The Wizards of Langley (37 page)

In November 1978, Dirks was back in court, again as the result of the compromise of a key satellite system. But rather than being in Los Angeles in early spring, Dirks was in Indianapolis in early winter. This time the defendant was a CIA rather than a contractor employee. And the trial revolved around the key secrets that had been divulged. Finally, the recipient was not the KGB but the GRU—the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff.

On trial was William Kampiles, who in March 1977 had begun his brief and undistinguished CIA career as a watch analyst in the Operations Center. Watch analysts, although junior officers, received information from the full range of intelligence community sources—CIA agent reports, KEYHOLE imagery, NSA communication intercepts, as well as Defense attaché and Foreign Service reports. They monitored the incoming intelligence reports from around the world and routed them inside the agency.
⁴⁶

Among the documents provided to help them understand the significance of the incoming data was Copy 155 of the
KH-11 System Technical
Manual
. Once someone was within the vaulted confines of the watch office, there was no further restriction on access to the manual, and it was not locked up. Its normal resting spot was on a shelf alongside a copy of an almanac in an unlocked cabinet, known as the CONSERVA file, beneath an ordinary copying machine.
⁴⁷

Despite access to such documents, Kampiles found the work tedious. He had envisioned using his fluent Greek in clandestine work overseas. But his undistinguished early record in the agency did not stimulate interest in him within the operations directorate. As his performance deteriorated, all hopes of a transfer disappeared. An operations center supervisor recommended that Kampiles be fired before his probationary period was up. He pawed the women in the office, bragged of his sexual exploits, and “stood out markedly from the rest of the people; he was a bullshitter.” In November 1977, after only eight months in the CIA and receipt of a formal letter indicating dissatisfaction with his work, he resigned.
⁴⁸

Before departing for good, Kampiles pilfered the KH-11 manual, which was not regularly inventoried. One day, he stuffed a copy of the manual into his sports jacket and carried it out of the building. Doing so was not particularly difficult. Removal of classified documents from the agency by employees who wanted to do some work at home had reached such proportions that DCI Stansfield Turner had sent a memo to agency employees ordering a halt to the practice.
⁴⁹

On February 19, 1978, Kampiles left for Greece. Three or four days later, he went to the Soviet embassy and offered to deliver documents. He provided a GRU officer with two to three pages of the KH-11 manual—its table of contents, summary, and an artist’s conception of the satellite. At a second meeting, Kampiles demonstrated his lack of skill as a covert operator—turning over the rest of the manual for a mere $3,000.
⁵⁰

Back in the United States, having received guidance from the GRU about topics of interest and instructions concerning further meetings, Kampiles was anything but discreet. On April 29, 1978, Kampiles sat on a bench outside CIA headquarters telling George Joannides, a friend and employee of the General Counsel’s office, how he had conned the Soviets out of $3,000—apparently believing that would make him more attractive to the operations directorate he still longed to join.
⁵¹

That talk was followed by a letter Kampiles wrote to Joannides at the latter’s suggestion, which he then passed on to an officer in the Soviet division, Vivian Psachos. She suggested that Kampiles, who was in Indiana, return to Washington to discuss the matter. Attending the discussions
on August 14, along with Kampiles, were Psachos, the FBI’s Donald Stukey and John Denton, and Bruce Solie of the CIA’s Office of Security. Those officials were aware of the CIA’s conclusion that the KH-11 had been compromised and also knew, from a GRU officer, of the sale of the satellite manual to the Soviets in Greece and when it was sold—as well as when Kampiles had been in Greece. They were also aware that the Soviets never paid money for promises, only for hard information or documents. Thus, they were more than skeptical about Kampiles’s claim of having swindled the GRU.
⁵²

The next day, in an interview at the Washington field office, James Murphy told Kampiles he didn’t believe him, and that if he didn’t believe it, “nobody in the whole world would believe it.” Kampiles, who had failed two polygraphs, slumped down in his chair and buried his head in his hands. After several seconds, Kampiles looked up at Murphy. “You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t get the $3,000 for nothing. I sold them the document.”
⁵³

Less than three months later, Kampiles was facing a jury, charged with espionage. The trial was the product of a Carter administration decision to prosecute espionage cases, even at the risk of further disclosures.
⁵⁴
In addition to the testimony of Murphy and Stukey, who recounted their interrogation of Kampiles and his ultimate confession, the prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Leslie Dirks.

