SITUATION REPORT VERIFICATION - THE PROBLEMS FOR NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000400420003-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 12, 2004
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: July 1, 1979
• Content Type: PERRPT

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Situation
.4J4.
A Quarterly Publication of the Security and lnzelligence fund
Volume 2, Number 1
July 1979
VERIFICATION -
.The Problems For National Into i ence
Do not think what you want to think until you know
what you need to know.
This maxim, honored in British intelligence circles
as Crow's Law, is from a classic work on technical
intelligence, "The Wizard War," written by the highly
respected R.V. Jones, presently professor of Natural
Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland
and, .during the last great war, Winston Churchill's
Director of Scientific Intelligence.
It is quoted approvingly by an American authority
on the technical side of intelligence, Mr. Arnrom H.
Katz, in a pamphlet entitled "Verification and SALT,"
which was recently issued by The Heritage Foundation.
The paper examines, with lucidity and wit, the
delusions and deceptions, the pitfalls and snares which
imperil the judgments, not to mention the hopeful
expectations, of statesmen and intelligence analysts
alike when it comes to measuring the capabilities and
gauging the intentions of a resolute adversary.
We commend it. Mr. Katz knows his subject. A
former Rand scholar, he had an important role in
pioneering the first reconnaissance satellites in the
1960's and from 1973 to 1976 he was an assistant
Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, in charge of its Verification and Analysis
Bureau.
Crow's Law, obviously, is a refinement for the
special instruction of present-day policy makers of the
cautionary wisdom summed up in such venerable
aphorisms as "Look Before you Leap" and "Let Not the
Wish be Father to the Thought." For many Americans,
the verifiability of the terms of the SALT agreement,
which is to say Soviet complicance with its constraints,
has become the centerpiece of U.S. - Soviet
relationships. President Carter, who startled serious
students of Soviet realities by proclaiming early in his
presidency that Americans were losing their
"inordinate fear of communism," this year shook the
It would be a naive American who accepted these
judgments as chiselled in stone. On the contrary, the
President's unqualified certification of the
competence of the means presently available to us for
determining whether the Soviets are beng straight in
SALT was a deliberate misrepresentation of the
technical situation. If only for its reckless
improvidence, it deserves to rank in the annals of
presidential prophecy with Franklin Rooseveit's
promise to the American people in the presidential
campaign of 1940 that their sons would not be called up
to fight in the war already ablaze in Europe.
We say this in incredulity mixed with dismay. Mr.
Carter's guarantee flew in the face of a contrary
opinion arrived at meanwhile by his principal
intelligence 'advisor - the Director of he Central
Intelligence Agency, Admiral Stan,ield Turner.
Admiral Turner's commanding position in he
intelligence community makes him responsible for the
direction and coordination of all the sophisticated
surveillance and monitoring apparatus - spatial and
terrestial, technical as well as two-footed - on which
the Government depends for national intelligence
estimates, and, in particular, the state of the Soviet
strategic nuclear forces.
On April 10, in secret testimony before the Senate
Select Intelligence Committee, Admiral Turner
acknowledged that as'a result of our expulsion from
two crucially important radar and telemetry-read:nb
stations in Iran, a serious gap had opened up in our
monitoring systems. U.S. inteiiigence will have to wait
five years, which is to say into ;984, before the essential
means for tracking the deveiopment of heavy Soviet
nuclear weaponry on the test ranges can be restored to
their past effectiveness. That leaves at best a margin of a
year before the treaty expires.
intelligence community when he assured the Turner's testimony, though given in a closed
American Newspaper Publishers Association, at their hearing, found its way to the front pages on 16 April. He
annual meeting in New York on April 25, that he is has not denied it. Indeed, at an open press luncheon,
"going to be able to verify a SALT agreement from the four days earlier, he conceded the impossibility of
moment it is signed." verifying by the technical means presently in use
A fortnight earlier, the First Lady, at the launching of whether the Soviets, if disposed to cheat, are in
the first huge missile-armed Trident submarine, USS compliance with the, treaty's terms. He supported his
Ohio, and presumably moved by faith alone, told her doubts with an instructive lecture. The surveillance and
audience in the shipyard at Groton, Conn., that "when sensing equipment in space and around the Soviet
Jimmy signs the SALT Treaty, it will be very much in the frontier enables himd merely to monitor technical
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be seen or heard. But the ability to say that one can
verify whether the ratio of weapons sanctioned by the
treaty is being covertly altered by apparatus being
developed and stored out of sight and hearing - under
the roofs of Soviet laboratories and factories -calls for
something more than monitoring can supply by itself. It
calls for a subjective judgment, a calculated risk which
the Admiral euphemistically describes as a "policy"
decision.
Admiral Turner has thus, in his own way, thought
through the unthinkable. On the U.S. side, the
controlling principle in the SALT negotiations from the
start has been the axiom that the terms of the treaty
must be verifiable by us. So far as SALT II is concerned,
the Admiral blew that condition precedent out of the
water.
