Linthicum, Maryland, March 1984
Gandy sat in his office looking across his small conference table at the man Deeley had described as Wallflower. We’ll call this NSA officer Wally.
Wally was of average height, average appearance, and average weight and outwardly seemed unremarkable in every way. The kind of person you’d pass on the street and never notice.
But Gandy knew Wally was anything but average. Possessed of a sharp mind, maturity, and good judgment, Wally had sat through countless meetings Gandy had attended, keeping silent as others argued, postured, and jockeyed for position, until Gandy asked for Wally’s opinion.
Wally’s opinion was invariably insightful and on point. It was easy to underestimate such a person, which was precisely why Gandy had sent him to Moscow the previous week: no CIA or State Department employee could imagine, in Gandy’s estimation, that Wally was carrying out a mission directly authorized by the president of the United States.
“Welcome back. How’d it go?” Gandy asked.
Wally pushed a thick three-ring binder across the table. “Well enough, sir. There’s my inventory.”
As Gandy opened the binder and leafed through it, he said, without looking up, “Please call me Charlie.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gandy sighed. NSA was a highly stratified, heavily military organization where it was hard for many junior intelligence officers like Wally to relax and act informally around civilian seniors (equivalent to brigadier generals and up in the military) such as Gandy. Scanning down the columns of entries, which described the model and serial number of every piece of electronics in the Moscow chancery, Gandy said, “Very thorough. How much gear in total are we talking about?”
“Ten to eleven tons, in all, counting copiers, faxes, printers, teleprinters, computers, OCRs, code machines, and typewriters.”
Gandy closed the binder and looked up. “That sounds like what I remember. We’ve got a huge task ahead finding replacements for all this gear and swapping it out without arousing suspicion.”
“Yes.”
Gandy was amused at Wally’s economy of expression. “Speaking of suspicion, how’d it go with the locals?”
“You mean CIA and State?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, they tried,” Wally offered.
“To learn what you were really up to?”
“Many times. It seems the cover story from Lamb [assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security] authorizing my inventory didn’t sit well with them. No one had ever done it before.”
“How’d they come at you?”
Wally thought for a moment. “Different ways. The State guys kept asking who I worked with back home, like they didn’t believe I was an NSA equipment control person and wanted to know why I was really there.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“New on the job, didn’t know anybody back home except my boss, didn’t know the reason for the inventory, only there to do as I was told, et cetera, et cetera. I was a broken record. Eventually, the State guys gave up.”
“What about the CIA folks?”
A grin slowly spread across Wally’s face, one that Gandy had never seen before. “That was fun, actually.”
“Really? I’ve had many encounters with them but can’t remember any that were particularly fun.”
“This one was. They dragged me to a party and tried to get me drunk, or laid, or both drunk and laid to loosen my tongue. Vodka was flowing like a river, and there were plenty of very friendly young ladies—if you know what I mean—all of them Russian, as far as I could tell.”
Gandy was about to comment when Wally added, “And the stereo kept playing ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It,’ you know, Tina Turner’s latest, like they were trying to hammer home a subliminal message that cheating on my wife was okay. What happens in Moscow stays in Moscow, that sort of thing.”
Gandy thought about telling Wally of his own steamy encounter with the honey trap in Moscow but thought better of it. Instead, he said, “I’m guessing that you escaped Moscow with your virtue intact.”
“Pure as the driven snow. I nursed one vodka all night, just for appearances. Eventually, the guys gave up on me.”
“Thanks. I knew you were the right man for the job. Anything else to report?”
“Just one. If you go back, accept any invitation to a party like the one I got.”
Gandy’s eyebrows raised in an unspoken question.
“Oh, I didn’t mean booze and women,” Wally said hastily. “I meant food. Blini, piroshki, smoked salmon, caviar. So much better than the embassy snack bar, only decent calories I took in the whole trip.”
* * *
Using Wally’s inventory as a guide, Walt Deeley’s organization undertook the daunting task of quickly obtaining eleven tons of electronics to pack up and ship to Moscow, and to box up everything and then return to Fort Meade with all the suspect equipment from the embassy. It was imperative to examine the Moscow embassy equipment at Fort Meade instead of in Moscow, because there were too many ways for the KGB to uncover and compromise any investigation on their own turf.
Also, NSA had more sophisticated tools for examining equipment at Fort Meade.
Some of the equipment to be exchanged, such as code machines, faxes, and computers, was already available at NSA, but there were 250 IBM Selectric typewriters at the embassy. Where to get that many IBM machines on such short notice, especially ones modified to operate on Soviet 210-volt power?
The IBM plant in Lexington, Kentucky, could supply only fifty new machines, so Gandy and Walt decided to settle for the fifty to replace those used in the most sensitive areas of the embassy, then to ship over additional machines to less critical areas as they became available. Walt reminded Gandy that, although President Reagan had set no hard time limit on Project GUNMAN, his body language during Walt’s briefing at the White House had said, “Don’t fuck around.”
