Date: 4/21/2021
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.
I happen to be elsewhere as you read this offering in the Classified Intelligence Brief Spy Tale series. Started writing this upon arrival, had a nuanced and frustrating exchange with “mother,” and managed to finish it while here. A byproduct is the likelihood that what has been happening over the past few days may result in some interesting investment developments to pass along upon my return.
My meetings are taking place about two hours south of our residence in southeast Florida. While Marina and I are based at one of our favorite weekend getaways (in Key Largo, just at the beginning of the Florida Keys), my meetings are taking place on a boat offshore in international waters with often nonexistent Internet service. More on this next week.
However, meeting with contacts over the past several days has prompted a personal remembrance of a less successful episode two decades ago. One of the other participants in the current meetings was an ancillary player in that experience. Counting this week, we have met twice in the intervening twenty years. And what is avoided in conversation makes both of us uncomfortable.
Because back then I had the security of somebody else in my hands. Unfortunately, circumstances left him in the lurch. For that, I bear some responsibility.
Yet, before I begin this week’s narration, some news. This tale marks a breakthrough of sorts. “Mother” has allowed a bit of my experiences on the ground in the USSR, both pre and post breakup, to see the light of day. At the moment, the allowance only involves events on the margins. Still, there has been some progress.
On the downside, I have had to rewrite more than usual before being able to send this one along, especially when it comes to discussing procedures used and methods followed. What transpires, therefore, is a very truncated version. I suspect several upcoming entries may prove to be more difficult to get past the censor.
At least one reader has asked what this review process is like. Sometimes it can be as discomforting as a visit to the dentist. On other occasions, frustration is a mild way of describing how I feel.
The vetting process never results in an “approval” as such. Rather, it has been successful if I obtain a “no information contained herein adversely impacts ongoing or anticipated operations.” Not exactly an endorsement, but I have learned to take what I can get.
There are less sanguine reasons why “mother” obstructs. Sometimes, it is because my narration touches upon matters of which I am not directly aware. Given the way intel moves up from the field to the policy maker, “need to know” produces what is usually called “stove piping.” That is, there is little horizontal filtering. Material moves further along the chain of command along a narrow channel, like a stove pipe, without any other lines knowing what is going on. These other lines, of course, usually have their own stove pipes ongoing. As a result, any public disclosure on my part, no matter when the events described took place, always runs the inadvertent risk of divulging somebody else’s actions.
Unfortunately, there is also another restraint ongoing. This involves the attempt by others to cover their posteriors. Restrictions based on security considerations can often be used to bury the mistakes or bad judgments made elsewhere.
This remains behind the limitations expressed over what I can talk about from my Vietnam experiences, making the permission for my “magnum opus” (“A Giving of Accounts…from Massachusetts to Vietnam,” February 17, 2001) so unexpected.
The problem as I see it is this. I was not in Vietnam for agency work. That was a counter intel assignment from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the Department of State (DOS). The agency did not have any authority over what I was doing there.
It likewise probably took place before “mother” was even born.
But given the disagreements I had with the CIA Station in Saigon (as it was called then; today it is named Ho Chi Minh City), there seems nonetheless to be an ongoing concern that my Spy Tales may prove embarrassing to the agency. There is also the no love lost affair between DOS and CIA.
This proclivity to “protect the lineage” can cover up a litany of sins elsewhere, especially by the higher ups. Upon occasion, it has also resulted in preventing me from even discussing mistakes that were my personal responsibility.
Which may account for the unusual pushback on today’s tale. There are other “fish to fry” in this episode. But to allow its release, you will only hear about my screwup. Of course, much additional info has been left on the room floor.
So, this time around the year is 2001 with the tale beginning in Kiev and ending in Odessa.
The USSR had been dissolved for barely a decade, but the post-Soviet honeymoon was already coming to an end. As expected, Russia had emerged as dominant among the now independent fifteen former Soviet republics. In the previous twenty years or so, I had managed to spend time in, or quickly traveled through, all of them. The Soviet geographic footprint was nothing if not huge (try 11 time zones) and all of it was well within my bailiwick.
But there had been repeated indications that the “new management” in the Kremlin had already designed a return to the old days, at least of a sort. The approach they preferred was a combination of effective annexation combined with dependence on Moscow for those parts remaining “independent.”
