A Secret Life (13 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
Forden’s first CIA assignment was on the Czech desk where, as a JOT, he helped support worldwide operations against Czech targets. In September 1956, Forden was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, as a junior case officer. While there, Sally studied German and worked as a translator, and their first daughter, Sara, was born. In January 1961, Forden was reassigned to the German desk at Langley.
He volunteered next for a Latin American assignment after he heard there were some State Department cover slots available. He was accepted―and only then was told that he would have to serve in “non-official” capacity, a riskier status than diplomatic cover. The CIA had persuaded American companies to allow officers to work secretly as employees overseas, but the officers first had to “resign” from the CIA to take such private jobs and had no diplomatic immunity if they were arrested.
Forden “resigned” and went to work for a New York consulting firm that had reopened an office in Buenos Aires after the CIA agreed to subsidize its cost and the hiring of Forden as its single employee. He spent two years in Argentina, assisting in CIA operations. He and Sally also had their second child, a son named Daniel. But the work was slower paced than he expected, and in 1964, when asked if he would replace Bill Donnelly as Chief of Station Warsaw, Forden accepted.
Forden returned to Washington, where he was “rehired” by the CIA. Over the next ten months, he immersed himself in intensive Polish-language study at the Foreign Service Institute in the basement of a Rosslyn, Virginia, apartment building. There he met Ron Estes, an officer who was learning Czech before becoming Prague Station Chief.
In the spring of 1965, Forden and Estes began three weeks of training at CIA headquarters to prepare for assignment in a denied area. It was a propitious time in CIA history, with some creative officers developing new methods to communicate securely with agents.
Until that time, the preferred method of communicating in denied areas was through a “dead drop,” typically a small place, such as a crevice in a stone wall, a crack behind a mailbox, or a spot on the ground where a message could be left. The “sticks and bricks” staff was adept at hollowing out stones or even fashioning a rock of epoxy, which could be weighted down and used to conceal a message. Such techniques carried great risks, as Forden and Estes learned. A package might be found by someone else or sit unattended for days. Dead drops were also one-way transactions―messages were left or received―and they involved a complicated series of signals that could place a source in jeopardy.
A CIA officer who was to “fill” or “load” a dead drop would, for example, make a chalk mark, raise a window shade, or move a flowerpot on a porch, to signal that a package would be left for an agent. Then, after the agent retrieved the package, he would leave an “unload” signal. These actions created a thread that tied the officer and the agent, and if at any stage the process was observed, the agent’s cover could be blown.
A second method of communication was the clandestine mailing, in which CIA officers sent ordinary letters to agents under their actual name. Such letters contained innocuous text as well as additional writing in invisible ink. But there were closely held horror stories at the CIA about officers being observed as they mailed letters. In one case, a CIA officer serving under State Department cover in an Eastern bloc capital dropped a letter to an agent in a mailbox across the street from the Soviet Embassy. The letter was intercepted, and the agency’s source was arrested and executed.
Another time, an officer in a denied area left the American Embassy and walked around for about an hour to be sure that he was not being followed. He then returned to the vicinity of the embassy. On his way back, he dropped a letter into a mailbox as he passed through a park near the embassy. Once again, the agent to whom the letter was addressed was arrested and executed. Later, after the CIA mapped the officer’s route, it discovered that he had been free of surveillance until the last minute. Had he mailed the letter anywhere else, there would have been no problem. But the park near the embassy was a surveillance-gathering point, and he tripped the wire.
Learning from each tragic mistake, CIA officers preparing to serve in denied areas began to innovate. One major advance in tradecraft was the development of the “brush contact,” which is credited largely to Haviland Smith, who served as the station chief in Prague from 1958 to 1960. Smith, who was about thirty, was followed constantly in Prague by the MV, the Czech secret police. Smith, who had played for the Dartmouth College ice hockey team in the era before face masks, had a goalie’s power of concentration and began to study the surveillance like a science. He noted that MV agents who trailed him tended to conduct their surveillance in random patterns. He would be driving around Prague in his 1958 Chevy, clearly identifiable with his American diplomatic plates and feeling quite alone, and the MV would suddenly appear on his tail. Smith concluded that the MV used random patterns to keep him from anticipating their moves. His first instinct was to try to elude them as he drove through Prague, whose serpentine streets, unlike Warsaw’s, had survived the war intact. But Smith soon discovered that the minute he lost the MV agents, they descended on him “like a house on fire.” However counterintuitive it might seem, the lesson he took from this experience was that rather than try to elude opposition surveillance, officers should develop rigid patterns of activity―driving, walking, shopping―and become as predictable as possible. The goal was to lull the surveillance agents into a mistaken sense of security. “What you don’t want to do,” he explained to colleagues, “is establish random patterns, because random patterns have them on edge all the time.”
Smith wanted the MV to believe that when he left the American Embassy at 10:30 P.M., to take his Czech babysitter to her home, he could be expected to go and return by the same route. After a few months, the tails of the MV agents became less frequent. Eventually, he found he could be as much as five minutes late on his return. If he ran later, though, the MV would be on him again the next time he went out. He began to build other patterns into his routine, such as getting a haircut on Thursday morning at ten o’clock once a month.
Smith also noticed that when he was in Prague, the MV often had four agents follow him―two behind him and two across the street. Smith began leaving the embassy at lunchtime to go shopping. He found that if he walked along a street and turned right, he created a gap in which the agents trailing him would lose sight of him for a few seconds, and those across the street for even longer. Smith promoted his concept within the CIA―do not elude surveillance; accept it as a way of life. One of his absolutes, he liked to say, was that “when you think you’re probably not under surveillance, you are probably in more danger than at any other time.”
