The Spy in Moscow Station

by Eric Haseltine

  Something didn’t add up. Gandy thought of himself as trusting and cooperative—sometimes to a fault—but he was certain the DO wasn’t giving him the whole story. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the outsider-phobic DO had asked for his help twice in the same city in the same month. Gandy mistrusted coincidences, especially when his “cousins” from CIA were involved.

  An unsettling idea began to take shape at the edge of Charles’s awareness. As he dwelled on the thought, it came into sharper focus. Gandy felt a chill crawl up his spine. The previous week, FBI had arrested two KGB officers, Cherneyev and Enger, working undercover in New York, which meant that the Soviets would be eager to trade for them before they told FBI too much about their operation. Such trades happened all the time, as when the Soviets exchanged U2 pilot Gary Powers for KGB master spy Rudolf Abel back in the ’60s. If Moscow didn’t already have any Americans “on ice” in Lubyanka, they’d need to quickly collect a few in order to trade for their men in New York.

  Perhaps these two fashion models sitting in front of him and their DO masters wanted Gandy to get caught running an errand so that he could be a convenient hostage for the swap. That way, the KGB wouldn’t be tempted to arrest a CIA officer or two—or three—at Moscow Station for that purpose. The identities of case officers were supposed to be secret, but one way or another, the KGB always seemed to know exactly who they were.

  Gandy was a very senior NSA executive. The way these swaps went down, he might be worth two garden-variety KGB men. And Charles’s noble sacrifice would keep CIA out of any future prisoner swap.

  Was that the real reason Moscow COS had asked him to come over?

  Gandy looked at the two CIA officers, searching their fresh scrubbed, wholesome faces for clues.

  Finding none, he chided himself for being paranoid. Not even the DO could be that devious, could they? More likely, there was a simpler explanation, maybe even the one they had supplied him. In his long career dealing with different flavors of intelligence officers, he’d learned that screwups were usually a better explanation than malice to explain why officers did the unexplainable things they did. He didn’t know what screwups might have happened in Moscow to make the DO unable to perform routine errands, but something had to be seriously wrong over there if the DO really did need his help running routine operations.

  Gandy later learned that “Tony” and “Ellen” had probably asked him to run the “errand” because Admiral Turner had prohibited CIA from conducting HUMINT, omitting, apparently, explicit instructions for employing U.S. intelligence officers outside of CIA.

  But in 1978, Gandy could only guess what had gone wrong in Moscow. His intuition told him it had to be connected somehow to the COS’s unusual call for NSA’s help with security, but he knew better than to ask the two youngsters in front of him about it.

  At length, he said, “Look. I assume you wouldn’t be asking me to do this if it weren’t important, but I really can’t help you out. Since they know who I am, running your errand would probably scuttle both your mission and mine. Then there are the leaks to worry about.”

  The officers, who’d both leaned in to hear, settled back in their chairs as if they’d been expecting this answer.

  Tony said, “It was worth a try.” He handed Gandy a card that bore only a name and gray-line phone number. “Sorry about getting a little testy a moment ago. Call if you change your mind.”

  But Gandy didn’t change his mind. He was headed straight into the belly of the beast and didn’t want to get chewed up and spit out before he got started there.

  3. In the Belly of the Beast

  Gandy looked out his window as the commercial passenger jet he had taken from Frankfurt circled Sheremetyevo International Airport north of Moscow, then lined up for final approach. Through the broken clouds, he could see large thoroughfares, wet with recent rain, that encircled the Soviet capital. Like most major cities, Moscow had a loop surrounding it, but unlike many sprawling urban centers, it possessed two such loops, rippling out in concentric circles.

  Or maybe rings on a target, Gandy mused.

  After the plane touched town and began to taxi to the gate, Gandy breathed an involuntary sigh of relief. Despite arriving in the world’s most dangerous city—at least for foreign intelligence officers such as himself—he was actually relieved to have made it to Moscow in one piece.

