Spycraft - Melton [90]
After spending the night at an airport hotel, the next morning Howard was on the first available flight from Albuquerque to Tucson, where he continued his secret journey to Moscow.52 The FBI did not discover his escape until some twenty-five hours after he jumped from the car.53
Howard’s defection had a catastrophic impact on Moscow operations. His devastating betrayal exposed to the KGB collection systems, tradecraft techniques, covert equipment, and agent-handling methods inside the Soviet Union and specifically CKTAW.54 Howard had been one of the handful of officers to participate in the CKTAW operation and, in fact, during the polygraph examination that led to his dismissal, admitted cheating during an exercise in the mock-up of the manhole by replacing the weights in his backpack with cardboard to make it easier to get into the small opening.55
Almost a year later, on August 7, 1986, TASS announced that Howard had been granted political asylum in the USSR.56 Reportedly, Howard continued drinking heavily and died at age fifty, in July 2002. Russian news reported the cause of death as a broken neck from a fall. Neither the Russian nor American intelligence services mourned his death.57
The significance of the American spy technology the KGB recovered from the manhole and the nearby cache was not lost on Soviet leadership. In a 1990 article that described and decried U.S. technical espionage against the Soviet Union, Lieutenant General Nikolai Brusnitsyn, deputy of the State Technical Commission of the USSR, complained that collection systems like CKTAW were interfering with arms control and reduction efforts between the two superpowers.58 Brusnitsyn concluded by admitting to Soviet “anxiety over the ever-growing capabilities and scope of intelligence gathering and spying technology.”59
Almost ten years later, in 1999, veteran KGB counterintelligence officer Rem Krassilnikov, author of The Phantoms of Tchaikovsky Street, provided a Soviet version of the CKTAW operation, which the KBG had code-named BILLIARD BALL.60 Krassilnikov described an “inductance data sensor” in the manhole as being connected to a metal box containing a tape recorder, control system to turn the recorder on and off during conversations, transceiver, and an internal power supply capable of operating the device for four to six months.61 According to Krassilnikov’s account, the box was buried a half meter deep and located not far from the manhole cover. In this KGB version, the box was painted bright red with the Cyrillic inscription DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE, protected by rodent repellent, and connected to a nearby ultra-shortwave (UKV) antenna.
Krassilnikov, citing the KGB’s technical analysis, reported the transceiver could be remotely interrogated up to 2.5 kilometers away. It responded with a coded signal indicating whether the unit had been disturbed, needed to have its tape changed, or required a replacement power supply.62 The analysis estimated that it was necessary for the CIA to service the unit only every four to six months.
CKTAW’s compromise did not diminish its achievement. For the CIA, the operation represented another remarkable fusion of technical reach and operational tradecraft, revealing vulnerabilities in the Soviet security apparatus. The imagination that conceived the operation, the engineering talent that built the system, and the operational execution represented a new kind of American technical collection capability. In the coming decades, the technologies developed during the CKTAW operation would be repeatedly applied to other equally critical targets.
SECTION IV
LET THE WALLS HAVE EARS
Crest of OTS audio operations