Something was wrong here.
By this stage of his career, Gandy had developed a savant-like sixth sense about electronics in general and surveillance technology in particular, and this sixth sense was telling him that something didn’t fit.
Moving to another machine that had been disassembled but still had the power switch linkage firmly attached to the aluminum bar, Gandy pushed the on-off switch on the keyboard on, off, on, off through multiple cycles, thinking as he watched the linkage move each time he hit the on-off switch.
Then it hit him. Transferring electrical power through separate mechanical linkages was a hit-or-miss proposition because parts that moved with respect to one another—as the linkage between the toggle switch and aluminum bar did—did not maintain a perfect, continuous electrical connection but momentarily made and broke electrical contact as the parts moved.
Over many on-off cycles, with mechanical wear, the electrical connection would get ever more tenuous. Such an intermittent, unreliable system could not be relied upon.
And yet the Soviet engineers, who were obviously hypercompetent, had done it anyway.
Why?
Shifting back to the bugged IBM machine where he’d discovered the insulated lug and insulated-core attachment screw, Gandy looked at the lug ring more closely.
And there they were!
Subminiature pins in the inner part of the lug ring, probably made of a hard, corrosion-resistant conductor such as rhodium, were pushed by tiny springs to maintain a snug connection between the grounding lug ring and screw.
These spring-loaded pins ensured a good electrical connection during and after movement of the linkage.
The whole assembly was … incredible! The KGB had anticipated that someone looking for a bug would try to trace power into the aluminum bar and had literally covered up the insulated power conductor inside the screw, both by insulating the lug and hiding an insulated, conductive core inside an attachment screw.
Satisfied that he was on the right track looking for the electronics that constituted a bug, Gandy turned to Arneson. “Let’s take the aluminum bar completely out of the machine. We need to get inside this thing.”
Arneson, who had been watching Gandy’s detective work, removed the aluminum bar.
Inspecting the aluminum bar through the loupe, Gandy noticed a line of dark marks, each less than a millimeter wide, along the bar’s underside. Using a needle probe, he poked at dark marks and immediately discovered that there were dabs of grease that concealed machined holes.
“Mike, can you find me some solvent?” Gandy asked, now the surgeon giving instructions to a skilled scrub nurse.
Again, Mike found what Gandy needed.
Gandy cleaned the dabs of grease away with the solvent and peered into one of the machined holes, which appeared to taper to a point. There, near the bottom of the taper in one of the holes, he saw two miniature slots.
Straightening from his work, Gandy put down the loupe and rubbed his eyes, recalling something he heard Winston Churchill say about Russia: “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
The multilayered hiding of intent that Churchill referred to was certainly evident here. The twin slots were probably spanner caps that hid a set screw that secured the cover of the supposedly “solid” aluminum bar to the body of the bar, which in turn must be hiding electronics. An insulated lug connected to a screw with a hidden insulated center conductor, now, a dab of grease had hidden a spanner cap that in turn probably hid a set screw.
Man, were these guys good at hiding things!
Gandy asked Mike, “Can you find me some precision calipers to measure these drill holes?”
Arneson rummaged around and found what Gandy needed, and he watched as the older man carefully measured the diameter of the small holes and jotted down his measurements.
Gandy took the pad on which he’d written the measurements to the gray phone and called the R9 machine shop. “Gandy here,” he said to his lead machinist. “I’m fixin’ to undo a custom cover and need you to make me a special miniature spanner wrench to these dimensions.” He then read off the dimensions he needed and asked, “When can y’all have it? An hour? Super. Thanks.”
Hanging up, Gandy looked at his watch. Four hours had slid by since he had entered the trailer. He asked Mike, “Can I buy you lunch?”
After lunch, Gandy collected the custom miniature spanner wrench from his machinist, who had driven it to Fort Meade as soon as he was finished making it, and returned with Mike to the trailer.
