SPECIAL EDITION: U.S. Bugging Operation Against Soviets

by Zach Dorfman

Recently, I obtained a set of declassified 1980s intelligence files from Poland’s cold war-era archives. The files detailed a Soviet operation to identify and remove a cornucopia of bugs placed in Russian diplomatic facilities across the United States. 

The document — written in Russian and almost certainly produced by the KGB, unlike the other Polish-language files in the tranche of documents — provides a meticulous pictorial account of the ways in which the U.S. spy services sought to technically surveil the Russians on American soil. The file offers an unprecedented, stunning — if dated — look at these efforts to eavesdrop on Russian government activities within the U.S.

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The file details a number of bugs found at Soviet diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, as well as in a Russian government-owned vacation compound, apartments used by Russia personnel, and even Russian diplomats’ cars. 

And the bugs were everywhere: 

• encased in plaster in an apartment closet; 
• behind electrical and television outlets; 
• bored into concrete bricks and threaded into window frames; 
• inside wooden beams and baseboards;
• stashed within a building’s foundation itself; 
• surreptitiously attached to security cameras; 
• wired into ceiling panels and walls; 
• and secretly implanted into the backseat of cars and in their window panels, instrument panels, and dashboards. 

It’s an impressive — and impressively thorough — effort by U.S. counterspies... 

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“The number of bugs is useful as an indication that this is a sustained operation over years,” a former U.K. intelligence official with experience conducting technical operations told me. (The official requested anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence techniques.) The sheer variety in where U.S. counterspies placed the bugs shows a great deal of “creativity” on their part, the former U.K. official said. While the bugging of cars and power outlets is considered “fairly standard,” the former official added, U.S. spies cleverly inserted bugs in more unusual locations like window frames...

It's unknown why the Soviets declined to publicize all the bugs they found within their U.S.-based facilities. The Russians ripped them out from their hiding spots, ostensibly preventing them from feeding the U.S. disinformation through the listening devices and trackers they identified.

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The likelier explanation is that the KGB knew that U.S. diplomatic facilities in the Soviet Union were bugged to hell — including, at certain points, with listening devices activated by blasting American facilities with microwaves. The use of this technique by the Soviets, which some U.S. officials believed sickened those exposed to it, became a serious diplomatic issue in the 1970s between the two superpowers. more

(Kevin) A friend of mine, now deceased, was one of the CIA technical specialists during this time period who developed and planted these devices. He was prohibited from discussing the actual devices and placement operations even after he retired. However, he did write a "fictitious" story which details a typical bugging operation. Corporate security directors especially should read... The Attack on Axnan Headquarters: An Espionage Operation

Spy History: KGB Spy in 1961 Used X-Ray to Crack U.S. Top-Secret Lock

In late 1961 [Robert Lee Johnson] received the top-secret clearance and was admitted into the vault as a clerk. At long last the KGB was in. […] Over the following weeks the infiltration began in earnest as he successfully copied the vault keys using clay molds supplied by KGB operatives. 

In October of 1961 he received a specially manufactured X-ray device from Moscow that he was instructed to place over the final lock in the vault; KGB technicians could then deduce what combination unlocked the vault by studying the cogs inside the locking mechanism...

On 15 December 1962, Johnson accessed the vault for the first time and looted its contents. The operation, extensively rehearsed beforehand, went exactly as planned and by 03:15 the following morning some of America’s most sensitive cryptographic and military information⁠—some of it classified higher than top secret⁠—was on its way to Moscow. more

New York’s KGB Espionage Museum Will Soon Go Up for Auction

It’s a sad fact that as the coronavirus crisis stretches on, many museums and galleries won’t be able to survive the economic crunch, and will likely be forced to sell off their collections. 

However, this also means that vast and unusual troves of items will be redistributed to the public, which is the case with an upcoming Julien’s Auctions sale of the entirety of the items within the KGB Espionage Museum in New York City. 

Set to take place on February 13, 2021 at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills and online simultaneously, the auction will include the world’s largest collection of authentic KGB spy equipment dating back to the Cold War...

“The KGB Espionage Museum’s collection of Cold War era items is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world,” Martin Nolan, the Executive Director of Julien’s Auctions, told Observer on Thursday. “We anticipate the auction will attract a wide range of collectors from museum curators to historians to James Bond fans, particularly in this election year." more

The Crazy Story of How Soviet Russia Bugged an American Embassy’s Typewriters

...All of the electronics at the embassy—some 10 tons of equipment—was securely shipped back to the United States. Every piece was disassembled and X-rayed.

