Baffled by this logic, one PFIAB member came back at Combs, “By this reasoning, you would say that it would be best if all of our embassy positions were staffed by the KGB.”
Together with Gandy’s previous alarms about Moscow security and Combs’s strange testimony before PFIAB the new NSA and FBI reports about embassy security in Moscow caused major headaches for both CIA and State. As early as May 1982, CIA director William Casey felt obliged to brief the PFIAB both on “CIA/State telecommunications” and renewed efforts to bolster counterintelligence against foreign intelligence threats.9
Secretary of State George Shultz, annoyed with the increasing attacks on the security of the Moscow embassy, particularly those originating from Gandy’s work, told his diplomatic security staff that he was tired of hearing about Moscow security and didn’t want to entertain further discussion on it unless someone could bring him a smoking gun proving a breach.
By late 1982, both State and CIA were irritated with NSA in general and Gandy in particular, ultimately leading to what Gandy would later refer to as “the worst phone call of my life.”
According to Gandy, just after lunch on a Friday in the fall of 1982, his secretary, Nancy, popped her head into his office, saying, “The director for you.”
As soon as Gandy picked up, Lieutenant General Lincoln Faurer said, “I’ve got some bad news.”
“Okay.” Gandy felt his stomach tense. In over twenty-five years at NSA, he’d never gotten such a call from an NSA director. “What happened?”
“We just got a memo from D/CIA [director of CIA] ordering us to ‘cease and desist’ all countermeasures activities outside of our core mission. We are directed to ‘go back to making and breaking codes.’”
Gandy felt a heavy lump of lead sink to the bottom of his stomach as he digested that. “Countermeasures activities” was a veiled reference to his Moscow embassy work. Pushing down his anger and disappointment, Gandy said, “Sounds like they’re referring to me and all those alarms I’ve been raising.”
“Sounds like it. You’ve been the lightning rod on these issues for a long time, and your slide presentations on the Russian threat must have finally really gotten to them.”
“Yep,” was all Gandy could muster, feeling numb.
“DCI claims he can’t go anywhere without Cap [Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger] or someone from NSC [National Security Council] pestering him about Moscow embassy security, and it’s become counterproductive. Apparently, State and CIA finally agree on something: they both don’t like you.”
Gandy could only look at his office wall in stunned silence.
Faurer went on, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to go along with this, Charlie. Although we’re part of DOD [Department of Defense], we report to D/CIA on diplomatic security, and we’ve got so many other problems with CIA right now, we can’t afford to add this one to the pile.”
Collecting himself, Gandy asked, “Do you think there’s any chance they’ll follow through in Moscow anyhow, without us?”
A curt laugh. “What do you think?”
“Okay,” Gandy said dully. “It’s not as if I don’t have other things to do.”
“Yes,” came the response. “And for what it’s worth, I think DCI, by taking this action, has done great harm to the nation. But we have to pick our battles.”
Gandy sighed. “Yes, I guess we do.”
After hanging up, Gandy cast his gaze out his office window. In a twenty-five-year NSA career, he had never once failed at any important task he had set out to accomplish, and this Moscow thing was about as important as you could get.
But now, for the first time in his working life, he had to swallow failure.
Locking away his papers in the office safe, Gandy put on his coat, turned off the light, and headed home early to dinner. Maybe Freda’s seafood gumbo could wash away the bitter taste of defeat.
7. Who Hates Whom
Gandy’s recollection that William Casey pressured Faurer to turn off his embassy countermeasures work with a cease-and-desist order remains controversial. When asked about the DCI’s prohibition of NSA security work in embassies, Bob Gates, who was deputy director of CIA for intelligence (DDI) at the time (and later CIA director and secretary of defense), along with Burton Gerber, thought Casey never pressured Faurer on embassy security.
Gates suggested that someone below Casey at CIA might have pushed back on Gandy’s constant harping about Moscow embassy security, but that Casey himself was too concerned about foreign intelligence threats to have taken such action.
