Spycraft - Melton [66]
In the assessment of officers who worked with him, Polyakov was a nearly perfect spy. Not only was he highly placed within the military structure, he possessed the training and discipline of a skilled intelligence officer.
Because he understood KGB counterintelligence tactics, Polyakov proved to be an extremely cautious agent. Methods of covert communicationswere changed frequently to lower the risks as much as possible. Initially he communicated using OTS’s latest secret-writing techniques and conventional dead drops. Outside the USSR, he employed brush passes and received signals via personal ads placed in The New York Times, under the name “Donald F.”5
These methods required significant time and planning, and carried with them varying amounts of risk. None permitted real-time or near real-time exchanges with the case officer in case of an emergency. “We had an agent providing us with critical counterintelligence and positive intelligence about military policies, technical information on Soviet equipment, and penetrations of the American government. These are invaluable reports. But whatever he had, it had to be condensed into short messages of a few hundred words laboriously written down and ciphered using an OTP,” said one of his ops officers. “Because Polyakov didn’t have a private place to work, this was all done while hiding in a closet or sitting on the john. His family didn’t know about his secret work, and his children, wife, and mother-in-law were living in his apartment. He had to sit and work with these miniature one-time pads and encipher all this information prior to sending it to us and decipher what we sent him. Then, Polyakov had to go outside, take a deep breath, put down a dead drop in a public place and hope he was not seen and that the case officer found it before anybody stumbled across it.” The operation needed a device enabling the Agency to communicate quickly and securely with an agent while lowering the risk of compromise.
The dilemma of securely communicating with Polyakov was solved while he was posted to India (1973-76), when the CIA developed its first electronic short-range agent communication system for use in a denied area. The new SRAC device, a form of “burst transmitter,” carried the code name BUSTER. Measuring approximately 6 × 3 × 1 inches and weighing just over half a pound, the unit was small enough to conceal easily in a coat pocket. BUSTER had a tiny single-digit display with a Cyrillic type font and a keyboard that was no larger than an inch and a half square. To load a message, Polyakov would first convert his text into a cipher using a one-time pad, then poke at the tiny keyboard one character at a time to store up to 1,500 characters. After the data was loaded, Polyakov would contrive a reason to go within the transmitter’s thousand-foot range of the base station receiver and press the SEND button.
The receiver base station was a larger unit, measuring approximately 81 ⁄2 × 11 × 5 inches thick, and typically sat in one of several windowsills of Agency residences or in parked cars. Because base stations were maintained in multiple locations, Polyakov could vary his transmission points making his pattern of movement around the city difficult, if not impossible, for any KGB watchers to discern. BUSTER’s burst signal minimized transmission time, thereby limiting the KGB’s ability to detect the signal and pinpoint its source.
When Polyakov returned to Moscow, he could communicate while riding in a car, streetcar, or bus, or when walking or riding a bicycle, simply by pressing a button on the device in his pocket during the few seconds he was within range. He could now send electronic messages at the time and location of his choosing. Better still, the communication link was two-way. Once the base station received the message, it replied with a confirmation signal and transmitted its own preloaded, though more limited character