The Spy in Moscow Station

by Eric Haseltine

  After a lifetime of seeking recognition for his abilities, appreciation—along with a nice check—was about to come to him. Mike later said, “Joan was so sure I had found the smoking gun, she was already spending the $10,000.”

  At 10:00, when Mike had finished x-raying eight more machines, he was desperate to tell someone—anyone—about his discovery. But late Friday night before a three-day weekend was the worst possible time for contacting his superior or any other boss. Mike phoned his office, but no one answered. His immediate two bosses were out of town or on vacation, and he was “too low on the totem pole” to get the NSA operator to give him Walt Deeley’s home number.

  Frustrated and angry at having to keep the news bottled up inside and to wait for vindication that had been a lifetime coming, Mike reluctantly shut down the equipment, locked up, and drove home with Joan for the longest three days of his life.

  He’d just have to wait for NSA to open for regular business on Tuesday.

  * * *

  The weekend was very hard on Mike. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so excited. I tried to keep occupied doing yard work, grocery shopping. washing the car … anything. I don’t think I slept the entire three days.” When he wasn’t working around the house to distract himself, he sat like a zombie in front of the TV, not really watching, just thinking about his discovery.

  At long last, when Tuesday arrived, Mike rushed into Fort Meade early, hoping to find someone to tell about his discoveries. But many of his coworkers had extended the three-day break into a longer holiday, and there was not one employee who was GUNMAN cleared with whom he could share his news.

  Frustration building, Mike finally found a coworker who had Gandy’s home number.

  “Gandy was way above me in rank, in the stratosphere. But I had been told that R9, who did all the spooky shit, reverse engineering and stuff, were the only ones authorized to dig deep into implants. So although I had never met him and only heard of him through his blacker-than-black program reputation, I called Gandy at home. But I couldn’t just tell him what I’d found, because it was an unclass [open] line.”

  About 7:30 a.m., Mike reached Gandy. “Sir,” he said, bursting with energy and pent-up frustration, “I think you should stop by the trailers on your way into work this morning.”

  Gandy, hearing the excitement in the young tech’s voice, simply said, “I’ll be right there.”

  “I hadn’t even finished dressing or eating breakfast,” Gandy later explained. “But I went right to Freda [an accomplished artist] and asked, ‘Can you quickly make up three awards with ribbons and gold seals [like the ones artists get for prizes at art shows]?’”

  “Okay,” Freda said as she pulled on a bathrobe and went for her supplies. “But why three?”

  “Well,” Gandy said as he quickly got dressed, “I want one for the guy who just called me and one each for his bosses. Nobody buys into anything at Fort Meade unless they get credit for it, and I need this young man’s bosses to get plenty of credit for his discovery to stick.”

  Shortly after Gandy finished dressing and had gulped down a cup of coffee, Freda presented him with three awards. “Perfect,” Gandy said, putting the awards into a manila file folder and heading for his car.

  The drive from College Park to Fort Meade went faster than usual, as many federal employees had extended their three-day holiday. Heading north on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway at an unusually brisk clip, Gandy felt a sense of triumph building inside. The young tech who’d called him would not have taken the risk of calling someone as senior as Gandy at home without an excellent reason. The excitement in the boy’s voice had said it all, and the excitement had infected Gandy.

  Six years of hard work, bureaucratic fistfights—including the big one he had lost with the cease-and-desist order from CIA—speculation, endless arguments about smoking-gun evidence … with one phone call from a tech in a trailer, all of that was about to come to an end.

  Gandy let out a long breath, allowing himself to savor the win. In his mind, there was zero doubt that GUNMAN had just unearthed an indisputable, inarguable smoking gun that this time could not be explained away. He had known it was there all along, but that feeling had been a lonely one.

  Now Walt would be able to keep his job, NSA would keep their reputation, and CIA assets in Russia might now get to keep their lives.

