The SPY in Moscow Station

One review I just read of the book “The Spy in Moscow Station '' by Eric Hazeltine, advises the reader of a spoiler alert and then reports, “The Spy” is not human as if somehow the title infers that to be the case.  In the end, the spy turns out to be a highly technical listening device implanted in the US Embassy in Moscow (Moscow Station) in place to extract keystrokes from the IBM Selectric typewriter in the US  ambassador to the USSR’s office. So not human. The implanted device was in the typewriter the ambassador would  use to type letters for the State Department.  Not to spoil that particular reviewer's fun (He was a former CIA muckety muck), but that is exactly what spies do.  It’s strange that he would say such a thing. Technical gadgets are a must.  So there should be no spoiler…I guess that reviewers' experience was at the CIA, where HUMINT and the use of human assets to provide intelligence is the game.  He also felt Hazeltine was grinding an axe about the CIA sometimes not taking the NSA seriously.   My point is simply that in order for those implants to be in the embassy, and be useful, it took an army of human spies (not one spy), inside the fence, to put them there, and be in  place to make the extraction through the operation of the technology. It’s a team effort.  That army of spies committed years of effort to keep the device alive and functioning so they could meticulously funnel out keystrokes from a typewriter.  Think about that for a second.  As I type this book review, should someone be recording keystrokes, they would have to listen (record) for hours and hours, perhaps days, over which I will start and stop, and backspace, and cut and paste, etc.  Also, there were 250 IBM Selectrics in Moscow Station at the time.  Implants were found in about 16 of them.   It’s eye-watering to think about the scale of effort the Soviets committed to this endeavor and it was a watershed moment for the United States when our government finally learned the extent of the breach and conceded the French were right.  The French government tipped off the US that the Soviets might be doing something along these technical lines since they discovered a similar implant in their communication gear.    I first read about the Gunman Project, the name given to the search for this particular implant, in Nicole Perlroth’s book, “This is How They Tell Me the World Ends' ' so I recognized what was happening in Haseltine’s book almost immediately.  Of course, I said to myself, this is the IBM Selectric implant fiasco.  Then I had to read the next 242 pages to get to the punch line. Perlroth’s chapter on the Gunman Project is less than 10 pages.  So Hazeltine reports a lot more on the technical side than Perlroth describes, most of which, however, comes from an academic paper written by Sharon A. Maneki in 2012 entitled, “The Gunman Project”.  This was written for the Center for Cryptologic History at the National Security Agency.  Hazeltine also references this paper but also conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Charles Gandy, whose involvement in the project was not reported on by Maneki, perhaps for security reasons back in 2012.

A few caveats up front.  My boss recommended this book.  When your boss recommends a book  two things apply.  One, you should definitely read it.  Two, you should generally agree with your boss's perspective. My boss made a few mea culpa’s about the book, because he’s a nice guy, and acquiesced away from responsibility should I not like it.  It’s my fault if you don’t like it.  He knows I write critical book reviews and can be a dick when a book doesn’t rise to my level of satisfaction.  Also, my boss is an expert in the subject matter.  So if I didn’t like it…perhaps it would be because I did not understand it.  Never fear, I liked the book so here is my positive review.

There are three distinct aspects to  this book which are unique.  

First, Eric Haseltine was a former director of research at NSA.  He held that position for three years in the early 2000s just after 9/11.  This is discovered early in the introduction by Gen Michael Hayden.  Gen Hayden hired Hazeltine from Disney to spark innovation at the NSA.  Whether that happened or not is debatable.  This book, however, isn’t about Haseltine’s time at the NSA, although it’s an interesting discussion point given the seemingly controversial action related to his being hired.  There was a lot of talk in the community that the US Government had hired the Disney Imagineer.  It turns out, the only thing I’ve found that this Imagineer accomplished was to influence the seating arrangement of analysts who sit on the Ops floor of various intelligence centers.  I’ve truly discovered nothing else.   

Second, this is a book about political relationships inside the intelligence community, in particular the rivalry between the NSA and the CIA as the NSA struggled to come to grips with its charter.  This is the axe the other reviewer from the CIA thinks Hazeltine is grinding.   This rivalry still exists today which is a huge detriment to the country.  Hazeltine, as an outsider, was in a key position to observe this tremendous power struggle.   But we all know about the power struggle.  It’s never been a mystery and occurred as soon as the NSA was established.   I think generally speaking, the NSA is an organization whose existence is highly dubious…their technical prowess exists elsewhere. This may seem like a controversial statement but the NSA is the organization that continuously gives intelligence a bad name for having the means for spying on the American public.  To counter this dubious side of the NSA, the intelligence they collect is locked behind legions of lawyers trying to keep the lid on potential missteps that could lead to violations of the constitution (inadvertent spying on Americans).  This lock down of intelligence for legal purposes thus prevents vital intelligence from making it into the hands of the warfighters who actually need it.  Undoubtedly an objective of Hazeltine’s work was to highlight the ineffectiveness of a government at odds with itself. I also personally disagree with the NSA’s belief that they are in a better position to inform the President.  The CIA is absolutely correct.  Technical collection is meaningless without context and it requires human analysts to provide context.  This will never change.

