# The First Female CIA Officer in Moscow, The Widow Spy | Marti Peterson (throwback episode)

An episode of [The Team House](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1492797340), 10 Dec 2025, 2 h 30 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/clrtpod.com/m/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/68967188/marti_peterson_throback_audio.mp3

Original airdate 7/16/2021 In this episode, the team sits down with legendary CIA case officer Marty Peterson, whose Cold War mission in Moscow led to one of the most dramatic KGB arrests of the era. Marty walks through running a top Soviet asset, the night of the failed dead drop, her capture at Lubyanka Prison, and what she later learned about her agent’s tragic fate. It’s a firsthand look inside real espionage, tradecraft, and the cost of intelligence work at the highest level. 00:00 – CIA Widow Spy: Marty Peterson Intro 12:40 – Moscow Tradecraft: Dead Drops & Surveillance 27:15 – Running Soviet Assets Under KGB Pressure 44:10 – Psychological Toll of Life as a CIA Spy 1:05:30 – Losing “Trigon”: Top Cold War Asset Compromised 1:22:45 – Was There a Mole? Suspecting CIA Compromise 1:33:15 – The Failed Dead Drop: Something Is Wrong 1:42:02 – KGB Ambush on the Bridge: Marty Is Taken 1:46:37 – Inside Lubyanka: Interrogation by the KGB 2:04:03 – How Trigon Died: Betrayal, Poison & Cover-Up 2:16:14 – Briefing President Carter: From Moscow to the White House 2:26:24 – Life After the CIA & Why She Wrote The Widow Spy Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Special Operations, Cobert Ops Espionage The Team House with your
[0:13] Speaker 1: hosts Jack Murphy and David Park.
[0:21] Speaker 2: Hi.
[0:22] Speaker 3: Everyone, this is episode one hundred and three of The
[0:25] Speaker 3: Team House.
[0:25] Speaker 2: I'm Jack Murphy, who with co host Dave Park.
[0:28] Speaker 3: Tonight, we are super excited to be joined with our guest,
[0:32] Speaker 3: Marty Peterson.
[0:33] Speaker 2: She is the author of The Widow Spy.
[0:35] Speaker 3: She was one of the very first actually she was
[0:38] Speaker 3: the first CIA case officer sent to Moscow.
[0:41] Speaker 2: But there's so much more to her story than just that.
[0:44] Speaker 3: Her husband was a Green Beret and then a CIA
[0:47] Speaker 3: paramilitary officer who was unfortunately killed in Laos during the war,
[0:53] Speaker 3: and Marty kind of stepped right into his jungle boots
[0:56] Speaker 3: and joins the CIA herself, goes through all the t
[1:00] Speaker 3: to become a case officer, warns Russian and gets deployed
[1:03] Speaker 3: to Moscow, where she handled a strategic asset and then
[1:06] Speaker 3: went on to have a thirty two year career at
[1:10] Speaker 3: Central Intelligence.
[1:11] Speaker 2: So Marty, we're so excited to have you here today.
[1:14] Speaker 4: Thank you so much. I really really am looking forward
[1:18] Speaker 4: to this.
[1:19] Speaker 2: So Marty, Jack and I have a manaje.
[1:22] Speaker 5: You like superhero comic book piques and every good superhero
[1:25] Speaker 5: has an origin story, how they gain their powers. And
[1:29] Speaker 5: one of the things that we like to ask our
[1:30] Speaker 5: guests is how did you get your powers? Like, how
[1:34] Speaker 5: did you grow up? How did you become who you became?
[1:39] Speaker 4: I was. I was a younger daughter, and I think
[1:44] Speaker 4: second children always have a little energy that the first
[1:47] Speaker 4: child doesn't have. We're there to do first things. And
[1:53] Speaker 4: my mother always said, you know, my sister was just
[1:58] Speaker 4: doing fine, But Martha Wels she always did things differently.
[2:02] Speaker 4: So I guess I just started out that way.
[2:05] Speaker 5: Yeah, And did you have any aspirations to work for
[2:10] Speaker 5: the government when you were growing up?
[2:12] Speaker 2: Was any of that there?
[2:16] Speaker 4: No, Dave, I knew two pieces of the government, the
[2:22] Speaker 4: Post Office and the I R. S. Those are the
[2:25] Speaker 4: only two pieces that had any impact on me. So no,
[2:28] Speaker 4: I had no idea. And without all the Internet and
[2:31] Speaker 4: all then when I was growing up, we had no
[2:34] Speaker 4: idea about the CIA or Washington or any event.
[2:39] Speaker 3: And can you can you tell us then about like
[2:40] Speaker 3: going to college, what your major was, and how you
[2:44] Speaker 3: met John and how that relationship began and what kind
[2:48] Speaker 3: of took you into this world.
[2:50] Speaker 4: I went to a small university in New Jersey, Drew University,
[2:55] Speaker 4: right outside of New York, and it was it is
[2:59] Speaker 4: a Methodist college, small liberal arts college. I met him
[3:04] Speaker 4: the first week in college, and he and I there
[3:08] Speaker 4: were sparks there, but he went on and dated other
[3:12] Speaker 4: people as I did. And he majored in physics and
[3:17] Speaker 4: I majored in sociology. The study of the obvious is
[3:22] Speaker 4: what John always called it. He was studying serious things
[3:26] Speaker 4: and I was studying sociology. So then you know, when
[3:32] Speaker 4: we graduated, he was accepted at three journalism schools. He
[3:38] Speaker 4: was an excellent writer, Columbia, Iowa, and Montana. And he
[3:44] Speaker 4: decided to enlist in the army. This was nineteen sixty seven.
[3:48] Speaker 4: He was bound to go to Vietnam, but he decided
[3:53] Speaker 4: to go into the Green Grays and he wanted a
[3:56] Speaker 4: fighting chance, and that's what he got. He was on
[3:59] Speaker 4: an eighteen him up in contum play coup up in
[4:03] Speaker 4: the North and ran with Montyard team.
[4:07] Speaker 2: So yeah, Worth, Command and Control North was that's what
[4:12] Speaker 2: he was.
[4:13] Speaker 4: He was c CC.
[4:15] Speaker 3: So he was he was with macv SA. Yes, wow, Okay,
[4:19] Speaker 3: I didn't that's that's not in the book. I didn't
[4:21] Speaker 3: know he was.
[4:21] Speaker 4: No, it isn't. Well, you know, I didn't know that
[4:23] Speaker 4: until I recently read a book on what they did,
[4:28] Speaker 4: and he never told me any of that coming out
[4:31] Speaker 4: on those helicopter leashes and oh.
[4:34] Speaker 3: My lord, so he was he was on he was
[4:38] Speaker 3: on a recon team with mac Vie Sag.
[4:42] Speaker 2: Yeah, did did you? Did you guys?
[4:46] Speaker 5: Were you together by the time you graduated college or
[4:49] Speaker 5: was it after that that you that you let the
[4:52] Speaker 5: spark take you.
[4:53] Speaker 4: Yes, now, for the last two years in college we
[4:57] Speaker 4: were together and that was great fun. We and then
[5:01] Speaker 4: go out for a picture of beer and yeah, it
[5:03] Speaker 4: was just great fun. We both graduated amazing, amazingly. But
[5:10] Speaker 4: then he went into the army.
[5:12] Speaker 5: And did you have any saying that or did you
[5:15] Speaker 5: have an opinion about it when he was making that decision?
[5:19] Speaker 4: Yes, I did. I said, this is not how I
[5:22] Speaker 4: figured this would work. And he said, I want to write,
[5:27] Speaker 4: but to write real things, you have to have authentic experiences.
[5:33] Speaker 4: He was smart and he knew he had to live
[5:36] Speaker 4: some before he could really make an impact as a writer.
[5:40] Speaker 2: That's amazing.
[5:41] Speaker 3: Yeah, it's hardcore, and I mean, you know, like so
[5:44] Speaker 3: many other you know, girlfriends and wives and spouses at
[5:47] Speaker 3: that time. I mean, you can see that guys are
[5:50] Speaker 3: coming home in bodybags from the war every day. I
[5:52] Speaker 3: mean you must have been, even though you didn't know
[5:55] Speaker 3: he was doing the most dangerous job in Vietnam. I mean,
[5:59] Speaker 3: you still know he's a Green Beret. I mean you
[6:01] Speaker 3: gotta there's a tension that you're worried about getting bad news.
[6:05] Speaker 6: Right.
[6:06] Speaker 4: He would write to me, of course when he was
[6:09] Speaker 4: back at the base, and he received two special awards
[6:15] Speaker 4: and got two free trips, so I knew he was
[6:19] Speaker 4: doing something really worthwhile. He got one trip to Taiwan
[6:24] Speaker 4: and one to Bangkok. And when we went to Laos later,
[6:30] Speaker 4: he said, you know, may I may have been here before,
[6:36] Speaker 4: so I got an idea, but he never he never
[6:39] Speaker 4: told me what he had done.
[6:41] Speaker 5: Now that's a really unique story too. You went to
[6:44] Speaker 5: Laos to be near this.
[6:48] Speaker 3: As you guys got Yeah, as you're getting married and
[6:51] Speaker 3: going there because now he's with the CIA, right.
[6:55] Speaker 4: He didn't tell me he was going to apply to
[6:57] Speaker 4: the CIA because we weren't there, you get And then
[7:00] Speaker 4: when we got married, he said, oh, by the way,
[7:04] Speaker 4: I applied to the CIA, and he took a training
[7:08] Speaker 4: for nine months at the farm and then he said, well,
[7:13] Speaker 4: by the way, We're going to a little town in
[7:16] Speaker 4: laws PACs, which was twelve kilometers from the hoche mintrail.
[7:21] Speaker 4: I mean we were in it, but it was, you know,
[7:25] Speaker 4: a little town. It was a little city. It was
[7:28] Speaker 4: very normal Native Loo town.
[7:34] Speaker 3: And I mean at this it's a different world. Of course,
[7:38] Speaker 3: this is early nineteen seventies. John was a paramilitary officer
[7:44] Speaker 3: working in Laos and your your role as the wife,
[7:48] Speaker 3: you kind of became like the minimum wage secretary if
[7:53] Speaker 3: that for the CIA, yes.
[7:58] Speaker 4: And I rather resent to that, but they we were
[8:03] Speaker 4: really free labor and they really needed the extra clerical
[8:08] Speaker 4: help there because they didn't they couldn't afford to send
[8:11] Speaker 4: secretaries out, so the wives filled in those jobs. Yeah,
[8:16] Speaker 4: I was a JS four clerk type. Is that? You know?
[8:19] Speaker 4: If I didn't have decided not to file a cable
[8:24] Speaker 4: at the end of the week, I decided maybe I
[8:26] Speaker 4: should just shred it. That way I wouldn't have to
[8:29] Speaker 4: file it. But yeah, I was. I was somewhat resentful,
[8:33] Speaker 4: but I knew they gave us all jobs just so
[8:37] Speaker 4: we wouldn't sit in the afternoons and drink.
[8:39] Speaker 2: Right, What what was that culture like?
[8:43] Speaker 5: Because there were other wives there in Laos near the
[8:47] Speaker 5: Hocheman Trail during the Vietnam War. What what was that
[8:51] Speaker 5: life like for you, because did you have your own
[8:54] Speaker 5: little subculture?
[8:56] Speaker 4: Well, yes, there was only US. There were I can
[9:02] Speaker 4: say there were probably under thirty Americans there. There were
[9:07] Speaker 4: some USAID officers there, but generally the CIA, well, I
[9:13] Speaker 4: was stuck together and we had all had parties together,
[9:18] Speaker 4: and we got very tired of each other. You know,
[9:22] Speaker 4: there's no TV, there's no radio, there's no newspapers, there
[9:26] Speaker 4: are hands, no not even a handful of nightclubs where
[9:30] Speaker 4: you know, you went and drank and beer and watched
[9:33] Speaker 4: the girls you know, were the boys whatever they were.
[9:36] Speaker 7: So, yeah, you mentioned it at one point in the book,
[9:41] Speaker 7: like what was the story with the index cards that
[9:43] Speaker 7: you would put like really funny things in there to
[9:46] Speaker 7: kind of like play a practical joke on some of
[9:48] Speaker 7: the other agency employees.
[9:51] Speaker 3: And then you realized he didn't read any of them.
[9:54] Speaker 3: He just filed them.
[9:56] Speaker 4: Right, So these were this was intel. I put quotes
[10:01] Speaker 4: around that because it was very low level. These were
[10:04] Speaker 4: reports from the road watch teams, the teams that would
[10:08] Speaker 4: go out and sit on the hotchi Men trail and
[10:10] Speaker 4: then report back so they would give us their coordinates
[10:14] Speaker 4: and then they would give us a brief description of
[10:17] Speaker 4: what they saw. So, as the clerk typist, I would
[10:22] Speaker 4: roll a little three by five card into a manual
[10:26] Speaker 4: typewriter and I would type what they said. Well, some
[10:30] Speaker 4: of them said in action a small platoon, seven men,
[10:35] Speaker 4: you know whatever, and then they would say they spot
[10:40] Speaker 4: at an elephant, or so I would write a small
[10:47] Speaker 4: platoon with short arms and long, long legs and fur.
[10:55] Speaker 4: And I would make these things up on these cards,
[10:58] Speaker 4: thinking that the report coorts officer, who now had to
[11:02] Speaker 4: plot these on a huge wall map with pins, would
[11:07] Speaker 4: read them. But he didn't. He just read the coordinates
[11:10] Speaker 4: and just put the pin there and filed these three
[11:14] Speaker 4: by five cards. Eventually I knew I had typed up many, many, many,
[11:19] Speaker 4: maybe two dozen, And I said, Billy, I do you
[11:25] Speaker 4: read those cards? And he said, oh, now they're just
[11:28] Speaker 4: they're just junk. And I thought, yeah, they are because
[11:31] Speaker 4: I made it up. But I had it was my
[11:36] Speaker 4: own amusement. I think it was my own little playground
[11:39] Speaker 4: I had. And meanwhile, what is what is John's job?
[11:43] Speaker 4: What was your husband's job over there? And what was
[11:45] Speaker 4: he doing? Kind of day to day. They were the
[11:50] Speaker 4: paramilitary officers there went to recruit and train, equip and
[11:56] Speaker 4: then deploy low irregular sold and many of them were young,
[12:03] Speaker 4: you know, seventeen eighteen, and they would take them up
[12:08] Speaker 4: to our training camp and train them and then they
[12:11] Speaker 4: would equip them with arms and uniforms, and then they
[12:16] Speaker 4: would deploy them on helicopters into Hlz's where they would
[12:23] Speaker 4: then disperse and engage the North Vietnamese Army that was
[12:28] Speaker 4: using the hoch Chimen Trail to move weapons and machinery
[12:33] Speaker 4: and all munitions everything down the Ho Chimen Trail to
[12:38] Speaker 4: South Vietnam. So their job was to interdict the flow
[12:42] Speaker 4: of that military supply line. They occasionally would dig a
[12:48] Speaker 4: big hole and put brush over it, and you know,
[12:51] Speaker 4: it was a great morning when we caught a tank
[12:54] Speaker 4: in one of those traps. What wasn't good, of course,
[12:59] Speaker 4: was that the people inside the tank were often chained
[13:02] Speaker 4: inside there, so it was it was a real low
[13:10] Speaker 4: level or effort, but it was very effective. They they
[13:14] Speaker 4: say that it is one of the most effective secret
[13:18] Speaker 4: wars during the Vietnam War. It was one of the
[13:21] Speaker 4: most successful efforts with the fewest amount of people because
[13:27] Speaker 4: there were just a handful of these paramilitary officers.
[13:31] Speaker 2: In Tucks Day right there.
[13:33] Speaker 3: What were they called again, the like GRP one, g
[13:36] Speaker 3: r P two like that, if I recall, they.
[13:39] Speaker 4: Were the group mobiles. Yes, I think that was from
[13:44] Speaker 4: the French.
[13:47] Speaker 3: Yeah, like you said, I mean it was a very
[13:49] Speaker 3: small effort with a white footprint, light American footprint, not
[13:53] Speaker 3: at all like Vietnam. There were not, yeah, the huge
[13:57] Speaker 3: military infrastructure in place.
[14:00] Speaker 2: And so John was going out there. It wasn't just
[14:03] Speaker 2: training them.
[14:03] Speaker 3: He was also going forward with a radio telephone operator
[14:06] Speaker 3: with his RTO and like doing some sort of like
[14:08] Speaker 3: field mentoring advising right.
[14:12] Speaker 4: And I mean they would fly above the troops after
[14:15] Speaker 4: they infilled them, and then they would cover them with
[14:18] Speaker 4: the importers, the plane pilate su porters and they would
[14:25] Speaker 4: fly overhead and track them and find out and then
[14:29] Speaker 4: of course know where they engage the enemy. Sometimes when
[14:34] Speaker 4: the law ran into a big group of North Vietnamese,
[14:38] Speaker 4: they leave their weapons behind and walk out. You know.
[14:42] Speaker 4: It was they were not fighters, it wasn't their fight,
[14:46] Speaker 4: it wasn't there war, and they knew it. It was.
[14:49] Speaker 4: They were all volunteers and it was a way to
[14:52] Speaker 4: make money and there it was exciting, I guess for
[14:56] Speaker 4: young men. But but for the most part they did
[15:01] Speaker 4: a good job in what they were supposed to be doing.
[15:06] Speaker 4: They were really engaging the North Vietnamese and that was
[15:10] Speaker 4: to interdict that flow, and I think that was the
[15:13] Speaker 4: effective party.
[15:15] Speaker 3: Can you tell us, I mean, this is a this
[15:18] Speaker 3: is a story that really tugs at your heart when
[15:20] Speaker 3: you read your book. But it is titled The Widow Spy.
[15:25] Speaker 3: Can you tell us what happened to John out there?
[15:29] Speaker 4: Yes, So this was a big operation and they put
[15:34] Speaker 4: in several group mobiles into this HLZ and John rarely
[15:40] Speaker 4: landed with the troops. Like I said, they covered them
[15:44] Speaker 4: from above. They rarely got approval from Vanchon to from
[15:49] Speaker 4: Art to the station and Vanchon to actually land with
[15:54] Speaker 4: the troops. But this was a big operation, a lot
[15:58] Speaker 4: of people. So John wanted very badly to land with
[16:03] Speaker 4: his troops, which he did, and there was another man
[16:10] Speaker 4: with him, come Sing. All of the Americans had loud
[16:14] Speaker 4: code names. John's was Timock and his very best friend
[16:21] Speaker 4: come Sing was also on the ground. And so the
[16:25] Speaker 4: troops got in and it seemed like they were engaging
[16:29] Speaker 4: a little bit. So John got in his helicopter, as
[16:33] Speaker 4: did come Sing. He was in another helicopter, and the
[16:37] Speaker 4: HLZ of course was wide open, but the perimeter had trees,
[16:42] Speaker 4: and of course if you stayed below those tree lines,
[16:45] Speaker 4: no one could get a shot at the helicopter. But
[16:48] Speaker 4: John's pilot lifted up and the helicopter was shot down.
[16:54] Speaker 4: It of course hit the ground and burst into flames,
[16:58] Speaker 4: as helicopters do, and uh Come Sing watched this and
[17:03] Speaker 4: tried very desperately to land, and within minutes John's team
[17:10] Speaker 4: came in his loud team and tried to get him out,
[17:14] Speaker 4: but he was dead and badly burned. And I think
[17:20] Speaker 4: one of the oppos assistants got off the chopper, but
[17:25] Speaker 4: John didn't. And then they had to carry his body
[17:29] Speaker 4: away from the scene because they really came under a
[17:33] Speaker 4: lot of fire then, and so his team carried him
[17:37] Speaker 4: into the jungle and they didn't get his body out
[17:41] Speaker 4: until the next day or so. I felt badly that,
[17:46] Speaker 4: you know, they John was gone, and you know, they
[17:50] Speaker 4: were really endangering themselves, but they were they were so
[17:55] Speaker 4: loyal to him. He was a wonderful leader. He really
[18:00] Speaker 4: they was truly a gifted leader of those kind of
[18:06] Speaker 4: people in that type of situation, and they were, They
[18:11] Speaker 4: were wonderful. They hit The wives of those team members
[18:17] Speaker 4: came to my house the next day, which was very unusual.
