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alphabet soup agencies that had burgeoned in Washington
since the 1950s. Our legends had us pinned as low-level admin-
istrative types, on par with bookkeepers or motor-pool invent-
ory specialists. Adopting the protective coloration of such
drones, we hoped, would free us from the intense surveillance
endured by some American officials who were permanently
assigned here under diplomatic cover.
The inspector removed part of the foldout visa and sat
poised, with his rubber cachet stamp raised, then shot me a
quick, searching stare. I tried my best not to flinch.
 Have good visit in Soviet Union, he said woodenly, ham-
mering down the stamp.
200 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
THE EMBASSY VEHICLE was a salt-rimed Chevy station wagon
that looked as if it had lost the war against Moscow s potholes
and ice ruts. The driver, a Russian in his thirties with a middle-
weight s body turning soft, drove the car as if it were a tank,
slamming on his horn and weaving through the lines of trucks
and rust-pocked little Zhigulis, the Soviet equivalent of Fiat
econo-boxes. He accepted a pack of Marlboro 100s with a grunt
and chain-smoked all the way into the city along Lenin-grad-
skoye Highway. Occasionally, he d point a finger at some
fleeting, snow-covered point of interest.  & Khimki& Ring
Road& 
Our low status as Temporary Duty (TDY) nondiplomats had
obviously not sparked his interest. This suited us fine. The
man belonged to the embassy s Miscellaneous Services Section,
officially a branch of the Soviet Foreign Ministry s service arm,
the UPDK. In reality, the UPDK was controlled by the KGB s
surveillance and counterintelligence directorates. If he had
been suspicious, he probably would have drawn us into con-
versation, no doubt revealing in the process an unusual fluency
in English.
We arrived at the American embassy on Tchaikovsky Street
along the Garden Ring just before the lunch hour. My initial
reaction to the 1950s-vintage, former apartment block was one
of foreboding. Maybe it was my critical painter s eye, but I
thought the place looked grimly misshapen, and even the ocher
stucco facade seemed poorly constructed, discolored in places
with mismatched patches. The station wagon lurched over an
icy hump of unswept sand choking the entrance, then past a
guard booth with a stern  mili-man, a member of the Interior
Ministry s Militia civil police. We passed under an archway
and emerged into a long, narrow courtyard.
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 201
When we entered the warren of the chancery building, I saw
that my negative first impression had been justified. Even
though the State Department had worked hard to transform
the original apartment house into a working embassy, people
assigned here still had to contend with cramped, low-ceilinged
rooms, narrow, musty halls, and dim staircases that resembled
rickety ships ladders. The floors sagged and rippled in places
because the planks had been laid on freshly felled tree
trunks one of the few commodities in abundant supply in
the Gulag-haunted Soviet capital of the 1950s. The electricity
was primitive, and when American specialists had been impor-
ted to renovate the offices, they were disgusted to find the in-
sulation between walls was a gritty mixture of coal ash and
sawdust, making the entire compound a potentially deadly
firetrap.
But the Tchaikovsky Street embassy was an ideal site for
electronic eavesdropping. Embassy and Agency security of-
ficers estimated that the KGB s ubiquitous local employees
had seeded the entire building with hard-wire and wireless
bugs. The windows were silently scanned with microwaves
that could reproduce the vibration of conversations into usable
recordings at the numerous KGB listening posts ringing the
embassy. Between the overtly inquisitive UPDK local employ-
ees and the hidden bugs, Americans, from the ambassador to
the lowest-ranking Marine security guard, were subject to au-
dio surveillance during every moment they spent in the U.S.
Mission, including in their apartments.
But there were important exceptions.
Because American officials in many embassies needed a se-
cure area to discuss sensitive cases, they usually went to  the
Bubble  the generic term for a clear plastic-walled enclosure,
raised from the floor on transparent Plexiglas blocks and me-
ticulously cleaned only by American
202 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
hands, so that none of the local staff, no matter how ingenious
they were, could attach miniature listening devices to the
structure without being detected.
Eventually, Jacob and I were expected at a meeting with the
local CIA chief,  Bill Fuller, a man with whom we had served
in the Far East and whom we knew as a very imaginative and
progressive case officer. His deputy,  Jacques Dumas, a feisty
Marine Corps veteran, with a Harvard degree and excellent
Chinese and Russian language skills, would also be with him.
But before we could attend that meeting, Jacob and I had to
display our deceptive cover through the dim corridors of the
chancery, where the KGB snoops could have a good look at
us. UPDK had assigned us a shared room in the Peking Hotel,
located up the Garden Ring from the embassy, a rather spartan
establishment befitting our low rank.
That afternoon, after a greasy daily special lunch at the em-
bassy cafeteria, Jacob and I unpacked our briefcases bulging
with authentic, unclassified paperwork, and settled down to
our separate drudge jobs. As the tedious afternoon passed,
several Russian local employees found excuses to visit the two
offices assigned to us. As I carefully reviewed monotonous
files through a pair of  plano -lensed (uncorrected) horn- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]