Spycraft - Melton [8]
Spycraft combines the experiences and lore of the techs based on the authors’ personal interviews and correspondence with nearly one hundred engineers, technical operations officers, and case officers. We verified specific details to the extent possible by collaboration with public material and multiple primary sources. The names of several individuals quoted by the authors throughout the book are changed as a matter of security, cover, or requested privacy. Appendix E provides a list of pseudonyms the authors assigned to these officers. Otherwise, we use true names throughout.
We did not seek access to, or use, classified files. At times, the fallibility of memory may produce less than a perfectly accurate account of events many years past. In a few instances, we purposefully obscured facts to protect operational information, or omitted sensitive details for the same reason. For example, the locations of operations, except those in Moscow, the former Soviet Union, and other denied area countries, are regionalized. Some operational terms and Agency jargon that appear in works by other authors not bound by secrecy agreements have not been used at the request of the Agency.
Why do history? Two thousand years ago Cicero observed, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of life unless it is woven into the lives of our ancestors by the records of history?” A twentieth-century view, as expressed by G. K. Chesterton, is: “In not knowing the past we do not know the present. History is a high point of vantage from which alone we can see the age in which we are living.” Richard Helms, who headed CIA operations in the early days of the Cold War and served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1967 to 1973, explained that he wrote A Look Over My Shoulder because it is “important that the American people understand why secret intelligence is an essential element of our national defense.”7 Our hope is that Spycraft becomes a part of that legacy.
—RW
Official Message from the CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency requested the following message be included in Spycraft. To provide the reader a sense of the reality of covert communications, the authors have presented the message using a page from a one-time pad issued to Aleksandr Ogorodnik (TRIGON) in 1977. Chapter 8 presents the TRIGON story. Use the one-time pad on page 99 and the instructions in Appendix F to decipher this message.
SECTION I
AT THE BEGINNING
CONFIDENTIAL 7 September 1951
1. Effective immediately the Operational Aids Division is redesignate<1 the Technical Services Staff.
CHAPTER 1
My Hair Stood on End
The weapons of secrecy have no place in an ideal world.
—Sir William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid
On a quiet autumn evening in 1942, as World War II raged across Europe and Asia, two men sat in one of Washington’s most stately homes discussing a type of warfare very different from that of high-altitude bombers and infantry assaults. The host, Colonel William J. Donovan, known as “Wild Bill” since his days as an officer during World War I, was close to sixty. A war hero whose valor had earned him the Medal of Honor, Donovan was now back in uniform.1 Donovan responded to the call to duty and put aside a successful Wall Street law practice to become Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and America’s first spymaster.2
Donovan’s guest, for whom he graciously poured sherry, was Stanley Platt Lovell.3 A New Englander in his early fifties, Lovell was an American success story. Orphaned at an early age, he worked his way through Cornell University to ascend the ranks of business and science by sheer determination and ingenuity. As president of the Lovell Chemical Company, he held more than seventy patents, though still described himself as a “sauce pan chemist.”
Donovan understood that the fight against the Axis powers required effective