Third, this is a book about The Gunman Project, which reports on the technical implants I mentioned above  in the US Embassy in Moscow that were exposed by Charles Gandy.  We can argue their value, but the Soviets sunk untold resources into creating the implant and operating it for perhaps a decade.  Maybe they debatably gained nothing,  that is short sighted.  They learned how to do it, and they learned it could be done.  Tradecraft is everything. Also, the only reason we pursued the implant was because the French government found an implant of their own in one of their networks and tipped off the United States to be on the lookout.  I like that Charles Gandy gets the credit for all of this thanks to Hazeltine.  He was left out of the previous history on this topic.

Perlroth never mentions Charles Gandy.  Gandy could also be called the spy (or counterspy) in Moscow Station.  He uncovered almost everything necessary to act in 1978 but then failed to get the Country to act on what he discovered for another six years…not until the intervention of Neely, who went behind his leadership’s back, directly to President Ronald Regan to secure the funding and resources, to start project Gunman, and find the leak in the embassy.  Thus, heretofore, Neely got the credit for Gunman, when much much more of the credit belongs to Gandy.

I think Hazeltine gets the politics correct, and definitely corrects history with regard to Gandy, but it’s not clear he fully understands the technology he was describing.   He continuously refers to signals known as TUMS as microwave flooding.  He totally misunderstands the nature of these signals and why they were there, and wildly, and incorrectly, speculates about their intended use.  

Gandy rediscovers the use by the Soviets of a signal called TUMS (technically unidentifiable Moscow Signals)…which amount to directing microwave radiation in the direction of the embassy.  This signal is largely and incorrectly speculated about by Hazeltine as a means to cause vibrations in certain materials which may themselves resonate with the possibility of carrying information, such as voice vibrations, out of the spaces that they flood.   He doesn’t really understand the technology behind what he’s writing about.  Also, this technique would never work or many reasons.  Regardless, many individuals still seem to carry around the belief in magic, just like a belief in aliens. (Gandy seems to believe this is real-or at least led Hazeltine to believe it's real)   OK, fine, let our adversaries chase their tail trying to develop that kind of attack.  Good luck.  However, more important to the point of microwave flooding,  why the United States permits the Soviets to flood US Sovereign territory with microwave energy, regardless of its purported innocuous or nefarious nature, is beyond me.  One need only boil water in a microwave oven to understand that we shouldn’t put biological systems in an environment and allow anyone to pump in directed radio waves of any frequency, regardless of intent. If you disagree, feel free to rig your microwave oven to turn on with the door open, and stand in front of it for a pinch.  (Don't do that)

The staff at the Embassy in Moscow discovered a chimney in the middle of their building that didn’t end at a fireplace.  I was just an open vertical tunnel in the middle of the building.  The CIA brings in Gandy from the NSA to investigate what’s going on. In the chimney they find a Yagi antenna (think old style TV antenna on the roof of your house) suspended by cables attached to a box of electronics pointed in the direction of the ambassador's office. Gandy discovered this on his first trip to Moscow station in the late 70’s.  Why this didn’t change things at the embassy is a mystery to everyone.  They brought him in.  They found something.  They didn’t look further.  The guy at the CIA who was in charge, who brought Gandy in, literally did nothing.  Later, he would rise in rank at the CIA and is one of their most decorated and experienced leaders in CIA history, a legend, in fact.  This makes no sense.  So…regardless of what was reported in this book, other things that are still classified, seem to have been a foot.  We may never know the true story.

Eventually Gandy get’s a receiver hooked up to the subject antenna and hears clicks.  Well Virginia, Bob is definitely your Uncle, but everyone but Gandy decided there was no Santa Claus.  It’s another six years before Project Gunman is started based on the tip from the French, the US secretly empties the embassy of every shred of electronics, and the search for a bug begins in earnest.  The search reveals the purpose of the original antenna left in the chimney.  It’s use was to record keystrokes from the implants in the typewriters. The clicking that Gandy had heard.  

Hazeltine might be off on tech but he is spot on with regard to the failure of the US to act on Gandy’s discoveries and the politics that lay behind the inability to act. 

In the end, the most powerful lesson from this book, regardless of whether the technology disclosed evidence that condemned Soviet assets to death, or if anything of value ever came out of the Soviet intelligence operation, Gen Hayden captures the message in his introduction.  He delivers it  quite  succinctly when he says, “The US cannot afford to underestimate the inventiveness and determination of highly motivated adversaries, nor can we underestimate the damage we do to ourselves when we fight each other responding to such adversaries.”

This is an important book.  Everyone in this business should know this story well.