The Spy in Moscow Station

by Eric Haseltine

  “So where do we stand?” Hathaway asked Gandy.

  “I believe from all the data my team has collected that you now have your smoking gun. We should organize an equipment swap and bring all text-processing devices back to Fort Meade for careful study as soon as possible.” He looked over at LeChevet and smiled, half kidding. “Including your typewriter.”

  Hathaway stood, bringing the meeting to an end. “Okay, I’ll think this over and discuss it with some folks at headquarters. You’ll be hearing from me.”

  They shook hands all around and parted on good terms.

  But Gandy wondered—for very good reasons, as it turned out—how long the fragile new relationship with Hathaway and the CIA would last.

  6. Obstacles

  Arriving back at Fort Meade for work on a Tuesday, Gandy tried to shake off the eight-hour jet lag from the long journey back from Moscow as he rode the elevator up to Admiral Bobby Inman’s office to brief the NSA director on his findings.

  You had to be sharp when briefing the admiral, who was legendary for having an honest-to-god, no-bullshit photographic memory. Gandy recalled a story that had become folklore at the agency about a time when one Captain Inman was sitting at the back of the room while his boss, a civilian head of R&D, testified in front of a congressional budget committee. When Inman’s boss was asked, half in jest, about an obscure budget line item from fifteen slides earlier, the admiral demurred, saying, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” But Inman spoke up, supplying the dollar figure of the budget item. The room laughed as if Inman were joking, but when a staffer resurrected the true budget number, it turned out that Inman, working only from memory, had gotten the amount correct—to the exact dollar.

  The admiral never made mistakes when performing such memory feats, adding to his fast-growing legend.

  Bobby Ray, as he was known to friends and close colleagues, was crisp, precise, and hardworking, often arriving at work before dawn and staying well into the night. He was famous for exhausting subordinates.1

  To the Washington bureaucracy, the energetic Inman was considered a force of nature, and under his leadership, NSA’s budget and importance in the intelligence firmament had soared.

  Born in the east Texas town of Rhonesboro and the son of a gas station owner, Bobby Ray graduated from the University of Texas at nineteen, joined the navy as a reserve officer, and began to rise through the ranks of naval intelligence at meteoric speed, becoming the head of naval intelligence at the age of forty-three. Three years later, he was promoted to vice admiral and appointed director of NSA.2

  Gandy liked Inman and had developed an easy working relationship with him. It didn’t hurt that the admiral frequently praised Gandy to others, dubbing him a “wizard” and a “magician.”

  Inman had also shipped a lot of money to R9, encouraging Gandy to “keep the magic coming.”

  Entering the director’s office, Gandy was met by Inman, who, in June, was already wearing his navy summer whites, and Bob Drake, the deputy director who’d just moved into the number-two job a few weeks earlier. The admiral’s golden shoulder boards, bearing the three stars of his vice admiral rank, glinted in the July sunlight.

  Gandy was relieved that the NSA deputy director was now Drake, not his immediate predecessor, Benson Buffham, with whom Gandy had crossed swords a number of times, most recently over security lapses that Gandy had uncovered at NSA’s European headquarters during Buffham’s tenure there as NSA European chief. Gandy had buried the hatchet with Buffham a few years earlier but was still happy to be dealing with his replacement.

  Another reason that Gandy appreciated Drake’s presence was that the executive had previously served as head of NSA’s A Group, which focused on the Soviet Union. Drake would understand—and hopefully support—the daunting nature of the task ahead of Gandy working the Moscow embassy problem. A former B-24 Liberator pilot in the Pacific theater of World War II, Drake was known for his thoughtful, low-key management style. Drake, true to his reputation for listening more than speaking, shook hands and simply nodded at Gandy, who nodded back.

  The admiral offered Gandy a chair facing the window at his large conference table, then sat next to his new deputy, directly across from Gandy.