Inserting the small fork of the wrench into the miniature slots at the bottom of one of the holes in the aluminum bar, Gandy gently turned, removing the threaded spanner from the hole. Through the jeweler’s loupe, he confirmed that a subminiature, flat-head jeweler’s screw was at the bottom of the hole. Arneson, who had been looking over Gandy’s shoulder, handed Gandy a set of fine jeweler’s screwdrivers. Selecting a screwdriver he thought was the right dimension, Gandy then unscrewed the tiny jeweler’s screw, turning the bar over when he was done and dropping the now-loosed screw into a jar.
Using the special spanner wrench and jeweler’s screwdriver, he quickly removed all the hidden screws, slid an X-Acto blade into a barely perceptible hairline seam that had emerged when all the screws were removed, and, with great difficulty because the near-perfect machining created a vacuum-like seal, lifted the cover off the “solid” aluminum bar. Gandy was stunned at the magnificent craftsmanship of the bar. The many small, hidden jeweler’s screws secured the bar’s cover so snugly to the main body of the bar that no seam could be detected visually—before the screws were removed—even with a jeweler’s loupe.
Gandy and Mike leaned over, looking at the inside of the aluminum bar. The first thing that the two men noticed was that there were small wires attached to a circuit board, densely packed with microelectronics, and six dark round circles lay in front of them. But the wires were unique for such a circuit because they were colored red, white, and blue (instead of red, white, and black).
Mike’s first comment upon seeing America’s colors in the electrical wires inside a Soviet bug was, “Ain’t that sticking it right in our face? Maybe the fricking CIA did this just to fuck with NSA.” Mike paused to consider what he’d just said, then added, “Naw. CIA is way too incompetent to create something this good.”
Letting Mike’s comment pass, Gandy pointed to the dark circles, which Mike had originally assumed were can resistors. “Those are magnetometers, almost for sure,” he said. “They must sense the movement of the latch interposers, which probably have some ferrous or magnetic material embedded onto them and when they pass over the bar on that felt pad there, and thus register which key has been struck.”
When a typist depressed any key of the IBM Selectric III, that key, through a complex set of mechanical links, in turn moved a set of six latch interposers in different combinations, which the Selectric decoded to determine which character to type. The ends of all six latch interposers passed forward and back over the aluminum support bar in which Arneson had discovered the magnetometers.
Mike said, while pointing at the interposers that moved back and forth over the bar, “Wouldn’t that mean there must be tiny magnets embedded in the ends of those interposers?”
Gandy smiled at Mike’s perceptiveness. “Yep. Now I need to ask if you have any Magnaflux.”
Mike said, “You mean that ferro-fluid that traces out magnetic lines of flux?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Not here in the trailer,” Mike said.
Gandy called his R9 lab and asked that the special fluid be couriered over to him.
While they were waiting for the fluid, Gandy said, “I’m going to spray some of it on the end of the interposer, and it will show us exactly where the magnets are and what type of magnets they are. It has microscopic particles that align with magnetic lines of flux.” As he spoke, Gandy examined the ends of the interposer with a loupe where they pa
ssed over the bar. The ends of the interposers looked completely solid, with no sign of a gap or milling marks or seam where magnets might be concealed.
When an R9 staffer delivered the Magnaflux, Gandy placed a clear plastic sheet over the interposer and quickly sprayed it over the end of the interposers, expecting to see curved lines of flux, denoting the presence of hidden permanent magnets underneath.
Gandy scowled as he and Mike looked at the fluid. Where a clear pattern should have been there was instead a random collection of speckles. No magnetic field was present in any of the interposers, implying that there were no magnets inside.
That simply couldn’t be. Why have the magnetometers in the bar if there were no magnets in the interposers?
Mike asked, “Could the magnetometers be sensing something else?”
“No way!” Gandy answered more loudly than he had intended, squinting at the random particle pattern of the Magnaflux. “There simply have to be magnets in there somewhere. Can you take the interposers out for me so we can lay them out on the table?”