[18:20] Speaker 4: Thellower very passive and generally don't come, but they came
[18:24] Speaker 4: and we sat in a circle and they were clearly
[18:28] Speaker 4: all shaken by the fact that this American had died.
[18:33] Speaker 4: So that was in the middle of the afternoon that
[18:37] Speaker 4: he died, and so I worked my normal day and
[18:43] Speaker 4: headed home, took the van, took me home, and I
[18:48] Speaker 4: was fixing dinner and sitting in the living room and
[18:51] Speaker 4: when we had a gravel driveway, and it was a
[18:56] Speaker 4: good doorknob a doorbell because you could hear trucks driving
[19:00] Speaker 4: on the gravel. And I heard the truck come in,
[19:03] Speaker 4: and event I thought it was John, of course, and
[19:06] Speaker 4: I went to the door and it was the chief
[19:11] Speaker 4: of our unit. And I said, Bill, John didn't tell
[19:15] Speaker 4: me you were coming for dinner. And Bill looked at
[19:18] Speaker 4: me and he said, oh, Marty, And I knew then
[19:22] Speaker 4: that something had happened to John. And so then he came.
[19:27] Speaker 8: In, and the whole office came in, and you know,
[19:32] Speaker 8: it's just you all have been there and you know,
[19:36] Speaker 8: it's just beyond comprehension.
[19:39] Speaker 4: You can't even think they were all wonderful to me.
[19:44] Speaker 4: And we had the next night. Everybody came and we
[19:49] Speaker 4: had our own little memorial and wake, and then I
[19:54] Speaker 4: flew home the next day to a world that was
[19:57] Speaker 4: so remote from where I'd been and what I felt
[20:01] Speaker 4: so passionately about. And that was towards the end of
[20:07] Speaker 4: that war in Laos. It didn't get any better then.
[20:12] Speaker 4: So that was October nineteenth, nineteen seventy two.
[20:16] Speaker 3: And at that point, yeah, you were writing that the
[20:19] Speaker 3: security situation for you and the families was deteriorating in Laos,
[20:24] Speaker 3: and there are debates about whether how much longer you
[20:27] Speaker 3: should stay there, and you know, even though this is
[20:30] Speaker 3: such an overwhelming, shocking thing that happened. I recall reading
[20:33] Speaker 3: in the book where you tell some of the other
[20:36] Speaker 3: agency employees, none of you need to die trying to get.
[20:40] Speaker 2: John's remains back.
[20:41] Speaker 3: You didn't want anyone else to get killed trying to
[20:44] Speaker 3: recover your husband. And so I think there's a little
[20:49] Speaker 3: bit of that even seen in you that early on,
[20:52] Speaker 3: in that moment of what was to come in the future,
[20:55] Speaker 3: that sort of service or that sort of dedication to
[20:59] Speaker 3: others and to the and despite all that, they did
[21:05] Speaker 3: recover John thankfully, and you escorted went home. And I
[21:09] Speaker 3: mean that was just such an ord deal in the
[21:11] Speaker 3: book as well, having the funeral and all these people
[21:14] Speaker 3: show up and you're you're like, what twenty five, twenty.
[21:18] Speaker 4: Four, twenty we were about twenty seven, twenty seven. Yeah, yeah,
[21:24] Speaker 4: it's it's it's shocking in a way. And yet I've
[21:29] Speaker 4: can tell you three weeks before John's death, a very
[21:32] Speaker 4: good friend of his died up in northern Laos and
[21:37] Speaker 4: John had sat me down when he saw how up
[21:41] Speaker 4: said I was about his death. And John sat me
[21:45] Speaker 4: down and said, Marty, this is real here. They were
[21:48] Speaker 4: not playing here and this could happen to any of us,
[21:51] Speaker 4: and if that happens, this is what you do. And
[21:55] Speaker 4: he gave me kind of a roadmap of how how
[22:00] Speaker 4: you go on after that, that I was to give
[22:05] Speaker 4: the insurance money to his family and that I would
[22:09] Speaker 4: be all right, and he gave me a certain calmness
[22:13] Speaker 4: about it that three weeks later I had in my heart,
[22:19] Speaker 4: you know, I knew what he intended for me. Sounds
[22:24] Speaker 4: kind of eerie that he foretold that maybe I would
[22:28] Speaker 4: have never remembered it had nothing ever happened to it.
[22:32] Speaker 2: Yeah, Marty out of curiosity to mock me. Do you
[22:36] Speaker 2: know what that meant? In Lowell? Was it a name
[22:38] Speaker 2: or like a call sign.
[22:41] Speaker 4: To mock? Yeah, it was a name, Okay, I didn't
[22:46] Speaker 4: a common name. Yeah.
[22:48] Speaker 5: I don't know if they like the guys were giving
[22:50] Speaker 5: each other ship and gave him like crazy like call
[22:52] Speaker 5: signs in.
[22:53] Speaker 2: LAO, or or if it was just it was just
[22:55] Speaker 2: a common name.
[22:57] Speaker 4: Yeah, that would makes sense. No, I think they were
[23:00] Speaker 4: all Well, I have to tell you a story. Then
[23:03] Speaker 4: in two thousand and fifteen, I went. I went to
[23:09] Speaker 4: Los Angeles where my daughter was working, and she worked
[23:16] Speaker 4: there at night at a club, and so she sent
[23:20] Speaker 4: a van for me to come and pick me up
[23:23] Speaker 4: at the airport. So the guy came. I was coming
[23:26] Speaker 4: down the escalator. He held up the sign you know
[23:29] Speaker 4: are you you know? And I said, that's me. We
[23:31] Speaker 4: got the suitcase. We went out to the van and
[23:33] Speaker 4: it was just he and I. So I sat right
[23:36] Speaker 4: behind him. I could see him in the mirror, and
[23:40] Speaker 4: so we started chatting as we left the airport, and
[23:44] Speaker 4: I asked him, I said, where are you from? And
[23:47] Speaker 4: he said, oh, I'm from the far East and I
[23:50] Speaker 4: said a where and he said Thailand And I said, oh, really,
[23:54] Speaker 4: I lived in Laos. He said in Vienscha, the capitol.
[24:01] Speaker 4: And I said, no, I lived in pac Say and
[24:04] Speaker 4: he said Paksey. He said, my mother lives in pac
[24:11] Speaker 4: Say and he said, I used to live in pac Say.
[24:16] Speaker 4: He said, I flew T twenty eights for the CIA.
[24:23] Speaker 4: And I said, then you must have known my husband
[24:27] Speaker 4: to mock and he said, I knew Tomck and I
[24:31] Speaker 4: knew come sing. Wow.
[24:34] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's surreal. That is amazing.
[24:37] Speaker 4: That gives you chills, doesn't it. In all the people
[24:41] Speaker 4: in Los Angeles.
[24:42] Speaker 2: To pick you up. Yeah, that's amazing.
[24:46] Speaker 4: So when we got to my daughter's apartment, you know,
[24:49] Speaker 4: we he and I cried some and laughed and all
[24:51] Speaker 4: the way to our apartment. We get to the apartment,
[24:54] Speaker 4: I get out, he gets out, He gets my suitcase,
[24:56] Speaker 4: and I turned around to say goodbye. Of course, he
[25:01] Speaker 4: and I embrace, and my daughter's said, mom, that was
[25:05] Speaker 4: a very short ruck.
[25:10] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's amazing.
[25:11] Speaker 4: You know, it is this small world, it is.
[25:14] Speaker 2: That's unreal. Now.
[25:16] Speaker 5: I think that it's an interesting point of transitioning, like
[25:19] Speaker 5: into your career. Is it seems like there's been a
[25:22] Speaker 5: mental change maybe for Uh, for Peter, and also for you,
[25:25] Speaker 5: in the sense that he went uh, you know, into
[25:31] Speaker 5: UH Special Forces to live a life, to struggle to
[25:35] Speaker 5: be a better writer. But then something must have grown
[25:40] Speaker 5: within him in order to continue after a service and
[25:43] Speaker 5: to go into CIA. And then you also, you said,
[25:46] Speaker 5: you know, you were not happy, you know, secretary at
[25:49] Speaker 5: the time, but when you were returning the States, you
[25:53] Speaker 5: you like you went back to this world that wasn't
[25:56] Speaker 5: yours and you left this cause that you believed in
[25:59] Speaker 5: what was happening with both of you, or you in
[26:02] Speaker 5: particular at that time.
[26:05] Speaker 4: You mean, in our dedication, are feeling a mission?
[26:08] Speaker 2: Sure?
[26:10] Speaker 4: Well, I think the CIA at the time and probably
[26:16] Speaker 4: still now is a very mission oriented group. And I
[26:24] Speaker 4: think I got that in spades. I was part of
[26:28] Speaker 4: this driven force this. I mean when John was in Vietnam,
[26:34] Speaker 4: he knew CIA officers, they actively recruited him. He came
[26:40] Speaker 4: home knowing that's what he wanted to do. Did he
[26:44] Speaker 4: quit writing? No, And he wrote the whole time he
[26:47] Speaker 4: was in Laos, and part of that journal is in
[26:50] Speaker 4: the book. Because he really loved writing. That was his passion,
[26:57] Speaker 4: but he really felt so strongly about what we were
[27:01] Speaker 4: doing in Vietnam and in Laos as I came to
[27:08] Speaker 4: really believe in all that too. And of course I
[27:11] Speaker 4: was a member, a child of the Cold War, you know,
[27:14] Speaker 4: I sat under desks in elementary school, and that nuclear
[27:20] Speaker 4: war was a real threat. And so I think all
[27:23] Speaker 4: of that came together in that time that the Communists
[27:27] Speaker 4: bad people, you know, that force against communism.
[27:32] Speaker 3: So, Marty, you get back home of gone through this
[27:36] Speaker 3: entire horrendous ordeal, what does this idea start to creep
[27:41] Speaker 3: up into your mind that you want to go back
[27:44] Speaker 3: into it, that you want to go and get some
[27:46] Speaker 3: payback for what happened to your husband, that you want
[27:50] Speaker 3: to go and actually do step into John's shoes in
[27:54] Speaker 3: a very real way.
[27:56] Speaker 4: You know, it wasn't my idea. And I really a
[28:01] Speaker 4: person who lives in the moment, and I and I
[28:05] Speaker 4: really believe when our friend Tom and Gerald, Tom had
[28:12] Speaker 4: been in Laos, well they both had been in Laos
[28:14] Speaker 4: with us, and Tom had worked with John, and Tom
[28:18] Speaker 4: said Marti, why why don't you do what John was
[28:21] Speaker 4: going to do? That was a key thing to say,
[28:27] Speaker 4: wouldn't you love to take up your husband's mission. And
[28:32] Speaker 4: you know, it's like women taking their husband's position as
[28:37] Speaker 4: a senator or congressman or governor or whatever. You really
[28:41] Speaker 4: do feel that identity connection that you know you can
[28:46] Speaker 4: fill that space. And that's why I thought, well I
[28:51] Speaker 4: can do that. But I probably never thought I couldn't
[28:54] Speaker 4: do anything.
[28:56] Speaker 2: It was interesting that it was.
[28:57] Speaker 3: It was a little rocky even Oh, you had an
[29:00] Speaker 3: inside connection trying to help you get into the CIA.
[29:04] Speaker 2: There were not very many women case.
[29:06] Speaker 3: Officers at this time, and like I said, very rocky,
[29:10] Speaker 3: just trying to get you through the front door. Like
[29:11] Speaker 3: you mentioned that, you go in for an interview and
[29:14] Speaker 3: after a couple hours, the guy's like, okay, well we
[29:16] Speaker 3: can offer you a secretary position.
[29:20] Speaker 4: Yeah, that's pretty distressing, but it was so common. Women
[29:24] Speaker 4: were teachers, nurses, secretaries, and stay at home mothers and
[29:29] Speaker 4: that was what was offered us. And yeah, to get
[29:33] Speaker 4: an interview to go into the operations, I was a challenge,
[29:39] Speaker 4: but I had wonderful mentors who really stuck with it.
[29:45] Speaker 4: The thought that this one man wanted me to go
[29:47] Speaker 4: as his girl Friday to Madrid. You know, come on,
[29:51] Speaker 4: that's pretty transparent, you know, I'm twenty nine years old
[29:56] Speaker 4: and you know, or twenty eight even you know, it
[30:01] Speaker 4: was really bad. It's really bad. And I found that
[30:06] Speaker 4: I had support of mail management within CIA that I
[30:11] Speaker 4: didn't even work for them, but they realized this guy
[30:14] Speaker 4: is really bad news.
[30:15] Speaker 2: So yeah, so how did you overcome that? How did
[30:19] Speaker 2: how did you work? You get around people like that?
[30:22] Speaker 4: But I just wouldn't I wouldn't quit, and I kept saying, no,
[30:27] Speaker 4: I want to be an operations officer. I have a
[30:30] Speaker 4: master's degree, I have overseas experience, I speak for languages.
[30:34] Speaker 4: What more do you want? R? Yes, I'm a real
[30:38] Speaker 4: deal here. I'm not a lot of way. I'm not
[30:42] Speaker 4: somebody's wife. I'm someone in in and onto myself. And
[30:49] Speaker 4: I think they finally heard that.
[30:52] Speaker 3: That's amazing, And so the foot door finally opens, you're
[30:57] Speaker 3: allowed into to begin your training. Can you tell us
[31:00] Speaker 3: a little bit about that whole process and when you
[31:04] Speaker 3: start to think about your future and CIA and where
[31:06] Speaker 3: it is, what it is you'd like to do there.
[31:09] Speaker 4: I must say, walking through that lobby, I think the
[31:16] Speaker 4: stars were on the wall when I walked through the
[31:20] Speaker 4: lobby on my first morning, and there was a lot
[31:24] Speaker 4: of repressed tears and emotion. I couldn't believe John had
[31:29] Speaker 4: walked those very steps, and do you know that I eoded.
[31:33] Speaker 4: I started to work on his birthday Julyard. It was
[31:38] Speaker 4: more than most people would have thought was acceptable. But
[31:43] Speaker 4: I was driven, I really was. And I think having
[31:49] Speaker 4: a mission really helped me through some of the awful
[31:52] Speaker 4: grieving and sadness. So I met my other career trainee people,
[31:59] Speaker 4: and you know, the last thing I was going to say,
[32:03] Speaker 4: I'm a widow, because then they'd say, oh, they gave
[32:07] Speaker 4: her an advantage, right, I think I always tried to
[32:12] Speaker 4: push that to the side. Nothing against John, but I
[32:15] Speaker 4: wanted to be who I was and I value by myself.
[32:21] Speaker 4: So but they were all very curious. There were very
[32:25] Speaker 4: few women in that class of forty some Yeah.
[32:31] Speaker 3: How did you take to the training that you're now
[32:33] Speaker 3: going to live in this whole clandestine world of dead
[32:36] Speaker 3: drops and aliases and and you know, source handling.
[32:41] Speaker 2: What are you thinking as you're kind of stepping into
[32:43] Speaker 2: this world?
[32:44] Speaker 4: I guess I just realized that this was my new challenge.
[32:51] Speaker 4: I you know, I have to tell you I'm a
[32:53] Speaker 4: Gemini and I believe in astrology, and I believe that
[32:57] Speaker 4: geminis do have two persons, so being undercover was kind
[33:03] Speaker 4: of a natural for me, and I guess I also
[33:07] Speaker 4: have a touch of actress or ability to act, and
[33:11] Speaker 4: so I think I felt okay with it. I lied
[33:15] Speaker 4: to my mother, my father, my sister, my neighbors, you know,
[33:21] Speaker 4: I took to it. I thought that was interesting and
[33:25] Speaker 4: I was very confident I could do whatever they told
[33:29] Speaker 4: me I could do.
[33:32] Speaker 2: Was the farm still nine months at that point in time, No, it.
[33:35] Speaker 4: Wasn't the training at the time. We had training in
[33:42] Speaker 4: Arlington for a while to learn the whole thing about
[33:46] Speaker 4: the Intel community and where CIA fit and then the
[33:49] Speaker 4: organization and all of that about CIA, and then in
[33:53] Speaker 4: January of seventy four we went to the farm, and
[33:59] Speaker 4: of course that's when Jimmy Carter's guess thing was happening.
[34:04] Speaker 4: So driving back and forth to Washington was probably difficult
[34:09] Speaker 4: because we'd have to wait in line for gas to
[34:11] Speaker 4: drive back to the farm. But every step that they
[34:17] Speaker 4: how they trained us was a logical progression, and you
[34:22] Speaker 4: learned one piece and then another, and it was exceptional training,
[34:27] Speaker 4: it really was. And all of the training was accompanied
[34:32] Speaker 4: by role playing, so you actually tried out your abilities,
[34:39] Speaker 4: you proved it to yourself that you could do it.
[34:41] Speaker 4: I remember that the instructor who at the end of
[34:46] Speaker 4: a series of meetings I actually had to recruit, and
[34:51] Speaker 4: we were in a small office and there was a
[34:54] Speaker 4: sofa and I was on one end and he was
[34:57] Speaker 4: on the other. I tell you, by the time I
[35:00] Speaker 4: recruited that man, he was hanging off the arm of
[35:04] Speaker 4: his chair trying to It was very difficult for him
[35:09] Speaker 4: to accept the fact that this young woman was recruiting him,
[35:14] Speaker 4: even though it was just role playing, you know, it
[35:17] Speaker 4: was it was funny, that's fascinating, very satisfying.
[35:21] Speaker 3: And when does it start this well, when you weren't
[35:25] Speaker 3: obviously that they're going to teach you Russian, but when
[35:28] Speaker 3: does this idea start to come about that they're not
[35:30] Speaker 3: just going to deploy you as an operations officer, You're
[35:33] Speaker 3: going to get deployed to you know, the World Series
[35:36] Speaker 3: of Espionage, right.
[35:39] Speaker 4: Well, of course that didn't happen until I had to
[35:42] Speaker 4: turn down two assignments that were what what I was
[35:47] Speaker 4: told by the women who held them were the girls' positions,
[35:51] Speaker 4: and I wasn't wasn't going to do that. I wanted
[35:54] Speaker 4: a real operations stand alone.
[35:57] Speaker 2: You know, what were the gross missions at the time.
[36:01] Speaker 4: Well, so one was in the Far East and a
[36:04] Speaker 4: small small station there, and you'd go out and meet
[36:09] Speaker 4: maybe a couple of safe housekeepers or low level assets.
[36:13] Speaker 4: But you weren't assessing and developing and recruiting people. You
[36:18] Speaker 4: were just running agents and doing name traces and things
[36:24] Speaker 4: like that. Those were the girl positions. The boys were
[36:27] Speaker 4: out really whining and dining and getting into the ministries
[36:32] Speaker 4: and local as well as the foreign element in a city,
[36:36] Speaker 4: trying to, you know, figure out who the good targets
[36:39] Speaker 4: were and how to go about recruiting them. So I
[36:44] Speaker 4: wasn't interested in the.
[36:45] Speaker 3: Girl So you turned down the girl jobs. What do
[36:48] Speaker 3: you tell your bosses you want?
[36:51] Speaker 4: I didn't tell them anything. I just said, well, they
[36:54] Speaker 4: knew what I wanted. I wanted what all the guys wanted.
[36:57] Speaker 4: I wanted a good ops officer position in an overseas post.
[37:02] Speaker 4: So then my mentor came to me and he said, Marty,
[37:06] Speaker 4: this man wants to interview you. So I went really cold.
[37:11] Speaker 4: I think I knew he was going to be chief
[37:14] Speaker 4: a station in Moscow, and I sat down with him. Well, Bob.
[37:20] Speaker 4: Bob had a wonderful, dry sense of humor, and so
[37:25] Speaker 4: we chatted a while and he said, you know, you'd
[37:27] Speaker 4: be the first woman out there, especially a single woman.
[37:31] Speaker 4: He said, but I'm a single guy, and they'd never
[37:33] Speaker 4: sent a single guy out there either, So you know,
[37:38] Speaker 4: we laughed about that, and he said, you know, if
[37:40] Speaker 4: you get arrested or I get arrested, it's all going
[37:43] Speaker 4: to be the same. It's going to hurt if they
[37:45] Speaker 4: hit us. So he knew, you know, and he laid
[37:50] Speaker 4: it right out that that was the risk. And it
[37:54] Speaker 4: was hardcore. But like I said, I don't think I
[37:58] Speaker 4: ever turned down a challenge. It was exciting and interesting,
[38:03] Speaker 4: and why not. It was it was, like you said,
[38:07] Speaker 4: the hardest of targets out there.
