What could have changed CIA minds? Had the Russians breached embassy security in some way that neither CIA nor State Department security officials could detect?
For instance, over the years, FBI, NATO allies, and others had discovered a broad range of KGB implants—listening and data-capture devices—that broadcast intelligence to nearby listening posts. The Russians had also developed special implants on telephone sets that exfiltrated conversations over phone lines and special “hooks” that covertly broadcast data from text-processing technology, such as teletypewriters, teleprinters, and text encryption devices used by the military, intelligence, and diplomats. Some of these attacks monitored tiny current fluctuations on power lines feeding a denied facility, such as an embassy, that conveyed useful information about data being processed on machines such as typewriters and teleprinters.
A declassified NSA document describes the power line vulnerability this way:
Any time a machine is used to process classified information electrically, the various switches, contacts, relays, and other components in that machine may emit radio frequency or acoustic energy. These emissions, like tiny radio broadcasts, may radiate through free space for considerable distances—a half mile or more in some cases. They may be induced on nearby conductors like signal lines, power lines, telephone lines, or water pipes and be conducted along those paths for some distance—and here we may be talking of a mile or more.1
Also, entry-level Russian textbooks on “information leakage through technical channels,” asserted that each keystroke of an electric typewriter or teletypewriter causes a current draw that’s slightly different from that of other keystrokes, enabling sensitive equipment attached to the power line feeding the sensitive building to pick up, differentiate, and decode typed information. When the Soviets couldn’t manage to implant listening or data-capture devices inside a target’s facility or attach sensors to phone or power lines, they had other ingenious options, both passive and active, for remotely capturing classified conversations and data.2
Passive remote attacks included what NSA codenamed TEMPEST collection. With TEMPEST, an adversary such as the Russians would pick up and decode unintended RF emissions from sensitive equipment at ranges of several hundred feet. In the 1950s, a British company called Rediffusion had pioneered a technology for remotely sensing RF signals radiating from ordinary televisions sets that were turned on, in order to enforce licensing fees for operating consumer TVs in the UK. If a Rediffusion monitoring truck that was driving down a residential street detected an operating TV set in a household that wasn’t paying the required fee, that house would soon be sent a notice and a bill.3 The KGB, ever on the lookout for new spy craft, had to have learned of this technology and adapted it for remotely monitoring signals from CRT data displays and television monitors in classified facilities. Russian textbooks confirm that the Soviets did, in fact, know about this technology.
A KGB technologist named Leon Theremin (the same Theremin who invented the musical instrument bearing his name) had also created two separate active remote techniques, where focused electromagnetic energy was beamed at a target from a remote post—say, a few hundred feet away—and reflections of that energy were analyzed to decode slight but discernible voice-induced vibrations from inside a building. One technique, codenamed BURAN by the Russians, used infrared radiation to capture slight voice-induced vibrations from windows, while the other, termed RF imposition by the Russians, captured voice signals from vibrations of different kinds of electrical conductors that reflected radio frequency (RF) energy.4 The Thing, discovered in the Moscow embassy in 1951, was Theremin’s brainchild, but Gandy knew that RF flooding could also remotely capture information without a cooperative device like the Thing, relying only on electronics present in a targeted room that were routinely used by an adversary, such as telephone microphones and speakers. Gandy believed that the TUMS and MUTS signals that the KGB constantly beamed at the Moscow embassy were almost certainly examples of active RF remote attacks that grew out of Theremin’s original work.
The KGB also employed a variety of “wired” remote attacks, in which they injected microwaves onto conductors that fed into a target’s facility, such as phone lines, then decoded voice and data information contained in reflections of those microwaves at nearby listening posts.
In 1975, this type of microwave radiation had been detected on Ambassador Walter Stoessel’s phone line at the Moscow embassy, prompting the State Department to protest the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.5
Gandy sometimes marveled at the inventiveness and technical sophistication of Russian intelligence. The Soviet economy was smaller than that of Texas, and yet they had somehow managed to blow past the United States in surveillance tradecraft. Part of the reason for this, he supposed, was that the Russians, who spent only one dollar on their national security for every ten dollars the American’s spent, had decided that excelling in a few narrow areas could level the playing field against vastly superior American science and technology and national wealth.
The KGB, for instance, had mounted a highly successful effort to steal designs of advanced U.S. military technology, such as airborne radars and stealthy submarine propellers, so that they could field this technology for their own armed forces at only a tiny fraction of the development cost that the Americans had spent to create the technology from scratch.6 Acquiring U.S. designs also taught the Soviets about the weaknesses of American weapons so that they could develop effective countermeasures to negate the advantage that America’s technology would otherwise enjoy on the battlefield. Understanding the weaknesses of American weapons could also save a lot of money for the Soviet military, because when the Soviets knew just the right way to shoot down an attacking American bomber, they could employ one well-aimed missile instead of the multiple missiles that would have otherwise been necessary.
Spending a lot of money on high-tech spying was a great way for the Russians to dramatically reduce spending on everything else.
