Gandy thought that if the secretary of state believed in his heart of hearts that the “fox in the henhouse” was NSA, not the KGB (who really did have free run of most of the embassy), how hard would State try to hide GUNMAN from the Soviets? Especially when the number-one State Department official in Moscow, Ambassador Arthur Hartman, had been the one who’d referred Gandy as a “ne’er-do-well” who wrapped himself in the flag of National Security and is doing great harm to our relationship with the Soviets.
After an additional two weeks went by and all but a few low-priority classes of equipment had been exhaustively studied with nothing to show for it but tens of thousands of x-rays and ten tons of disassembled equipment, Gandy and Walt found themselves in a meeting unrelated to GUNMAN. They exchanged worried glances across the large conference table.
Gandy was not looking forward to the three-day weekend, just a day away from starting, and by the look on Walt’s face, he wasn’t either.
Although Gandy didn’t know it, ten straight weeks of no results, with just a few pieces of equipment to go, had taken an emotional toll on Walt. Walt normally arrived home at nearby Catonsville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, after his family had finished dinner, and he either had a light snack and a beer, watched TV with his wife, Patricia, and youngest children, Sean and Kathleen (the only two of Deeley’s eight children still living at home), or simply went to bed.
But for the last couple of weeks, as it became clear GUNMAN might fail, Walt’s home life started to change. Each night, he would arrive exhausted, usually after 8:00 p.m., grab a beer or two, retreat into his study, and turn Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue up on the stereo, a signal to his family that he needed solitude. For over an hour, Walt would sit in his study, nursing his beer, playing the same Gershwin piece at high volume, over and over again, as if the music could cleanse him of toxins.
At NSA, watching Walt chain-smoke at a faster pace than usual in the meeting they were both attending just before the weekend, it occurred to Gandy that he was looking at a man whose improbable career, which had taken him from a lowly army sergeant to a deputy director of the agency, was about to come to an abrupt end. If GUNMAN failed, Gandy’s reputation would take a severe beating, for sure, but Walt had gone over the heads of the NSA director, secretary of defense, CIA director, and the national security advisor to get to President Regan. There was no way Walt would survive having been wrong to do so.
NSA would need a scapegoat for the embarrassing GUNMAN spectacle, and Walt’s take-no-prisoners approach to moving up the career ladder had left him with plenty of powerful enemies both inside and outside NSA.
Gandy also felt compelled to consider the impact of GUNMAN’s failure on NSA’s standing in the national security community. After raising such a stink and not-so-subtly impugning both State and CIA’s abilities to keep the embassy secure, while keeping them in the dark about the GUNMAN operation, the hit to NSA’s reputation might take decades to recover, especially given that CIA had recently pushed hard to keep NSA out of embassy countermeasures work.
But careers, reputations, and NSA’s prestige hanging in the balance were not Gandy’s main concern that Friday afternoon: whether the techs found any bugs or not as GUNMAN wound down, Gandy knew for certain that the Moscow embassy had been penetrated and that Soviets working for America had died in the past because of the penetration, and more would likely die in the future if the leak were not found and plugged through GUNMAN.
If GUNMAN failed, embassy security in Moscow would stay firmly in State and CIA’s hands—for decades, if not forever—leaving the embassy with the same security it had always had: crappy.
U.S. intelligence gathering in Russia, as a result, would continue to limp along, occasionally grinding to a halt as it had under Admiral Turner. On top of these worries, Gandy believed that the KGB would continue to know in advance U.S. positions on nuclear weapons treaties, human rights issues, foreign policy, and a host of other sensitive national security information flowing into and out of the Moscow embassy.
Gandy found it difficult to concentrate on the meeting he was in as he realized that time was fast running out on his best, and possibly last, chance to stop the Russians from eating America’s lunch in Moscow.
As the long meeting wrapped up and participants filed out, Gandy stayed behind to chat with Walt about GUNMAN.
