Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

During the night of July 21-22, we forced a cease-fire by threatening Turkey that we would move [US] nuclear weapons from forward positions—especially where they might be involved in a war with Greece. 48

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:

He apparently had just given a speech and, in his egotistical way, was asking her what she thought of it. He was saying, in effect, “How did I look? You really thought I sounded well?” The transcript showed Kissinger to be a vain and boastful man.

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. 50Though 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:

It is advisable that, when there is a meeting with Kissinger, if he again raises that issue, the Soviet ambassador should state that the antennae set up on the Soviet embassy’s roof are being used on the basis of the principle of [diplomatic] reciprocity to ensure communications with Moscow, as well as to receive general radio and television transmissions. These antennae are in no way a contradiction of the embassy’s status. It should be brought to the attention of the Secretary of State that the US government should prevent the installation of equipment, including that on buildings close to the embassy, which would impede the normal operation of the USSR embassy’s radio station. 51

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. 52Kissinger 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. 54In 1977 POCHIN summaries and transcripts increased again to over 10,500 pages, 55covering foreign visits by, among others, Vice-President Walter Mondale and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. 56For 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. 60Its eavesdroppers quickly became used to Bureau jargon. According to a report in KGB files:

FBI look-out posts and surveillance teams communicate using simple codes, slang expressions and pre-arranged phrases which are easily deciphered by the RAKETA operator. Conversations between the look-out posts and a surveillance team consist of short dialogues in which the post informs the team of the target’s number and the direction he is moving in up to an intersection and beyond.

Daily radio intercept of the operation of the FBI dispatch center provides a picture of the operational environment and the FBI’s conduct of operations in the city. Whenever the [KGB] residency is conducting an operation in the city, the RAKETA operator monitors the operation of the FBI’s radio center; if necessary, an operations officer can be given a danger signal prior to his going out to the site where an operation is to be conducted, [or told] to back off from an operation if he has been detected by surveillance. The RAKETA post makes note of local citizens who have come to the attention of the FBI, and they are put on file in the KONTAKT system [the FCD’s computerized name-trace system].

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. 61In 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