Letter from Thailand: Spy versus Spy

LETTER FROM THAILAND: SPY VERSUS SPY

Barry Taylor

I met the regional Security Officer of the American Embassy in Pretoria in 1967 when I was investigating the case of the attempted kidnapping of the American Ambassador.

I have already written about the matter and do not want to repeat it.

The person and I became very close friends and are still friends today. He lives in Montana, and I last saw him in 2018. He is currently 86.

He was a brilliant man with a PHD in Electronics.

He received promotions every now and then over the years and was later a Director in Security Services of the USA but never a political appointment and in his lifetime visited over 87 countries at all the Embassies of the USA.

He also once lived here for more than three years with his entire family.

In 1985 I was in London for a check-up and decided to visit him in Washington and flew there over Easter weekend.

Good Friday in the USA is a normal workday, and he and I went from his house to DC. I wanted to visit the Smithsonian, but he told me I had to make sure I was at his office for about three hours.

I arrived in the fancy office that afternoon and there were two other people there and he also told the secretary she could go home and right after that a few friends of his showed up.

They then took a bunch of liquor out of a cabinet, and I drank wine.

In one of the reclining chairs sits a thin man. He looked just like that guy in Co-Operation Stories with the moustache, old Genis.

He then told me he could tell by my accent that I was not American, and I was not from NZ or Australia but south of the equator, namely South Africa.

I then noticed that on one wall there was a whiteboard covered with a white curtain in front of the board.

I asked my friend what was on the whiteboard, and he said in front of everyone that it was the American embassy they built in Moscow.

He then pulled the curtain away and I saw that the place was only half built, about five or six stories high, but just a skeleton.

CIA

Then he told me the story. Both the Russians and the Americans wanted to build new embassies, and the Russians gave them a piece of land in a valley, but the Americans gave the Russians a piece of land in DC on a hill. He said that only the Americans could be so stupid and give them land with a beautiful view and easy communication.

The Americans then began building the embassy, using sand, cement, and all other building materials purchased in Russia and Russian builders.

He then told me that when the embassy looked like I saw it there, they decided to test the building for listening devices and then irradiated the entire building with Cobalt X-rays and what a surprise they were when they found over 800 listening devices in the building.

The geodes were all attached to pipes built into the building’s walls, and the pipes gave the geodes enough power to listen in on conversations and send them out to the devices that would pick them up in neighbouring buildings.

They then had to tear down the entire embassy to its foundations and start over.

They then flew all the sand, cement, concrete pillars, literally everything in from Germany where it was loaded onto the planes under the supervision of soldiers.

Now the embassy is finished, and the Americans are moving in.

The typists in the typist pool all sit in one office and one day one of their sources in the KGB comes and tells them they enjoy reading all the confidential letters that are being typed in the embassy.

They then determined that the typewriters at that time were still these electric IBM Machines with the Golf Ball

What happened was that the machines were built at IBM’s factory in the USA and shipped to Germany and were in a warehouse there before being shipped out to Moscow.

Somehow the Russians got to the machines and built a radio transmitter into each machine and every tenth test that was printed sent out a short signal which the Russians then picked up and he then told me that the Russians received the letters even before they were signed by the staff.

They then had to have new machines manufactured at IBM under the supervision of security personnel and fly the stuff into sealed cabinets and then also install white noise in the typing pool room.

I read in Time about the Russian girls who had such fun with the US Marines, and he then told me that one of the Marines knew a Russian girl and started visiting her.

Then they decided to treat the girls at the embassy instead and before long each guy had a girl who would help him at night when they were on night duty. They smuggled the girls in afterhours, but typically young men didn’t think that the girls were from the KGB and were looking around and asking questions. As my friend said, not much damage was done by the girls, and the poor guys were all transferred over the phone.

He said one night he was in Moscow and decided to go for a walk and then came across a bar and went in to have a beer. He hadn’t been there long when two very beautiful girls walked in, and he said within minutes it was just him and the girls in the bar and all the other Russians had walked out.

KGB

The two girls then told him to come and sit with them, which he did. He then introduced himself and his first question to them was which department of the KGB do you work for. They then swore loudly and low that they did not work for the KGB and he then told them to stop lying and just enjoy the evening together. He said he had a good time with them, and they admitted they worked for the KGB when he told them who he worked for.

He said many times they wanted tickets for the Bolshoi Theatre for men and then they asked for tickets and got the tickets from the Russian government and then when the Russians wanted tickets for the Kennedy Theatre, they always gave them tickets.

He says the Russians and the Bulgarians eavesdropped on people in their homes.

They drilled holes in the walls of the house and then hid the devices in the holes and plastered them over, especially the dining rooms where they knew that dinners were regularly held.

Today he sits quietly at home and thinks about all the sports and has been married to a Russian for over 20 years.