Spycraft - Melton [278]
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 Milton Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), 37.
2 Various aids were improvised by the agent to assist in ensuring the proper distance between lens and document as well as centering the camera. Knitting needles and threads of the proper length could be used as reference points. While these could be used if the agent was assured of privacy while photographing, they could be alerting and the objective would be to provide the agent sufficient training and confidence to operate the camera without any other aids. Over time, with improved lens design, the focusing tolerance expanded.
3 In OTS jargon, the pen was known as an “active concealment” because the concealment functioned as the product it represented, in this case a writing instrument.
4 Comments by policy officials on intelligence are usually offered in informal exchanges with officers who present the information and passed to senior Agency managers. The fact that the feedback reached a working-level case officer, like Saxe, was unusual and indicative of the significance of the information.
5 The L-pill, concealed in a pen identical to the one that housed the agent’s subminiature camera, was passed to TRIGON during a single hourlong clandestine meeting with a CIA officer in Moscow in 1976. After TRIGON’s arrest and suicide, the KGB produced the concealment pen said to have contained the L-pill.
6 Richelson, Jeffrey T., A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 343.
7 Kalvar, a commercial product developed as an alternative to traditional microfilm, represented a commercial product that OTS could apply to reduced-image photography. The original company ceased operations in 1979 but other firms continued making the product. For operational use, Kalvar had the advantage that it could be handled and processed in normal room light and developed in boiling water without requiring special chemicals.
8 Wording is based on a translation of the purported note on display in the FSB museum in Moscow.
9 Igor Peretrukhin, Agent Code Name—TRIANON (Agenturnaya Klichka— TRIANON) (Moscow: Tsetrpoligraf, 2000), 217-218.
10 Polmar and Allen, Spy Book, 362.
CHAPTER NINE
1 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, 10-11.
2 The original stump is on display inside the FSB museum in Moscow. A replica is displayed inside the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.
3 The TOO approach to providing technical support to operations officers contrasted with the OSS model. In 1944, OSS printed a catalog of available spy gear that could be ordered as needed. Following World War II and prior to the TOO program, TSS and TSD operated primarily as a supply and on-call service. If sustained technical support was needed for an operation, a TSS officer would be sent on TDY for that specific purpose. TOO represented a different philosophy that said a properly cross-trained officer with technical aptitude could make an ongoing contribution to the full range of an office’s operations. The forward-deployed TOO could provide expertise in his principal technical area and working-level technical support from his cross-training in other areas. Further, he would have immediate and direct access to the experts in every OTS discipline when those were required. The TOO became integral to operational planning and execution in locations of their assignments.
4 The first SRR-100 models were approximately 3⁄4 × 21⁄2 × 31⁄2 inches. The key design dimension was thickness because the unit would likely be worn in a shirt pocket or the inside pocket of a man’s suit coat.