Date: 07/22/2021
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.
This week’s Classified Intelligence Brief Spy Tale comes a day late because of my most recent foreign travel, accentuated by some flight delays. All of this pushed arrival back in the States to the wee small hours of this morning.
The trip may have some important developments in recommendations I will make to subscribers on how to navigate the market turbulence coming. It has also renewed my working arrangements with some well-healed global private investment sources.
But today, as promised last week, we are returning to the least favorite time during my frequent Cold War periods of residence in Moscow.
In the last CIB Spy Tale, I introduced you to Cowboy Jack Platt and the Internal Operations Course (IOC) he ran (“How Cowboy Jack Saved Me in a Moscow Jail Cell, Part I,” Classified Intelligence Brief, July 14, 2021). As I said then:
Jack called it “necessary harassment 101.” By the time I took it, shortly before my assignment as a NOC in Moscow (see “Setting the Stage in Moscow,” Classified Intelligence Brief, May 12, 2021), everybody (and especially those, like me, who were going in under “No Official Cover”) had to take IOC as part of pre-assignment preparation before moving into Iron Curtain or other denied areas.
IOC became particularly important for NOCs and support going into a hostile field area where they would not be able to claim diplomatic cover. Folks like me were in the open all the time and could not rely upon embassy help if the local trouble found us. We needed to have some ability to navigate the terrain and withstand what the other side might do. Since career operatives (those formally attached to the CIA Station under a consulate or embassy cover in someplace like Moscow) where probably known to the KGB, their use was limited on the street. That put a premium on NOCs.
IOC was one of the toughest things I have ever done. It was not only because it was physical. Rather, it was worse, playing on your mind and emotions. Much of it would take place off camp in the streets of Washington, northern Virginia, and rural areas. It was a grueling prolonged test of mental stamina and endurance made to parallel parameters in a denied area. Jack would greet an IOC class on the first day, saying: “If you pass this, you will still love your mother. But you will hate the day I was born.” By the time it was closed over a decade ago, out of the 350 who entered the IOC training over the years, only six women ever made it through. Three of them are stars on the wall in the old administration building lobby at Langley having died in action. The rest of us still can size up a room on entering it, identify recurring faces in crowds, recognize cars that passed hours ago, blend into any scenery anywhere, and undergo continuous pain. We are also, to a person, exceptionally light sleepers.
Jack did that.
As he recalled to some of us years later: “The [IOC] goal was survival, survival, survival. You’re being sent into hell, a political dictatorship. They’ll wreck your car, break into your house, jump you in an alley, throw you in a jail cell. The only way to learn to live with that is to be harassed yourself.”
And boy did he ever.
Jack made sure every single one of us had to run a gauntlet of what appeared to be progressively more real-life situations. This included running ops exposing us to potential legal action. In one of these, I was instructed to steal a file from a downtown government office.
He made certain that I was arrested by the FBI, taken into an alley and turned over to guys in black hoods, thrown on the ground and then in a van, beaten, subjected to several hours of (occasionally physically rough) interrogation, and put in dark confinement. By the time he came to “rescue me,” in my mind it was no longer an exercise but a personal test of survival. I also had a broken rib before it was done.
As Jack would say later over beers, ”I always want a real arrest, to have you bounced off the f**king wall. If it doesn’t feel genuine, it’s a waste of time and manpower.”
The IOC experience was not pleasant but I somehow made it through. Even received a strange, framed award citation testifying to my successful completion of a “Camp Perry training exercise.” It remains one of my most cherished mementos, although I still occasionally wince when looking at it.
The overall design of the IOC was to hone senses and discipline how one acclimates to a hostile environment over an extensive period. You became focused not on how to make it through a situation but how to take make it through the next sixty seconds. “Baby steps’ is the way Jack would put it.
I would put the course to the test almost two years later. The address was Ulitsa Lefortovskiy Val, house 5, Moscow,111250. But the KGB simply referred to it as Lefortovo Prison. The locals preferred not to think about it at all.
And it is here we pick up the story this time around.
I have previous referred to “Moscow Rules.” These are procedures used in environments where one is under continuous actual or potential surveillance. These demand there be no direct contact with assets (in such environments foreign citizens who do the actual spying or provide support on your behalf), avoidance of even being in proximity to them, or drawing attention in any way to ongoing operations.
Even dead drops are chancy (see “Twenty Years After a Botched Dead Drop in Odessa,” Classified Intelligence Brief, April 21, 2021). These involve a signal placed at one location to indicate something should be retrieved at another. While these are used in a denied access environment like Moscow, they often will simply lead the other side to one or both ends of the exchange.
All of this makes contacts with locals in your intel network exceptionally dangerous. However, sometimes we could profit from what my Uncle Gene used to say about staying alive on a battlefield.
He won the Silver Star (and one of his three Purple Hearts) in the final European push in World War II. Gene saved other GIs by crossing closely in front of a German machine gun and drawing away fire (allowing the Americans to escape an enclosed situation) and despite being wounded, coming back to take out the emplacement.
