The Spy in Moscow Station

by Eric Haseltine

  Gandy took a deep breath, let it out, and got back to work, realizing that such a chat should never—and would never—happen.

  Listening through his earphones for an hour to signals that might come through the antenna and box, while watching his spectrum analyzer, Gandy could not hear or see any meaningful signals in any of the antenna’s three frequency bands.

  He was disappointed but not surprised at the lack of signals. Bugs and implants often transmitted in ultrashort bursts to reduce the time over which TSCM scans could detect them. Also, given that it was 1:30 a.m., no one in the target zone where the antenna had been pointed in the chimney was at work, so he didn’t expect voices or data from typewriters or faxes to be transmitting.

  Well, that was what tape recorders were for. He could leave the system on and record what it heard 24-7.

  Before setting up his recorders, Gandy debated whether or not to open up the aluminum box and to probe it with an oscilloscope to study the way it processed signals. LeChevet told him that he had x-rayed the device and found no explosives, but Gandy, recalling that the Russians were experts at designing around sensors like x-rays, knew there were ways of masking such booby traps to x-rays.

  He couldn’t risk having the circuit self-destruct, because it was the only one he was ever likely to get.

  And it would also be nice not to have his hands and face blown off. How would he explain that to Freda?

  * * *

  Waking early the following morning after a fitful sleep, tired but satisfied with his previous night’s work, Gandy asked for and got a meeting with Hathaway in the box.

  Hathaway met Gandy at the entrance to CIA’s SCIF, wearing tennis whites and what looked like brand-new tennis shoes. Gandy noticed that three tennis rackets and two cans of balls lay on the floor by Hathaway’s desk. Gandy had spotted Hathaway dressed this way before, with his wife, Karin, who also was an avid tennis player. It was now June in Moscow and time to get back on the courts for serious players.

  Hathaway led Gandy back to the box. As Gandy settled into his seat, Hathaway turned on the light, activating the external blower, then took his own seat across from Gandy. “What’s on your mind?”

  Gandy started by describing his midnight encounter with the woman in the peasant’s blouse. That blouse, and the treasures it contained, had been burned into his memory—probably forever—although he did not tell the CIA man that. Gandy concluded, “You’ve got some serious problems with embassy security.”

  Hathaway shook his head. “That can’t have happened. Impossible.”

  Gandy suppressed his disappointment about not being believed. What did Hathaway think, that Gandy was lying about the encounter? Gandy said in an even voice, “Well, if you want confirmation, I can bring in the two NSA guys who were listening to the whole thing right behind a stack of boxes.”

  Hathaway started to say something, then evidently thought better of it and remained silent for a few moments, lost in thought. It seemed to Gandy that Hathaway still didn’t believe him but didn’t want to argue. At length, Hathaway asked, “What did you conclude about the chimney antenna?”

  “I haven’t had time to study it thoroughly, but the bottom line is that you almost certainly have at least one, and probably more, implants here that are not detectable by either State or your TSCM gear. My guess is that the devices are in or near the ambassador’s office and on several floors below it.”

  Hathaway regarded Gandy for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “First, I want to thank you for coming out here. You’ve been very helpful. But please understand, I’m going to have to convince headquarters about your conclusions, and I’m expecting it to be a hard sell.”

  “I expect so.”

  “So I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and ask you the hard questions I know will come up. I hope you won’t take my comments the wrong way.”

  Gandy smiled. “Well, I imagine in your business you hear lots of things of dubious validity. And I’ve gotten used to skepticism from your side of the river. So shoot.”

  “Okay,” Hathaway began, “why do you say that the antenna is aimed at Toon’s office? That antenna might be left over from an old operation. How can you know it’s still active?”

  “I can’t, until I hear what it’s hearing and find the source or sources. But it seems to me the other side has used this recently. Didn’t one of State’s secretaries hear a scraping noise in the chimney a few months ago? Those noises were probably the antenna bumping against the chimney’s brick walls when it was raised or lowered.”