[38:09] Speaker 2: And there was some sort of like, I mean, I
[38:12] Speaker 2: guess it could happen.
[38:13] Speaker 3: Certainly happened to men too, that they sent Natasha's to
[38:15] Speaker 3: seduce them, But there was also some kind of chauvinistic
[38:19] Speaker 3: thing that maybe they'd send Boris to seduce a female
[38:23] Speaker 3: case officer.
[38:23] Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I waited, I waited, Yeah, twenty one months
[38:30] Speaker 4: never happened. But I have to tell you, Bob, and
[38:32] Speaker 4: I laughed about it because he said he waited too,
[38:36] Speaker 4: and there was never a Natasha.
[38:38] Speaker 5: Never so disappointing, maybe like the Russian honey pot program
[38:43] Speaker 5: was on hiatus at that time.
[38:45] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I guess so.
[38:47] Speaker 9: Yeah, out of curiosity, you said Carter was the president,
[38:54] Speaker 9: were you were his cutbacks on the CIA and sort
[38:57] Speaker 9: of emphasis on the nsaying was that before after you
[39:01] Speaker 9: entered the agency?
[39:08] Speaker 4: Well, I don't, I don't know. I was referring to
[39:14] Speaker 4: Jimmy Carter and the gasolene.
[39:16] Speaker 2: Oh okay, okay.
[39:20] Speaker 4: Uh no, then that was Slession lessened and that was
[39:24] Speaker 4: later on.
[39:25] Speaker 2: Okay.
[39:26] Speaker 5: I was just I was just curious if you if
[39:29] Speaker 5: you saw, because that's sort of like a part of
[39:32] Speaker 5: history or something you read about that Carter had this
[39:36] Speaker 5: favoritism towards technological and believe that human was dead.
[39:39] Speaker 4: But I was, no, that was Stansfield Turner.
[39:42] Speaker 2: Oh stan Siel Turner.
[39:43] Speaker 3: Okay, well we'll talk about because that comes in later. Okay,
[39:49] Speaker 3: all right, great, great, she meets all these characters. Yes,
[39:56] Speaker 3: so talk to us about how you get you you
[40:00] Speaker 3: the interview. Then I take it you passed the interview
[40:02] Speaker 3: and they're going to send you to Moscow. What's the
[40:05] Speaker 3: preparation to get ready for this and then getting over
[40:08] Speaker 3: getting sent over there.
[40:11] Speaker 4: So I had to take forty four weeks of Russian language.
[40:16] Speaker 4: I had to have a good conversational knowledge of Russian.
[40:21] Speaker 4: So then I went to Russian class for forty four
[40:26] Speaker 4: weeks every day. It was some periods of time where
[40:31] Speaker 4: I was a We were in an intensive Russian language
[40:36] Speaker 4: where we only plowed Russian, and yeah, it was hard.
[40:40] Speaker 4: And then of course when I got out of it,
[40:44] Speaker 4: they tested us. And our instructors at the time were
[40:49] Speaker 4: older people who had emigrated and actually they had lived
[40:55] Speaker 4: in Saint Petersburg and we were long into Leningrad, so
[40:59] Speaker 4: they were older people that had I felt didn't have
[41:02] Speaker 4: the current language. So there was some disconnect in the
[41:06] Speaker 4: language I learned. But when I got to Moscow, it
[41:10] Speaker 4: was that's what there was, all right.
[41:12] Speaker 3: So Marty tell us about arriving in Moscow, because this
[41:17] Speaker 3: is very different than laws, obviously very different than America.
[41:20] Speaker 2: The entire.
[41:22] Speaker 4: Permit.
[41:23] Speaker 3: It's a non permissive, denied environment that you are going
[41:26] Speaker 3: into where you're just under observation.
[41:29] Speaker 2: And well, I'll let you tell it. Please explain to us.
[41:33] Speaker 4: Well, I left Fort Lauderdale and it was a beautiful, sunny,
[41:37] Speaker 4: warm day, and I flew via Frankfurt to Moscow and
[41:41] Speaker 4: when we landed it was like three in the afternoon.
[41:45] Speaker 4: It was pretty pretty dark, but this is November fifth,
[41:49] Speaker 4: and of course where the winter is really setting in.
[41:53] Speaker 4: And the plane landed and I thought, why is there
[41:57] Speaker 4: sand on this side of the runway, And then I
[42:00] Speaker 4: realized that it was snow and it had already they'd
[42:04] Speaker 4: had a major snowstorm in the end of October, so
[42:08] Speaker 4: that was a big alert. And of course, you know,
[42:12] Speaker 4: in seventy five we didn't have polar tech yet. So
[42:16] Speaker 4: I had a camel coat with a pile lining and
[42:20] Speaker 4: I struggled to put that on, and they had no jetway,
[42:25] Speaker 4: so we had to walk down the stairs right onto
[42:28] Speaker 4: the tarmac and it was cold. It was like twenty
[42:32] Speaker 4: degrees and it was really cold coming from Florida. And
[42:38] Speaker 4: so as I walked to the terminal there there was
[42:43] Speaker 4: a big sign over the terminal door, you know, Moskova,
[42:47] Speaker 4: and I thought, gee, I wonder how many eyes are
[42:50] Speaker 4: looking at me. And I thought, I wonder if that
[42:54] Speaker 4: stencil that they put on my forehead shows that says Cia,
[42:58] Speaker 4: you feel like you have no clothes on, you feel
[43:01] Speaker 4: like everyone must know who you are. But of course
[43:08] Speaker 4: nothing seemed to happen. Very differently. I went in like
[43:11] Speaker 4: everybody else. I had to go in the diplomat line
[43:14] Speaker 4: because I had a black passport. I was a diplomat,
[43:17] Speaker 4: and so I handed in my passport and he looked
[43:20] Speaker 4: up and looked down and looked up, and he called
[43:22] Speaker 4: someone over, and I thought, hey, I wonder what's going
[43:25] Speaker 4: to happen. And he just stamped it, and off I went,
[43:29] Speaker 4: and a man from the embassy was there, not one
[43:33] Speaker 4: of my CIA colleagues. They had someone else meet me,
[43:37] Speaker 4: and he had a Soviet driver in a black black
[43:43] Speaker 4: zill and put me in the car and off we
[43:45] Speaker 4: went into Moscow, and we chatted a little, you know,
[43:51] Speaker 4: how's the weather. I didn't know this man, and I
[43:54] Speaker 4: knew the Soviet driver was listening, so that was all
[43:57] Speaker 4: we said. He dropped me at the base taking hotel.
[44:02] Speaker 4: He helped me get my bag out, and there I was,
[44:07] Speaker 4: and he gave me no rubles. I hadn't brought any
[44:11] Speaker 4: rubles with me, so I got into the hotel. And
[44:15] Speaker 4: the worst thing in Moscow when whenever you went into
[44:19] Speaker 4: a hotel. They took away your passport. Now that isn't
[44:23] Speaker 4: a happy moment. Now you're there without anything. You just
[44:28] Speaker 4: you know who you are and that's about it. But
[44:30] Speaker 4: they take it, of course, and process it and copy
[44:34] Speaker 4: it and all what they have to do. So then
[44:37] Speaker 4: I got into the elevator and they had a man
[44:40] Speaker 4: on the elevator with it was a cage, you know,
[44:42] Speaker 4: So they pulled the cage across and up we went.
[44:45] Speaker 4: And then there's a lady on every floor in the
[44:51] Speaker 4: in any hotel in Moscow, and they're called the Hall Dragons,
[44:56] Speaker 4: and they keep the keys. So I stopped and told
[45:00] Speaker 4: her the room number, and she gave me my keys.
[45:02] Speaker 4: And I got into my hotel room and I thought, oh,
[45:06] Speaker 4: I made it. You know, I'm safe here. And of
[45:08] Speaker 4: course the phone rang off and on all night. But
[45:14] Speaker 4: as I stood there, I thought, you know, this is
[45:17] Speaker 4: just a hotel room, and if they're watching me, what
[45:20] Speaker 4: are they gonna see? You know, I'm just gonna wash
[45:24] Speaker 4: up and go to bed. But the problem was I
[45:26] Speaker 4: had no rubles, and I thought, I wonder if I
[45:28] Speaker 4: can go downstairs to the hotel and charge my room.
[45:32] Speaker 4: But I decided, you know, i'd made it to the hotel.
[45:36] Speaker 4: I was tired, and so I opened my suitcase and
[45:40] Speaker 4: my mother had packed a bag of apples Macintosh apples
[45:45] Speaker 4: in my suitcase, and I thought, what a sweet thing
[45:50] Speaker 4: mother did. She knew how much I loved apples, and
[45:54] Speaker 4: we didn't have any apples in law. So this was
[45:57] Speaker 4: just a wonderful well home for me. And I had
[46:02] Speaker 4: taken the cheese and crackers off the luftonsa plane and
[46:07] Speaker 4: put them in my purso I had cheese and crackers
[46:10] Speaker 4: and apples for dinner. I don't think I was probably starving.
[46:15] Speaker 4: I was nervous and excited. So the next morning I
[46:20] Speaker 4: got up and I had to, you know, kind of
[46:22] Speaker 4: find the embassy. Well, of course that was no big
[46:24] Speaker 4: deal because I had long studied the map of Moscow.
[46:28] Speaker 4: I knew every twist and turn at that point. So
[46:31] Speaker 4: I walked out. But I didn't wear a hat, and
[46:34] Speaker 4: I had no I didn't have my gloves on. And
[46:36] Speaker 4: this little old lady came up to me on this
[46:39] Speaker 4: street that next morning and said, you don't have your
[46:44] Speaker 4: hat on, and I thanked her and went on my
[46:48] Speaker 4: way to the embassy. Yeah, it was quite a welcome
[46:51] Speaker 4: to Moscow.
[46:53] Speaker 3: And so what was the reception like at the at
[46:56] Speaker 3: the embassy, Because of course you're a CI A officer,
[47:01] Speaker 3: but as far as most people in the embassy, they
[47:03] Speaker 3: just think you're, like, what a secretary?
[47:04] Speaker 2: Right?
[47:05] Speaker 4: Yes, they all thought I was an admin and a clerk.
[47:10] Speaker 4: And I never disabused anyone. I never really talked about
[47:14] Speaker 4: my work, but that's true about most places. That's not
[47:20] Speaker 4: the first thing you talk about. You know where you
[47:22] Speaker 4: come from when you do that kind of thing. So
[47:24] Speaker 4: I got to the Marine Guard, which was on the
[47:27] Speaker 4: ninth floor. It was an upside down embassy with the
[47:30] Speaker 4: top floor was where you went in. The embassy guard
[47:34] Speaker 4: was there, and he signed me in and called a
[47:38] Speaker 4: secretary in the office where I was allegedly working. She
[47:43] Speaker 4: came and got me and took me down to the office.
[47:46] Speaker 4: I met everyone, hung up my coat, and then she
[47:49] Speaker 4: took me the rest of the way down one flight
[47:53] Speaker 4: of stairs where the actual CI station was. And so
[47:59] Speaker 4: she got me into there. And when I opened the
[48:03] Speaker 4: door into that box, there were all my colleagues from training.
[48:08] Speaker 4: There was Bob, my new chief of station, and all
[48:11] Speaker 4: the other fellas, and two of the wives who worked
[48:15] Speaker 4: in the station. That it was wonderful.
[48:18] Speaker 3: It was like it was like a box inside the room,
[48:22] Speaker 3: right to help eliminate bugs and listening devices and things
[48:25] Speaker 3: like this.
[48:26] Speaker 4: Yeah, that was wholly inspectable. You could see every single side.
[48:31] Speaker 4: There were really no power lines into it that weren't
[48:37] Speaker 4: somehow you know protected.
[48:41] Speaker 2: That's interesting.
[48:42] Speaker 5: Now, when you were there under State Department cover, did
[48:46] Speaker 5: you have to do a State Department job? Did you
[48:49] Speaker 5: put in like eight hours a day or whatever as
[48:51] Speaker 5: a State Department employee?
[48:55] Speaker 4: You know, I will say yes. I can't tell you
[48:58] Speaker 4: any more than that. Sure, the State Department doesn't like
[49:02] Speaker 4: me to go into but I did work an eight
[49:04] Speaker 4: hour job and I worked that the second year I
[49:08] Speaker 4: was there. Worked in an office where there were eight
[49:11] Speaker 4: Soviet women in the office, so they were they could
[49:15] Speaker 4: have observed me all the time. So I really did
[49:18] Speaker 4: work eight hours at the job. It is a full
[49:21] Speaker 4: time job.
[49:23] Speaker 3: And so the US government, of course gives you two paychecks, right,
[49:25] Speaker 3: You're getting one for your job at the State Department
[49:28] Speaker 3: and one from the CIA.
[49:29] Speaker 2: That's how that works, right, yeah.
[49:31] Speaker 4: Right, No, no, no, I must say I did get
[49:37] Speaker 4: paid over time by the State Department when I worked
[49:40] Speaker 4: overtime in my coverage job. So that was a good thing.
[49:43] Speaker 4: But no, people always say, yeah, no, I was the
[49:46] Speaker 4: lowest paid office officer in the station. I was a
[49:50] Speaker 4: brand new officer. So yeah, there wasn't anything to spend
[49:55] Speaker 4: money on. It didn't matter, did it, you know.
[49:58] Speaker 3: So it really was that you were the sort of
[50:01] Speaker 3: mild mannered State Department secretary or something, but by night
[50:05] Speaker 3: you're Marty the CIA officer out there doing sneaky things
[50:09] Speaker 3: around Moscow.
[50:10] Speaker 4: That's right. Yeah, my name is Marty, but they all
[50:15] Speaker 4: call me party Marty, and that was my that was
[50:20] Speaker 4: my persona. I drank a lot of Carlsberg beer, and
[50:23] Speaker 4: I had friends at the Marine House, and I invited
[50:28] Speaker 4: all the single embassy women to go with me in
[50:32] Speaker 4: my car and I'd take them out. We'd take picnics
[50:34] Speaker 4: or go out, and while they were standing there, I'd
[50:37] Speaker 4: take a picture with my nikon camera, you know. But
[50:41] Speaker 4: they didn't know right there behind them was the drop
[50:44] Speaker 4: site where I was recasing it. You know. It was
[50:47] Speaker 4: always a point to where I was going.
[50:51] Speaker 3: Yeah, And so what was those sorts of initial experiences
[50:54] Speaker 3: like in Moscow?
[50:55] Speaker 2: I mean, what was Moscow like?
[50:57] Speaker 3: And I believe this was nineteen seventy five, and what
[51:00] Speaker 3: were what were some of your initial taskings things for
[51:04] Speaker 3: you know, the first female case officer in Moscow to do.
[51:07] Speaker 4: Yeah, well, the what what all the officers did when
[51:11] Speaker 4: they got there was the first thing was to get
[51:14] Speaker 4: a car. And so the the Soviets had uh Fiat
[51:20] Speaker 4: that they manufactured in the Soviet Union. And so my
[51:25] Speaker 4: job the first week I was there was to go
[51:28] Speaker 4: to our office in the embassy where there was a
[51:32] Speaker 4: Soviet lady and she would take us out to a
[51:36] Speaker 4: lot that was right next to a train line, a
[51:40] Speaker 4: rail line, and there they all floaded, all these little
[51:45] Speaker 4: jiggilies and they were bright yellow, orange, purple, turquoise, blue, charters, green,
[51:53] Speaker 4: they were all colors. I'm telling you. This lot was huge.
[51:58] Speaker 4: So I looked at all of them and I thought
[52:00] Speaker 4: none of them looked very sedate. So I picked an
[52:06] Speaker 4: orange one. Well, you know, another guy in the office
[52:09] Speaker 4: had a turquoise one, and Bob had a you know,
[52:12] Speaker 4: a yellow one. So we looked like every other car
[52:17] Speaker 4: in Moscow. They were those who did bring cars from
[52:21] Speaker 4: from home or imported them from Sweden or Germany. Those
[52:26] Speaker 4: cars never started when the temperature was thirty below the
[52:30] Speaker 4: jiggle started. Yeah, so that was my first job. And
[52:35] Speaker 4: then with the car, I had the ability to really
[52:38] Speaker 4: start looking to see whether people were the KGB was
[52:43] Speaker 4: following me. And what I had to do to really
[52:49] Speaker 4: be secure in knowing that was to wear a piece
[52:54] Speaker 4: of equipment called the s R R one hundred.
[52:58] Speaker 10: It was.
[53:00] Speaker 4: A small size like a cigarette pack, and it had
[53:06] Speaker 4: an on off switch and it had a squelch, and
[53:11] Speaker 4: it had in it the one frequency one crystal, one
[53:16] Speaker 4: frequency of the of the frequency that the KGB used
[53:22] Speaker 4: in their surveillance teams to communicate between each other. So
[53:27] Speaker 4: if one car, one surveillance car, one KGB car spoke
[53:33] Speaker 4: to another car, we could hear it. So we had
[53:39] Speaker 4: this little radio and then there was a plug in
[53:43] Speaker 4: at the top and then a neck loop that went around,
[53:46] Speaker 4: so we plugged that in and then we had a
[53:49] Speaker 4: wireless earpiece. It was induction to the the antenna. So
[53:55] Speaker 4: we turned this on. The men had a harness. Headquarters
[54:00] Speaker 4: had sewn a harness to put the little radio or
[54:05] Speaker 4: receiver in. But you see, I have different equipment and
[54:09] Speaker 4: the harness didn't fit me. So in February of nineteen
[54:15] Speaker 4: seventy six, a little known fact Headquarters sent us a
[54:19] Speaker 4: new invention, and it was called Velcrow. So I took
[54:24] Speaker 4: it home. I took this strip of Alcrow home, and
[54:26] Speaker 4: I tore up a T shirt and I made a
[54:30] Speaker 4: little pocket for it that I hooked on to the
[54:33] Speaker 4: side of my braw and so then I could slip
[54:37] Speaker 4: the little receiver in there, put the neck lubon the
[54:41] Speaker 4: earpiece in. Now all the men wore them too, and
[54:45] Speaker 4: they were always under their T shirt, under their dress shirt.
[54:48] Speaker 4: We wanted no one in the embassy, of course, to
[54:51] Speaker 4: know that we wore these things, which of course was
[54:56] Speaker 4: our our real insight into whether a team was following you.
[55:03] Speaker 4: So the chiefs Station, Bob would go out and he
[55:07] Speaker 4: could hear in his radio the team would say, targets
[55:12] Speaker 4: turned right up, targets turn left, targets lost. Bob often
[55:17] Speaker 4: got lost target's home. And then I would wear it
[55:22] Speaker 4: and I would go out and I could drive for hours.
[55:26] Speaker 4: I never heard anything, and I always changed the batteries
[55:31] Speaker 4: because I figured it was operator error. Obviously the batteries
[55:35] Speaker 4: were dead. That's why I wasn't hearing anything. But occasionally
[55:39] Speaker 4: I would be with someone out on the street or
[55:42] Speaker 4: in the environs near someone and I would hear their teams.
[55:46] Speaker 4: So we always wore this.
[55:50] Speaker 3: So just the takeaway was they didn't think women worked
[55:55] Speaker 3: as spots.
[55:57] Speaker 4: True, absolutely, that was why they didn't to follow me.
[56:01] Speaker 4: Why would you follow party, Marty? You know you can
[56:04] Speaker 4: see what she's doing. My pattern was flatline.
[56:10] Speaker 2: You know.
[56:10] Speaker 4: I didn't do anything jerky, herky jerky or anything. I
[56:15] Speaker 4: just followed a very normal pattern.
[56:19] Speaker 3: And okay, so now I got to have you tell
[56:22] Speaker 3: us about Trigone.
[56:24] Speaker 2: Who was Trigone? How does this enter the picture for you?
[56:29] Speaker 9: Right?
[56:29] Speaker 4: The reason we were in Moscow, other than technical collection,
[56:34] Speaker 4: which is a whole different world, was to run agents
[56:38] Speaker 4: that we recruited overseas. So we would recruit an agent,
[56:45] Speaker 4: for instance, in Bogata, Columbia. Trigone was an agent who
[56:51] Speaker 4: we recruited there. We came upon him when we listened
[56:56] Speaker 4: to the telephone tap that we had on the Soviet
[57:00] Speaker 4: embassy in Bogata, and eventually we determined that he was
[57:08] Speaker 4: not a typical Soviet. He colored outside the lines. He
[57:12] Speaker 4: had a girlfriend, but his wife was there. He was married,
[57:17] Speaker 4: and he hated the Soviet system, and it became very
[57:20] Speaker 4: clear in his attitude on the phone I must say,
[57:24] Speaker 4: it takes a while to figure out who it is
[57:27] Speaker 4: you're listening to without caller ID, and we're very spoiled today.
