The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

expensive operation. The revelation that Ivy Bells had been compromised prompted an intensive and exhaustive effort to find the spy. Yurchenko underwent a series of debriefings and also pored through mug books of NSA employees in order to help. He’d been in on the initial meeting with the NSA volunteer—he thought it had taken place between 1977 and 1979—and had helped smuggle the man out of the Soviet embassy disguised as a Soviet worker after shaving his beard. But he still hadn’t seen his photo in any of the mug books.

Meanwhile, Yurchenko had backpedaled from his initial reporting on Navy chief Thomas Hayden, the supposed American spy he’d met on a secluded beach south of Rome. He was now telling his debriefers that he had known Hayden was a provocation all along. Sensing the CIA’s lack of urgency in pursuing the lead, he concluded, correctly, that Hayden had been a dangle. Yurchenko shifted gears smoothly and began saying he had smelled a bad operation even before he left Moscow. But, he explained to his debriefers, he had needed a reason to travel out of the Soviet Union. The loss of the John Walker spy ring, and the possibility that Hayden represented a replacement for Walker, meant that the Soviets couldn’t pass up the Navy communications specialist. He shrugged off as a joke his earlier admonition to the FBI not to shoot Hayden, whom he described as a dangerous spy but still a good man.

The debriefings eventually moved away from the CIA’s immediate interest in identifying American traitors and shifted into the esoteric world of KGB counterintelligence efforts in Moscow. Yurchenko then began to talk about the chemicals that the KGB used to try to track CIA officers in Moscow.

Since the late 1950s, the CIA had known that KGB technical laboratories had been developing a variety of synthesized chemical agents that would enable them to track CIA officers and their Soviet agents inside the USSR. The stories ranged from the ingenious to the ribald, including rumors of KGB experiments with chemical substances—pheromones—associated with female dogs in heat. The procedure was simple. The KGB sprayed the pheromones where they might be transferred to a Moscow case officer’s shoes—the floor mats of a car, for example. When the case officer was known to have “gone operational,” the KGB would set male dogs on his trail. Bingo! One had no difficulty conjuring the image of the hapless CIA case officer in Gorky Park with a pack of amorous hounds in ardent pursuit.

Stories of KGB tracking techniques had come from a variety of sources and defectors, and in the early 1980s one CIA case officer, a young woman assigned to Leningrad, had found the inside of her gloves coated with a yellowish chemical. A year after the Leningrad discovery, CIA covertly received another sample of the chemical substance directly from GTCOWL—the anonymous KGB officer in Moscow who had handed over a sample of the substance to his Moscow case officer. COWL had warned that the KGB was using the substance to “keep track of your people.”

Laboratory tests of the glove from the female officer in Leningrad had revealed the presence of a compound identified as nitrophenylpentadienal, NPPD for short. The second sample, provided by COWL, was also the odorless organic compound NPPD. U.S. government scientists examining the chemical could find no NPPD in lists of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals. A review of journals by the American Chemical Society turned up seven articles on NPPD and related compounds, six of which had been written by Soviet scientists. Using a screening method developed by Bruce Ames, a Berkeley biochemist, researchers determined that NPPD could be mutagenic—that is, if absorbed by humans in an unaltered form, it could cause alterations in cell structure. In humans, mutagens can be carcinogenic but are not always so. But the early tests set off alarm bells at the CIA.

By the time Yurchenko confirmed the use of tracking agents, the CIA was facing a growing problem. At what point would the agency have to tell its employees, the State Department, and the rest of the world what it knew about NPPD? By the third week of August 1985, it was clear that the time for hedging on NPPD had run out. Gerber assigned me the task of coordinating how the CIA should go public with its concerns about NPPD, now known within the agency as “spy dust.”

Moscow, 1830 Hours, August 21, 1985

I was sitting alone at the back of the auditorium in Spaso House, the prerevolution mansion that served as the residence of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. The American community of Moscow had gathered for a briefing by a State Department team on the potential health effects of spy dust, a subject of intense controversy in the international media over the last few days. James Brodine, a State Department medical officer, was on the stage explaining to a skeptical audience that it had been known for some time that the Soviets were employing chemical agents. Until recently, the United States believed the Soviets used them only sporadically. But during the spring and summer of 1985, Brodine explained, the Soviets had apparently increased their use. What’s more, recent laboratory tests had tentatively classified the spy dust as a mutagenic compound, prompting the State Department to inform the American community about it and to protest its use to the Soviet authorities.

The reaction in the Spaso House auditorium was a mixture of resignation and irritation. Embassy employees had little comment; there was nothing new about aggressive Soviet actions against U.S. personnel in Moscow. Some in the audience remembered how the KGB had flooded the U.S. embassy with microwave transmissions, for reasons that were never completely clear. At least a few Americans were still being monitored for possible long-term health effects from the exposure.

But the press corps was more alarmed, and American reporters based in Moscow began to grill Brodine about the health threats stemming from the spy dust. Their questions