  Gandy was traveling as a U.S. government employee but had refused the government travel office’s direction to take an Aeroflot flight with a stopover in Sofia, Bulgaria, and instead had offered to pay out of his own pocket for a more expensive ticket on a U.S. carrier that stopped over in Frankfurt, Germany. In Gandy’s view, a lot of things could happen on an Aeroflot flight, none of them good.

  Although he had deep respect for Russian intelligence tradecraft, he did not think much of the safety record of Soviet-made commercial aircraft. On top of that, Aeroflot was owned and run by a Communist government who had made known their strong objection to his visit.

  Doubtless, he would be surveilled on Aeroflot and possibly seated next to a “honey trap”: a KGB female sexual operative whose goal would be to compromise him. Gandy knew he could not be seduced into giving up classified information, but the KGB had many ways of successfully employing honey traps against unwilling targets. An attractive woman seated next to him, for example, could, without warning, lean over and kiss him passionately on the lips while simultaneously placing her hand in his crotch for the benefit of surveillance cameras. Then, once he landed in Moscow, the KGB could show him the embarrassing photos and threaten to send them to his wife, Freda, or his bosses back in the States.

  Or an attractive man could stage the same performance, creating even greater blackmail leverage.

  Crude but sometimes effective.

  Then there was the one-night stopover in Bulgaria, a close Soviet ally. What genius in the travel office had thought it was a good idea to park a highly valued U.S. intelligence officer—known to the KGB—in a Communist bloc country for an evening in a Sofia hotel without a personal security detail or even a weapon (which Gandy sometimes carried on other overseas assignments)?

  But an Aeroflot journey wasn’t the only hazard Gandy had to worry about. The Russians knew exactly when he was coming and probably which U.S. carrier and flight he had chosen, thanks to excellent Soviet SIGINT capabilities on the rooftops of diplomatic facilities in Washington and New York, where U.S. airlines transmitted passenger and flight information by microwaves—which, as mere “commercial” links, could probably be intercepted by any local foreign embassy employees in the United States.

  It wasn’t unheard of for the KGB to harass and rough up the opposition, although by a gentleman’s agreement between U.S. and Soviet spy agencies, this sort of thing was kept to a minimum. But gentleman’s agreement or no, the Soviets had strenuously objected to Charles’s visit and might have caused him trouble in Frankfurt. If West German thugs mugged him at the airport, who was to say who or what had made them do it?

  Modern jetways had not yet made it to Russian airports, so Gandy and the other passengers deplaned via old-fashioned mobile stairways. The late April Moscow air was chilly, and Gandy could see his breath, along with a small mounds of dirt-streaked snow in the shadows, reminding him that Moscow’s latitude was just a smidgen south of Juneau, Alaska.

  Carrying a government passport, Gandy was ushered by stern-faced officials into “the fast lane,” where he presented his papers. The uniformed officer studied his passport and attached visa carefully, taking his time leafing through every page of the documents, then going over them again.

  And again. And again.

  Finally completing his elaborate perusal, the officer said nothing and made no move to stamp the documents. Instead, he fixed Gandy with an unblinking death stare. Gandy, realizing the Soviets were simply stalling so they could search his luggage in a back room, had been prepared for this, so he just stared back.

  At length, the officer answered
his phone, simply said, “Da,” stamped the passport, and curtly waved Gandy through, where he picked up his luggage.

  Outside of customs, Gandy was met by a driver from the embassy accompanied by Jon LeChevet from the U.S. embassy’s Regional Security Office (RSO).

  “Welcome to Moscow,” LeChevet said, extending his hand.

  In the car, a late-model American sedan, Gandy and his host kept the conversation light, avoiding any shoptalk. The driver, like most U.S. embassy employees, was either a serving KGB officer or employed by them. And the odds were excellent that the car was bugged.

  Although Gandy needed no reminder to obey “Moscow rules”—the hyper-strict security protocols that Western intelligence officers followed in the Soviet capital—a forceful reminder nevertheless presented itself as the embassy sedan pulled away from the curb at the arrival terminal. Four black Russian-made sedans abruptly boxed in the embassy car, proceeding slowly into the flow of traffic.

