Spycraft - Melton [39]
For the KGB, even simple technology in the hands of the public was a potential threat to the government and “state security.” Virtually every typewriter sold in the Soviet Union, for example, had its fonts sampled on a sheet of paper that was then filed away should the need ever arise to trace the origins of a suspicious document. Complex procedures granting access to copy machines in government offices included signed authorizations and meticulously kept logs of the copies produced.8 Even consumer items commonly available in the West, such as Kodak point-and-shoot cameras, electric appliances, and battery-powered transistor radios, could not be purchased in the USSR. A typical Soviet possessing such Western-made items would assuredly draw KGB attention.
For agents to operate in this security-obsessed environment, with its deep suspicion of technology, TSD would need to develop an array of special cameras, communications equipment, concealments, and countersurveillance devices.
CHAPTER 6
Building Better Gadgets
The Game is so large that one sees but a little at a time.
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Russell saw a new role for technology, particularly in its potential for enhancing agent communications. For a spy the greatest danger usually is not stealing a secret, but rather, passing it to his handler. Covert communication (known as “covcom”) dominated operational planning. Without the means to transfer information securely between agent and handler, espionage could not exist. The most secure covert communication system was an impersonal exchange that separated the agent and case officer by distance, time, place, or some combination of the three.
The tradecraft lexicon is filled with colorful phrases for impersonal exchanges of information. The best-known method, and most widely used, is called dead drop by the CIA, taynik by the Soviets, and dead letter box by the British.
Another personal exchange, the brush pass, requires the agent and handler to walk close enough to each other so that a note or package can be dropped or passed quickly and discreetly. The drop might be made into an open shopping bag or handed off folded into the morning’s newspaper. The car toss, a variation of the brush pass, involves throwing a package through the open window of a slowly moving vehicle.
What these pieces of tradecraft have in common is the goal of minimizing the time agent and handler spend in the same space at the same time. With some techniques, such as with the brush pass, the time is reduced to a fraction of a second. Nevertheless, even the seemingly insignificant half second required to make a successful brush pass brings the agent and handler to the same place at the same time. In hostile areas, such as Moscow, mere proximity of two individuals could arouse suspicion. Was it possible that in Moscow, a city of millions, an American would, by chance, bump shoulders with a leading scientist on a streetcar? The KGB would not believe in such chance encounters. Their view might well have been derived from the legendary New York Yankees catcher, Yogi Berra, who is reputed to have said, “That’s too coincidental to be coincidence.”
Dead drops, a preferred means of covert communication in denied areas, separate the agent and handler by time, but carry the risk of leaving the package unattended in an environment that could change without warning. A concealment package left at the site could be found by an unwitting passerby or buried by an unexpected snowstorm. The act of loading or clearing the drop site if it appeared unnatural could draw suspicion.1
Russell, the case officer, now surrounded by engineers, proposed a solution for improved agent communications that was both ingenious and technologically elegant. A TSD audio surveillance engineer remembered receiving an unexpected call from the chief. “Russell called me up one day in early 1963 and said, ‘I was just thinking last night: If you compromise your audio operation by telling the agent where a hidden microphone