Moscow spy
Almost a thousand years history Moscow has said and written a lot about our wonderful city.
Moscow white stone.
Golden-domed Moscow.
Moscow kabatskaya.
And even gangster Moscow.
But there is also another Moscow - the capital of all kinds of secrets and secrets, spyware tabs and caches, as well as secret apartments. Moscow is a field of the invisible battle of Russian special services with intelligence agencies from around the world, and recently with the cells of numerous terrorist organizations. This is another Moscow - Moscow spy.
SPYONIAN GUIDEBOOK
Many will think that Moscow is relatively young espionage, has its history somewhere since the twentieth century, well, at least XIX. However, this is not the case. By and large, we can start our spy guide from time immemorial, when there were still wooden intrigues and conspiracies in the walls and towers of the wooden, and later white-Kremlin. Princely civil strife, oprichnina affairs, fighting the steppe, militant northwestern and southern neighbors — the whole history of the Russian state is implicated in secret diplomacy, secret missions and delicate tasks.
However, in this case, our spy excursion could last more than one day, and its avenue was not one dozen volumes. Therefore, within the framework of this article we will limit ourselves only to those places of our city that are associated with the loudest spyware revelations that took place in the not so distant past.
And we will begin our story, of course, with the Lubyanka. After all, it was here, in the beautiful mansion of the insurance company “Russia”, that the famous VChK moved to 1920 - the All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage established in December 1917 (since August 1918 - the Cheka for fighting counter-revolution, speculation and crimes against posts). Fighting counterrevolution, operations against intelligence services of the countries of the former Entente, war against banditry, hard work, repressive 30's hard times, revealing and liquidating German fascist agents, organizing a partisan movement during the Great Patriotic War, identifying traitors and punishers, decades of cold war, intelligence in the countries of the main enemy, opposition to the aspirations of foreign intelligence agencies - the center of all these events was a complex of buildings on Lubyanskaya Square.
The abyss of secrets remember these walls. Many of the information will remain forever secret. For example, the death of the terrorist Boris Savinkov, who jumped out of the window of the fifth floor of the 7 in May of 1925, and allegedly was buried right there in the courtyard of the inner prison of the house No. 2. But the death of Raoul Wallenberg was made public.
BOX WITH FLOWERS AND REMOTE CONTROL
Go ahead. Here are the capital hotels "Beijing", "Ukraine". It was here that in the 1961 – 1962 years, meetings of the coherent British intelligence, Greville Wynne, took place with a particularly valuable agent Yang, an employee of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the USSR Ministry of Defense Oleg Penkovsky.
Under the sound of water from a tap in the bathroom of a hotel room, microfilms with secret footage, data on Soviet strategic nuclear missiles and various documents on the military-technical theme were transferred to a foreigner. And the traitor received new reconnaissance missions, secrets, money, photo and radio equipment, instructions on how to communicate and souvenirs from foreign friends.
But for the secret meetings of Penkovsky with Anna Chisholm - the wife of a career intelligence officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), who worked under the roof of the second secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow, Arbat lanes were chosen. The scheme of conducting contacts was simply banal. The agent entered the entrance of a preconditioned house, where, after a thorough check, the liaison arrived. Having exchanged packages, they diverged one by one with an interval of 30 – 50 seconds. And on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, Young handed the child Anna Chisholm a box of chocolates, where, mixed with sweets, lay microfilm tapes wrapped in bright candy wrappers. But diplomatic receptions in the British and American embassies were considered the safest for exchanging spy materials, where Penkovsky could be by the nature of his work.
Former embankment of Maxim Gorky, now - Kosmodamianskaya. Here in the house number 36 lived Yang. To document his espionage activity, a cable was laid across the bottom of the Moskva River to one of the apartments opposite the building (on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment), through which the control was carried out ... a box for flower seedlings on the balcony above the high-rise building where the spy lived. As soon as Penkovsky laid out secret documents for re-filming on his window-sill, a drawer was put out from the neighbor's balcony, and the camera mounted in it, at the command of outdoor surveillance intelligence officers, photographed all the spy's actions.
