CHAPTER 5
Warfare is no longer a matter of chivalry but of subversion, and
subversion has its own, special arsenal of tools and weapons. Only
Research and Development is capable of creating such an arsenal . . .
—Stanley Lovell writing to Allen Dulles in 1951
When Seymour Russell took the helm of TSD in the summer of 1962, no one doubted his disappointment with the assignment. For Russell, a highly regarded and ambitious Clandestine Service operations officer, an assignment outside one of the geographic divisions was almost certainly a detour in a fast-tracked career. After a series of impressive successes in the field as a case officer and station chief, Russell had every reason to expect an assignment as Division Chief overseeing operations in Western Europe or Asia, or even heading up all CIA operations as Deputy Director for Plans.
“Seymour Russell lived operations,” said a TSD officer who became one of his top lieutenants. “He made no secret that he didn’t want the TSD job. He wanted a senior job in the DDP.” While Technical Services was a “division” in the DDP, it did not have the status of the six area divisions with their geographic responsibilities, such as the Far East, Africa, or Soviet Russia.
Joining Russell on the new TSD management team were his deputy, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, and Richard Krueger as Chief of Research and Development. A chemist by training, Gottlieb was known internally for directing some of the Agency’s most sensitive research under the MKULTRA program. Gottlieb arrived at Langley through a circuitous career path. He entered government service in 1944 by way of the Department of Agriculture, followed by a stint at the Food and Drug Administration, and then a spot at the University of Maryland before joining the Agency in 1951. After running a small, dozen-person chemistry division inside the Technical Services Staff for six years in the mid-1950s, he took a two-year assignment in Germany before returning to Washington in 1959 to head the TSS Research and Development program.
Krueger, who had been the young tech who installed the secret microphones and recorders in Dulles’s office and served as the DCI’s technical tutor, then moved on to the CIA’s U-2 and radar programs. Now, steeped in the science of big technology, he was returning to the basics of espionage tradecraft.
Barely a decade old, TSD had expanded from fewer than fifty technicians in 1951 to an office of several hundred engineers, craftsmen, scientists, psychologists, artists, printers, and technical specialists. After 1962, with the formation of a separate CIA Directorate of Research, TSD existed solely to support operations, with 20 percent of its staff assigned to a network of forward-deployed bases overseas. With the exception of “denied areas” such as the USSR and China, these dispersed technical specialists could be summoned to any part of the world to provide immediate support to an operations officer. If an operation called for concealing a camera, secreting a microphone in the office of a target, or installing a phone tap, the tech could provide it, install it, or fashion a custom version from “off-the-shelf ” parts. If something didn’t work, the tech could repair it. Moreover, if it still did not function, the tech could figure out a “work around” from whatever materials were at hand.
Among newer case officers, the techs were becoming prized for their ingenuity as well as their engineering skills in the field. But there were serious limitations. Many other officers, while not exactly technophobes, did not fully embrace technology. Operations were generally conducted using World War II tradecraft refined by personal experience. When TSD techs were brought in for their expertise or gadgets, their assistance was often not viewed as critical for either the successful day-to-day agent operations or an ops officer’s career. “It was nice to have the techs there when we needed them, but if we didn’t have their gadgets, we still ran the operation,” said one case officer active during the early 1960s. The necessary technologies for miniaturization, low power, and reliable electronics were in their infancy. Both the scientific advances of the 1960s and the leadership of Russelland Dr. Gottlieb would be required before technology and operations would become interdependent.
Russell, who lived for operations, was also one of a handful of senior case operations officers of his generation who understood the potential advantage technology could give to operations. “When you went to one of Russell’s stations overseas, you saw good technical skills meshing with ops. He really sucked the techs dry in terms of wanting to know what they could provide and how it was going to happen,” said one TSD veteran. “A lot of station chiefs literally didn’t want to know that ‘tech stuff,’ but Russell wanted to know it all.”
Over the next four years, the Russell-Gottlieb-Krueger team proved to be an inspired, if unlikely, trio. This combination of a case officer with no scientific experience, a scientist of limited operational experience, and an engineer steeped in Big Technology programs would transform TSD. Eventually, this new organization would play a major role in nearly every significant CIA operation for the remainder of the twentieth century.