And yet, Gandy vividly remembers the phone call from Faurer because “it was the first time in my entire career I had failed at anything. That phone call definitely happened, and I did abruptly cease all embassy countermeasures work. I even turned over all of my carousel slides to the technical security folks at CIA, hoping they might act on the information since I couldn’t act on it anymore.”
Gandy acknowledged that he never actually saw the cease-and-desist memo Faurer referred to, and, when recently told of Gates’s and Gerber’s doubts about Casey having authored it, speculated that someone below Casey might have contacted Faurer claiming to be carrying out Casey’s wishes, or that Faurer, in order to take political heat off NSA, might have overstated CIA’s position.
Certainly, both NSA and Gandy had no shortage of bureaucratic rivals who might have been making Faurer’s life difficult.
By the time he got Faurer’s call, Gandy had heard reports about Shultz’s smoking-gun comment and was puzzled by it.
He had given both CIA and State more smoking guns about Moscow in 1981 on top of the original evidence from his 1978 trip. Then there was the chimney antenna, the constant MUTS bombardments, and the new stuff about KGB penetrations of the NOB. What did State think those were about?
A possible explanation for State’s and CIA’s lack of enthusiasm arrived in the form of a CIA report a few months later, sponsored by technologists in CIA’s DS&T, describing CIA’s analysis, among other things, of Charles’s conclusions concerning KGB microwave attacks on the embassy.
The report contained a scathing rebuke of Gandy’s conclusions, pointing out that the microwave signals probably were just jamming of U.S. receivers in the embassy, as the Soviets had argued. The report concluded that the KGB simply didn’t have the technology or expertise to extract voice or data from the embassy in the way that Gandy said they could and even called into question the underlying physics of numerous demonstrations that Gandy and his team had presented at Fort Meade to prove that sophisticated KGB attacks were feasible. The report implied, but did not state outright, that such demonstrations had been “dry-labbed”—faked.
Gandy was appalled. Did those guys really believe what was in the report, or was the report just an instance of CIA pissing around their territory to keep NSA away? In an attempt at black humor, he placed two crossed Band-Aids on the report’s cover before sending it around to his troops for review, signifying that the report was “damaged.” In R9, the CIA document came to be known as the “Band-Aid report.”
Word also came through the grapevine that CIA had analyzed the chimney antenna and concluded it was nearly worthless, with a high noise floor (ergo, low sensitivity to RF signals). What were those guys thinking? Had they treated it like a standard Yagi and completely missed the genius of the device, the way it plucked faint signals out of massive interference from TV stations? Of course the system had a high noise floor, in order to handle the extreme dynamic range (span of signal strengths) coming from multi-megawatt Moscow TV stations!
* * *
In late spring 1983, shortly after receiving the Band-Aid report, as Gandy puttered around with his ham radio gear in his home workshop in College Park, Maryland, he considered what to do about the resistance from CIA.
Gandy felt a strong urge to push back against CIA’s pushback. If CIA had issued the cease-and-desist order based on the Band-Aid report and the erroneous analysis of the chimney antenna,
perhaps he could, purely through technical arguments, get back into the Moscow ball game.
Ever since returning from his first trip to Moscow in 1978, concerned about the human cost of leaks in the Moscow embassy, Gandy had kept tabs on asset roll-ups and PNGs from the Soviet Union, mostly from press accounts because—for good reason—CIA did not share raw HUMINT-related information with NSA. As far as Gandy could tell from the newspapers and RUMINT (rumor intelligence), there had been a string of problems following the 1977 arrests of Ogorodnik and Filatov and expulsions of their CIA case officers Martha Peterson and Vincent Crockett, respectively. These problems included:
The expulsion of diplomat Donald Kursch in 1978
The conviction of a Soviet scientist “B. Nilov” for espionage in 1980
The expulsion of case officer Peter Bogatyr in August 1981 (which had occurred while Gandy was in Moscow)
The arrests for espionage, announced in Moskovskaya Pravda, of four scientists in September 1982
The expulsion of diplomat Richard Osborne in March 1983
Later in 1983, two other case officers, Lon Augustenborg and Louis Thomas, were also expelled. A senior NSA COMSEC (communications security) officer familiar with Moscow comms told Gandy that the Soviets were so brazen about their penetration of the Moscow embassy that they tacitly told Ambassador Arthur Hartman about it during a heated exchange over the proposed Soviet gas pipeline to Europe.