In the sudden crisis, President Carter responded
characteristically.. He wheeled up his Defense
Secretary, Harold Brown. Dr. Brown is a physicist.
Philosophically, he is allied with the Pugwash school of
scientists, a fraternity of defense and foreign policy
intellectuals who preceeded President Nixon and Dr.
Kissinger into detente, Dr. Brown, in an earlier stint at
the Pentagon, had a hand in conceptualizing
McNamara's Mutual-Assured-Destruction (MAD)
doctrine of nuclear strategy, a rapidly foundering
concept. Federal service in the negative politics of
defense has made him an astute master of the
vocabulary of ambiguity.
In response to an order from the Commander-in-
Chief, Dr. Brown undertook to bring the Pentagon
shore batteries to bear on the Admiral upriver at
Langley. On April 17th he issued a formal statement in
which he predicted that it will take no more than
"about a year" to bring forward electronic monitoring
devices comprehensive and reliable enough to provide
an adequate verification - a straight yes or a clear no,
to the question of whether the Soviets are in
compliance or not. But Dr. Brown did agree with
Admiral Turner that a full recovery of the capabilities
lost in Iran is not likely before 1983 or 1984. What is even
more significant, considering the divided counsel
prevailing on both banks of the Potomac is that the
proponents of SALT, in order to hold ranks among
doubters, have been driven to an elastic redefinition of
what constitutes adequate verification.
The new standard is a monitoring capability
sensitive enough to detect a significant improvement
in a Soviet weapon undergoing tests, a finding that,
given the pace of technological advance, would only
certify an event which had been four or five years in
preparation by the time it is recognized.
So, given the shady Soviet performance under SALT
i, American prospects under SALT If are murky, to say
the least. Because of this, many wholly respectable and
well informed citizens from all segments of our society
have come together in opposition to the paper signed
in Vienna. SALT I was acceptable to most Americans
because new inventions- space machines and various
sensing devices - allowed us to look dow,i on and
eavesdrop on some secret Soviet happenings.
SALT iI, however, introduces qualitative factors
amenable to covert alterations of high value to strategy
which our entire panoply of remotely placed technical
surveillance devices can not possibly detect in
development - e.g., the number of warheads in a
Soviet ICBM, the true design range of either a cruise
missile or of the Backfire bomber, of indeed the
number of weapons hidden across the USSR. Cheating
here could decisively swing the strategic balance
further against us without our monitoring analysts
being any the wiser. There is only one way for us to be
sure that the Soviets are not cheating. It is for them to
open their frontiers on a reciprocal basis to
unrestricted inspection, and this they will never do
until the shrimps have learned to whistle.
So the question of whether it will take one year or
five to raise the level of monitoring is beside the point.
As The Economist of London pointed out in a telling
commentary in its issue of May 12, well before the
panic induced at the White House by Admiral Turner's
caveat, the main question is "whether it is right for the
Carter Administration to claim that the SALT II Treaty is
verifiable when part of it is not." (our italics).
Yet, in spite of Admiral Turner's sombre admission
on the 10th and Secretary Brown's equivocal finding on
the 17th, the President went ahead before the month of
April was out to assure the newspaper publishers, by
reputation a hard bitten lot, that the treaty he was
making ready to sign could be verified. If there was
significant cheating we would catch it.
Machines Are Not Enough
The quality of intelligence is the business of our
Fund. If and when the President is called upon some
future day to decide whether the Soviet Union is in
compliance with the conditions of SALT II, the
evidence to which he will have recourse in his hour of
soul-testing is not likely to be supplied by a physicist at
the Pentagon, a lawyer et Foggy Bottom, or the political
scientists in the National Security Council. It will have
to come from the intelligence community. Its people
run the surveillance systems; they do the ferreting out.
They look to technology for evidence of what is in
preparation, for example, on the missile test ranges, or
in guerrilla battle zones. They look to human
intelligence - to what men observe and hear from
The Situation Report is published quarterly by the Security and Intelligence Fund, inc., Suite 500,
499 South Capitol Street, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20003. Phone [phone].
Chairman ...................... James Angleton
President ......... Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow
The Situation Report is available by subscription or through Security and Intelligence Fund
membership. Annual subscription rates: United States, U.S. possessions and Canada, $5 per year.
Additional copies are available at $.25 each postpaid.
Copyright ? 1979 by the Security and Intelligence Fund, Inc. All rights, reserved, However, any
material herein may be reproduced if context is preserved and if attributed to the Security and
Intelligence Fund. Printed in U.S.A.
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other men - for clues to what the adversary is thinking,
for a line on what his true intentions may be.
