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number of years, squad members met with the KGB officer at least once a week.
    The meetings with the KGB officer were alternately held in two safe houses, both apartments in the Washington area. To give the KGB officer an alibi for taking time away from his regular duties, the squad passed him information obtained from a man who was in the defense consulting business. Acting as a double agent, the man pretended to work for the Soviets but really was working for COURTSHIP. Occasionally, the squad members let the KGB officer meet with the man himself. Anything the man told the KGB officer or the Soviets was cleared by the U.S. government first.
    The squad members instructed the KGB officer to engage in elaborate “dry cleaning”—driving into dead ends, speeding up to seventy miles per hour, then slowing to twenty miles per hour—before he met with them. They wanted to make sure he was not being followed. Because it is a precautionthe man should have taken anyway in the normal course of his spy work, the “dry cleaning” would not raise any suspicions if the Soviets noticed it.
    Even before they asked him for any information, the squad members asked the KGB officer what he had been doing for the past several hours. They wanted to make sure he had protected himself. The next order of business was to agree on the location for the next meeting—one of the two safe houses rented just for meeting with the KGB man. Then the squad members debriefed him on the latest developments within the embassy and the KGB’s plans. Without his knowledge, the squad members videotaped the sessions, which lasted an hour to an hour and a half.
    To make sure he was genuine, the squad members asked the KGB officer a series of questions the answers to which they already knew. He passed with flying colors.
    It was the first recruitment of a KGB officer from the Soviet embassy in Washington. In the view of CIA and FBI officials, that one recruitment alone justified the existence of COURTSHIP. *
    The COURTSHIP squad paid the KGB officer $200 for each meeting, plus $1,000 a month placed directly in a special bank account in his name. Because the squad members were worried that the man would call attention to himself, they asked him near the beginning of each meeting what he had done with the money he’d previously received.
    Only a few months after the man had been recruited, an FBI squad succeeded in recruiting a second KGB officer within the embassy. Besides this source, the FBI had previously recruited a KGB officer assigned to the Soviet United Nations delegation in New York. With the help of the CIA, the FBI had also recruited another KGB officer assigned to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. However, the two recruitments in Washington were by far the most important.
    The KGB man recruited by COURTSHIP provided theCIA and FBI with a road map to how the KGB worked in Washington. He gave away identities and duties of KGB and GRU officers, biographical data on Soviet diplomats, and plans for recruiting Americans as spies. The KGB officer knew the locations of listening devices the KGB had planted and the details of how other electronic devices operated. For example, he revealed that the KGB supplies its agents with devices that propel themselves underwater. When they surface, they send coded messages in bursts to satellites for transmission to Moscow. They thus conceal the location of the agent using the transmitter.
    From the KGB officer, the CIA and FBI learned how the KGB protects itself just before its officers pick up classified documents from dead drops in tree stumps in the Washington area. A KGB officer drives around the area with a monitor that picks up FBI radio transmissions. If everything is safe, he switches on a green light visible through his windshield. If FBI transmissions are detected, he switches on a red light and the pickup is called off.
    The KGB officer revealed how the Soviets intercepted microwave calls to and from U.S.