  Hathaway, eyebrows raised, fixed him with a skeptical look.

  “Not hard evidence, I agree,” Gandy went on, “but the aluminum of the antenna and box are tarnished, but not that much. I doubt they’ve been there more than two or three years.”

  Hathaway still didn’t look convinced.

  “And one more thing,” Gandy observed. “Why leave the antenna where we might find it if they weren’t actively using it? It would have been smarter to remove it and all the other gear in the chimney so that, if we ever went in there, we wouldn’t suspect the chimney’s true purpose. They would almost certainly want to use the chimney again sometime.”

  Hathaway’s expression was neutral, and as Gandy watched him jot down some notes, he couldn’t tell if Hathaway was just playing devil’s advocate or harbored deep doubts himself. Gandy knew that good intelligence officers—and Hathaway was a good one by all indications—did not jump to conclusions or marry themselves to the first plausible idea. So skepticism was healthy, up to a point.

  Hathaway said, “I don’t know. You’re implying that the Russians, who can’t even keep food on the shelves of their state-run stores, are so far ahead of us that they can make bugs that state-of-the-art equipment can’t detect.”

  “I’m not implying it, Hathaway; I’m saying it outright. They’ve done it before, with the Thing. And what do you suppose the radar flooding [microwave attacks on the embassy] is all about? They wouldn’t sustain such a large operation if it weren’t producing results. But the technical folks here really haven’t a clue what the Russians are up to.”

  Hathaway waved his hand, dismissing the argument. “When we complained about the microwaves a couple of years ago, the Russians said the transmissions beamed at us were just jamming whatever listening gear we might have. My own guys think that may be the explanation.”

  Realizing Hathaway was probably just testing him, Gandy said, “That’s not what the microwaves were doing back in ’51, with the Great Seal bug. Why would it be any different now?”

  “Okay,” Hathaway said. “Suppose I believed you—and I’m not saying I do yet—what should we do about it?”

  “For one thing, we should take out every piece of electronic gear in the embassy and x-ray it carefully—but not here, where the KGB knows our every move. We should ship it all back to the States where we can go over it at our leisure with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Dead serious,” Gandy said. “It’s the only way we can know for sure. You don’t have the special equipment or expertise here to do the job properly.”

  “You do realize,” Hathaway said, failing to mask a growing impatience, “that’s wildly impractical. The disruption to our workflow would be catastrophic. And you’re talking about, literally, tons of equipment: faxes, teletypes, scanners, electric typewriters, crypto gear. State has no money to replace all that. Work here would grind to a halt.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Gandy answered. “In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a lot of money, and we could fly in clean replacements before we shipped stuff out.”

  “Not a lot of money to NSA, maybe, but the State Department is dirt poor. They would fight this tooth and nail. Hell, they already think intel officers are paranoid and see spies under every bed.”

  Gandy smiled at that. “This is Moscow, Hathaway. There are spies under every bed.”

  Hathaway smiled back
. “Good point, but those ubiquitous microphones are in the residences and common areas, not in our secure areas up here.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. My midnight visitor proved the locals can go pretty much anywhere they want. There are a whole lot more of them in this building than there are of us.”

  Hathaway, apparently not wanting to argue the point further, glanced at his watch. “Look, I can’t miss my court time with Karin. We’re in a tournament, so I have to go. But I need more than you’ve given me—a lot more—if we’re going to convince Langley, not to mention State, to do as you suggest with all the gear here.”

  “What exactly do you need?”

  Hathaway rose from his chair. Reaching for the light switch, but before turning the light and blower noise off, he said, “Bring me solid proof about what the chimney antenna is doing. Bring me a smoking gun.”

  * * *

  Back in his quarters, Gandy played back the conversation with Hathaway in his mind.

  A smoking gun.