The peculiar and fateful duties laid upon the
intelligence services give sobering relevance to Crow's
Law cited at the start of this report. No illusion could be
more damaging to the conduct of U.S. high strategy in
the dangerous years immediately ahead, when by
general agreement the U.S. Minuteman retaliatory
force will become vulnerable to a preemptive strike,
than for a President to believe the power balance is
what he wants it to be. The intelligence community's
monitoring functions are no wiser than the machines
that collect the evidence. They report only on what is
there to be seen or overheard, This is one aspect of the
many problems facing us in the collection of national
intelligence to which your Fund shall address itself
from time to time. Our point here has to do with the
relatively narrow issue of verification. For want of will,
and out of a timid reluctance to use and reinforce the
clandestine services, we have come to depend almost
entirely on technology for intelligence in this crucial
sector. We let ourselves be persuaded that we are
smarter than the Soviets, that we really know how well
they are faring in their massive investments in heavy
weapons and that they have no way of knowing how
much we know about their progress. The two
lamentable failures in security and counterintelligence
which we shall now examine, from a careful review of
the trial proceedings, teach us otherwise.
To the extent the Kampiles case carries a moral, it is
this: a national intelligence service that lacks a vigilant
counterintelligence and security service may wake up
one morning and find that the trusted Watchman has
made off with the family jewels.
William Peter Kampiles served as a junior Watch
Officer at the Operations Center of the Central
Intelligence Agency at Langley, Virginia, a twenty-
minute drive from the White House. He was only 23
years old when he went to work there and he lasted
barely eight months. Hired in March, 1977, he quit in
November, after being put on notice that he would be
fired unless he shaped up fast. Brief as the association
was, it was long enough' for him to commit an act of
treason which, quite apart from the immense damage
done to the nation's ability to monitor Soviet military
capabilities, has cast a deeply disturbing shadow over
the CIA's conduct of its own affairs.
Kampiles's crime was to steal from the Agency's file
a technical manual describing the characteristics and
performance, as well as the limitations, of a secret
reconnaissance satellite known as the KH-11. About
three months after stealing the document, he sold it in
Athens, Greece, to a Soviet agent for $3,000, hardly
more than small beer money, considering the dollar's
decline, not to mention the purchaser's horseback
opinion that it ought to be worth as much as $200,000 to
his principals back in Moscow.
In truth, it was a beggar's price for the keys to an
invention that cost the U.S. taxpayer hundreds of
millions of dollars to develop and which had gone into
operation only a year or two before, There's no telling
what the betrayal of its unique properties may cost us
all in the long run. The U.S. attorney for the
prosecution, David T. Ready, said of the pilfered secret,
"This may be one of the greatest losses ever sustained
by U.S. intelligence."
The members of our Fund understand why. For
some three decades we Americans have been drawn
into an immensely complicated and deadly technical
game of wits with the Soviets. The contest began in a
serious way in August 1949 when, to the surprise of the
most influential American scientists, the Air Force
collected in the winds blowing off the Siberian tundras
the debris which proved that the Soviet Union had
emerged otherwise in secret as a rival nuclear power.
The pace of the duel quickened in the 1950's as our
rudimentary surveillance systems, starting with the U-2
and moving on into the photographic satellites in polar
orbit, began to pick up the first sobering clues of the
(Reprinted by the kind permission of The Washington
Star and its famous cartoonist, Mr. Patrick Oliphant.)
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massive Soviet tests aimed at fitting the new nuclear
warheads into their new missile and bomber
technologies for intercontinental warfare. On our side,
the necessity all the while, made acute by the rising
threat, has been to pierce the shadows cloaking a
closed society sworn to destroy us and to be ready to
fend off a possibly catastrophic attack prepared in
secrecy. On their's, it has been to hide the scope and
weight of a vast military investment that has never
stopped, in the service of a strategy we can only
surmise.
The CIA's Deputy Director for Research and
Technology, Dr. Leslie C. Dirks, has described the KH-
11 as "a photographic satellite" that is a key element in
"an extremely advanced" system, "drawing on the
highest U.S. technology." Its most revolutionary
advance lies in its capability to transmit instantaneously
to ground stations. in friendly countries good pictures
taken high in space of things and events in otherwise
inaccessible areas, The pioneering photographic
satellites that served our intelligence analysts and
policy makers so well through the 1960's, by enabling
them to look down on the military gear the Russians
were testing and deploying inside their frontiers took
pictures on film which was parachuted in canisters
down to planes circling a drop zone near Hawaii. The
interval between photographing the targets and the
delivery of the developed film to the interpreters in
Washington could be days, even weeks. Then with the
advent of the KH-11 system, introducing an electronic
data conversion technique, time was telescoped. A
picture of whatever is down there that we should know
about, behind frontiers we cannot penetrate, can be
had, when weather and sun favor, almost with the
speed of light.
Certain aspects of the KH-11 system remain
classified. But from what has already been published it
is obvious that the invention was itself an integral
element of a still more elaborate and highly
sophisticated communications and sensing system
utilizing space craft in geostationary orbit 22,300 miles
above the earth.
