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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 2: The Principal Suspect In the James Bond movies, the armourer who outfits the fictional spy with his exotic gadgetry is known simply as Q. In real life, if anyone inside the CIA came close to the description of the American Q, it would almost certainly have been S. Peter Karlow. Karlow had served with distinction in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. After the war, he joined the new Central Intelligence Agency. For Karlow and so many others who had fought a secret war in the OSS, the pull of the new CIA -- a place to continue the same clandestine struggle in the Cold War -- was almost irresistible. Although not trained as a scientist or engineer, Karlow had always been drawn to technical problems. He realized that the fledgling intelligence agency lacked the sophisticated equipment needed to support its spies. Bugs, cameras, tape recorders, radios -- all were huge and bulky. In particular, the CIA lacked state-of-the-art eavesdropping devices. Something would have to be done, Karlow realized, to bring America's espionage organization into the modern age. With that goal in mind, Karlow had approached the agency soon after it was created in 1947. The CIA's leaders found his arguments persuasive. "I said that during World War II, we had mostly relied on British tools. Why is it that we, as the world's greatest technological society, couldn't make our own?" Karlow suggested a crash program to develop high-tech gadgetry. "I was set up as chief of the Special Equipment Staff. We got into problems such as bouncing sound off a windowpane. In those days, we couldn't do it. The state of technical equipment for surveillance was pathetic. Case officers were being sent abroad with little or no technical training. It was an exercise in frustration." Karlow's efforts to improve the CIA's technical capabilities ran into the usual bureaucratic obstacles until 1949, when he received help from an unexpected quarter. On a visit back to CIA headquarters, Peter Sichel, the chief of the Berlin base, later to become famed as a wine expert and producer, asked the agency's technical people to make up hollow bricks that could be used as dead drops, the hiding places that spies often use to communicate with their agents. [1] "The technical people asked what German bricks looked like," Karlow recalled. "We should have known exactly the size and shape of German bricks. Sichel hit the ceiling." The incident proved Karlow's broader point -- that the CIA needed better technical support for all of its clandestine operations. " And that's when Helms said, 'Go to Germany and set up a lab.'" At the time, Richard Helms was chief of Foreign Division M, which became the agency's Eastern European (EE) division. [2] Karlow was delighted. Although born in New York City, he had spent part of his childhood years in Germany and spoke the language fluently. Soon after New Year's of 1950, he reported in to the CIA station in Karlsruhe, south of Frankfurt. Within six months, he had set up his laboratory in what looked like an innocent group of row houses in Hochst, a suburb of Frankfurt. "Dick sent me to Germany to see what was needed to send agents intoEastern Europe," Karlow said. At the time, the Eastern European division was attempting to infiltrate agents into Soviet-bloc countries. The CIA's Soviet Russia (SR) division mounted a parallel operation to parachute agents into Soviet territory. "We dealt with guns, locks, paper. We made the tools you needed to send people into denied areas," Karlow said. "Clothing with correct labels, identity papers, union membership cards, employment documents, ration cards." The CIA got many of its documents from refugees from the East who had turned in their identity papers. Karlow altered the documents, making what he called "new originals." For cover purposes, the CIA designated Karlow's staff of forgers and printers as the "7922d Technical Aids Detachment of the United States Army." The unit also manufactured documents, using the same German paper stock that the Eastern European countries imported and used. "For documents, we had to know when they changed paper color, rubber stamps, and so on. We aged documents by walking on them with our bare feet, carrying them in our back pockets. It was all stage-prop stuff. That's what I did. Stage props." Some of the problems confronting Karlow seemed insoluble. For example, there were times when the CIA's agents in the field needed to develop a roll of film without access to a darkroom. Could it be done? Karlow went to the Polaroid Corporation, whose founder, Edwin H. Land, helped to develop the U-2 spy plane and its cameras for the CIA. Karlow outlined the problem, and the Polaroid technicians came up with a simple answer. "They said to take the two chemical packs that come with Polaroid film, go into a dark area, and run the strip of undeveloped film between the packs. It worked!" Not everything did. In 1952, according to Peter Sichel, "we got the