Apart from time pressure from the White House, the longer the equipment swap took, the more opportunities there would be for the State Department, CIA, or the KGB to discover what NSA was up to and to interfere. Although State and CIA could only throw bureaucratic hurdles in NSA’s way, KGB opposition could take much more lethal forms: in the past, the KGB had poisoned, beaten, or harassed technicians from NATO countries sent to look for bugs in Moscow embassies.
Given that the entire reason for the equipment swap was to hunt for bugs that were compromising sensitive embassy communications, NSA had to assume that the KGB would intercept any messages sent to or from the embassy about the equipment swap-out itself. Thus, only two State Department officials—Secretary Shultz himself and Under secretary Lawrence Eagleburger—were told the full details of the operation, while at CIA, only Director William Casey was informed. U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Arthur Hartman would be informed of the ultrablack operation behind the equipment swap by a note hand-carried by an NSA officer once the shipment arrived safely in Moscow.
Although Gandy and Walt assumed that if the KGB had bugged embassy equipment, the modifications most likely were made either in Russia or while the equipment was in transit from the United States to Moscow, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the Russians had managed a “supply chain” operation that modified equipment at its point of origin in the United States. So Gandy and Walt arranged for each piece of new equipment to be x-rayed for bugs, then carefully tested, as well as adding some new secure countermeasures and tamper-evident and authentication technologies to make sure all the equipment would work in Moscow the way it was intended to (and not have to undergo a shipping-and-repair process that would create new opportunities for the KGB to tamper with the equipment).
One particularly vexing challenge, given the compressed schedule, was to find enough anti-tamper sensors, tags, and technologies to place on each and every box, PC board, and connector of every piece of equipment shipped to or from the embassy. Mindful that the Soviets had pervasive access to t
he chancery, Gandy and Walt assumed that the KGB would quickly learn about new equipment arriving and make every effort to compromise the new equipment as soon as it arrived. So, in addition to all those anti-tamper sensors, tags, and sensors, which Gandy obtained from various operational sites, Gandy and Walt organized guard details to watch over equipment coming in and out of the embassy 24-7. The concern was that the KGB, given the chance, would insert “gifts” into the new equipment and remove monitoring devices on old equipment before it could be shipped back to NSA to cover their tracks. As an added security measure, Gandy directed that these special anti-tamper sensors, tags, and technologies be placed inside every sensitive device and case, such as those for code machines and OCR devices, in addition to sensors attached to shipment boxes.
By April, all the new equipment, except for the two hundred IBM Selectric III typewriters, had been bought, x-rayed, tested, packaged, and tamper-proofed, then placed into secure containers. Also, each container was wrapped in burlap, signifying it was part of the diplomatic pouch, which, by treaty, would not be inspected by Soviet customs authorities. The Armed Forces Courier Service then transported the entire shipment to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in unmarked semitrailers.
A glitch arose at Dover Air Force Base when the NSA officers accompanying the shipment found that no crane was available to load the shipment on its designated cargo plane. Rather than leave the containers at Dover while a military crane could be found, NSA rented a commercial crane so that the shipment could depart on schedule.
Once in Frankfurt, NSA supervised the transfer of the shipment to a guarded warehouse.
From Frankfurt, NSA chartered special Lufthansa flights to Moscow in stages, which fit the State Department’s normal procedure for shipping new equipment by diplomatic pouch to Sheremetyevo International Airport.
At Sheremetyevo, the large, sealed CONEX boxes (sea/rail shipping containers) filled with replacement electronics were loaded onto flatbeds for transport to the embassy. Guards accompanied the shipment because the KGB had been known to follow trucks carrying sensitive equipment, insert skilled operatives into the cargo section of the moving trucks—Mission: Impossible–style—and to modify or replace sensitive equipment without the driver of the cargo truck in question ever sensing that anything was amiss.
One factor that helped conceal the true reason behind the April equipment shipment was that the U.S. embassy normally waited until mid-spring to receive new equipment each year, because the embassy’s heavy equipment lift was normally frozen—literally—during subzero Moscow winters.
The first day of unloading the equipment and hoisting it up to the attic for storage went without incident, but on the second day, the Soviets cut off power to the equipment hoist, causing the NSA techs to carry, by hand, most of the heavy boxes ten stories from the courtyard up narrow stairways to the attic.
Why the Soviets disabled the powered hoist has never been established, but one reason could have been that a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, outraged at the unannounced work disruption from a complete equipment swap, sent an irate cable back to Washington, D.C., demanding to know what was going on. If the Soviets were monitoring such communications through bugs that might have been implanted in sensitive communication equipment, they would have been tipped off that the arrival of new equipment was not a routine spring upgrade.
Proceeding on the assumption that the KGB would now try to compromise the new equipment, NSA technicians ran wires from the tamper sensors on boxes in the attic down to the Marine guard station on the sixth floor, where the boxes could be monitored 24-7. As an added measure, NSA arranged for round-the-clock guards for the attic itself.
Over the next ten days, NSA techs systematically emptied the new boxes they had stored in the attic, filled each of those boxes with corresponding equipment that was being replaced, then reengaged the tamper sensors.
The swap complete, NSA ran the shipping operation in reverse, transporting the old equipment in guarded CONEX containers to Sheremetyevo via diplomatic pouch, from Sheremetyevo to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Dover, and ultimately Dover to Fort Meade, Maryland.
