The Spy in Moscow Station

by Eric Haseltine

  When Gandy had finished, Perry said, “I’m concerned about the security in Moscow—and at our other missions, too, for that matter. What can I do to help?”

  “You’re doing it,” Gandy answered, “just showing that you care.”

  “You don’t need extra funding?”

  Gandy smiled. “You’ve been more than generous already, and honestly, R9 has got a lot on its plate already, with more work coming in all the time, so money isn’t my problem.”

  Perry regarded Gandy but didn’t say anything for a beat. It occurred to Gandy that Perry, ever considerate, was too polite to ask what he was really thinking: Then why did you come here?

  Answering the unasked question, Gandy said, “This could get ugly. I’m encountering the same resistance in the [intelligence] community to my ideas about the Russian threat that I have for the last decade. My Moscow trip evidently hasn’t changed anything.”

  “Sounds like you could use some air cover.”

  Gandy nodded. “I like the way you put that,” he said, rising to leave. “This is a lot like air warfare. When you’re over the biggest targets, you catch the most flak.”

  Perry rose and shook Gandy’s hand as he escorted him to the reception area outside his office. “I’ll remember that one.” Perry laughed. “I’ve never heard a better description of what it’s like to get things done in D.C.”

  * * *

  Gandy’s prediction that things would get ugly and that he would take flak for pressing for action in Moscow proved accurate.

  Despite Hathaway’s seemingly genuine desire to find and plug leaks in Moscow, the rest of CIA, following the lead of the security group Gandy had met with after returning from Moscow, closed ranks and refused to act on Gandy’s recommendation to swap out suspect equipment in Moscow for clean gear sent from the States.

  Ditto for the State Department. Jon LeChevet later said that he “caught a lot of shit” for helping Gandy as much as he had on the recent trip. One senior diplomat in Moscow opined, in a thinly veiled attack on Gandy, “There is no place here for ne’er-do-wells who wrap themselves up in the flag of national security and pursue witch hunts.” LeChevet’s masters at State Diplomatic Security also ordered him not to help further with Gandy.

  As the months wore on and it became clear that neither State nor CIA were going to cooperate with Charles’s efforts to find and plug the Moscow leaks, Gandy considered his options.

  He could send a cable to Hathaway, hoping that the man who had the most to lose by inaction would light a fire under his colleagues. But Gandy’s long experience with CIA suggested that the most he would get would be a vague “We’re working on it” response. Worse, the cable might aggravate CIA headquarters, who had already expressed their deep skepticism. Perhaps it was best not to tickle the dragon’s tail, lest he get scorched.

  But Gandy didn’t want to give up. His whole life, obstacles had gotten in his way. Gandy’s father, Carl, had been handed a crushing debt when a business partner embezzled most of their company’s cash, and Carl had to pay the company’s debt out of family funds. So although Gandy’s father was a professional engineer with a good job managing a power plant, money was extremely tight, and Gandy had had to find inventive ways to pay for his ham radio and electronics hobbies. If he couldn’t buy a part, like an induction coil, he would make it by hand from scraps.

  But a far bigger obstacle was Gandy’s reading disability.

  It was hard enough to grind through his textbooks over and over again until comprehension seeped through, but he also had to cope with teachers who interpreted his “slow reading” as a lack of intelligence. It was an enormous effort to learn when the people teaching you didn’t think you could learn.

  But the early difficulties Gandy faced had been a blessing of sorts, because he had not only overcome them by sheer force of will but had learned a larger lesson that people without disabilities sometimes never get the opportunity to learn: that you could surmount enormous obstacles if you only looked hard enough for a way around them, just as when he would have his mother, and later Freda, read textbooks to him, because he was a quick study when the information came through his ears instead of his eyes.

  Now, decades later, he had another towering mountain to climb—or go around: CIA and State’s intransigence. He wasn’t certain why they were digging in, ignoring overwhelming evidence of Russian successes in Moscow. Perhaps they were afraid of being criticized for having missed penetrations right under their noses or, with the twisted logic of D.C. bureaucracies, simply thought NSA was more of a threat to them than the Russians. Or maybe, an uneasy voice inside told him, they’re simply too arrogant to accept that the Russians could be that much better than we are.