order to steal a MiG from the Russians." The priority request had come to the CIA from the Air Force, which badly wanted to acquire the latest-model MiG fighter plane, the MiG-15. To do the job, the CIA recruited an agent who was an experienced pilot but had never flown a MiG. "The agent was a Czech with a withered hand," Karlow said, "and we promised him hand surgery." Karlow was assigned to provide technical support for the scheme. The CIA's plan was to steal the MiG-l5 from East Germany and fly it across the border to a West German airfield, where the U.S. Air Force had a plane hidden and a crew ready to take the MiG apart, load it aboard, and fly it to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio. "We found a vulnerable East German airfield, but the Czech agent would have to cut through electrified barbed wire. We designed noiseless cutters that would allow him to get through without being electrocuted or causing the wires to twang when they were cut. On each side of the cutter blade, we put screw clamps that held the wire in place as it cut. We also equipped him with a silenced Luger pistol." To help train the Czech agent, Karlow was asked to build a mock MiG cockpit. At first Karlow had to guess where the various handles and levers would go. "Then they gave me more data, and we changed the handles. We had to know what the cockpit looked like, because our agent would have thirty seconds to fly it out." But first the agent was taken to an airfield in the British zone of Germany "and tested on a Vampire that he had never seen before." The agent took off and flew the plane successfully. The plot to steal the MiG was ready to go, according to Karlow, when General Walter Bedell Smith, the director of the CIA, called the case officers in charge back to Washington. "Beedle" Smith asked where the pilot had been trained for the mission. "When told that he was trained at an American air base in Germany," Karlow said, "Smith canceled the operation. Nobody had stopped to consider that stealing a Russian plane might start World War III. If the pilot were caught, the first thing he would be asked is where he was trained. It would tie it right to the United States." Karlow spent six years in Germany, returned to headquarters, and was assigned to work for Helms in a psychological warfare unit of the Eastern European division. Later, after the Hungarian revolt of 1956, he was named deputy chief of the Economic Action Division, another psywar unit in the Directorate of Plans. Three years later, he finally had a chance to push for miniaturization of cameras, transmitters, and other spy equipment. "Why can't we have a transmitter in the onion in a martini?" Karlow asked. [3] His pleas were heard, and that year Karlow organized and, with the title of secretary, headed the CIA's Technical Requirements Board. The board worked on methods to bug electric typewriters so the words being typed could be captured electronically from some distance away, and it helped to develop a tiny transmitter that could be placed behind the dashboard of a car to enable it to be followed at adistance. But the CIA's technical boffins worked hardest of all at playing catch-up with the KGB: they were trying desperately to reproduce an unusual, highly sophisticated bug that the Soviets had used against the United States with devastating effect. The bug employed a technology that had not been encountered before, and CIA scientists were having trouble figuring it out. In 1945, the Soviets had presented to Ambassador Averell Harriman in Moscow a carved replica of the Great Seal of the United States. The hollow wooden seal had decorated the wall of four U.S. ambassadors before the listening device it concealed was discovered by the embassy's electronic sweepers in the early 1950s. [4] "We found it and we didn't know how it worked," Karlow recalled. "There was a passive device inside the seal, like a tadpole, with a little tail. The Soviets had a microwave signal beamed at the embassy that caused the receptors inside the seal to resonate." A human voice would affect the way the device resonated, allowing the words to be picked up. "Technically it was a passive device, no current, no batteries, an infinite life expectancy." The effort to copy the Soviet bug that had been discovered inside the Great Seal was given the code name EASY CHAIR by the CIA. The actual research was being performed in a laboratory in the Netherlands in two supersecret projects code-named MARK 2 and MARK 3. Unknown to Karlow and the CIA, British intelligence had succeeded in replicating the Soviet bug, which MI5, the British internal security service, code-named SATYR. In his book Spycatcher, former MI5 official Peter Wright said he first thought the device was activated at 1,800 megahertz, but then tuned it down to 800 MHz and it worked. [5] But, according to Karlow, the British did not share their secret with the CIA. [6] Karlow's work on EASY CHAIR was to have unexpected consequences. When AnatoIy Golitsin dug his package out of the snowbank in front of Frank Friberg's house