Spycraft - Melton [57]
Martha Peterson arrived in Moscow in 1975. She worked a regular eight-hour daily cover job, improved her Russian language skills, and kept a low profile. For the KGB watchers, she merited little attention. Only on her scheduled breaks, lunch hours, and nights did she assume the responsibility of handling a spy she would never meet, the CIA’s highest-placed agent in Moscow.
A young woman, dressed in the latest fashions and doing a woman’s administrative job was not how the KGB envisioned a CIA officer. If Peterson did not fit the KGB profile of Agency personnel in the USSR, she did not fit the traditional CIA denied-area case officers, either. She had won the coveted assignment due to the insistence of the office chief who had been impressed by her earlier operational work.
From the time of his recruitment in Columbia, TRIGON had proven himself to be a productive agent. Then, in the spring of 1977, the operation took a turn for the worse. The first indication that something was wrong surfaced when communication schedules between the agent and CIA broke down. Finally, an early July OWVL radio message was sent to TRIGON instructing him to put out the standard meeting signal by parking a car in a specific location at a specific time. Uncharacteristic of his normal responsiveness, no car appeared at the site. However, a second request for an alternate signal, a red lipstick mark on a “child crossing” pole, did elicit the appropriate response—the red mark appeared on the pole the next day. The signal indicated TRIGON would pick up a package at a predetermined time and designated dead drop site.
On July 15, Peterson made a point to leave work on time. For the next four hours, she walked, rode, drove, and used public transportation, executing a carefully constructed surveillance detection run. Her single operational act that night would be to load a dead drop for TRIGON. She had conducted more than a dozen similar operations during the previous eighteen months. As in the past, she encountered no problems or indication that KGB surveillance might be following her.
The dead drop site was a window crevice in one of the arched pillars along the footpath on the Krasnoluzhskiy Bridge that spans the Moscow River. Peterson carried an OTS concealment fabricated to look like a piece of asphalt debris in her shopping bag. The relatively flat 6 × 8 × 4-inch “black rock” was sealed with reversed screws and rubbed with soil and mud to give it a dirty look. The cavity was filled with small-denomination Russian rubles held tight with a rubber band, a resupply of six loaded T-50 camera bodies, some jewelry, a pen concealment, new commo schedules, one-time pads, contact lenses, and a personal note on Kalvar film.7
Included in the package was a cautionary note in Russian that read:
Instructions for use of a one-time pad in covert communications, 1975.
COMRADE! YOU HAVE PENETRATED INTO ANOTHER’S SECRET. TAKE THE MONEY AND THE VALUABLES, THE REST THROW INTO A DEEP PLACE IN THE RIVER. AND FORGET ABOUT ALL OF THIS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.8 Should someone other than TRIGON stumble across the container, the note, with its threatening message, might persuade them to dispose of the package instead of reporting the find to the KGB.
CIA-prepared dead drop instructions for TRIGON at Moscow bridge, 1977.
Dusk was darkening into night when Peterson finished her surveillance detection run. Confident she had no surveillance, she loaded the dead drop at 10:30 PM, pushing the concealment as far back as her arm could reach into the crevice, and then walked a few steps to a long staircase that descended from the bridge. Just before she reached the bottom, three men suddenly