Spycraft - Melton [52]
Ogorodnik also had three problems that made him vulnerable to recruitment. The first was that a KGB officer in the embassy was trying to recruit him to work as an informer. Such a role would place additional demands on the diplomat’s life, while turning down the invitation could generate questions of loyalty. Ogorodnik’s second dilemma was that, although married, he had a Colombian mistress, and she was pregnant with his child. This led to the third problem. He would be compelled to return to Moscow when his tour ended. Trapped in a diplomatic soap opera that involved a failing marriage, pregnant mistress, career ambitions, and the KGB, Ogorodnik faced a difficult situation.
Once contact was established, it became evident to the case officer that Ogorodnik had both strong motivations and character traits to become a spy. He hated the Soviet system and was prepared to work against it, though was not foolish. He required compensation and precautions. In exchange for his commitment, funds would be deposited into an escrow account to support his mistress and child in the short term. In the long term, after an undetermined period, the Agency would assist him in defecting. The CIA gave Ogorodnik a code name, TRIGON, and insisted that as few people as possible be involved in the operation, since the more people who knew about his secret work, the greater the risk that one of them would betray him. However, to be securely handled inside the Soviet Union, TRIGON needed intensive tradecraft training before returning to Moscow.
George Saxe got the call. The instructions were precise. He was to close up everything else he was working on and concentrate all his efforts on TRIGON. He could talk to no one about the new assignment in which he was to train the agent and create a communications plan for passing photographs of documents to the CIA in Moscow.
Although the training would take place in Colombia, there were still security concerns. The KGB had a strong presence in the country and maintained close ties with local sources, including police, journalists, and government employees. Ogorodnik’s Western lifestyle made him a high-profile personality within the diplomatic community, and local KGB officers were monitoring him as part of their own recruitment campaign.
It took George a month to work out a training and commo plan. Since he spoke and wrote excellent Russian, he would conduct the training himself in Colombia with an OTS tech available for technical consultation and assistance. Unlike Penkovsky, TRIGON was not a professional intelligence officer. He would require basic instruction in tradecraft and operational techniques, including the use of dead drops, signal sites, brush passes, car tosses, and accommodation addresses. This would be followed by a series of more advanced covert technology and tradecraft techniques, such as document photography, receiving OWVL broadcasts, using one-time pads for encryption and decryption, secret writing, and microdot reading.
Even for professionals, comprehensive operational training takes months of study and years to perfect. Now, in a room in the Bogotá Hilton, George had the daunting task of schooling a spy to operate in the toughest counterintelligence environment in the world in a matter of weeks.
Among the devices issued to TRIGON was a new OTS ultraminiature camera. Work on the subminiature camera that began in early 1970 had a direct connection to Penkovsky. Quentin Johnson, during his assignment to TSD, pressed for development of “a camera that an asset could use to photograph documents while inside a KGB rezidentura.” Initially, the technical requirements seemed nearly impossible. In addition to