  * * *

  Gandy parked his car in the motor pool, jumped out, and stepped briskly toward the trailer where Mike Arneson was working. He heard loud voices throughout the trailer’s thin wall, arguing.

  “It’s just a new mod,” one of the voices said, angry. “Nothing there to get excited about.”

  The response, in a voice Gandy recognized as Arneson’s, said, “How can you say that? Look! Have you ever seen a power switch in your life with a coil hidden inside it?”

  When Gandy climbed up on the spool of wire that served as the trailer’s doorstep and knocked on the door, the door quickly flung open, revealing a young man with a mop of brown hair that he assumed was Mike Arneson.

  “Come in,” Mike said. “You can settle this.”

  Gandy shook Mike’s hand, then that of an older man, presumably the one arguing with Mike, and went into the trailer, pulling the door shut behind him.

  Mike walked Gandy over to the x-ray light table and pointed at the x-ray of a power switch showing what looked like solenoid coil wrapped inside of it. “I say that’s an implant, but he,” Mike said, motioning to the other man, “says it’s just a rivet of some kind.”

  Gandy, still holding the manila folder, peered at the x-ray.

  “There.” Mike pointed again at the coil in the power switch.

  After studying the x-rays for fifteen seconds, Gandy asked, “Can you show me the machine itself?”

  Mike walked Gandy over to the disassembled typewriter and pointed at that particular switch.

  Gandy experienced a cocktail of emotions looking at the typewriter switch. His dominant feeling was elation, because he agreed with Mike that there could be no innocent explanation for a coil hidden in a simple power switch. Gandy knew this because very recently, on an unrelated project, he himself had been working on the problem of how to retrofit a transformer into an ultraconfined space and had been unable to manufacture the added space needed for such a transformer. But whomever had modified the IBM power switch had succeeded where Gandy had failed, cleverly taking advantage of the “unused” space inside a power switch to embed the coil.

  So, on top of feeling exhilarated at Arneson’s find, Gandy felt humbled and a little embarrassed that he had given up on his own transformer problem too early.

  Straightening up as he turned toward Mike, Gandy opened his folder and took out one of the awards Freda had made. “Well, I can settle your argument here and now. Got something to pin this on?”

  Mike took the award. “Does this mean you believe me?”

  “Oh yeah,” Gandy answered. “That’s exactly what you think it is: an exploit. It’s a transformer coil that converts 210 volts into something much lower, probably 5–12 volts.”

  Gandy didn’t mention that he was also inwardly kicking himself for not having thought of this packaging idea for his own project.

  “How can you be so sure those are not just normal IBM mods or upgrades?” asked the man who’d been arguing with Mike.

  Gandy thought Arneson was bright and seemed to catch things on the first bounce, but this other guy seemed to lack imagination or even common sense. But ever polite, Gandy asked with no rancor or sarcasm, “Can you give me any reason why IBM would build a transformer into a power switch? They have plenty of space. Why go to all the trouble of modifying a switch? And why use expensive nonstandard parts?”

  The other man, not having ready answers and evidently realizing who he was talking to, kept silent.

  “So,” Gandy continued, “I think Mike here has solved the mystery of the information leaks in Moscow. This transformer is powering some hid
den electronics that are reading and transmitting keystrokes to a KGB listening post.”

  Gandy, remembering the clicks he had heard six years earlier in Moscow through the chimney antenna, realized that the clicks were probably burst transmissions containing recorded keystrokes from the device he was looking at or one just like it. Gandy pointed to the IBM device and looked at Mike. “Where did this one come from?”

  “The ambassador’s office,” Mike said. “That’s why I started with it. I thought it would be the most likely one modified.”

  Gandy nodded in admiration of Mike’s achievement. “Then it could have been the same one that the chimney antenna was listening to all those years ago. Everything typed by the ambassador’s secretary or the ambassador himself, and possibly the deputy chief of mission [DCM] was going straight to Moscow Center [KGB headquarters].”

