The Sword and the Shield

^TWENTY-ONE SIGINT IN THE COLD WAR

One of the largest gaps in histories of Cold War intelligence operations and international relations in both East and West concerns the role of signals intelligence (SIGINT). The role of the ULTRA intelligence generated by British and American codebreakers in hastening victory over Germany and Japan during the Second World War is now well known. Research on post-war SIGINT, by contrast, has barely begun. With the exception of the VENONA decrypts of mostly wartime Soviet communications, British and American SIGINT records for the Cold War remain completely closed. Other declassified files, however, show that SIGINT sometimes had an important influence on British and American policy. An in-house CIA history concludes that during the Korean War SIGINT became “a critically important source of information.” During the 1956 Suez Crisis, the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, wrote to congratulate the director-general of the British SIGINT agency, GCHQ, on the “volume” and “excellence” of the Middle Eastern decrypts it had produced and to say “how valuable” the decrypts had proved to be.¹ In 1992, after the end of the Cold War, President George Bush described SIGINT as “a prime factor” in his foreign policy.²

In both Britain and the United States Cold War SIGINT operations were controlled by a single agency. Soviet SIGINT was more fragmented. The GRU had responsibility for intercepting and decrypting military communications, the KGB for diplomatic and other civilian traffic. An attempt early in the Cold War to combine the SIGINT operations of the two agencies was short-lived. Until the late 1960s KGB SIGINT, ciphers and communications were the primary responsibility of the Eighth Chief Directorate.³ The volume of SIGINT supplied to the Soviet leadership was very large. The KGB annual report sent to Khrushchev early in 1961 reveals that during 1960 the Eighth Chief Directorate decrypted 209,000 diplomatic cables sent by representatives of fifty-one states. No fewer than 133,200 of these intercepts were forwarded to the Central Committee (chiefly, no doubt, to its international department). ⁴ By 1967 the KGB was able to decrypt 152 cipher systems employed by a total of 72 states.⁵ Though the text of all these decrypts remains inaccessible in the archives of the Eighth and Sixteenth directorates, FCD files and other sources contain important information on KGB SIGINT operations and some of the results achieved by them. Both FCD residencies abroad and the Second Chief Directorate (SCD) within the Soviet Union made impressive contributions to these operations.

David Kahn, the leading Western historian of SIGINT, plausibly concludes that, on present evidence, bugs and agent penetration contributed more than cryptanalysis to Soviet SIGINT successes during the Cold War.⁶ The SCD had a long tradition of bugging Moscow embassies. For over thirty years after the establishment of Soviet—American diplomatic relations in 1933, the United States embassy was one of its most successful targets. A navy electrician who conducted the first electronic sweep of the embassy in 1944 discovered 120 hidden microphones. For a time, according to a member of the embassy staff, more “kept turning up, in the legs of any new tables and chairs that were delivered, in the plaster of the walls, any and everywhere.” ⁷ The embassy seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security by its failure to find more bugs during the early years of the Cold War. In reality, it remained highly vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated Soviet electronic eavesdropping until at least the mid-1960s.

In 1952 the new American ambassador, George Kennan, ordered a thorough search of both the embassy and his own residence. The security experts sent from Washington asked him to dictate the text of an old diplomatic despatch in his study in order to help them discover any voice-activated listening device. As he continued his dictating, one of the experts suddenly began hacking away at the wall behind a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. Finding nothing in the wall, he then attacked the seal itself with a mason’s hammer and triumphantly extracted from it a pencil-shaped bug which had been relaying Kennan’s every word (and no doubt those of previous ambassadors) to Soviet eavesdroppers. Next morning Kennan noted a “new grimness” among the Soviet guards and embassy staff: “So dense was the atmosphere of anger and hostility that one could have cut it with a knife.”⁸

In 1953 work began on a new US embassy in Tchaikovsky Street. During its construction American security personnel stood guard each day to prevent the installation of listening devices, particularly on the two top floors which were to contain the CIA station, the ambassador’s office and the cipher rooms. The day-long security vigil, however, served little purpose since the guards were withdrawn at night, thus allowing KGB personnel ample opportunity to bug the embassy. Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who had succeeded Kennan as ambassador, later blamed the extraordinary decision to leave the new embassy unguarded overnight on “carelessness” (presumably his own) and the desire “to save money.”⁹ “Carelessness” in matters of security was by now an embassy tradition.

During a heated discussion with US ambassador Foy Kohler in 1962, Khrushchev made clear—to the dismay of the KGB—that he knew the ambassador had personally opposed the supply of steel tubing manufactured in the West for the construction of natural gas pipelines in the Soviet Union.¹⁰ Though Kohler probably deduced that Khrushchev knew the contents of some of his cables to Washington, he seems not to have realized that the information came from the bugging of his own embassy. In 1964, however, acting on intelligence from the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, the embassy discovered over forty bugs concealed in bamboo tubes built into the walls behind the radiators in order to shield them from metal detectors.¹¹ Remarkably, most studies of US—Soviet relations take no account whatever of the almost continuous hemorrhage of diplomatic secrets from the United States Moscow embassy for more than thirty years.