These systems gave us the upper hand, while the
secret lasted, in the battle of the wits with the Soviet
missile forces. The KH-11 system, as Dr. Dirks testified
at Kampiles's trial, was and remains a principal means
for monitoring secret military capabilities across the
whole range of strategic weaponry. It is and remains on
that account an essential tool in verifying Soviet
compliance with the terms of the SALT agreements. But
now that the Soviets have the manual, they know how
the system works. They know how well and how
quickly it responds to remote control, the quality of the
pictures, how they are passed on through the American
intelligence channels and, alas, how the system can be
foxed or nullified. To lose this powerful hole card, at an
hour when the margins of political influence and
military power are everywhere narrowing against us, is
bad enough. But the manner of losing it is hardly less
disconcerting, revealing as it does the sorry decline in
the professional standards of the intelligence service
itself, and the shocking lapse in discipline in the ranks.
There is no need here for a full retelling of
Kampiles's treachery. A rather full account appears in
the June issue of The Reader's Digest, under the title:
which concern us are those that bear on the reliability
of the intelligence services, their vigilance, and their
self-discipline. Three questions loom large:
Why was Kampiles hired at all?
Why was he placed sosoon in a sensitive post where
he could put so much in jeopardy?
Why was the CIA unable to discover the breach in
security?
Save for the monstrous defect of character that was
observed too late, William Kampiles was an altogether
ordinary young man. Son of an immigrant steel worker,
he grew up on Chicago's South side. His father died
when he was ten and the mother, a hard-working,
stouthearted soul, took a job in the caferteria of the
Ford Assembly plant. She supported the son through
high school into college. 'He took his degree in political
science, with good marks, at the University of Indiana.
A CIA recruiter interviewed him there in his senior year
and while waiting for the call from the CIA he accepted
a job with a hospital supply company in St. Louis. The
invitation to join the Agency finally came toward the
end of winter. He quit his job, and in March 1977
reported for work at the headquarters in Langley. His
salary was $11,500, about a third less than he was
earning in private industry, but he entertained
romantic visions of a career of derring-do in the cloak-
and-dagger world.
His first and only job in intelligence was in the
Watch Office, on the seventh floor of the great
building standing in a clearing in the Virginia woods.
The Watch Office is the collection center of the
Agency's world-wide intelligence traffic. It is manned
around the clock. Kampiles during his shift shared a
desk with three other junior Watch officers. Their job
was to scan the incoming messages for intelligence
urgent enough to demand fast handling by the higher
command.
Kampiles disliked the changing shifts, the paper-
pushing, and was impatient for a prompt transfer to the
livelier distant marches of the clandestine craft. His
duty officers rated his work unsatisfactory and
Kampiles, realizing that he was marked for the axe,
quit.
That would have ended the otherwise impalpable
impact of William Kampiles on the fortunes of the CIA
but for two parting actions by him.
One was to snitch a blank ID (or identification) card
before leaving the premises. On it he imposed his
photograph and forged a counter-signature
identifying him as a bona fide CIA employee. The
expiration date was farsightedly projected five years
ahead, to 1982.
His other act was to pilfer the KH-11 manual. This
top secret document, was usually kept, for the
convenience of some three-score officers who
constituted the round-the-clock watch, in a cabinet
above the Xerox machine, along with other reference
works. A total of 350 manuals had been distributed
among various intelligence agencies, on a need-to-
know basis. Four were allocated to the CIA, Numbers
153-156. The first was destroyed because it was
superseded by the last three, issued in December, 1979.
No. 154 and No. 156 were stored in the safe of the
Senior Watch officer. No. 155 was the one Kampiles
took.
One afternoon or evening, as Kampiles finished his
day's stint, he slipped 'the manual under the sport
jacket he wore to work and carried it through the
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from trafficking with U.S. citizens in a matter involving
espionage. Joannides pressed him to hear Kampiles
story, having no reason to doubt it, and the man
upstairs finally agreed that Kampiles should put it all in
a letter.
During his last days at the Agency, in late
November, Kampiles kept the manual hidden in a
dresser drawer in his flat nearby. When he left for
Chicago to stay with his mother while he looked for
another job, he took it with him. And when he flew to
Athens from New York on February 19th, having
meanwhile landed a job with the Bristol-Myers
Company, the manual was in his baggage, but with the
Top Secret classification now scissored off the pages.
Three days later, on the 22nd, he sold it to a GRU agent,
a certain Michael Zavala, who was attached to the
Soviet Embassy there under military attache cover.
Michael gave Kampiles $3,000 in $10 and $20 bills as an
advance on future packets of information. Within the
fortnight, Kampiles was back in the United States to
report for work at his new job.
At the headquarters of his earlier employer, the
absence of the manual was not discovered until August
17, some six months after it had been rushed by the
Soviet Embassy's daily courier to Moscow.
