Spycraft - Melton [60]
TSD chief Sid Gottlieb conveyed a similar message to the techs. “You are not there to fiddle around with the technical gadgets,” he directed. “I’m sending you there to become part of their operations and use our gadgets wherever they think will help.” Over the next two years, the combination of new tradecraft and technical gear would revolutionize the operational environment in Moscow. Fire was being carried to the Soviet arctic.
Traditionally, new CIA officers received a block of basic technical training during the six-month-long intensive tradecraft course required by the DO. This instruction included photography with a 35mm, Minox, and some subminiature cameras; principles of developing and printing 35mm film, lock picking, sketching of operational sites, secret writing, fashioning an improvised concealment, and “burying” microdots. The objective was to introduce case officers to a variety of technical tools and familiarize them with the operational capabilities available through OTS.3
OTS technical operations officers, known as TOOs, who were trained specifically for field assignments, came from all disciplines, including documents, disguise, audio, and secret writing. After acquiring proficiency in each of the other areas, their primary expertise was then matched with the overriding need of an office. In the early 1970s, the prevailing requirement in Moscow was support for covert photography used for operational casing.
Depending on circumstances, Moscow officers would use commercial 35mm or special subminiature cameras to photograph persons or equipment of interest as well as locations for meetings, dead drops, and signal sites. A favorite small camera was the Tessina, which took a half-format image using 35mm film to produce seventy-two exposures instead of the standard thirty-six and featured a spring-wound motor that allowed for one-handed operation and ten exposures before rewinding, eliminating the need to remove the camera from its concealment after each shot. The techs also made concealments for these casing cameras, incorporating them into purses, little leather pouches, and books.
Case officers returning from an operational photography mission, called a “casing run,” would hand over the camera to the tech who would develop and print the film, and then return the camera, loaded with fresh film and in a concealment, to the case officer.
The TOO in Moscow could also fabricate small concealments for dead drops out of fabric, leather, pieces of wood, pipes, dirty work mittens, plastic tubing, or discarded cardboard milk or juice cartons. What the TOO could not do on-site with his supply of hand tools and ingenuity, he accomplished by playing the role of consultant, relaying requirements for covert devices—such as audio transmitters—to a larger OTS tech base outside the Iron Curtain or to Headquarters. A TOO working in a denied area experienced the same pressures as case officers, including drawing surveillance when they shopped in the local market or drove their children to the international school.
The KGB may not have realized the degree to which the Americans were monitoring and exploiting the radio transmissions of its surveillance at the time of Peterson’s arrest. Certainly they had been confounded by the small receiver, no larger than two packs of cigarettes, she carried.4
Development of the SRR-100 began in the early 1970s after a communications tech intercepted transmissions on known KGB frequencies and correlated those with the movement of American personnel. Just as TSD had probed Soviet Bloc mail in the 1960s to understand postal censorship patterns, the CIA now began orchestrating a series of “rabbit runs” to probe KGB surveillance transmissions. A set of scanners identified signals and recorded the transmissions while a dilapidated plotter