In the center of Moscow, in Lubyanka (then Dzerzhinsky Square), Yang's career ended, and for CIA employees, contact with the traitor Penkovsky ended at the entrance of the house No. 5 / 6 on Pushkin Street, where the Americans wanted to perform a secret operation with their agent.
Today, this entrance is not to know - it is tightly closed. Half a century ago it was here, between the shabby wall and the steam heating battery, that the security officers hung a matchbox on a wire hook - a lure for the staff of the US embassy residency. During the seizure of this hiding place, in which, as the Americans believed, there was intelligence of state importance, and an embassy officer Jacob was detained. On the same day, counterintelligence of Hungary was arrested and brought to the USSR by Greville Winn.
SPYONIAN GENERAL
The espionage life of the American agent Dmitry Polyakov turned out to be longer. Having served as a major general in military intelligence, for more than 20 years he provided the CIA with secret information. During this time, the traitor gave the Americans nearly two dozen Soviet intelligence agents, illegal immigrants, more than one hundred and fifty agents from among foreigners and more than a thousand officers of the GRU and KGB. And among his "gifts" were strategic materials of a military-political nature, concerning the prospects for a global nuclear war, information on the line of military-technical intelligence, and much more, which was of great interest to foreign intelligence services. Some CIA experts considered Polyakov to be an even more important source of information than Penkovsky.
What tricks the Americans did not use to preserve this source of super valuable information. For example, a portable impulse transmitter was created specially for it, which in less than three seconds transmitted a significant amount of encrypted information to a receiving device at the US embassy.
The crowded store "Wanda", the hotel "Central Tourist House" in the south-west of Moscow are just two points on the map of the capital, from where instant radio broadcasts were made. And in the spy arsenal included caches in the covers of books; sheets of cryptic carbon paper, indistinguishable from ordinary paper, double-bottom fishing bag and many other tricks. All of them together provided the traitor with a long operational life. Long, but not endless.
Although sometimes it seemed that the spy simply mocked our counterintelligence. For example, a place for a secret operation was chosen at the intersection of Moscow’s Khavskaya and Lestev streets, not far from one of the buildings of the Higher School of the KGB of the USSR. Here, near the house №12, in the telephone booth lay a cache for American intelligence. After picking up the phone and dialing any number, the spy imperceptibly “stuck” a magnetic container to the underside of the telephone table. A few minutes later, in the same way he was withdrawn by an American intelligence officer.
Polyakova was arrested at the end of 1986 of the year, and 15 of March of 1988 of the year was shot by conviction of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court for treason and espionage.
Time went by. They removed bulky phone booths, as if specially designed for caching operations, instead of putting graceful square caps on racks instead. Not stood, however, in place and intelligence.
TRUSTOR INITIATIVE
Many spy tricks are familiar to the high-rise building on Vosstaniya Square. Here lived the leading designer of the Research Institute of Radio Electronics "Fazotron", the American agent-initiative Adolf Tolkachev. For more than a year, from January 1977 to February 1978, he hunted for cars at the US Embassy, twice tried to throw up notes with a proposal for cooperation. However, the intelligence officers of the embassy residency of the CIA ignored the intrusive espionage services, reasonably suspecting the initiator of the Soviet counterintelligence.
Ultimately, Tolkachev prepared on several pages a material with information about the developments of his scientific research institute related to the creation of airborne radar stations for military aircraft, in which he pointed out some of the technical characteristics of these radars, and also specified a method of communication with it.
The Americans could not refuse such an offer. And a few days later a phone call rang in Tolkachev's house - an unfamiliar voice with a slight accent called him the address of the bookmark hiding place: Trekhgorny Lane, which is located at Krasnaya Presnya, a shoe store, a phone booth ... and the dirty mitten behind it.
Having established a secret counter-observation, the CIA officers recorded how a middle-aged man approached the appointed place and, looking around, raised his gauntlet.