Russell wasted no time in exerting his influence on TSD. He conveyed a sense of operational reality and urgency that made the case officer’s concerns for recruiting and handling spies a concern for his engineers, while daily advances in technology began to influence his vision of operations.
However, Russell and TSD faced a problem unrelated to technology, that of the tightly compartmented world of the Agency itself. Although TSD was a “global division,” its technical officers were rarely privy to the details or scope of the operations they supported. Compartmentation sealed off all but the basic facts of an operation to anyone who did not have an absolute need to know. This constraint was of little consequence if the requirement was to secretly photograph a document or prepare a dead drop container. However, with more sophisticated and flexible technology becoming available, the more the techs knew, the better they could match TSD expertise and technology to the operation.
“This was a place where compartmentation and need to know were at odds,” said one case officer. “To perform the task perfectly the tech should know everything. But in our world the techs weren’t allowed to know everything. Compartmentalization is a necessary fact of life.”
Along with this situation, which separated the tech and the case officer, there also existed a subtle cultural divide. In the DDP, the case officer was the star player. The culture of the DDP had evolved from the OSS. The “Ivy League” image that once prompted derision in the press and the “Oh So Social” sobriquet carried over with the former OSS officers who were among the founding members of the CIA. DCI Allen Dulles had an Ivy League background (Princeton, class of 1914) and an association with New York’s powerful white-shoe law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. Richard Helms, later a DCI himself, had attended boarding schools overseas, including the prestigious Swiss prep school Le Rosey, before attending Williams College. OSS head William Donovan, although not from a wealthy family, attended Columbia University (class of 1905) and its law school (class of 1907). DCI William Colby, the son of an army officer, graduated from Princeton and Columbia University Law School. DCI Bill Casey, who graduated from Fordham University, Catholic University School of Social Work, and Brooklyn Law School, represented the exception that proved the rule.
President Lyndon Johnson may have been thinking of the historical characterization of the so-called blue-blooded case officer when he said, “The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.”1
Conversely, TSS and later, TSD, included few famous family names or Ivy League bona fides, with the notable exception of Cornelius “Corney” V. S. Roosevelt (grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt), who served as director of TSS/TSD from 1959 to 1962. The reason for this was quite simple. For the most part, the OSS technical and engineering staff returned to their corporate or university laboratories after the war ended in 1945. By 1951, when Allen Dulles authorized the formation of TSS, the Agency turned to state universities, technical colleges, and institutes, where engineering programs were emphasized, to hire its first wave of technical officers. 2
Typically, these technical recruits had shown a childhood penchant for tinkering that eventually turned into engineering and hard-science degrees. They were often the first or only member of their family to attend college and many came from rural communities in the Midwest and Southwest. They arrived at the CIA seeking technical opportunities and adventure.
It did not take long before these newly minted engineers began delighting in calling operations officers “liberal arts majors.” For engineers, this less than flattering term summed up both a case officer’s educational background and the imprecise, unscientific nature of agent recruiting and handling.
Case officers, for their part, had their own traditions. In theory, spies are acquired through a methodical process of spotting, assessing, developing, recruiting, and handling. All of it was usually done person to person. While living in Switzerland during World War II, Allen Dulles met with agents in his well-appointed study.3 Penkovsky was met and debriefed in hotel rooms. Face-to-face meetings between the agent and case officer were common practice. Agents were briefed, debriefed, and tasked in safe houses and out-of-the-way restaurants over leisurely dinners.
These meetings built rapport, mutual trust, and personal relationships that often approached friendship. Despite the inherent manipulation, deception, and potential for fatal consequences, the handler and spy worked as a team, with the best case officers also playing the role of a psychologist, cheerleader, banker, confidant, or best friend, depending on the needs of the agent.
Given the limited capabilities of most counterintelligence services after World War II, this process worked well until the 1960s. Highly valued spies such as Pyotr Popov and Penkovsky could use commercial cameras, pass film to their handlers via dead drops, receive messages in the form of strings of random numbers over a standard shortwave radio, and decrypt those numbers with OTPs like those used by the French or Polish underground in Occupied Europe.