[57:33] Speaker 4: But we didn't have caller ID. You had to listen
[57:35] Speaker 4: and figure this out who the different speakers were on
[57:39] Speaker 4: the phone. So we determined that he had this girlfriend
[57:44] Speaker 4: and that she was going back to Madrid where her
[57:47] Speaker 4: family lived, and she had some tax issues there in Bogata.
[57:53] Speaker 4: She was going home, I think, to get money from
[57:56] Speaker 4: her family to pay the back taxes. So we would
[58:00] Speaker 4: listen to the phone calls after she left, and we
[58:03] Speaker 4: determined when she was coming back to Moscow, back to Bogata,
[58:09] Speaker 4: and so we knew the flight and the time, and
[58:14] Speaker 4: Trigon was going to meet her at the airport, so
[58:18] Speaker 4: we met with her. We stopped her before she got
[58:25] Speaker 4: to the exit point, and two of our officers went
[58:29] Speaker 4: and talked to her and said, you know, you might
[58:32] Speaker 4: want to consider getting Trigon to come meet us. We
[58:37] Speaker 4: have an offer that he probably won't want to refuse.
[58:40] Speaker 4: So she got the message. She went and told Tragon
[58:44] Speaker 4: and he met us then at the assigned Dayton time
[58:49] Speaker 4: in the Hilton Hotel in the Turkish back. You can't
[58:54] Speaker 4: make these I mean, truth is the basis of all
[58:59] Speaker 4: good fiction. And why a Turkish bath, Well you have
[59:06] Speaker 4: to wear a towel, so you can't hide a microphone
[59:09] Speaker 4: or anything like that. So these two men met in
[59:13] Speaker 4: the Turkish bath and trygun. Like all good assets, many
[59:17] Speaker 4: of the best ones. Was a volunteer. Really, he said, yes,
[59:21] Speaker 4: that's what I want to do. I'll do this, I
[59:24] Speaker 4: will spy for the US government and you pay me money.
[59:28] Speaker 4: That sounds like a good deal. So he was right
[59:31] Speaker 4: on it. And so then we began to meet him
[59:35] Speaker 4: regularly at various safe houses around Bugata, and it was
[59:43] Speaker 4: clear he had great access. But he was a ministry
[59:49] Speaker 4: a foreign affairs officer, he was not a KHGB officer.
[59:52] Speaker 4: So what he had access to mostly was information about
[59:58] Speaker 4: the Soviets influence in Latin America and in Columbia and
[1:00:05] Speaker 4: the area, and and that was of course very interesting
[1:00:08] Speaker 4: to the analysts at home, But of course more interesting
[1:00:13] Speaker 4: was his agreement to go back to Moscow and spy
[1:00:17] Speaker 4: for US there. So we trained him on various things,
[1:00:21] Speaker 4: on how to pardon me, write secret writing on the
[1:00:29] Speaker 4: back of letters, how to receive radio broadcasts, and then
[1:00:38] Speaker 4: to decipher the message that he receives were.
[1:00:42] Speaker 2: So called what are they the random number stations?
[1:00:46] Speaker 4: Read this is the one time pads, and that's what
[1:00:51] Speaker 4: they're called one time pats. There. They were on small
[1:00:54] Speaker 4: pieces of very thin tissue like water soluble paper, and
[1:00:59] Speaker 4: they were groups of numbers for five numbers in a
[1:01:03] Speaker 4: group all the way across. He would match up what
[1:01:07] Speaker 4: he was hearing with a number, and then he would
[1:01:11] Speaker 4: write the numbers under it and then decipher it. He
[1:01:16] Speaker 4: could encipher using another pad if he wanted to incipher
[1:01:21] Speaker 4: a letter to us. And we also trained him on
[1:01:25] Speaker 4: how to use a miniature camera. The miniature camera was
[1:01:31] Speaker 4: in a black fountain pin and when I, of course
[1:01:36] Speaker 4: give us talk to younger people, I have to show
[1:01:39] Speaker 4: him what a fountain pen looks at it, you know.
[1:01:45] Speaker 4: But the camera itself was in the barrel of the pen.
[1:01:48] Speaker 4: He would hold it over the document and plunge the
[1:01:51] Speaker 4: top down. Every time he plunged the top it would
[1:01:55] Speaker 4: take a picture of a full piece of paper and
[1:01:58] Speaker 4: it would advance the film. And all of that was
[1:02:01] Speaker 4: in this big fountain pen. It was a one time thing.
[1:02:07] Speaker 4: It was created by CIA for this. So we tried
[1:02:12] Speaker 4: trained him on how to use this. He had a
[1:02:15] Speaker 4: fake pen, a real pin that he carried with him
[1:02:18] Speaker 4: all the time, and then he had the one pin
[1:02:21] Speaker 4: that had the camera in it. So he learned how
[1:02:24] Speaker 4: to do that. He was very proud of himself. He
[1:02:26] Speaker 4: was a very astute man and he he did this
[1:02:30] Speaker 4: very well. Then we also trained him on how to
[1:02:34] Speaker 4: do dead drops, how to find a rock or a
[1:02:37] Speaker 4: log in the in the forest that had spy equipment
[1:02:42] Speaker 4: in it. We taught him some about how to determine
[1:02:45] Speaker 4: if he was being followed, that kind of all those
[1:02:49] Speaker 4: tradecraft things that he needed to know before he went
[1:02:53] Speaker 4: back to Moscow. We also then eventually cave him uh
[1:02:59] Speaker 4: signals site that he came up with in Moscow that
[1:03:03] Speaker 4: he could use but was never written down anywhere, and
[1:03:08] Speaker 4: that was a parked car signal site in a parking
[1:03:11] Speaker 4: place in front of his mother's apartment. So he was,
[1:03:16] Speaker 4: like I said, a very astute and willing spy and
[1:03:19] Speaker 4: he gave us a lot of documentary intelligence before he left.
[1:03:24] Speaker 4: We gave him a schedule of drop sites in Moscow,
[1:03:28] Speaker 4: a brief description that he memorized. When we put that
[1:03:32] Speaker 4: schedule in the back of a hardback book and the
[1:03:36] Speaker 4: inside cover under the glueden piece of paper there. So
[1:03:43] Speaker 4: he had a full schedule wanning he left to go
[1:03:46] Speaker 4: to Moscow.
[1:03:47] Speaker 3: Well, when he got to Moscow, right, he kind of
[1:03:49] Speaker 3: went dark, like there was some difficulty in Cia in
[1:03:54] Speaker 3: your station reconnecting with their asset.
[1:03:57] Speaker 2: Right.
[1:03:58] Speaker 4: Well, he was told two he would be on ice
[1:04:02] Speaker 4: for a year, but there was some difference of opinion
[1:04:08] Speaker 4: whether he should pick up a package before then. And yeah,
[1:04:12] Speaker 4: we went through some difficult times. I also need to
[1:04:16] Speaker 4: tell you that one of the stipulations he had was
[1:04:21] Speaker 4: that we would give him a way to commit suicide,
[1:04:25] Speaker 4: and that was the only way he would agree to
[1:04:28] Speaker 4: go back to Moscow.
[1:04:29] Speaker 2: And so that was his stipulation, Yes.
[1:04:34] Speaker 4: It was, And so we decided that that ability would
[1:04:41] Speaker 4: be also in an identical pin that we would give
[1:04:46] Speaker 4: him in Moscow. So he in fact had three pins,
[1:04:50] Speaker 4: the one plane one, the one with a camera, and
[1:04:53] Speaker 4: then later on the one with a poison. He didn't
[1:04:56] Speaker 4: take the one with a camera back with him. We
[1:04:59] Speaker 4: had to deliver that to him.
[1:05:01] Speaker 3: And the pen, as I understood it in the book,
[1:05:04] Speaker 3: was if you unscrewed it the cartridge, the ink cartridge
[1:05:08] Speaker 3: had actual poison in it that he would fight down
[1:05:11] Speaker 3: on right.
[1:05:13] Speaker 4: Right where the ink reservoir was, so he could bite
[1:05:19] Speaker 4: through the actual outside of the pen.
[1:05:23] Speaker 2: Oh okay, okay.
[1:05:25] Speaker 4: And he would puncture that poison capsule.
[1:05:28] Speaker 3: Was it cyanide or what was it you guys gave him?
[1:05:31] Speaker 11: I never asked, Yeah, I mean, and that's a lot
[1:05:38] Speaker 11: of trust on his part to to receive something like
[1:05:42] Speaker 11: that kind of a one time used thing and go,
[1:05:45] Speaker 11: it's going to work.
[1:05:46] Speaker 2: That's okay, it's a one time use.
[1:05:48] Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Well you don't practice, you don't train, right, right,
[1:05:52] Speaker 4: And I think you're all worried that he would.
[1:05:54] Speaker 5: Use it appropriate prematurely, right, Yeah, exactly if he got scared,
[1:06:00] Speaker 5: aired or something and with seeing ghosts on the street
[1:06:03] Speaker 5: or something like.
[1:06:03] Speaker 2: That, that you might get nervous.
[1:06:05] Speaker 5: Yeah, So they didn't bring in dentists to implant like
[1:06:09] Speaker 5: a tooth, a cyanide capsule onst tooth.
[1:06:12] Speaker 2: That always worried me in the sense of like what
[1:06:14] Speaker 2: you're eating a bike down out? Yeah, yeah, you just.
[1:06:18] Speaker 4: Wouldn't want to eat popcorn?
[1:06:20] Speaker 5: Right, But oh no, how long for especially in an
[1:06:26] Speaker 5: environment like the Soviet Union, such a non permissent environment,
[1:06:31] Speaker 5: how long would you train him in tradecraft or train
[1:06:35] Speaker 5: somebody like that in tradecraft before you felt comfortable making
[1:06:39] Speaker 5: them operational.
[1:06:42] Speaker 4: As long as you have Okay, you know we've trained
[1:06:46] Speaker 4: people on the run, We really have, because it's however
[1:06:51] Speaker 4: much time you have, you use all that time.
[1:06:54] Speaker 5: Because you're trying to you're kind of putting them through
[1:06:57] Speaker 5: a mini farm in a way, you're trying to make
[1:06:59] Speaker 5: them skill.
[1:07:00] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:07:01] Speaker 4: Absolutely. Plus he's now having to be in Moscow by himself,
[1:07:07] Speaker 4: without any coaching, without anyone saying other than our packages
[1:07:11] Speaker 4: to him. And we'd say, you know, great package, but
[1:07:14] Speaker 4: we never wanted to say too much because we didn't
[1:07:17] Speaker 4: want to if someone else found the package, identify him right.
[1:07:22] Speaker 3: And as I recall, it was I believe it was
[1:07:25] Speaker 3: Jack who pitched, who pitched trigone in Bogata, got him
[1:07:30] Speaker 3: on board.
[1:07:31] Speaker 4: It wasn't, but he.
[1:07:33] Speaker 10: Did need him in boga Okay, okay, So and then
[1:07:38] Speaker 10: Jack is with you in Moscow, so there's some continuity, gotcha, right, Okay,
[1:07:44] Speaker 10: So go ahead.
[1:07:47] Speaker 4: So trying so eventually try Gone put a signal down
[1:07:53] Speaker 4: that he was ready to receive a package. And I
[1:07:57] Speaker 4: arrived on the fifth of November, and this was like
[1:08:01] Speaker 4: the middle of December, he put this mark down, which,
[1:08:05] Speaker 4: of course later on the KGB of course thought there
[1:08:08] Speaker 4: was some reason that this all collide, you know, collided there,
[1:08:12] Speaker 4: but it was just timing. And so he put a
[1:08:16] Speaker 4: mark signal down saying that he would drop a package
[1:08:20] Speaker 4: for us, and it was all predetermined where he would
[1:08:23] Speaker 4: put that package. So Jack, who was our deputy chief
[1:08:27] Speaker 4: of station a Marine forever, he went for a morning
[1:08:33] Speaker 4: walk run and so at five o'clock he'd get up
[1:08:37] Speaker 4: and put on his jogging outfit and go out, didn't
[1:08:40] Speaker 4: matter what the weather was. And it was cold in Moscow,
[1:08:43] Speaker 4: and he ran two or three miles, and his surveillance
[1:08:49] Speaker 4: team always followed Jack. Jack had surveillance all the time,
[1:08:55] Speaker 4: but you know, they knew what Jack was going to do.
[1:08:58] Speaker 4: He was going out, he was running to or three
[1:09:00] Speaker 4: miles and he was running back. So you know, they
[1:09:03] Speaker 4: sat in their car and probably drove a little bit
[1:09:06] Speaker 4: and watched him, and they could still see him. And
[1:09:08] Speaker 4: then he turned around and when he came back, he
[1:09:12] Speaker 4: ran through a portico which was over a sidewalk. It
[1:09:17] Speaker 4: was just a portico over the sidewalk and inside was
[1:09:21] Speaker 4: a window and Tryana had left his package right on
[1:09:26] Speaker 4: the windowsill, so as Jack ran by, he swiped it
[1:09:30] Speaker 4: up and tucked it inside his jogging soup, ran on back,
[1:09:34] Speaker 4: never missed a beat, and got back to his apartment,
[1:09:38] Speaker 4: and his surveillance was of course nonetherwiser. He then brought
[1:09:42] Speaker 4: the package into the station. We were all there waiting.
[1:09:46] Speaker 4: We were so excited, and we opened up the package,
[1:09:50] Speaker 4: our tech officer did, and inside were two pieces of
[1:09:54] Speaker 4: paper with children's drawings on him. And I looked at
[1:09:57] Speaker 4: him and I thought, that's what we're waiting for. And
[1:10:00] Speaker 4: of course on the back was the secret riding that
[1:10:03] Speaker 4: he had put on. And he said he had he
[1:10:06] Speaker 4: had a safe trip back, and they'd had several security
[1:10:14] Speaker 4: interviews with him, and you know, he just had to
[1:10:17] Speaker 4: go through the normal reinvestigation. And he said he had
[1:10:21] Speaker 4: a great job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in
[1:10:25] Speaker 4: global affairs, and he wanted his camera badly because he
[1:10:32] Speaker 4: saw lots of good things that he wanted to give us.
[1:10:35] Speaker 4: And he divorced his wife and he didn't want to
[1:10:39] Speaker 4: involve her in his nefarious affairs. Well, of course, I
[1:10:43] Speaker 4: think he was actually looking for a new wife at
[1:10:46] Speaker 4: the time. So it was all very exciting and we
[1:10:50] Speaker 4: were ready to pick up and deliver the trying on.
[1:10:54] Speaker 4: So that was exciting.
[1:10:58] Speaker 3: So that was the next And how did it come
[1:11:02] Speaker 3: that you were going to be the one to begin
[1:11:04] Speaker 3: servicing these dead drops and kind of handling fragon, you.
[1:11:09] Speaker 4: Know, because all the guys had surveillance all the time,
[1:11:15] Speaker 4: all the time, whether they went to take their kids
[1:11:17] Speaker 4: to school or the grocery score, or to the church
[1:11:22] Speaker 4: or wherever they went, they had surveillance on their bumper.
[1:11:25] Speaker 4: And even sitting in the Bolshoy theater, they had surveillance
[1:11:30] Speaker 4: sitting two rows behind. And because it seemed that I
[1:11:36] Speaker 4: was not getting any surveillance, the thought was that I
[1:11:40] Speaker 4: would be good to go out and make these pickups
[1:11:43] Speaker 4: and deliveries to try on. But they didn't quite believe me.
[1:11:48] Speaker 4: So we had to do this test. And one of
[1:11:51] Speaker 4: the couples in the station, the case office, Sernier's wife,
[1:11:56] Speaker 4: went to a Barrioska store, and the Barrioska was a
[1:12:01] Speaker 4: diplomatic store where they took hard currency only no rubles,
[1:12:07] Speaker 4: and it was called the dollar store. That's what we
[1:12:11] Speaker 4: called it, the dollar store because we spent dollars there.
[1:12:15] Speaker 4: And so this store was up on the second story
[1:12:18] Speaker 4: of a building, and there was a big parking lot
[1:12:22] Speaker 4: out in front, and all I had to do was
[1:12:26] Speaker 4: to drive by and pull into the parking lot, and
[1:12:30] Speaker 4: this couple would be upstairs in the second floor, watching
[1:12:33] Speaker 4: out the window very nonchalantly and listening, of course, on
[1:12:38] Speaker 4: their radio. And I came by, I drove into the
[1:12:43] Speaker 4: parking lot, I parked, and I got out of the car,
[1:12:47] Speaker 4: and then I got back in the car and I
[1:12:48] Speaker 4: drove away, and there was no chatter on the radio.
[1:12:53] Speaker 4: And so it kind of confirmed to my peers that
[1:12:56] Speaker 4: I was seeing nobody. It was a good confirmation, and
[1:13:03] Speaker 4: I think it helped me feel a little more confident.
[1:13:07] Speaker 4: You don't ever want to drag a surveillance team to
[1:13:10] Speaker 4: meet your agent, you know. So it was it was
[1:13:15] Speaker 4: real stress. It was hard to do, and I felt
[1:13:18] Speaker 4: like every time I had to give it everything to
[1:13:22] Speaker 4: make sure I had no surveillance.
[1:13:25] Speaker 3: And yeah, you take some extraordinary steps. You know, you
[1:13:28] Speaker 3: are not surprised how much the CIA. Let you write
[1:13:31] Speaker 3: in this book about you know, you're driving in your car,
[1:13:34] Speaker 3: you get out of the car, you get on the subway,
[1:13:36] Speaker 3: you get off the subway, you get back on the subway.
[1:13:38] Speaker 3: You're doing this extensive surveillance detection route before any sort
[1:13:42] Speaker 3: of not not contact with it.
[1:13:43] Speaker 2: You never met trigone just to hit a dead drop site.
[1:13:47] Speaker 4: Right, absolutely, And it was a religious thing to me.
[1:13:52] Speaker 4: I just felt that was the most important thing I
[1:13:56] Speaker 4: did and all of Moscow was to do that route ever,
[1:14:00] Speaker 4: very single time.
[1:14:02] Speaker 2: Yeah, Marty, Like we've had some of the other case.
[1:14:05] Speaker 5: Officers we've had on when they talk about doing meats
[1:14:07] Speaker 5: in hostile or non permiss environments, there's generally like a
[1:14:12] Speaker 5: counter surveillance element.
[1:14:14] Speaker 2: Was that was just before counter surveillance was a thing?
[1:14:17] Speaker 5: Or was Moscow just so non permissive that the more
[1:14:20] Speaker 5: Americans you got out there, the more problems it cost.
[1:14:24] Speaker 4: Well, who would you get to do it? The guys
[1:14:28] Speaker 4: that had surveillance all the time, right, You couldn't do
[1:14:32] Speaker 4: anything without double thinking about they're going to see what
[1:14:36] Speaker 4: we're doing. The first drop I made to try GN
[1:14:39] Speaker 4: we had to have cigarette packs. Well, the Soviet cigarette
[1:14:44] Speaker 4: packs are kind of small, the cardboard is very poor,
[1:14:49] Speaker 4: and so in fact we ended up buying five packs
[1:14:52] Speaker 4: of Soviet cigarettes, and what American out there buys Soviet cigarettes?
[1:14:57] Speaker 4: So that itself was an operation act that we had
[1:15:01] Speaker 4: to do that when we weren't under surveillance or they
[1:15:06] Speaker 4: weren't aware. I mean they'd go up to the guy
[1:15:09] Speaker 4: afterwards and say, what did that guy buy five cigarettes?
[1:15:12] Speaker 4: Why would? Why would? In America, They're terrible cigarettes.
[1:15:18] Speaker 2: So that's amazing. I mean, there's so much detail that
[1:15:21] Speaker 2: would go into it.
