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262 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

“I can’t say what the SVR would do today. I am long retired,” he said, with a nostalgic shake of his head. “But in my day, we needed some reason to believe the gift was genuine.”

“Would you need to vet the person delivering it?”

“With Hanssen we did not have that opportunity,” he said. “If we believed the documents were genuine, we would of course grab them.”

The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald Pelton, the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979. Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought to get money from the KGB. On January 14, 1980, he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., and asked to see an intelligence officer. After he was ushered into a secure debriefing room, he said that he had information that Russia would find interesting, but he wanted money in return. What interested me about the Pelton case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton, even though he was no longer working at the NSA and no longer had access to the NSA. In addition, because the FBI had twenty-four-hour surveillance on the embassy, Pelton had almost certainly been photographed entering it and had also possibly been recorded asking for an intelligence officer by electronic bugs that the KGB suspected the NSA had planted there. What did the KGB do in a situation in which a former civilian employee at the NSA possessed no documents?

Despite the risks involved, Cherkashin decided Pelton had to be debriefed by communications intelligence specialists. So he had him disguised as a utility worker and smuggled out in a van to the residential compound of the ambassador in Georgetown. A few days later, he was dropped off at a shopping mall.

“Why did you go to such effort if Pelton had neither documents nor access to the NSA?” I asked.

“It was the information in his head that we wanted.” Cherkashin said that because the KGB rarely got access to any NSA officer, it was worth the risk. So Pelton was given $5,000 in cash and a plane ticket to Vienna, where he was domiciled at the residence of the Soviet ambassador to Austria. A KGB electronic communications expert, Anatoly Slavnov, was then sent to Vienna to supervise the

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 262 9/30/16 8:13 AM
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