FROM THE 1960S onwards the KGB also had a series of successes in bugging American and British embassies in the Third World, as well as the intelligence stations for which they provided diplomatic cover. The planting of listening devices on targets outside the Soviet Union was the responsibility of the FCD OT (Operational Technical Support) Directorate (also known as the Fourteenth Department), whose officers in residencies had a wide range of duties which included providing the equipment for clandestine photography of classified documents, short-range radio communication and the construction of apparently innocent objects (such as hairbrushes and cans of shaving cream) which could be used to conceal film and other espionage paraphernalia. Each of the OT eavesdropping devices, often remote-controlled, was individually constructed in order to assist concealment in the target area, which was always carefully reconnoitered beforehand. The devices were fixed in place either by FCD operations officers or by local agents employed as cleaners, electricians, plumbers, furniture makers and telephone company technicians.¹²

One of the FCD’s most successful eavesdropping operations against a British target was directed at the chief SIS station in the Middle East, which was located in the British embassy building in Beirut (codenamed OVRAG, “Ravine”).¹³ During the early 1960s a Lebanese maid in the embassy, Elizabeth Aghasapet Ghazarian, was talent-spotted by a bishop in the Armenian Orthodox church, codenamed OLAF, who had been recruited as a Soviet agent in 1947.¹⁴ In 1964 Ghazarian was herself recruited as agent ZOLUSHKA (“Cinderella”).¹⁵ By January 1966 she had successfully planted a radio microphone (STEREO-1) in the office of the ambassador, Sir Derek Riches. On February 4 ZOLUSHKA succeeded in concealing another radio microphone (STEREO-2), about the size of a matchbox, behind the desk of the Old Etonian SIS head of station, Peter Lunn (codenamed PHOENIX), who worked under diplomatic cover as the embassy first secretary.¹⁶

The Centre was briefed on Lunn’s background and career by his former colleague Kim Philby, who had worked in Beirut as a journalist and SIS agent from 1956 until his defection to Moscow in 1963, soon after SIS obtained proof of his treachery.¹⁷ Lunn was one of Britain’s leading skiers; he had been captain of the British team at the 1936 Winter Olympics and was the author of a series of well-known skiing manuals. ¹⁸ He and Philby joined SIS at almost the same moment in 1941.¹⁹ After his defection Philby informed the KGB that Lunn had been awarded the CMG (the highest decoration then given to any SIS officer save the Chief) for his success in the planning and operation of a 500-meter tunnel under East Berlin which in 1955-6 tapped Soviet and East German telephone lines. The Centre rather admired Lunn’s professionalism and calm, self-assured manner. According to a report on operation RUBIN in 1967:

Lunn’s only major weakness, in the Centre’s view, was his relaxed attitude to station security. The KGB eavesdroppers overheard one of his staff suggest extra security measures. They must have been relieved to hear Lunn reply that no further measures were necessary. The bugging of the office of the Beirut head of station, codenamed operation RUBIN, continued for three and a half years after Lunn was recalled to a post at SIS headquarters in November 1967.²⁰

The deputy head of the FCD, Mikhail Stepanovich Tsymbal, reported to Andropov in 1967 that RUBIN had identified over fifty British agents in the Middle East and Europe: “Of the greatest interest is the identification of an SIS agent group consisting of a courier and two agents in the highest government circles of Iraq.” SIS was also alleged to have “an important agent” in Egypt “with access to President Nasser,” and “sub-sources” who included the foreign minister of one Middle Eastern country and the army chief-of-staff of another.²¹

Operation RUBIN also revealed that SIS had penetrated the Lebanese Communist Party. Its most important penetration agent was a lawyer who was a member of the Party’s Politburo and a personal friend of its general secretary, Nicolas Chaoui. On September 27, 1967 the Centre informed the Soviet Politburo that, in addition to keeping SIS well informed on the affairs of the Lebanese Communist Party, the lawyer had provided intelligence on contacts between the Party leadership and the retiring Soviet ambassador, and on Soviet involvement in the affairs of the Lebanese and Syrian peace movements and of the Cairo Peace Conference. The Centre, however, was reluctant to warn Chaoui that one of his closest associates was an SIS agent, probably for fear that he would confront the agent, who in turn would alert SIS to the penetration of its operations.

In 1971, a year after SIS had discovered the bugging of its Beirut station, the Soviet Politburo gave permission for Chaoui to be briefed during a visit to Moscow. At a meeting in the international department of the CPSU on December 25, Pavel Yefimovich Nedosekin, a senior FCD officer, informed Chaoui that the lawyer was regarded by SIS as “one of its very valuable agents” and had given it secret information about the Lebanese Communist Party and two of the most important Soviet front organizations, the World Peace Council and the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee. Though doubtless somewhat shocked, Chaoui admitted that, as early as 1949, he had received a report of a confidential meeting between the lawyer and a British consul; he added that since 1968 the lawyer had twice been to London, ostensibly for treatment to a cataract. Chaoui acknowledged that he had no intelligence department capable of protecting Party security, and promised to take immediate action to set one up.²²

Among other unwelcome revelations of operation RUBIN was the discovery that SIS had succeeded in planting six agents in the KGB, the GRU and the Czechoslovak StB. The most important appears to have been SHAUN, the owner of an advertising bureau in Damascus, who was discovered to be a double agent run by Lunn’s deputy, BARITONE. A Centre damage assessment concluded that SHAUN had compromised a series of KGB operations in which he had taken part, among them the recruitment of the Spanish cipher clerk GOMEZ (arrested after his return to Spain); the attempted recruitment of an unidentified member of the West German embassy in Damascus; and contacts between the Soviet military attaché and the chief of the Syrian general staff. SHAUN had also reported to SIS on an affair between the KGB resident in Damascus and the wife of a Soviet doctor. Andropov was tersely informed that “measures have been taken to neutralize the consequences of SHAUN’s treachery.”²³