[1:15:24] Speaker 4: Yes, it really was. Every time I went out on
[1:15:28] Speaker 4: the street, we had the map out on the on
[1:15:31] Speaker 4: the desk, and all all my peers, all my teammates
[1:15:36] Speaker 4: in the station. I showed them exactly where I was
[1:15:39] Speaker 4: going to drive. I didn't go out and drive some
[1:15:42] Speaker 4: random route. I knew where I was going, and I
[1:15:45] Speaker 4: plotted it out for them, and they told me. In
[1:15:49] Speaker 4: one case, you know, Marty, on that road, behind that wall,
[1:15:53] Speaker 4: there are five MiGs. They're all folded up and parked
[1:15:58] Speaker 4: in there. I guess it was in case they had
[1:16:01] Speaker 4: to pull them out real fast and take off because
[1:16:05] Speaker 4: the streets were that big. But I didn't know that.
[1:16:08] Speaker 4: I didn't know where all the police stations where. We
[1:16:10] Speaker 4: had a map that had all the hotspots. But you know,
[1:16:14] Speaker 4: this was not a random route that I drove every time,
[1:16:18] Speaker 4: and every time it was different. It was amazing. Yeah,
[1:16:21] Speaker 4: the level of detail we went into.
[1:16:24] Speaker 3: So can you tell us about some of those initial
[1:16:27] Speaker 3: dead drops where you're receiving a package. Sometimes you're dropping
[1:16:30] Speaker 3: a package off and then bringing raw intelligence back to
[1:16:35] Speaker 3: the CIA station.
[1:16:37] Speaker 4: Absolutely. So, eventually Traigon and I got into a good
[1:16:43] Speaker 4: kind of give and take. We decided that if we
[1:16:48] Speaker 4: put one package down and he picked it up and
[1:16:51] Speaker 4: left a package in the same site. Because I had
[1:16:54] Speaker 4: no surveillance, we could do this exchange in the same place.
[1:17:00] Speaker 4: You had someone with surveillance. They can only go buy
[1:17:02] Speaker 4: there once and that was it. They'd never go by
[1:17:04] Speaker 4: there again. So this way the packages were on the
[1:17:08] Speaker 4: ground the shortest amount of time and it was done
[1:17:12] Speaker 4: in one run. So I did the counter surveillance run.
[1:17:15] Speaker 4: I'd drive the two hours. I would park my car
[1:17:19] Speaker 4: where other diplomatic cars would be parked. I ducked them
[1:17:24] Speaker 4: into the subway. I took several stops. Like you said,
[1:17:27] Speaker 4: I changed, I went out and got onto another line
[1:17:30] Speaker 4: and eventually got to the stuff. This was one of
[1:17:35] Speaker 4: the routes was out Cartuoza Ski Boulevard, and it was
[1:17:40] Speaker 4: to a park called Park Pagetti, the Victory Park, and
[1:17:45] Speaker 4: it was kind of out along Boulevard and it was
[1:17:49] Speaker 4: off to the side. It had one road going through
[1:17:54] Speaker 4: it which was one way, and the actual site had
[1:17:59] Speaker 4: been cased as a card toss site. So originally the
[1:18:03] Speaker 4: case officer would drive by this particular lamppole and it
[1:18:08] Speaker 4: was a driver toss, which was very unique for a
[1:18:12] Speaker 4: car toss. So the driver would be on this one
[1:18:15] Speaker 4: road one way road through the park, he'd roll down
[1:18:19] Speaker 4: his windows. We had no electrin windows. You had to
[1:18:22] Speaker 4: roll them down. If there's surveillance behind you, of course
[1:18:25] Speaker 4: you can't go like this, you know, you have to
[1:18:29] Speaker 4: carefully roll down the window now it's cold, and then
[1:18:35] Speaker 4: get the package and pitch it out the window without
[1:18:39] Speaker 4: your hand going through the window and then open landed
[1:18:43] Speaker 4: close by the target. But see, because I had no surveillance,
[1:18:47] Speaker 4: I could put that package under my clothes and walk there.
[1:18:53] Speaker 4: So this lamppost in this park, in Park Pabietti, which
[1:18:58] Speaker 4: was code named Less which means woods in Russian. I
[1:19:04] Speaker 4: would walk to it from the metro site. It was
[1:19:08] Speaker 4: a long ways and I walked down under the trees
[1:19:13] Speaker 4: on the side of the road, so it was really
[1:19:16] Speaker 4: a very large canopy of trees and the path was
[1:19:20] Speaker 4: quite set back from the road, and I walked down
[1:19:24] Speaker 4: there and I would make sure there was no one
[1:19:28] Speaker 4: in the park, and I would then walk to the
[1:19:31] Speaker 4: lamp post, take the package out from under my arm,
[1:19:34] Speaker 4: and drop it in the hollow of the lamppost. Then
[1:19:39] Speaker 4: I would continue walking out of the park into a
[1:19:43] Speaker 4: large Soviet neighborhood where people were out walking day and night.
[1:19:47] Speaker 4: It was always very busy. I had a very gray, dark,
[1:19:52] Speaker 4: ugly coat and I had nothing that appeared American. I
[1:19:59] Speaker 4: would spend an hour there. While I was there, Traygon
[1:20:03] Speaker 4: would come. He would come to that site, he would
[1:20:08] Speaker 4: take my package, pick my package up, and he would
[1:20:13] Speaker 4: then put his package in the same place and then
[1:20:17] Speaker 4: leave the area. So that's how we delivered many of
[1:20:21] Speaker 4: the packages. They have a log here, can you see it?
[1:20:27] Speaker 12: Yeah, And this one sought off at the ends, but
[1:20:33] Speaker 12: of course the ones we had were rough at the end,
[1:20:37] Speaker 12: like it looked like it had fallen off the tree.
[1:20:39] Speaker 4: But all of his package was inside a hollowed out area,
[1:20:45] Speaker 4: and then the top was glued back on and the
[1:20:48] Speaker 4: mark glued back on that and inside there would be
[1:20:53] Speaker 4: the camera in the pin and a roll of money
[1:20:58] Speaker 4: in blow denominations rubles. There was a notes to him
[1:21:07] Speaker 4: on white film. It was called Calvar film, not Kevlar,
[1:21:13] Speaker 4: but Calvar film is kind of on. And so there'd
[1:21:17] Speaker 4: be some one time pads, forum and a resupply and
[1:21:21] Speaker 4: then a schedule of the next drops for him. We
[1:21:26] Speaker 4: also put in there and a jewelry which he wanted
[1:21:29] Speaker 4: us to buy in Bogota to give to his mother
[1:21:32] Speaker 4: because we knew she'd never get a life insurance policy
[1:21:35] Speaker 4: if something happened to him.
[1:21:37] Speaker 5: So at the time, was DS and T a thing
[1:21:42] Speaker 5: like did you have people that specialized in this tech
[1:21:45] Speaker 5: stuff or were you guys doing it all?
[1:21:48] Speaker 4: Now? It was all It was an office of Technical
[1:21:51] Speaker 4: Services OTS and a lot of these things you can
[1:21:55] Speaker 4: find in the book Spycraft by Bob Wallace. It's a
[1:21:59] Speaker 4: very very detailed book about all the gimmicks and things
[1:22:03] Speaker 4: we used and many of the things I'm talking about
[1:22:07] Speaker 4: whole war stuff yep.
[1:22:08] Speaker 3: And so the type of dead drop you used that
[1:22:11] Speaker 3: what did you call it? A L E S or
[1:22:14] Speaker 3: something like this? It was a time limited time, yeah,
[1:22:19] Speaker 3: in time.
[1:22:20] Speaker 4: To exchange, that's what we called it.
[1:22:22] Speaker 2: Time to exchange.
[1:22:24] Speaker 4: And so I knew he knew I wouldn't be back
[1:22:27] Speaker 4: for an hour, So he would leave his package and
[1:22:29] Speaker 4: lean and then I would come back and pick up
[1:22:32] Speaker 4: his package.
[1:22:33] Speaker 2: And so what was his package?
[1:22:36] Speaker 4: So he would leave the same package often that was
[1:22:41] Speaker 4: on the window sill. It was a pyramid shaped child
[1:22:45] Speaker 4: size carton of milk. It was crushed and dirty. It
[1:22:49] Speaker 4: all always looked like you wouldn't want to pick it up.
[1:22:53] Speaker 4: Sometimes he bought a mustard plaster. It was an old
[1:22:57] Speaker 4: fashioned remedy for pneumonia, bronchitis, that kind of thing. It
[1:23:03] Speaker 4: was a It was dry plastic mustard on a on
[1:23:07] Speaker 4: a piece of blax paper. He would put it on
[1:23:09] Speaker 4: someone's back and then a hot towel on top of it,
[1:23:13] Speaker 4: and it would get very hot, and it was supposed
[1:23:15] Speaker 4: to be healing, but he would get it and just
[1:23:18] Speaker 4: wet it and then drive it over whatever it was.
[1:23:20] Speaker 4: It would look like baby poop or vomited. It was disgusting.
[1:23:24] Speaker 4: Nobody would touch it, and of course it being mustard,
[1:23:28] Speaker 4: no animal would touch it either. So I always kept
[1:23:32] Speaker 4: a plastic bag to tuck his package. And sometimes he
[1:23:36] Speaker 4: used there was an old ugly glove and that it
[1:23:42] Speaker 4: had oil and it was all misshaped, and then he
[1:23:45] Speaker 4: would the way he kept his cassettes out of the
[1:23:50] Speaker 4: camera dry. He would put them as well as a
[1:23:56] Speaker 4: roll of thirty five millimeter inside a condom. He would
[1:24:00] Speaker 4: then tuck them into the condom and then tie the
[1:24:03] Speaker 4: top off it kept it dry and clean, and they
[1:24:05] Speaker 4: would tuck it inside of the milk carton or the
[1:24:08] Speaker 4: glove or crushed milk can, tin can or whatever he used,
[1:24:14] Speaker 4: and those little cassettes out of out of the pen,
[1:24:19] Speaker 4: we would pouch back to head quarters. We never developed
[1:24:25] Speaker 4: him in the station because they were like seven millimeters
[1:24:30] Speaker 4: wide and very very thin emulsion, very thin, so nobody
[1:24:36] Speaker 4: wanted to go oops, the water was too hot or
[1:24:38] Speaker 4: too cold. So I mean, can you imagine what he
[1:24:41] Speaker 4: would have done with digital camera. I mean, it's incredible.
[1:24:44] Speaker 4: We did all this with film, real film, And like
[1:24:48] Speaker 4: I said, he gave us a roll of thirty five
[1:24:51] Speaker 4: millimeter film undeveloped in a black little film canister, and
[1:24:57] Speaker 4: that film he took pictures of his operational notes for us,
[1:25:04] Speaker 4: how he was doing, what his health was like, problems,
[1:25:07] Speaker 4: He had that kind of thing. So he knew that
[1:25:10] Speaker 4: if someone opened it and pulled out the film, of
[1:25:14] Speaker 4: course it would expose and destroy.
[1:25:17] Speaker 3: And so what was the quality of the intelligence that
[1:25:19] Speaker 3: he was providing, it was exceptional.
[1:25:24] Speaker 4: This was produced in only five copies for the five
[1:25:31] Speaker 4: cop people in our government. What he had access to
[1:25:37] Speaker 4: was all the communicates being sent back from every Soviet
[1:25:41] Speaker 4: embassy in the world, and it was the reports from
[1:25:46] Speaker 4: the ambassadors. The ambassadors would write reports in Tokyo or
[1:25:51] Speaker 4: Mexico City, or London or Buenos Aire's or Washington, d C.
[1:25:58] Speaker 4: So we were seeing what anatolely De Brennan was thinking
[1:26:03] Speaker 4: and planning about relations with the US government. And this
[1:26:09] Speaker 4: was a time we were discussing the salt talks, me
[1:26:14] Speaker 4: nuclear you know, elimination to.
[1:26:18] Speaker 5: Right right, Marty, you know, this is the type of
[1:26:21] Speaker 5: source that I think like a seasoned person, like somebody
[1:26:27] Speaker 5: who had been in these for years and years, this
[1:26:29] Speaker 5: would be like their their pinnacle to you know, like
[1:26:33] Speaker 5: the thing and this is out of the farm, your
[1:26:37] Speaker 5: first source. Did you know how big this was? And
[1:26:42] Speaker 5: how did like your station react to this?
[1:26:45] Speaker 4: Now, you know, headquarters was very protective of the information
[1:26:51] Speaker 4: and they sent nothing to summarize what was in the
[1:26:57] Speaker 4: van Kelly gave us. It was too precious and they
[1:27:02] Speaker 4: wanted no one to know how valuable that was, and
[1:27:08] Speaker 4: so it wasn't disseminated. It wasn't part of any other intel.
[1:27:12] Speaker 4: You know, a lot of times a piece of intel
[1:27:15] Speaker 4: that's disseminated is pieces from all different agents. This was
[1:27:20] Speaker 4: singular blue border five copies. So I only saw it once.
[1:27:26] Speaker 4: When I was back to doy, the chief of reports said,
[1:27:30] Speaker 4: I asked her, I said, may I see it? And
[1:27:32] Speaker 4: she opened her safe. She picked out one report. I
[1:27:37] Speaker 4: didn't get to read it, and she showed it to
[1:27:41] Speaker 4: put it back, truly, and it was important because you
[1:27:45] Speaker 4: never know, you know, And that's how we, you know,
[1:27:51] Speaker 4: preserved him, I think.
[1:27:53] Speaker 2: And then as time goes on.
[1:27:56] Speaker 3: That you started using the log instead, and also from
[1:28:01] Speaker 3: his operational notes and the quality of his photography, you
[1:28:05] Speaker 3: guys noticed that his mental.
[1:28:07] Speaker 2: State is beginning to deteriorate. What the stress is starting
[1:28:10] Speaker 2: to get to him.
[1:28:11] Speaker 4: Yes, in April of seventy seven, now in August of
[1:28:17] Speaker 4: seventy six, before Jack, our deputy left town, Jack met
[1:28:22] Speaker 4: with Trygon in a park in person. And this was
[1:28:27] Speaker 4: because Tragon and Jack had met each other. It was
[1:28:31] Speaker 4: a good way to see the state of Trygon. It
[1:28:34] Speaker 4: was also a way to hold him and say you're
[1:28:37] Speaker 4: doing great, and you can't imagine the stress he was
[1:28:41] Speaker 4: under being all by himself taking this risk. So that
[1:28:44] Speaker 4: was a wonderful moment in the life of the operation,
[1:28:49] Speaker 4: and so we I think from then on we thought
[1:28:54] Speaker 4: it was going to go all right, and which it
[1:28:57] Speaker 4: did through that fall. But come in April of seventy seven,
[1:29:02] Speaker 4: we hadn't heard from him. He generally didn't deliver a
[1:29:05] Speaker 4: lot of packages in the winter. It was just too difficult.
[1:29:09] Speaker 4: His car didn't work, it was up on blocks, and
[1:29:12] Speaker 4: it was just hard. And so in April I went
[1:29:17] Speaker 4: out to pick up the package, and I put down
[1:29:28] Speaker 4: the package and came back and picked his up and
[1:29:32] Speaker 4: this was in less and the package itself had a
[1:29:38] Speaker 4: few anomalies in it. Or Tech said that in the
[1:29:41] Speaker 4: bottom of that thirty five milimeter that little can there
[1:29:46] Speaker 4: had been a leader of the film cut off, which
[1:29:49] Speaker 4: was really atypical because Tryon was so precise. And then
[1:29:55] Speaker 4: later on headquarters told us that in his production there
[1:30:01] Speaker 4: was something a little odd, and so we knew, and
[1:30:07] Speaker 4: that's all we knew. We didn't know in this station
[1:30:09] Speaker 4: the full details about the anomalies that they thought there
[1:30:14] Speaker 4: were in his recording. But we then got on some
[1:30:19] Speaker 4: higher level of caution and concern about Tryon. So that
[1:30:27] Speaker 4: was in April, and then we didn't hear from him.
[1:30:32] Speaker 4: We had a drop in the end of June. June
[1:30:37] Speaker 4: twenty fourth, it was again in the same place unless
[1:30:43] Speaker 4: and it was a dreadful rainstorm that night. I went.
[1:30:47] Speaker 4: Of course, I was feeling concerned that something had happened
[1:30:51] Speaker 4: to him, or that things weren't right, so I was
[1:30:56] Speaker 4: on high alert and I went into the forest. I
[1:31:01] Speaker 4: put down the package. There was no one around. I left.
[1:31:05] Speaker 4: I went over to the Soviet apartment buildings and walked around,
[1:31:10] Speaker 4: and when I came back into the woods, I came
[1:31:14] Speaker 4: down the path like I normally did, and I didn't
[1:31:19] Speaker 4: get to love even with a lamp poll. When I
[1:31:23] Speaker 4: saw out in that one on that one way road
[1:31:26] Speaker 4: that there was a van park there, a small panel van.
[1:31:31] Speaker 4: The dome light was on and the windows were flogged.
[1:31:34] Speaker 4: So I thought this could be Romeo and Juliet out here,
[1:31:38] Speaker 4: but it also could be an ambush, so I continued
[1:31:42] Speaker 4: walking on down. I decided not to stop at the
[1:31:47] Speaker 4: lamp post. I walked on, and as I came to
[1:31:51] Speaker 4: kind of a dip in the path, there was. I
[1:31:55] Speaker 4: was startled when a man stepped in front of me,
[1:31:59] Speaker 4: but he hadn't seen me, so we were both startled.
[1:32:03] Speaker 4: And I continued walking, and I guess he did too,
[1:32:09] Speaker 4: because I just walked down into the woods, and eventually
[1:32:12] Speaker 4: I stepped off the path in casey came looking for me.
[1:32:16] Speaker 4: And I waited there, and the man had a big
[1:32:22] Speaker 4: black cape on. He had a military cap with a
[1:32:25] Speaker 4: shower kind of thing on the top to keep the
[1:32:28] Speaker 4: rain on. And I had a big flashlight. You know,
[1:32:32] Speaker 4: it was probably not that big, but it looked that big.
[1:32:37] Speaker 4: I waited, and eventually I thought, well, I will return
[1:32:42] Speaker 4: by means of the other side of the street and
[1:32:45] Speaker 4: I'll see what's happening. So I returned across the street
[1:32:49] Speaker 4: to the other side, and as I came up towards
[1:32:52] Speaker 4: the lamppost on the other side, the van was gone.
[1:32:57] Speaker 4: There was nobody in the park. So I diagonaled the
[1:33:01] Speaker 4: cross back across the street, and I looked down at
[1:33:04] Speaker 4: the bottom of the wet post, and of course there
[1:33:07] Speaker 4: was the log. There was his package. He had not
[1:33:11] Speaker 4: been there that night, he hadn't picked it up. So
[1:33:14] Speaker 4: I went home and had to go in and tell
[1:33:17] Speaker 4: them the next morning, you know, there's a problem here.
[1:33:20] Speaker 4: He has no news schedule, he hasn't been here. And
[1:33:24] Speaker 4: I ran into this man and there was a van.
[1:33:27] Speaker 4: All bad signs, very bad. So we had to figure
[1:33:36] Speaker 4: out then how to get in touch with him. So
[1:33:39] Speaker 4: we went to him via the radio broadcast. He had
[1:33:43] Speaker 4: a Transitionanic radio that he listened on, and so we
[1:33:46] Speaker 4: would broadcast out off of an antenna in Germany into
[1:33:51] Speaker 4: Moscow and he would copy the numbers down and then
[1:33:55] Speaker 4: get his one time patient.
[1:33:57] Speaker 2: These are those famous radio stations.
[1:33:59] Speaker 3: Where's the woman's voice saying fourteen two at twenty six.
[1:34:05] Speaker 4: Olf Deutsche in Germany. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, it really was.
[1:34:11] Speaker 4: Can you imagine doing this in an apartment you share
[1:34:14] Speaker 4: with someone else and you're trying to get the numbers right,
[1:34:17] Speaker 4: and oh my lord.
[1:34:18] Speaker 2: There's still an operation today. Yeah you can hear them.
[1:34:21] Speaker 4: Yeah, oh they are, Yeah, they still are. It works.
[1:34:24] Speaker 4: It works. So so I went into the office and
[1:34:30] Speaker 4: we were out of communication dates with him, so we
[1:34:35] Speaker 4: decided we'd put a broadcast up and we said, if
[1:34:38] Speaker 4: you can park your car park plots on July fourteen. Well,
[1:34:44] Speaker 4: I told you early that we didn't write down where
[1:34:47] Speaker 4: park plots was so only he knew where that was.