  Through the expansive window in the director’s office of the OPS1 headquarters building, Gandy noticed that morning traffic on nearby Route 32, just a couple of hundred yards to the west, had ground to a halt. Route 32, a major thoroughfare, was close enough that Gandy could make out the figures of individual drivers.

  How strange, Gandy thought, not for the first time, that random drivers could look right into the office of DIRNSA (director of NSA). Until the 1975 congressional hearings on Nixon’s domestic use of the intelligence services, NSA was so secret that it didn’t officially exist, although locals knew all about it—how could you miss such a mammoth organization right next to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway? Locals affectionately called NSA No Such Agency, and NSA employees themselves often said NSA stood for Never Say Anything.

  Gandy wondered if adversaries such as the KGB took advantage—or even caused—traffic jams like the current one on Route 32 in order to create opportunities to surveil the nearby agency from a van or semitruck. Perhaps he ought to do just that someday, Gandy mused, and present whatever he was able to collect from the experiment to Director Inman in order to improve security.

  After many weeks in Moscow, going up against the A team, Gandy was acutely aware of what a skilled adversary like the KGB might do to NSA given such close access to the agency’s headquarters.

  Interrupting Charles’s reverie, Inman dispensed with pleasantries and got right to the point. “Welcome back. What did you find?”

  Gandy produced documents he had prepared describing his findings in Moscow, laying them on the conference table. “They’ve got serious problems over there.”

  For the next thirty minutes, he presented his measurements and other findings and described the lapses that allowed KGB officers into the depths of the embassy, including secure areas.

  Inman said, “Impressive. What are your next steps?”

  “Until I hear back from Hathaway there’s not much I can do. As you know, NSA has no real authority over there: security is handled by State and CIA.”

  Inman considered that for a moment. “Yes, and the admiral [CIA Director Stansfield Turner] and I are not on good terms right now. About the only thing we agree on lately is that we don’t agree on anything.”

  No one in the room laughed. The turf struggle with CIA over which agency controlled SIGINT, along with budget issues, had been steadily growing worse and had recently moved into the category of open warfare.

  Gandy said, “I sit on an interagency security panel that meets regularly across the river. How would you feel about me presenting this information at our next meeting there? It might light a fire under State and CIA.”

  “Fine with me,” Inman said, rising from his chair to indicate the meeting was ending. “You might also want to brief Bill Perry downtown.”

  “I will do that. Wish me luck,” Gandy said on his way out the door.

  “You’ll need it,” Inman came back, only the slightest trace of a smile on his lips.

  * * *

  To prepare for the next interagency security group meeting, Gandy put together a 35 mm slideshow describing the chimney antenna and his recordings from it, along with other smoking-gun evidence of KGB penetrations of the Moscow embassy. Then, after a month of preparation, he took his show on the road.

  At the first meeting of the interagency group, which included CIA’s head of counterintelligence, Hugh Tovar, Gandy clicked through his 35 mm carousel of slides in a darkened room deep in the bowels of CIA. He took forty-five minutes to work through the technical presentation, receiving very few questions.

  The FBI representative to the group seemed impressed by the presentation and asked several good questions, but the State and CIA representatives sat through the slideshow ston
e-faced.

  “Any questions?” Gandy asked the group as he flipped on the room lights.

  The CIA representatives looked at each other, and eventually the most senior officer among them, Hugh Tovar, spoke up. “We are pretty up to speed here on KGB tradecraft, and I can’t say I share your concerns about the chancery. Guys on the other side just aren’t nearly as smart as you give them credit for.”

  From his previous failed attempts with the group to raise red flags about Soviet technical intelligence prowess, Gandy had expected this. “Fair enough,” he answered. “Would any of you like to see a demonstration I’ve prepared to prove the art of the possible? The demo reproduces some of what I recorded over there.”

  This elicited a reluctant nod from the CIA officers present.

  As he jotted his classified line phone number on a notepad, Gandy said, “Okay. Please call my office, and they’ll arrange for you to come to NSA, where I can show you the demo. Then we can discuss what happened during my trip in Moscow with all of us on the same page.”

