CKTAW
| Operation CKTAW | |
|---|---|
| Part of the Cold War | |
| File:Moscow Varshavskoye Highway 2013-01 085.JPG Varshavskoye Highway in southern Moscow. The manhole used for the tap was located just off the roadway, screened by a narrow treeline. | |
| Type | Wiretap / signals intelligence collection |
| Location | |
| Planned by | Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) |
| Target | Underground communications cable linking the Krasnaya Pakhra nuclear weapons research institute in Troitsk to the Soviet Ministry of Defence |
| Date | c. 1976 – 1985 |
| Executed by | CIA Moscow station with the Directorate of Science and Technology and the National Security Agency |
| Outcome | Tap productive from 1981 until spring 1985; betrayed to the KGB and dismantled |
CKTAW (later GTTAW, and CKELBOW in an earlier phase) was a Cold War wiretap operation run by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Moscow. From 1981 until 1985 a clandestine tap recorded telephone, fax and teletype traffic passing through a buried cable that connected the Krasnaya Pakhra nuclear weapons research institute in the closed town of Troitsk with the Soviet Ministry of Defence in Moscow.[1][2] The KGB, which uncovered the device in 1985, referred to the case as Billiard Ball (Script error: The function "langx" does not exist.).[3]
The operation ran in parallel with the agency's handling of Adolf Tolkachev and was one of its most closely held activities in the Soviet Union. It ended in 1985, the year American counterintelligence later called the Year of the Spy, and was disclosed to the KGB by at least one, possibly two, CIA insiders: the dismissed officer Edward Lee Howard and the mole Aldrich Ames.[4][5]
Name
CIA cryptonyms for Soviet operations carried the digraph CK in the late 1970s; the wiretap appears in declassified material and memoirs first as CKELBOW, then CKTAW, and finally GTTAW after the agency changed the digraph to GT in the mid-1980s.[6][7] Milt Bearden, a former chief of the CIA's Soviet/East European Division, recounted that a technical officer made a farewell gift for Burton Gerber, the departing Moscow station chief: a bent steel tube with a black glass sphere hanging from a chain, its outline suggesting taw, a letter of the Hebrew alphabet.[7]
Background
In the mid-1970s, American technicians monitoring the radio spectrum in Moscow intercepted microwave transmissions between the Ministry of Defence and the laboratory complex at Krasnaya Pakhra, near Troitsk, a centre of Soviet research on nuclear weapons and on laser and particle beam programs. The signals, normally confined to a narrow line-of-sight path, became readable during rainstorms, when diffraction scattered them off the city's tin roofs. The interception ended once the Soviets recognised that microwave links were vulnerable and moved the traffic to a buried landline.[2]
Imagery from the KH-11 reconnaissance satellite, first launched in December 1976, showed a trench being dug for communications cables between Moscow and Troitsk, with a line of manholes along the route for maintenance access. In 1977 the CIA authorised a development program to design equipment able to extract signals from the lead-sheathed, gas-filled cables without breaching the sheath or triggering tamper alarms. The work involved the Office of Development and Engineering and the Office of Technical Service (OTS) within the Directorate of Science and Technology, the Soviet/East European Division of the Directorate of Operations, and the National Security Agency.[2][4]
Preparation
CIA officers spent more than two years discreetly surveying over a dozen manholes along Varshavskoye Highway near Moscow's outer ring road, using concealed Tessina cameras, satellite imagery and sketches to build a three-dimensional model of the site. The manhole eventually chosen sat off the roadway behind a treeline less than fifty feet wide, opposite a large open field and within sight of a KGB Second Chief Directorate installation two kilometres away. Candidates for the entry rehearsed in a full-scale replica of the underground chamber built at Camp Peary, the agency training facility in Virginia, and disguise clothing was bought at flea markets in Vienna, East Germany and Warsaw so that the officers could pass as Soviet workers.[2]
James M. Olson, later chief of CIA counterintelligence, made the first entry into the manhole in 1979 to survey the cables, and received the Intelligence Medal of Merit for the mission.[8] In 1981 an OTS technical officer, after a lengthy surveillance detection run and a change into local clothing, spent about two hours in the chamber, thigh-deep in groundwater, sampling data from each of roughly a dozen cables with a 25-pound recording unit to identify the line carrying Krasnaya Pakhra traffic.[2]
Operation
Once analysis of the samples confirmed the target cable, a permanent tap was installed. A two-piece collar fitted around the cable drew off signals by induction and fed them to a recording container buried near the manhole. Officers from the Moscow station returned periodically, on the order of two or three times a year, to swap tapes and power supplies, and the unit could be interrogated remotely to report whether it had been disturbed. The recordings were returned to Langley for processing and yielded material on Soviet laser and particle beam weapons research.[2][3] Bearden wrote that the operation "ran like clockwork for five years" and described it as a successor to the 1950s Berlin tunnel and the US Navy's undersea cable taps.[7]
Loss of the tap
In the spring of 1985, an officer sent to service the device aborted the run after a remote check returned a tamper warning. After internal debate between the station and headquarters, a second officer near the end of his Moscow tour recovered the recording unit some weeks later, but the tapes were blank. Unable to establish whether the cause was a malfunction or KGB tampering, the agency shut the operation down and listed it among the unexplained "anomalies" of 1985, a year in which a series of its Soviet agents were arrested.[7][2]
