Spycraft - Melton [85]
That had happened to Penkovsky in late 1961. The Seventh Directorate watchers first spotted a man suspected of passing material to Janet Chisholm, wife of MI6 officer Roderick Chisholm, inside a doorway just off one of Moscow’s busy shopping streets. Rather than make an arrest, they increased surveillance and eventually spotted the same man a few days later in a public park making another exchange. The unidentified subject was then placed under surveillance and later identified as GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky.
The spy, not the intelligence officer, was the ultimate target.20 However, once the KGB had identified an agent, arresting the foreign intelligence officer during an operation offered additional value. When the KGB arrested Martha Peterson on the Krasnokaluzhsky Bridge in 1977, although TRIGON was probably already dead, her detention brought negative international publicity to the United States and disrupted CIA operations in the USSR.
As Ken walked the paths of the park, the decision of whether to go to the manhole site was complicated by the number of people around him. Soviet citizens frequently used Moscow parks and on this early spring day, with the snow off the ground and the weather warming, the park was particularly crowded. Ken knew crowds could be used to his advantage, allowing him to blend into packs of visitors, but they also served a similar function for KGB watchers.
There was also danger in looking too closely at every person that crossed his way. Training and experience had taught Moscow personnel that if they looked hard enough, anyone could seem out of place. Since surveillance teams attempted to imitate everyday life, ordinary citizens can easily be mistaken for more than they really were. The old man wearing a cloth cap and walking slowly with a cane, the young couple strolling hand in hand along a path, a mother with children seeking a few hours’ reprieve from a small apartment, or the stout, middle-aged lady with the ubiquitous plastic “perhaps bag” swinging at her side—any one of them could be members of the Seventh Directorate.21 Then again, they could be just what they appeared to be, Muscovites enjoying a spring day outdoors.
Ken was well aware of this particular operational paralysis. Intelligence officers called it “seeing ghosts.” The psychology of the phenomenon was rooted in the inherent anxieties of clandestine activity coupled with the real possibility of encountering hostile security. What made it particularly vexing was the uncertainty of proving a negative. If one observed surveillance, or heard transmissions over the monitor, it became a certainty, but if one did not see or hear surveillance, several possibilities came into play. There could be no surveillance, the officer had not identified surveillance, or surveillance could know where he was headed and be waiting there.
To combat the uncertainties, Ken relied on confidence that previously effective SDR techniques would work again. In the end, it came down to trusting experience, training, and whatever technology was at hand. When well executed, the plans, maneuvers, and detailed routes that had been so carefully constructed, studied, and practiced should reveal surveillance, but ultimately Ken would act on his instincts. Even if his elaborate vehicular and foot SDRs did not reveal surveillance, Ken, like every other officer, had the option to abort the operation based on nothing more than “gut feeling.”
Case officers frequently donned light disguises, such as that of a Russian worker, for meeting with agents in Moscow, circa 1982.
“You absolutely trusted the process. But at the same