Spycraft - Melton [299]
5 Crawford, Volunteers, 26.
6 Ibid., 27.
7 Weiser, A Secret Life, 74.
8 Ibid.
9 For visual examples of sophisticated criminal “brush passes” see the 1973 movie Harry in Your Pocket.
10 Weiser, A Secret Life, 81.
11 Ibid., 75.
12 Crawford, Volunteers, 27.
13 Victor Suvorov, Inside Soviet Military Intelligence (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 119.
14 Crawford, Volunteers, 28.
15 British intelligence (MI6) refers to them as “dead letter boxes” (DLBs).
16 CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a mole for the KGB and Russian Intelligence Service (SVR), sharply complained to his handler about the size of the dead drop site (code name PIPE) they had selected for his use along a horse path in Maryland’s Wheaton Regional Park. Ames communicated that he needed more money and estimated that the size of the drainpipe used for the dead drop would accommodate up to $100,000. See: Wise, Nightmover, 220.
17 Weiser, A Secret Life, 58.
18 Before the FBI arrested Ames on February 21, 1994, they attempted to lure a SVR officer into a trap by leaving a horizontal chalk mark on the side of a U.S. Postal Service mailbox located at the corner of R Street and 37th Street in Washington, D.C. Unbeknownst to the FBI, however, the SVR had changed the location of the signal site. The horizontal mark left by the FBI meant nothing and the SVR didn’t respond. See: Wise, Nightmover, 272-273.
19 Crawford, Volunteers, 30. The most famous instance of a botched signal occurred on May 19, 1985, when KGB spy John Walker was participating in a complicatedsignal and drop sequence in rural Montgomery County, Maryland. The KGB officer arrived in the general area and left a soda can at the base of a stop sign to signal his presence. Walker left a second can at the base of another stop sign as a signal to the KGB. Walker saw the can left by the KGB officer and proceeded to leave his secret documents at the base of a telephone pole some distance away. Unbeknownst to the KGB, the FBI had Walker under surveillance and made the mistake of removing the signal can he left at the stop sign. When the KGB officer could not see Walker’s can to confirm that he was in the area, he followed his instructions and aborted the operation. After leaving the secret documents, Walker proceeded to a second drop location where the KGB was to have left money for him. He found nothing and when he returned to retrieve the documents, they were gone as well. Walker was arrested early the next morning at the Ramada Hotel in nearby Rockville, Maryland, and the KGB officer departed the country for the Soviet Union the following day. See: Jack Kneece, Family Treason, The Walker Spy Case (New York: Stein and Day, 1986), 109-123.
20 Polmar and Allen, Spy Book, 573, describes secret writing. Spy Book attributes to Ovid in “Art of Love” counsel that one’s missive “can escape curious eyes when written in new milk [then] touch it with [charcoal] dust and you will read.”
21 Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior: Second Thoughts of a Top CIA Agent (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 130-131.
22 Ibid., 131.
23 Accommodation addresses differed from dead drops in that once a letter was dropped in a mailbox both the agent and the handler lost control of the message. An effective AA would have a constant stream of business or personal correspondence, letters, and postcards going and coming. In some countries, a post office box or a “letter-drop” provided an adequately safe and convenient type of accommodation address. A message can be communicated through an AA without SW if the type, style, or color of a postcard is, in itself, the signal. For example, a recruited agent who has just returned from a posting abroad could signal to the CIA his willingness to begin his clandestine work by mailing a specific type of postcard to an innocuous AA. For the most sensitive agents, AAs were used only once.
24 Weiser, A Secret Life, 23.
25 During