The Moscow Rules: The Secret CIA Tactics That Helped America Win the Cold War by Antonio J. Méndez & Joanna Mendez & Matt Baglio

Author:Antonio J. Méndez & Joanna Mendez & Matt Baglio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-05-20T23:00:00+00:00

As the Cold War progressed, the Moscow Rules became increasingly dependent on innovation and creativity. An operational need would arise for a particular requirement, which would then force our techs go out and find the solution, either by repurposing something or building it from scratch. The JIB was a perfect example of this.

The origin of the JIB came about in 1973, when I received a message from a chief of base in the subcontinent, looking for help with their surveillance problems. Our officers who were stationed in one of the countries in that region were under massive surveillance by the local Internal Branch, part of their intelligence service that at that time was in bed with the Russians. We needed a tool that could give a case officer the opportunity to exit a vehicle being driven by a partner while under vehicular surveillance.

In those days, I was a traveling technical officer assigned to Southeast Asia, representing both the CIA’s documents and disguise capabilities. As part of the routine duties of traveling technical officers, I would probe border controls and also characterize hostile surveillance. For this trip, Dan, a photo-operations officer, was with me, also traveling from our regional base. I had worked with Dan in a previous assignment and would continue to work with him throughout my career. A droll cynic with a wicked sense of humor, he never failed to lighten the mood. He was a great traveling partner.

On a hot and humid early evening in early July, we sat down together at a local version of a coffee shop and ordered a couple of cold Kingfisher beers and a plate of samosas after making some dry runs on the street. Classic paper napkin spread out on the rusty tin table, we conjured up an idea to have a “Johnny Jump Up,” an inflatable silhouette, replace the figure of a passenger in a car escape scenario. We wrote up this requirement to get it into development back at headquarters and fired it off, like a rocket, to our colleagues in Langley. While this request came from the subcontinent, we recognized that our network of colleagues had similar problems in other parts of the world, and the tool could be used worldwide.

After we returned to our base, we went shopping. The city robustly lived up to its reputation as the sex capital of Southeast Asia, and we had no problem finding just the right solution to our high-tech problem. Anatomically correct plastic sex dolls were readily available, although I found that confounding, given the plentitude of the real thing in the local bars. Nevertheless, for a few coins, we headed back to our office with an assortment of these devices stuffed into shopping bags. Experimenting in our labs, we found old gas canisters to use in inflating the dolls. However, we initially found that the gas came out so fast that it would freeze the plastic dolls, and they would become brittle and shatter, showering the lab with plastic shards. Adding a flash tube to the gas canisters allowed the gas to slow down long enough to warm up.

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