  Gandy thought, but did not say, And if the ambassador or DCM had ever sent TOP SECRET cables written on this machine containing the identities—or clues to the identities—of either CIA case officers or their human assets, the implant that Mike had just discovered could have triggered the arrests and executions of our assets in Moscow … and God knows what other supersensitive information they got.

  The man who had been arguing with Mike when Gandy had arrived in the trailer, apparently finding his nerve after Gandy’s earlier gentle put-down, said, “But that antenna was removed six years ago. Wouldn’t that make the typewriter worthless to the Russians?”

  “Not at all,” Gandy said. “Those guys have backups for everything that they do, and backups to their backups. If they didn’t have some other way of listening to this device—and probably others in the chancery—it would be a first.”

  As Mike Arneson watched this interchange, a wide grin appeared on his face. He held tight to the award Gandy had given him. Maybe the paper-and-ribbon award was a little cheesy, but no less than the head of spooky shit, Charles Gandy, had just given it to him. Gandy’s outfit was so black, so spooky, that Mike had been told before GUNMAN that he couldn’t even talk to anyone from R9, let alone its leader.

  To Mike, at that moment, Freda Gandy’s hastily assembled award was far more than a couple of ribbons glued to a piece of paper cut with serrated edges to look like a gold seal: it was the first fatherly recognition he had ever gotten in his life.

  And, man, did it feel good. Not just the $10,000 check he would be getting soon, but something far, far more precious. The unfillable hole left by unappreciative parents, at least for the moment, had been filled.

  * * *

  After the skeptical man, who Gandy later learned was Mike’s supervisor, left the trailer, Gandy asked Mike if he could use the gray phone—the classified line.

  “Sure,” Mike said, pointing to one of two phones in the trailer.

  Gandy went to the phone and dialed his office, getting his secretary, Nancy, on the first ring. “Could I get you to cancel all my meetings today? Something urgent has come up.”

  Replacing the receiver, Gandy removed his coat jacket and draped it over the back of a chair, loosened his tie, and unbuttoned and rolled up his sleeves. He knew that, as a very senior executive, he should delegate the detailed investigation to the talented engineers who worked for him, but here was the most exciting find of his long career. There was no way he was going to turn all the hands-on work over to anyone else. This investigation was going to be more fun than, well, thinking of Freda … almost anything he had ever done before in his life.

  He asked Mike, “Do you have one of those new Simpson volt ohm meters [VOMs]?”

  Mike opened a drawer and handed a new VOM, which was used to measure voltages, currents, and resistances, to Gandy. Accepting the instrument, which had one black and one red lead running from it, Gandy glanced at the probes and asked, “Got any leads with fine-needle probes?”

  “Sure.” Mike quickly retrieved a set of probes with ultrafine points and handed them to Gandy, who swapped them for the duller probes that had been originally attached to the VOM.

  “Okay,” Gandy said, “let’s do some detective work.” Gandy experienced a flutter of excitement in his chest that he always felt when performing TSCM work. He was about to embark on an incredibly exciting hunt, matching his wits against those of world-class KGB adversaries. He had asked for the needle-point probes because he strongly suspected that the KGB engineers had gone to great lengths to hide the implant from the kind of inspection he was about to perform and would need to make ultraprecise placement of his probes.

  Clamping the black lead on the chassis’s ground of one of the typewriters where Arneson had discovered a modified power switch, Gandy held the red probe, guiding the tip along push bars embedded in springs leading away from the power switch. Presumably, the springs around the push bars helped the on-off key on the keyboard operate the switch, which was located almost a foot away from the on-off key, linked by a complex set of pivoting mechanical bars that moved the switch’s toggle arm from on to off (or the reverse) when the on-off key was depressed.

  The mechanical links from the on-off key on the keyboard to the switch toggle seemed unremarkable, so Gandy traced the connections of the switch to the structural aluminum bar.