After tens of thousands of fruitless X-rays, a technician noticed a small coil of wire inside the on/off switch of an IBM Selectric typewriter. Gandy believed that this coil was acting as a step-down transformer to supply lower-voltage power to something within the typewriter. Eventually he uncovered a series of modifications that had been concealed so expertly that they had previously defied detection.

A solid aluminum bar, part of the structural support of the typewriter, had been replaced with one that looked identical but was hollow. Inside the cavity was a circuit board and six magnetometers. The magnetometers sensed movements of tiny magnets that had been embedded in the transposers that moved the typing “golf ball” into position for striking a given letter. more

Granny Was A Spy

UK - In 1999, an 87-year-old British woman held a press conference in front of her home to announce that for nearly four decades, she’d worked as a spy for the Soviet Union.

In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Union’s longest-serving British spy...

In 1979, she and her husband—who knew about her spying and disapproved—visited Moscow so the Soviet Union could award her the Order of the Red Banner (she accepted the honorary award, but turned down the financial reward).

How did Norwood get away with it for so long? more

Infographic - Check Your Phone for Spies

There is a lot which can be done to check your phone for spyware. 
Everything from following instructions in a book to a full forensic inspection.

In the meantime, you can start with this...

You can find a slightly larger version here.

Yet another Spy Museum Opens

The KGB Spy Museum (in New York City) features the largest collection of USSR KGB espionage artifacts.

The KGB, an initialism for КГБ Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti translated in English as Committee for State Security, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, KGB always wanted to compete with the CIA in all possible ways.

Interactive spy museum presents to visitors that era special technique: spy cameras, KGB concealment devices, secret recorders, crypto and cipher machines, spy radios, secure telephones...

The museum exhibition, much of which is only now being made public, presents a never-before-seen collection of items covering the activities of prominent KGB agents and revealing the strategies and methods that underlay many of history’s top secret espionage operations. more

Spy Collector Alert: Soviet Spy-Camera Auction

On July 12, Aston’s Auctioneers of Dudley, England (about halfway between Liverpool and London), will feature the Russian Collection auction, 25 lots of rare and unusual cameras collected from the Cold War days, when Russia merely constituted much of the U.S.S.R. and Germany was still separated into two states.

“To find as many [cameras] in one place is pretty unusual,” says Tim Goldsmith, photographic consultant to Aston’s. The unnamed source for the auction had been collecting Soviet spy cameras for 30 to 40 years, as far back as when smuggling anything of this sort in or out of the Soviet Bloc would have needed spycraft itself. “Obviously, that’s when East Germany was still completely surrounded,” says Goldsmith. Until recently, finding such a trove in the West was nearly miraculous. “And it’s unheard of in the U.K., though it’s dribbling out since the whole universe discovered these things on the internet."

Aston’s hosts three camera auctions a year, yet this one, as Goldsmith put it, “has fired everyone’s imagination.” more

Fred Kovaleski, International Tennis-Playing CIA Spy Dies

Just coincidence?

Fred Kovaleski, whose international tennis-playing career became his cover in the 1950s while he was working as a spy for the C.I.A., died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

Mr. Kovaleski was well into his career on the tennis circuit, having played at Wimbledon and in tournaments abroad and in the United States, when he joined the C.I.A. in 1951 and began training in spycraft at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Va.

Within three years, his ability to play tennis and his Russian-language training with the C.I.A. became essential when Yuri Rastvorov, a K.G.B. lieutenant colonel and avid tennis player, defected to the United States. more

Spy Demise? You Decide.

Russian intelligence officer, Aleksandr Poteyev, who was sentenced for treason in absentia by Russia after blowing the cover of a spy ring in the US, has reportedly died. Moscow, however, is not confirming the news or taking the defector of its wanted list.  more

The 'Spy in a Bag' Case Continues

Gareth Williams was blackmailed with 'staged photos in Las Vegas hotel room' by Russian spies, claims former KGB agent...

A former KGB major says he believes Gareth Williams was murdered by Russian hit men as the MI6 spy refused to become a double agent, even after they blackmailed him by taking compromising, staged photographs.

The former major and intelligence officer Boris Karpichkov, who was exiled from Russia and now lives in the UK with a new identity, told his version of events to The Daily Mail. He claims to have a source high up in Russian intelligence services.

