[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

so tight in Moscow, Bill and Jacques explained, that such
meetings were rare; an officer might never hold one during
his entire two-year tour.
However, Agency case officers in Moscow were still expected
to perform the most important duty of clandestine espionage
operations: secure and timely communication with agents-in-
place. The two station officers reviewed for us the clandestine
agent communications plans they had devised to keep channels
open to their assets in such a hostile area.
 We have to spend every waking moment working on these
prob-
206 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
lems, Jacques said.  Everything we do outside our apartments
and, these offices is geared toward agent communication.
 I haven t taken an unplanned stroll on the street or had a
friendly tennis match for almost two years, Bill conceded.
Whenever he was outside the  sanctuary of the American
mission, he was constantly at work, trying to overcome inevit-
able threats to our agent pipelines by playing mind games with
the far superior forces of the KGB.
Turning back to the memo, Jacques described the basic
structure and reputed modus operandi of the Seventh Chief
Directorate s street surveillance teams. Once assigned to a
suspected foreign intelligence officer, a dedicated team focused
their entire attention on that person, twenty-four hours a day.
Identifying senior CIA officers was sometimes made easier by
the Agency and State Department s practice of giving them
fairly senior diplomatic cover jobs so that they had plausible
reasons to visit a variety of Soviet government offices, meeting
and assessing potential Soviet official targets on the diplomatic
social circuit as well. Devoting around-the-clock surveillance
to an officer who was merely suspected of espionage was not
simply an extravagance for the KGB: They understood the
immeasurable harm to the Soviet Union that an effective spy
could inflict.
When Jacob and I reached Moscow in 1976, an uneasy
equilibrium existed in the spy-versus-spy power struggle. The
KGB could not be certain of how many foreign intelligence
officers were working in the capital, nor were they sure of ex-
actly who they all were. To protect themselves, the Seventh
Chief Directorate tended to overestimate the numbers of the
opposition, and to saturate people they considered obvious
candidates with grossly inflated surveillance teams. The dubi-
ous distinction of being targeted for concentrated surveillance
arose from sev-
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 207
eral factors. It was important for us to identify what they were
in order to avoid coming under suspicion as we conducted
our disguise survey.
 We know from our reporting and defectors that they study
our overt behavior patterns, overall demeanor, and daily pro-
files, Jacques explained.  So you ll have to be very careful
about your actions in this regard.
Bill added that the sheer size of the KGB surveillance opera-
tion often made it cumbersome and less flexible than it had
been perhaps fifteen years earlier. This deterioration was due
to several factors. By 1976, both the foreign diplomatic presence
and business community had grown considerably since the
darkest days of the Cold War. Our closest NATO allies, Great
Britain and West Germany, also had large embassies in Moscow
and were subject to the same level of scrutiny and suspicion.
Then there were the Chinese, hardly the stalwart allies of the
Soviet Union they had once been. Finally, Moscow s population
had steadily increased, year by year, despite official Soviet ef-
forts to restrain migration to the coveted Center.
To meet these challenges, the KGB had played its hand like
a gutsy table-stakes poker player, raising each of the opposi-
tion s bets. As the CIA and the West German Bundesna-
chrichtendienst (BND) intelligence service expanded their
Moscow operations, for example, KGB surveillance teams
proliferated. The Soviets were good but not  ten feet tall. The
increasing density of surveillance trailing foreign suspects
from the Western diplomatic district west of the Kremlin occa-
sionally led to one team tripping over another in pursuit of
their quarry.
 That can be damned funny, Bill said.  But it doesn t hap-
pen very often. These guys are generally invisible.
 And that s the problem, Jacques admitted.  Your average
Soviet
208 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
citizen can somehow sense the KGB in the Metro or the queue
for the trolley, but they just look away. You grow up in this
country, you acquire a set of antennae to detect KGB vibrations
two blocks away. I wish we could do it that easily.
 Let s look at how we think the bad guys operate, Bill
suggested, giving us another single sheet showing a schematic
diagram.  This is the estimated size and MO of a typical KGB
surveillance team. Inside the circle at the center of the page
was  the rabbit, a suspected CIA officer. Depending on his
cover diplomatic, lower embassy rank, or nongovernment-
al the officer might routinely have a sizable team of surveil-
lance specialists serving in shifts around the clock, with a ro-
tating stable of cars at their disposal. The team s function was
to keep the suspected officer in direct sight, or to be confident
that the rabbit was safely ensconced in his office or otherwise
accounted for at all other times.
 By the way, Bill said with a wry grin,  we re pretty sure
our Soviet friends have augmented their audio bugs with
hidden audio and video in the apartment blocks, probably
trying to acquire some spicy  Peyton Place tape for potential
blackmail.
 Not only do the walls have ears, Jacques added with a
chuckle,  they also have beady, bloodshot eyes. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]