Spycraft - Melton [83]
In reality, Ken’s carefully selected cultural excursions and interest in the outdoors worked toward a single purpose—to build a persona that established a predictable pattern of activity that began on the day he arrived and would continue until he departed. As artfully engineered as a piece of spy gear, Ken’s job, hobbies, and interests—all of those elements that make up daily life—were meticulously designed before he stepped off the plane at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
Like all other Americans in Moscow, Ken would be a potential target for surveillance and subject to assessment by the KGB. He would be closely monitored during his first weeks in Moscow for inconsistencies in the carefully crafted profile. It would not take much to catch KGB attention. One or two anomalies outside the normal pattern of activity would label Ken an intelligence officer, bringing continuous surveillance and compromising his operational value.
Within a few weeks Ken concluded that he fell into the KGB’s middle tier of surveillance priorities—an American who would be accorded periodic surveillance at random intervals. Even this would most likely lessen over time as surveillance observed him maintaining a consistent profile and pattern of activity in Moscow.
One critical piece of Ken’s activity was frequent family outings doubling as well-planned surveillance detection routes (SDRs).13 Whenever possible, Ken, accompanied by his wife and two small children, visited Moscow’s leso parks or “forest parks” on day trips. Large expanses of green—sometimes spanning hundreds of acres—these parks were a welcoming world away from the gray, soot-covered streets of Moscow’s center and a logical destination for a young American family that loved the outdoors.
Ken and his wife, Sharon, spent hours in the parks with their children, who were four and seven at the time, picnicking, throwing Frisbees, and hiking the long trails through the forests. The rucksack Ken carried became a familiar accessory to those who might have him under surveillance. The rucksack contained food, water, toys, and blankets for a day in the park. These excursions also provided a logical reason to visit all areas of Moscow, allowing Ken to familiarize himself with the roads, geography, and traffic patterns as well as identify choke points, escape routes, and observation stops for planning future SDRs.14 On days when they happened to have surveillance, Ken, with Sharon’s help, could practice identifying KGB vehicles, license numbers, surveillance tactics, and team members.
On a spring morning in 1981, five years of operational planning, targeting analysis, satellite imaging, signals intelligence, and technical development culminated in one of history’s most elaborately planned and expensive family picnics. Leaving home in the family’s green and tan VW bus, Ken began a twenty-mile trip that appeared identical to his past travel patterns. But in this instance, each road, each turn, and each stop was designed to detect and identify surveillance.
In their ears, Ken and his wife wore small radio receivers for the OTS monitors secured in harnesses near their armpits and tuned to the KGB’s 103.25 MHz primary surveillance frequency. Ken also carried a second receiver, a six-channel scanner that searched for any “near field” transmissions from militiamen and the ubiquitous Seventh Directorate.15
The inductive antennas looped around their necks were encased in soft fabric, concealed under their clothing, and transmitted the signals from the receivers to the earpieces no larger than the head of a Q-Tip. The small earpieces were concealed by latex sculpted by OTS disguise specialists to match natural ear contours and colored to blend with Ken’s and Sharon