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How Cold War spies got the goods

By | Sunday, June 15, 2008

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At the outset, permit me to whet your appetite. Spycraft (Dutton, $29,95, 533 pages reveals more concrete information

about CIA tradecraft than any book I've encountered in half-century of spook reading. It is the story of CIA's Office of Technical Services, or OTS, and how it worked with the operations arm, the Clandestine Services, to pull off some truly astounding feats.

The principal author of "Spycraft" is Robert Wallace, former OTS director, with the assistance of H. Keith Melton, a CIA consultant, who has amassed perhaps the largest collection of spy gear in the world. The attending wordsmith was Henry R. Schlesinger, who writes about intelligence technology for Popular Science Magazine.

The story is of how OTS evolved from wartime technicians of OSS who fashioned relatively unsophisticated items such as miniature cameras and microphones. The first generation CIA "technies" produced pretty much what came to mind, with relatively little guidance from the Clandestine Services, which prefers to do its business in private.

Things changed rapidly with the affair of Col. Oleg Penkovsky in the early 1960s. High in the Soviet military, as a walk-in agent, Penkovsky gave crucial information to the CIA during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He had spied successfully for years because his work permitted him to travel abroad, where he could slip away for debriefings. But during the crisis period, when he was operating in Moscow, he was detected and executed.

His loss brought CIA operations in the USSR to a standstill, a loss that was "a tightly held secret among the elite" of the Soviet Russia Division and the CIA counterintelligence staff. As "Spycraft" notes, "For agents to be handled clandestinely in-country, the CIA needed the means to detect and counter KGB surveillance before conducting an operation, to conduct impersonal communications, and to ask and receive materials secretly from the agent."

Enter a reborn OTS, which was incorporated into the Clandestine Services, and made privy to operations while they were being planned, so that it could devise the means to support them.

Thus OTS developed such gear as the T-100 camera, small enough to conceal inside a cigarette lighter or fountain pen, but capable of taking 100 exposures on a 15-inch film strip. Case officers could monitor KGB surveillance attempts through false clamp-on ears concealing minute radio receivers.

"Dead drops" involved - perhaps appropriately - such items as dead rats. There were even "audio dead drops" - microphones concealed in building fronts. Agents could pause and murmur a few words, enough to say a drop had been serviced, or to set the time for a face-to-face meeting.

"Spycraft" relates in fascinating detail Operation CKTAW, one of the more elaborate technology feats of the entire Cold War. Radio technicians in CIA's Moscow station became curious about microwave transmissions audible during heavy rains. They proved to connect a nuclear research lab in Troitsk, a closed city outside of Moscow, and the Ministry of Defense. CIA had just commenced monitoring when the Soviets discovered the technical glitch and shut down the transmissions.