[1:34:52] Speaker 4: And if you can't park your car a park plots,
[1:34:55] Speaker 4: mark a signal on the fifteenth and we will delivered
[1:35:00] Speaker 4: to you at a site we called set Tune, and
[1:35:04] Speaker 4: he had some sketches for.
[1:35:06] Speaker 3: That, and.
[1:35:10] Speaker 4: So that was a remedy, you know, and how we
[1:35:15] Speaker 4: hoped we'd get back in touch with him. So I
[1:35:19] Speaker 4: worked a full day on the fourteenth and drove past
[1:35:24] Speaker 4: park plots, as did several of my colleagues, and the
[1:35:27] Speaker 4: car was not there. And so then the next morning
[1:35:32] Speaker 4: I got up and I was the one to drive
[1:35:35] Speaker 4: by the signal site. As I came towards it, I'm
[1:35:39] Speaker 4: sure I was more than a block away. It was
[1:35:43] Speaker 4: a big bright signal was on a child crossing sign,
[1:35:48] Speaker 4: and it looked like it had been stenciled like that
[1:35:52] Speaker 4: big in red so you couldn't miss it. So I
[1:35:57] Speaker 4: drove by it and I came into the station and
[1:35:59] Speaker 4: I said, the signals up. We had a brand new station, sheef,
[1:36:05] Speaker 4: And of course he wasn't about to let this go.
[1:36:09] Speaker 4: And so although at the time I said why don't,
[1:36:12] Speaker 4: so doesn't somebody else go, you know, I think deep
[1:36:16] Speaker 4: in my heart I knew I had to go, because
[1:36:19] Speaker 4: I wasn't afraid I was, it was just maybe I
[1:36:23] Speaker 4: didn't want to know the end. And so I worked
[1:36:30] Speaker 4: a full day again with those eight Soviet women, and
[1:36:35] Speaker 4: I packed up my desk and I went up to
[1:36:38] Speaker 4: the station at the end of the day. And so
[1:36:43] Speaker 4: I always sat down with the map like we always did,
[1:36:47] Speaker 4: and went through the route where I would park and timing,
[1:36:53] Speaker 4: and I had it all down. And we had one
[1:36:55] Speaker 4: other detail that we had every single time, and that
[1:36:58] Speaker 4: was where I would be at a certain time, so
[1:37:01] Speaker 4: that my station pals, my peers couldn't know I was
[1:37:06] Speaker 4: safe and I hadn't been run off the road or
[1:37:11] Speaker 4: something other than the worst possible thing. It was called
[1:37:15] Speaker 4: my safety signal. If you have a wife, that's no problem.
[1:37:18] Speaker 4: When you get back, your wife knows you're safe. But
[1:37:20] Speaker 4: when you don't have a wife, I had no one
[1:37:23] Speaker 4: to know I was home. So we set that at
[1:37:27] Speaker 4: twelve or twelve thirty something that night. So off I
[1:37:31] Speaker 4: went with a package in my hand. It was a
[1:37:37] Speaker 4: piece of asphalt and this also had a top that
[1:37:42] Speaker 4: lifted off at screws and you lifted it off, and
[1:37:48] Speaker 4: so off I went on my long tour. I parked
[1:37:51] Speaker 4: my car Gorky Street. I had no surveillance that night.
[1:37:56] Speaker 4: It was pretty bright out because the sun, you know,
[1:38:00] Speaker 4: rarely gets very low below the horizon. And I went
[1:38:05] Speaker 4: into industrial areas, all kinds of places, and I spotted
[1:38:11] Speaker 4: no surveillance and I heard nothing. So I parked my car.
[1:38:15] Speaker 4: I took the subway several stops. I got out of
[1:38:19] Speaker 4: the subway at Lenin Stadium. There was a soccer game
[1:38:23] Speaker 4: letting out, so all the escalators were coming down. I
[1:38:27] Speaker 4: fought my way to go up on them, and then
[1:38:30] Speaker 4: I realized they were all coming down, so then I
[1:38:32] Speaker 4: had to turn around, which would give me a good
[1:38:35] Speaker 4: view of anyone that was following me. And turning around too.
[1:38:40] Speaker 4: I went out in the park and walked along this
[1:38:45] Speaker 4: dark park, stopped on a couple of benches. I listened,
[1:38:49] Speaker 4: I looked. I had no surveillance following me. I went
[1:38:55] Speaker 4: then out to the edge of the river along the side,
[1:39:00] Speaker 4: walked there and I was a little early, so I
[1:39:03] Speaker 4: walked away from the site and then I saw it
[1:39:09] Speaker 4: was about time to head back to the site, and
[1:39:13] Speaker 4: as I did, there were three men across the street
[1:39:17] Speaker 4: walking towards me, but they went into the entrance to
[1:39:22] Speaker 4: the Novidjevitchy Cemetery, which is a very famous cemetery. It's
[1:39:27] Speaker 4: where khrush Chef is buried and the cosmonauts were buried.
[1:39:33] Speaker 4: There some musicians that kind of thing, so it wasn't unusual.
[1:39:38] Speaker 4: It was a very bright night. So I continued on
[1:39:42] Speaker 4: to the stairs up to the railroad bridge, and the
[1:39:47] Speaker 4: railroad bridge at the top of the bridge is where
[1:39:51] Speaker 4: the site was located. It was in one of the
[1:39:55] Speaker 4: four pillars on the bridge, one of those pillars right,
[1:40:01] Speaker 4: and I walked on the pedestrian walkway through the pillar
[1:40:05] Speaker 4: and there was a window inside the pillar. So I
[1:40:09] Speaker 4: walked up about forty seven steps to the top of
[1:40:12] Speaker 4: the bridge. When I got to the top, a train
[1:40:14] Speaker 4: came from behind me. He had his headlight on and
[1:40:18] Speaker 4: shone it all the way across the bridge, so I
[1:40:21] Speaker 4: could see nobody was out there waiting for me. So
[1:40:24] Speaker 4: I went into the center of the pillar. I took
[1:40:27] Speaker 4: the package out and I put it into this narrow window.
[1:40:32] Speaker 4: Trygun and I had used this before, so he was
[1:40:35] Speaker 4: aware of where the package would be. I walked out
[1:40:39] Speaker 4: in the middle of the bridge. I was listening and
[1:40:42] Speaker 4: watching and I heard nothing, so I turned around, went
[1:40:46] Speaker 4: back through the pillar and started down the forty seven steps.
[1:40:51] Speaker 4: I got to the fourth from the bottom, and those
[1:40:54] Speaker 4: three men came towards me from across the street. The
[1:41:01] Speaker 4: sunderman said move out, so she doesn't run, and I
[1:41:06] Speaker 4: knew right then. I thought I'm going to get mugged
[1:41:10] Speaker 4: or raped, which would have been a better thing. But
[1:41:13] Speaker 4: in fact, they grabbed me by my arms. My purse
[1:41:18] Speaker 4: was across my chest, so he went to take my purse,
[1:41:23] Speaker 4: and as all women do, I crossed my arms to
[1:41:27] Speaker 4: prevent that. But what happened was I drove this man's
[1:41:30] Speaker 4: hand right into the sr R one hundred on my
[1:41:35] Speaker 4: bra and that's where the infamous picture of these people
[1:41:40] Speaker 4: with their hands in my blouse comes from.
[1:41:43] Speaker 3: Yeah, there are pictures in the book where you're being
[1:41:47] Speaker 3: accosted by these godless communists on the streets of Moscow.
[1:41:52] Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know if folks can say.
[1:41:54] Speaker 4: It's a better picture on the back cover.
[1:41:58] Speaker 3: Well, you can go and check out Party's website ww
[1:42:01] Speaker 3: dot widowspy dot com and the pictures are on her
[1:42:04] Speaker 3: website and you can get into a look.
[1:42:06] Speaker 4: Right. So, they eventually got this transceiver off receiver off
[1:42:15] Speaker 4: my bra They didn't have a clue about vela crow,
[1:42:18] Speaker 4: so they were just doing brute force, and finally it
[1:42:20] Speaker 4: gave way. At the same time, this big van came
[1:42:24] Speaker 4: from under the railroad tracks and it was like the
[1:42:28] Speaker 4: circus fan with all these people coming out. Among them
[1:42:32] Speaker 4: a man with a big flash on his camera, and
[1:42:35] Speaker 4: they took all these wonderful pictures, and within moments the
[1:42:40] Speaker 4: package showed up. It was They had it right up
[1:42:45] Speaker 4: beside me taking pictures. It was, of course, very clear
[1:42:51] Speaker 4: that something had happened to try on. I spoke in
[1:42:54] Speaker 4: English and I said, in a very loud voice, you
[1:42:57] Speaker 4: cannot arrest me. I'm a diplomat. Must call the American embassy.
[1:43:02] Speaker 4: I gave him the phone number. If I gave it once,
[1:43:04] Speaker 4: I gave it about six times. But I got angry,
[1:43:09] Speaker 4: and when you get angry, your brain isn't recording properly.
[1:43:15] Speaker 4: And I did kick some of those people, mostly man.
[1:43:19] Speaker 4: And there is a folk tale out there that I
[1:43:23] Speaker 4: hospitalized one and he couldn't have sex for a while.
[1:43:27] Speaker 4: But my mother wouldn't approve of that. So I'm I'm pleading.
[1:43:31] Speaker 2: Up, Marty.
[1:43:32] Speaker 3: What what's Yeah, what's the story that supposedly you learned
[1:43:36] Speaker 3: taekwondo and that you kicked some spetsnas guy in the junk.
[1:43:41] Speaker 4: But I probably did that too. Yeah. I had taken
[1:43:44] Speaker 4: karate before, I taekwondo, before i'd gone to Moscow. Yeah,
[1:43:48] Speaker 4: I had, Yeah, and I was pretty good at it. Uh,
[1:43:53] Speaker 4: But I was just angry at that point.
[1:43:55] Speaker 5: Man.
[1:43:55] Speaker 4: I landed some good blows and eventually they lifted my
[1:43:59] Speaker 4: feet up, so I'm suspended in air. I guess I
[1:44:04] Speaker 4: was pretty strong. Yeah, I was very angry. I was angry.
[1:44:10] Speaker 4: I knew if Dragon was anywhere near. Initially I thought,
[1:44:13] Speaker 4: if he's anywhere near, I'll holler so he can hear
[1:44:16] Speaker 4: me and he'll know to get the hell out of there.
[1:44:20] Speaker 4: I wasn't quite quite the case. So they eventually put
[1:44:24] Speaker 4: me into the van and took me to this center
[1:44:27] Speaker 4: of Moscow.
[1:44:29] Speaker 2: And what they took you to was a KGB headquarters.
[1:44:32] Speaker 4: Yeah, it was lu Bianca prison. Yeah. They drove around
[1:44:38] Speaker 4: to the back where there was a big sign breasts
[1:44:40] Speaker 4: plaque on the door that said KGB.
[1:44:43] Speaker 3: Okay, so you're you're an American CIA officer getting dragged
[1:44:48] Speaker 3: into the belly of the beast by the KGB I mean,
[1:44:51] Speaker 3: what's going through your mind at this moment?
[1:44:55] Speaker 2: You're dead, Like, what are you thinking right now?
[1:44:58] Speaker 4: You know, I'm I'm just hoping that what they told
[1:45:02] Speaker 4: me in that one lecture on diplomatic immunity work, which
[1:45:05] Speaker 4: said you know, and they'll send you home money, well
[1:45:10] Speaker 4: good luck with that. I had nothing else to go on,
[1:45:14] Speaker 4: and I knew that if I spoke English, I knew
[1:45:17] Speaker 4: what I was saying, And at that time, man I
[1:45:20] Speaker 4: realized that I really had to turn on my Russian
[1:45:24] Speaker 4: translator head and listen to what they were saying and
[1:45:27] Speaker 4: collect any information that they might have given inadvertently to me.
[1:45:34] Speaker 4: So we sat in a large conference room at a
[1:45:40] Speaker 4: table with two microphones. There was a piece of Provta newspaper.
[1:45:45] Speaker 4: Provda means the truth, and they put the piece of
[1:45:49] Speaker 4: congressphalt right in the middle of the table. The chief
[1:45:54] Speaker 4: interrogator was very angry with me. He was it was
[1:46:00] Speaker 4: beyond reason. He was just angry. So I was reading
[1:46:06] Speaker 4: everything around me at that point and trying to figure
[1:46:09] Speaker 4: out what had happened to Trygun and why and all
[1:46:14] Speaker 4: of those details. But at some point I said, you know,
[1:46:21] Speaker 4: you really have to call the embassy. I gave him
[1:46:26] Speaker 4: the phone number. Again, I said, I worked for a
[1:46:28] Speaker 4: man named Cliff Gross, and sitting across the table from
[1:46:33] Speaker 4: me was the MFA officer who was there to protect
[1:46:38] Speaker 4: my rights as a diplomat. And amazingly, he said, I
[1:46:44] Speaker 4: know Cliff. So he got up and he walked to
[1:46:46] Speaker 4: the phone and he called him at home, and Cliff said, oh,
[1:46:52] Speaker 4: I'll come right down. Well, I did work for Cliff
[1:46:58] Speaker 4: in my coverage jump. I'm sure Cliff thought, like everyone
[1:47:02] Speaker 4: else who might have thought that I worked at CIA,
[1:47:05] Speaker 4: that I was a clerk. What was I doing out there?
[1:47:09] Speaker 4: So he got there and his mouth was wide open.
[1:47:12] Speaker 4: He was just shocked.
[1:47:13] Speaker 2: He could now.
[1:47:16] Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. So when he gets there, they then decide
[1:47:21] Speaker 4: to open the package. Well his eyes are like this now,
[1:47:25] Speaker 4: looking at all this fiyer coming out of this package,
[1:47:29] Speaker 4: and he's he's in himself a curiosity. He had two
[1:47:36] Speaker 4: watches on and the KGB thought one was I mean,
[1:47:40] Speaker 4: they really were Tracy. One was Washington time and one
[1:47:44] Speaker 4: was Moscow time. That was it. But they thought he
[1:47:48] Speaker 4: had a camera or recording divisor something. Was very funny.
[1:47:52] Speaker 4: They were very occupied by him. But every time they
[1:47:56] Speaker 4: asked me a direct question, he said, she doesn't know
[1:47:59] Speaker 4: what you're talking about. He was a great support to me.
[1:48:05] Speaker 4: So they opened the package and they took out a
[1:48:09] Speaker 4: warning note that we put in every package if somebody
[1:48:13] Speaker 4: else found the package. You know, if you find this package,
[1:48:17] Speaker 4: don't go farther, throw it in the river. So then
[1:48:21] Speaker 4: they found that they read the chief interrogator read that
[1:48:24] Speaker 4: out loud, and then they took out each item, the
[1:48:28] Speaker 4: role of Rubles the jewelry. We actually resupplied Tridon with
[1:48:33] Speaker 4: contact lenses because they didn't have any lost out at
[1:48:36] Speaker 4: the time. And then they took out a role of
[1:48:42] Speaker 4: that white film where we put our message to him
[1:48:46] Speaker 4: and it said, dear friend, we're so sorry we missed
[1:48:49] Speaker 4: you the last time you asked for an accounting of
[1:48:53] Speaker 4: our funds in the escrow account that you have accumulated,
[1:48:58] Speaker 4: and that song the total is And he stopped reading
[1:49:03] Speaker 4: because there were a lot of junior KGB officers circling
[1:49:07] Speaker 4: in a circle around the room, and he knew he
[1:49:10] Speaker 4: said three hundred and sixty five thousand dollars, they'd be
[1:49:13] Speaker 4: over to volunteer. So he stopped reading and put it down,
[1:49:18] Speaker 4: and the next thing out of the package was the
[1:49:23] Speaker 4: pen and he said to the tech who was taking
[1:49:28] Speaker 4: everything out, put that over in the corner of the paper.
[1:49:31] Speaker 4: Don't touch it, he said, I want no one to
[1:49:35] Speaker 4: touch it. And of course that's when I knew. I
[1:49:38] Speaker 4: knew this pen and this package was a camera. But
[1:49:41] Speaker 4: it gave me the clear message that he thought it
[1:49:46] Speaker 4: was the peasant poison pen. That that was the single
[1:49:53] Speaker 4: most important thing I learned from that whole evening, and
[1:49:59] Speaker 4: I was I did it a little after ten, and at
[1:50:02] Speaker 4: two o'clock in the morning, they said to Cliff and
[1:50:05] Speaker 4: I you may leave now.
[1:50:08] Speaker 2: Now.
[1:50:08] Speaker 4: Most people say, why didn't they keep you? Why didn't
[1:50:11] Speaker 4: they put you in a jail? And I said, you know,
[1:50:14] Speaker 4: it was tit for tat. And if we arrested FBI
[1:50:19] Speaker 4: in the US, and they were diplomats, we had to
[1:50:21] Speaker 4: let them go. If the FBI arrested a KGB officer
[1:50:26] Speaker 4: in the US, the same same thing. It was. It
[1:50:31] Speaker 4: was reciprocal. Yeah, not so much today in many places.
[1:50:36] Speaker 4: So so Cliff and I walked out and went back
[1:50:41] Speaker 4: to the embassy. And so, of course I'm thinking at
[1:50:44] Speaker 4: twelve o'clock, of course they already got the dogs out
[1:50:48] Speaker 4: looking for me. Right wrong. Now we'll give her a
[1:50:51] Speaker 4: little bit longer, she'll be fine. Yeah, right, she'll be back.
[1:50:58] Speaker 3: So you're you're declared persona non grada. I'd have like
[1:51:02] Speaker 3: what forty eight hours to vacate Moscow and go back home, right.
[1:51:06] Speaker 4: Well, they didn't say anything yet until the next day
[1:51:09] Speaker 4: when they called the ambassador to the MFA, And yeah,
[1:51:13] Speaker 4: that wasn't pretty, but the State Department knew and I
[1:51:18] Speaker 4: left the next day. That was it.
[1:51:20] Speaker 3: I was, Yeah, Marty, I want to get into the
[1:51:23] Speaker 3: backstory of Trigone and what you later learned about what
[1:51:26] Speaker 3: happened to him, But first let's do some the viewer questions.
[1:51:29] Speaker 5: Yeah, I just wanted to when you and Cliff walked
[1:51:32] Speaker 5: out together, did he really did he have a burning
[1:51:36] Speaker 5: desire to have a private conversation with you?
[1:51:39] Speaker 4: No? No, he didn't want to anymore. That was wlenty O. Yeah,
[1:51:45] Speaker 4: I see in the car his wife had been winning
[1:51:48] Speaker 4: on the curb in the car, and so she said, Marty,
[1:51:53] Speaker 4: what are you doing? And Cliff said, oh, Marty's been
[1:51:57] Speaker 4: kissing Milliman. So that was the extent of the conversation. No,
[1:52:02] Speaker 4: I don't know what Cliffs thought. I don't know.
[1:52:05] Speaker 3: That's amazing party, Mary, but obviously his cool head may
[1:52:10] Speaker 3: have saved you some some strips, you know, I have
[1:52:14] Speaker 3: saved you.
[1:52:16] Speaker 4: Yeah, he was playing the role very beautifully, he really did. Yeah. Uh.
[1:52:22] Speaker 5: Richard Bollen, thank you very much, he says, great guests,
[1:52:25] Speaker 5: and we agree. Andrew Dunbar, thank you. Uh so Peter
[1:52:30] Speaker 5: had a low draft number, he was do we already
[1:52:33] Speaker 5: asked that.
[1:52:35] Speaker 2: Well, John the oh John, I'm sorry.
[1:52:40] Speaker 4: He enlisted, he volunteered.
[1:52:43] Speaker 5: Yeah, so that was never in the sorry about that,
[1:52:45] Speaker 5: John Peterson, Jerry j thank you. You are a very
[1:52:48] Speaker 5: brave woman. You have my respect. I lived behind the
[1:52:51] Speaker 5: Iron curtain. Do Americans today have an have any kind
[1:52:58] Speaker 5: of grasp on what it was like?
[1:53:00] Speaker 4: And tell you Russia now, they really don't. I think
[1:53:07] Speaker 4: it's hard to replicate that in today's mental state. I
[1:53:11] Speaker 4: don't think they really understand what communism is like and
[1:53:14] Speaker 4: how how repressive it is and how it strips people
[1:53:18] Speaker 4: of any incentive to do anything, and how cool it
[1:53:23] Speaker 4: was without medical care and oh it was just horrible.