Dirks told the jury that U.S. national defense could be “seriously harmed” if the Soviet Union had access to the KH-11 manual. He said knowledge of the manual would suggest ways that the Soviet Union could hide its nuclear and military capabilities from the satellite.
⁵⁵
He explained that the “KH-11 system is a photographic satellite with associated ground facilities for controlling [the] satellite and distributing its products” and “one of the principal intelligence collection sources used to verify that the Soviet Union is indeed living up to the terms of their [SALT] agreement with the United States.”
⁵⁶

Disclosure of the top-secret manual to a hostile foreign power, Dirks testified, would do serious harm to national defense. The manual described “the characteristics, capabilities and limitations of the satellite” and described the “process of photography employed by the KH-11 system and illustrates the quality of the photos and the process used in passing the product along to the users of the system.” Further, the manual detailed the “responsiveness and timeliness in the delivery of the ‘product.’” Page eight of the sixty-four-page manual described the satellite’s “limitations in geographic coverage.”
⁵⁷

In addition, possession of the manual would “put the Soviet Union in a position to avoid coverage from this system. For example, by rolling . . . new aircraft [under development] into hangars when the system passes overhead, thereby preventing photographs of the new airplanes.” Knowledge of the quality of the photographs could enable the Soviets to devise “effective camouflage.”
⁵⁸
Compromise of the KH-11 system would, according to Dirks, cost the United States the advantage of being able to produce “accurate and current information” on Soviet capability for the U.S. president “in a time of crisis.”
⁵⁹

The jury deliberated for just ten hours before returning their verdict—guilty on all counts. Two counts dealt with espionage and the defendant’s intent to injure the United States and carried the possibility of a life sentence. Other counts, carrying lesser penalties, concerned passing U.S. documents to unauthorized persons and the sale of U.S. documents valued at more than $100.
⁶⁰

At his December 22 sentencing, Kampiles said, “First of all, Your Honor, I’m sorry for everything that has happened. Not at any time did I want to injure my country in any way. I only wanted to serve my country.” Prosecuting attorney David T. Ready suggested a “substantial sentence.” Kampiles “chose to casually disregard the safety and well-being of 200 million Americans.”
⁶¹

Judge McNagny sentenced Kampiles to forty years in prison stating that “This case is a complete tragedy for a young man who has never been in trouble before” but that “the United States has suffered a severe setback because of the sale to the Russians.”
⁶²

At the beginning of 1976, the Office of ELINT was not the only CIA component with a signals intelligence mission. In the operations directorate, Division D continued its mission of collecting COMINT from outposts in various U.S. embassies and consulates as well as from vans loaded with eavesdropping equipment. The primary mission of those outposts was “close support” of CIA operations—including monitoring the communications of the local security service.
⁶³

But in February 1977, Division D and OEL were merged into the Office of SIGINT Operations (OSO), which would be part of the science and technology directorate. The consolidation may have been a means of eliminating the “constant battles” that former OEL chief Robert Singel
recalled being fought by the two organizations. But according to Roy Burks, who became head of the OSO operations group when it was formed and then its director in September 1981, the merger was a friendly one, with no opposition from the operations directorate.
⁶⁴

Heading up the new office during its first fifteen months was Edward Ryan, a veteran of the operations directorate whose previous assignments had included chief of station in Stockholm, chief of base in Berlin, and, until the merger, head of Division D. In May 1978, he was succeeded by another operations officer, David Barry Kelly, whose CIA service had included stints in Nepal, Vietnam, and Moscow.
⁶⁵