By early May, all the equipment was back safe at Fort Meade, and the frantic hunt for bugs was on.
Fort Meade, Maryland
The first Monday after the equipment arrived, as the morning shift began at NSA, twenty-five handpicked security specialists from Walt Deeley’s organization stood shoulder to shoulder in one of the trailers that had been rolled into the parking lot of the NSA motor pool, waiting for the big boss, Deeley, to show up. The spring weather was cool, but the air inside the cramped trailer quickly grew hot and stuffy.
Each of the techs had been read into the GUNMAN compartment and had been given stern warnings to tell no one of the project, even—for those in the group who were married to cleared NSA employees—their spouses.
Walt didn’t keep the group waiting long. Climbing into the trailer by stepping on a large spool of wire that served as the trailer’s stepladder, he took one last puff on his cigarette, threw it into the parking lot, faced his troops, and got right to the point.
“We’re meeting here in this fucking shit hole because I don’t want any rubber-neckers in OPS3 [the main information security building] getting curious. You’ve all been told this project is VRK [very restricted knowledge], right?”
There were nods and murmured yeses everywhere.
“You know what VRK really means?” Walt didn’t wait for an answer. “It means I’ll cut your fucking balls off if you breathe a word about what you’re doing to anyone, and I mean anyone.” Walt pointed to the open door and uttered the words everyone in the audience knew were coming. “You do this my way, or it’s the highway.”
The group did not wait for Walt’s inventible “Got it?” to start nodding.
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” Walt continued. “We’re dividing the gear into two groups; the accountable stuff [e.g., cipher machines that had to be carefully tracked] will be looked at in our labs in OPS3, while the rest [‘unaccountable’ equipment that processed uncoded plaintext, such as faxes, teleprinters, copiers, and typewriters] will be examined here. Each of you has been given a specific assignment by your supervisor, and work starts the second I leave here.”
Walt surveyed the room, then continued, “Just so you know, I had to pull lots of strings very high up to make this happen, and for better or worse, NSA’s reputation will be riding on how well each of you does your job.” After letting that sink in, Walt said, “And we don’t have forever to get the job done. The longer we take finding whatever exploits the other side has slipped in, the more chance that we’re gonna get fucked by assholes at State, at Langley, or by the Russians.”
Walt paused to light up another cigarette, then took a deep drag. “Accordingly, to speed things up, I’m offering $10,000 to the first one to find a smoking gun.”
An excited murmur spread through the group—$10,000, equivalent to $25,000 in today’s dollars, was a sizable fraction of most NSA employees’ yearly pay.
Walt looked around the room. “Any questions?”
There were none.
“Okay,” Walt said, “then get to work.” With that, Walt climbed out of the trailer, stepped down from the wire spool, and headed back to his office.
* * *
Whether the electronic device in question was accountable or unaccountable, the procedure for checking it was the same. Walt’s techs would perform a careful visual inspection, then prepare the device for x-ray using emulsion films. Some devices could be x-rayed directly, while others, such as copiers, had to be partially disassembled so that the x-rays could penetrate each and every component. Once the x-rays were developed, they were compared against x-rays of safe equipment of the same model that had been previously filmed.
The work was slow and exacting. Based upon the craftsmanship and stealthiness displayed by the KGB implant inside the French teleprinter, techs were instructed to pay exquisite attention to detail, ta
king note of and photographing the slightest anomaly.
Walt directed that his techs start with equipment that processed the most sensitive information from the embassy, such as code machines, along with teleprinters and computers used for classified information.
As the first full week of the bug hunt turned into the second, x-rays piled up by the hundreds, then thousands. But no implants were discovered. By the end of the third week, several thousand x-rays failed to reveal anything amiss. Walt stopped by each survey location in the trailers and OPS3 once a week, chain-smoking, looking over shoulders and getting quick status updates, but by the end of the fourth week, despite painstaking examination of over five tons of equipment from Moscow, all the equipment appeared normal, so far.
Gandy stopped by from time to time when other business took him to Fort Meade, growing nervous after the sixth full week and over ten thousand x-rays had produced nothing. After the end of the eighth week, all the accountable equipment, and a significant portion of the less sensitive gear, had been thoroughly investigated with the same result: nothing.
Gandy was baffled. His smoking-gun information, collected on multiple R9 trips to Moscow, made him certain that the Soviets had been transmitting text of some sort from inside the U.S. embassy text-processing machines for at least the past six years. Had the KGB somehow managed to remove the bugging device, or devices, before NSA’s swap-out team had arrived in Moscow? Given the lax security at the embassy and the number of Soviets with access, the possibility could not be ruled out. Although only two people at the State Department and one at CIA knew in advance about GUNMAN, one of those three individuals might have purposely or inadvertently leaked the operation to someone who then relayed the information to the embassy, where the KGB could have picked up on it.
Word had filtered back to NSA through the rumor mill that although George Shultz obeyed the direct order from the president to cooperate with GUNMAN, Shultz’s reaction to NSA having free run of the embassy to recover possibly bugged equipment was, “We’re letting the fox in the henhouse.”1
The Spy in Moscow Station Page 18
