This had been one of those frustrating investigations where something looked red today and then two months later another piece of information would come along and suddenly what you had was a different color. As it turned out, it was also a case in which outside circumstances functioned like a light source that projected a larger and more ominous shadow than the actual object. But espionage was a world in which shadows often had substance, and Lanny McCullah was convinced that any reasonable person, having access to the same information he had, would have made the same decisions. He had not concocted the idea that a KGB worldwide MSG recruitment campaign was going on—that notion had come from a Soviet defector. He had not come up with the theory that the American Embassy had been penetrated—no one was even thinking like that until Arnold Bracy raised their suspicions.
Throughout the investigation McCullah had talked confidently about an inevitable “big break” he knew would come with the next witness interview or the discovery of a planted eavesdropping device. But the closest he’d come to something like that turned out, in the end, to demonstrate the impossible situation NIS had found itself in.
By early June, notwithstanding press reports of an embassy riddled with Soviet “bugs,” he had yet to receive official notification of the results of technical sweeps of the embassy and the inspection of dismantled embassy communications equipment. Given the difficulty he’d encountered obtaining any information from the CIA or State Department that might prove embarrassing to either agency, he reasoned that if a planted device was found, that information might not be released to NIS, because to do so, while providing the needed corroborating evidence, would invite additional outside scrutiny and significant embarrassment to both agencies.
While discussing the dilemma with his deputy Bud Aldridge, McCullah hit on another strategy. They could sit back and wait for a report that might never arrive, or they could become proactive and maybe by pushing the right buttons generate sufficient pressure to force a candid and truthful response. It was decided that McCullah would arrange a meeting at FBI headquarters with their director of counterintelligence, Buck Revell, and the CIA director of counterintelligence, Gus Hathaway, to discuss Bobsled and Moscow, leaving the specific agenda intentionally unspecific.
At that meeting, after presenting the group with a status report, McCullah surprised everyone with an exfiltration proposal. He named three candidates—Galya, Violetta, and Uncle Sasha—and suggested the CIA contact them and offer them a million dollars to defect from the Soviet Union and testify in the United States, after which they would be placed in the FBI’s defector program.
McCullah realized the proposal was a wild shot that the CIA would probably turn down because its exfiltration procedures and routes for defectors were closely guarded and reserved for the most critical situations. He suggested it anyway to project his displeasure at what he perceived to be a lack of assistance from both the FBI and the CIA, and to put them on the defensive before he moved on to the main issue: the lack of information being provided regarding the technical inspection of the embassy and its communications equipment. Not one word had been received by NIS in that regard, he said in a voice that made no effort to conceal his annoyance, yet the media was reporting unnamed FBI and other government sources of having knowledge of bugs. If it was true, if there was evidence the embassy had been penetrated, he wanted to know before Lonetree’s court-martial.
The discussion obviously got the FBI’s attention, because they advised they would take the lead and make an inquiry into the matter. Several days later a package arrived at Bobsled headquarters that contained an explanatory letter and a photograph of the code machine used by the State Department and the CIA in Moscow to take messages and scramble them into electronic signals that could only be deciphered in Washington and Langley. Attached to the cable leading into the machine was an anomaly that had been discovered by technical personnel. No one knew what it was, but it didn’t belong there. There were safeguards built into this particular piece of equipment that supposedly made it tamperproof, and if it had been tampered with—if, for instance, a repair had been done—there should be an audit trail. But there were no records to indicate any work had been done on it. Its location suggested that it might be a device to decode encrypted electronic messages and that it may have been installed by Soviet technicians.
McCullah and Aldridge were less than thrilled. An anomaly was exactly that: something that could not be explained. It might be significant, it might not. Had technicians from the KGB’S Technical Support Group penetrated the embassy’s most sensitive and guarded inner sanctum long enough to make or install a subverting modification? Or had an overworked embassy technician simply made a repair and in haste forgotten to make an annotation in the equipment log? Was it the elusive “smoking gun,” or just another lapse in security procedures?
There was a degree of cautious excitement at Bobsled. McCullah knew this was not an exploitable piece of courtroom evidence, but finally, after all the disappointments and bad press, he felt they were on the verge of that “big break.”
But information on the anomaly was followed by several weeks of silence. So just before the Lonetree court-martial, inquiries were initiated to obtain the results of the examination and a conclusive opinion. The response was deceptively simple: McCullah was told it was an unexplainable, benign anomaly, without purpose or audit trail, perhaps a manufacturer’s defect or the result of sloppy paperwork.
A frustrated Lanny McCullah was left without confirmation or denial, and the realization that if, in the process of examining the equipment, hard evidence of penetration had been discovered, chances were the NIS never would have known it. The information would have been kept in-house. The priority would have been to determine the manner in which it had been penetrated and to initiate countermeasures, not to notify NIS and say, “Yeah, you guys were right. Now you can silence your critics.” Better to keep the Soviets guessing and the public in the dark.
Looking objectively at what the NIS had accomplished, McCullah thought they’d done an outstanding job under extremely difficult circumstances. Marines who admitted to violations that potentially made them national-security risks had been removed from their positions. Others who appeared to be in the early states of recruitment were rescued from continuing with activities where they might have inflicted damage. The identification of problems within the Marine security guard program had precipitated changes in procedure and policy within the Marine Corps and State Department.
But success had a thousand fathers while failure was an orphan, and the Naval Investigative Service was left looking like a bastard son, because when all was said and done, after interviewing 564 Marines and more than 1,300 other people, administering 264 polygraph examinations and opening 143 investigations into possible espionage on security-related infractions by Marines, it had scored a single successful prosecution: Clayton Lonetree.
The Marine Corps draws heavily on traditions, and every battalion has its heroes. Those who have come before, who distinguished themselves in combat, are continually held up as examples to emulate. Stroll down the corridor of any Marine facility and you will find rooms named for soldiers who lost their lives in the line of duty, and memorial plaques dedicated to individuals who stood fast before machine-gun fire and exploding mortar rounds. Recruits are told that when they read about the exploits of other Marines, they could be looking at their own future. The ghost of Sergeant Tuberville, killed when Communist terrorists attacked a U.S. mission with hand grenades during an embassy softball game in Phnom Penh, is believed to patrol the halls at the Marine security guard battalion, looking over the students’ shoulders….