As a result, case officers were generally passive toward technology’s potential in operations. “We didn’t comprehend what was there [technically], and either took a defensive position of operational arrogance or retreated into a shell of saying, ‘Look, there’s no way I will ever understand what you tech types are doing and if the success of this operation depends on me understanding, then we’re just not going to make it,’” remembers one case officer.
For case officers, lacking a clear understanding of technology meant not grasping its potential, while techs ran the danger of either misapplying technology or failing to capitalize on some special advantage. This attitude was especially frustrating for the eager engineers of TSS seeking insight into what was really needed in the field. Highlighting the separateness between operations and technology was the fact that TSD did not receive space in the new Langley CIA Headquarters building where the DDP operational components resided. Six miles separated TSD’s downtown Washington location from Langley, a distance that precluded the professional lubrication of drop-in meetings, cafeteria luncheon conversations, or office gossip.
Russell and Gottlieb, both with operational experience, understood this divide and undertook the task of bridging it. “Clearly there was a cultural division. No question about that. When Sid Gottlieb came back from Germany in 1959 to head TSD’s research and development work, his approach was, ‘Yes, there is this divide, but it needn’t be there. And TSD has to bridge it, because the DDP won’t,’” explained a TSD engineer. “Gottlieb was right on the mark.” Ultimately, the DDP controlled the operations, the dollars and the manpower, so if TSD was to get the funds and requirements needed to be successful, it had to become part of operations.
One of Gottlieb’s first moves was to bring research and development closer to the techs directly supporting operations.4 Less obvious at the time was the significance of the creation of the Directorate of Research in 1962.5 With this decision, R&D supporting the Big Technology of aerospace and satellite programs became independent from the DDP. TSD remained in the DDP with the single mission of operational support, specifically technical support to stations, case officers, and agents.6
Gottlieb and Russell saw a future in which TSD technology would enable operations through new tradecraft devices and techniques. The Big Technology of satellites and photoreconnaissance had proven successful on a large scale in the relatively predictable environment of space. Now TSD had the opportunity to demonstrate how sophisticated, scaled-down technology could expand the scope of what was possible in the unpredictable environment of street operations.
This ambitious strategy first had to address some immediate and not altogether pleasant realities. Much of the equipment in TSD’s inventory was woefully outdated and the technical staff seemed imbalanced toward technicians at the expense of engineers. As late as 1960, most electronic gear available for field deployment was too big, too cumbersome, too unreliable, too complex, and too power hungry. In the decidedly blunt terminology of one scientist of the day, the equipment was “junk.”
What Russell and Gottlieb had was largely a “craft and special service boutique” for operations. TSD could provide excellent forged documents, quality clandestine printing, and well-made concealments. But that was insufficient to meet the DDP’s demands for conducting clandestine operations against the Soviet Union.
“TSD leadership had two mountains to climb. One was the technology, which was pretty bad,” said a TSD staffer from the era. “For instance, with secret writing, we were issuing systems that Caesar could have used during the Gallic Wars. We used systems that were developed during the First World War. We weren’t taking advantage of post-World War II chemistries; and the opposition, the Soviets, certainly had the capability to detect our existing systems. So, we had to get better technology. Second, we had to convince working level case officers that we had something to contribute. But it [the technology] wasn’t on our shelves, so we’d have to develop the new capabilities and the new equipment across the board.”
In chemistry, Gottlieb’s field, the few academically degreed chemists directing research were trained prior to World War II. Other TSD “chemists” and techs supporting secret writing in the field were former military medics with no professional training. To remedy this problem, Gottlieb and Russell began recruiting university graduates—scientists and engineers, rather than technicians—specifically for R&D. Their strategy was to exploit the current science from university and research centers and package it quickly into viable covert systems.