But Gandy knew there was more to Russia’s superior technical spy craft than the heavy resources they focused on it. Studying the original Thing that the KGB had created in the 1940s, along with other Russian innovations such as optical attacks and other Russian surveillance tech, Gandy realized that the KGB focused Russia’s very best minds on developing innovative bugs, implants, and remote attacks. America’s brightest scientists got Ph.D.s at places like MIT and faculty positions at Harvard or Stanford, then went on to win Nobel Prizes. However, the KGB scooped up Russia’s best brains, sometimes before they even went to grad school, and offered them privileges, prestige, and perks only available to KGB officers and top Communist Party officials. Gandy had a fabulous team at R9, but thinking about the intellectual achievement of Leon Theremin’s Thing and other KGB marvels, Gandy wondered if the KGB’s A team was, pound for pound, better than anyone else in the world.
A final crucial advantage that the KGB enjoyed, Gandy realized, was that he had been unable to convince people outside NSA—particularly at CIA and the State Department—that the Russians were as good as he knew they were. As a result, American investment in thwarting the KGB’s virtuoso technology was lacking. To protect their facilities, CIA and State performed security scans against the bugs and remote attack technology that they themselves used, on the assumption that U.S. technology was the best in the world.
Expending efforts to protect against better than the best possible attacks in the world made no sense, State and CIA believed.
Arrogance, pure and simple, Gandy thought as he considered how devastatingly effective the KGB’s remote radar and optical attacks probably were.
Active remote attacks particularly intrigued Gandy because discovering these magical techniques as an eleven-year-old had motivated him to go into intelligence work in the first place.
Shortly after the end of World War II, Gandy had gone with friends to the local theater in Homer, Louisiana, to see one of the many war movies that came out in the mid-to-late 1
940s. In the movie, FBI agents monitoring Nazi spies in America remotely beamed energy from a dish antenna at a room where the spies were planning their next attack. The intrepid FBI agents were able to decode voice signals in the room from reflections off a vibrating speaker in a telephone headset and thwart the attack.
Eleven-year-old Gandy was in awe of FBI’s advanced technology and vowed, at that moment, to pursue a career catching America’s enemies using technology.
By that time, Gandy had already become a ham radio operator and learned from his older brother Carl and a family friend how to build and operate radio transmitters and receivers.
After watching the FBI score a spectacular technical success against German spies, Gandy resolved to build on his ham radio skills to become an electrical engineer somewhere in U.S. law enforcement or intelligence, in order to keep America safe.
But the path to that dream faced formidable obstacles.
One such obstacle was Gandy’s extreme distaste for going to school. Early in the first grade, when a teacher punished him for a minor infraction by lifting him up by both ears, Gandy suffered extreme pain and ear infections that lasted two weeks. On top of that, the Homer elementary schoolhouse was old, dank, and dark, not an inviting place at all for an active six-year-old.
Compounding an extreme “allergy” to school, Gandy had an undiagnosed learning disability that made it difficult for him to read. He nearly flunked second grade, and one of his high school teachers scoffed at his dreams of becoming an engineer, saying, “You will never be college material.”
It wasn’t until 2017 that a neuroscientist determined that Gandy suffered from an extreme case of dyslexia.
Despite this disadvantage, Gandy won two state high school competitions in physics and general science. He passed the FCC exam to earn a first-class commercial radio license at age seventeen that later enabled him to take a job as chief engineer at radio station KRUS during his junior and senior years in college. Getting this highly technical license required study of a thick manual, which his mother read to him while he lay in the family’s hammock. “I absorb information best when I hear it,” Gandy later said.
Midway through his senior year in high school, Gandy got accepted to Louisiana Tech, where he excelled at engineering and physics classes. English, history, and other classes that required heavy reading or writing term papers were another matter. Fortunately, he’d met his future wife, Freda Grambling (the same Gramblings who’d donated land to the university that was to be named after the family), who helped write his more difficult papers, and he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1955.
Gandy then promptly joined the air force and shipped off to NSA, where he began pursuing the dream that had begun in a movie theater a decade earlier watching FBI agents surveil Nazis spies.
Twenty-three years later, it appeared he would get an opportunity to confront a dangerous enemy.
Gandy got up from his desk, poked his head out of his office, and asked his secretary, Nancy, to come inside and close the door so he could get her started on the paperwork for his trip to Moscow.
Two weeks later, the State Department informed Gandy that a major snag had developed processing a critical part of his paperwork: a travel visa to the USSR. Apparently, the Soviets knew exactly who he was and what he did for a living, perhaps from his frequent trips to Berlin, Vietnam, and other places “downrange” (intelligence jargon for a war zone or hot area) from NSA. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had denied his visa on grounds that the only reason for his journey to the USSR was to conduct espionage.
Disappointed, Gandy assumed that would be the end of his personal involvement in any trip to Moscow. But to his surprise, State, which was not a big fan of NSA due to constant tension with NSA over the agency’s constant criticisms of embassy security, took a hard line with the Soviets.
“If you won’t let our man travel to the USSR,” State had informed the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “then no Soviet diplomats will be allowed to travel to the United States either.” For eight days, all Soviet diplomatic travel to the United States was blocked.
