discovering the cause of the blaze, because the timing of the fire, coming right after RSO had set in motion an investigation of the chimney, was suspicious. It was entirely possible that the KGB, either through one of their hundred-plus employees or informants in the embassy, or bugs in State Department spaces, had learned of RSO’s plans to investigate the chimney.
Moreover, the presence of KGB agents—wearing clean, brand-new fire gear—among the ranks of legitimate Moscow firefighters who fought the blaze (some of whom even offered Hathaway oxygen) also suggested the Russians may have caused the fire, especially considering that KGB “firefighters” had broken into—and in some cases, stolen—classified information in State Department offices.15 Although Soviet citizens weren’t supposed to have access to the eighth floor where the fire erupted, both CIA’s TOPS and State Department’s RSO officers knew that the Soviets had several ingenious ways of remotely igniting such a conflagration. For instance, when the Soviets wanted to harass Americans in the embassy, they sometimes created overvoltages on the external power lines feeding the embassy, blowing out electronic equipment in the embassy, melting electronic equipment, and generating acrid smoke.
When, months after the fire, U.S. fire investigators ultimately discovered that a frayed electrical cord on the eighth floor had ignited the blaze,16 the KGB-triggered overvoltage theory took on more weight, because the electrical cord in question had old-style flammable cloth insulation instead of the more fire-resistant rubber or plastic insulation that Americans used in modern construction.
(The final conclusion of the months-long fire investigation was that the fire started accidentally, but KGB defector Victor Sheymov testified before the U.S. Congress in 1998 that the KGB had, in fact, intentionally caused the fire.17)
But on the positive side, if the fire had indeed been a smoke screen, as it were, to protect KGB secrets in the chimney, that clearly suggested the chimney might hold a clue to the recent rash of asset roll-ups and case officer PNGs.
In order to keep CIA assets alive and his case officers safe, Hathaway had to know what was in that false chimney, so, in early 1978, he pushed RSO to restart the chimney investigation as soon as fire repairs would allow.
But there was another urgent reason Hathaway needed to solve the chimney mystery, get to the bottom of the microwave threat, and to generally button up embassy security: Admiral Stansfield Turner, CIA’s new director, had, as a result of the recent intelligence compromises in Moscow, shut down all human intelligence (HUMINT) operations in Russia the year before as being too risky.18
Many officers in the DO thought Turner was a real piece of work and a real pain in the ass. A U.S. Naval Academy classmate of the current president, Jimmy Carter, Turner was a c
areer military officer with no intelligence experience whatsoever, who favored technical intelligence collection from overhead (spy satellite imagery, called IMINT) and NSA SIGINT over HUMINT. Turner was smitten by high-tech gadgets and mistrusted the dirty business of human espionage as inherently fraught with messy ethical and moral dilemmas.19
President Carter had campaigned in 1976 on a promise to restore trust in government after the Watergate scandal and revelations of CIA’s occasional practice of opening American citizens’ mail and assassinating (or attempting to assassinate) foreign leaders. Turner understood that part of his job was to restore ethics and morals to CIA clandestine operations.20
Not an easy task with espionage, which routinely involved emotionally manipulating Russian nationals to betray their country and to risk both their lives and those of their closest relatives. Just how do you persuade, cajole, bribe, or even seduce people (and CIA has done that, with Anatoly Filatov) ethically?
Easier to rely on spy satellites, communication intercepts, and other morally pure technical means than to dirty your hands with messy HUMINT, where people can, and do, get killed.
Acting on his disdain for HUMINT, Turner had instigated the Halloween Massacre on October 31, 1977, abruptly dismissing over two hundred DO officers as unnecessary after the conclusion of the war in Vietnam.21
Hathaway, like other case officers, wasn’t pleased with the massacre and was unhappy that HUMINT operations on his turf had been curtailed.
Hathaway was a cold warrior from way back who believed that HUMINT against the Soviet target was essential. An army veteran who had been wounded in the leg and awarded a Purple Heart while serving in France and Germany during World War II, Hathaway went right into CIA in its third year of existence after graduating from the University of Virginia in 1950. Stints as a case officer in Frankfurt, Berlin, and most recently South America had taught him that some kinds of intelligence simply couldn’t be gathered through technical means.22 Hard intelligence targets—such as Soviet officials, for instance, who’d grown up under the tyranny of Stalin and took security extremely seriously—rarely made mistakes that would allow SIGINT or IMINT to capture their deepest secrets. The really good stuff, such as what policies the ruling Soviet politburo had just approved or what new technical capabilities Soviet fighter planes were slated to get, was best obtained, in most case officers’ opinions, through HUMINT.
The Spy in Moscow Station Page 2