The Mitrokhin Archive by Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin

Author:Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin [Andrew, Christopher & Mitrokhin, Vasili]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141966465
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-07T23:00:00+00:00

Not all the intercepts of Kissinger’s conversations concerned affairs of state. On one occasion he was heard talking to his fiancée, Nancy Maginnes, shortly before their marriage in 1974. According to Kalugin’s somewhat censorious recollection:

He apparently had just given a speech and, in his egotistical way, was asking her what she thought of it. He was saying, in effect, ‘How did I look? You really thought I sounded well?’ The transcript showed Kissinger to be a vain and boastful man.

Word came back from Moscow that Andropov ‘loved the intercepted conversation’. He enjoyed boasting to some of his Politburo colleagues that the KGB was able to eavesdrop on the intimate conversations of the US National Security Adviser.49

The complex antennae sprouting on the roofs of Soviet missions gradually alerted Western SIGINT agencies to the presence of the intercept stations within.50 Though probably unaware the KGB had successfully gained access to his own communications, Kissinger protested to Ambassador Dobrynin on 15 August 1975 at the interception of radio and telephone conversations by the Soviet embassy. The Centre drafted a robust reply:

It is advisable that, when there is a meeting with Kissinger, if he again raises that issue, the Soviet ambassador should state that the antennae set up on the Soviet embassy’s roof are being used on the basis of the principle of [diplomatic] reciprocity to ensure communications with Moscow, as well as to receive general radio and television transmissions. These antennae are in no way a contradiction of the embassy’s status. It should be brought to the attention of the Secretary of State that the US government should prevent the installation of equipment, including that on buildings close to the embassy, which would impede the normal operation of the USSR embassy’s radio station.51

Kissinger was inhibited in pursuing his protest by the knowledge that NSA also ran SIGINT operations from the US embassy in Moscow. In 1971 columnist Jack Anderson had revealed in the Washington Post that the embassy had succeeded in intercepting the microwave radio and telephone communications exchanged between the large black Zil limousines of Politburo members as they sped around Moscow.52 Kissinger seems, however, to have been genuinely alarmed by the electronic counter-measures taken to frustrate SIGINT operations run from the Moscow embassy. In November 1975 he told Dobrynin that it was believed that the American ambassador, Walter Stoessel, had developed leukaemia as a result of prolonged exposure to electromagnetic radiation directed against the embassy. On instructions from Moscow, Dobrynin replied that the electromagnetic field around the embassy did not exceed Soviet health standards. Dobrynin claims that he was privately informed by the State Department during the Carter administration that a study had concluded that there was, in fact, no evidence of damage to the health of embassy personnel.53

Kissinger’s protests failed to halt the continued expansion of POCHIN and PROBA operations. Summaries and transcripts of POCHIN intercepts grew from 2,600 pages in 1975 to 7,000 in 1976. During these two years 800 reports based on the intercepts were cabled to the Centre from the Washington residency.

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