Already at home, Tolkachev got acquainted with the contents of the cache: a questionnaire on topics of interest to American intelligence, code tables, two mail envelopes with recipient addresses and letters in English with conditional text, sheets of sympathetic carbon paper and instructions for preparing cryptographic text, its encryption and methods of communication. Especially the spy-initiator was pleased with the money - half a thousand rubles, which was almost a three-month salary of a research institute employee who decided to betray the motherland.
After several meetings, the CIA supplied its sponsor with a tape recorder with an encoder built into the body. Charging him with secret information about advanced Soviet military technology, Adolph Tolkachev drove up to the American embassy by bus and, standing at a bus stop, “fired” a huge amount of information from the radio recorder to the embassy receiving antenna for a second.
“Your information is invaluable,” the Americans encouraged their agent. “Her loss will throw the Soviet Union back many years.” And during 19 personal meetings and with the help of secret operations, the CIA received photocopies of materials about fifty modern developments of electronic equipment created for the needs of the Soviet military aviation.
The operational scheme for organizing and conducting conspiracy meetings was also simple and reliable. The window of the traitor’s apartment, closed by a curtain or with an open window, meant that the cache was set up. Driving through the square in a car, the American intelligence officer "shot" this conventional signal and, after chatting around Moscow for several hours, drove to the hiding place of the cache. And there were also calls to the traitor’s home phone with conditional phrases, which meant the next meeting, and the same incomprehensible answer to the outside listener - the consent to hold a turnout or an offer to postpone it for another time.
The CIA did not stint on spy fees either - the salary of a Soviet traitor was equivalent to the then salary of the President of the United States. The agent received part of the money in rubles, but the fixed assets were deposited in Tolkachev’s personal currency account opened with a US bank. During the secret cooperation of such "fees" has accumulated as many as two million. And there were also antique jewels, expensive medicines, various spy equipment and even ... audio tapes with rock music - the shortest thing at that time in the country.
Domestic special services still keep secret information about how the valuable American agent was revealed. Whether he was issued by one of the secret sources who worked for the Soviet Intelligence Agency in the CIA, or the exposure of Tolkachev was the result of a set of counterintelligence measures implemented by the KGB. But the fact remains that an initiative spy was detained while returning to Moscow from the dacha.
A search of Tolkachev’s apartment revealed several cameras, including those disguised as key rings, a secret kit, a transmitter with an integrated spy headset, money, gold, antique jewelry, and an ampoule with a horse’s dose of cyanide of potassium embedded in a pen. Take advantage of this poison traitor did not have time.
A few days later - 13 June 1985, a CIA residency officer in Moscow, Paul Stombauh, who worked under the cover of the position of second secretary of the US embassy, went to another spy event. Starting from lunch, I longed in the car through Moscow streets, revealing possible surveillance, then a long subway ride, and then a pedestrian march to the south-west to the cherished point on the map of Moscow, located near the intersection of Kastanayevskaya and Pivchenkova streets. It was here at about eight o'clock in the evening that he was taken with the staff of the State Security Committee. During the detention, confidential instructions for Tolkachev, prepared on small sheets of instant paper, operational photographic equipment, as well as a diagram of the area of the espionage operation and a large amount of Soviet money, were withdrawn from the American.
Having documented the criminal activity of the “second secretary,” Stombauha, as a diplomat, was released, declaring him persona non grata and expelling from the Soviet Union. But the traitor Adolf Tolkachev was shot 24 September 1986 year - by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.
HAVE DONE TO DIE
However, a spy story of another kind happened in Moscow. One of them was told to me by the major general of the state security organs, Alexander Mikhailov. A regular diplomat, who arrived in Moscow, got used to his “gelding” regularly to leave our outdoor area (the Surveillance Service), using the archway of house 30 in Skatertny Lane to tear it off. The place there was open, there were few cars, so the Chekists had nowhere to hide. A diplomat dive into the arch - and disappeared. To pursue it without the risk of decoding the operatives was simply impossible.
In the end, the Soviet counterintelligence bored all this - it was decided to bring order to their land. For starters hung at the entrance to the arch "brick". But the foreigner did not understand the fatherly warning and, as if nothing had happened, continued to ride under the prohibition sign. Probably hoping for his own passport.
