Spycraft - Melton [41]
“I traveled to Leningrad and then to Prague, just looking at transit times. One item, like a postcard, came through in about two days; sealed items came through in about two weeks,” recalled one member of TSD’s probe team. “We began to get a real good feel for what various countries were doing with censorship. The project gave us something solid to take to the Soviet Russia Division officers and recommend, ‘Use this technique for mailing from these cities.’ We had real postal data that the case officers wanted to hear and could use.”
Transit times of letters, postcards, and other commonly mailed items may seem a prosaic detail of intelligence, yet in this way TSD began chipping away at the massive KGB security apparatus.
It took years of efforts by the engineers to make even modest progress. George Saxe had an engineering degree when he was recruited into the Agency directly out of college in 1951. Like most new CIA officers of the time, his career path was not something he anticipated, although the happenstance manner that launched his twenty-five-year service in espionage remains one of his favorite stories.
As an engineering student in the Southwest, Saxe had high hopes for a corporate career in a solid company like Westinghouse or General Electric. It was during his senior year, facing a tight job market, that George spotted a recruitment notice on a campus bulletin board. Turning to a friend, he asked, “What do you think the Central Intelligence Agency is?”
President Truman had established the Agency four years earlier, but the organization had little visibility outside of Washington. George, with no better employment prospects on the horizon, signed up for the interview. When he arrived at the interview, George had no hint that the man seated across the table from him had introduced himself with an alias or that it was not George’s engineering skills that made him an attractive candidate.
“The guy had scars all over his face. And I’ve got papers with my grades and the courses I’d taken, and I’m ready to talk about engineering—what I’ve been studying for the last four years,” remembered George. “The first question was, ‘I understand you’re on the pistol team?’” George, as it happened, was the captain of the team and regularly posted the highest scores.
“The next question was about whether I ever handled a small boat. Now, this is in a setting where I’m the young engineer looking for my future career,” George said with a laugh. “Then he looked at me kind of intently and asked, ‘What do you think about jumping out of airplanes?’”
Truthfully, George had not thought about it all that much, but answered that he imagined he could do it. After a few more questions, the interviewer invited George to the campus hotel for a follow-up conversation. “I got there and the first thing he does is haul out a bottle of bourbon, which was not allowed on campus. So, that was my introduction. This was not exactly interviewing for a position at Westinghouse.”
Nor was Saxe interviewing for an engineering job. The CIA’s interest in George came from its covert paramilitary work to counter a potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Soviet-U.S. tensions had not yet coalesced into their four-decade Cold War standoff and all forms of military action seemed possible, if not likely.
“In the early 1950s the Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Security folks—everybody who thought they knew anything about the strategic situation in the world—believed the Red army was going to cross the Rhine River,” said George. “So my first tour in Germany had nothing to do with recruiting spies and everything to do with the Soviet Union. I was caching—burying—arms and demolitions for stay-behind