The scale of the damage was recorded internally the following year. In November 1986 the chief of the Soviet counterintelligence group in the SE Division wrote a memorandum describing "45 Soviet and East European cases and two technical operations that were known to have been compromised or were evidencing problems", and the agency set up a special task force in October 1986 to investigate the losses.[9]
Responsibility
Edward Lee Howard joined the CIA in 1981 and was selected the following year for a Moscow posting, receiving access to details of agency operations in the Soviet Union, including training in the manhole mock-up. He was dismissed in 1983 after a polygraph examination disclosed drug use and petty theft; during the same examination he admitted having cheated in the mock-up exercise by replacing the weights in his backpack with cardboard.[9][2] He subsequently sold information on Moscow operations to the KGB.[10]
Howard came under suspicion in August 1985, when the KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko defected in Rome and told his debriefers he had seen 1984 KGB cables identifying a former CIA employee, code-named "Robert", as a Soviet source; the CIA matched the description to Howard within days.[9] On 21 September 1985 Howard evaded FBI surveillance in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the help of his wife and a dummy propped up in the passenger seat of his car, and fled the country. On 7 August 1986 the Soviet Union announced that it had granted him political asylum.[11][12] He died at his dacha outside Moscow in July 2002.[13]
Aldrich Ames, the CIA counterintelligence officer who began spying for the KGB in April 1985, also claimed knowledge of the case. In taped jailhouse interviews with the journalist Pete Earley after his 1994 arrest, Ames described CKTAW among the operations he had disclosed, together with CKABSORB, a sensor program directed at Soviet missile warheads on the Trans-Siberian railway.[5] Published accounts generally credit Howard with giving the KGB the location and operational details of the tap, with Ames independently confirming its existence; the overlap between the two men's disclosures in 1985 left the exact attribution of several losses unresolved.[4][11]
KGB account
Igor Atamanenko, a retired KGB counterintelligence officer, wrote that the Second Chief Directorate began searching the area southwest of Moscow after a surveillance team lost an American diplomat carrying a heavy rucksack on 27 June 1982, and that the recording container, marked in Russian with a high-voltage warning and treated with rodent repellent, was eventually found buried beside a special-communications manhole. He further claimed that KGB and Alpha personnel rehearsed an ambush at the site for months and detained three American technical officers there on 12 June 1985.[3] American accounts of the operation record no arrests at the site; the officer who retrieved the device in 1985 returned without incident.[4][2]
A technical description from the Soviet side was published in 1990 by Lieutenant General Nikolai Brusnitsyn in the pamphlet Openness and Espionage, which presented photographs of the recovered hardware and complained about the scale of American technical collection.[14] The KGB counterintelligence general Rem Krassilnikov gave a fuller account in 1999, describing an inductive sensor clamped to the cable, a buried electronics box holding a recorder, transceiver and a power supply lasting four to six months, and a shortwave antenna that allowed the unit to be interrogated from up to 2.5 kilometres away.[2]
See also
- Operation Gold, a 1950s cable-tapping tunnel in Berlin
- Operation Ivy Bells, a US Navy tap on Soviet undersea cables
- Adolf Tolkachev, a CIA agent in Moscow also betrayed by Howard
References
- ↑ Peake, Hayden (2008). "SPYCRAFT: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to Al-Qaeda" (PDF). Studies in Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency. 52 (2).
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 Wallace, Robert; Melton, H. Keith (2008). "An Operation Called CKTAW". Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to al-Qaeda. New York: Dutton. ISBN 978-0-525-94980-0. Search this book on
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Atamanenko, Igor (26 September 2014). "Страсти вокруг "Объекта Троицк"". Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye (in русский).
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Stein, Jeff (27 July 2003). "Spy vs. Spy". The New York Times.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Earley, Pete. "Confessions of a Spy: The Story of Aldrich Ames". peteearley.com. Retrieved 10 June 2026.
- ↑ Hoffman, David E. (2015). The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-53760-7 Check
|isbn=value: checksum (help). Search this book on
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Bearden, Milt; Risen, James (2003). The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB. New York: Random House. pp. 28–29. ISBN 0-679-46309-7. Search this book on
- ↑ "A Biography of Professor James Olson: Under Cover". The Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. 22 June 2022.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (1 November 1994). An Assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames Espionage Case and Its Implications for U.S. Intelligence (PDF) (Report). United States Senate.
- ↑ Engelberg, Stephen (8 August 1986). "Immense Damage Seen From Ex-C.I.A. Employee". The New York Times.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Wise, David (November 2015). "Thirty Years Later, We Still Don't Truly Know Who Betrayed These Spies". Smithsonian Magazine.
- ↑ "Fired CIA Agent Who Fled Arrest Surfaces in Moscow : Accused of Espionage, He Is Granted Asylum". Los Angeles Times. 7 August 1986.
- ↑ Wise, David (28 July 2002). "Spy in a Gilded Cage". Los Angeles Times.
- ↑ Brusnitsyn, Nikolai (1990). Openness and Espionage. Moscow: Military Publishing House, USSR Ministry of Defence. OCLC 23976148. Search this book on
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