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second phase of his operation.
230 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
 What a feeling! Jacques told us later that summer, when
we were summoned back to Moscow.  I immediately under-
stood the enormous potential of breaking free. I was invisible.
On his return to the apartment that morning, Jacques made
a point of strolling down Kutuzovsky Prospekt from the north,
not from the direction of the river, clutching a string bag with
a bottle of fresh milk and a loaf of bread from the state gastro-
nom on Kalinina Prospekt. The KGB knew our commissary
was closed on Sundays, so his sudden appearance on the
sidewalk with these groceries was plausible.
The Moscow office also grappled with an urgent need to
free an officer from surveillance long enough to meet a poten-
tial volunteer. While this was always a tricky situation, it was
even more complicated in Moscow. The volunteer could easily
be a KGB provocateur, sent to ensnare the officer who came
to the meeting. Even if the volunteer was legitimate, he or she
could be under intense surveillance.
Since Jacques was nearing the end of his tour, he was as-
signed to be the action officer and offered a bold suggestion.
There were members of the foreign community in Moscow
whose work rarely took them into the city and were therefore
subjected to much less rigorous surveillance than suspected
case officers such as the  persons of little interest Jacob and
I had become in February. It had been established that this
group, and their counterparts from other allied governments
communities, could attend social functions such as sports
tournaments, picnics, and the occasional night on the town,
without arousing KGB suspicion.
Jacques saw an opportunity to develop a novel variation on
Moscow tradecraft. If he could somehow imitate the pattern
and profile of the  little interest group, surveillance teams
might let him slip through their net. It was a radical notion,
but worth a try.
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 231
The operation, which would eventually be referred to as
 CLOAK, began with the open discussion of dinner plans at
the Ukrania Hotel s hard-currency restaurant. To make sure
that they would be seated at a booth with a window overlook-
ing the river in the towering Stalinist building, the cover group
had relied on the UPDK to call for reservations, thus making
the KGB privy to the plans. In conversations certain to be
picked up by hidden microphones, they spoke of the upcoming
dinner on their office phones and in their apartments.
When one of the dinner group,  Len, drove his car into the
courtyard on the night of the operation, the snoops lingering
nearby paid scant attention. As the passengers left the apart-
ment complex to enter the car, another of them,  Niles, patted
his suit jacket, mumbled that he d forgotten his  damn glasses
and disappeared into the apartment doorway, creating a brief
diversion, during which Jacques, ostensibly an unexpected
fifth member of the group, and wearing a disguise, slipped
into the backseat of the big Olds sedan. Moments later, Niles
returned sheepishly, brandishing his eyeglass case. The surveil-
lance team in the outer courtyard and the street did not notice
that there were now five low-ranking Americans in the car,
not just four.
Len drove a fairly provocative SDR (surveillance detection
route), turning sharply off Smolensky Bul var onto Shchukina,
then getting  lost in a side street near the Mexican embassy.
Confident that no one was following, Jacques removed the
disguise, and when Len stopped near a Metro station, he left
the car dressed as a Russian worker in a cloth cap and rust-
stained overalls.
While the others headed to their dinner, Jacques kept his
personal meeting with the volunteer. Once again, he had been
virtually invisible to the Committee for State Security. Resum-
ing his previous identity as
232 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
one of the members of the dinner party, Jacques rejoined the
other four at a pickup spot. He returned as he had left, undetec-
ted by his surveillance team, who assumed he was simply
working late at the embassy.
In his postaction report cable, Jacques requested that I return
to Moscow to help refine disguise methods. When I arrived
that summer, he exclaimed with characteristic enthusiasm,
 We ve almost got our hands on the Silver Bullet, Tony.
As he described it, CLOAK closely paralleled a tactic I had
been developing for an Agency office in Eastern Europe, so I
was aware of the potential in this type of deception operation.
But I cautioned Jacques and the other officers not to expect too
much from techniques that simply altered physical appearance.
 It s not the quality of the disguise that matters, but the quality
of the operation, I said.
They were grateful for any help I could provide. Their op-
timism happened to coincide with the sudden reappearance
of a potentially valuable agent,  TRINITY.
This Russian official had been recruited while serving at a
large Soviet embassy in the West. Like the famous Colonel
Oleg Penkovsky, TRINITY had acted from mixed motives:
fervent anti-Communism, personal grievances against his
corrupt superiors, and more practical considerations. He knew
that if he delivered valuable intelligence to the CIA, he d be
paid well and eventually exfiltrated to live in secure and
comfortable retirement in America. Therefore, he worked hard
in his intense training to master the demanding subtleties of
tradecraft before he was reassigned to an important ministry
job in Moscow. He understood the relentless scrutiny he would
be under while trying to conduct clandestine espionage close
to the Kremlin walls. Once he went operational in Moscow, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]