At the foundation of this “new empire” is the Slavic brotherhood – Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Belarus is already little more than a vassal of Moscow. But Ukraine has had a quite different post USSR dynamic.
There had been a continuing popular opposition to Nikita Khrushchev’s 1954 grant of Crimea to Ukraine. Then, it was merely regarded as an administrative transfer of territory from one part of the USSR to another. It was only after the breakup of the Soviet Union that it became a problem.
The reason was because most of the Crimean population has always been heavily Russian. The case remains the same in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. Western Ukraine, on the other hand, is fiercely independent and anti-Russian.
The Russian annexation of Crimea in February and March of 2014 was met with overwhelming support by both the Russian and Crimean populations. It did not go down so well in the West or with the Ukrainian government in Kiev.
The current massing of Russian troops and military equipment on the Russian-Donetsk border signals the matter is hardly over. A next stage of “Russia’s warm regard for its Slavic brothers” may be on the horizon.
All of this was brewing in 2001 as well, but with an important caveat. Unlike today, the top levels of the Ukrainian national government were still reliant on the Kremlin. That meant it was questionable where Russian political interests ended and Ukrainian interests began.
This was particularly the case with the Ukrainian state intelligence agency at the time. Despite serving what was a post-Soviet independent country, the current agency – Sluzhba zovnishn’oyi rozvidky Ukrayiny (SZR) – did not even emerge until October of 2004. Prior to that point, it was only an educated guess who you were really talking to.
And that was my problem in 2001.
My overt role here was as a member of a DOS panel reviewing finalists for coveted Muskie Fellowships. These had been established by Congress to bring top students from the post-Soviet republics for graduate study at American universities. Named for Edmund Muskie – the former governor of Maine, US Senator, vice presidential candidate, and US Secretary of State – the idea was to educate a next generation of leaders.
The Muskie Fellowships in their initial form lasted from 1992 until 2013. Today, they are largely a program of summer internships.
Under my academic “cover,” I had responsibility to interview Muskie finalist candidates in Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. I would also select several of the fellowship winners to study with me for their MA degrees (with an emphasis in energy policy and public administration).
Upon occasion, the Muskies would have a significant impact. For example, while Mikheil Saakashvili was President of Georgia (2004-2013), every member of the Georgian Cabinet including the president had been a former Muskie. And every one of them had been selected by my review committee. Saakashvili, who used his Muskie to obtain an LL.M. from Columbia Law School, would later move to Ukraine and in 2015-2016 was the governor of the Odessa oblast (or region, which happens to be the location of the tale to come in a moment). He currently heads the Ukrainian National Reform Council. He lost his Georgian citizenship in the process but is negotiating a return.
My Muskie responsibilities were essentially academic in nature. But obviously there were occasional opportunities to assess effects on likely national policy a few years hence in the republics of the former USSR. I also was setting up connections I could use in a range of public and private sector activities down the line.
Of course, that also meant I would be available for “other” assignments while in country for the interviewing process.
Bringing me back to what happened in 2001.
We were well into the interview process when I received notification from the embassy officer on our committee that I was needed to assist the embassy in a “consular matter.”
Upon arrival, I was escorted to the CIA Station office complex inside. While Ukraine was certainly within my primary sphere of counterintelligence responsibilities, I had not expected to be called for any intel work. Usually, we thought it best to keep the Muskie interviews separate from anything that might arise through different channels.
But one must always be prepared for a change in activities on the fly, as happened this time.
My Ukrainian Muskie interview travel would center on Kiev but could also include occasional extensions to L’viv in the west and Odessa in the south. This time around I had no responsibility in either of the other two cities. All finalists from the west and south had been told their interviews would be in the capital.
Nonetheless, while the US Embassy in Kiev would coordinate the files for each candidate, there were occasionally matters arising in the L’viv and Odessa consulates. This time around, the cover story involved possible problems in the backgrounds of two application finalists. A “request” that I discuss the matter with consular officials in Odessa had been lodged.
As a result, I took the flight and contacted an agency field operative residing there under diplomatic cover as a low-level consular officer. My avowed reason for the visit was to review for possible problems in the two Muskie applications.
The actual reason was an apparent snafu in servicing a dead drop by an asset. A dead drop is a location used to deliver or pick up information/material in a high-risk contested area. Such drops were used to avoid direct contact between an asset (a foreign national serving as an intel agent) and an officer. Each drop would have a series of designated signal locations and pick up points.
