Spycraft - Melton [65]
The culture of the DO added yet another hurdle for technical operations. Large-scale technical collection systems transformed the traditional roles between case officer and technology. Essential technology, such as secret writing, document photography, and agent communications, historically had served the DO as an aid to agent operations. However, technical collection operations in a hostile country were new. When technology became the means for collecting intelligence, the role of the DO sometimes shifted to supporting the collection operation rather than managing it.
Some DO case officers felt that they were being asked to carry all of the operational risks in denied areas, while any successes were credited to the technology. And the risks were high. Like agent operations, a compromised technical program could expose methods of collection, result in the arrest of officers, create an international incident, and jeopardize other ongoing, but unrelated intelligence activities.2
Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a career Soviet intelligence officer who eventually rose to the rank of Lieutenant General within the GRU, began life as a spy for the United States at almost the same time as Penkovsky in 1961 and continued his clandestine work through the 1970s.3 During his service as an agent for U.S. intelligence, Polyakov was a pioneer in the transition from the CIA’s reliance on traditional “low-tech” to innovative high-tech tradecraft.
Polyakov was recruited in New York in 1961 by the FBI as a counterintelligence source. He provided identities of illegals working for Soviet intelligence within the United States as well as the names of several Americans who were Soviet penetrations of the U.S. government.4 After his reassignment in 1966, Polyakov was handed off to the CIA and continued reporting from a series of postings in Burma, India, and the Philippines. Rising within the ranks of the GRU, he accumulated a long list of CIA code names, including GTBEEP, TOPHAT, and BOURBON.
TOPHAT requested little money from his case officers, and accepted only a few small gifts from the Agency, such as woodworking tools and a couple of shotguns for hunting. Motivated primarily by his hatred of the Soviet system, he saw himself as a proud Russian, but a reluctant Soviet. One case officer who knew Polyakov well described the agent as capable of “both intense moments of pride in the Soviet military while simultaneously despising the system it served.”
He was the consummate professional. During a turnover meeting in India in the late 1970s, when a departing CIA case officer introduced his replacement, Polyakov noted the new officer’s neatly trimmed beard. “We don’t allow beards in the GRU,” commented Polyakov. At the next meeting, when the two case officers arrived at a hotel room safe house in advance of Polyakov, the senior officer asked the replacement why he had not shaved the beard.
“Why should I?” asked the younger man.
“What our friend was telling you,” explained the senior officer, “is that a GRU general is not comfortable being with someone wearing a beard. It could raise questions.”
The young officer got a razor from the front desk, went into the bathroom, and shaved off his beard. Shortly thereafter Polyakov arrived and immediately complimented his new case officer on neatness and appearance. The turnover went smoothly, although the officer’s wife found it curious that, after wearing a beard for several years, her husband, without warning or explanation, had decided suddenly to go clean-shaven.
Understandably, the Agency and FBI were eager to keep open this pipeline of counterintelligence, which had grown over the years to encompass Soviet espionage operations outside the United States as well. Polyakov also reported on the Red Army and its armaments, including biological and chemical weapons programs. If one were to judge the value of intelligence by the number of customers who used the information,