In January 1967 ZOLUSHKA also succeeded in placing a bug in BARITONE’s office in the SIS Beirut station. In addition to running SHAUN, he was discovered to have sixteen agents inside the Lebanese Communist Party and other left-wing organizations. A detailed study of the SIS officers in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere identified through the bugging of the Beirut station led the Centre to draw a number of general conclusions which, surprisingly, it does not seem to have fully grasped before. The report on operation RUBIN concluded, correctly, that the cover posts occupied by SIS officers in British embassies were rarely as high as counselor and never higher; most were first, second or third secretaries, and seldom headed any of the main embassy departments such as trade and information. SIS personnel did not keep to the daily diplomatic routine, spent more time outside the embassy, lived in worse accommodation, drove older cars and gave fewer large receptions at their homes than British diplomats, but had higher expense allowances and arranged more meetings in restaurants and other public places. Philby had doubtless made such points before, but KGB debriefers still tended to seek only detailed classified information from agents and defectors and failed to use them to add to their general understanding of the West. By the late 1960s Philby was, unsurprisingly, deeply depressed and drinking heavily, convinced that the KGB had “no idea” of how to profit from his vast experience.²⁴

In 1967 ZOLUSHKA was rewarded for her work as a KGB agent with the secret granting of Soviet citizenship. For the next four years she continued to provide classified documents and other intelligence from the British embassy and the SIS station in Beirut. In 1971, after she had been questioned about the discovery of the radio microphones, she was hurriedly exfiltrated to the Soviet Union, settled in Armenia and given a modest pension of 120 roubles. In 1978, after the Armenian KGB reported to the Centre that the pension was insufficient, Andropov approved an increase to 180 roubles.

BECAUSE OF THE closeness of Anglo-American intelligence cooperation, eavesdropping on the SIS Beirut station also produced intelligence on the CIA. The KGB discovered plans for, and was able to forestall, a joint CIA/SIS operation to bug the Beirut bureau of Novosti.²⁵ In 1969 the KGB residency began an operation which, it was hoped, would penetrate the CIA station (codenamed OMUT (“Whirlpool”))²⁶ as successfully as ZOLUSHKA had penetrated that of SIS. On KGB instructions, one of its Lebanese agents, a hotel owner codenamed MARAT, founded an employment agency designed to attract maids and domestic servants who could be used in operations against the Main Adversary. The most promising applicant to the agency was Mary Matrosian (codenamed VERA), a Lebanese maid from an Armenian family living in Syria. Until 1967 she had worked in the American ambassador’s residence in Beirut, but had taken refuge with her family in Syria after the outbreak of the Arab—Israeli Six Day War. On her return to Beirut in 1969, MARAT’s agency found her domestic work with a series of American diplomatic families. VERA was recruited by MARAT under a false flag to provide information on her employers and remove papers from their homes. MARAT told her the information was needed by Armenian community and church leaders in order to keep them informed of potential threats to the security of the Armenian people. In 1971 MARAT handed her over to a controller from the Beirut residency, who posed as a fellow Armenian. With VERA’s (possibly unwitting) help, the KGB succeeded in bugging the apartment of the CIA officer for whom she worked.²⁷

KGB files record a number of other KGB attempts to bug CIA stations, though none seems to have been as successful as operation RUBIN. Among the most vulnerable US embassies was that in Conakry, the capital of Guinea. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin contains a brief reference to the successful bugging of an American diplomat’s apartment in Conakry in 1965.²⁸ Much fuller details are available on the bugging of the Conakry embassy during the 1970s, when sub-Saharan Africa became for the first time a priority area for both Soviet foreign policy and KGB operations.²⁹ In December 1972 a Guinean employee of the embassy recruited by the KGB (code-named successively RUM and SANCHO) succeeded in installing a radio-operated eavesdropping device in the office of the ambassador, Terence Todman (succeeded in May 1975 by William Harrop). RUM/SANCHO was instructed that, if detected, he was to tell his interrogators that he had been paid to place the bug by a Chinese diplomat whose visiting card he was given. The bug (replaced by an improved version in January 1974) was so well concealed, however, that it went undetected during three annual checks on embassy security. The KGB monitoring post which recorded Todman’s dictation and conversations with embassy and CIA staff (operation REBUS) was situated in an apartment only thirty meters from the ambassador’s office.

The voice-activated bug was sometimes activated by Todman’s engaging habit of bursting into song or whistling cheerfully to himself. In general, however, operation REBUS provided what the Centre considered information “of great operational value” on US policy to African liberation movements as well as on State Department assessments of Soviet-American relations and Soviet policy in Africa. The volume of intelligence was so large that two English-speaking operations officers, Anatoli Mikhaylovich Zheleznoy and Yuri Yefimovich Tatuzov, were seconded from the KGB residency in Addis Ababa to process it. In July 1975 bugged conversations in the ambassador’s office revealed that the embassy was aware there had been a leak in its communications with Washington and had asked the State Department for help in reviewing embassy security. Though strongly tempted to remove the bug, the Conakry residency decided not to do so for fear of compromising RUM/SANCHO. According to a KGB damage assessment, when the bug in the ambassador’s office was discovered in September, “suspicion fell entirely on the Guinean Special [Intelligence] Services.” RUM/SANCHO went undetected and remained on the embassy staff.³⁰