In the course of divulging his treachery, Kampiles
told four different tales of his encounter with Michael
in Athens.
The first version he tried on a Greek acquaintance in
government, a woman named Tess Thamakas, who
worked for the U.S. Information Agency. At a chance
encounter with her, he told of flying to Athens to look
for a job with an American company there, and of
finding himself seated next to a Russian who arranged
introductions for him at the Soviet Embassy -
introductions which offered, he implied, promising
avenues for intelligence work on behalf of his former
employer. Miss Thamakas passed on the story to a
mutual friend, George E. Joannides, a senior CIA
officer who had befriended Kampiles at Langley. His
curiosity aroused, Joannides asked her to have
Kampiles call on him when next in Washington.
A few days later, Kampiles turned up in the Capital.
That same afternoon, on April 28, he went out to the
CIA headquarters for a talk with Joannides. The two
men sat on a stone bench outside the building, near the
statue of Nathan Hale, and the traveller spun a second
tale to deceive his friend. By this second account,
Kampiles, soon after arriving in Athens, yielded to
impulse late one evening while on a lonely stroll and,
on hearing sounds of festivities turned into a
compound which proved to the garden of the Soviet
Embassy.
He was made welcome in due course by a Soviet
officer named Michael, who, after Kampiles
introduced himself as an economic analyst with the
CIA, suggested they move on to a cafe for a nightcap.
Michael's interest heightened after Kampiles flashed
his ID card and in a later meeting he handed over $13,000
with the understanding that Kampiles would return to
Greece during the summer with valuable information.
In this version, Kampiles wanted his friend and former
colleague to believe that the contact put him in a
splendid position to serve the CIA by offering himself
as a vehicle for feeding disinformation into the KGB.
Counterintelligence being then outside's
Joannides' jurisdiction (he was attached to the office of
the Legislative Counsel) he telephoned an officer in the
Soviet division and asked him to come to meet
Kampiles. The colleague begged off. He was busy; he
gave the further excuse that a new Executive Order
promulgated,
The Unopened Letter
Kampiles returned to Chicago. In late May or early
June, the promised letter came to Joannides's hand. He
was ailing then, having undergone heart surgery
during the winter, the letter was not opened until late
July. There was little new in it - only that Kampiles had
had five meetings with the man named Michael, that he
had been promised a lot of money, and that he was to
rendezvous with Michael in Athens in June under a
prearranged code.
Joannides passed the letter on. Now the CIA's
Security office came alive. On instructions from that
quarter, Joannides called Kampiles and asked him to
come to Washington for a talk before returning to
Athens. Two days later, on August 13, Kampiles
checked in at the Holiday Inn in Georgetown. Next
morning, he was picked up by two CIA officers. They
drove him to the Twin Bridges Marriott Hotel where
they were joined by two FBI officers, one of whom was
Donald E. Stukey, a senior counterintelligence
supervisor. Kampiles tested a third version.
In their first interrogation, Kampiles held pretty
much to the story he had told Joannides: that he had
given nothing to Michael and the $3,000 was only a
tender for future services, Stukey was sure he was lying,
and told him so: Soviet intelligence never paid out so
much money unless they got something valuable in
exchange. Kampiles agreed to submit to a polygraph
test. On the second morning, August 15, he was taken
to the FBI Field Office for the test, Failing, he broke
down and finally told yet another story - the one that
led to his conviction.
The fourth story was that he went to the Soviet
Embassy directly on his arrival in Athens. He informed a
security guard that he was an American with valuable
information to give. The man named Michael
presented himself. At a nearby cafe, after identifying
himself as a CIA officer, Kampiles gave the Russian the
first three or four pages of the manual. These carried
the table of contents, a summary of capabilities of the
system, and a sketch .of the satellite itself. At their
second meeting, the Russian got the rest of the manual;
at their third, Kampiles received the $3,000 with the
promise of more: and at the fourth he made a deal at
the rate of $10,000 per contact, to return to Athens
every three months or so with intelligence about CIA
operations, its personnel, and also U.S. military
developments in general.
The FBI let Kampiles return home. At the CIA, a
nervous and increasingly embarrassing search for
manual Number 155 revealed that it was no longer in
the Watch Office and no one had missed it. Worsestill,
a search throughout the intelligence community
established that a total of 13 manuals were missing, and
the custodians could not account for their
evanishment.
Now the net closed on William Kampiles. He was
arrested in Munster, Indiana, and tried at Hammond
nearby, on charges of espionage. On November 17,
1978, the jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to
forty years in jail. The case is now pending appeal
As
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community maintains a silence about them that is less
dignified than it is pained.