  Because Mike had shown Gandy the six circular smudges in an x-ray of the bar, it was likely that the bar concealed some kind of electronics that would need power—of the kind that could theoretically come from the concealed transformer inside the power switch—so Gandy’s first thought was that what looked like a purely mechanical anchoring mechanism, in which the springs from the power switch toggle “anchored” to a lug under a screw attached to the aluminum bar, probably was a disguised electrical power connector. In other words, in Gandy’s estimation, the “spring” was not a mechanical spring at all but a power conductor.

  If that were the case, the spring connecting from the power switch toggle would be hot with electrical power, and the screw that secured the lug that held the spring to the bar would also be hot, floating from the typewriter’s electrical ground so that a voltage difference between the power source and ground could provide current to any electronics hidden in the aluminum bar. (If the spring, lug, and attachment screw did not float with respect to ground, no voltage could be developed to power hidden electronics.)

  But when Gandy used the VOM to check the resistance between electrical ground and the head of the attachment screw that secured the spring from the power switch toggle, he found a direct short, indicating that there were no hidden electronics present.

  Perplexed, Gandy put down the probes and considered his next steps. He felt certain that the power switch transformer must be providing low-voltage AC to hidden electronics, probably secreted within the aluminum bar, but the ohmmeter didn’t lie: a short was a short, and you couldn’t power electronics with zero voltage through a short.

  Staring at the baffling attachment screw, it occurred to Gandy that maybe a short wasn’t a short after all. Picking up the needle probe again, he poked at the head of the attachment screw securing the lug and found that it was as hard and unyielding as he would expect with bare metal. But when he probed the lug that held the spring from the power switch toggle, he was surprised to feel some give beneath his needle probe.

  Examining the lug closely with the loupe, he saw that the lug was not bare metal but insulated with a clear, rubbery coating. Placing the red needle probe on the lug’s coating, he saw, with satisfaction, that the lug did indeed float from ground.

  Now he was getting somewhere! But how the heck did current from the power switch transformer pass through the insulated lug, through a screw shorted to ground into the electronics presumably hiding inside the aluminum support bar? The screw being shorted to ground was like a deep moat surrounding a castle: nothing could get past.

  Unless, by analogy, there were a hidden tunnel under the moat.

  Removing the spring from the lug and unscrewing the lug from the attachment screw, Gandy inspected the lug ring through which the attachment s
crew passed and saw that the clear insulation that protected most of the lug had a neat, circular gap in it running all the way around the ring of the lug.

  Okay, Gandy thought. That’s how current gets out of the insulated lug. But how does it get through a solid metal screw without shorting to ground? On its face, the idea seemed impossible.

  But careful inspection of the screw revealed that the KGB had milled a circular groove in the underside of the screw head and installed a floating metal conductor ring, which, when tested with the ohm meter, proved to be perfectly isolated from the main body of the screw itself. Thus, current could flow out of a gap in the ring of the lug, into the floating conductor ring in the screw head.

  Turning the screw on its end, examining the threaded tip under his loupe, Gandy discovered that the screw had a tiny insulated core that contained a conductor connected to the isolated conductive ring on the bottom of the screw head.

  That was how the KGB got power into the bar through an “impossible” short to ground.

  Gandy put down the loupe and reflected on his discovery. His admiration for the Russian mind that had conceived of this concealment transformed into something far deeper than admiration: Adoration? Affection, even? After a moment, Gandy pinpointed the emotion: kinship.

  The fraternity of elite intelligence officers who did what Gandy did was exceedingly small, so there were very few people with whom he could—or should—share his passion for ultrasophisticated surveillance technology. Looking at the virtuoso piece of engineering in front of him, though, Gandy felt that he was, in a weird way, communicating with a kindred spirit, someone who got it, someone he could respect and understand.

  And who could understand him.

  But as much as he admired and respected the adversary who had crafted the marvel in front of him, a nagging thought tugged at the edge of his consciousness.