[1:53:29] Speaker 4: You know, can you have an appendec to me with
[1:53:31] Speaker 4: a local I don't think I want to do that.
[1:53:34] Speaker 4: And that was so op there, you know, it was
[1:53:38] Speaker 4: people were abused and I mean bad food and no
[1:53:43] Speaker 4: food right right in the market down the street from
[1:53:47] Speaker 4: my apartment.
[1:53:48] Speaker 2: It was real, Martin, what are you talking about.
[1:53:51] Speaker 5: Cuba had like free medical care and everybody was awesome.
[1:53:54] Speaker 2: Everybody like loved it. Yes, right, did you want to come.
[1:54:00] Speaker 4: On agree if it's nonexistent?
[1:54:02] Speaker 5: Right, John Dugan or Dugan thank you a fantastic interview.
[1:54:09] Speaker 2: I'm buying the book now.
[1:54:10] Speaker 5: And guys, you can find the book on Amazon, both
[1:54:13] Speaker 5: in the paperback version, and also it is free if
[1:54:16] Speaker 5: you have Kindled Prime, and Mary still gets paid for
[1:54:20] Speaker 5: that based on the number of pages read. So if
[1:54:23] Speaker 5: you have Kennel Prime, which I mean honestly, you should
[1:54:25] Speaker 5: because it's a great deal, get the book and read it.
[1:54:29] Speaker 2: It just the preface, which we'll get into it. It's
[1:54:34] Speaker 2: just yeah, this preface.
[1:54:36] Speaker 3: This is one of the best books I've read quite
[1:54:37] Speaker 3: a while, so I hope people will check it out.
[1:54:41] Speaker 2: Andrew, thank you.
[1:54:42] Speaker 5: Was it true that aldrich Ames was Tryon's first handler?
[1:54:47] Speaker 4: Yea, he knew about He probably knew about him in Columbia,
[1:54:52] Speaker 4: but he was not the handler that was Peter. Early
[1:54:55] Speaker 4: in his book he claimed that not true.
[1:55:01] Speaker 5: Jerry j thank you. I was an until after nineteen
[1:55:05] Speaker 5: eighty nine. If I know something about Cocher, I would say,
[1:55:10] Speaker 5: but STV burned.
[1:55:11] Speaker 2: A lot of evidence. Oh culture, culture, Sorry about that.
[1:55:16] Speaker 4: M Yeah, he's the one that dropped a dime on Drygon. Oh.
[1:55:21] Speaker 5: Yeah, we'll get it. Yeah, we'll get into that for sure. Andrew,
[1:55:24] Speaker 5: thank you. Since you were in Moscow in the in
[1:55:27] Speaker 5: the era. How accurate was the movie Gorky Park? Probably
[1:55:32] Speaker 5: a book too.
[1:55:34] Speaker 4: Yeah, I am. I remember watching that and it was accurate.
[1:55:41] Speaker 4: I really can't think of the details that much. Yeah,
[1:55:44] Speaker 4: I could rewatch it. Yeah anything.
[1:55:53] Speaker 5: How good does it feel leaving Lubyanka prison?
[1:56:01] Speaker 4: You know, I think I was so upset about what
[1:56:06] Speaker 4: had happened to Trygone. It was several years before I
[1:56:11] Speaker 4: really found out what happened to him, So it was
[1:56:14] Speaker 4: I was carrying a lot of guilt that night and
[1:56:17] Speaker 4: feeling how did I screw up? What did I do? Right?
[1:56:20] Speaker 3: Because you felt that your surveillance or your counter surveillance
[1:56:24] Speaker 3: may would not have been good enough, and maybe you
[1:56:27] Speaker 3: were compromised and they used you to get to him.
[1:56:29] Speaker 10: And yeah, right right, we'll get We'll get to the
[1:56:33] Speaker 10: real story in a minute.
[1:56:34] Speaker 6: Yeah, that must have been tough. I mean, yeah, and
[1:56:44] Speaker 6: thank you h.
[1:56:45] Speaker 5: Do you feel that the world is less with the
[1:56:49] Speaker 5: loss of Moscow Rules?
[1:56:51] Speaker 2: Wouldn't that really end?
[1:56:56] Speaker 4: Okay? I won't say anything about mosss. It was written
[1:57:01] Speaker 4: by a colleague of mine. There's a lot of uh
[1:57:05] Speaker 4: stuff that's not correct in that, and Moscow Rules didn't
[1:57:09] Speaker 4: It was his fiction. So some of the rules were
[1:57:15] Speaker 4: I mean, we didn't call them Moscow rules. It was
[1:57:17] Speaker 4: just a way of operating in enormous, a very difficult place.
[1:57:21] Speaker 5: Yeah, so Moscow Rules, whether it's accurate or not, but
[1:57:26] Speaker 5: it describes sort of a set of like diplomatic situations rights.
[1:57:33] Speaker 3: Like we didn't we didn't encounterfeit each other's currency because
[1:57:36] Speaker 3: we understood it would collapse the economy overall. It would
[1:57:39] Speaker 3: be like so bad. There were just some things we
[1:57:40] Speaker 3: didn't do. Mutually assured destruction, that's what it was. Yeah,
[1:57:46] Speaker 3: that's right, Isaac.
[1:57:49] Speaker 2: Thank you H. Are the habits that you learned, things
[1:57:54] Speaker 2: that you still do.
[1:57:57] Speaker 4: You know, I've taught my children and how to look
[1:58:01] Speaker 4: for surveillance, and I think I'm still aware of anyone
[1:58:06] Speaker 4: following me around me. I'm very observant. It's just I
[1:58:11] Speaker 4: guess it was trained into me. It's not something and
[1:58:16] Speaker 4: especially a woman, you learn those things. You have to
[1:58:18] Speaker 4: be a little careful and not allow people to follow
[1:58:23] Speaker 4: you or you know, get yeah, compromise you. It's a funny,
[1:58:28] Speaker 4: funny thing.
[1:58:29] Speaker 2: Martin Marty, can you tell us maybe a couple like
[1:58:32] Speaker 2: myths or.
[1:58:33] Speaker 5: Misconceptions of counter surveyor or not counterstand surveillance detection and
[1:58:39] Speaker 5: the actual truth of it.
[1:58:41] Speaker 4: Right, Well, if if you don't want to let on
[1:58:48] Speaker 4: that you're looking for surveillance, one you're not stopping and
[1:58:54] Speaker 4: looking around, but you're also trying to keep the foul point.
[1:59:00] Speaker 4: And if you start doing jerky things, what you're telegraphing
[1:59:07] Speaker 4: to the surveillance is that you're aware you should have surveillance.
[1:59:10] Speaker 4: So why are you aware of surveillance? Somebody in Moscow
[1:59:17] Speaker 4: and my era, my secretary, she would have never thought
[1:59:21] Speaker 4: about it, so she would have never looked for it,
[1:59:24] Speaker 4: she would have never been aware of it, and she
[1:59:27] Speaker 4: were I. So I tried to be like her and
[1:59:30] Speaker 4: just be part of the scene, you know, and not
[1:59:36] Speaker 4: be aware of it. But the minute of surveillance smellles
[1:59:39] Speaker 4: that you're looking for them, then you've identified yourself. And
[1:59:44] Speaker 4: that was the last thing I wanted to do.
[1:59:47] Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it was it Jack the former Marine
[1:59:51] Speaker 5: case officer. Yes, And I think it's interesting what you
[1:59:54] Speaker 5: said about him, because I think that in the popular conception,
[1:59:57] Speaker 5: like an American philography and like that is you do
[2:00:01] Speaker 5: these movements where all of a sudden you vanish and
[2:00:03] Speaker 5: surveillance didn't know where you go. You he just he
[2:00:09] Speaker 5: just bored them to death. He just bored them to
[2:00:10] Speaker 5: where they got complacent.
[2:00:12] Speaker 4: Absolutely, you don't go around the corner and then jump out. Yeah, exactly, Mark,
[2:00:18] Speaker 4: although some of them got pretty familiar with there's surveillance,
[2:00:22] Speaker 4: like the one in the ballshoy when my friend was
[2:00:26] Speaker 4: at the ballet and the guy was two rows behind
[2:00:29] Speaker 4: him was someone he saw all the time, you know,
[2:00:32] Speaker 4: so I'm sure he kind of elbowed him or something.
[2:00:35] Speaker 4: But that was the collegial And we had stories when
[2:00:39] Speaker 4: Defense Chaise would go on long trips and their car
[2:00:43] Speaker 4: would break down and or the tire would break. Well,
[2:00:47] Speaker 4: there's surveillance eventually came up and changed the time. But
[2:00:51] Speaker 4: because he is what, we're all in this together.
[2:00:53] Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I'm stuck out here because you're stuck out here.
[2:00:57] Speaker 4: That's right. So there was some collegial met with surveillance.
[2:01:01] Speaker 5: It was very amazing, and I think it's interesting when
[2:01:04] Speaker 5: you talked about Trygon and his sort of you know,
[2:01:08] Speaker 5: his mental fatigue and what was happening to him, because
[2:01:12] Speaker 5: if you're always always looking for somebody following you, yes,
[2:01:18] Speaker 5: and you don't have a plan, you're you're.
[2:01:20] Speaker 2: Always going to see people following you.
[2:01:22] Speaker 4: Yes, that's right, that's right. You know, I didn't mention it,
[2:01:27] Speaker 4: but he did have an escape plan. We did have
[2:01:30] Speaker 4: an ex filtration plan if he could get to that point,
[2:01:34] Speaker 4: so we could have gotten amount. But yeah, well, Martin, I.
[2:01:38] Speaker 3: Think that's talked to us about what you learned in
[2:01:41] Speaker 3: subsequent years down the line about Trygon.
[2:01:44] Speaker 2: Who who who?
[2:01:45] Speaker 3: What was his real name, what happened to him, the
[2:01:49] Speaker 3: whole backstory that you didn't know at all the night
[2:01:52] Speaker 3: you were arrested.
[2:01:53] Speaker 2: This kind of came out later on.
[2:01:55] Speaker 4: Right, Trygon, his name was Alexander Agdnik and he was
[2:02:03] Speaker 4: actually he had been in the Navy and he wanted
[2:02:08] Speaker 4: to be a pilot. Were bad, so he got out
[2:02:11] Speaker 4: of that. He went into Ministry of International Affairs, so
[2:02:20] Speaker 4: he was a bona fide MFA officer. He and his
[2:02:26] Speaker 4: wife married at a convenience to get to Bogata because
[2:02:30] Speaker 4: he can't travel single. So there was no love loss there.
[2:02:36] Speaker 4: What I didn't tell was that when he left Bogata
[2:02:42] Speaker 4: and left Plar behind, his girlfriend she told our case
[2:02:47] Speaker 4: officer in Bogata that she was pregnant at the time.
[2:02:53] Speaker 4: She asked us not to tell Trigon that, and we
[2:02:56] Speaker 4: passed letters from her to him through the day drops
[2:03:01] Speaker 4: and she never told him that she was pregnant. The
[2:03:05] Speaker 4: baby was born in March of nineteen seventy five in Madrid.
[2:03:10] Speaker 4: She went back to Spain after Trygon left, and so
[2:03:15] Speaker 4: she had a baby girl in nineteen seventy five, and
[2:03:20] Speaker 4: Trigon died, of course, never knowing that that baby was born.
[2:03:26] Speaker 3: Yeah, and so what did go down with Trigon? How
[2:03:31] Speaker 3: did the KGB catch him? How did that whole situation
[2:03:34] Speaker 3: come about?
[2:03:36] Speaker 4: Right? He So, I told you. We had a telephone
[2:03:40] Speaker 4: tap in the Soviet embassy in Bogata, and we would
[2:03:44] Speaker 4: send back the tapes from that telephone tap, and they
[2:03:49] Speaker 4: were the big reel to reel tapes, and we'd send
[2:03:52] Speaker 4: them back to headquarters and we had a transcribing section
[2:03:57] Speaker 4: and the man who transcribed those taps was Carl Kocher.
[2:04:01] Speaker 4: He was a Czech national who was allowed to emigrate
[2:04:05] Speaker 4: from Prague to the US in the mid sixties. We
[2:04:11] Speaker 4: remember that Froude was invaded in sixty eight by the Soviets,
[2:04:17] Speaker 4: which all seemed kind of kinky now looking back. But
[2:04:22] Speaker 4: he went to school at Columbia University and he and
[2:04:26] Speaker 4: his wife were members of a sex swapping club. When
[2:04:31] Speaker 4: they got tired of that, they moved to Washington, d c.
[2:04:35] Speaker 4: He became an American citizen, and then the CIA hired
[2:04:40] Speaker 4: him on contract because he knew all the East European languages,
[2:04:48] Speaker 4: so he transcribed the tapes and eventually, I guess told
[2:04:56] Speaker 4: the Czech handlers because he had volunteered to the Czech
[2:05:00] Speaker 4: Intel Service, and he told them that CIA had something
[2:05:06] Speaker 4: going down in Bogota, and he didn't know much other
[2:05:10] Speaker 4: than that, other than something that had been implied to
[2:05:13] Speaker 4: him that the officers were very interested in his transcribing
[2:05:18] Speaker 4: these tapes. So the Czechs obviously told the KGB, and
[2:05:26] Speaker 4: the KGB looked at who had come and gone from
[2:05:28] Speaker 4: Bogatad during that period of time. When trying on Riyack
[2:05:33] Speaker 4: in Moscow, they knew there were three candidates who could
[2:05:38] Speaker 4: be the spy that the CIA was interested in, and
[2:05:43] Speaker 4: eventually they determined it was him. They could eliminate the
[2:05:49] Speaker 4: other two, so they got him involved in a fake operation.
[2:05:56] Speaker 4: The KGB officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs became
[2:06:02] Speaker 4: friends with Trigon and asked try On to help him.
[2:06:07] Speaker 4: They went to the sauna at the big swimming pool there,
[2:06:13] Speaker 4: and while he was there with his KGB friend, a
[2:06:18] Speaker 4: team came in and got his keys and went to
[2:06:21] Speaker 4: his apartment, installed cameras, and after that they watched him.
[2:06:29] Speaker 4: And the night before a drop, he got out the
[2:06:35] Speaker 4: spy equipment to check the site and all of that,
[2:06:38] Speaker 4: and they watched him and said he can't make another delivery.
[2:06:43] Speaker 4: They went to his apartment. They stripped him down and
[2:06:48] Speaker 4: told him that he really had to make a confession,
[2:06:52] Speaker 4: that it would be easier on him. He knew that
[2:06:55] Speaker 4: being caught, he'd probably get a bullet in the back
[2:06:58] Speaker 4: of the head like everyone had before him. And now,
[2:07:02] Speaker 4: so he sat there at his table and he said, look,
[2:07:05] Speaker 4: I'll write a full confession. Bring me some paper. They
[2:07:09] Speaker 4: brought the paper, he picked up his pen. He began
[2:07:14] Speaker 4: to write, and he bit on the end of the
[2:07:17] Speaker 4: pen and died. There are various versions of how long
[2:07:24] Speaker 4: it took for him to die, but I can only
[2:07:27] Speaker 4: imagine that's why that chief interrogator was so angry with me.
[2:07:32] Speaker 4: He didn't confess they had no case against him. They
[2:07:36] Speaker 4: had circumstantial and eventually, after several days, his family came
[2:07:44] Speaker 4: looking for him. He in fact had married a young woman,
[2:07:48] Speaker 4: so she was concerned. His parents were concerned, his brother
[2:07:52] Speaker 4: and sister were concerned, and the KGB had no case,
[2:07:57] Speaker 4: so they gave the body to them. And in the
[2:08:00] Speaker 4: back of a Soviet book that a KGB officer wrote
[2:08:08] Speaker 4: about this case, they wrote about the investigation of Trigon.
[2:08:14] Speaker 4: There's a picture of his funeral pyre and the funeral casket,
[2:08:22] Speaker 4: and we actually have a picture of his grave in Moscow.
[2:08:30] Speaker 4: So that's how he died. So that was June twenty
[2:08:35] Speaker 4: first of nineteen seventy seven, three or four days before
[2:08:41] Speaker 4: I went to the park and ran into that man
[2:08:45] Speaker 4: in the park. And according to this book, which I
[2:08:49] Speaker 4: read with some trepidation because I worried that in there
[2:08:52] Speaker 4: it was going to say, oh, yeah, we had her
[2:08:54] Speaker 4: all along. They were in that park, one hundred men
[2:08:59] Speaker 4: strong man at night. Wow, looking for maybe for me,
[2:09:06] Speaker 4: but I'll never know that. So I wove my way
[2:09:12] Speaker 4: through that whole mess and avoided that night, but of
[2:09:19] Speaker 4: course only to be caught later. So the FBI then
[2:09:27] Speaker 4: started an investigation of Carl Kocher. I think we had
[2:09:32] Speaker 4: some other reporting on him. He was arrested in nineteen
[2:09:36] Speaker 4: eighty four. You see, that was seven years after I
[2:09:40] Speaker 4: was arrested. That was a long time for me to
[2:09:44] Speaker 4: dwell on that. He was put in jail along with
[2:09:49] Speaker 4: his wife, and eventually they were swapped for a Soviet
[2:09:55] Speaker 4: dissident and a totally Sharansky. Ronsky is a famous and
[2:10:02] Speaker 4: very well known Israeli official. Now you can look him up.
[2:10:07] Speaker 4: He's It's amazing what he did, even after this start
[2:10:11] Speaker 4: he had. He was a Jewish dissident in Moscow and
[2:10:15] Speaker 4: then called Coacher. They have made a film of him.
[2:10:21] Speaker 4: A Canadian journalist went to Prague and interviewed him. So
[2:10:26] Speaker 4: there's a movie about him on Canadian TV. So that's
[2:10:33] Speaker 4: that's called coachure. I think he's still alive. And that's
[2:10:37] Speaker 4: how Trygon came to an end. After I wrote my book,
[2:10:42] Speaker 4: I had one concern that Trigon's daughter would come and
[2:10:46] Speaker 4: appear on our front step. Well, she didn't do that.
[2:10:50] Speaker 4: She emailed me, and from her email I knew it
[2:10:53] Speaker 4: was her. And I went to Washington with my husban
[2:11:00] Speaker 4: and we met her and her two children and her son.
[2:11:05] Speaker 4: Trygon's grandson is living proof that Trigon was his father.
[2:11:10] Speaker 4: He looks so much like him. It's very interesting. And
[2:11:13] Speaker 4: she and I keep in regular contact.
[2:11:17] Speaker 2: How does she feel about the whole thing?
[2:11:21] Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean she was, she was. She didn't
[2:11:25] Speaker 4: learn till she was fifteen that her father was this person.
[2:11:29] Speaker 4: Her mother kept that secret all along, and so that
[2:11:33] Speaker 4: was a revelation. And their mother didn't tell her all
[2:11:35] Speaker 4: the facts. And her mother now has dementias, So there
[2:11:40] Speaker 4: is that's a dead end. Her name is Alejandra, and
[2:11:47] Speaker 4: her one dream is, of course, to go to Moscow,
[2:11:49] Speaker 4: which I've told her would be suicide and not a
[2:11:52] Speaker 4: smart thing to do. She wants to meet her relatives,
[2:11:56] Speaker 4: but of course that's that would never be a normal thing.
[2:11:59] Speaker 4: That KGB or the SBR would intercept all that, and
[2:12:02] Speaker 4: that would not be possible.
[2:12:04] Speaker 5: So yeah, you said, and understandably like you had this doubt.
[2:12:10] Speaker 2: Did your trade craft, you know, was it something you did?
[2:12:15] Speaker 5: Was was there also, were there ramifications at all in
[2:12:19] Speaker 5: the agency?
[2:12:20] Speaker 2: Was there doubt or did they know that you had
[2:12:22] Speaker 2: done your job right now?
[2:12:24] Speaker 4: They had, They had no doubt. Nobody blamed me. Nobody
[2:12:28] Speaker 4: treated me very differently from the officer who handled pop Off,
[2:12:35] Speaker 4: and he had a very bad experience with that and
[2:12:38] Speaker 4: finally had to quit the agency. But in my case,
[2:12:43] Speaker 4: they polygraphed me. I think I flew through the olegraph.
