Spycraft - Melton [46]
That same morning George smiled as he deciphered an ops cable advising that a courier had departed Moscow that day for Washington with a special delivery. His package weighed somewhat more than normal for hand luggage and had a slightly fishy odor.
In part, because of his work in developing the sophisticated commo plan that yielded the valuable missile diagrams, Saxe was appointed special assistant to the chief of Soviet Operations in 1967. This new post not only took advantage of Saxe’s skill at creating commo plans, but also his ideas about using technologies that could finally make operations possible inside the USSR.
Sid Gottlieb, now heading TSD, recognized in George exactly the kind of ops officer that would assure the long-sought “relevance” of TSD to operations. George was one of the few case officers in the Soviet Division willing to spend time on technology and agent communication. While most of his colleagues wanted to make their career in recruiting agents, George possessed no aspirations to become the DDP or the DCI. He genuinely liked the techs and saw the value in what they could do for operations.
Six miles away from Langley, across the Potomac River at the TSD headquarters, George was able to translate the basic concepts of denied-area operations to TSD engineers who possessed little, if any, operational experience. The quandary was how to reveal the needed information about an operation without violating compartmentation. Seemingly minute details, such as an agent’s military rank or nation of origin, could breach security.
But without those basic facts, how could TSD techs know what type of camera to propose? Issuing a $1,200 camera in 1970s to an agent inside the USSR would surely attract unwanted attention. Suspicions might also arise if the agent, who had not been abroad, suddenly acquired equipment not available on the Moscow market. These were precisely the small but significant details TSD needed to understand. The techs needed to know what types of equipment, such as cameras or radios, an agent, based on his salary and status, could easily own in his country. Conversely, from the case officer’s point of view, high-quality images required better cameras, but only an informed tech could explain the necessary technical and security tradeoffs. SR Division officers would need to reveal more about the ops to the techs, and the techs would have to honor that trust.
Mastering operational requirements for equipment was no small thing, particularly for operations behind the Iron Curtain. To the case officers it sometimes seemed engineers operated from principles of design that were in conflict with covert operations. Engineers are schooled in the design of industrial and consumer products so that form usually follows function. The can opener in a kitchen and the ratchet wrench in the workshop look the way they do because engineers chose the most logical design solution. Spy gear inverts that concept. For clandestine use, function must often adapt to forms that disguise the true nature of the device. The challenge for TSD engineers was to design a can opener to look like a shoe, a vase, or a tube of toothpaste—anything but a can opener—and they had to do it without sacrificing any of the can opener’s functions or reliability.
One of SR Division’s early concealment requirements came to TSD during 1967 when operational planners needed a dead drop container for passing money to an agent. Moscow officers collected brick fragments from the dead drop area to match the color and texture of the local masonry. Even the brick collection operation required careful scripting, since Americans in Russia did not stop their cars and jump out to pocket a few random stone fragments from a construction site without prompting questions from KGB surveillance.
While the Moscow office concerned itself with finding brick fragments, another officer was dispatched to Switzerland to obtain nontraceable and well-circulated small