But when the two NSA executives were alone, they just looked at each other and realized there was little to talk about. The techs would either find something in the next couple of weeks, or they wouldn’t. Walt would survive to fight another day at NSA, or he wouldn’t. Gandy’s six-year odyssey for validation would end in success or infamy.
What else was there to say?
Walt put out his half-smoked cigarette in an overflowing ashtray in front of him and simply nodded to Gandy as he left.
Gandy nodded back and headed out of the building for the most agonizing three-day break in his long career.
10. A Wife in the Wrong Place at the Right Time
Motor Pool Trailer, Fort Meade, Maryland, July 20, 1984
Of the twenty-five security specialists that Walt had handpicked to hunt for bugs in the Moscow embassy equipment, none was more motivated than twenty-five-year-old Mike Arneson. Mike had grown up in a poor Minnesota family with a mother who had five boys and three girls before she was thirty-one and a father who worked as a machinist. Mike thought of his father as a workaholic who spent most of his spare time with friends at a favorite bar, away from the constant arguing with Mike’s mother.
Mike said his parents weren’t very good at giving recognition to any of their offspring, because they’d become parents immediately after high school and had eight kids before they were both thirty-two. No matter how well Mike did in school or sports, or how clever he was inventing gadgets (he had sold greeting cards from the back of comic books in order to buy a pair of walkie-talkies that he souped up to get a much longer range), young Mike Arneson never felt appreciated by either parent.
During the separation and divorce of his parents, Mike, who was the oldest boy, had to become a proxy father to his younger siblings. Mike observed that his father’s disengagement from the family had left him with a “permanent hole, with the constant need for recognition, that I would never achieve until much later in life.”
This unquenchable need drove Mike to “work harder than everyone else” and to be the first person in his family to go to college. But in 1974, when he approached his father about college, his father just laughed and said, “The only way to college for you is through Saigon,” meaning Mike would have to enlist in one of the armed forces to get the GI bill benefits if he wanted a college education.
So, with his parents’ approval, when Mike graduated from high school at seventeen, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. Mike tested high in mathematics and electronics, so the air force put him through security electronics training at the Electronic Security Command after he completed boot camp.
Mike then went to Camp Bullis for advanced field and survival training, but he never went to Vietnam because the war was fast drawing down. Instead, Mike shipped off to Aviano Air Base in Italy.
After serving six years in the air force, with tours in Turkey, South Korea, and Japan, Mike served his last tour of duty in Denver, Colorado, at the Aerospace Data Facility.
While in Denver in 1979, just before leaving the air force, Mike noticed an executive secretary at NSA named Joan. Joan had also noticed Mike, and one morning at the start of the work shift, she asked him out on a date.
Mike knew from asking around that Joan was seven years older than he was, but he accepted her offer anyway and went out with her that night. On the date, Joan told Mike she was a Baltimore girl from the little village of Dundalk and that she’d worked at NSA since 1968 after graduating high school.
Within a year of that first date, Joan and Mike were married.
When Mike left the air force, he joined Hughes Aircraft Company as an engineering te
chnician, working in Denver.
In early 1984, Joan had to curtail her work in Denver because her mother experienced kidney failure and needed dialysis. To help Joan’s mother, Joan and Mike moved to Maryland, where Mike hired on at NSA as an engineering specialist, a low-level technician.
When GUNMAN began later that year, Mike had earned his two-year engineering degree at night school while working full-time, but despite “working my ass off” and leading a research-and-development team of about a dozen technologists, developing many highly classified programs (including biometrics, liquid crystal technology, and holographic tamper protection tags/pouches), Mike was still effectively invisible in an agency loaded with Ph.D.s and fully degreed engineers.
Each of Mike’s supervisors told him he’d never get promoted because he didn’t have a bachelor of science in electronic engineering (BSEE) degree and that he would always be a tech and only a tech.
The only NSAers who got promoted, it seemed to Mike, were the ones who constantly took time off to get second master’s or Ph.D. degrees, while doing no “real” work to fulfill NSA’s mission. Mike said that “underlings like me, who carried so much of the workload that they had no time for vacation, never got promoted.”