The KGB’s most ambitious bugging operation against a US diplomatic mission during the later Cold War was the bugging of a new eight-storey Soviet-built embassy building in Moscow on which construction began in 1979. The CIA was warned in 1980 by a defector from the Eighth Chief Directorate, Viktor Sheymov, that “the KGB was going to make the building itself a giant system of sensors that could pick up virtually anything.” Officials in Washington, however, rashly concluded that any sensor installed by the KGB could be detected and removed before it was used. Five years later they discovered they had made an expensive mistake. Further investigation revealed a series of highly sophisticated bugs built into the fabric of the building which made it, according to a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “an eight-storey microphone plugged into the Politburo.” Steel-reinforcing rods set into the concrete were designed to serve as antennae. A power source, codenamed BATWING by the CIA, which was discovered embedded in a concrete wall, was estimated to be able to last for a century. One US official, interviewed by the Washington Post, commented, “Our technical people were astounded at the level of sophistication. One man from the CIA said, ‘These are the kind of things that are only on the drawing boards here.’” For the KGB as well as the State Department, however, the operation ended in expensive failure. The new embassy building was never occupied.³¹

MOST EAVESDROPPING OPERATIONS using bugs planted in foreign embassies or overseas targets were short-term, unlikely to last more than a few years. By the late 1960s the FCD’s most important and long-term SIGINT operations were run by specialized posts within its residencies in foreign capitals which intercepted local telephone and radio communications. The earliest such intercept post appears to have been that set up in the Mexico City residency in 1963. Codenamed RADAR, it was given the task of intercepting the communications of the US embassy and CIA station, but had only limited success.³² The most successful of the residency posts created to intercept the communications of the Main Adversary were those set up in the United States itself. The first, codenamed POCHIN (“Start” or “Initiative”), started life in 1966 on the top floor of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street in Washington, a few blocks from the White House. In 1967 a similar post, codenamed PROBA (“Test” or “Trial”), was established by the New York residency. There were eventually five POCHIN intercept posts in various Soviet establishments in and around Washington and four PROBA posts in the New York region.³³

By 1970 POCHIN-1 (at the embassy) and POCHIN-2 (in the embassy residential complex) had transformed intelligence collection by the Washington residency.³⁴ According to Oleg Kalugin, head of Line PR:

Among the intelligence which most impressed the Centre was secret data on the vetting of ninety candidates for posts in the first Nixon administration. In 1969-70 twenty-three POCHIN intercepts were considered sufficiently important to be shown to leading members of the Politburo.

During the same period PROBA-1 (in the Soviet mission to the UN) and PROBA-2 (in the large embassy “dacha” at Glen Cove on Long Island) intercepted diplomatic traffic sent and received by the UN missions of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Portugal, Spain and Venezuela, as well as some US military cables and the communications of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. According to the PROBA files, the intelligence from these intercepts was given “a high evaluation” by both Foreign Minister Gromyko and the Soviet UN representative, Yakov Malik.³⁶

THE KGB’S SIGINT operations against the Main Adversary were greatly assisted by a series of agents and defectors—all of them walk-ins—with access to highly classified intelligence on American cryptanalysis and/or cipher systems. In 1960 two NSA employees, Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin, who had made contact with the KGB a year earlier in Mexico City, were exfiltrated by the FCD to Moscow, where they continued being debriefed for several years.³⁷ In 1963 Staff Sergeant Jack E. Dunlap committed suicide after several years spent smuggling top secret documents out of NSA headquarters at Fort Meade for the GRU. Shortly before Dunlap’s suicide, another NSA defector, Victor Norris Hamilton, arrived in Moscow. In 1965 Robert Lipka, a young army clerk at NSA responsible for the shredding of highly classified documents, began handing many of them over to the KGB. Lipka is the last KGB agent inside the NSA identified in the files seen by Mitrokhin. (A retired NSA employee, Ronald Pelton, was, however, to provide valuable intelligence to the Washington residency in the early 1980s.) Shortly after Lipka left NSA in 1967, Chief Warrant Officer John Walker, a communications watch officer on the staff of the commander of submarine forces in the Atlantic (COMSUBLANT), began an eighteen-year career as a KGB agent, supplying detailed information on US naval ciphers.³⁸

During the late 1960s both the New York and Washington residencies had a series of other striking SIGINT successes. Late in 1969 operation PRESSING, run by the New York residency, succeeded in concealing remote-controlled radio transmitters in UN offices used by the chairman of the Security Council. The devices, hidden in wooden boards, were fixed beneath bookcases and constructed from Western materials to conceal their Soviet origin. Simultaneously, operation KRAB, which almost certainly had to be approved by the Politburo, succeeded in bugging the secretariat of the UN secretary-general, U Thant (codenamed BROD). A radio-controlled eavesdropping device was also concealed in the offices of the Ghanaian mission to the UN.³⁹

In 1969 the Washington residency succeeded in concealing a remote-control radio-operated bugging device in the meeting room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The device, once again constructed from Western materials, continued to function for at least four years. In February 1973 information (which may have been inaccurate) reached the residency from press sources that a bug had been found attached to the underside of the press table in the Foreign Relations Committee room. The KGB was puzzled by the report since its own listening device was fixed beneath the seat of a chair rather than under the table and still appeared to be functioning normally. Expecting its bug to be discovered, Service A prepared a story claiming that it had been placed by the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service. To the KGB’s surprise, however, the media lost interest in the episode and no report of the bug beneath the chair appeared in the press.⁴⁰

