Cold War Non-Fiction Book Review: Special Tasks – The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster

Published in 1994 by Little Brown and Co.; 509 pp

My Administration for Special Tasks,” Sudoplatov begins, “was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping and assassination of our enemies beyond the country’s borders.” The administration to which he refers was one of the key divisions in Stalin’s security police, an agency he headed from the summer of 1941 until he took over the Fourth Directorate, which was responsible for guerrilla warfare behind German lines. The assassinations included Trotsky’s, a project Sudoplatov directed and here describes in detail. Stalin met with him twice during the plot, and Sudoplatov gives a revealing account of the dictator’s mood and motives in commanding the murder.

Earlier he had personally killed Yevhen Konovalets, the leader of an migr Ukrainian nationalist organization, in Rotterdam with a bomb rigged in a box of chocolates. His long career began as a 14-year old in a special intelligence unit in the Ukraine (fighting the army of the same Konovalets whose inner circle he would penetrate 15 years later) and eventually gave him control over Department S, the organization responsible for gathering intelligence on atomic bomb research in the West and funneling it to Soviet scientists. Sudoplatov devoted himself to the business of grooming and deploying agents, counteragents and masters of deception and disinformation.

Given the intensely sensitive positions that he occupied for the period of high Stalinism, he is able to provide not only missing information on an astonishing range of questions, from the fate of Raoul Wallenberg to the impulses behind the anti-Jewish “Doctors’ Plot”, but also a clear picture of his grim organization’s inner workings. Yet, reader beware: at points Sudoplatov recounts things he could not have known (such as a given leader’s private motives) as though he did, and, in the book’s most discrediting section, he tars the famous principals in the Manhattan Project with the unsubstantiated charge of knowingly abetting Soviet agents in gathering the information Moscow so eagerly sought.

Read the Original Review at Foreign Affairs 

Cold War Espionage: How Soviets used IBM Selectric keyloggers to spy on US diplomats

How Highly sophisticated bugs went undetected for 8 years during the Cold War.

By Dan Goodin

A National Security Agency memo that recently resurfaced a few years after it was first published contains a detailed analysis of what very possibly was the world’s first keylogger—a 1970s bug that Soviet spies implanted in US diplomats’ IBM Selectric typewriters to monitor classified letters and memos.

The electromechanical implants were nothing short of an engineering marvel. The highly miniaturized series of circuits were stuffed into a metal bar that ran the length of the typewriter, making them invisible to the naked eye. The implant, which could only be seen using X-ray equipment, recorded the precise location of the little ball Selectric typewriters used to imprint a character on paper. With the exception of spaces, tabs, hyphens, and backspaces, the tiny devices had the ability to record every key press and transmit it back to Soviet spies in real time.

A “lucrative source of information”

The Soviet implants were discovered through the painstaking analysis of more than 10 tons’ worth of equipment seized from US embassies and consulates and shipped back to the US. The implants were ultimately found inside 16 typewriters used from 1976 to 1984 at the US embassy in Moscow and the US consulate in Leningrad. The bugs went undetected for the entire eight-year span and only came to light following a tip from a US ally whose own embassy was the target of a similar eavesdropping operation.

Read the Remainder at Arstechnica