Despite experiencing powerful career headwinds, Mike wanted to be the first “non-degreed engineer to make it to the Senior Executive level” (i.e., as high as Gandy) and was still looking for the recognition he never got from his parents. NSA, by failing to recognize Mike’s contributions, was replaying the awful dynamic of Mike’s family: Excel as much as you like, but we’re never going to praise you.
In other words, NSA, by failing to acknowledge his good qualities, was pushing all of Mike’s buttons, and pushing them hard.
Thus, Mike was highly motivated to be the one to find a bug in the Moscow embassy equipment first. “Most of the other guys were just putting in their time, watching the clock,” according to Mike, but Mike continued to stay late, work weekends, and “do whatever it took.” Another reason Mike wanted to find the bug was that, after learning of what GUNMAN’s purpose was, he was “pretty pissed off at the Russians for trying to screw us.”
This same passion for recognition and achievement would serve Mike well later in life. Upon leaving NSA in 2000 at the age of forty-two and after twenty years of service when a “controlling asshole boss ticked me off for the last time,” Mike gave up all of his government retirement. He then went on to found multiple start-ups (Matrics1, Matrics2, and Innurvation), authored over 150 patents or patent applications, won two prestigious IEEE best paper awards, and played a key role in developing important technologies such as USB thumb drives and ultralow-power RFID chips. Mike’s first start-up sold for over $230 million.
But back in July 1984, Mike was just an anonymous, lowly tech without even a bachelor’s degree, who was focused on winning Walt’s $10,000 prize and the recognition that—finally—would come with it.
Mike worked nights and weekends in the stifling, hot trailers, wearing just shorts and flip-flops to keep cool because there was no air-conditioning and, for security reasons, he and the other techs needed to keep the doors closed. The trailers smelled of “nasty body odors and grease.”
To ease the tension, Mike and the other techs would play Trivial Pursuit at lunchtime and throw a baseball around the motor pool, then plunge back into the stiflingly hot trailers, don their lead aprons, and start snapping more x-rays. Mike observed, “It got to the point where most of the guys thought they were going to be glowing in the dark after all the hundreds of thousands of x-rays they took.”
About once a week, Walt would drive up to the trailers smoking a cigarette with an ash nearly an inch long in what Mike described as “a big light-colored boat that actually was Walt’s ’70s-era Cadillac.”
“Find anything yet?” Walt would ask. Mike’s answer was always the same “No,” and Walt’s loud response was invariably the same “Fuck!”
Part of Mike’s strategy for winning the $10,000 was to take a different approach from that of the other handpicked techs who were working only on the most likely places where the Russians might have planted bugs—within the code machines, which processed the most sensitive information.
So Mike decided he didn’t want to work on the code machines, because he figured that the Russians would have to have broken NSA codes to exploit them, so he started first on x-raying the optical character recognition (OCR) equipment that had converted the classified and unclassified text/handwriting to digital text. The OCRs had huge electronics boards with thousands of wires running everywhere—“a perfect place to hide an implant,” according to Mike.
But after what Mike called “two fricking months of donning a lead apron, snapping x-rays, developing the film, and looking and evaluating each and every x-ray film” on a light table, Mike had found nothing.
Finally, Mike turned his attention to “all those lonely IBM Selectric III embassy typewriters, which nobody wanted or cared to even look at.”
Those typewriters were the least “sexy” of all the equipment because they were ubiquitous. When originally shipped to Moscow, the IBM machines were not even sent by diplomatic courier or pouch because they were not considered that sensitive. However, Mike knew that every classified telegram from the embassy, from TOP SECRET on down, had to be typed by the secretaries before being scanned into crypto-equipment or via the OCRs. If I were a Russian spy, Mike thought, why spend all the extra money on hacking U.S. crypto when I can have it free in plaintext [typed on the IBM Selectrics]?