He said the key was to swallow hard, run like hell, and remember that the Wehrmacht MG 42, while an excellent weapon to lay down suppressive fire, had a singular drawback. Due to its pronounced recoil, it was less reliable the closer the enemy was to it.
Gene usually had a colorful way of explaining matters. “The closer, the better. If over the gun oil you could also smell what they had for breakfast, you had a better chance of surviving.”
This became my “Uncle Gene” principle, applied throughout my years of intel field service. If I had no choice but to do something right under KGB view, I needed to do it as close in as possible.
It also mimicked one of Cowboy Jack’s preferences when it came to fighting in confined spaces (or, as he put it, “unconventional nasty close order drill”). The nearer you are to the other guy, the more you limit his options.
Anyway, I would bring together what Uncle Gene and Cowboy Jack taught me over one memorable three-day period in the throes of a cold Russian winter.
The op was the only time I had sole responsibility to contact an asset directly during my time of living in Moscow. Unfortunately, it also required that I put myself in a Lefortovo Prison holding cell to pull it off.
Designed to accomplish what would have been a simple meeting most other places in the world, it became a classic example of how difficult it was to conduct tradecraft in the USSR. Moscow Rules permeated everything you did. We worked this out at my base in London, but it was debatable whether I could pull it off once back in Mother Russia.
If you would write this up as a dramatic plot, even a desperate TV network would pitch it in the “circular file” as too unbelievable. But it avoided using known agency personnel in a risky contact and was more doable than one might think. It just required the toughness Cowboy Jack had beaten into me and the Uncle Gene principle of “swallow hard and do it under their noses.”
The key here was the other side’s penchant for following formal SOPs (standard operating procedures). These dictated how the KGB operated, especially the case with the Главное управление пограничных войск (GUPV, the KGB Main Border Troops Directorate).
This was the part of state security responsible for overseeing entry into the country covering all access to the USSR including airports. Given my appointment to the Soviet Academy (see “Setting the Stage in Moscow,” mentioned above), I had a prized multiple entry visa that allowed me to cross the Soviet border frequently.
However, the visa required that I follow a certain reporting practice upon entering the country. The first time I used it was during a dismal January. After having my visa stamped at passport control, I deliberately departed immediately from Sheremetyevo Airport to my apartment in town, bypassing the reporting procedure.
After spending a few hours at home, I visited with some friends and colleagues – guaranteeing I would be absent when they first came looking for me but setting up a continuous schedule of my actions for them to review (as they would, eventually).
Nonetheless, the alarm bells would sound, quickly engulfing “Sergei,” my KGB shadow who was fast becoming an ally, as I have recounted in previous Spy Tales. They were waiting when I returned to the apartment.
GUPV SOPs then kicked in with the “entourage” moving on immediately to central KGB passport detention … at Lefortovo. The process then slowed down, as much to intimidate me as anything else.
Now I was never in the dreaded interrogation cells downstairs, the ones with drains in the floors. Nonetheless, the distinctive smells (body odor, bad food, urine) permeated throughout the detention areas, the single flickering light bulb descending from the ceiling was always on, and the guards seemed straight out of central casting.
The holding cell had other detainees whose futures were as up in the air as mine seemed to be. Included in that group was a fellow interdicted returning from Finland to Karelia in far northwestern Russia without all of his papers in order.
Since he was a Muscovite (his papyska required he reside in Moscow), they brought “Karelian guy” back to the city. He was the asset I needed to contact and had been crossing the Finnish border for business under a timber export agreement approved by the Soviet government.
The single most difficult factor we had to wrestle with while designing this unusual op back in London was to coordinate our detentions. That turned out to be rather complicated, but under the “sources and methods” limitations to what I can include in the Spy Tale series involves matters beyond what I can comment upon in this writing.
Both of us were in custody, but nobody was connecting any dots here. My sole reason for getting arrested was to pass a series of verbal messages to the “Karelian guy” and receive a brief report.
That we did and I then sat against the wall hoping the situation would play out quickly. It took three days, probably the longest three days of my life, but I was finally released (into Sergei’s custody) on a bitterly cold Monday. They had been able to document where I was at every stage after I left the airport, finally putting me in the “stupid foreign academic” category.
“Karelian guy” was released a few days later.
I received stern verbal warnings about following the rules, professed my own profuse apologies, and even received some supportive attention of sorts later from the administration at my Academy institute. On every other Soviet border crossing during the life of my visa I followed the reporting rules to the letter (even bringing along foreign cigarettes for the office staff there).
Leaving Lefortovo, Sergei and I said nothing as we sat in the back of the black Volga sedan (standard issue KGB vehicle). He accompanied me into my apartment, produced a paper bag from under his coat, and we sat at the table in my small kitchen.
The bag contained Russian salami, along with a bottle of a certain liquid distilled from potatoes and rumored to be the cure for just about everything. Sergei kept laughing for much of the ensuing evening.
Dr. Kent Moors
This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it. Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations).
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