  Gandy looked over at the KGB car closest to him and spotted two officers in black fedoras—shockingly similar to those worn by the Spy vs. Spy characters in his son Chuck’s Mad magazine cartoons.

  The black-hatted officer looked back at Gandy, wearing a menacing expression similar to that of the immigration official.

  I wonder if they teach that look at the KGB academy, Gandy thought as he settled in for the half-hour ride to the embassy.

  * * *

  Although Gandy was weary from the long trip, he wanted to get a feel for the country he now found himself in and the people who lived there. So instead of succumbing to a powerful urge to nap during the ride from Sheremetyevo, he took in the sights of the outskirts of Moscow as best he could given that he was still boxed in on all sides by his KGB “escort.”

  Putting aside his specialized knowledge of Russian technology and tradecraft, most of what Gandy knew about Russia had come from movie, television, and news depictions of a grim, dark, poor, soulless place where blocky men in fur hats and long leather coats ordered jackbooted subordinates to haul innocent civilians out of bed in the small hours of the morning for long journeys to the gulag and a life of hard labor in the Siberian wilderness.

  A Stalinist hell, in other words.

  But for the most part, outer Moscow looked like the surroundings of other large cities Gandy had visited. Factories, power lines, trucks and cars speeding to their destinations on surface streets. The occasional pedestrians who he spotted did not appear to be trudging ahead, heads down, occasionally looking over their shoulders for secret police, as American stereotypes of life in Russia suggested.

  No, on the whole, the place and the locals who inhabited it looked surprisingly normal, with a few important exceptions.

  One of those exceptions was a line of crossed-rail tank barriers in Moscow’s outskirts. The tank traps were rusted and old, some with graffiti painted on them.

  Clearly these defenses were left over from “the great Patriotic War” against Hitler thirty-five years earlier. Why were they still there? Did the Russians expect another attack from the West all these years later? Did they ceremonially mark the farthest point of German advance decades earlier? Or were the tank traps just another form of Communist propaganda, reminding the populace that danger was everywhere?

  As Gandy took in bomb-damaged buildings also left over from the war, another explanation for the tank traps occurred to him: any country too poor to rebuild bombed-out buildings was also probably too poor to remove tank traps. It seemed that building up and maintaining their armed forces and nuclear capability took higher priority than building up their civil infrastructure.

  As he entered Moscow proper, a palpable, heavy sense of his surroundings, and the men who ruled them, crept into his bones. Here was a place that would not soon—if ever—forget that enemies from the West had nearly destroyed them. And literally nothing—including rebuilt housing for its people or factories for its industry—was worth sacrificing for military strength against Western adversaries like America, its main enemy.

  Nothing.

  * * *

  After unpacking in his room at the north annex of the U.S. embassy at 19 Chaikovskova, a short walk from Red Square, and getting a good night’s sleep, Gandy went down to breakfast in the embassy snack bar. Loading food on his tray, he scanned the tables, looking for tourists who had stopped by the embassy to check in and to get a reasonable meal, as good food was scarce in Russia, even for Western tourists with hard currency.

  From many previous trips abroad, Gandy had learned how to spot tourists in American embassies: they were usually bright-eyed and excited about being where they were, talking fast and smiling a lot—and they wore cameras around their necks. Career diplomats, especially in Iron Curtain countries, were not so cheery. And they rarely carried cameras in the snack bar.

  Gandy needed to avoid diplomats in the cafeteria at all costs. He was supposed to be in Moscow working as a routine government employee and didn’t want to draw the usual questions about which section of the department he worked in or what his job was.

  But if he ate alone, some diplomat or other, exhibiting the normal social graces of people who are selected for their relationship-building skills, would seek him out, if for no other reason than to keep him company.

  So Gandy looked for nearly full tables of tourists. Finding a family of three seated at a table for four, Gandy asked if he could join the group and sat down. A pleasant-looking couple from New Jersey in their midforties was in the middle of breakfast with their daughter, already dressed in a brightly colored down coat for the chilly weather, and welcomed him.