When the Soviets pressured the Polish government to declare martial law in December 1981, the Reagan administration showed their displeasure by imposing sanctions on the Euro-Siberian natural gas pipeline, which was to bring a massive new supply of gas to Western Europe and a major new source of revenue to Moscow. The sanctions, imposed early in 1982, prohibited the use of any American technology in the project. For example, GE gas turbine engines, the preferred power source for pumps for the pipeline, were embargoed by the sanctions.1
The American gas pipeline sanctions posed a major obstacle to the project, so in 1982, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to pressure Ambassador Hartman to persuade President Reagan to lift the restrictions. As a diplomat, Hartman didn’t say no, merely, “I’ll see what I can do,” but in fact took no steps whatever to do as the Soviets had requested.
During a face-to-face meeting in Moscow between Hartman and a senior Soviet diplomat, when Hartman told the Russians, “I’m doing everything I can to help you,” and said he had sent a cable urging reconsideration of the sanctions, the Soviet yelled (according to Gandy’s source), “You’re a goddamn liar! I read everything you send back to the States!”
To Gandy, this account, if true, was deeply troubling because it implied the Soviets were monitoring diplomatic traffic from the embassy and they didn’t care whether the United States knew it. Worse, the “I read everything you send back to the States” remark implied that the Soviets believed (correctly) Hartman would do nothing to investigate exactly how the Russians knew he was lying.
No, Gandy thought. It’s unacceptable that we sit on our hands while compromises in Moscow continue to risk the lives of assets who work for us and degrade the integrity of our sensitive diplomatic and national security communications. Who can I get to help me turn this situation around?
Taking out a fresh piece of quadrille engineering paper, he diagrammed out the key players who might be shaping events. Perhaps by examining the motivations and relationships among these key players, he could figure out how to prove to someone with influence that closing holes in security at the Moscow embassy would be in their best interests. Maybe he could find an ally or two.
As he looked over the diagram he was creating, he remembered the old adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Perhaps in the convoluted, ever-shifting web of relationships inside the beltway, he could find a friend or two.
Gandy had drawn the diagram with three types of lines. Gray lines identified different actors and what Gandy thought of as neutral relationships—that is, those relationships that were not particularly warm or antagonistic but more or less businesslike. The relationship between the Department of Justice and FBI, who served under them, was an example of a neutral relationship. There had been ups and downs between Justice and FBI, especially when Hoover was FBI director, but now attorney general William French Smith and FBI director William Webster got on well enough, so Gandy sketched a line between the two leaders in gray. Black lines denoted positive relationships, as between FBI and NSA. Gandy got on well with FBI special agents, helping them from time to time with their counterintelligence pursuits. True, he did call the clean-cut law enforcement colleagues “lawyers with guns,” sometimes to their faces, but all in the spirit of good fun.
From press accounts,2 he sensed that Caspar Weinberger, the secretary of defense, and William Clark, the national security advisor, also saw eye to eye on most matters. Both publicly advocated tough stances against the Russians, and Gandy was aware that steep increases in military spending under Reagan suggested that both the president and Congress agreed with Clark and Weinberger. So Gandy drew the connection between DOD to the national security advisor in black as well. NSA reported to Weinberger through several bureaucratic layers, but Gandy drew that connection in gray because of occasional friction between the secretary of defense and the NSA director, most recently over budgets. (The following year, Weinberger would fire Lieutenant General Lincoln Faurer for refusing to go along with budget cuts at NSA.3)
On balance, the secretary of defense and national security advisor, who were hard-liners when it came to Russia, along with FBI, who chased Russian spies in the United States, might be potential allies in Charles’s investigation.