Kelly would play a key role in the creation of a new and still classified secret signals intelligence organization, which merged the embassy eavesdropping operations of the DS&T and NSA. In 1976, Charlie Snod-grass, staff director for the House Armed Services Committee, conducted a study on U.S. SIGINT activities—and didn’t like what he found: too much duplication, not enough coordination, and lack of clear lines of authority in key areas. It had been the practice under Duckett for the CIA to conduct SIGINT activities as it wished, ignoring whatever edicts came from NSA.
⁶⁶
As a result of Snodgrass’s study, and the pressure from Congress that followed, the CIA was forced to acknowledge the NSA as the national SIGINT authority. NSA was quite willing to take over responsibility for all SIGINT. A memorandum of agreement between the two agencies followed, covering liaison, overhead collection, and a number of other subjects.
⁶⁷
In addition, agreement was reached for the CIA and NSA to merge embassy intercept operations. The CIA really had no choice, as the congressional oversight committees’ perception of too much overlap and competition between CIA and NSA embassy operations led Congress to cut off funding for the CIA operation.
⁶⁸

The issue was somewhat more complex than that, according to Roy Burks. The CIA viewed the primary purpose of its embassy sites, not surprisingly given Division D’s origin, as to assist CIA stations and their officers in the field. For NSA, the mandate was different. It had no operatives in the field to support, so the focus of its intelligence activity was to support national and military policymakers.
⁶⁹

The embassy operations, both CIA and NSA, had produced some valuable intelligence. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Moscow operation, code-named BROADSIDE, intercepted the radiotelephone conversations of Soviet Politburo members—including General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, President Nikolai Podgorny, and Premier Alexei Kosygin—as they
drove around Moscow. Traffic from the interception operation was transmitted to a special CIA facility a few miles from the agency’s Langley headquarters.
⁷⁰

Originally, the conversations simply needed to be translated, since no attempt had been made to scramble or encipher the conversations. After columnist Jack Anderson disclosed the operation in 1971, the Soviets began enciphering their limousine telephone calls to plug leaks. Despite that effort, the United States was able to intercept and decode a conversation between Brezhnev and Minister of Defense A. A. Grechko that took place shortly before the signing of the SALT I Treaty. Grechko assured Brezhnev that the heavy Soviet SS-19 missiles under construction would fit inside the launch tubes of lighter SS-11 missiles, making the missiles permissible under the SALT treaty.
⁷¹

In general, however, the intelligence obtained, code-named GAMMA GUPY, was less than earthshaking. According to a former intelligence official involved in the operation, the CIA “didn’t find out about, say, the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was very gossipy—Brezhnev’s health and maybe Podgorny’s sex life.” At the same time, the official said that the operation “gave us extremely valuable information on the personalities of top Soviet leaders.”
⁷²

When the United States opened a liaison office in Beijing in late May 1973, CIA station chief James Lilley set up limousine watches to monitor high-level meetings at the Great Hall and Zhongnanhai, the walled compound that has served as the seat of government in the Communist era. Subsequently, advanced eavesdropping equipment was brought in by diplomatic pouch and placed on the office’s roof. The equipment was used to monitor Chinese aircraft movements and intercept both military and civilian communications. It was not long before the liaison office, by monitoring the arrival of flights from the provinces, was able to determine when a Central Committee meeting was imminent.
⁷³

Details of the merger of embassy intercept operations were worked out between Vice-Adm. Bobby Inman, who became NSA director in July 1977, and OSO chief Barry Kelly. It was agreed that the joint enterprise, to be called the Special Collection Service (SCS), would be initially headed by a CIA official who would serve a two-year term. The deputy director of the SCS would be selected from NSA, and an NSA official would become director after the CIA official completed his term. The director’s job would continue to alternate between CIA and NSA officials, with the director’s deputy succeeding him.
⁷⁴