One challenge of the large IBMs was that, in order to get a clear eight-by-ten-inch x-ray, Mike had to take each of them apart so that one part of the complex machines would not block another on the x-ray film. But after snapping tens of thousands of x-rays on GUNMAN, NSA had run out of Kodak x-ray film, causing delays in the time-pressured bug hunt. This film shortage forced Mike and the other techs to preserve film by taking fewer shots of larger “chunks” of equipment, which Mike said “wasn’t optimal for spotting anomalies.”
Most nights, Joan would wait in the car for Mike to finish, reading one of her Danielle Steel novels. Although Joan had a very high security clearance, she was not “read in” to the GUNMAN compartment and therefore was not allowed in the trailers or even to know about the project’s existence.
But Mike didn’t feel right leaving Joan alone in the parking lot, so early in the evening on the Friday of a three-day weekend, he broke the rules and brought Joan into the trailer, where he had just begun to inspect the ambassador’s secretary’s IBM typewriter (Mike’s theory was that if there were any implants in these typewriters, they would be placed in the machines of the highest-ranking diplomats).
Another good reason for having Joan join him was that she typed classified documents all day every day on the same type of Selectric III typewriter that Mike was about to inspect, and she might have some useful insights about what was normal versus abnormal.
Joan, who, against protocol, had already learned about GUNMAN from her husband, handed Mike his favorite drink, a Mr. Pibb, found a chair at the far end of the trailer, opened her Danielle Steel novel, and let Mike get to work. There was little chance Mike and Joan’s security violation would be found out, because all the other techs had left early for the long weekend.
That evening, after weeks of taking, developing, and examining thousands of x-rays of dismantled machines, Mike had ruled out implants in all but four components: a transformer, the typing keys themselves, the power switch, and a solid aluminum bar that held the typewriter together. Donning his lead apron, Mike began the next tedious process of x-raying each of those parts.
Three hours later, as Mike was inspecting a freshly developed x-ray of the aluminum bar, he grew confused over the images on his light table. There, in the middle of what should have been a solid piece of metal, were “six dark circles.” He had x-rayed “normal” typewriters earlier and had never seen anything resembling such circles, nor did he recall there be
ing any electronics or devices inside a solid piece of aluminum.
His first impression was that the six circular objects resembled “can” (metal-shielded) resistors with three faint wires leading from them. He thought, What possible reason could there be for any electronics to be embedded deeply inside a purely solid structural aluminum bar?
Mike looked up from the light table. Motioning to Joan, he said, “Mind taking a look at this? Isn’t the bar across the front of the typewriter supposed to be solid?”
Joan put down her novel, keeping her place with a bookmark, and traversed the length of the trailer. Mike pointed to the x-ray. “You use these, right?”
“Yes,” Joan said. “Everyone in the office does. Why are you asking?”
Pointing to the six circular smudges, Mike said, “There’s electronics in there. It could be that we’ve just won $10,000, or it could also be that this is some new kind of Selectric model, maybe one that could read memory cards.” A few years earlier, IBM had introduced a precursor to the word processor with a magnetic memory card that stored information typed on IBM Selectric IIIs.1 “Do you have any models like that?”
“No. None of these had memory cards that I know of.”
Mike looked at his wife. “Holy fuck! I found it!”
Working feverishly, Mike unpacked and x-rayed seven other machines and found the same anomalies in all of them. He also noted that a power switch in some of the eight machines contained what looked like a transformer coil. Studying electronic engineering in night school to get his bachelor’s, Mike knew of no reason for such a coil to live inside a simple on-off switch. Perhaps that coil, which wasn’t supposed to be there, was a hidden transformer to power electronics that also weren’t supposed to be present within that “solid” aluminum bar.
Mike could only guess how the stealthy electronics were sensing and transmitting typed information, but on that Friday night, it didn’t matter. He, Mike Arneson—lowly, unrecognized, associate-degreed tech—had just found the most sophisticated implanted Soviet bug in all U.S. history.
The Spy in Moscow Station Page 19