Getting his tools, Mike did as Gandy requested.
Gandy took one of the freed interposers and laid it flat on the workbench at a right angle to the way it normally sat in the Selectric, then covered it with plastic and sprayed the Magnaflux on it again.
This time, a horseshoe pattern of lines quickly appeared. “I knew it!” Gandy exclaimed, pointing at the lines of flux. “That there is what you’d expect with horseshoe magnets, with the north and south poles right next to each other.”
“Why didn’t we see it on the top of the interposers?” Mike asked.
“Because the other side is diabolically clever. With a tiny horseshoe magnet, you’re never going to see any net lines of flux because, in the vertical orientation, with one pole on top of the other, the fields will appear to cancel each other. The only way to spot the magnets is to turn the interposers on their sides where you can see the magnetic field lines exiting and entering the poles.”
Man, oh, man, Gandy mused. The KGB designers were fighting his efforts to diagnose what they had done at every turn. A power switch hid a transformer. Supposed mechanical springs meant to anchor the switch toggle were actually conductors that attached to a lug screw that hid its true purpose with a thin insulated cover and floating inner conductors. Grease spots hid holes, which hid spanner covers, which hid set screws, which clamped the bar’s lid so tight that a razor-thin seam was hidden even to a jeweler’s loupe.
Gandy looked at Mike and said, “What we’re looking at here is what happens when smart people who take security very, very seriously are given a free hand. They went to extreme lengths to prevent us from finding these implants, even with thorough inspections. You’ve got to take your hat off to them.”
Mike asked, “Want to dig into the end of those interposers to find the horseshoe magnets?”
“Oh yeah,” Gandy answered and went to work doing just that.
Five hours later, he had found and removed six tiny horseshoe magnets that had been secured inside milled-out cavities in the ends of each interposer. “You do realize the genius of these things,” he told Arneson. “Flipped vertically, the horseshoe magnets have both north and south poles pointed toward the magnetometers so that when they pass over the magnetometers, they generate two signals, one signal for both north and for south. Redundant, and I’m sure, extremely reliable. This thing is nothing less than a work of art.”
At that, Gandy looked at his watch. “Oh, wow. Where did the time go?” he said to Mike. “I should let you get home to supper.”
Mike nodded and let Gandy out, locking up the trailer. Even though it was July, darkness had fallen, and stars filled the eastern Maryland sky. Gandy looked up at the sky, patted Mike on the shoulder, and said, “You are one of those now, Mike. A star.”
The two men parted, each to his own wife and own supper, and each to his own reward.
* * *
The next day, when Mike heard that Walt Deeley had returned to work, he and one of his bosses, a man named Herb, asked for and got an appointment to see the big boss to inform him of the typewriter finding. On the walk over, Mike was bursting with excitement. Yeah, he thought. I knew I’d be the first one to find this sucker! Yeah! Mike had hardly slept the night before, anticipating the reception the head honcho was going to give him, running the expected encounter repeatedly in his head.
Walt Deeley didn’t keep Mike and Herb waiting in his reception area—as NSA top executives usually did—but had them shown into his spacious office as soon as they arrived.
Mike, who had never set foot in the office, looked around the cavernous space in awe. Glass bookshelves were filled with exotic mementos from Walt’s many travels around the globe. The view was spectacular, the whole setup radiating the awesome power of Deeley’s position as an NSA deputy director.
A feeling of euphoria came over Mike as Walt rose to shake his hand. Mike felt that he had well and truly just changed the world and was about to be recognized for it.
But Walt didn’t congratulate Mike, thank him, or say, “Well done.” When Mike and Herb had sat in two chairs in front of Walt’s desk (without being invited to take seats) and had given Walt a brief account of the typewriter find, Walt said to Mike, without removing the cigarette from his mouth, “Okay, you’ll be getting the $10,000 check.”
“Thank you, sir. But I want you to know it was truly a team effort. We all worked hard.”