Smith moved to Germany for the CIA in 1960. He found that when he entered East Berlin, he could not identify the surveillance as he could in Prague. He tried to create predictable patterns, but was unable to determine whether he was being trailed. Either the agents were too elusive, or they were not following him at all. But he still acted as if he were always being watched and operated “in the gaps.” He found mailboxes that were located near street intersections, which could be approached after a right turn. When he had to make a clandestine mailing, he would go for a walk, string out potential surveillance behind him, and post his letter in the seconds in which he created a gap. “Almost everything I did in Berlin I tried to do in the gap,” he said later. He also started a training program for officers being sent into denied areas, expounding on his theories about the gap and using Berlin as a training ground.
In early 1965, Forden and Estes were the first students in a denied-area training course that Smith helped set up near Washington. The doctrine was simple: Be natural. Don’t be sneaky. Go everywhere. Be interested in everything. Shop, sightsee, and love castles, and take your family to the country on picnics. But be predictable. Before you know it, you will have a dozen different routes you can walk anytime you want without alarming opposing surveillance officers. Ideas flowed in from veteran officers who had served throughout Eastern Europe.
Smith had another inspiration. One of his students was a Czech intelligence official who had volunteered to work for the United States and was receiving tradecraft lessons in New York before he was sent back to Prague. One evening at rush hour, they were at Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan. Smith was training the agent in the use of signals and dead drops, but it was clear that the agent was reluctant to leave a package unattended for any length of time. “Anything I put down for you is going to incriminate me, and anything you put down for me is going to have stuff that will incriminate me,” the agent said.
Smith replied, “Your concern is that it’s sitting out there with nobody in charge?” The agent nodded. Improvising, Smith escorted the agent to a subway entrance near Grand Central, which also led into the old Biltmore Hotel. A pedestrian could walk straight into the hotel or turn right and descend a flight of steps into the subway. “Let’s try this,” Smith said. He asked the agent to stand inside the crowded doorway at the top of the stairs leading down to the subway, where he could not be seen from the street. “I’ll walk through the door, and hand you a newspaper,” Smith said. “When you get that newspaper, turn around and go down the stairs, and I’ll go straight into the hotel.”
Smith then carried out the exercise: He made two successive right turns, first at the corner and then into the subway entrance. In his mind, he was losing one set of imaginary Czech security agents who were conducting surveillance from across the street, and a second set of trailing agents who were following as he turned into the hotel. Smith had only a few seconds to hand off the newspaper to his agent before the imaginary surveillance would catch up. The agent took the newspaper and turned down the stairs, while Smith continued his walk into the hotel. They repeated the exercise again and again and had other CIA officers play the role of hostile surveillance agents. Each time Smith and the agent made a “brush pass,” as it was called, the CIA officers watching them did not detect the hand-off. By the time the role-playing surveillance agents caught up with Smith a few seconds later, it appeared he was merely continuing his walk into the Biltmore. When the exercise was complete, the Czech agent turned to Smith and said, “That was terrific. I’ll do that in Prague.”
The escape route, which in this case was the stairway into the subway, was essential. Prague, built around sharp corners and full of gated courtyards, offered countless possibilities for successive right turns and escape routes.
Smith took the concept of the brush pass to his superiors and won their approval. Together with Bronson Tweedy, then chief of the East Europe Division, they went to see Richard Helms, then deputy director for plans. Smith and Tweedy asked for approval of the brush pass for the Czech agent when he returned to Prague, but Helms refused. The arrest and execution of Oleg Penkovsky was still on his mind, and he felt it was foolhardy to carry out personal exchanges inside the Soviet bloc. “He looked at me,” Smith recalled, “and said, ‘I have saddle-sores all over my ass from the Penkovsky case, and I’m not going to approve this kind of operation.’”
Smith continued to press to have the concept approved for Prague. In the spring of 1965, he organized a personal demonstration for Helms. Smith had refined the technique, even consulting with a magician for tips on the art of misdirection, engaging in one action to distract attention from another. The goal was to use an orthogonal approach―at right angles―so that an agent would not walk directly into the face of opposing surveillance. Smith also drew Estes and Forden into the conversations.
Helms sent his deputy, Thomas H. Karamessines, to the demonstration, which was held in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Like the subway entrance in New York, the Mayflower was an ideal place to practice the brush pass. The CIA officer could walk along the sidewalk, turn right, enter the hotel’s front door, and proceed into a lobby where there was a bank of telephones.
With Karamessines and Tweedy watching from a bench in the lobby, about ten feet from the telephones, Smith had Ron Estes, the officer being assigned to Prague, act as if he were an officer in a denied area. Smith played the role of an agent and stood by the phones, pretending to make a call. Estes entered through the hotel door, with his raincoat draped over his right arm, covering the small package he was holding in his hand. In the few seconds that it took to enter the lobby and approach Smith, Estes shifted the raincoat into his left hand, shaking it slightly, and letting it flop over his left arm. The idea was to divert attention to Estes’s left, while he handed the package in his right hand to Smith. After receiving it, Smith disappeared into the hallway.
Karamessines turned to Tweedy and asked impatiently, “When are they going to do it, anyway?”
“Tom, they’ve already done it,” Tweedy replied.
That day, the concept was approved for use in Prague, though deferred for Warsaw. The Polish capital had been destroyed in the war and rebuilt on a grid with broad open intersections. As a result, Warsaw lacked the twists and turns that an officer or agent would need to find the necessary angles and escape routes for a brush pass. For now, Forden would have to rely on more traditional methods like dead drops, car tosses, and clandestine mailings.
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