  As the meeting adjourned, most of the men present from other agencies copied Charles’s phone number as they filed out.

  Two weeks later, at Fort Meade, after Gandy presented a demonstration of the technology he believed the Soviets were employing against the embassy, he invited those who had seen the demo into a nearby SCIF for a discussion.

  Gandy addressed the group. “I hope it’s now clear that what I said the other side is doing to us in Moscow is entirely possible.”

  “Theoretically possible, yes,” Tovar came back, “but probable … no. The fact that you can do it doesn’t mean the Russians can do it. They’re simply too backward.”

  Gandy controlled his mounting frustration and tried to keep his voice even. “What about the collection from over there that I presented at our last meeting demonstrating exfil? How else do you explain that?”

  Another CIA officer, who had said nothing in the security group meeting two weeks earlier, spoke up. “There are several plausible explanations for what you showed us and multiple reasonable interpretations of each explanation. You are not a Soviet all-source analyst or Russian linguist, are you?”

  “No,” Gandy answered, sensing where this was going. “Of course not.”

  “I thought so,” the CIA man said. “You’ve done what many armchair analysts do and have become wedded to your first idea without carefully weighing alternatives. Why don’t you leave the job of translating and analyzing collection to the expert Soviet analysts here, who know the target intimately, and just stick to your job of making and breaking codes?”

  Here at last, the elephant in the room had reared its head. CIA’s job, along with collecting HUMINT, was to analyze collection from all the other agencies in their all-source analyst group, the DI. That was why, in CIA’s view, it was the Central Intelligence Agency, as in the center of the universe: the Rome of the Roman Empire. CIA deeply resented other agencies “trespassing” on their analytic turf and jumping to “naïve” conclusions about what targets like the Russians were doing and—as a result of their amateurish conclusions—stirring up trouble around D.C.

  CIA was also growing increasingly angry with NSA for withholding raw SIGINT collection so that NSA could issue its own, exclusive analytic reports to important “customers,” such as the president.

  In an internal CIA memo written a couple of years earlier, a CIA staffer summarized a long list of beefs the CIA had with what they perceived to be NSA’s bad behavior.

  Three paragraphs from that declassified internal memo sum up CIA’s feelings toward NSA.3

  TOP SECRET

  20 August 1976

  MEMORANDUM FOR: Assistant Comptroller [CIA], Requirements and Evaluation

  1. SUBJECT: The CIA/NSA relationship

  2. REDACTED

  3. REDACTED

  4. NSA’s new feeling of importance became evident in many other ways, such as footnotes to various political and military NIE’s [national intelligence estimates], in public and, not so public forums in which NSA reps let it be known in numerous ways that there was little or no need for “middlemen” such as CIA, DIA etc., to chew, digest and regurgitate perfectly good SIGINT data and provide it to the real intelligence consumers such as the President, the Secretary of State and the NSC [National Security Council] chair.

  5. As a part of its ceaseless effort to assert itself more vigorously in the intelligence process, NSA began a policy of “gradualism” with regard to the format and content of its output. More and more it put less and less data in its publications, always with the explanation or excuse that it wanted to improve its or the Community’s security and provide “better service” to its customers. Almost all of these changes made the SIGINT product less meaningful and more difficult for our analysts to interpret. Most such changes were instituted unilaterally by NSA and announced after the fact; if at all. In almost all instances, however, consumers objected, but almost always to no avail. NSA began more and more to hide behind the “technical information” dodge which meant that users of SIGINT data had no need for and weren’t really to be trusted with information on intercept positions, collection capabilities, traffic volume, crypt systems, etc. Such practices have usually been at the heart of most CIA analyst complaints.