in Helsinki, one of the papers it contained was a KGB technical document warning that the CIA was working on an eavesdropping system to match the Soviet bug. "Golitsin said it was a KGB requirements circular that came from headquarters in Moscow to Helsinki," a CIA officer recalled. "The document said to be on the alert for any information about the joint American-British research effort. It was detailed enough to lead the CIA to conclude that this referred to the project we were working on with the Brits." Although the eavesdropping device had not yet been perfected, the document said, the system was a potential threat. The KGB seemed to know about EASY CHAIR. And EASY CHAIR was a project of the Technical Requirements Board. The Counterintelligence and Security staffs of the CIA immediately swung into action. To the agency's sleuths, it seemed logical to start at the top. They zeroed in on the secretary of the board. *** If Peter Karlow had not existed, James Angleton would have had to invent him. "Sasha," Golitsin's mole, had spent time in Germany. KarIow had run the laboratory in Hochst. Sasha had a Slavic background, and a name that might have ended in "-sky ." When the CIA's investigators pulled out Karlow's file, they discovered that his name at birth was Klibansky, and that his father at times had claimed to have been born in Russia. And Sasha's name, according to Golitsin, began with a K. To top it off, there was the apparent leak from the CIA's eavesdropping and countereavesdropping unit. By January 15, 1962, wiretaps had been secretly installed at Karlow's home on Klingle Street in Northwest Washington. In the thick, secret CIA dossiers that began to build as the counterintelligence and security staffs hunted for the elusive Sasha, one phrase appeared repeatedly in the documents dealing with Karlow. He was, the CIA files made clear, the "principal suspect." [7] It did not stop with Karlow. On the basis of Golitsin's vague and fragmentary information, the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff and the Office of Security began searching through the files of all CIA officers in the Clandestine Services whose names began with the letter K. More than one loyal CIA officer was to find his career sidetracked -- or ended -- merely because he had the misfortune to have a name beginning with the eleventh letter of the alphabet. Within three weeks of Golitsin's arrival at the safe house in northern Virginia, the mole hunt that was to corrode the CIA for almost two decades had begun. *** Peter Karlow had not intended to become a war hero. He was a student on a full scholarship at Swarthmore College in the summer of 1941. "I saw war coming and wanted to get into intelligence," Karlow said. He filled out several applications, and in July 1942 he was commissioned an ensign in the U.S. Navy and assigned to the OSS. By February 1944, he was stationed on Corsica, working with PT Boat Squadron 15, a Navy unit that supported OSS operations. The OSS maintained a fifteen-man radar intercept station, known as a listening post (LP), on Capraia, a small island north of Elba. The intercept station was a vital link, because it was used to spot German planes flying in low to bomb the U.S. air base on Corsica. "The LP was manned by OSS uniformed guerrillas, all Italian-speaking Americans," Karlow said. "The Germans attacked, landed a raiding party, and destroyed the radar set and other equipment." As the duty officer that day, Karlow's job was to get the LP operating again. By this stage of the war, Italy had declared war on the Nazis and joined the Allies. "I ran around trying to find replacement equipment and a boat to bring it in. There was no U.S. boat available, so I got hold of an Italian PT boat. I rounded up the Italian crew from the local bars and found the captain and we went out. We reached the island, made contact with the radar detachment, unloaded the equipment, and got out." But the Germans had planted trip mines in the shallow harbor of Capraia, rigged to go off after a ship passed over them a certain number of times. As Karlow's boat edged gingerly out of the harbor on February 20, one of the mines exploded in ten feet of water. The ship blew up. "I was standing on the port side, the mine was on the starboard side. I was blown out into the water." In the explosion, Karlow smashed his knee on the torpedo tube. Italian fishermen pulled him out of the sea, but he developed gangrene from the polluted water. He was taken to a field hospital in Corsica, then flown to Sardinia, where surgeons amputated his left leg above the knee. Of the twelve-man crew -- ten Italians, including one officer; Karlow; and one British officer who went along as an observer -- all but Karlow and two enlisted men died. Karlow was the sole surviving officer. At the age of twenty-two, he had given his left leg for his country. Karlow was fitted with an artificial limb, and learned to walk again, to swim, drive a car, and live a close-to-normal existence. Indeed, so determined was he to overcome his disability that few who met