While The Company Slept
As in the Kampiles case, the TRW case involved the
treasonable sale to Soviet intelligence of high
technology on order for the CIA-managed satellite
reconnaissance systems. The particular theft which the
government chose to prosecute was a design for an
advanced signals satellite, but that invention was only
one element in the nexus of inventions upon which the
American intelligence community, and ultimately, the
President are almost entirely dependent for warning
and instruction about Soviet might in being and in the
making. An important difference between the two
cases is that whereas in the former the failure of
security occurred inside a Federal agency, in the latter
it was a public corporation of towering prestige that
dozed while its high security walk-in vault was rifled
methodically for nearly two years of secrets that
belonged to the nation.
There is another point of difference, all the more
regrettable. No clear moral emerges in the TRW case. If
anything, the loose standards of security which
prevailed inside the presumably "secure" area of TRW
suggests a bland amorality in the attitude of corporate
executives toward technological secrets of the
government - an attitude which calls, in our
judgment, for soul-searching in the board rooms. For
the lapse from grace was shocking in its magnitude and
duration. Harsh as this judgment may seem, it may still
fall short of a full measure, because it has lately been
disclosed that the particular act of espionage at TRW
which the Government elected to try was only the tip of
a veritable iceberg of treasonable pilfering.
The traitor at TRW, like Kampiles at the CIA
headquarters, was a youth devoid of promise, and of
wavering character. Christopher John Boyce was 23
years old when arrested in January 1976 for stealing top
secret papers and conspiring to sell them to the Soviet
Union. He had been a $140 dollar-a-week confidential
clerk at TRW for two years; his job was to operate an
enciphering teletype channel between the TRW
headquarters at Redondo Beach, California, near Los
Angeles and the CIA Headquarters at Langley. TRW is,
of course, the acronym of the huge Thompson Ramo
Wooldridge Corporation, an advanced technology
organization whose senior executives, among other
brilliant accomplishments, brought along the great
ICBM weapon systems for the Air Force. It had a major
role from the beginning in developing and perfecting
the technologies utilized by the advanced
reconnaissance satellites put up by the CIA and the
Pentagon. So the information which young Boyce
decoded and encoded day in and day out in 1975-76
was of the highest importance. In his case, as in
Kampiles's, one is left baffled by why one so young and
so unstable was ever cleared for information so
sensitive. For Boyce smoked pot, drank more than he
should, and consorted with disreputable companions,
among whom was a 27 year old footloose itinerant
carpenter and occasional drug peddler of many aliases.
The second man's real name was Andrew Daulton Lee.
He served as Boyce's courier, bagman and confederate
in the prolonged transactions with the KBG purchasers
in Mexico City.
Kampiles gave himself away but the Boyce-Lee
conspiracOkPPEo vdidzFW( lelbssws200S/O1tI r3gciCIA
careless. On January 6, 1976, Lee was arrested outside
the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City by Mexican security
police who had seen him flip a packet over the Embassy
wall. He had bungled or missed a contact with his
Soviet handler the day before. At headquarters he was
asked to empty his pockets; among his possessions was
a long white envelope containing 20 strips of microfilm
of some 280 documents. On examination, the film was
found to show many different diagrams, each bearing a
top secret classification, of an advanced covert satellite
communications system. Pyramider was its code-name.
TRW had submitted a study for the project to the CIA in
1973 pursuant to a contract.
The Mexican police, held Lee in jail for ten days,
then escorted him to the U.S. border for deportation.
The FBI was waiting for him there. His arrest ended a
simple, brashly massive operation for rifling national
secrets that went on undisturbed and unsuspected for
nearly two years from April 1975 until he came a
cropper. For the exposure of the conspiracy we Ameri-
cans are indeed indebted to the Mexican government,
and in particular to the vigilance of two of its officers,
named in the trial, Mr. Miguel Nazar, Deputy Director
of Federal Security in Mexico City and Major Renaldo
Lopez Malvaez who, with their colleagues were
responsible for the downfall of Lee. But for their
astute police work, the Soviet plundering of TRW's top
secret treasures might be unknown to this day.
"It Started Off SI31w1y ...y'
Lee talked. On the same day the FBI seized him at
the border, other FBI agents in Los Angeles picked up
Boyce, who had quit his job a few days earlier. He
talked too. He was the one in the conspiracy who
selected the desirable documents in the TRW vault,
photographed them in microfilm either on the
premises or at his apartment, and delivered the film to
Lee who smuggled it to Mexico City. There the film was
passed at various rendezvous to a Soviet agent named
Boris A. Grishin. He paid Lee off - a niggardly $70,000
during the operation, and Lee on his return gave an
even more niggardly $15,000 share to Boyce.
Boyce was tried first, on April 12, 1977, in the U.S.
District Court of California, in Los Angeles. The charge
against him numbereci 11 counts of espionage and
conspiracy with Lee and the man named Boris to
transmit to a foreign power documents affecting the
national security. The trial lasted 16 days. On April 28,
the jury found Boyce guilty on 8 counts. He was
sentenced to 40 years imprisonment.
Boyce was hardly contrite. In the explanation
offered to account for his grave offense, as in those
presented in Kam?piles's behalf, the word
"disenchantment" occurs. Kampiles was
"disenchanted" because his ambitions were thwarted.