  Recalling his deep suspicions about CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, Gandy even briefly considered, then discarded, the possibility that a KGB mole at CIA or State (or both) was working hard to discredit him.

  Whatever the reason, whether well-considered, petty, or sinister, CIA and State were going to put up a fight on this one.

  Gandy took pride at never having failed at anything he had set out to accomplish in his years at NSA, and he was determined not to give in to the growing opposition.

  A no from a government bureaucrat, Gandy had come to believe, was really just a slow yes.

  Gandy sometimes wondered what had made him so focused and persistent going around, boring through, or dynamiting obstacles in his life. Other people he knew persevered in the face of adversity, but he had rarely encountered anyone who was as allergic to failure as he was. Could it be that, at some level, he had spent his whole life trying to prove wrong the teachers who’d doubted him? Maybe, but it was also possible that a passionate, unquenchable curiosity—not a bad trait for an intelligence officer—drove him to be so persistent. Gandy found it difficult to keep a steady stream of clues, possibilities, and technical ideas from flowing into his head, and every day, before going to bed and after he awoke, he filled up three-by-five-inch index cards with these thoughts.

  Regardless of his deep motivations, any reasonable person, in Gandy’s view, wouldn’t let the Moscow problem go. Lives were at stake.

  The first strategy that Charles employed was to brief as many cleared security experts as he could in the Defense Department, FBI, State Department, and other intelligence agencies on what he had learned in Moscow. He took many trips down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, his Kodak projector and two full 35 mm TOP SECRET carousels beside him. Perhaps he could build up a critical mass of support behind doing what needed to be done. At the very least, his national security colleagues would be warned about Russian capabilities and take steps to protect their own operations.

  Mostly, his audiences were polite and asked an occasional question, but Gandy suspected that many of them either didn’t really understand or didn’t believe what he claimed the Russians could do. Part of the problem, Gandy knew, was that even Ph.D. scientists couldn’t grasp the basics, but would feign comprehension, embarrassed to admit that they really had no clue what he was talking about.

  More than once over Charles’s career, a colleague who possessed more candor than tact had told Gandy that he was “too smart,” that he saw things so clearly that sometimes he didn’t understand what others couldn’t understand. Gandy was a very visual thinker who saw lines of electromagnetic flux in his head, along with antenna gain patterns, eddy currents flowing in conductors, ground conduction effects, and other esoteric RF and electromagnetic phenomena.

  Couldn’t everyone?

  No, everyone couldn’t, he had discovered. Gandy had worked around his dyslexia, but how to overcome other people’s problems, grasping concepts that came so easily to him?

  He had worked hard at simplifying the complex but knew that he didn’t always succeed.

  Rumors had reached him over the years that some people he worked with thought that he left huge holes in some of his technical explanations, automatically and unconsciously assuming
that his audiences would get things on the first bounce.

  Perhaps that was one reason the concerns he was raising were not acted upon. Or perhaps people believed him but had other priorities.

  One bright spot was that Gus Hathaway, who wielded considerable influence as Moscow COS, did not seem to share the perception of others at CIA that Charles’s conclusions about the Russians were off the mark. Based on a thumbs-up from Rusty Williams, whom Turner had sent to Moscow to evaluate security, Hathaway had finally gotten the go-ahead from Turner to run Adolf Tolkachev as an asset (Gandy didn’t know this at the time) and was doubtless eager to protect this valuable new asset from security leaks at the chancery. So in the fall of 1978, Hathaway put in a request for R9 to continue to investigate security at the Moscow embassy. Gandy complied, sending two of the colleagues who’d accompanied him on his first trip to gather more information about KGB activities from November 1978 through early January of 1979.

  But R9’s second trip to Moscow uncovered no new evidence of KGB penetrations, possibly, in Charles’s estimation, because the KGB had become aware of his success on his first trip and laid low during R9’s second visit. The New York Times, in 1987, said, “A team of investigators sent to Moscow in 1979 found nothing, according to the officials, who theorize that the Russians had been alerted.”5

  Gandy didn’t dwell long on the failure of R9’s second trip because his organization had a huge backlog of work.

