Among the chief conceits of American Cold Warriors was an innate sense of their system’s superiority. They were going against a communist state that couldn’t keep food on the grocery store shelves; how, then, could the Soviets possibly compete at techno-chess against the United States?
In 2019, the former head of Research and Development for the National Security Agency exposed that complacency for what it was. In his nonfiction accounting, The Spy in Moscow Station, Eric Haseltine described a ballsy KGB electronic eavesdropping operation inside the U.S. embassy in Moscow during the 1970s and ‘80s. After sweeping the joint for leaks, it took NSA agent Charles Gandy a good six years to convince officials with the State Department and the CIA to take his leads seriously.
When he was finally permitted to ship embassy hardware back to the States for inspection, Gandy was in awe of the ingenuity at play. He discovered the Soviets had managed to wire 16 IBM typewriters for radar flooding and radio signaling, with bugs hidden behind 18 levels of protection. In 2005, however, a report on KGB spycraft indicated the Russians had actually installed 30 typewriter bugs in the embassy, meaning Gandy’s team had discovered barely half of the plants.
“(Gandy’s) admiration for the Russian mind that had conceived of this concealment transformed into something far deeper than admiration,” Haseltine wrote. “Adoration? Affection, even? After a moment, Gandy pinpointed the emotion: kinship.”
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