Spycraft - Melton [132]
The newly availabile fractional cubic inch transmitters encouraged planning for aggressive audio operations inside the USSR. Once the CIA had demonstrated that its officers could free themselves from surveillance in Moscow, technical audio operations followed. “In the late 1970s we were doing things in Moscow that were intentionally below the Soviet radar,” remembers a tech. “We were trying to find the balance between high-, medium-, and low-technical operational acts on the street—the capability of the agent, capability for the case officer to meet the agent, capability to dead drop certain-sized things. All of that technology we provided the agent. Now we asked, can we bring audio into the mix?”
In one of the first operations of its kind in Moscow, a plan was formed to bug one of the police shelters located throughout the city. The small shacks, also set up at strategic points in the foreign embassy district, provided shade and warmth for the police, militia, and KGB surveillance teams as well. The young officers who manned the shacks had duties other than traffic control and maintaining civil order. Their presence was a deterrent to Soviet citizens from contacting foreign officials, because any Russian wandering in the area could be stopped, asked for identification, and questioned about the reason for being there. Equally important for the KGB were the reports from officers in the shacks who relayed the comings and goings of foreign officials to the KGB from these excellent observation posts.
As the CIA increased its clandestine contacts inside the USSR through the 1970s, the chief decided to bug one of the shacks. The secret audio could potentially provide valuable intelligence from an officer “calling out” the movement of diplomats to the KGB surveillance teams and from capturing other security instructions he received.
The target shack, which was manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, was classically basic. Constructed of wood and roughly twice the size of an old-fashioned phone booth, it contained a small table built into the wall, a telephone, and a heater that offered minimal comfort for two men against the cold of the Russian winter.
Over several months, CIA observers noted that the officer in the target shack was often away from his post, across the street talking with a friend. They were able to estimate the size of the small table in the booth and predict the times when the officer took a break for periodic gossip.
The operational requirements for the audio device were specific. It needed to be small enough to hide under the table in the shack, large enough to hold enough batteries for extended transmission life, and capable of being installed in less than a minute while the shack was vacant.
The techs created a woodblock audio concealment matching the faded color of the wooden table. They set spring-wound screws into one side of the wood block with enough torque from the spring to secure the block to the table’s underside. When the wood block was placed firmly underneath the tabletop’s bottom, the protruding screw heads were depressed, which released springs to turn the screws.
Because the bug required so many batteries for power, the wood block was too long to fit into the briefcase the chief normally carried. This required the techs to create a sling for cradling the device that could be worn under a topcoat. Every day, regardless of weather, the chief wore the topcoat and walked by the shelter, awaiting a time when he could enter unseen, open the coat, kneel down, pull the woodblock out of its sling, put it under the table, and activate the screws. It could all be done in less than thirty seconds.
Several weeks passed with the chief carrying the device each time he walked by the shack. The opportunity finally arose one day as the chief was walking his dog. At a distance, the chief noticed the officer leaving the shelter