  Under Gandy’s leadership, R9 constantly engaged in quick reaction capabilities (QRC) programs to solve one critical national security challenge after another.

  Throughout 1978 and 1979, while Gandy continued to evangelize the Moscow problem, most of his time was spent fighting fires as trouble erupted around the globe. And where there was trouble, you would usually find NSA gathering information for policy makers and the military. America’s ally in the Middle East, Israel, was enmeshed in a protracted, ugly war of occupation in Lebanon; Italian premier Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered, probably by left-wing terrorists such as the Red Brigades; terrorists killed 171 in a bomb attack in Beirut; Mauritania’s government was toppled in a military coup; and so was Bolivia’s. Worse, Marxist-leaning Sandinistas took over the national palace in Nicaragua, raising the specter of another Communist dictatorship in America’s backyard. Back at home, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, presided over by Jimmy Carter, were being conducted. Intelligence agencies, such as CIA and NSA, often supported diplomats in such negotiations, providing valuable insights about motivations and possible negotiating positions of different actors. Late in 1978, President Carter officially recognized China, meaning that a new embassy, and threats to that embassy, needed to be addressed.

  Then the big bombshell hit in early 1979: after months of unrest and street violence, the shah of Iran fled his country, an Islamic revolutionary government came to power, and hostages were taken at the U.S. embassy. At the end of 1979, another huge challenge for the intelligence community, including NSA, was the unexpected Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

  In other words, R9—which, by 1978, had evolved into a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency response team—had its hands full responding to one global emergency after another. Gandy also assisted FBI in their counterintelligence efforts to find and arrest foreign spies illegally in the United States.

  But throughout 1978, 1979, and 1980, despite the lack of results from R9’s second trip to Moscow, Charles never stopped pressing for action in Moscow. He would have abandoned the apparently quixotic campaign if the evidence he’d accumulated in Moscow had been equivocal, but he was certain of his findings and their implications about how the Russians had destroyed CIA’s HUMINT network in Russia.

  In May 1980, support for Charles’s campaign to find and plug security leaks in Moscow came from an unlikely source: a KGB major named Victor Sheymov.

  Sheymov, who worked as an engineer and self-described troubleshooter in KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate—responsible for enciphering classified Soviet communications—defected to the United States after operating as a CIA asset in place for a short time. During his debrief in the United States, Sheymov warned that the KGB had plans to thoroughly bug the New Office Building (NOB) of the chancery that had begun construction in 1979. Some of the exploits that Sheymov warned that the KGB was inserting into the new building included technologies similar to those that Gandy had described in his slideshows.6

  Possibly as a result of Sheymov’s warnings, Hathaway, who by 1981 had moved up to run CIA’s Soviet Eastern Europe Division (SE) in the DO, once again put in a request for Gandy to search the Moscow embassy for security leaks. Another reason for Hathaway’s request could have been the mid-1981 arrest of Y. A. Kapustin, a CIA asset in Moscow. Thus, in August 1981, Gandy made his last trip to Moscow to find and plug technical penetrations of the U.S. embassy.

  From Charles’s point of view, the trip produced more smoking-gun evidence that the KGB were collecting text information from somewhere in the embassy, but CIA officials in Moscow, and many at CIA headquarters, remained unconvinced.

  “I was never sure of Gandy,” said Burton Gerber, CIA’s COS during Gandy’s 1981 visit. “He claimed in 1981 that the other side could read text using microwaves [MUTS], but he never produced any proof. It felt to me like Angleton [CIA’s notorious chief of counterintelligence], who was always saying, ‘If you knew everything that I know, you wouldn’t argue with me,’ but never produced everything he supposedly knew.… Gandy simply never proved a single thing he said. He was like a lot of technical people who raised alarms but, in the end, never any proof.”

  Asked about Hathaway’s views of Gandy, Gerber, who was close to Hathaway and was Hathaway’s subordinate in 1981, replied, “Hathaway thought Gandy was a genius, but even he wasn’t convinced of Gandy’s claims.”