EARLY IN 1968 the KGB achieved its most important penetration of British SIGINT operations since John Cairncross had entered Bletchley Park in 1942. Corporal Geoffrey Arthur Prime, then working in the RAF SIGINT station at Gatow in West Berlin, handed a message to a Russian officer at a Soviet checkpoint asking Soviet intelligence to make contact with him. Prime’s note was passed not to the FCD but to the comparatively lowly KGB Third Directorate, whose main responsibility was the surveillance and security of Soviet armed forces but which sometimes succeeded in making (usually low-level) recruits among Western troops stationed in Germany. Anxious to steal a march over the more prestigious FCD by gaining the credit for Prime’s recruitment, a Third Directorate officer left him a message, inviting him to a rendezvous in East Berlin, in a small magnetic cylinder attached to his car door. At the meeting which followed and at subsequent rendezvous, Prime agreed to work as a KGB agent but explained that his service with the RAF was due to end in August 1968. In agreement with his Third Department case officers he applied, successfully, for a job processing Russian intercepts at GCHQ, the British SIGINT agency.

Prime was a sexual and social misfit who blamed many of his problems on the capitalist system and, as he later acknowledged, developed “a misplaced idealistic view of Russian Communism.” He was, however, skillfully handled by his controllers. In September 1968, before taking up his job in GCHQ, Prime spent a week in the KGB compound at Karlshorst in the East Berlin suburbs being trained in radio transmission, cipher communications, microdots, photography of documents with a Minox camera and the use of dead letter-boxes. Before flying to Britain, he was given a briefcase containing a set of one-time cipher pads, secret writing materials and 400 pounds in banknotes. He continued working as a Soviet agent in GCHQ for almost nine years, spending most of his time transcribing and translating intercepts. Among the intelligence supplied by Prime during his final year working for GCHQ in 1976-7 were details of British successes and failures in decrypting Soviet traffic. Though his GCHQ colleagues were struck by his morose appearance, they put it down to his unhappy marriage and failure to be promoted.⁴¹

The expansion of KGB SIGINT operations during the late 1960s led to a reorganization at the Centre. Hitherto the KGB Eighth Directorate had handled SIGINT as well as ciphers and communications. Probably in 1968 Andropov established a new Sixteenth Directorate,⁴² headed by Nikolai Nikolayevich Andreev, to specialize exclusively in SIGINT. Its operations were among the most highly classified in the whole of the KGB. The Sixteenth Directorate worked closely with the Sixteenth Department of the FCD, founded at about the same time, which was given responsibility for residency intercept posts, operations to acquire foreign codes and ciphers and attempts to penetrate other SIGINT agencies.⁴³ On May 15, 1970 Andropov approved a plan for radio-intercept posts (some were already functioning) in fifteen residencies: Washington, New York, Montreal, Mexico, Tokyo, Peking, Teheran, Athens, Rome, Paris, Bonn, Salzburg, London, Reykjavik and Belgrade. During 1971 these fifteen posts intercepted a total of 62,000 diplomatic and military enciphered cables from 60 countries, as well as more than 25,000 plain text messages. ⁴⁴

The most important intercept posts, operated by the Sixteenth Department with the assistance of OT personnel, remained the Washington area POCHIN and New York PROBA stations. The most striking achievement of the POCHIN stations during the 1970s was the interception of many of the messages exchanged between Washington, via Andrews Air Force Base, and the aircraft taking the President, Secretary of State and other senior members of the administration on overseas trips. ANTON, one of the POCHIN operational officers, was awarded the Order of the Red Star for his success in intercepting US communications during Kissinger’s visit to London in July 1974 for talks with the British Foreign Secretary (and future prime minister), James Callaghan.⁴⁵ The Centre’s particular interest in these intercepts doubtless derived from the fact that the main purpose of Kissinger’s visit was to brief Callaghan on Nixon’s recent visit to Moscow—his last foreign trip before his resignation at the height of the Watergate scandal.⁴⁶ Soon afterwards the PROBA stations succeeded in intercepting Kissinger’s telephone conversations with Callaghan and the Turkish foreign minister, Professor Turan Gånes, during the crisis caused by the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus on July 21.⁴⁷ The KGB was thus able to monitor the dramatic way in which, as Kissinger later recalled:

Not all the intercepts of Kissinger’s conversations concerned affairs of state. On one occasion he was heard talking to his fiancée, Nancy Maginnes, shortly before their marriage in 1974. According to Kalugin’s somewhat censorious recollection:

Word came back from Moscow that Andropov “loved the intercepted conversation.” He enjoyed boasting to some of his Politburo colleagues that the KGB was able to eavesdrop on the intimate conversations of the US National Security Adviser.⁴⁹

THE COMPLEX ANTENNAE sprouting on the roofs of Soviet missions gradually alerted Western SIGINT agencies to the presence of the intercept stations within.⁵⁰ Though probably unaware the KGB had successfully gained access to his own communications, Kissinger protested to Ambassador Dobrynin on August 15, 1975 at the interception of radio and telephone conversations by the Soviet embassy. The Centre drafted a robust reply:

Kissinger was inhibited in pursuing his protest by the knowledge that NSA also ran SIGINT operations from the US embassy in Moscow. In 1971 columnist Jack Anderson had revealed in the Washington Post that the embassy had succeeded in intercepting the microwave radio and telephone communications exchanged between the large black ZIL limousines of Politburo members as they sped around Moscow.⁵² Kissinger seems, however, to have been genuinely alarmed by the electronic countermeasures taken to frustrate SIGINT operations run from the Moscow embassy. In November 1975 he told Dobrynin that it was believed that the American ambassador, Walter Stoessel, had developed leukemia as a result of prolonged exposure to electromagnetic radiation directed against the embassy. On instructions from Moscow, Dobrynin replied that the electromagnetic field around the embassy did not exceed Soviet health standards. Dobrynin claims that he was privately informed by the State Department during the Carter administration that a study had concluded that there was, in fact, no evidence of damage to the health of embassy personnel.⁵³

Kissinger’s protests failed to halt the continued expansion of POCHIN and PROBA operations. Summaries and transcripts of POCHIN intercepts grew from 2,600 pages in 1975 to 7,000 in 1976. During these two years 800 reports based on the intercepts were cabled to the Centre from the Washington residency. Among the communications to and from Andrews Airforce Base intercepted during 1976 were important messages dealing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s visits to the NATO Nuclear Planning Group in January and June, and to US armed forces headquarters in Europe in February; and on Kissinger’s meetings with British, French, West German and South African leaders.⁵⁴ In 1977 POCHIN summaries and transcripts increased again to over 10,500 pages,⁵⁵ covering foreign visits by, among others, Vice-President Walter Mondale and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.⁵⁶ For much of the Carter administration the POCHIN posts also intercepted a substantial amount of State Department material; the KGB kept a card file on all the officials mentioned in it.⁵⁷

Given the KGB’s lack of high-level penetration agents in Washington during the 1970s, it seems likely that POCHIN and other SIGINT operations were the Centre’s most important source of intelligence on the foreign and defense policies of the Ford and Carter administrations. The general effect of this intelligence was probably benign—to limit the natural predisposition of the Centre to conspiracy theories about American policy. During the 1979 crisis caused by American protests at the presence of a Soviet “combat brigade” in Cuba, for example, POCHIN intercepts of Pentagon telephone discussions and other communications enabled the Washington residency to reassure Moscow that the United States had no plans for military intervention. ⁵⁸

The most important intelligence provided by the POCHIN stations during the 1970s and early 1980s, however, was probably military. The intercepts provided highly classified information on the Trident, MX, Pershing-2, Cruise and surface-toair missile systems; the F-15, F-16, F-18, B-52 and B-1 aircraft; and the AWACS early warning system. From 1973 onwards the main priority of the New York PROBA stations was also scientific and technical intelligence, particularly in the military field. Its most striking success during the remainder of the decade was the interception of fax communications from the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and a series of major companies, among them Boeing, Fairchild, General Dynamics, Grumman, Hughes, IBM, Lockheed and Sperry Rand. Fax intercepts on military projects included important material on the design and development of the A-10, B-1, EF-111A and F-14 aircraft; the anti-missile defense program; and the anti-submarine defense system. By 1976 an intercept post, codenamed VESNA (“Spring”), was operating in the San Francisco residency, successfully intercepting fax and telephone communications of defense contractors and other high-tech companies on the West Coast.⁵⁹

The KGB residencies in New York, Washington and San Francisco also had radio-intercept posts (codenamed, respectively, RAKETA, ZEFIR and RUBIN) which monitored FBI (codenamed FIRMA) communications in order to keep track of surveillance of its operations. In New York during the 1970s the RAKETA post monitored continuously six FBI shortwave radio communications channels.⁶⁰ Its eavesdroppers quickly became used to Bureau jargon. According to a report in KGB files:

For several years the New York residency deluded itself into believing that it was able to detect every instance of street surveillance of KGB personnel by the FBI.⁶¹ In 1973, however, it realized that it had been taken in. Having discovered that the FBI was aware of the activities of some of its operations officers, as well as of three “developmental” agents, it finally grasped that the apparent simplicity of FBI surveillance techniques was actually a means of diverting the residency’s attention from far more sophisticated methods which it had failed to detect. The residency’s operations were temporarily disrupted as it tried to come to terms with methods of surveillance it did not fully understand.⁶²

THE RUNNING COSTS for the main intercept posts in KGB residencies around the world in 1979 show that the Washington and New York operations were by far the most expensive.⁶³ The SIGINT post in the Havana residency, the third most expensive, was also focused chiefly on the United States. All other intercept posts were also instructed to give priority, when possible, to the communications of the Main Adversary. The most important of the KGB’s foreign intercept posts targeted on the United States from outside, however, was located not in a residency but in the large SIGINT base set up by the GRU at Lourdes in Cuba in the mid-1960s to monitor US navy communications and other high-frequency transmissions.⁶⁴ On April 25, 1975 a secret Soviet government decree (no. 342—115) authorized the establishment of a new KGB SIGINT station (codenamed TERMIT-P) within the Lourdes base, which began operations in December 1976. Run by the Sixteenth Directorate, TERMIT-P had a fixed 12-meter dish antenna and a mobile 7-meter dish antenna mounted on a covered lorry, which enabled it to intercept microwave communications “downlinked” from US satellites or transmitted between microwave towers.⁶⁵ Other large GRU/Sixteenth Directorate SIGINT stations established in the late 1970s included those in South Yemen and at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. The biggest, however, remained the Lourdes complex, which continued to grow steadily over the next decade. President Reagan declared in 1983:

A joint report by the Departments of State and Defense in 1985 estimated that the total personnel at the Lourdes SIGINT base had increased further to 2,100.⁶⁶

By the early 1980s all KGB residencies possessed an intercept post.⁶⁷ Each post was required to submit an annual report to the Centre in November, giving details of encrypted and plain text material intercepted over the past year; the proportion of operationally significant intercepts; newly discovered communications channels of intelligence value; characteristics of the “radio-intelligence environment” in the country concerned; the handling and fulfillment by the intercept post of its SIGINT assignments; measures taken to protect the security and secrecy of its operations; conclusions about past performance and proposals for the future.⁶⁸

In 1980 the Washington area POCHIN posts reported that, as a result of new security precautions, it had become much more difficult to intercept the communications of the federal government.⁶⁹ The residency there, however, reported one major new SIGINT success. In September 1980, after two years’ planning, in an operation codenamed FLAMINGO, the residency succeeded in bugging the conference room of System Planning Corporation (SPC), a private company in Arlington, Virginia, which did research for the Pentagon. Viktor Vasilyevich Lozenko (code-named MARVIN), a Line X (scientific and technological intelligence) officer under diplomatic cover at the Washington residency, had noticed that the SPC conference room was also used for meetings of the Society for Operational Research, of which he was a member. The day before he left Washington at the end of his tour of duty, he succeeded in fixing the listening device—a battery-powered rod a quarter of a meter long—underneath a table in the room. The signal from the bug was monitored from a command post in a car with diplomatic number plates, fitted with a T-shaped antenna built into the front windshield, which took up position at one of nine locations situated at distances of 300-500 meters from the SPC offices.

For the next ten and a half months operation FLAMINGO provided what the Centre considered “highly important” intelligence on the current and future deployment of US nuclear weapons in Europe, on American chemical weapons, on the US navy’s chances of survival in a nuclear conflict, and on the US position on the SALT-2 talks. On January 27, 1981 a senior Pentagon official presented a classified report at a meeting entitled “Current Status and Trends in the Advancement of the US Nuclear Forces in the Central European Theater of War.” Among the issues discussed at the meeting were: American mobilization capabilities; the effectiveness of laser guidance systems; plans for the destruction of 730 tons of chemical weapons which were now unusable; and the extent of US intelligence on, and requirements concerning, Soviet chemical weapons. Other meetings in the bugged conference room, also attended by senior Pentagon officials, discussed the current status and proposed reforms of the US armed forces. The operation came to an end not because the listening device was discovered but because its power supply gradually ran out.⁷⁰

Four of the KGB officers involved in operation FLAMINGO received the Order of the Red Star: Lozenko, who selected the location and placed the bug; V. I. Shokin, who supervised the operation; the head of the POCHIN station Yuri Nikolayevich Marakhovsky, who played a leading role in collecting and processing the intelligence collected from the SPC conference room; and Yuri Vasilyevich Gratsiansky, head of the residency’s Operational—Technical Support section, who was responsible for the technical side of the operation. Three other residency officers received lesser awards.⁷¹

SOVIET SIGINT OPERATIONS, like those of the United States, were assisted by allied agencies. The UKUSA Security Agreement concluded in 1948 between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand provided for the division of collection tasks and the sharing of the product between their SIGINT services.⁷² The KGB, however, was determined to give its allies only limited access to its cryptanalytic secrets. In January 1975 Andropov approved “Regulations on the Principles and Directions of Co-operation with the Security Agencies of the Socialist Countries in Decryption Operations,” drafted by the Sixteenth Directorate. Its two guiding principles were, first, that joint operations with the “friends” (allied agencies) were to be under KGB control; second, that cryptographic information supplied to allied agencies “should not disclose the level of the latest [Soviet] achievements in the field of cryptanalysis:”

On no account were the “friends” to learn of the existence of the top secret training school for KGB cryptanalysts; they were to be given the impression that all training took place at the Centre. Though, on occasion, allied agencies could be given cipher communications from shortwave transmissions intercepted by the Sixteenth Directorate, they were never allowed access to SIGINT from residency intercept posts, satellite communications or telegraph lines within the Soviet Union.⁷³

Despite the Sixteenth Directorate’s reluctance to share most SIGINT secrets with its intelligence allies, it depended on their assistance. With the growing complexity of computer-generated cipher systems, Soviet cryptanalysts were increasingly dependent on the penetration of foreign embassies to steal cipher materials and, when possible, bug cipher machines and teleprinters. During 1974 alone joint operations by the FCD Sixteenth Department and its Soviet Bloc allies succeeded in abstracting cipher material from at least seven embassies in Prague, five in Sofia, two in Budapest and two in Warsaw.⁷⁴ Soviet Bloc intelligence services also shared some of their agents in Western embassies and foreign ministries with the KGB. Among those who were particularly highly rated by the KGB Sixteenth Directorate was a Bulgarian agent codenamed EPIR, a security official in the Greek foreign ministry recruited by Bulgarian intelligence in 1966. Over the next ten years he assisted in the removal of over 12,000 classified pages of documents from the ministry.⁷⁵