Mr William’s dead body was found locked in a bag in his Pimlico flat in 2010. He has been a codebreaker at GCHQ but at the time was on secondment to MI6 at their offices in Vauxhall, London. more

The Top 5 Soviet Bugs & Wiretaps During the Cold War

In an interview Leonid Shebarshin, a former head of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB said, “Our good fortune will only be made known after we suffer a major defeat. Our real success will be made known no earlier than 50 years down the line.” Successful spy operations are already a thing of the past, with modern-day intelligence seeming to consist of a series of failures...

1. Operation “Information of Our Times”
2. The wiretapping of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Tehran
3. A bug in the U.S. coat of arms (The Great Seal Bug)
4. Bugs in Moscow and beyond
5. The Soviet Union’s Cuban ears
(more)

Economic Espionage - NYC Russian Banker Arrested by FBI

Federal prosecutors arrested a Russian banker in New York on Monday and charged him as a spy, accusing him and two others of secretly gathering information about the New York Stock Exchange, U.S. energy resources and sanctions against Moscow.

Prosecutors described clandestine meetings and coded communications between the banker and his handlers, one of whom worked as a trade representative of the Russian Federation in New York, the other as an attaché to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.

The spycraft alleged in the complaint reads like a throwback to the Cold War. Yet the alleged operatives’ target was more modern: economic intelligence... 

The most interesting part...
Mr. Buryakov suggested they ask about the NYSE’s use of exchange-traded funds, potential limits on the use of automated high-frequency trading systems... NYSE spokesman declined to comment.
(more)

• The movie Blackhat illustrates market manipulation, and why it would interest them.
• Classic spycraft is alive and well. It ain't all IT-based.
• Nice job, FBI!

Before There Was Snowden There Was Mitrokhin

The papers spent years hidden in a milk churn beneath a Russian dacha and read like an encyclopedia of Cold War espionage.

Original documents from one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history — a who's who of Soviet spying — were released Monday after being held in secret for two decades.

The files smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by senior KGB official Vasili Mitrokhin describe sabotage plots, booby-trapped weapons caches and armies of agents under cover in the West — the real-life inspiration for the fictional Soviet moles in "The Americans" TV series.

In reality, top-quality spies could be hard to get. The papers reveal that some were given Communist honors and pensions by a grateful USSR, but others proved loose-lipped, drunk or unreliable.

Intelligence historian Christopher Andrew said the vast dossier, released by the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge University, was considered "the most important single intelligence source ever" by British and American authorities.

Mitrokhin was a senior archivist at the KGB's foreign intelligence headquarters — and a secret dissident. For more than a decade he secretly took files home, copied them in longhand and then typed and collated them into volumes. He hid the papers at his country cottage, or dacha, some stuffed into a milk churn and buried.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin traveled to a Baltic state — which one has never been confirmed — and took a sample of his files to the U.S. Embassy, only to be turned away. So he tried the British embassy, where a junior diplomat sat him down and asked, "Would you like a cup of tea?"

"That was the sentence that changed his life," said Andrew.

Smuggled out of Russia, Mitrokhin spent the rest of his life in Britain under a false name and police protection, dying in 2004 at 81. (more)

Today in Eavesdropping History

1964 - American officials have discovered a network of 40 microphones buried for 11 years deep in the walls of four floors of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the State Department said today [May 19]. ‘‘It must be assumed that at least some of them were in operating condition when discovered,’’ said a State Department statement. State Department officials described the discovery as the ‘‘worst case’’ of ‘‘bugging’’ found so far in U.S. posts behind the Iron Curtain. They said they were found in the ‘‘eighth, ninth and tenth floors and in apartments below.’’ Ambassador Foy D. Kohler’s office is on the ninth floor of the buff-colored, ten-story structure on Tchaikovsky Street. The offices of the U.S. military attachés are on the tenth floor. (more)

Spy vs Guy (short movie)

A retired Russian spy hunts down sensitive technology after it falls into unsuspecting hands. Well done, cute, improbable, with humorous moments.

Jalta Hotel opens its 1950s anti-nuclear bunker and listening post to the public

If you were a VIP who stayed at Prague’s Jalta Hotel between 1958 and 1989, your room was bugged and your phone was tapped. Behind its attractive 1950s façade, the hotel has been hiding a secret – there was a 24-hour underground spying operation that listened in on guests.

From an anti-nuclear bunker 20 meters below Wenceslas Square, communist officials monitored the hotel’s foreign guests with a large bank of listening equipment that only a select few ever knew existed. None of the hotel staff were allowed to go into or even talk about the basement. And while communism ended in 1989, the bunker remained in the possession of the Ministry of Defense until 1998, when they finally declassified its existence and turned it over, as is, to the hotel.

