The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy’s Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat. Eric Hasletine. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
In 1985, CBS Nightly News aired a sensationalistic story. News Anchor Dan Rather announced the KGB had bugged about a dozen IBM Selectric typewriters at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in an elaborate electronic operation. The Spy in Moscow Station, doesn’t open with the widely known typewriter story, but rather begins at the beginning when National Security Agency (NSA) operatives found an antenna in a fake chimney built into an embassy room. Written in the style of a thriller, the book brings to life the so-called GUNMAN operation chronicled by the NSA in a declassified report. Unlike many anonymized de-classified reports that delete methods and sources, this book personifies the story and raises the main characters to the level of heroes.
Former NSA director General Michael V. Hayden brought Eric Haseltine in from Walt Disney Imagineering to become Director of Research at the NSA. Haseltine writes the story drawing heavily on interviews with Charles Gandy, the main NSA technical officer protagonist. In fact, Haseltine has an uncanny ability to get in the head and minor actions of Gandy. The book is replete with phrases like “Gandy hung up the gray-line phone…and smiled inwardly.”[1] “Gandy took a deep breath, let it out, and got back to work.”[2] Whether these phrases are poetic license or drawn from detailed interviews chronicling every minute of Gandy’s life, it does make Haseltine’s work read like a novel.
The book departs from its novelist approach when the author uses de-classified cables and memoranda from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) Freedom of Information Act reading room. While this often adds historical authenticity to the book, at times he overdoes it by reproducing too much text. In one instance the reader has to plow through fourteen pages of reproduced cables; numerous other passages quote six pages of cables.[3] This interrupts the narrative flow of the text and could easily have been edited, condensed, and commented on while placing longer passages in an appendix.
According to Haseltine, the CIA’s Moscow Chief of Station (Haseltine erroneously refers to him as a case officer), Gardener “Gus” Hathaway, had asked the NSA to send Gandy to Moscow in 1978 to find out why the KGB was bombarding the embassy with radio waves. These microwaves targeted the upper floors of the embassy where the ambassador and the CIA had offices. He also wanted to discover how the KGB was identifying and liquidating American spies in the Soviet Union. For over a year, Hathaway had witnessed the loss of many high-profile agents (or “assets” as the CIA calls its recruited agents) and the arrest of case officers. In 1977 alone, Alexandr Ogorodnik and Anatoly Filato were arrested by the KGB, the former killing himself by dramatically biting into his L-pill—a suicide pill containing lethal poison developed by the CIA—hidden in a pen he said he would use to write his confession. The CIA later found that Ogorodnik had been betrayed by Karl Koecher, a Czech translator. In fact, as Burton Gerber points out, most of the blown assets named above had been betrayed by a human source, minimizing the argument in the book that the losses came as a result of listening devices.[4]
The U.S. Embassy had been a victim of KGB bugging many times during the 20th Century. The most infamous listening device, discovered in 1951, was called “The Thing.” It was a device hidden behind the wooden Great Seal of the United States in the Ambassador's office, a gift to the ambassador from a troop of Russian girls.
Aside from implanted KGB listening devices, the Embassy employed a large number of Russian nationals as cooks, maids, drivers, switchboard operators, travel coordinators, and guards. Given the KGB’s penchant for using human informants and agents, many, if not all, of these employees were probably KGB informants, agents, or officers. In fact, it’s surprising so many locals were employed in sensitive areas.
Finally, there was the mysterious chimney at the embassy that had emitted curious scraping sounds. When the State Department investigated, it found that the chimney had no fireplace but was apparently used for other purposes. Gandy was brought in because he was known in intelligence as the snake-oil salesman who presented long detailed technical reports about installations and would be able to discover if there was a connection between the chimney and the microwave radiation bombardments.
Unlike his CIA counterparts, Gandy had a great deal of respect for the KGB’s technical ingenuity and accomplishments. The CIA assumed the Soviet Union was technically backward and would not be able to create sophisticated technology. Gandy also describes himself as a techie unschooled in the human intelligence (HUMINT) ways of the CIA. In one instance, he says he was “DO’d” by Hathaway, because operatives from the Directorate of Operations tried to stroke people by flattering them or appealing to their vanity or weaknesses. What he means by this is that the Director of Operations (the DO) pulled a human intelligence tactic on him.
It wasn’t only the CIA that used HUMINT tactics on Gandy. In another chapter, Gandy describes in detail a KGB attempt at ensnaring him in a honey trap, a term referring to an attempt by a woman to seduce a man of intelligence interest. He relates that “I went on automatic…not really thinking at all because I wasn’t accustomed to the HUMINT side of things.” But he knew it was “obviously a KGB honey trap,” so he slammed the door in the woman’s face and saw her walk off as her smile disappeared and she grew pale. She was escorted away by a large man who had his back pressed against the wall.[5]
These passages sometimes add color to an otherwise highly technical book filled with acronyms like TUMS [Technically unidentified Moscow signals] and MUTS [Moscow unidentified technical signal], but at some point they almost become a cliché. For example, terms like “in the belly of the beast” are used to describe going to Moscow.
When Gandy returned to America after his 1978 trip, he had no answers for the CIA, but he did begin to encounter resistance from rival intelligence agencies and the State Department. Much of the book details these conflicts that nearly ruined Gandy’s efforts to solve the mystery of the listening devices. Finally, a colorful character from the NSA, Walter Deeley, approached the President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and Gandy was given a green light to continue his investigations.
The NSA and CIA painstakingly removed all technical devices—some ten tons of them—from the Embassy, including code machines, copy machines, and typewriters and began to X-Ray all of them looking for implanted electronic devices. It was tedious work in an uncomfortable trailer. The NSA offered a reward for anyone who found a device among the copious equipment. After ten thousand X-rays, the team working in uncomfortable trailers had found nothing. But then a persistent employee got lucky.
Here, another hero emerges in Haseltine’s account. Mike Arneson was a motivated, but junior, NSA technician with only an associate’s degree who craved recognition. While other technicians focused on code-breaking machines, Arneston thought typewriters would be the likelier place to implant a bug, and he was right.
In the end, this episode was a true-life spy vs. spy story. Both the KGB and the U.S. intelligence community ended up spending a lot of time and money bugging and de-bugging, tying up valuable resources. And it is likely the KGB followed the NSA’s and CIA’s efforts since it had bugged the equipment.
The United States Embassy in Cuba. (Meridith Kohut/The New York Times)
The story outlined in Haseltine’s book is not an isolated incident. It seems the successors to the KGB continue to use unidentified mysterious invisible rays to attack U.S. Embassies. But U.S. intelligence still has not solved the recent mysteries surrounding the brain trauma that has afflicted staff at the U.S.Embassy in Cuba and in China. Although Haseltine does not bring up the Cuban or China Embassy cases, there are many parallels with earlier episodes in U.S.-Soviet relations.
Readers interested in a detailed technological Cold War spy story pitting U.S. technical spy sleuths against Soviet spies hell-bent on installing listening devices in the U.S. Moscow Embassy, will profit from this book.
Kristie Macrakis is a historian, author and Professor at the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech specializing in the history of espionage. She is the author or editor of five books, including Seduced by Secrets and Prisoners, Lovers and Spies.
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Notes:
[1] Eric Hasletine, The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy’s Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2019): 18.
[2] Hasletine, The Spy in Moscow Station, 105.
[3] Hasletine, The Spy in Moscow Station, 80-94.
[4] Hasletine, The Spy in Moscow Station, 225.
[5] Hasletine, The Spy in Moscow Station, 98-100.