  It turned out, after quick intros, that the family were not, strictly speaking, tourists, because only embassy staff and their guests, along with the occasional student, were allowed into the Moscow embassy snack bar. These people were guests of the embassy, but they were almost as good as tourists for Charles’s purposes.

  As was usually the case when Gandy sought out nongovernment types, the family asked Gandy no questions except for his name, and they proceeded to talk about their visit, what they had bought, how horrible the food was in Moscow, how hot the hotel rooms were, and how grim the locals looked. The embassy snack bar seemed to offer the only digestible food in the city, if not the country.

  Gandy loved every second of the boring one-way conversation, because no return conversation from him was expected—or apparently desired. He nodded and smiled at all the right times as he worked through his plate of scrambled eggs and sipped his coffee.

  God, he loved tourists, even if they weren’t really tourists!

  Breakfast completed, Gandy wished the New Jersey family a fun outing and found his way up to Jon LeChevet’s office for his first appointment.

  Jon offered him a seat, and they chatted for twenty minutes, filling each other in on their backgrounds.

  Gandy learned that LeChevet was from Oneonta, New York, and had a mother who, in a post–atom bomb world, had encouraged him to study physics in high school and to become a physicist because “the country needs more physicists.”

  So Jon earned a Ph.D. in solid state physics from Northeastern University, only to discover when he graduated in 1971 that the world did not need more physicists. Academic and private-industry jobs for physicists were scarce, so Jon took a postdoctoral position at Georgetown University, where he applied his expertise to develop ultrasensitive weapons detectors for airports. He developed a detector capable of sensing the location, type, and shape of weapons, but the FAA passed on his device because it was an eight-foot-long tunnel that made passengers feel claustrophobic.

  His postdoctoral work at an end, Jon decided to try his luck in private industry and took a job working for a company that made superconductors, where, among other projects, he worked on applying superconductor technology to detecting submarines.

  But after a couple of years, Jon decided to do something more meaningful with his life and accepted a job at State Department security, protecting diplomatic facilities
overseas. After working in the research-and-development section for a couple of years, Jon shifted over to the operational side of diplomatic security and trained in a government interagency TSCM (technical security countermeasures; basically, finding bugs) program and shipped off to Moscow, accompanied by his family.

  After Gandy sketched out his own background, the two got down to business. “I wanted to fill you in on what I’ve learned here before we go downstairs to see the COS and the boss”—CIA chief of station Gus Hathaway and Ambassador Malcolm Toon, respectively, whom they were slated to meet an hour later.

  “I’d appreciate that,” Gandy answered. He’d already thoroughly prepared for the trip at Fort Meade by poring over security data collected at the embassy, but he was always open to learning more.

  “I’ve been here since last June,” LeChevet began, “mostly repairing all the damage from the fire last year that destroyed the eighth floor, damaged parts of the ninth and most of the tenth, gutted the attic, and collapsed the roof. When I can, I do the usual security work: making sure event detectors—room-entry alarms, metal detectors, and so on—work properly, monitoring the microwave signals beamed at the upper floors, and checking for bugs and hidden microphones in the State Department’s sections of the embassy. As you probably know, CIA officers do security in CIA areas.”

  Gandy nodded.

  “Bugs and microphones in the residences and nonsecure offices are, despite a never-ending battle to find and remove them, a constant presence,” Jon continued. “And with over a hundred Soviets running around the building, including maids, cooks, drivers, secretaries, administrative staff, and even security personnel, it’s impossible to stop the Russians from planting the devices.”

  Gandy thought, The walls don’t have ears; the walls are ears.

  Gandy had heard from a State Department man named Javits, who had been posted in Moscow, that his eight-year-old son, who lived with him in the residence section of the embassy, had his bike stolen. Infuriated, and accustomed to Russian harassment, the boy screamed at the wall in his bedroom, “Wall, give me my bike back!”