If such a thing - our counterintelligence had to go to the next stage of the operation. At the exit of the arch exactly in the middle of the road they dug, and so that local motorists did not disrupt the operational plan, they also concreted a short but powerful pillar.
One evening, the diplomat-spy left for the next meeting with the secret agent and again decided to use his favorite method for separation from outdoor. Wandering around the city, he again went to Skatertny Lane and turned into a familiar arch. He also added gas. As an American intelligence officer, he remained alive after a cordial meeting with the KGB post - only God knows. The hood of his "Mercedes" literally embraced, and very tightly, the ill-fated barrier.
Carefully, with all caution, the unlucky spy was scraped from the driver's seat in the trash of a wrecked car, put in an ambulance, which “happened to be nearby in the bushes.” Soon one of the best teams of Moscow surgeons restored the poor fellow. But his "gelding" was not subject to resuscitation.
Since then, the American has become a very disciplined driver, even paid the fare for the prohibition sign. And our outdoor advertisements no longer delivered.
Another spy attraction of Moscow is the Krasnoluzhsky Bridge. It was here that American intelligence chose a place for a secret operation. This time the recipient was the second secretary of the Foreign Affairs Planning Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Ogorodnik, who was recruited by the American knights of the cloak and dagger at the beginning of 1974 during his business trip to Colombia. One of the gardener recruiters was Spaniard Pilar Suarez Barkala. Constantly meeting with a young diplomat, she thoroughly studied the strengths and weaknesses of the young embassy staff. After the agent returned to Moscow, the Frankfurt Intelligence Center, specifically for Ogorodnik, opened a new communication line on the air. And in Victory Park and other secluded places in our capital, the spy regularly picked up stones and pine sticks, which were actually specially made containers, in which the instructions of intelligence centers, spy equipment, poisons and money were kept.
And in case the spy package unexpectedly falls into the wrong hands, American intelligence officers left such notes in it: “Comrade! You accidentally got into someone else's secret, picking up someone else's package and things that were not intended for you. Leave money and gold in your possession, but do not touch other things in the package so that you don’t know too much and put your life and the lives of your loved ones in danger. Take the things that are valuable to you, and throw the rest of the contents and package into the river and forget about everything ... otherwise you will subject yourself and your loved ones to great trouble. You're warned !!! ››
But the skill of our counterintelligence was above the caution of the American special services. The spy was detained by 22 June 1977 of the year in his apartment in the house number 2 / 1 on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment and immediately admitted in collaboration with the CIA. Already at two o'clock in the morning, having written the first sentence of the penitential letter, the Gardener suddenly squeezed his pen with his teeth. From his mouth went copious foam. He fell from his chair and lost consciousness. Two hours later, without regaining consciousness, the spy died at the Sklifosovsky Institute. "The clinic of dying does not fit into the framework of the clinical picture of poisoning with any of the known toxic and poisonous substances," was the conclusion of the doctors then. With careful study of the pen, they found a small hole in which the poison was placed.
At that time, the Americans, not knowing about the arrest of their confidant, were carefully preparing for a new caching operation for the Ogorodnik. Late in the evening 15 July 1977, the CIA officer Martha Peterson walked to the Krasnoluzhsky bridge. Approaching the granite pylon of the bridge, she checked again, opened her purse, and with her left hand took out a container — a piece of coal — to put it in a “loophole” - a small rectangular opening of a bridge pillar. But before that, the seizure began. However, the courage of this lady can only be envied. Realizing that failed, she fought professionally, tough and prudently. Even her hysterical screams - a mixture of English and Russian mat - and sharp head movements, as it turned out, had their own meaning. Screaming, she wanted to warn about her failure to an agent who, by prior agreement, should have already approached the bridge to remove the cache, while shaking her head, she tried to shake the clip from her ear, with which she listened on the air on our transmitters' frequencies turned out to be smarter - the air was empty). And if there was no proc from the heart-rending screams, since Agent Gardener was exposed and already three weeks dead, the clip fell out in the evening twilight, unnoticed by anyone, and our counterintelligence could not understand for a long time how the portable electronic device found in it control over the air.