Boyce's "disenchantment" was with the American
system. The Government had done many had things: it
had betrayed his youthful idealism. While in jail
awaiting sentence, Boyce had passed a note to another
inmate boasting that he still worked for the KGB and
that his allegiance lay with that institution. Further of
interest was his admission that he had quit his job at
TRW on the urging of his Soviet handler, Boris, who
may have feared that he might be overstaying his leave.
Boris advised him to return to a university, and take a
degree in either Soviet or Chinese philosophy. This
would qualify him for a post in the State Department
~R"88e(4'153w`~''~Ovpuld be enhanced.
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Lee, a petty crook rather than an ideologue, was let
off in a separate trial with a sentence of only six years
because he gave evidence against his co-conspirator.
For us, the officers of your Fund, the transcripts of
the two trials make absorbing reading not only because
of the revelations of the incredible porosity of the
security procedures at TRW and the vulnerability
corporation's linkages with the CIA, but even more
because of the far more damning evidence which the
Government hid from the public gaze and indeed from
Congress itself. The basic facts are these:
Boyce went to work for TRW early in 1974. He was
the son of one former FBI agent and the nephew of
another, so the family roots looked sound. He had
earlier fallen under the influence of Lee, who was four
years older than he, at high school. There was drinking
and pot-smoking at Lee's place and at a party there, not
long after Boyce went to work at TRW, he boasted of
the vast amount of classified information scattered
about the vault, ready for the taking. Property of that
quality ought to fetch a lot of money from the Soviets,
he suggested. In his subsequent confession to the FBI,
Boyce said that Lee became "excited." A compact was
struck; Boyce would steal the papers, and Lee would
find a Soviet buyer in Mexico, where he had
connections.
"it started off slowly," Boyce told the FBI. "And it
got rolling and it got bigger and bigger all the time.
Boris in Mexico City, the KGB man with whom Lee
established contact, suggested that Boyce use a Minox
camera to photograph the documents. A tiny roll of
film or two would be easier to smuggle across the
border than bulky documents. Boyce claimed that
control over classified material in the supposedly
restricted vault was all but non-existent: he had no
difficulty taking out papers to photograph them at his
flat or, for that matter, photographing them in the
vault. By his recollection, he photographed
"thousands" of classified papers of many different
categories. Compared to the total value of the
information passed in these continuing transactions to
the Soviets from TRW's overflowing cornucopia of
secrets, the betrayal of the Pyramider proposal was of
relatively little significance. The booty was delivered in
microfilm to Boris by Lee in the course of perhaps as
many as a dozen trips to Mexico City. Boyce himself,
having come to distrust Lee, in the summer of 1975
made a separate excursion to Mexico City, to meet
Boris, deliver some film that he had withheld from Lee,
and to open a separate channel of his own to the KGB.
As a bonus, Boyce even supplied Boris with the critical
key list necessary to set up the KW-7 teletype channel
to the CIA which he operated, as well as the key cards
to the scrambling devices used in the KG-13 security
voice communications system. These systems were in
constant use between CIA and TRW. With the keys
Boyce supplied, the Soviet eavesdroppers had the
information just about as fast as our people did.
The Secret Inside The Secret
The photographs of theTRW study of the Pyramider
system was Boyce's last piece of work for the KGB
before he quit. It was, moreover, the act of espionage
for which he was specifically tried. Pyramider was a
then still in suspense, for expanding the
scheme
,
usefulness of the combination of signals satellites
maintained by us in high geostationary orbit over Asia
by adapting the satellites to serve as the transmission
Iinks for instant communications with our secret agents
in foreign lands.
The far greater crime was the sale to the KGB of the
"thousands" of other top secret documents which the
government chose not to declassify for the trial. So
massive was the despoiling that the government was
loath to acknowledge its scale, not from fear of
exposing secrets to the Soviets - they already had
them - but because the sheer magnitude of the
breach in national security was unparalleled. On the
face of it, the TRW case has the look of a sleeping
scandal. For us, one of the most reprehensible
revelations of the whole squalid treachery was the
disclosure in the trial that the fingerprints of Lee, a
petty con man who hadno connection with TRW, were
discovered all over : the KG-13 devices in the
supposedly "secure" top secret walk-in vault
accessible by rule and logic only to authorized
individuals.
The bulk of the iceberg has lately lifted a bit more
clearly into view. From obviously well authenticated
reports in The New York Times, Aviation Week, and
The Washington Post, it has become increasingly clear
that the Soviets knew about or had surmised the
function of the KH-11 satellite even before Kampiles's
treachery. They appear also to have learned that the
space system of which it was a part was monitoring the
telemetry signals of their test rockets. RHYOLITE is the
code name given to our signals satellites, and ARGUS to
a still more advanced system proposed several years
ago to supersede it. Both systems, though under the
highest national security classifications, have recently
been described in the press, and the speculation, never
denied, is that their names and functions were among
the secrets betrayed by Boyce and Lee.
