“What is it?” LeChevet asked with a touch of irritation, straining to hear three floors below. “Tell me.”
“Sorry,” Bainbridge answered, “it’s just that these aren’t bricks at all but some kind of rubbery material molded to look like bricks.”
“Can you pry the fake bricks loose?” LeChevet asked.
“Trying now.” Bainbridge worked his fingers into the seams between the real and fake bricks and pried the rubbery material away. Behind the fake bricks, there was a black anodized aluminum panel.
LeChevet, who was illuminating the area with his own light, instructed, “Can you remove that panel, too?”
Bainbridge placed his hand flat on the panel and pushed on it, feeling some give, as if it were attached to a spring. Pushing harder, the panel receded an inch or two, then slammed back into place.
Someone who was clearly on the other side of that panel didn’t want the Americans to explore further.
Underscoring this point, the panel pulled back into the wall and three pointed steel spikes advanced through three holes that had just been drilled in the brick, almost certainly with circular, water-lubricated drill bits that had left the water stains. The long spikes proceeded at a leisurely pace to a spot just under the observation portal on the opposite wall. Then, the spikes withdrew into the wall from which they had come, but almost immediately snapped quickly back across the shaft, below the antenna.
The message was not subtle: if Bainbridge—or any American—attempted to descend into the shaft again, they would be impaled.
Bainbridge screamed, pulling on the boatswain’s chair hoist, “Get me up! Now!”
LeChevet thought, It looks like the opposition is about to retrieve their prize by pushing the row of bars across the shaft to catch the antenna when it falls, manually cutting the monofilaments to make the antenna fall into their clutches.
He called down to Bainbridge. “Okay, but first we’ll bring you up to the antenna, where you can hold on to it. Then I want you to cut the signal and power cables and nylon control lines, retrieve the antenna and that aluminum box, and get the hell out of there.”
Bainbridge did as he was instructed.
The Americans never again ventured into the shaft.
5. Clues to the Mystery
During his regular morning meeting with LeChevet the day after the antenna had been retrieved from the chimney shaft, Gandy looked at the antenna. He asked, “Exactly where was this when you pulled it out?”
“Near the top floor.”
“And can you confirm where was it pointed?”
LeChevet pointed toward the upper southeast corner of the main chancery building. “Looks like the ambassador’s office, as we feared.”
Gandy thought for a moment. “Would you mind getting on the roof and mapping out precisely how high up it was and where it was pointed?”
“Sure,” LeChevet answered, “but why?”
Gandy placed his hand on the antenna. “Small details matter—a lot.”
“Okay. I’ll measure the distance from the antenna to the ceiling here, then use that distance as a reference from outside the building to figure out exactly where it was. I’ll be back in a bit.”
A half hour later, LeChevet returned. “Well, the antenna was almost exactly level with the roof of the main chancery building next door, tilted up at the same angle as the sloping roof of the chancery.”
“What is the roof made of?” Gandy asked.
“Copper, I think. Definitely some kind of metal.”
“That’s what I would have predicted,” Gandy said.
“Why does a metal roof matter?” asked Carl, who had joined the meeting.
“I believe the metal roof channels RF energy from some kind of implant in the chancery, probably the ambassador’s office, directly to the antenna, greatly increasing its sensitivity. That increase in sensitivity, along with the proximity of the antenna, would allow the implant to broadcast at extremely low power to avoid detection.” Gandy looked up from the antenna and caught LeChevet’s gaze. “That could be why your TSCM scans never caught it.”
“Maybe,” LeChevet said. “Or maybe it’s no longer in use.”
Gandy didn’t think that was likely, given the great lengths the KGB went to in order to retrieve the antenna. He asked, “When can I take the antenna for analysis?”
“Well, I can’t just hand it to you to take back to your work area, because you shouldn’t be seen by Russian embassy staff carrying it over to the north annex.”
“True enough,” Gandy said. “What do you propose?”