  6. During this period (which extends to the present), CIA representatives at various levels from all agency directorates objected to the NSA way of doing business. More and more as NSA became stronger and more aggressive it became an uphill battle for Agency reps in defense of the DCI’s and Agency’s position and responsibilities in the intelligence business. The increasingly aggressive, determined and sometimes overbearing policy on NSA’s part, and the lack of a steady, coherent, reasoned and positive Agency policy supported by top Agency [CIA] management have resulted almost by default in the emergence of NSA in a Community role in which the tail too often wags the dog.

  [Redacted Signature] Requirements & Evaluation Staff Office of the Comptroller

  TOP SECRET

  The attitudes about NSA expressed in this CIA memo, by 1978, were widely shared in the intelligence community and the Defense Department, who were, in theory, NSA’s customers. As a result, NSA’s customers often said that NSA’s true motto about its “customers” for SIGINT was “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”

  Aware of the negative attitudes about NSA of many in the national security community, Gandy noticed that the State representative was nodding vigorously during the CIA’s officer’s smackdown of NSA. “Yeah, you tell ’em,” the nods seemed to say. The relationship between CIA and State was not much better than the CIA-NSA relationship, but State and CIA did agree on one point: uppity NSA should stay in its own backyard.

  Gandy exchanged a look with his assistant, who had helped him with the demo. I told you so, the other man’s shrug said.

  Realizing that enmity toward his agency was very broad and deep, Gandy addressed the room. “Okay, thanks for your time. You know where to reach me if you have any follow-up questions.”

  * * *

  A few weeks later, acting on Director Inman’s suggestion, Gandy drove directly from his home in College Park, Maryland, to the Pentagon to brief Under Secretary of Defense Bill Perry on his Moscow trip. Based on the cool reception he’d received at CIA and the hostility he’d encountered after the demo at NSA, he knew he was going to need all the help he could get to fix the problems he had uncovered in Moscow and plug the leak (or leaks) that had produced the recent HUMINT roll-ups and asset death sentences. Perry was a beltway heavyweight who was fast making a reputation as an innovator who got things done. (Bill Clinton would later appoint Perry secretary of defense).

  Gandy was looking forward to the meeting for more than professional reasons. He and Freda had become good friends of Bill and his wife, Lee, when Bill ran Electromagnetic Systems Laboratories (ESL). One reason Perry occupied a special place in Gandy’s heart was that, during a spelunking adventure Gandy had organized for Bill,
Beth Gandy—Charles Gandy’s daughter—had met her future husband.4

  Entering Perry’s large office on the outer ring of the Pentagon, Gandy’s attention was drawn to the Potomac River basin a few hundred yards away. He couldn’t help wondering if some of the boats visible in the marina there were attacking Perry’s office—and those of other top Pentagon officials, such as Les Aspin, the secretary of defense, with exactly the technologies he was about to describe to the under secretary. He made a note to himself to propose a “Red Team” microwave and optical attack, KBG-style, from the marina, in order to assess whether such attacks would work against Pentagon’s defenses. If his Red Team attacks succeeded at the Pentagon and NSA headquarters—as he suspected they would—he wouldn’t be a very popular man.

  Oh, well, he had risen as high as he’d wanted to and didn’t much care about popularity. But he cared deeply about what the KGB was getting away with, for sure in Moscow and probably on this side of the Atlantic as well.

  It was funny what a trip to Moscow did to you, Gandy mused. He couldn’t look at Route 32 or the Potomac River anymore and see just a road and a waterway: electronic danger lurked everywhere now.

  Gandy reluctantly put thoughts of rivers, Russians, and Red Teams aside as Perry rose to meet him and shake his hand.

  Gandy proceeded to highlight his findings to Perry, describing in detail the numerous security holes at the embassy (leaving out the part about the honey trap in the frilled peasant blouse).

  Bespeckled and slender with dark, receding hair, Perry listened carefully to the details, asking insightful, highly technical questions that Gandy didn’t usually hear from presidential appointees. Perry, a Ph.D. mathematician, had picked up a lot about SIGINT while running the defense company ESL, which he had founded.