[2:12:47] Speaker 4: There was no doubt in my mind that you know,
[2:12:50] Speaker 4: I was who I was. Nobody had compromised me, and
[2:12:54] Speaker 4: I I just had to live with what I had
[2:12:57] Speaker 4: done and realized that I h I you know, the
[2:13:04] Speaker 4: anomalies and the package pointed to other things. That was
[2:13:09] Speaker 4: all never really explained to me. But I eventually felt like,
[2:13:14] Speaker 4: you know, I was confident enough to realize it wasn't
[2:13:17] Speaker 4: something I did.
[2:13:18] Speaker 5: So were you kind of over it by the time
[2:13:21] Speaker 5: the whole coature thing was revealed or Did debt have
[2:13:23] Speaker 5: any kind of emotional release for you?
[2:13:25] Speaker 4: Yes, it was. It was a relief for me. It
[2:13:28] Speaker 4: was by then I was already married another, I had children.
[2:13:33] Speaker 4: It was you know, I'd moved on. But you know
[2:13:37] Speaker 4: that doubt is always there. You we take our agent safety.
[2:13:43] Speaker 4: So I mean it is godlike, it is something that
[2:13:46] Speaker 4: is something we never shirk. We will be there for
[2:13:49] Speaker 4: the end.
[2:13:50] Speaker 3: Yeah, after you got PNG out of Moscow, come back
[2:13:56] Speaker 3: to the United States. I like to hear you tell
[2:13:59] Speaker 3: a story about me. President Carter and a big new
[2:14:01] Speaker 3: Braziinski at the White House.
[2:14:06] Speaker 4: So they I before I left Moscow, I didn't go
[2:14:10] Speaker 4: back to my apartment, so I had no clothes except
[2:14:12] Speaker 4: what I had on, and I had pink pants and
[2:14:14] Speaker 4: a pink top. And so that's how I flew back
[2:14:19] Speaker 4: tomorrow to Washington. And so that night I stayed with Jack,
[2:14:25] Speaker 4: the deputy Chieva Station and his wife in Arlington, and
[2:14:30] Speaker 4: Jack said, well, you have a busy day tomorrow. You
[2:14:33] Speaker 4: have to meet the director. And I said, well, Jack,
[2:14:36] Speaker 4: I got to have clothes. And the next morning his
[2:14:39] Speaker 4: wife and I went and we bought clothes, and I
[2:14:41] Speaker 4: bought pantyhose, shoes, underpants, braw everything, bottom, top up, all
[2:14:47] Speaker 4: the way. So I had this great turquoise dress that
[2:14:51] Speaker 4: I bought. And so I went to see Stansfield Turner
[2:14:56] Speaker 4: that day, and like you said before, he was a computer.
[2:15:00] Speaker 4: I really liked the new satellite stuff. He was all
[2:15:03] Speaker 4: into the technical peace, and here was this woman here
[2:15:06] Speaker 4: before him who had been dealing with a human source,
[2:15:10] Speaker 4: and so he wanted no one in the office with me. Well,
[2:15:16] Speaker 4: I told my story. I think maybe I would have
[2:15:19] Speaker 4: worried that I would change it somehow. So I told
[2:15:22] Speaker 4: him what happened. And he sat there and it looked
[2:15:25] Speaker 4: at me and he said, Marty, would you be willing
[2:15:28] Speaker 4: to go to the White House with me tomorrow? Well?
[2:15:31] Speaker 4: Was I going to be saying no? I don't think so,
[2:15:33] Speaker 4: So I said sure, you know, so I had the
[2:15:36] Speaker 4: same clothes on the next day, and off we went
[2:15:38] Speaker 4: to the White House. So he went in the special
[2:15:42] Speaker 4: way and I went down the long tunnel and up
[2:15:44] Speaker 4: the stairs and into the oval office and there sat
[2:15:49] Speaker 4: Walter Bale and Jimmy Carter. Well, Jimmy came in a
[2:15:53] Speaker 4: little later, but it's a big new Verrghinski and so
[2:15:57] Speaker 4: I sat on the sofa next to the Stansfield turner
[2:16:01] Speaker 4: and Carter came in. President Carter's a diminutive man. He's
[2:16:07] Speaker 4: very small, and he had a bad rash on his face,
[2:16:13] Speaker 4: and I remember feeling sorry for him with the weight
[2:16:17] Speaker 4: of that office, and I felt it they're sitting in
[2:16:21] Speaker 4: the Oval office, and so we had the replica of
[2:16:26] Speaker 4: the package on the table and I told the story
[2:16:29] Speaker 4: and the director told me I had like twelve minutes
[2:16:33] Speaker 4: to tell it, and like twenty five minutes.
[2:16:35] Speaker 3: I had to tell this story that we've been talking
[2:16:38] Speaker 3: about for two hours and eighteen minutes.
[2:16:41] Speaker 4: Yeah, I do, go.
[2:16:43] Speaker 2: On right, No, no.
[2:16:46] Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's interesting. He sat there and he looked
[2:16:51] Speaker 4: at me, and the director said, you may go. So
[2:16:55] Speaker 4: I stood up, and President Carter stood up and he said, Marty,
[2:16:59] Speaker 4: well you may returning to Moscow. I looked at him
[2:17:03] Speaker 4: and I said, I don't think I'll be going back
[2:17:07] Speaker 4: and Big News and I no, she won't ever be
[2:17:10] Speaker 4: returning to Moscow. And then as I left, Big New
[2:17:14] Speaker 4: Virginsky said to me, Marty, we greatly admire your courage.
[2:17:19] Speaker 4: And he was the one of the five people you
[2:17:23] Speaker 4: see who had received this intelligence. He knew the value
[2:17:27] Speaker 4: and what we had lost. It was momentous. That was
[2:17:32] Speaker 4: quite a moment. So he said, your pictures now, I
[2:17:35] Speaker 4: don't think so this is.
[2:17:37] Speaker 3: So incredible because you are how old at this point
[2:17:40] Speaker 3: thirty two? Okay, you're thirty two, you're a young CIA
[2:17:43] Speaker 3: case officer. You went through this whole experience in Laos,
[2:17:46] Speaker 3: losing your husband. Young case officer, You're handling a strategic
[2:17:51] Speaker 3: asset and the intelligence that you are servicing at this
[2:17:54] Speaker 3: dead drop is going from you to the station, to
[2:17:59] Speaker 3: CIA headquarter and then landing in the lap of the
[2:18:01] Speaker 3: National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, and.
[2:18:05] Speaker 5: Then you meet with the President of United States. And
[2:18:08] Speaker 5: you've been in the agency what as a case of
[2:18:10] Speaker 5: for like five years now, four years?
[2:18:12] Speaker 4: Yeah, seventy one, Yeah, yeah, five years.
[2:18:19] Speaker 5: Where most case officers are kind of just getting their
[2:18:21] Speaker 5: feet wet, right, They've had like a tour or two.
[2:18:23] Speaker 2: They're starting to get their legs underneath them.
[2:18:26] Speaker 4: Well, there is value in being a new officer. You
[2:18:29] Speaker 4: have no preconceptions and you also have no cover of history,
[2:18:33] Speaker 4: and that was one thing that was.
[2:18:36] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, to B has no idea who you are.
[2:18:40] Speaker 3: I think there's just a couple more questions and then
[2:18:43] Speaker 3: we'll start wrapping it up here.
[2:18:50] Speaker 2: Yeah, Isaac, thank you.
[2:18:53] Speaker 5: In your opinion, is the FSB playing the same games
[2:18:57] Speaker 5: that the KGB did, for example the twenty sixteen election
[2:19:00] Speaker 5: roll for Arms, the Hacks and Wagner.
[2:19:02] Speaker 4: Absolutely, there's no you know that the year I arrived
[2:19:09] Speaker 4: at Moscow was the same year that Putin started with
[2:19:12] Speaker 4: a KGB and and lemoningred. Ye the same.
[2:19:16] Speaker 2: Now you can change the name, but what does that
[2:19:18] Speaker 2: actually do?
[2:19:19] Speaker 4: Yeah, they still have the same job, right The.
[2:19:22] Speaker 2: New boss is the same as the old boss.
[2:19:23] Speaker 5: Oh and Maria, my girlfriend says, how dare you not
[2:19:28] Speaker 5: use your custom teamhouse whiskey to the camp. Let me
[2:19:30] Speaker 5: actually get that and I'll explain why we didn't because
[2:19:33] Speaker 5: we just had like a small bottle half a bottle lefreud.
[2:19:36] Speaker 2: We're out of the whiskey.
[2:19:39] Speaker 3: It's going to pay for that, Yeah, John John says.
[2:19:43] Speaker 3: John Dugan says, cheers to John and his wife, who's
[2:19:46] Speaker 3: a great patriot.
[2:19:49] Speaker 2: Andrew, thank you.
[2:19:52] Speaker 3: Jim wants to know how long did you stay with
[2:19:55] Speaker 3: the c i A after that and what sort of
[2:19:57] Speaker 3: assignments did.
[2:19:58] Speaker 2: She have.
[2:20:00] Speaker 5: That?
[2:20:02] Speaker 4: Well, I had many assignments. I had one overseas assignment
[2:20:06] Speaker 4: which I can't talk about.
[2:20:08] Speaker 5: But come on, yeah, come on, look, go to jail,
[2:20:13] Speaker 5: Go to jail for us.
[2:20:14] Speaker 2: Please, it's just you me, Dave Internet.
[2:20:18] Speaker 4: Okay, Well, you know, if I said to you, you
[2:20:23] Speaker 4: start in the pits of Laos and you think it
[2:20:26] Speaker 4: can't get worse, and then they send you to Moscow.
[2:20:30] Speaker 4: I mean, where would you like to go? So nice,
[2:20:33] Speaker 4: nice place in Europe?
[2:20:34] Speaker 5: Probably, right, Yeah, yeah, that's what you're supposed to do, right,
[2:20:38] Speaker 5: You get those cushy jobs after the rough ones.
[2:20:41] Speaker 4: Right, that's right. But I did have a thirty two
[2:20:45] Speaker 4: year career, which was amazing, and I did work undercovered
[2:20:49] Speaker 4: till the very end. And the FBI and I had
[2:20:52] Speaker 4: kind of a joke that if they ever had a
[2:20:55] Speaker 4: troublesome office of Soviet officer there and wash Washington, they
[2:21:01] Speaker 4: would invite me to a party, you know, and I
[2:21:04] Speaker 4: would just have to say, oh, Dmitri, don't you remember
[2:21:08] Speaker 4: we met? I'm Marty Peterson, Because you know that was
[2:21:13] Speaker 4: I had quite a reputation, and.
[2:21:14] Speaker 2: The Russians would the Russians would pull them going, oh,
[2:21:17] Speaker 2: how do you know her?
[2:21:19] Speaker 5: Yes exactly, because you actually were on the in the
[2:21:23] Speaker 5: Washington Post in like nineteen seventy eight, right on the cover.
[2:21:27] Speaker 4: Yes, Washington Post. Yeah.
[2:21:30] Speaker 5: How hard is it after that to maintain like a
[2:21:33] Speaker 5: covert presence wherever you go?
[2:21:35] Speaker 4: It was easy. I just said, you know, it's it's
[2:21:39] Speaker 4: just propaganda, Soviet propaganda. I said, then they say that
[2:21:43] Speaker 4: about all kinds of people who you know. I just
[2:21:47] Speaker 4: went along with it, and I married someone in the
[2:21:49] Speaker 4: State Department, so I was gold Yeah.
[2:21:52] Speaker 5: Plus you didn't have Facebook, Facebook facial recognition to deal
[2:21:56] Speaker 5: with it those times.
[2:21:57] Speaker 4: None of that. And I got married again, so I
[2:22:00] Speaker 4: changed my name.
[2:22:01] Speaker 2: So it was all good, golden, and I should uh.
[2:22:04] Speaker 3: I'd also just like to point out to people that
[2:22:06] Speaker 3: Marty's story is featured in the Spy Museum in Washington,
[2:22:10] Speaker 3: d C.
[2:22:11] Speaker 2: And it was, No, it was and are you are you.
[2:22:16] Speaker 3: Still in the KG BET Museum though, yes, you are
[2:22:19] Speaker 3: in the kg Moscow.
[2:22:22] Speaker 2: So yeah, that's amazing.
[2:22:23] Speaker 3: And I talked to uh, I talked to a guest
[2:22:27] Speaker 3: we're going to have on the show later on who
[2:22:30] Speaker 3: is an FSB defector who is here in the United States,
[2:22:33] Speaker 3: and he said he learned about he learned about you
[2:22:35] Speaker 3: and the academy.
[2:22:36] Speaker 4: Yeah, that was well known.
[2:22:38] Speaker 5: Yeah, I how was So this isn't the first five
[2:22:47] Speaker 5: years of your career? How were were you like a
[2:22:52] Speaker 5: child star? And then it was all downhill from there
[2:22:55] Speaker 5: for you? Because I mean, because it almost feels like
[2:22:58] Speaker 5: a peak, right you You.
[2:22:59] Speaker 2: Have me using asset in Moscow.
[2:23:02] Speaker 5: You get arrested by the KGB, you meet the president
[2:23:07] Speaker 5: and the director of the CIA, and you shall have
[2:23:10] Speaker 5: twenty seven years left.
[2:23:12] Speaker 4: Yes, well you don't though, do you. You just keep
[2:23:15] Speaker 4: going one job to the next. Yeah. And it was
[2:23:19] Speaker 4: I've realized recently when I was in the company of
[2:23:23] Speaker 4: other CIA women of my age, and I said, you know,
[2:23:28] Speaker 4: I did some disservice then, because when I would change
[2:23:32] Speaker 4: offices and inside headquarters building, you have a job for
[2:23:36] Speaker 4: two years, maybe three, but if you're smart, you move
[2:23:40] Speaker 4: to another office so you get different experience. You keep
[2:23:43] Speaker 4: filling your pockets with new experience. But when I would
[2:23:46] Speaker 4: go to the new office, if they didn't know because
[2:23:50] Speaker 4: I had changed my name, I wouldn't tell my worst story. Now,
[2:23:56] Speaker 4: to be sexist about this, a man will lead with
[2:23:59] Speaker 4: his war stories. That will be his identity. But you see,
[2:24:04] Speaker 4: because I was caught, it wasn't something I wanted to
[2:24:11] Speaker 4: lead with. Oh you're that woman, and I think I
[2:24:15] Speaker 4: always did that. So why did I write this book?
[2:24:20] Speaker 4: So I was in CTC my last assignment, because I
[2:24:24] Speaker 4: served in counterintelligence, counter espionage straight ops and then in
[2:24:31] Speaker 4: the end of counter terrorism. That's where I was when
[2:24:34] Speaker 4: the nine to eleven happened, and I worked with an
[2:24:39] Speaker 4: amazing group of people. And one of the men came
[2:24:43] Speaker 4: in to my office the day I retired and he said, Marty,
[2:24:48] Speaker 4: I had told them my story. A psychologist came to
[2:24:53] Speaker 4: the office and suggested that I tell these men my
[2:24:57] Speaker 4: war story. So I did, and there was a new,
[2:25:00] Speaker 4: you know, awareness that she's just not a pretty face somewhat.
[2:25:05] Speaker 9: And so.
[2:25:07] Speaker 4: He came into my office and he said, Marty, you
[2:25:10] Speaker 4: need to go home and tell this story. People need
[2:25:12] Speaker 4: to know who you are and what life was like
[2:25:16] Speaker 4: for you. So that's you know, I realized if he
[2:25:20] Speaker 4: thought I could write this and that it was worthwhile,
[2:25:24] Speaker 4: I respected him and I thought, well, that's what I
[2:25:27] Speaker 4: should do. It isn't my nature to shout about myself.
[2:25:32] Speaker 4: It isn't and most CIA officers are like that. They
[2:25:35] Speaker 4: don't tell you much about themselves or what they have accomplished.
[2:25:40] Speaker 4: So this has been a really strange proposed retirement phase
[2:25:47] Speaker 4: for me where I have to kind of come out,
[2:25:50] Speaker 4: and you know, just even saying I was CIA was
[2:25:54] Speaker 4: a choker at the beginning, you know, I am.
[2:25:58] Speaker 3: I think the book is a it's a terrific tribute
[2:26:01] Speaker 3: to the good work that the CIA does. Usually, you
[2:26:04] Speaker 3: guys just get a lot of bad press for the things,
[2:26:07] Speaker 3: but this is an example of some of the good
[2:26:09] Speaker 3: work that the agency does.
[2:26:11] Speaker 2: I think it's a great tribute. Speaks well of yourself.
[2:26:14] Speaker 3: It's also a great tribute to your late husband, John,
[2:26:17] Speaker 3: who is just one of the kind of unsung I
[2:26:21] Speaker 3: don't want to say, forgotten heroes.
[2:26:23] Speaker 2: He has a star on the wall.
[2:26:25] Speaker 3: But it was a secret war and not not a
[2:26:28] Speaker 3: lot of people understand what happened over there.
[2:26:31] Speaker 4: That's right, that's right.
[2:26:32] Speaker 2: We don't want to keep you too long.
[2:26:34] Speaker 5: But the preface you're say something for the bonus, okay,
[2:26:38] Speaker 5: So in the bonus segment for our Patreon yours and
[2:26:41] Speaker 5: it's only one dollar a month or more. We'll we'll
[2:26:45] Speaker 5: find out about when Marty actually told her teenage kids.
[2:26:51] Speaker 2: She was a spy, that she was in the CIA.
[2:26:54] Speaker 3: It's the very beginning of this book. It's like it's
[2:26:58] Speaker 3: like I felt like I was being shot in the
[2:27:00] Speaker 3: heart in the first four pages. Will wrap you and
[2:27:03] Speaker 3: you will not put the book down.
[2:27:05] Speaker 5: And I just want to say, Maria, uh so, my
[2:27:09] Speaker 5: girlfriend had our decanter and these glasses made for us
[2:27:12] Speaker 5: custom glasses. We appreciate it. We just didn't want to
[2:27:15] Speaker 5: put a little bit of the freud again there. We'll
[2:27:17] Speaker 5: vote with Bourbon next time.
[2:27:18] Speaker 2: We'll make it right for you, Maria. Yes, yes, I promise.
[2:27:21] Speaker 3: Next guys, next episode is going to be with Delta
[2:27:24] Speaker 3: Force operator retired Delta Force operator Paul Howe, who served
[2:27:29] Speaker 3: in Panamon manga tissue. Pretty famous for the whole Black
[2:27:33] Speaker 3: clock Down incident, but he had a good, long career.
[2:27:35] Speaker 2: Also, we're excited to talk to him next episode.
[2:27:38] Speaker 3: Please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, check
[2:27:41] Speaker 3: out our Instagram account, check us out where else.
[2:27:47] Speaker 2: Patreon.
[2:27:48] Speaker 3: Yeah, we have a link to our Patreon down in
[2:27:50] Speaker 3: the description to get access to the bonus segments.
[2:27:53] Speaker 2: And there's also like t shirts and coffee mugs and
[2:27:55] Speaker 2: stuff like that, and get Marty's vote.
[2:27:57] Speaker 5: I mean you, honestly, if more people know like a
[2:28:03] Speaker 5: name like all of your change, for instance, then then
[2:28:08] Speaker 5: they do your name Marty like that that needs to change.
[2:28:12] Speaker 3: Well, it's emblematic that people hear about the failures more
[2:28:16] Speaker 3: than the successes, right, and please go check out our
[2:28:19] Speaker 3: website It's widowspy dot com, where you can learn more
[2:28:22] Speaker 3: about the book. And you also see a bunch of
[2:28:23] Speaker 3: pictures about what we've been talking about on this episode.
[2:28:26] Speaker 2: It's it's pretty cool, you know.
[2:28:28] Speaker 5: And it's I mean, it's an inspiration for women, it's
[2:28:31] Speaker 5: an inspiration for men. It's it's a sumportant part of history.
[2:28:34] Speaker 5: It's we are so glad that you actually decided to
[2:28:38] Speaker 5: write this book.
[2:28:38] Speaker 2: Yeah, and we really appreciate you coming on the show tonight. Yeah,
[2:28:41] Speaker 2: we were very grateful for that.
[2:28:44] Speaker 3: So if Marty, if you just stick around, if I
[2:28:47] Speaker 3: can keep you for like another ten minutes, I really
[2:28:49] Speaker 3: appreciate it.
[2:28:50] Speaker 2: Okay, thank you so much. Ten it'll be like twenty.
[2:28:52] Speaker 2: We just want to trag a story, all right, guys,
[2:28:56] Speaker 2: we will see, we'll see all

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