Half an hour later, a container, the same piece of coal, was opened in the reception room of the KGB of the USSR at Kuznetsky Most, house No. 22, in the presence of the consul of the United States Embassy Gross. It turned out to be a regular spy kit. The next day, Martha Peterson was declared persona non grata and flew to Vienna.
A few years later, the entire span of the Krasnoluzhsky bridge migrated towards the Kievsky railway station and became a pedestrian bridge, and the supports with the “loopholes”, one of which was a spy container, remained in the same place.
The domestic viewer in a slightly modified version of this event can regularly watch on their television screens during the demonstration of the series “TASS is authorized to declare”, where Agent Trianon acts - as the American hosts called the diplomat-traitor Alexander Ogorodnik.
MYSTERIOUS STONE
Another point on the map of Moscow, where the next operation of the American intelligence failed, is the pylon of the power line on the waste ground not far from Serebryakova, which is at the Northerner platform. It was there that CIA personnel officer Paul Zalaki laid a container for his confidant disguised as an ordinary cobblestone. However, the KGB Surveillance Service tracked down the tab of its cache, after which it familiarized itself with its contents, which was a regular spy kit: instructions for the agent and a very large sum of money for those times - 25 thousand rubles. (in those years it was possible to buy as many as four cars with this money).
Behind the cache it was decided to install covert surveillance.
A day passes, two, three, a week ... No one comes for a container. The Chekists have already begun to think that the Americans had revealed a secret post and warned their secret agent about the danger.
Another week passed, and suddenly on Saturday a man appeared at the power transmission tower. Soon the pre-installed alarm went off, indicating that the "stone" was taken from its place. Jumping out of cover, the capture group twisted the stranger, but ... there was no cobblestone on him. Even more amazement befell the outdoor workers after it became clear that in front of them ... the intelligence officer of the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR Leonid Poleshchuk.
He explained the appearance of the support by the fact that he was searching for some stone in order to put it under the wheel of his car. However, he had to lock up for a short time. During the search of the suspect’s car, the instruction and the location map for the cache were compiled using a directory published in the United States (the street where the cache was left was marked with the old name, and the corner was marked with a cross).
But why then did Poleshchuk have neither stone nor money?
The traitor gave an answer to this question already during the interrogation at the Lubyanka. It turns out that he acted in accordance with the instructions of the CIA: he took a stone in his hands (at that moment the alarm went off), but after a few seconds he threw it near the place where he had lifted it, and moved aside. This had to be done so that in the event of a seizure he would not be detained red-handed, that is, with a spy container in his hands.
So it happened. And if it were not for the instructions and the scheme, very unprofessionally worked by the Americans, to prove the involvement of the Soviet intelligence officer to the secret CIA agents would be quite problematic. This example once again proved that there are no trifles in the work of the special services.
Already during the investigation, the werewolf scout admitted his guilt and said that he had been recruited by the CIA officers in the early 1970s during his long-term reconnaissance mission to Nepal and for some time provided the Americans with secret information about the composition and activities of the Soviet intelligence station in country. After returning to Moscow, communication with him was temporarily suspended and resumed only in 1984, when he left for another trip to Nigeria. The stash of a betrayal fee, he had to withdraw during his arrival in Moscow on a regular vacation. In the summer of 1986, the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced Leonid Poleshchuk to the death penalty - execution.
Today, we only slightly lifted the veil of secrecy covering the uncompromising struggle that our special services are waging with various foreign intelligence services and their spies. And this is not the end of the spy stories of Moscow. Moreover, they continue now, when you are holding this number in your hands. However, we will be able to tell about it in detail only ... eleven years later. And even later. If we can do it at all: the world of intelligence and counterintelligence loves silence and does not welcome publicity. Well, except for the good of the case, as part of a regular operation to capture a diplomat spy or a deeply buried "mole."
Information