Spycraft - Melton [59]
The death of TRIGON and arrest of Martha Peterson were bitter victories for the KGB. The Soviets may not have known TRIGON had been an active agent for more than four years, but they certainly would have understood the significance of the information he provided. TRIGON did not hold the most senior of Soviet government ranks but had access to documents containing vital national secrets.
Unlike Penkovsky, there would be no public trial during which TRIGON’s pet poodle and South American mistress would be submitted as evidence of “moral degradation” and “individualism.” Worse for the KGB, TRIGON’s suicide precluded any kind of interrogation and follow-up damage assessment of what he may or may not have handed over to the Americans. They would have to assume the worst, and the worst was significant. Throughout his tenure in Moscow, TRIGON had access to some of the most sensitive policy and planning documents in the ministry, including those pertaining to the Soviet negotiating positions during the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks.1
TRIGON supplied the type of vital intelligence that fed directly into the poker game of realpolitik diplomacy and military threat assessment at a critical juncture in the Cold War. It was intelligence that could not be gained from the technology of satellites, the open sources of Soviet media, or a defector who fled across the border at night. It was also perishable information, the sort of intelligence that required continuous refreshing to track shifts in the dynamics of international relations. Only a human agent with the tools to copy documents, record conversations, prepare secret correspondence, and communicate regularly with his handlers could acquire it.
The KGB did not provide accurate details of its investigation beyond those printed as propaganda in Pravda and other government-controlled media outlets. However, from the KGB’s counterintelligence perspective, it was now painfully apparent that the CIA was capable of running agent operations in denied areas, including Moscow. It was as if a banker, supremely confident in his massive safe, alarm system, and armed guards, had suddenly realized a doorway had been cut at the rear of the vault.
There could be little doubt that secrets in Moscow—and the entire Soviet Bloc—were now vulnerable to American intelligence, and technology was playing an essential role. The level of American communications and collection technology evident in the subminiature cameras and the surveillance receiver confirmed a new level of technical capabilities available to American agents and case officers in the field.
For the KGB, early evidence of America’s technical sophistication occurred in 1974 with the discovery of a ground sensor. Concealed as a tree stump near an air force base, the device was crammed tight with electronics capable of capturing and transmitting radio data from the airfield.2 Now TRIGON’s roll-up confirmed that advanced technology was also in the hands of agents. Dead drops, signal sites, and one-time pads were still used by the Americans, but operations were evolving. It did not require great imagination by KGB leadership to envision that soon these time-honored pieces of tradecraft would soon be supplemented or supplanted entirely with a new generation of ingenious devices that would move agent communications from the street to the airwaves.
Peterson presented yet another problem for the KGB officers of the Second Directorate. Because she was not a stereotypical case officer by KGB standards, Peterson’s cover work fit cultural and professional expectations of Western women in Moscow. For nearly two years, the immense Soviet security apparatus apparently had not focused on her activities. “When they caught Marty Peterson, I think that opened their eyes a lot,” observed an officer intimately involved with the case.
The KGB had done its best to create a cold, dark, inhospitable arctic-like environment for agent operations in Moscow. For years, both the reality and myth of the KGB’s blanket surveillance