Spycraft - Melton [133]
Possibly more important to CIA operations than the intelligence collected from the little shack’s tapes was the act itself. The CIA had successfully implanted an audio device that clandestinely collected KGB tactical conversations. The small breach of the KGB’s internal security wall demonstrated that sound tradecraft combined with applied technology could compromise KGB communications. The little audio device became an early indicator of the possibility of future high payoff from technical collection operations inside the USSR.26
OTS officers who cataloged and analyzed foreign spy gear began to sense a peculiar pattern when it came to Soviet electronic gadgets in the late 1970s. Soviet technology seemed stalled. OTS testing repeatedly showed that the components and performance fell short of the kind of progress seen in Western spy gear.
The analysis proved correct. In a 1994 memoir, The First Directorate, the KGB’s former counterintelligence chief, Oleg Kalugin, recounted a scene in which Nikolei Yemokhonov, the deputy for scientific and technical research, was “called on the carpet” by then KGB chief and future Premier, Yuri Andropov. Andropov reprimanded Yemokhonov for lagging behind American espionage technological developments and asked about an OTS transmitter obtained by the KGB.
“Well,” replied Yemokhonov, “we don’t have devices this size.”
“What size have we got?” asked Andropov.
“Ours weighs about a kilogram,” said Yemokhonov.
The American device weighed only a few ounces: everyone in the room knew that the bulky two-pound Soviet transmitters and receivers were barely suitable for clandestine work.27
Victor Cherkashin, a senior KGB officer, offered a similar take regarding OTS audio technology in his memoir published in 2005. Cherkashin recalled that information about U.S. eavesdropping operations inside the USSR “simply astounded the KGB” when provided by American traitor Aldrich Ames. Cherkashin recounted that at the time of Ames’s initial betrayal in 1985, the CIA “was juggling several highly complex, technically advanced, ingenious operations inside the USSR without the KGB’s knowledge including eavesdropping devices disguised as tree branches near research installations.”28
On the defensive side, by the mid-1970s, the KGB had developed a significant countermeasures tool (code name MAGIC) to detect embedded audio eavesdropping devices. The KGB’s first experiment with it inside their embassy in an Asian country found more than two dozen listening devices, some more than twenty years old with corroded batteries, hidden throughout the large complex. Called the Nonlinear Junction Detector (NLJD), the device could detect a transistor or integrated circuit inside a clandestine listening device even when it was not turned on.
The Nonlinear Junction Detector worked by setting up a field of energy—radio waves—that read reflected energy. Any circuitry containing a diode present in the field was read as a disruption. Unlike metal detectors, which searched for metallic objects by means of electromagnetic induction, the NLJD was more selective in its search, noticing only the junctions of diodes found in transistors and integrated circuits.
“It was the beginning of the end for classical embedded audio devices,” said Sasha, a former member of the KGB counterintelligence, who claimed the KGB removed “hundreds and hundreds of listening devices from each continent. Europe, Canada, Great Britain, United States.” Sasha asserted that the KGB “presented this nonlinear detector to Cuba, then Warsaw Pact countries, followed by Third World, so-called friends, such as Iraq, North