Russell broke ties with the Agency’s Office of Personnel, TSD’s traditional source of “new hires,” at the urging of his R&D chief, and began sending senior officers to universities to talk to engineers and recruit new graduates. A co-op program was started in which college sophomores and juniors were hired for a summer or school term and put to work in a lab. An instant success, the co-op program offered a view into the newest research at the universities and allowed TSD to assess a potential employee before making a long-term commitment. In a bit of clever bureaucratic maneuvering, the division skirted personnel ceilings by hiring engineers as “contract employees” on two-year contracts. Not counted as permanent CIA staff, they fell outside the personnel ceiling limitation. The contracts could be renewed every two years as long as sufficient funds were available, and TSD always found the dollars.
“I came in as part of Gottlieb’s program to hire these young people with fresh ideas just out of graduate school. I remember sitting in my first SW [secret writing] course. Several of us newly hired chemists started giggling at the 1930s technology the instructor was giving us,” said one chemist. “We’d sneak in a question, ‘Does this d-orbital . . . ?’ The instructor didn’t know the term ‘d-orbital’ [an advanced chemistry term related to the subatomic properties of certain substances, such as crystals and metals].7 I’m picking on one guy on one point, but that illustrates the level on which the chemical technology existed.”
The new hires had a profound impact on TSD’s technology. Young chemists improved formulas and processes for SW that had remained unchanged for decades. The SW chemists referred to themselves as “lemon squeezers” in acknowledgment of one of the oldest SW ingredients—lemon juice.
“In World War II secret messages were prepared with a wooden stick and a little bit of water-based ink,” explained an SW chemist. “The agent would dissolve the ink chemical, stir it around, take a small piece of cotton, wrap it around the end of the stick and dip it in. He had to first steam the paper, then write the message, re-steam the paper, and then press the paper flat. Finally, he had to write a cover message over the top of the secret writing.”
Although not particularly complex, the laborious multistep process required time to complete, and given the limited privacy in many apartments behind the Iron Curtain, was not very practical. “About the time I was hired, we understood the Russians and the British did it a little bit differently and much more securely. My guess is that’s when management finally realized we were far behind the curve in SW chemistry,” said the chemist. “Why are we using this liquid stuff? Why couldn’t we do it dry?”
If the operations officers were not immediately aware of the changes taking place, there were good reasons. TSD had not been moved into CIA’s new Headquarters Building at Langley in 1961 with the other DDP divisions. Rather, in 1965, TSD consolidated many, but not all, of its functions into three buildings, Central, East, and South, at the original CIA complex in Washington, D.C., on E Street on Medicine Hill next to the State Department. The TSD chief and deputy chief occupied offices formerly used by Dulles and other CIA directors. The consolidation improved communications among the techs but required a six-mile trip from South Building to Langley for the techs to meet with case officers.
By the late-1960s, Gottlieb’s focus on hiring engineers and scientists, combined with adequate funding from the DDP and revolutionary technology, had transformed TSD. In audio surveillance and secret writing, the technical advances produced new capabilities to meet technical support requirements in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and much of Asia. The exceptions were China, the Soviet Union, the Soviet Bloc, and Cuba—“denied area operations” countries where direct access to targets was nearly impossible and internal security strict. Yet, outside of the Vietnam War, these were the countries of highest priority for U.S. intelligence. A major initiative to make technology that would work in the toughest environments was demanded.
The Soviet Union presented a special set of operational problems. One involved the very technology that could help operations. The KGB, under its chief Yuri Andropov, fielded one of the most pervasive counterintelligence services imaginable. By virtue of its primary mission “to protect the Revolution,” the KGB regarded the Soviet citizenry, foreigners, and emerging consumer technologies with deep suspicion.
For the KGB, even simple technology in the hands of the public was a potential threat to the government and “state security.” Virtually every typewriter sold in the Soviet Union, for example, had its fonts sampled on a sheet of paper that was then filed away should the need ever arise to trace the origins of a suspicious document. Complex procedures granting access to copy machines in government offices included signed authorizations and meticulously kept logs of the copies produced.8 Even consumer items commonly available in the West, such as Kodak point-and-shoot cameras, electric appliances, and battery-powered transistor radios, could not be purchased in the USSR. A typical Soviet possessing such Western-made items would assuredly draw KGB attention.
For agents to operate in this security-obsessed environment, with its deep suspicion of technology, TSD would need to develop an array of special cameras, communications equipment, concealments, and countersurveillance devices.