Spycraft - Melton [47]
Its work completed, TSD called George to the lab for a look at the brick. What he found was a beautifully constructed concealment, matched in color, texture, and dimension, thanks to the brick fragments. Every detail was perfect, until George picked it up. It felt light as Styrofoam.
“This won’t work. Go back to the lab. Get a real brick and weigh it. Your brick doesn’t have to be precisely the same, but it has to be close,” he told the TSD staff. “I don’t care if you put lead in it or whatever you have to do. I know you have to make it hollow and large enough for the wad of rubles, and that paper is lighter than brick material, but whoever picks it up has to believe they’re holding a brick.”
What George wanted—and what the operation required—was a “brick” that fit into the environment in every way possible. It was not good enough that it simply looked like a brick. It had to be a brick to anyone who accidentally came across it. The critical question was: If you put it down in the playground, would a ten-year-old boy come over and pick it up and say, “Boy that’s a light brick,” or would he say, “That’s just an old brick,” and throw it away? Would a construction worker who picks up rubble all day say, “That doesn’t look or feel right”? This was the degree of protection required to handle agents inside the USSR and the product quality demanded from the TSD.
Getting money to agents in denied areas was, in fact, another ongoing problem. Operational security dictated that higher denominations of rubles were more likely to arouse the suspicions of shopkeepers or bartenders, who could report the unusually large notes to the KGB. However, for a dead drop concealment to remain inconspicuous there was a limit to its size. George took TSD a stack of twenty-ruble notes with the requirement to figure out a way to fit the Soviet currency into the smallest cubic inches possible. At the TSD lab, the engineers devised a combination shrink-wrap, vacuum-packing technique that compressed hundreds of ruble notes into a roll that felt like a stone of solid paper. That single process eventually enabled SR officers to pass millions of rubles in small concealments to the agents.
A few months later, a top-level Soviet scientist, acting on instructions from his OWVL message, approached a high-voltage transmission tower outside of Moscow. There, as instructed, he picked up a brick at a specific location that matched the dead drop description he was given. Something must be wrong, the agent concluded, because this was identical to all the other bricks scattered around the area by workers who erected the tower. Discarding the brick, he headed to the bus for the journey home wondering what had gone wrong.
Russian counterintelligence image of a CIA Cold War dead drop rock container and contents, late 1970s.
Closed CIA rock concealment of the type used to pass instructions, cameras, and money to agents, late 1970s.
Several anxious days passed as the case officer awaited confirmation that the agent had successfully “unloaded” the dead drop. Then came word that the agent had indeed gone to the site, but no “special” brick had been seen. An OWVL broadcast quickly followed, reiterating the instructions with assurances that the ordinary-appearing brick he had discarded was indeed a very special one. It was a modest, but important success.
“The guys in TSD were technically adept, but they were coming over into the operational lion’s den,” remembered George. “We who did Moscow operations were the most security conscious part of the whole SR Division, which was the most buttoned-up part of the CIA. I mean it was tight and TSD never had the benefit of having a tech assigned in Moscow or dealing closely with denied-area case officers in operational planning. At first they didn’t realize all the little points we were always thinking about, worrying about.”
A new way of thinking about the operational environment