  To Gandy, the presence of the antenna in the chimney was a smoking gun. The constant microwave bombardment was another. Who in their right mind would take seriously the Russians’ claim that they were broadcasting microwaves in order to jam (block with high noise) the embassy’s own electronic gear? All you had to do was look at the very low power levels of the microwave signals (just a few milliwatts) and the broad range of microwave frequencies that the KGB were using, along with the rapidity with the frequencies hopped around, to know instantly that the microwaves had nothing to do with jamming. Gandy had spent a lot of time in Berlin listening to East German and Russian high-power jamming signals and knew exactly what Communist jamming transmissions sounded like.

  The Russian microwave attacks in Moscow were nothing like what he had heard in Berlin—or anywhere else, for that matter.

  What would it take to convince Hathaway and his skeptical masters at Langley: Finding the implant (or implants) the chimney antenna was picking up? Uncovering newer, stealthier versions of the Thing that responded to microwave activation?

  Probably not, Gandy decided. CIA could argue that whatever bugs or implants might be found were left over from an earlier time, just like the chimney antenna. Random microphones were always popping up around the embassy, some of very old design, that had probably gone dead years earlier.

  No, finding an implant, by itself, would not prove that particular implant was the source of the recent HUMINT roll-ups.

  Hathaway was setting the bar of proof extremely high. Considering the various reasons Hathaway might do that—other than a need to convert skeptics at Langley—an uncomfortable thought crept in: What if CIA didn’t really want NSA to find the source of the devastating leaks? NSA would look like heroes if they found a leak, while CIA, in contrast, would look like incompetent bumblers. Perhaps Hathaway had summoned Gandy to Moscow just to go through the motions of looking for the leaks. “I left no stone unturned,” he could argue to CIA headquarters. “I even brought in NSA’s best. If they couldn’t find bugs, then there probably aren’t any, so we need to look elsewhere.”

  Perhaps saving face and making CIA look good was more important to Hathaway than saving the lives of his Russian assets.

  Harsh, but Gandy had seen this type of bureaucratic cover-your-ass behavior before in CIA case officers (and elsewhere in the intelligence world, if truth be told).

  However, sizing up Hathaway, Gandy decided bureaucratic ass-covering was not the Moscow COS’s game. He genuinely seemed to want to find the leaks and stop them, and he seemed a lot less into protecting CIA’s turf than other agency men he’d met.

  Another reason that Hathaway was acting like such a hard sell could be that he actually did buy everything Gandy was saying but didn’t want NSA to follow up with the bug hunt, reserving that task for CIA’s own technical support officers at the embassy. Unlike Gandy, CIA officers were directly under Hathaway’s control and could be relied upon to keep their mouths shut about what they found (or didn’t find).

  Gandy had experienced this tactic at Langley many times, giving rise to him saying, “They screwed me so many times, I’ve grown to like it.” Most folks at CIA hated, hated, hated relying on outsiders for anything. On the surface, Hathaway didn’t seem to fit the CIA mold, but one never knew.

  Leaning back in his chair and staring at the water-stained ceiling of his room, Gandy pondered his options.

  Coming to a decision after a few minutes, he thought, To deliver a smoking gun, I somehow have to demonstrate not only that the KGB could be stealing secrets from the embassy but that they actually are stealing secrets.

  And he knew just how to do that.

  Gandy sprang from his chair and set out for the equipment room, where he had left the chimney antenna.

  * * *

  Over the next two weeks, Gandy and his team played and replayed recordings on equipment that he had hooked up to the chimney antenna. He took most of the recordings with the antenna aimed at the southeast corner of the embassy’s main building, where the ambassador’s office sat, reproducing as best he could the original geometry from the chimney.

  It occurred to Gandy that the Soviets had carefully chosen the chimney as the best place to hide the antenna for that very reason. Indeed, they may have built the false chimney in the first place back in the ’50s knowing that it would be the perfect location from which to spy on the ambassador’s corner office.