The Harsh Lesson
We shall be frank. Certain aspects of the costly and
technically marvellous systems compromised by
Messrs. Kampiles, Boyce and Lee remain classified and
in discussing them we shal! remain within the
boundaries of the public record. But fatuous things
have been said by those who pooh-poohed the
indispensible function of counterintelligence and
none was more so than a judgment tossed off by a
former Director of the CIA, William E. Colby. In an
interview which he gave U.S. News and World Report a
year ago, he claimed that the KGB had fallen on hard
times. ideological defectors to its cause were scarce;
the Soviets were being driven to pay for the West's
secrets. "The Soviets have offered some guy $5,000 or
$15,000 for secrets," he said. "They'll get odds and ends
that way, but they won't get very much."
Boyce seems to have been moved by
disillusionment with. American ways, Kampiles by a
yearning for adventure and fame, and Lee by plain
greed. But the KGB got the technological treasure at
bargain prices, and its high time that the
Administration and the Congress address itself to the
urgent responsibility of reinstituting a resolute corps of
professional security and intelligence officers. They
should be scrupulously trained for the task of
defending the national secrets against the piunderings
of a resourceful and attentive adversary.
There is a harsh- lesson for us here. It is that the
scattering to the winds of the talents and accumulated
experience of the nearly 1000 CIA officers from the
clandestine service who were forced out at the start of
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the present Administration has left a gap in the intelli-
gence system that could well foster a Pearl Harbor.
The Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko
undertook to drive home a different kind of lesson the
other day. Hewarned us in brutal language reminiscent
of the Khrushchev years that the United States Senate,
should it dare to alter the document signed at Vienna,
would do so on peril. Few statesmen can be as well
drilled as Comrade Gromyko is on the importance of
verification where nuclear weapons are concerned. It
was he who came to the United States in October 1962
to assure President Kennedy that the Soviet Union was
putting no offensive missiles into Cuba. The Soviet
Union knew what our U-2 could do. They had shot
down the pilot'Powers more than two years before.
They had seen the film. Khrushchev and the other
members of the Politburo would never have risked
instructing Gromyko to tell a bare-faced lie unless they
were sure, on the strength of their own intelligence,
that we had made no serious effort to verify the arrival
in Cuba of the weapons even then being rushed into
operational status. U.S. intelligence had in fact been
laggard because a "policy" judgment of the kind in
which we have lately been instructed by Admiral
Turner - a judgement reached by President Kennedy's
highest advisors - had concluded that the Politburo
would not have dared to attempt so significant an
alternation in the power balance in the Western
Hemisphere.
Let us hark back to Crow's Law. Through that
dangerous autumn of 1962, the wishful thinking
around the President held stubbornly to the notion
that the Soviets would not deploy the equivalent of
strategic nuclear weapons into Cuba: they would be
restrained from doing so out of fear of massive
retaliation by us.
That terribly mistaken judgement was upset in the
nick of time only because President Kennedy made a
reluctant decision to send the U-2's over Cuba to
obtain hard intelligence - what he needed to know
according to Crow's Law, as Commander-In-Chief, not
what his own people wanted him to think as a politician
of peaceful co-existence.
As we ponder the history of the so-called Cuba
missile crisis of seventeen years ago, it is important to
remember that two of the senior Soviet officials in the
grand deception played out their roles as if they were
actors in a phantasmagoria intended to emplace Soviet
nuclear power at our threshhold in the Caribbean.
Nikita Khruschev has-long since left the stage but
Gromyko, somewhat aged, but elevated in authority to
the Politburo, remains on the stage to play a leading
part in the second act, called SALT. Gromyko was not
the only Soviet personnage of exalted rank to lie to the
President. Ambassador Dobrynin, still with us, still a
favorite of our detente-minded policy shapers was also
the Soviet Ambassador here during the missile crisis.
Again and again, by the account of the President's
brother, the late Robert Kennedy, Dobrynin assured
him on explicit instructions from Khruschev in Moscow
that the USSR was not placing offensive nuclear
weapons in Cuba and "under no circumstances"
would it do so. When the President's brother summed
up the behaviour of Gromyko, Dobrynin and the
leadership in Moscow in his book about the crisis
"Thirteen Days", he all but cried out in wrath "It had
been all lies, one gigantic fabric of lies." These same
masters of deception are now pressing us to accept in
the SALT agreement conditions which the Director of
Central Intelligence has told Congress cannot be
adequately verified.
The continuity of Soviet foreign policy is self-
evident. Are we prepared to invite another colossal act
of deception by these practiced hands which have not
lost their cunning?
I TO MhkNU N. STIICNGTIIfN
SECURITY and INTELLIGENCE
FUND
Suite 500
499 South Capitol St., S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20003
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