Spycraft - Melton [20]
It was standard operating procedure for the communicator to place the encrypted message in a heavy manila security envelope, securely seal it, and call SR to advise that a cable had been received from Moscow. On the morning of November 2, the young SR officer who walked to the communications vault, accepted the sealed envelope, and, without opening it, retraced his three-minute route to SR’s small warren of offices, could not have known that he now had a role in one of history’s most significant espionage events.
At his desk, the officer opened the envelope, removed the single sheet of paper, and, with painstaking care, began deciphering the message by hand. He used a one-time pad, or OTP, whose printed columns of numbers and letters exactly matched those used by the person who had composed the brief message. After the message was deciphered, the page of the one-time pad used was destroyed. The Soviet Union paid a heavy price during World War II when they reused one-time-pad pages for communicating with agents in different parts of the world. This seemingly innocuous error provided an advantage to U.S. code breakers who were able to unravel many Soviet ciphered communications that had been intercepted from Washington, D.C. and New York City. This secret would become known as VENONA and remains one of the notable achievements of the Army Security Agency and later the National Security Agency.3
The cable did not mention Penkovsky by name. Rather, it reported that Richard Jacob, a CIA officer in Moscow, was apprehended while clearing a dead drop. After a nerve-shattering but relatively brief interrogation, the message continued, Jacob was released to the custody of the U.S. ambassador and returned to the safety of the U.S. embassy. Because he was a diplomat, Jacob could not be formally charged with a crime. Instead, he was “PNG’ed,” declared persona non grata by Soviet authorities and ordered out of the country.4
Penkovsky’s arrest by the KGB was not confirmed during those first few hours, but it did not seem realistic to hold out much hope for the agent. As in the immediate aftermath of any roll-up, there were more questions than facts, but for those few who knew about the case, it required no imagination to conclude that Penkovsky either was dead or would be very soon.
The officer delivered the decrypted cable up the chain of command to the SR Division Chief. The Chief took the bad news to the Deputy Director for Plans who in turn briefed John McCone, the Director of Central Intelligence. Within twenty-four hours, McCone would personally inform President Kennedy. That so few understood the enormous impact Penkovsky’s arrest would have on America’s national security was partially due to the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the nearly eighteen-month operation and the care given to the handling of the remarkable intelligence he single-handedly supplied.5
Intelligence reports based on Penkovsky’s information had been structured to suggest that the intelligence originated from multiple sources. To reinforce this illusion, the Penkovsky product circulated under two code names, IRONBARK for that material that was scientific or quantifiable and CHICKADEE for material that included his personal observations.6 For anyone outside the small group who knew the truth, the vast quantity of intelligence flowing from the Soviet Union looked like the work of an extensive spy network, coupled with mysterious and advanced technical collection, rather than the efforts of a single spy.
A small team of CIA and British intelligence officers ran Penkovsky. He was alternately known as HERO to