  One afternoon, shortly before he was scheduled to return to the States, Gandy heard a series of clicks on the tapes from the previous few days. To Charles’s trained ear, they sounded like burst transmissions from a covert communication device. Putting on the earphones hooked up live to the antenna, Gandy heard the same clicks again occurring in real time.

  Although he was encouraged by the clicks and strongly suspected they represented exfil transmissions from active implants in the embassy, the clicks were far from the smoking gun that Hathaway had demanded. Such clicks could result from light switches turning on and off or appliances throwing off electrical transients. Arc welders had been known to generate such clicks, too. Even flushing toilets generated such RF noises. Who knew where the clicks were coming from?

  The only thing Gandy knew for certain, after reviewing tapes for the past two weeks, was that the clicks only showed up during embassy working hours. That implied that they originated in activity that uniquely occurred during the workday.

  But if the clicks represented what Gandy thought they did, he had a pretty good idea what kind of implant he was dealing with and what type of information might be leaking out.

  Gandy had gathered other information during the previous two weeks (still too sensitive to describe here) that was entirely consistent with his theory.

  Because of a lack of publicly available records on Charles’s activities in Moscow, we can only speculate about the sources of this information. Perhaps he had somehow managed to rob the highway robbers.

  What is more certain is the substance of what transpired during Gandy’s final out-brief with Hathaway and Jon LeChevet a few days later.

  * * *

  After the three men settled into the box for their final meeting and turned on the light and blower, Gandy summarized his findings from all sources, ending with the clicks he had heard the previous few days through the chimney antenna.

  “What do the clicks tell you?” LeChevet asked.

  “Well,” Gandy began, “they’re not voice signals. Too narrow bandwidth.”

  Hathaway leaned forward, resting his elbows on the small conference table. “What does that leave?”

  “Text, almost certainly,” Gandy said. “A teleprinter, typewriter, crypto machine or OCR [optical character reader]. And the other information I just told you about corroborates that. I’m quite certain we’re dealing with some kind of text exfil. It could very well be the source of the leaks you brought me here to find.”

  Hearing this, LeChevet looked uncomfortable.

  “Wh
at is it?” Hathaway asked.

  LeChevet cleared his throat. “Well, it’s probably nothing, but after the fire, one of our IBM Selectric typewriters—you know, the ones with the ball heads that are all over the embassy—was damaged. We’re on a very tight budget here, so I asked the husband of one of the folks living here at the embassy, a guy who used to repair those IBM typewriters for a living, to see what he could do to fix it.”

  “Go on,” Hathaway urged.

  “Anyhow, the guy came to me and showed me parts of this typewriter that he’d never seen before on any Selectric: springs on switches, stuff like that. He didn’t understand what those extraneous things were doing and thought I ought to know about it, even though the features could simply be a new modification on late models.”

  “Did you x-ray the machine?” Gandy asked.

  “Yes, I did, and found nothing. I’ve wired D.C. for instructions about what to do next—you know, should I send the typewriter back for closer study or just keep it. I haven’t heard anything back yet. In the meantime, based on the negative x-ray findings, I’m using that typewriter now myself. It’s all fixed.”

  “You think it’s safe?” Hathaway asked.

  “Well,” LeChevet answered, “unless the Russians have magically figured out how to make electronics that won’t show up on x-rays, I’d say, yes, it’s safe. Anyhow, I don’t type any really sensitive stuff on it. The RSO secretary, Dotty, does all our classified typing on her machine.”

  Listening to this exchange, Gandy agreed that, as clever as the Russians were, they hadn’t yet figured out how to violate the laws of physics, which dictated that metal conductors, which were present in all electronics, would show up on x-rays.

  But the fact that LeChevet’s machine probably hadn’t been compromised didn’t mean that other embassy text machines, such as other IBM Selectrics, teleprinters, or crypto gear, hadn’t been messed with. For example, the electric typewriter that Dotty used might be one source of the mysterious clicks that Gandy had recorded.