him in later life even realized he had lost a leg in the war. Back in Washington in the fall of 1944, Karlow was greeted by General William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of the OSS. And Donovan, who later pinned a Bronze Star on Karlow for the action at Capraia, had good news. "When I reported back to the OSS buildings on E Street, Donovan came out, put his arm around me, and said, 'Peter, welcome back, I've got a job for you.' Then he was gone in an instant. That's the way he was -- he moved fast but took a personal interest in his men." The job was to serve as a member of Donovan's personal staff for the rest of the war. Then, in 1946, Karlow was assigned to write, with the help of Kermit Roosevelt, a classified history of the OSS in World War II. The study was later declassified and published. [8] In the new CIA, Karlow's vision and his technical skills won him steady advancement and the support of the influential Richard Helms. It was to Karlow that Helms turned in 1961 after the agency was rocked by the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Helms, then the deputy director for plans, called Karlow in and gave him a special assignment. President Kennedy, Helms said, wanted to establish a single place within the government to handle foreign policy crises; he had ordered Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, to set up an operations center at the State Department, with an officer assigned from each military service and agency of the government involved in national security. Karlow would be the CIA representative. "In the summer of 1961," he said, "I reported to the State Department." It was a prestigious post, representing the CIA in a presidentially created center within the State Department, but it was outside the agency, and it was not the job that Karlow wanted. What he hoped for, he had told Helms, was to be appointed chief of the CIA's Technical Services Division, which developed and controlled all of the agency's gadgetry, from exotic weaponry to wigs, from voice alteration devices to the latest bugs and eavesdropping gadgets. By background and experience, Karlow felt he was qualified to run TSD, a post that would truly and finally make him the American Q. Helms had been noncommittal, but Karlow came away from the meeting with the impression that he might yet get the TSD job after his tour at the State Department. Within six months he would instead become the prime suspect in the CIA's frantic search for a traitor within its ranks. In the prevailing climate of suspicion, bordering on panic, the agency's highest officials would succumb to the fear that Peter Karlow, winner of a Bronze Star, was a Soviet mole. And no one would tell him. _______________ Notes: 1. The Berlin base chief came from a family of generations of winemakers from Mainz, near Frankfurt. He left the CIA in 1959, after serving as station chief in Hong Kong, and became perhaps best known as the producer of Blue Nun wine. 2. To avoid confusion, Foreign Division M (FDM) will be referred to here by its later and better-known name, the Eastern European or EE division. 3. Karlow was speaking figuratively, But a microphone disguised as the olive in a martini was actually displayed at a Senate wiretap hearing in February 1965. What appeared to be a green olive stuffed with pimiento was really a tiny transmitter that could pick up a conversation whether or not it was submerged in gin and vermouth, the senators were told. The "toothpick" sticking up from the olive acted as an antenna. 4. The United States kept the embarrassing discovery secret for almost a decade. But in late May 1960, after the Soviets shot down the CIA's U-2 spy plane, Washington tried to counter international criticism by going public with the Soviet eavesdropping device. Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, opened up and displayed the Great Seal and its tiny bug at the UN Security Council. 5. Peter Wright, Spycatcher (New York: Viking, 1987), pp. 19-20. 6. In his book, Peter Wright indicated that he had perfected SATYR by 1953 and shared the device with U .S. intelligence. But Karlow says the CIA was not told. "It's obvious Wright knew about SATYR, and I didn't," Karlow said. "It was still a requirement to me in 1959. We had no indication there was a working model of SATYR." 7. For example, a memo labeled "Espionage" from Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA's Office of Security, to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, begins: "Mr. Peter Karlow, principal suspect in the subject case ..." Memorandum, Edwards to Hoover, February 19, 1963. 8. War Report of the OSS, with a new introduction by Kermit Roosevelt (New York: Walker and Company; Washington, D.C.: Carrollton Press, 1976). As Karlow had done, "Kim" Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, moved from the OSS into the CIA. He ran the CIA operation in Iran in 1953 that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh and restored the Shah to the throne.
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