But in Washington, such a strength can also be a weakness. With dashed lines denoting antagonism, Gandy connected State and DOD, and State and the national security advisor, who had locked horns over the U.S. foreign policy with Russia. Weinberger and Clark were adamantly opposed to any negotiations with the Soviets, on the grounds that the United States would, as it had in the past, come out on the short end of any deal due to the Soviets’ superior ability to negotiate.4 The Kremlin could decide exactly what it wanted in a negotiation and go for that objective with singular focus, but the United States was much more fragmented. The president had to get treaties he’d negotiated approved in the Senate, which often had a different agenda from the president’s. It was tough to come out ahead in a negotiation when your adversary had its shit together and you didn’t, Weinberger and Clark reasoned.
In contrast, Shultz and the State Department argued strongly for constructive engagement and negotiation with the Soviets across a broad range of issues, including arms control and human rights.5
As a result of these divergent agendas, State, DOD, and the national security staff had been waging increasingly open warfare with each other for the past year.
Thus, State might view anything that the national security advisor and DOD advocated—and NSA was part of DOD—as an attempt to undermine diplomacy with Russia. Gandy’s “witch hunt” for KGB penetrations at the Moscow embassy might be viewed from exactly this perspective. “Sure,” a State executive might say, “NSA [and by extension DOD] found smoking guns in Moscow. What better way to scuttle diplomacy than to accuse the other side of bad behavior?”
Bottom line: the very fact that DOD and the national security advisor might be on Gandy’s side could cause State to dig in its heels even deeper.
As Gandy fleshed out his chart with gray, dashed, and black lines, he found that he mostly sketched dashed lines after filling out the original set of actors and routine reporting relationships. State and CIA hated each other for many reasons, chief among them the fact that Bill Casey, who’d been Reagan’s campaign chairman, had lobbied hard for Shultz’s job back in 1981 and had had to settle for the consolation prize of CIA. Still believing that Reagan expected him to weigh in on foreign policy, Casey was constantly involving himself in foreign policy debates, much to Shultz’s displeasure. State also had a long-standi
ng, simmering resentment of CIA spying on the very people that State’s diplomats were trying to make friends with.
Casey and Weinberger didn’t get along very well, which was typical of CIA-Pentagon relationships since 1947, when CIA was established with the express purpose of developing intelligence assessments that were a counterweight against the typically dire threat assessments that the Pentagon used to justify its budgets.
Within the different agencies, there were also long-simmering disputes that Gandy drew in dashed lines.
State’s black dragon diplomats looked down their noses at diplomatic security officers, who returned the ill will, and COS Moscow sometimes chafed under CIA headquarters control, as during the Turner-Hathaway years. But Gandy wasn’t sure about the current relationship between COS and CIA headquarters, so he made the connecting line there gray. CIA’s DS&T often felt bullied by the vastly more prestigious and powerful DO. Maybe DS&T had authored the Band-Aid report to undermine DO as well as Gandy: stranger things had happened.
With a few exceptions, CIA and NSA were connected by dashed lines of enmity, as were CIA and FBI, who were about as culturally different as you could get. FBI agents were straight-shooter Eagle Scouts with a strong sense of right and wrong, who only wanted to put criminals behind bars and notch up convictions. To FBI agents, CIA DO officers were criminals, who bribed, blackmailed, conned, assassinated (before the intelligence reforms of the 1970s), and resorted to any other dubious or underhanded scheme to get a job done. From CIA’s perspective, “Fat Boys Incorporated” agents were dull, unimaginative types who waited around for bad things to happen, while CIA was out in the field making sure bad things never happened in the first place.
The Spy in Moscow Station Page 15