LeChevet considered that. “What if I boxed it up and brought it to you at midnight?”
“Tonight?”
“Yes, tonight,” LeChevet said.
Fourteen hours later, at exactly midnight, Gandy heard a knock on the door of the quarters where he was working.
Expecting LeChevet, he opened the door wide and got what he would later call “the shock of my life.”
Standing before him, instead of LeChevet, was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She wore a frilled, very low-cut Russian peasant blouse with patterned trim and a big smile. Gandy’s gaze involuntary wandered to the blouse, which did a poor job of covering the woman’s ample, braless breasts. Part of his brain registered the woman’s intense blue eyes and blond hair cascading down to pale, bare shoulders. Her face wore a playful, confident expression that somehow seemed to say, “Yes, you can get in trouble for sleeping with me, but it would be so worth it.” Her glossy lipstick was impossibly red, and Gandy caught a heady whiff of perfume.
“I went on automatic,” Gandy later said, “not really thinking at all because I wasn’t accustomed to the HUMINT side of things. Here was obviously a KGB honey trap. For a full minute, I didn’t know what to do and just heard myself talking to the woman. I could feel my heart thumping away in my chest.”
But Gandy did have the presence of mind to close the door all but a crack. Peering through the opening, and glad he had blocked a view of the room’s interior with stacked boxes, he asked, “What can I do for you?”
The woman leaned forward, giving Gandy a more generous view of her breasts. In lightly accented English, she said, “I used to live in this apartment and left some valuables here. Can I come in to get them?”
“There’s nothing in here like that,” he answered.
Wrapping the fingers of one hand around the edge of the door as if to open it, the Russian said, “Perhaps I could come in for a drink?” With her other hand, the woman held up a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka up where Gandy could see it. “You could help me practice my English.”
Gandy decided then to end the encounter and stepped out of his room, closing the door behind him. Immediately to his left, he saw a large man in an ill-fitting suit, pressing his back against the wall.
The woman’s smile disappeared, and red blotches appeared on her face, which then drained of all color. “It was the fastest I had ever seen anyone pale in my life,” Gandy said.
Abruptly, without a word, the woman and her escort turned and fled down the nearby stairs.
Shaken by the encounter, Gandy did not immediately answer the next knock on the door a few minutes later. “Who is it?” he asked through the door.
“Jon,” LeChevet responded. “I’ve brought what you asked for.”
Gandy opened the door, ushered LeChevet in, and quickly closed it. As the two stepped around the stack of boxes in front of the door, Gandy asked, “Did you tell anyone you were coming?”
“No, why?” LeChevet asked, putting the box with the antenna down on a table behind the stacks of boxes.
Gandy briefly described the encounter he’d just had with the blond woman and her escort.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” LeChevet observed. “How would they get past embassy security and the outside guards?”
“The guards are Russian,” Gandy responded, “and probably saluted when she went by.”
“Th
at’s not supposed to happen.”
“Well, yeah,” Gandy said, “but the Russians knowing you were bringing me the antenna exactly at midnight was also not supposed to happen either. I can’t believe the woman’s timing was just a coincidence.”
LeChevet sighed. “Troubling.”
“Yeah,” Gandy agreed. “Troubling.”
* * *
Even though it was past midnight, Gandy didn’t go to bed; he was eager to check out the antenna and the aluminum box connected to it. With normal beam antennas, he could infer a great deal about what frequencies the antenna was “listening” to by measuring the length of the crossbeams, which in turn, would narrow down the possibilities for what bugs or implants the antenna had been picking up. An antenna crossbeam is cut to respond best to the frequency band it works in because antennas are most sensitive to frequencies whose wavelength are exactly twice the antenna length. FM radio and the old TV broadcast system operated in the very-high frequency (VHF) band covering wavelengths from 1 meter to 10 meters while the ultrahigh frequency (UHF) band encompassed wavelengths between 0.1 meters and 1 meter.