In this case, the agent-initiated signal location was supposed to be a stanchion about a third of the way down the north face of the famous Potemkin Stairs. A chalk mark would be placed there indicating an exchange to be made at a pickup point on the underside of a secluded metal bench in a low-level business district on the other end of the city.
The officer-initiated signal location was the side of an alley facing Deribasovskaya Street, a main thoroughfare in the city center, turned into a pedestrian walkway in 1985.
The alley was adjacent to the “Odessa Passage,” an enclosed shopping strip well known in the city.
The equivalent pickup point was a cutout tree base on the less traveled side of a city park nearby.
Each of these drop sites could be triggered in only one direction with signals removed by the initiating party three days later. That is, transfers from the first were always initiated by the asset; the second served for anything coming from the agency to the agent.
Normally, one of the two full time agency officers in Odessa would make the rounds several times a week, to check for signals at the stairs or to start a process in the alley, and then to receive or leave material at the drop proper.
There was an exception, called a “dead man’s switch” (a phrase I hated), or DMS. The Odessa DMS version for this asset was the following. It would be initiated by a personal message column entry in the Odessa regional version of the daily newspaper Vesti. A message sent by the agent for “Dyad’ko (Uncle) Maksym” and referring to an upcoming birthday would initiate a contact at the agent’s drop point. A message sent by the officer for “Titka (Aunt) Yana” and referring to a proposed meeting for dinner would initiate contact at the officer’s drop point.
In each case, the meeting would by scheduled for 6 PM two days after the message appeared in the newspaper. In any location where ops were being run under expected surveillance, these meetings violated basic no contact assumptions (i.e., part of what are referred to as “Moscow Rules”). They are to be used only in the most extreme circumstances and always arise because of a serious situation unfolding. Put simply, they were dangerous, usually more so for the asset rather than the officer.
An initial agent-initiated drop sequence had been initiated but never resulted in anything appearing at the drop site. A second similar sequence likewise produced nothing as a result. In each case, the signal had been erased within the 72-hour period. Standard procedures in such a situation were to cease contact. Allow the asset to solve whatever problem existed and simply await further developments.
That occurred in short order. An agent initiated DMS in the newspaper’s personal column appeared several days later. Both officers in Odessa were under constant surveillance. So, another needed to be brought in from the outside to do the physical contact run.
Me. After all, I happened to be in the neighborhood.
I spent several hours doing a detailed SDR (surveillance detection run) to assure that I was not being followed and ended up at a vantage point overseeing the bench serving as his drop point. I was wearing the visual signals for the agent to be able to identify me. I had reviewed his file at the embassy back in Kiev and could have picked him out of a crowd leaving a metro station. So, I waited.
More than an hour after the 6 PM deadline there was still nothing. I decided to do a walk by of the bench. Sitting down, I ran my hand across the underside and located the hollow magnetic canister used for a drop. Inside was this message in English: “Thank you for confirming that [name of agent] works for you.”
Yes, we had been set up. The other side (KGB, Russian support inside Ukraine, ????) had probably detained the agent, forced him to initiate the two aborted drops and send the DMS. I had only arrived in Odessa that morning. That meant, while the other side certainly had identified the regular officers at the consulate, they could not have known who I was.
My decision to approach the bench had done that for them.
In some future Spy Tale, I may explain why it is that, in most cases, a blown cover revealing who you are to the other side was simply part of the job, not the subject of a Hollywood plot. Apart from the rare major breakdown that leads to something like the genuine espionage live fire conflict I discussed early in this series (“A Firestorm in Vienna,” November 18, 2020), each side avoided targeting the other (or ever, ever, their family members). Knowing who you are dealing with was in some cases essential (see the very first CIB: “A Tale of Changing Investment Risk, Part 1,” August 24, 2020).
That did not apply to what our assets might experience.
That I had been made did not put me in harm’s way. The same could not be said for the agent I had probably compromised. Back in Kiev and later, I never found out what happened. Part of me did not want to know. But another part wondered who had thought it a good idea to force anybody to have such power over anybody else. So, I filed the report and moved on.
Oh yes, the fellow in my current meetings was on staff at the embassy in Kiev at the time. He was supposedly in the commerce services division. At least, that was what his name tag said.
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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