Under this pressure, the Soviets relented, granting visas to Gandy and two of his top technologists for a one-month stay in Moscow.
A few days after hearing that his trip to Moscow was back on, Gandy was at CIA headquarters in Virginia, picking up his travel paperwork for Moscow, when a young man and woman Gandy had never met before approached and quietly asked him to join them in a nearby conference room.
Gandy grew more alert as he followed the pair into a cubbyhole near the spy museum on the first floor, because everything about the pair screamed DO. One clue was that they were quite attractive, neatly dressed, and well-groomed. The tall, slender woman sported shoulder-length auburn hair and makeup that had been sparingly but artfully applied. Her smile radiated a million watts. The man was shorter than the woman, but solid, with an erect, military bearing and a short haircut. Well-toned shoulder and upper-arm muscles pressed against the fabric of his cream-colored Lacoste polo shirt.
Both officers held Gandy’s gaze in a way that somehow made him feel special. He’d seen the same performance in other case officers he’d met over the years. In contrast, DI analysts were likely as not to appear academic and tweedy, while DS&T officers dressed and acted a lot like Gandy did.
As he seated himself across from the pair, he suspected he was about to be manipulated into doing something advantageous to the DO.
He wasn’t disappointed.
The woman began. “I’m Ellen, and this is Tony. We’re from SE”—the Soviet Union Eastern Europe Division.
Gandy believed the second part of the sentence but not the first. Case officers sometimes supplied their real names, and sometimes they didn’t. Gandy sensed in this case that Ellen and Tony were not really Ellen and Tony.
“We understand you’re going downrange,” the woman went on.
Gandy was supposed to reveal details of his trip only on a need-to-know basis. He wasn’t even permitted to tell Freda his true destination until after he got back. But he decided not to be coy. “That’s right,” he said.
Tony’s pleasant expression grew serious. “We’d like to ask a favor.”
“Okay. What’s on your mind?”
The CIA officers exchanged quick glances. As if by prior agreement, Ellen said, “We were wondering how you’d feel about venturing outside the embassy while you’re over there to run an errand for us.”
Alarm bells went off in Gandy’s head. “Running an errand” sounded a lot like hard-core espionage on the KGB’s home turf. He wasn’t particularly worried about the physical danger—he’d been shot at and subjected to mortar attacks in Vietnam—but he didn’t think Freda would care much for him wandering the streets of Moscow. Also, he didn’t know how he would stand up to the KGB’s notorious interrogation methods, including drugs, if caught. He had way, way too much ultrasecret knowledge rattling around in his head to risk falling into Soviet hands.
He asked, “You mean do the kinds of things y’all do over there?”
“More or less,” Tony answered.
“I’m confused. Can’t one of your own folks do this? You’ve got troops over there, and I’m not trained for this sort of thing.”
Ellen answered, “We’re in a bit of a bind at the moment and are, well, shorthanded.”
Gandy edged closer to the conference table. “You do realize the other side knows who I am.”
Ellen said slowly, “We might have heard something about that.”
“So what am I missing? They’re gonna be on me like white on rice. How do I do what you ask without getting picked up and hustled to Lubyanka?”
“We assess that risk as very low,” Tony chimed in. “You’re a fresh face, and we don’t think they’ll be looking for you to do this. They believe you NSA guys just do SIGINT.”
Gandy pushed down his growing irritation. “I don’t mean to be difficult, but we do just do SIGINT. My secur
ity folks at the Fort wouldn’t agree to this in a million years. Neither would Director Inman.”
Neither of the CIA officers spoke, their facial expressions unreadable. Feels like a poker game where I’m the sucker, Gandy thought. He said, “If all y’all are from SE, then you know about security problems over there. Plenty of recent roll-ups and PNGs, from what I’ve heard.”
“Oh,” Tony said in a neutral voice, “what have you heard?”
“Well, the Marti Peterson PNG hit the papers last year. I assumed she was one of yours. And then there was your other guy, I forget his name—Vincent something or other.”
Ellen spoke up. “Those things happen from time to time; it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be safe.”
Gandy looked at her evenly. “I assume you know why COS Gus Hathaway asked me over there in the first place, to find and plug leaks?”
A trace of anger leaking into his voice, Tony said, “Maybe it would be most constructive to stay away from what we know and don’t know and just stick to the topic at hand.”
“A fair point,” Gandy said. “But my being asked to help the DO find and plug a security leak is not something that happens every day—or every decade, for that matter. I’ve got to believe that whatever leak, or leaks, have sprung up over there could have already compromised whatever project you want my help with.”
Ellen’s pretty face creased into a frown. “Does that mean you won’t help us?”
“I’d love to help you, and it might even be fun to play James Bond. But I’m not James Bond. Is this somehow related to my mission over there?”
Tony said, “Not exactly.”
“Does COS know?”
“I assume so,” Tony answered.
Gandy thought for a moment. Assume so? Weren’t these guys talking to each other? What the heck was really going on? An important station like Moscow would have ample DO staff to run errands. Could it be that all the case officers over there had been “blown” to the KGB? If so, why hadn’t CIA already replaced the officers with “fresh faces”?
The Spy in Moscow Station Page 4