Newly appointed to run the CIA by President Carter, Turner became convinced that the rewards from running operations in Moscow weren’t worth the risks. He ordered a total stand-down of the station. The action forced the CIA to break contact with a series of newly recruited agents, some of whom were permanently lost as a result. Just five years after David Blee had brought the SE Division out of the Angleton sick-think, Moscow operations were once again plunged into paralysis.
Turner’s stand-down lasted a year and a half. From 1977 through the fall of 1978, frustrated case officers in Moscow Station did little besides identify new clandestine sites they could use for future meetings with agents—if they were ever allowed to meet agents again. The stand-down would not be lifted until the most persistent Soviet volunteer of the decade—Adolf Tolkachev, the CIA’s most valuable spy since the legendary Penkovsky—made his fourth approach to the CIA, offering the Americans the keys to defeating the Soviet Union in the air wars of the future.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 0845 Hours, June 14, 1985
Paul Redmond walked unannounced into Burton Gerber’s corner office. Gerber was writing on a yellow legal pad. Without looking up, he handed Redmond a stack of Moscow cable traffic and continued writing.
Redmond glanced quickly over Gerber’s shoulder at the small child’s blackboard on which Gerber wrote in white chalk each morning his four- or five-word thought for the day. The board was still clean. As he sat in the chair opposite Gerber’s desk, Redmond began to read the cables. He had seen the initial cable reporting Stombaugh’s arrest the night before. But in the cold light of day, as more detailed cables arrived from Moscow Station, the enormity of the loss sank in.
IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR
WNINTEL
MOSCOW 2199
1.
FURTHER TO REF, CASE OFFICER PLIMPTON WAS ARRESTED 2130–2135 HOURS EVENING OF 13 JUNE WHILE ON THREE HOUR OPERATIONAL RUN TO MEET VANQUISH. NO SURVEILLANCE DETECTED AT ANY TIME DURING RUN. PLIMPTON DETAINED AND INTERROGATED FOR FOUR HOURS AT KGB CENTER AT LUBYANKA UNTIL CONSULAR ACCESS GRANTED 0230 HOURS AND PLIMPTON RELEASED AT 0430 HOURS.
2.
ARREST OF PLIMPTON APPEARED CHOREOGRAPHED WITH CAMERA ELEMENTS ALREADY IN PLACE, SUGGESTING COMPROMISE OF VANQUISH PROBABLY OCCURRED FAR ENOUGH IN RECENT PAST TO GIVE KGB AMPLE TIME TO SET UP AMBUSH. PLIMPTON DID NOT SEE VANQUISH AT THE SITE OF THE AMBUSH, THOUGH WHAT APPEARED TO BE VANQUISH’S CAR WITH MOSCOW LICENSE TAGS WAS PARKED NEARBY AS SAFETY SIGNAL.
3.
ANTICIPATE PLIMPTON AND SPOUSE WILL BE GIVEN USUAL FORTY-EIGHT HOURS TO DEPART THE USSR. WILL ADVISE TRAVEL DETAILS WHEN KNOWN.
4.
AMBASSADOR HAS BEEN BRIEFED. HE EXPECTS SUMMONS FROM FOREIGN MINISTRY LATER THIS MORNING TO BE ADVISED OF PNG ACTION AGAINST PLIMPTON AND SPOUSE.
5.
PLIMPTON SPOUSE REMAINED AT RENDEVOUZ SITE WAITING FOR PLIMPTON UNTIL 0115 HOURS. AT 0005 HOURS SHE NOTED GROUPS OF PEOPLE IN PARK OBVIOUSLY SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING OR SOMEONE. AT 0105 HOURS A SOVIET FEMALE APPROACHED PLIMPTON SPOUSE AND ASKED HER FOR DIRECTIONS TO LOCAL LIBRARY. PLIMPTON SPOUSE CORRECTLY DEDUCED THAT WOMAN WAS KGB AND THAT PLIMPTON HIMSELF HAD PROBABLY BEEN ARRESTED. SHE RETURNED HOME AT THAT TIME TO AWAIT PLIMPTON’S RETURN AT 0530 HOURS.
6.
DEBRIEFING OF PLIMPTON AND SPOUSE CONTINUES. WILL ADVISE BY SEPARATE CABLES ADDITIONAL OPERATION DETAILS PLUS INVENTORY OF CASH (RUBLES), CAMERAS, OPERATIONAL MATERIALS AND MEDICATIONS PLIMPTON CARRIED, ALL OF WHICH RETAINED BY KGB. END OF MESSAGE.
Gerber was still writing, and Redmond chose not to interrupt his train of thought. He glanced at the teak end table beside him. On it sat a farewell gift fashioned for Gerber by a CIA technical officer at the end of his stint as Moscow chief. A black steel tube bent into an elbow shape was mounted on a wooden base. Suspended by a beaded chain from the elevated end of the elbow was a black glass sphere. Redmond knew the message behind the odd creation: The outline of the steel elbow and dangling chain was suggestive of a taw, the twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
GTTAW was the code name for the CIA’s cable-tapping operation on the outskirts of Moscow, an operation that had harnessed the best in American technical and human intelligence. The tap had been placed on an underground communications line between Moscow and Krasnaya Pakhra, the location of a nuclear weapons research institute southwest of the Soviet capital. For years, the United States had listened to communications between the scientists working at the complex and defense officials back in Moscow by intercepting signals beamed through the air by microwave; but by the late 1970s, the Soviets had wised up and buried land lines underground. When American listening posts went silent, U.S. spy satellites began to search for clues of a new land-based communications system. It took them a while, but they finally detected telltale signs of construction alongside the main road between the complex and Moscow. Satellite photos soon revealed a series of manholes along the route, sites where maintenance workers could access the underground cable lines for repairs. Working with the National Security Agency, the supersecret eavesdropping and code-breaking arm of the U.S. government, the CIA hatched a plan to tap the lines and began training case officers at the Farm for the physically demanding operation.
In 1979, Jim Olson had been the first CIA case officer to go down into a manhole, and he planted the first listening device. It worked; the CIA and NSA had developed a unique “collar” that could eavesdrop on the cable without requiring a physical tap into the line. Soon, CIA officers were making regular runs out to the rural road where the tap was located to retrieve the tapes, which were constantly recording everything going over the line. It was a reprise of the CIA’s famous Berlin Tunnel of the 1950s and in many ways a landlocked version of the U.S. Navy’s equally secret operations to tap the Soviet Navy’s offshore communications cables.
It ran like clockwork for five years,
