Spycraft - Melton [18]
“Warfare is no longer a matter of chivalry but of subversion,” Lovell wrote to the man who would dominate U.S. intelligence for the next decade. “Subversion has its own special arsenal of tools and weapons. Only Research and Development is capable of creating such an arsenal.”13 Lovell also advised that a central R&D component for the CIA should begin with a minimum staff of several hundred scientists and engineers.14
The recommendation found a receptive ear with Dulles and he assigned his special assistant, Richard Helms, to study the issue of technical support. In turn, Helms tasked Colonel James H. “Trapper” Drum, then head of the OAD, to produce a report with recommendations that addressed the problem. Four months later, Drum, a West Point graduate, who left the military a full colonel to join the Agency, produced a lengthy report that formed the foundation for a new approach to providing operations with technical support.
Known as Drum’s Bible, the report advised combining all technical elements responsible for supporting operations into a single organization directly under the DDP. Drum wrote to Dulles in August of 1951 that the proposed new office would “provide the tools of the trade required to support the operating components of the Clandestine Service.”15 As Lovell had recommended several months earlier, Drum envisioned a new organization with two primary responsibilities: centralized technical support to deliver gear needed by field operations, and research and development to improve collection capabilities.
Dulles accepted the recommendations and created a Technical Services Staff (TSS) with “powers and authorities” equivalent to those of the other operational offices in the CIA.16 On September 7, 1951, the DDP formally announced establishment of TSS, a small component numbering about fifty officers, with Drum at its head. Explosive growth followed. Within two years, the demand for TSS “products and services” was so strong that the staff expanded more than fivefold. TSS existed until July of 1960, and was then renamed the Technical Services Division (TSD).
The OTS “birth certificate.” This official memo authorized formation of the Technical Services Staff on September 7, 1951.
It took nearly a decade for technical services to gain formal recognition as a DDP “division,” nomenclature previously reserved for components operating in particular geographic areas. However, before TSD celebrated its second anniversary, it faced the grim reality that the KGB’s counterintelligence capabilities far outmatched the ability of the CIA, using World War II tradecraft and technology, to run agents securely inside the USSR. Events that would teach those bitter lessons began promisingly in 1961 with a stream of spectacular intelligence reporting from a senior Soviet military intelligence officer, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky.
SECTION II
PLAYING CATCH-UP
CHAPTER 3
The Penkovsky Era
Each man here is alone.
—Oleg Penkovsky quoted in the Penkovskiy Papers
Bad news, like every secret communication from Moscow, arrived at CIA Headquarters encrypted. The news that arrived mid-morning on November 2, 1962—as the Cuban Missile Crisis was winding down—was particularly bad. Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a career Soviet military intelligence officer and the Agency’s most spectacularly successful spy, was, in all likelihood, lost. Penkovsky had held a senior position in the Glavnoye Razedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (GRU), the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff while secretly reporting to U.S. and British intelligence. In the colorful parlance of espionage, he had almost certainly been “rolled up.”
At the new Agency compound at Langley, Virginia, the paint was barely dry on the walls when the Communications Center on the ground floor—Headquarters’ sole secure link to Moscow personnel—received the super-enciphered message. It arrived as an “IMMEDIATE” cable, a long, narrow strip of paper snaking out of a bulky machine, much like a price quote from an old-fashioned