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dinner on their office phones and in their apartments.
When one of the dinner group, Len, drove his car into the
courtyard on the night of the operation, the snoops lingering
nearby paid scant attention. As the passengers left the apart-
ment complex to enter the car, another of them, Niles, patted
his suit jacket, mumbled that he d forgotten his damn glasses
and disappeared into the apartment doorway, creating a brief
diversion, during which Jacques, ostensibly an unexpected
fifth member of the group, and wearing a disguise, slipped
into the backseat of the big Olds sedan. Moments later, Niles
returned sheepishly, brandishing his eyeglass case. The surveil-
lance team in the outer courtyard and the street did not notice
that there were now five low-ranking Americans in the car,
not just four.
Len drove a fairly provocative SDR (surveillance detection
route), turning sharply off Smolensky Bul var onto Shchukina,
then getting lost in a side street near the Mexican embassy.
Confident that no one was following, Jacques removed the
disguise, and when Len stopped near a Metro station, he left
the car dressed as a Russian worker in a cloth cap and rust-
stained overalls.
While the others headed to their dinner, Jacques kept his
personal meeting with the volunteer. Once again, he had been
virtually invisible to the Committee for State Security. Resum-
ing his previous identity as
232 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
one of the members of the dinner party, Jacques rejoined the
other four at a pickup spot. He returned as he had left, undetec-
ted by his surveillance team, who assumed he was simply
working late at the embassy.
In his postaction report cable, Jacques requested that I return
to Moscow to help refine disguise methods. When I arrived
that summer, he exclaimed with characteristic enthusiasm,
We ve almost got our hands on the Silver Bullet, Tony.
As he described it, CLOAK closely paralleled a tactic I had
been developing for an Agency office in Eastern Europe, so I
was aware of the potential in this type of deception operation.
But I cautioned Jacques and the other officers not to expect too
much from techniques that simply altered physical appearance.
It s not the quality of the disguise that matters, but the quality
of the operation, I said.
They were grateful for any help I could provide. Their op-
timism happened to coincide with the sudden reappearance
of a potentially valuable agent, TRINITY.
This Russian official had been recruited while serving at a
large Soviet embassy in the West. Like the famous Colonel
Oleg Penkovsky, TRINITY had acted from mixed motives:
fervent anti-Communism, personal grievances against his
corrupt superiors, and more practical considerations. He knew
that if he delivered valuable intelligence to the CIA, he d be
paid well and eventually exfiltrated to live in secure and
comfortable retirement in America. Therefore, he worked hard
in his intense training to master the demanding subtleties of
tradecraft before he was reassigned to an important ministry
job in Moscow. He understood the relentless scrutiny he would
be under while trying to conduct clandestine espionage close
to the Kremlin walls. Once he went operational in Moscow,
his survival would depend on how well he had grasped the
essentials of the training.
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 233
With TRINITY s overseas tour coming to an end, his CIA
handlers suggested an introduction to an American friend
soon to be stationed in Moscow. Jacques was dispatched from
Washington to meet the Russian agent and was presented as
his new case officer in effect, a living, breathing recognition
signal that the KGB could never replicate to entrap TRINITY.
Both men could then travel to the Soviet Union, expecting to
reestablish contact safely and easily.
Jacques had been gratified when the agent had followed in-
structions, laying down several clandestine signals indicating
that he had in fact returned to Moscow. Then, nothing
happened. Six months passed with no more signals from
TRINITY. He did not respond to one-way radio instructions.
A full year went by.
We were convinced we d lost him, Jacques later told me.
By the summer of 1976, he feared that this seemingly well-
motivated and potentially important agent had either been
compromised by KGB counterintelligence or had become too
frightened to resume communication with the Americans. For
security reasons, it was too late to respond to any signals that
might now be sent; they had expired, and would have to be
considered KGB entrapment if they suddenly appeared. The
Moscow office wrote TRINITY off as just another source who
had found the environment back home too hostile for comfort
or had been rolled up.
One warm June afternoon in Krymskaya Square, Jacques
spotted a man bearing an unusually strong resemblance to
TRINITY among the throng of office workers trudging toward
the Metro escalators. In spite of the presence of discreet foot
surveillance around him, Jacques moved closer to the other
man. It was TRINITY, he thought with a start, certain that the
other man had also recognized him.
With Headquarters permission, the Moscow office reactiv-
ated
234 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
TRINITY s original signals. Two days later, confirmation sig-
nals appeared at the prearranged sites. Tenuous two-way
communications were reestablished, leading to the construction
of a risky plan for picking up a drop from TRINITY. Everyone
in the Moscow CIA office was involved in one way or another
in the complex operation to service this drop. Again, Jacques,
within weeks of his scheduled departure date, was sent to pick
it up. The package the crust of a sandwich wrapped in
newspaper turned out to harbor a roll of Russian 35mm film.
The Moscow office did not want to risk the possibility that
the film might require special processing, so one of our officers,
Nikolai, was told to hand carry it to Washington to be de-
veloped by OTS experts. Although he was not privy to the final
results, he did see the first photo prints floating in the washing
tray of a secure Technical Services darkroom. They were, ap-
parently, official Soviet documents.
Washington kept silent on the value of TRINITY s initial
product, but there was now a decided urgency in the tone of
communications from Langley, which Bill and Jacques had
never witnessed before.
We knew something very big was happening, Jacques re-
called.
On the day Jacob and I returned to Moscow, still under our
former cover, Jacques gave us a draft cable that he d prepared
for IMMEDIATE transmission to Headquarters. He was due
to leave on his reassignment to Washington within weeks, but
he had one essential piece of business to tend to: He proposed
to use the CLOAK technique, with the help of Jacob and myself,
to break free of KGB surveillance for an extended personal
meeting with TRINITY. CIA Moscow had never attempted
such a meeting with a key asset. Jacques was suggesting that
he slip through the surveillance net, meet with TRINITY for
several hours, then return without leaving any trace of having
been gone from the compound.
Jacob and I faced a vexing problem. Since February, my
Technical
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 235
Services disguise team, supported by Jerome Calloway and
other contractors, had been slaving away to prepare materials
that would alter the appearances of the Moscow contingent,
should the CLOAK technique become a viable tradecraft op-
tion. However, we had nothing ready for Jacques himself be-
cause of his imminent departure date. I promptly wrote my
own IMMEDIATE cable to follow Jacques s message, request-
ing the OTS disguise team to get to work right away on dis-
guise materials that would allow Jacques to negotiate the streets
of Moscow unrecognized. Time was limited, and there was
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