But the antenna in front of Gandy was not a normal Yagi, because all three of its elements were “active,” meaning that each of them fed signals via a coaxial cable to the aluminum box. Most Yagi antennas have only one active element that connects to a receiver or transmitter, while the other cross members are unconnected to any electronics, acting solely as passive reflectors and directors of RF energy (sort of like echo chambers for acoustic energy). The antenna wasn’t really a Yagi at all, where all elements worked together, but three separate antennas operating independently.
In order to learn the antenna’s operating frequencies—a critical step to identifying and capturing the signals the device was designed to listen to—Gandy would have to activate the electronics, stimulate the antenna with a signal generator, and observe its response on a spectrum analyzer.
Turning his attention to the aluminum box, Gandy attached new connectors to the coaxial cable and power lines into the box that had been cut when the antenna was removed. Then he connected the antenna elements to his receivers and spectrum analyzers and hooked up a power supply to the box.
Because he didn’t know what voltage the box required—even though LeChevet had told him it was probably 12 volts, he gradually walked the voltage up until the box came to life, telling him he had found the proper operating voltage. It turned out LeChevet had been right: the device operated nicely at 12 volts DC.
First, Gandy used a variable-frequency signal generator attached to a small antenna of its own to stimulate the antenna at different frequencies. He soon discovered that circuits in the aluminum box maximized sensitivity of each of the three active elements at 30 MHz, 60 MHz, and 90 MHz.
Now it was time to listen to what the antenna was hearing. Donning headphones, he picked up the antenna and pointed it in different directions, rotating it so that the cross members were alternately parallel and perpendicular to the floor. Because the antenna was most sensitive to signals arriving along its long axis, systematically moving the antenna around like this could help direction find (DF) a signal. Rotating the antenna parallel and perpendicular to the floor aligned the device to either vertical or horizontal polarizations of energy (the plane of oscillation of the radio frequencies in question). The antenna had been mounted in the chimney with the elements vertical, suggesting that they were oriented to receive vertically polarized signals, but Gandy wanted to be as thorough as possible.
Gandy spent the most time pointing the antenna at the southeast corner of the embassy, in a vertical orientation, replicating as much as possible the aim of the antenna from its original chimney position, reasoning that, when the antenna was discovered, it had been listening to a bug or implant in the ambassador’s office or somewhere close by.
The first thing that struck Gandy as highly unusual about the sounds coming through his earphones was not what he heard trying various angles and polarization orientations—even pointing at the antenna’s presumed target in the Southeast embassy—but what he didn’t hear. As he tuned his ultrasensitive receivers and spectrum analyzers across the VHF band, he did not hear two Moscow TV stations that were broadcasting megawatt signals from a few miles away.
Incredible! This silence of these hyperpowered TV stations was the equivalent to sitting in a hotel room next to railroad tracks and never hearing trains go by.
The spectrum analyzer told the whole story of what the antenna wasn’t hearing. Where enormous spikes and sidebands of the TV signals should have been were only flat traces, signifying that no energy was being relayed out of the aluminum box at broadcast wavelengths.
What in tarnation was in that aluminum box? Gandy assumed it was some kind of preamplifier that boosted received signals prior to sending them down the coaxial cable to a KGB listening post, but the strange box seemed to be doing the opposite of that, thoroughly eliminating powerful signals.
By watching the traces on his spectrum analyzer while listening on his headphones, Gandy could tell, through elevated noise (random background clutter generated by a wide range of electrical machines and appliances) at 30, 60, and 90 MHz, that the antennas and circuits in the aluminum box were tuned to, and most sensitive to, signals 10, 5, and 3.33 meters, respectively, but not TV stations. Gandy also observed that the amplifier circuits in the box had unusually high noise floors, meaning that they were not designed, as he’d expected, to pick up faint, stealthy signals but to capture signals over an extremely large dynamic range of everything from relatively weak to incredibly strong signals.
