No, in spite of this book’s title, it’s not a story about a Russian spy in the CIA’s Moscow Station. It’s something much more engaging—an account of a long-running counterespionage investigation into KGB surveillance technology at the US Embassy in Moscow. An investigation that brought into focus the bitter, long-running war within the American intelligence community. The former head of the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate, Eric Haseltine, does himself proud with this eye-opening exposé of the CIA and NSA’s dirty laundry. Read this book, and you’ll never again look on our country’s vaunted spy agencies without an appreciation for their built-in weaknesses.
A jaw-dropping Cold War spy story
Haseltine held executive-level posts in the US intelligence community from 2002 to 2007. The Spy in Moscow Station is not his story but that of the late Charles Gandy, a superstar NSA counterintelligence officer who played the central role in this drama from 1976 to 1984. Haseltine interviewed Gandy and then dug deeply into NSA and CIA internal correspondence and the cable traffic between Moscow and Washington.
Haseltine builds his account around those sources, quoting extensively from the cables and memos written during those years. It’s a jaw-dropping story that reveals how top CIA and State Department officials permitted the KGB to hear top-secret conversations within the Embassy and print out copies of cables to Washington and other sensitive documents for six long years—all to avoid the embarrassment of admitting that the KGB’s surveillance technology was better than the CIA’s.
The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy’s Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat by Eric Haseltine (2019) 288 pages ★★★★☆
Asking for help from the CIA’s archenemy
Gandy became involved in 1978 when Gus Hathaway, Chief of Station for the CIA in Moscow, took note of the repeated loss of CIA assets in the Soviet government. One after another had been exposed, and some of them executed. At the same time, some of their CIA handlers were exposed as well and sent home as Persona Non Grata. Hathaway suspected that KGB officers had planted bugs in the CIA station and the Embassy which had led to the losses. He arranged for the CIA’s bureaucratic archenemy, the NSA, to send Charles Gandy, their top counterintelligence officer, to investigate. (Gandy held a civilian rank that was the military equivalent of major general.) And he went to work immediately after hitting the ground in Moscow.
Three yawning gaps in US security: an exposé of the CIA
Gandy quickly found three gaping holes in the Embassy’s and the CIA Station’s security:
- Scores of locally hired staff had free run of the facilities. They were all, or virtually all, officers or assets of the KGB. And many were in ideal positions to plant or service bugs even in the most sensitive places.
- The Soviets were beaming high-power microwaves into the Embassy compound from an adjoining building. Gandy knew that this represented a way for the KGB to communicate with bugs implanted there. The frequency was far too high to be used for jamming American communications.
- One of the Embassy’s walls abutted a Soviet apartment building. And between the two structures, but clearly within US territory, was a huge, non-working chimney that had no discernible function other than to serve as a way for the KGB to monitor conversations within the Embassy and the CIA Station.
Despite the fact that Gandy was the reigning US expert on surveillance technology, the CIA had a glib explanation for every one of these three threats. There were no bugs in the Embassy or the station, the CIA insisted. They’d detected none even after repeated efforts to do so. The microwaves from the Soviet side were merely to jam US communications. They denied Gandy’s assertion that the frequency was too high for that purpose. And there was nothing to fear from the chimney, because the CIA had detected no bugs or other equipment planted there. Rarely had there been such blatant evidence of inter-service rivalry.
Denial with real-world consequences
This long-running debate was no academic exercise. It had dramatic real-world consequences. Because for six years, from 1978 to 1984, the KGB read all the cable traffic from Moscow to Washington and Langley and eavesdropped on many of the most sensitive meetings involving high US officials, including the ambassador and the station chief. Those were the years of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage crisis, the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of William Casey as Director of the CIA, the insurrections in Central America, and top-level nuclear disarmament negotiations between the US and the USSR. The Embassy in Moscow was directly involved in many of these events.
Soviet technology that shamed the Americans
Unfortunately, the KGB surveillance technology was so good, the bugs so tiny and beautifully hidden, that it took Gandy months to prove his case. And then, even though he had done so, the CIA and the State Department continued to contest his findings for years on end. The KGB couldn’t possibly be doing what Gandy said they were doing. Their technology was years behind that of the CIA. His evidence didn’t mean what it meant.
But how could the KGB be so far ahead of the CIA? Haseltine offers the answer. In the United States, the most talented scientific minds gravitated toward top universities or private operations such as Bell Labs. Many went on to win Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry. Not so in the USSR. There, the most promising young scientists were steered into the military, the KGB, or the GRU.
The Spy in Moscow Station is one of the most important books I’ve come across in many years of reading widely about the CIA and espionage generally. It’s more than a simple exposé of the CIA, because the implications are far worse. Haseltine makes a sobering case that bureaucratic turf wars and overconfidence can have dreadful consequences. And they’ve done so to the detriment of American security for many years.
About the author
“Eric Haseltine is chairman of the Board of the US Technology Leadership Council (USTLC). He is a technologist who has worked in senior-executive positions in both industry and the United States intelligence community.” His experience as Director of Research for the National Security Agency from 2002 to 2005 and as associate director for Science and Technology, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, from 2005 to 2007 form the basis on which he wrote this book. Haseltine was awarded the coveted National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal for his work in the intelligence community. He is the author of six books on diverse topics. But he seems uniquely well qualified to have written this exposé of the CIA.
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