Spycraft - Melton [28]
In addition to the ubiquitous informers among the embassy staff, pervasive technical surveillance within the embassy itself was discovered in 1963. A defector reported that the embassy was riddled with listening devices and the assertion carried enough credibility that an Agency sweep team was dispatched to find the bugs. For the majority of American diplomats, the embassy compound served as both home and office space. If the embassy was bugged, there was no limit to what secrets, personal and professional, the KGB’s microphones captured.
After the sweep team’s initial hunt for listening devices turned up nothing, Navy Seabees were flown in to conduct a physical search that included demolition of a sample office. Walls, floors, and ceilings were torn up without finding any trace of covert wiring. It was only after removing the cast iron steam radiator that squatted at one end of the room and dismantling the wall behind it, that the first listening device was discovered. Standing amid the wreckage of the demolished room, a tech pointed to an inch of protruding wood and asked, “Now, what do you suppose this is?”
Cleverly hidden behind the radiator, the device consisted of a hollowed-out wooden dowel positioned so its center was flush against a pinhole in the wall’s plaster. About a foot long, the dowel provided a clear air passage for sound to travel to a microphone concealed in an oversized brick on the building’s exterior. Wires from the microphone were not run through the interior walls, where they would have been more easily detected, but through the mortar of the exterior stucco façade and into the basement, eventually trailing off to a listening post.
Members of the sweep team marveled at the ingenuity. Low-tech dowels had defeated the West’s advanced metal detectors by placing the metallic microphone beyond range. Positioning the bug behind the radiator not only minimized the possibility of discovery, but also reduced the risk of the air passages being sealed by paint or plaster.
Given such realities, the psychological pressure on Agency personnel and their families throughout the sixties and seventies was especially intense. At times it seemed that the embassy took on a “through the looking glass” atmosphere. “You just assumed your apartment was bugged,” said the wife of a TSD tech. “The KGB came with the apartment, like the nanny.” Families needing privacy could go to “the bubble,” a Plexiglas-like box measuring ten feet by ten feet by six feet high in a sealed and shielded room in a section of the embassy off limits to Soviet nationals. The bubble, although facilitating personal conversation, served as a stark reminder of the extraordinary measures required to evade KGB listening devices.
The KGB capabilities extended to breaking into the safes of foreign embassies. Surreptitious entry teams used a portable x-ray device positioned over a safe’s lock to view the tumblers falling into place. The clever device came with one design flaw, the emitting of high levels of radiation that slowly poisoned its users. Within the KGB, members of these teams were known as bezzubyye, which roughly translates into “the guys with no teeth.”
Especially alarming was a case in the mid-1960s involving a foreign diplomat recruited by the Agency for a single mission: to load one dead drop site in Moscow. For the concealment package, TSD engineers fabricated a four-inch hollow anodized pointed aluminum alloy spike to hold a one-time pad and the agent’s commo plan. The cylindrical concealment was designed for quick planting at a precise location by simply stepping down on it, driving the spike into the ground and then covering the head with dirt.
However, the agent proved unreliable. Not only did he fail to load the drop but he also ignored security instructions. “We told him never to let the spike out of his possession because we had reliable information that KGB teams were going in and out of the safes in many of the embassies, including his,” said the officer who directed the operation. “But naturally,