Anthony “Tony” Mendez was close to a legend in CIA circles. He spent several decades in the agency’s technical services arm, specializing in forgeries and then in disguises.
He quarterbacked the exfiltration (love that word!) of six American diplomats from Tehran (q.v. “the Canadian caper”) in February 1980.
He also spent more than a little time in Moscow.
All through the decades, he also had a front-row seat to the developments in tradecraft (the mechanics of spying, notably how you meet with agents).
Moscow is rightly regarded as the toughest place in the world to practice the intelligence craft — a “denied area”, in spyspeak.
Soviet counterespionage (the KGB or Committee for State Security) had thousands of officers there that it could assign to surveillance work, and it did not need to fret about a subject’s legal rights either.
No surprise, then, that for many years, American spy efforts in Moscow were modest.
To begin with, the U.S. did not have a permanent foreign intelligence service until 1947, decades after the British and Soviet agencies had begun. The elderly apartment building that had become the American embassy in 1935 was honeycombed with listening devices and the local staff the Soviets forced the Americans to use were all informers.
As a result, Mendez says the CIA throughout the 1950s had no human sources in Russia – not a single one. That is why so much emphasis was put on the U-2 spyplane program and electronic listening stations on the edge of the Soviet empire. So bad was the spying situation that when a Russian GRU officer came forward with information on Soviet intentions during the Cuban missile crisis, the Americans had to ask the British intelligence service (MI6) to meet him in Moscow and take his information.
The CIA director of counterespionage, the paranoid James Angleton, was convinced that every Soviet “walk-in” was a “dangle” sent by the KGB to trick the Americans with false information.
In the face of all that, the aging Ivy League preppies who ran the CIA 60 years ago decided that running agents in Moscow was not worth the danger and political risk.
What turned things around was the retirement of the wartime generation of operations officers and managers. Angleton was pushed out. A new chief of the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern Europe section did some research and found the KGB had so little trust in its own officers that it had never “dangled“ one of them to the CIA – apparently fearing they would give away priceless information, then leave the country.
A new generation of CIA case officers -- the people who deal with sources -- began pushing for more aggressive action. A CIA officer in Prague learned from experience that the local counterespionage types were creatures of habit, so he began developing “the brush pass” – an ultradiscreeet handoff to get a small package from a source to a handler.
“If the right techniques were used, anything was possible,” Mendez writes.
The CIA got its first female operations officer and sent her to Moscow, where she operated successfully, picking up information from a KGB officer who’d been recruited in Columbia. She continued this for several years before being caught and (as a diplomat) expelled — the cost of doing business.
One of the products of this era were “the Moscow rules” a checklist of attitudes and practical tips to make the intelligence officers handler’s life easier and safer. (See below)
Mendez entered this world in the mid-1960s, hired
out of a job as a technical illustrator for a defense
contractor. He became the
CIA chief of disguise in 1974 and soon found himself picking the brain of a
legendary Hollywood make up artist, and also those of a magician, to teach
young agents how to use deception and distraction to do their jobs. CIA
technicians between jobs in Bangkok came up with the idea of a “jack in the
box” that could be opened in a car in seconds, giving the impression a person
was still occupying a seat vacated by a human agent.
Other CIA technicians in Washington came up with the Discus: a handheld device using a stylus to compose messages that could be beamed a few hundred metres to another one.
But the second half of the 1980s saw the pendulum of spying swing back toward the Soviets.
An eccentric American ambassador removed the few curbs on Russian civilian staff in the American embassy. Marine Corps guards were seduced to get into the few secured areas in the building. The KGB started bombarding the embassy and apartments the apartments of American diplomats with low intensity microwaves designed to make personnel sick.
Key loggers were found in the electric typewriters in the embassy and cameras in the photocopiers.
When American diplomats were on holidays at work or on holidays, KGB agents would break into their apartments, steal goods and even kill pets, Mendez says.
Worse, the Soviets succeeded having several agents in the very heart of American intelligence.
This brings us to the topic of MICE, the acronym explaining why people commit espionage: take the first letters of the words money, ideology, coercion and ego -- the latter being a sense that one’s talents were being overlooked and that “I’ll show them!”
That was typified by Robert Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent who thought he was undervalued.
Money was the motivator for Aldrich Ames, an undistinguished CIA middle manager who, with his spendthrift wife, ran up huge bills.
By the time they were caught and jailed, the Soviet Union had collapsed and transformed into the Confederation of Independent States and then Russia. The feared KGB was divided into the Federal Security Bureau and the SVR, the new foreign intelligence service, which operated in competition with the GRU, or military intelligence.
The first few years under new management was chaotic and saw the release of archival documents proving that the Soviets had hundreds of agents in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, though virtually all of them had been caught or expelled by the time Senator Joe McCarthy started his ferocious witch hunt in 1950.
Very quickly, though, the Russian SVR and GRU was back in business. Remember the dozen agents caught in New York, trying to cozy up to the city’s movers and shakers? And the assassination plots (one successful, one not) against Russian defectors in the UK?
Can’t forget the recent hacks at US government agencies, a digital raid attributed to the Russians by just about everybody -- except Donald Trump. Hmmmmm.
MOSCOW RULES
• Murphy is right.
• Never go against your gut.
• Everyone is potentially under opposition control.
• Don't look back; you are never completely alone.
• Go with the flow; use the terrain.
• Take the natural break of traffic.
• Maintain a natural pace.
• Establish a distinctive and dynamic profile and pattern.
• Stay consistent over time.
• Vary your pattern and stay within your profile.
• Be nonthreatening; keep them relaxed. Mesmerize!
• Lull them into a sense of complacency.
• Know the opposition and their terrain intimately.
• Build in opportunity but use it sparingly.
• Don't harass the opposition.
• Make sure they can anticipate your destination.
• Pick the time and the place for action.
• Any operation can be aborted; if it feels wrong, then it is
wrong.
• Keep your options open.
• If your gut says to act, overwhelm their senses.
• Use misdirection, illusion, and deception.
• Hide small operative motions in larger nonthreatening motions.
• Float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.
• When free, in obscura (IO – literally, in the dark and masked from enemy surveillance), immediately change direction and leave the area.
• Break your trail, and blend into the local scene.
• Execute a surveillance-detection run designed to draw them out over time.
• Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is an enemy action.
• Avoid static lookouts; stay away from choke points where they can reacquire you.
• Select an IO (in obscura) or meeting site so you can overlook the scene.
• Keep any asset separated from you by time and distance until it is time.
• If the asset has surveillance, then the operation has gone bad.
• Only approach the site when you are sure it is clean.
• After the IO meeting or act is done, close the loop at a logical cover destination.
• Be aware of surveillance's time tolerance so they aren't forced to raise an alert.
• If an alert is issued, they must pay a price, and so must you.
• Let them believe they lost you; act innocent.
• There is no limit to a human being's ability to rationalize the truth.
• Technology will always let you down.
• Never fall in love with your agent.
• Betrayal may come from within.