Deeley squinted at Mike through a thick cloud of smoke. “Split it with whomever the fuck you want. I don’t give a shit. But you’re paying the fucking taxes to the fucking IRS on the full $10,000.” (Perhaps Walt was focused on the IRS because he not only got to keep his job but got his own $50,000 check for his role in GUNMAN.) Walt then looked down at some paperwork on his desk, the meeting evidently over.
Herb and Mike looked at each other, rose from their chairs, then left the office.
Mike’s euphoria seeped away, replaced by a feeling that he likened to losing his virginity: Is that all there was?
As far as Mike Arneson’s technical work was concerned, it quickly became clear that yes, that was all there was.
Although he was passionately curious to learn more about the bugs he had discovered, the next day, unmarked trucks—presumably from R9—showed up, and some techs Mike had never met—also presumably from R9—removed all the typewriters and took them “behind a green door.” (A green door was NSA slang for an ultrablack-burn-before-reading operation). To Mike, everything at R9 was behind a green door.
But the authority to reverse engineer enemy tech rested with R9 and others in Walt’s COMSEC organization, not Mike’s organization, so Mike would be shut out of any follow-up discoveries or insights. He’d been fortunate to see as much as he had when Gandy had spent the previous day with him.
As a reward for finding what came to be known as the GUNMAN implant, Mike was eventually promoted, given a check and plaque at an NSA assembly (for achievements, according to the presenter, that “cannot be talked about”), and earned a trip to Moscow in the fall, where he joined the team inspecting the new embassy building for listening devices. But as far as the typewriters went, he’d just have to learn what he could from RUMINT, along with everyone else at NSA.
But Mike wasn’t like everyone else at NSA. In his mind, everything in life happens for a reason, and he had been put on the planet for many things, including finding the GUNMAN bugs.
And he had not disappointed whomever had put him on the planet to do that.
11. Behind the Green Door
R9, Linthicum, Maryland, July 1984
Gandy was a hands-on leader who spent hours each week at a workbench in R9 laboratory spaces, working alongside his employees on electronics. Soldering, probing, measuring, adjusting, fabricating, and testing. A player-coach, this time Gandy was not going to delegate away all the investigation of the most exciting discovery of his career.
He was going to do some of the work himself.
He organized teams to x-ray, probe, disassemble, and test each of the twenty-five typewriters that had come back in the first shipment from Moscow, assigning to himself some of the work.
R9 would later examine additional IBM machines from Moscow, Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), and U.S. embassies throughout the Warsaw Pact nations, along with stateside machines from high-level U.S. government facilities, including the White House.
But that July, R9 focused first on the eight machines in which Mike Arneson had found implants.
Using the x-rays as a guide, Gandy and his team carefully took apart each piece of each machine and subjected the parts to rigorous visual, mechanical, RF, and electronic investigation.
Building on Gandy’s and Mike’s discoveries that first day in the trailer, it became apparent that the A team at the KGB had designed and built the typewriter bugs. The workmanship, technical sophistication, stealthiness, and sheer genius of the system were, in Gandy’s view, nothing short of jaw-dropping.
To fully understand the cleverness of the KGB exploit, an understanding of the IBM Selectric typewriter itself is essential.
IBM first introduced the model in 1961, completely revolutionizing the way electric typewriters worked. Whereas the first electric typing machines were simply motorized versions of manual typewriters, where each letter had a dedicated swinging lever arm that typed on paper moving on a carriage, the Selectric had one ball that moved on a carriage, leaving the paper stationary (except for line advance).
The Selectric permitted much faster typing because it was impossible for multiple letters to type simultaneously, jamming against each other. Instead, all letters and characters were on a single ball that contained four rows of twenty-two columns, with small letters on one side of the spherical ball and capital letters on the opposite. By simply changing one type ball for another, different character fonts or special scientific and mathematical characters and languages could be typed.
The Spy in Moscow Station Page 21