  Despite these doubts, Gerber—a famous stickler for meticulous tradecraft—had given enough weight to the concerns about the KGB’s ability to copy text that Gandy had raised on his 1978 trip, that when Gerber relieved Hathaway as Moscow COS in 1980, he ordered that all typewriters, both manual and electric, be removed from CIA’s offices. “Pencils are pretty hard to compromise,” Gerber observed.

  Gerber, and others at CIA, however, still had their doubts. Another reason they weren’t overly concerned about the KGB compromising text at the embassy was that any compromises of typewriters, printers, faxes, or other text machines had to be, in CIA’s opinion, strictly those used by the State Department. Also, unlike State, CIA only shipped sensitive equipment through heavily protected channels. Finally, CIA operated inside of an RF-shielded SCIF that—in theory, at least—would not allow MUTS, or any RF signals from bugs, in or out.

  By definition, in CIA’s view (and Gandy’s as well), State Department text and communications were essentially insecure anyhow because, well, State was clueless about security, letting foreign service nationals (FSNs) run all over the place, accepting KGB microphones as a fact of life, being careless with shipments into and out of the embassy, and so on. So even if Gandy were right about the KGB reading text, who really cared? Any lost text would be State’s, which was probably lost anyhow due to State’s lax security.

  The bottom line was that Gandy’s 1981 trip damaged his credibility at CIA because, in CIA’s view, he never backed up his claims about KGB capabilities with demonstrations to DO case officers there.

  Here was a classic breakdown in communication. Gandy had in fact demonstrated at Fort Meade that his claims were reasonable in 1978, then later in 1979 to CIA DS&T officers, but either those officers never passed along the information to DO officers such as Gerber and Hathaway, or they passed it along with the caveat that “Gandy might be able to do it, but the Soviets can’t.”

  Gandy, for his part, assumed that Gerber and others would believe him precisely because of the multiple demonstrations he had presented to CIA officers at Fort Meade. It never occurred to Gandy that Hathaway, or even Gerber, didn’t really believe him. Also,
Gandy enjoyed a godlike reputation at NSA and was accustomed to people there taking him at his word.

  Another difficulty that followed Gandy’s 1981 Moscow trip came from the State Department.

  “Gandy and State were in open warfare,” Jon LeChevet said of the time following Gandy’s 1981 trip, “because Gandy was going around saying that the Moscow embassy was compromised.”

  By 1982, this conflict had spread to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which started to investigate both Gandy’s assertions, including KGB access to the chancery, and troubling reports about bugging of the NOB in Moscow. Following up Sheymov’s warning about the KGB bugging the NOB, a special team sent to study the NOB construction site discovered in May 1982 that prefabricated components of the NOB had listening devices embedded in them.

  According to a declassified NSA report titled “American Cryptology During the Cold War”:

  In the early 1980s people on Reagan’s National Security Council became concerned about the hostile foreign intelligence threat in general and about the security of the Moscow embassy in particular. So in 1982 NSA sent a team of people to look at technical penetrations in the Moscow embassy. They found the chancery honeycombed with insecurities, including cipher locks that didn’t cipher and alarms that didn’t sound. NSA alerted the FBI, which did its own survey and confirmed the problems that NSA had found, plus others. [An unnamed NSA employee] teamed up with an FBI representative to brief President Reagan on the matter. The State Department, already suspicious of NSA “meddling” in embassy affairs [due to Gandy], was reportedly unamused.7

  Against this backdrop, the PFIAB, under Anne Armstrong, started asking State pointed questions about security at the Moscow embassy, especially the heavy use of FSNs in Moscow.

  The State Department official who briefed PFIAB to justify the use of FSNs did not make State’s life any easier when he confidently asserted that hiring KGB officers was actually safer than hiring Americans to do the same job. The official, Richard Combs, who was the deputy director of the Soviet desk, said that if the embassy hired Americans, they would be inevitable targets for KGB recruitment. Combs said it was safer to have known KGB employees than unknown security risks posed by cleared U.S. citizens who might be recruited by the KGB.8