The strange behavior of the antenna and box suggested to Gandy that the device had special “notch” filters that eliminated strong TV signals, while at the same time amplifying signals in the gaps between adjacent TV stations where intermodulation products would normally appear.
Intermodulation products are to radio frequencies what acoustical beats are to acoustic frequencies. If you strike two piano keys at the same time, simultaneously generating two distinct frequencies of acoustic energy, those two frequencies will “beat” against each other as the two acoustic waves constructively interfere (reinforce) each other at frequency intervals equal to the sum and difference between the two frequencies, generating overtones.
In the same way, two pitches of radio frequency will beat against each other in a radio receiver, generating overtones called intermodulation products at sum and difference frequencies.
Local TV stations did not broadcast at the peak frequency sensitivities of the chimney system at 30, 60, and 90 MHz, so Gandy suspected that the antennas were not designed to pick up TV stations, but rather signals hidden inside intermodulation overtones of TV stations that were broadcasting 30, 60, and 90 MHz apart from each other.
Gandy’s heart raced as he realized what he had discovered: an incredibly clever, stealthy way to hide signals from bugs or implants where no one using normal amplifiers and antennas would ever find them.
Normal TSCM antenna/amplifier systems, such as what LeChevet employed for bug scans, did not “notch out” certain frequencies but were designed to pick up all frequencies equally well. Also, normal TSCM gear, even if it were designed to minimize intermodulation effects, would still generate extremely strong intermodulation products while receiving energy from nearby megawatt TV transmitters, because the sheer power of these transmissions would overwhelm anti-intermodulation circuits in the TSCM equipment. Overwhelmed in this way, TSCM spectrum analyzers would display a strong spike at 30, 60, and 90 MHz that completely masked any weaker signals that might hide there.
Switching to normal amplifiers connected to his spectrum analyzer, Gandy confirmed that—without the KGB special aluminum box—he did indeed see strong intermodulation signals coming through the Soviet’s chimney antenna.
Gandy was impressed by the KGB’s ingenuity. The aluminum box in front of him, by blocking out the powerful TV signals themselves, would completely eliminate intermodu
lation signals so that it could hear what normal TSCM gear could never hear: signals from bugs and implants.
“I’ll be dipped and rolled in cracker crumbs,” he said under his breath, invoking a phrase oft heard in the Deep South. He had never seen anything like this sophisticated surveillance scheme.
For a full ten minutes, Gandy stared at the antenna and aluminum box that came with it, working through the elegant genius of the KGB’s design. The hide-in-plain-sight approach to masking signals from bugs with intermodulation artifacts was one he had never seen before, but it totally fit the way the Russians did things. The KGB made a point of knowing, somehow, exactly what types of equipment U.S. security personnel used to find bugs and implants, then designed around that equipment to avoid detection. The original Thing, for instance, consumed no power and had no active elements—such as amplifiers—that could be detected by U.S. TSCM equipment of the time.
Another aspect of the chimney antenna system that seemed clever to Gandy was the simple pulley system by which KGB technicians, crawling to the bottom of the shaft through the tunnel from the nearby changing room, could grab the nylon monofilaments and move the antenna up and down, while simultaneously pointing it in an optimal direction. If Soviet technicians listened to the bug or implant while manipulating the antenna, they could use the pulleys to optimize reception.
By raising and lowering the antenna, the KGB officers could also aim the antenna at different targets on different floors.
Sobering. The strong implication was that the Russians had planted multiple bugs or implants on multiple floors of the embassy—and LeChevet’s TSCM scans had found none of them.
Gandy’s regard for his Soviet adversaries, already very high, climbed a couple of notches. He appreciated true technical competence wherever he encountered it and found himself imagining the Russian mind that had conceived of the exfiltration system that lay before him on the table. He imagined the fun he could have chatting up the KGB technologist who had designed this system, comparing notes and “heterodyning” (bouncing ideas off each other).
The Spy in Moscow Station Page 11
