Spycraft - Melton [80]
Secret intelligence has never been for the fainthearted.
—Richard Helms, A Look over My Shoulder
Running concurrently with the Tolkachev operation, a parallel technical collection operation known as CKTAW remained one of America’s best-kept secrets.1 Generating new insights into Soviet particle beam and laser weapons research, CKTAW’s priceless intelligence did not come from an agent photocopying secret documents and loading dead drops in out-of-the-way locations. Neither did it arrive from the Big Technology of satellites with high-powered lenses. However, before it was over, the full spectrum of intelligence tradecraft and technology would come into play, from an orbiting satellite to hard won covert experience acquired over nearly a decade of successful operations handling agents in Moscow.
CKTAW was a wiretap on underground communications lines that linked the Krasnaya Pakhra Nuclear Weapons Research Institute in the closed city of Troitsk to the Soviet Ministry of Defense in Moscow.2 Data flowing via phone, fax, and teletype between the two facilities was recorded as it passed through a seemingly secure section of cable running beneath the streets of a Moscow suburb.
Tunnels and tapped communications lines had been previously used against the Soviets. The Berlin tunnel operation (Operation GOLD) in 1955-563 was conceived at a time when Soviet communications were mostly unencrypted and carried by underground telephone and telegraph wires. However, unprotected hardwired communications had fallen out of favor during the 1960s when governments and military commands adopted microwave links to communicate. These directional signals, transmitted from antenna to antenna in line-of-sight of each other, offered some security advantages. Though the towers were often visible, the directional transmission cone of the signals made them difficult to intercept without positioning an antenna between two towers, an espionage act that would have been impossible in Moscow.
In the mid-1970s, officers monitoring the RF (radio frequency) spectrum in Moscow discovered mysterious microwave signals with no clearly discernible origin. Eventually identified as data from a link connecting the MOD headquarters to the Krasnaya Pakhra lab,4 the signals unexpectedly appeared during rainstorms and suddenly vanished when the rain stopped.5 Engineers studying the phenomenon concluded that the temporarily exposed signals were caused by an atmospheric anomaly combined with one of the city’s unique architectural features. Apparently, the rain caused enough diffraction to send the secret microwaves ricocheting off Moscow’s tin-roofed buildings. The combination of rain and century-old roofs essentially turned a precisely targeted transmission into something resembling a broadcast. Rain and tuning to the right frequencies were all that was needed to listen in on some of the Soviet Union’s most closely guarded weapons development secrets.
The intelligence windfall was short-lived. When the Soviets became aware their microwave transmissions were vulnerable to intercept, both from land-based and satellite collectors, the signals diminished and then, eventually, disappeared completely.
U.S. analysts were certain that another, more secure communications link had been established, but did not know where it was located. Eventually, analysis of images from the new KH-11 satellite revealed that the Soviet military was laying communications cables in a trench running between Moscow and Troitsk.6 Launched in December 1976, the KH-11, the first space-based platform to use digital technology and transmit near-real-time images, provided eye-in-the-sky images from Moscow whenever it was in position and clouds did not obscure the target.7 Corroboration of the image analysis came when CIA technical and operations officers in Moscow exploited information from every possible human and technical source to confirm that the trench did in fact carry the new Krasnaya Pakhra signals.
Closer examination of the route showed a series of manholes along