A conference of the KGB leadership in May 1981 included in its main priorities the recruitment of agents from the cipher personnel of the United States, Britain, France, West Germany and China. Andropov reaffirmed that priority in a special directive issued after he succeeded Brezhnev as general secretary in 1982.⁷⁶ He also approved the secret award of the Order of the Friendship of Peoples to the KGB’s longest-serving cipher officer agent, JOUR in the French foreign ministry, in recognition of his “long and fruitful co-operation” over the previous thirty-seven years.⁷⁷ The FCD Sixteenth Department, headed by A. V. Krasavin, had plans to create another forty or fifty intercept posts in Soviet establishments around the world by the end of the decade. It calculated optimistically that the volume of intercepted communications would increase by five to eight times its present level if the current rate of expansion were maintained.⁷⁸

According to Viktor Makarov, who served in the Sixteenth Directorate from 1980 to 1986, the European states whose diplomatic traffic was decrypted with varying frequency during these years included Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany. There was, he believes, no penetration of high-grade British cipher systems during that period.⁷⁹ An inner circle within the Politburo—consisting, in 1980, of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko, Kirilenko, Suslov and Ustinov—were sent a daily selection of the most important intercepts. A larger selection was forwarded each day to the heads of the First and Second Chief Directorates. ⁸⁰ Though neither selection is yet available for research, both will one day be sources of major importance for historians of Soviet foreign policy.

In addition to obviously important items such as Kissinger’s and Vance’s meetings with foreign leaders, the intercepts selected for the inner circle of the Politburo undoubtedly also included, whenever possible, Western responses to their public pronouncements. Vyacheslav Ivanovich Gurgenev (alias “Artemov”), deputy head of the FCD, complained publicly in 1991:

Residencies around the world were expected to provide prompt reports of favorable responses to every major speech by the Soviet leadership. When no such responses occurred, they were commonly invented to avoid the risk of offending the Politburo. ⁸² Since the Sixteenth Directorate was able, by the later 1960s, to decrypt at least some of the diplomatic traffic of over seventy states,⁸³ its chances of finding some suitable response among the thousands of decrypts produced each week were much greater than those of even the most active residency.

In the pre-glasnost era controversial references to Soviet leaders were routinely edited out of translations of diplomatic decrypts. Makarov recalls seeing an intercepted cable from the Swedish ambassador in Moscow in August 1984 discussing the likely power struggle which would follow the demise of the ailing Konstantin Chernenko. Among the passages removed or doctored in the Russian translation was a disparaging reference to Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa Maximovna. On another occasion Makarov was ordered to remove from a diplomatic telegram he had decrypted the sentence, “Gorbachev is like Andropov.” Such excisions were known within the Sixteenth Directorate as “minding the words.”⁸⁴

DURING THE 1980s SIGINT agencies in both East and West began to face two formidable new technological challenges: the use of fiber optics in global telecommunications and the greatly increased availability of highly sophisticated encryption systems. Neither the KGB nor any other SIGINT agency seems to have devised a system of intercepting messages which passed along fiber-optic lines as streams of light. In the late 1980s Britain installed a highly secure fiber-optic trunk system, codenamed BOXER, which linked 200 military installations. Simultaneously, the development of Public Key Cryptography by mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and subsequent refinements such as Phil Zimmermann’s PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) system, made ciphers which were difficult, if not impossible, for SIGINT agencies to crack, available to anyone with a powerful desktop computer and modem.⁸⁵

The SIGINT-related files seen by Mitrokhin, which end in 1982, do not explain how the KGB sought to respond to these new challenges. It is clear from other evidence, however, that Soviet SIGINT operations continued to expand, at least in volume, during the Gorbachev era. Those of the GRU, targeted chiefly on the armed forces of the United States, NATO and China, were on an even larger scale than the KGB’s. By the end of the 1980s the Red Army had 40 SIGINT regiments, 170 SIGINT battalions and over 700 SIGINT companies. Since the launch of Kosmos 189 in 1967, the GRU Space Intelligence Directorate had put over 130 SIGINT satellites into orbit. More than 60 Soviet surface ships and over 20 different types of aircraft were used for SIGINT collection. The GRU and KGB had between them over 500 SIGINT ground stations in the Soviet Union and around the world. In all, the GRU and KGB SIGINT network probably employed about 350,000 intercept operators, processors, cryptanalysts and other technical specialists, a majority of them military personnel—about five times as many as the NSA and US Service Cryptological Authorities, which together had an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 personnel.⁸⁶ According to Vladimir Rubakov, a senior KGB officer interviewed shortly before the reorganization of Soviet intelligence in 1991, SIGINT operations consumed a quarter of the KGB budget.⁸⁷

In December 1991 the former Eighth and Sixteenth Directorates of the KGB were reconstituted as an independent service, the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information (FAPSI in its Russian acronym), responsible for communications security, ciphers and SIGINT. Russian SIGINT operations today are on a significantly smaller scale than those of the former Soviet Union. One of the least noticed consequences of the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc was the dismantling of the great majority of the 150 ground stations in former Warsaw Pact countries. ⁸⁸ Some of the most important stations outside the Russian Federation, however, still survive—among them the large SIGINT complexes near Tallinn in Estonia and at Lourdes in Cuba (though the Lourdes personnel was reduced by over half to a total of about 1,000 in 1993).⁸⁹ The residencies of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, continue to contain active intercept posts. Though FAPSI operates with somewhat reduced resources, faces harder targets and probably finds it increasingly difficult to match NSA’s state of the art technology, Russian SIGINT still has a global reach.