Anti-nuclear Bunker and Cold War Museum
When: Mon. and Wed. or Tue. and Thu (alternating weeks) 5–8 p.m.
Where: Jalta Hotel, Wenceslas Square 45/818
Reservations required: call 222 822 111 or e-mail concierge@hoteljalta.com
Tickets: 75 Kč or 3 euros

Protesters Capture Government Surveillance Van

The Security Service of Ukraine, the nation’s intelligence agency, have its white mini-van back, courtesy of the Berkut anti-riot police officers.

Demonstrators seized the van during a protest rally on the evening of Nov. 25, suspecting that it contained sophisticated equipment for eavesdropping on telephone conversations of protest leaders.

The taking of the van prompted clashes last night between police and protesters. After a 30-minute standoff, punctuated by fighting, the demonstrators recovered evidence from the van and the police reclaimed it.

Opposition lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytsky posted a picture of a passport, car tag numbers and what he said were technical listening devices found in the van on his Facebook page. Opposition leaders promised to analyze the recordings and release their findings. 


 
Equipment believed to be listening devices found in the white mini-van that SBU officers were using while parked near European Square.

That left officials trying to explain what the van was doing at the protest site...

 

License plates that protesters say they found inside a van used by SBU officers that was parked near European Square...

According to eyewitnesses, protesters overtook the van, prompting hundreds of riot police to descend on the scene, triggering the violent clashes. An SBU officer in the van eventually escaped with police help, while the leaders of the demonstration took to the stage in triumph after police backed off about 9 p.m. (more) (video footage)

A Brief Spy Technology Retrospective

Government surveillance is nothing new. The United States started tracking telegraphic information entering into and exiting the country in 1945. The technology associated with spying, however, has become much more advanced. History shows a steady evolution of the ways governments secretly gather information.

More info about The Thing.

"Spying has gone on throughout history," says Peter Earnest, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and executive director of the International Spy Museum. "Since globalization, spying has increased because countries want to know what other countries are doing.The discipline of intelligence has already increased a great deal in the post-Cold War world."

Briefcase recorders in the 1950s led to transmitters hidden in shoes in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, bugs hidden in tree stumps intercepted communication signals. Devices continued to become more compact. In the 1980s, tiny transmitters with microphones were hidden in pens.

The advent of the Internet ushered in the Web bug, which tracked who viewed websites or e-mails and provided the IP address of an e-mail recipient. In 2013, drones and computer programs continue to develop as surveillance tools.

So how does the future look for spying?

"It looks good," Earnest said. (more, with photos of spy gear)

10 Most Audacious Eavesdropping Plots

Operation Ivy Bells
At the height of the cold war, the National Security Agency, CIA and the US Navy collaborated to tap into underwater communication lines used by the Soviet Union. 

Operation Stopwatch
This joint operation between the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service was again an attempt to tap into communications by the Soviet Military.

The Cambridge Spies
Rather than relying on modern eavesdropping, this operation used old fashioned infiltration.

Click to enlarge.

The Gunman Project
During 1976, the KGB managed to install miniaturized eavesdropping equipment and transmitters inside 16 IBM Selectric Typewriters used by staff at the US embassy in Moscow and consulate in Leningrad. 

The Bundesnachrichtendienst Trojan Horse Affair
Germany may have been the victim off NSA eavesdropping, but its own Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, has also engaged in such activities.

The MI6 Spy Rock
In a modern version of the dead letter drop, British spies working out of the embassy in Russia used a transmitter concealed in an artificial rock to pass classified data. 

Acoustic Kitty
Acoustic Kitty was a top secret 1960s CIA project attempting to use cats in spy missions, intended to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. (more)

Moles in Berlin

In 1956, American and British agents tunneled into East German territory in order to tap a telephone line. This allowed them to eavesdrop on important conversations between Red Army leaders and the KGB. A segment of the tunnel can now be visited. (more)

U2
An international diplomatic crisis erupted in May 1960 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) shot down an American U-2 spy plane in Soviet air space and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Confronted with the evidence of his nation's espionage, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to admit to the Soviets that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been flying spy missions over the USSR for several years. (more)

Animal Spies
A former CIA trainer reveals, the U.S. government deployed nonhuman operatives—ravens, pigeons, even cats—to spy on cold war adversaries. “We never found an animal we could not train.” (more)