Spycraft - Melton [30]
“Soviet intelligence is over-confident, over-complicated, and over-estimated,” wrote Allen Dulles in his 1963 book, The Craft of Intelligence. Published the year following Penkovsky’s arrest, the assertion was more bravado than fact, as Dulles no doubt had full knowledge of the situation in Russia at the time.13
Dulles, however, was not blind to the potential of technology. Nearly a decade earlier, in the winter of 1954, a twenty-seven-year-old Technical Services Staff (TSS) officer received an odd proposition from the TSS chief, Willis “Gib” Gibbons. “He asked whether I was game for taking on an unusual job. I asked for a better description than that and, of course, didn’t get one,” the officer remembers.
The assignment turned out to be that of a technical tutor for Dulles, who had been appointed CIA Director by President Eisenhower in February of 1953. Dulles was not an unknown to the young tech. The two had met the previous autumn when the tech worked on another unusual job for the DCI’s security detail. As part of the construction of the new DCI suite, the tech installed several covert audio devices, including microphones in the ceiling hardwired to recorders in the security offices. He also installed a secret button on the DCI’s desk to summon a secretary should a visitor outlast his welcome.14
An intelligence officer of the “old school,” in which clandestine activity was conducted “nose-to-nose” or using easily understood devices, such as dead drops and concealments, Dulles realized that he was now involved in a technically complex world. Increasingly surrounded by engineers, including his deputy, Air Force General Charles P. Cabell, Dulles was determined to keep his knowledge relevant. He seemed to sense, even at this early stage, the advances in technology would shape Cold War intelligence as well as the CIA itself.
“Apparently Cabell stepped to the fore whenever anything technical came up, and Dulles didn’t like to be overshadowed,” the staff officer recalled. “The DCI wanted a technical education and needed it quickly. Basically, he was uncertain and somewhat afraid of the jargon—that sort of thing.”
As with many of his generation, Dulles was ill adept, if not ill at ease, with even simple technology, including his office telephone and intercom system. Born in 1893, he was part of the generation that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and witnessed the unfolding of technological miracles of a “modern world.” His generation was the first to experience the emergence of technology in daily life, in which the underlying science is neither intuitively apparent nor easily understood without some technical acumen.
The young engineer assigned as Dulles’s tutor was only three years out of college, and had a degree in physics and electro-mechanical systems. As he had done several times when making the DCI’s audio installations, he walked the two miles from the Technical Service Staff’s covert building on 14th Street near the Department of Agriculture to Dulles’s office on the second floor of South Building at 2430 E Street. Perched on a modest rise of land called “Medicine Hill,” the facility was a hand-me-down from the U.S. Navy. Several scattered buildings had sprung up over the years within the small fenced compound, which had also been the final Headquarters for the OSS.15 First home to the U.S. Naval Observatory, it then served as the Naval Museum of Hygiene, and the Naval Medical School with hospital facilities for sick officers. Now, in the mid-fifties, the complex was again pressed into service for a “spy agency,” though, by current standards, security was surprisingly relaxed.
“When I first went to see Dulles, I remember particularly the women who worked for him. They were an odd