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government offices from a secret listening post at Mount Alto, their new compound in Washington. Thanks to gross bureaucratic ineptitude, the State Department had allowed the Soviets to build the compound on the second-highest elevation in Washington.
    “They were trying to isolate CIA recruiting offices,” an American intelligence officer said. “They intercepted a call from someone in North Carolina who was calling a recruiting office. If the Soviets got their names and they showed up somewhere, they would conclude they are CIA. . . . The KGB officer said the Soviets targeted Langley, the White House, and State, but he never knew of anything good that came out.”
    According to the KGB officer, the KGB supplies its officers with a wish list of technology or other information it would like to obtain. The list ranges from plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars, to inside information on who would most likely win the next presidential election. The KGB officer relayed these lists to the COURTSHIP squadmembers. In addition, when he returned to Moscow periodically, the officer reported back on the latest changes in the leadership of the Soviet intelligence organization and the KGB’s plans worldwide.
    At one point, the KGB man handed over copies of the formal plans of the KGB in Washington for the next year, including specific plans to sow disinformation by distributing fraudulent documents.
    As an example of how the KGB worked, the officer related that KGB headquarters—known as the center—periodically sent a tasking document that instructed each officer to mention the same piece of information to every American with whom they met. The information might relate to Soviet plans for arms reduction talks, for example, or how many missiles the Soviets had.
    “So you had a hundred guys saying the same sentence. Everyone agrees it must be true. In fact, it’s a lie,” the KGB officer involved in the operation said.
    From the officer’s account, the squad gathered that the KGB was not having quite as much success as the FBI and CIA had thought. Often, KGB officers sent reports to Moscow claiming to have obtained secret information that they actually got from the newspapers.
    “One guy wrote a ten-page report on a conversation he allegedly had with Caspar Weinberger [when he was secretary of defense],” a former officer involved in the operation said. “Actually, all he did was shake his hand in a receiving line.”
    Understandably, there was much that the KGB man did not have access to. For example, he did not know of any recruitments of Americans in Washington, even though former Navy warrant officer John A. Walker, Jr., was then working for the Soviets there. But the information he did provide enabled the CIA and FBI to anticipate KGB moves and, where possible, counteract the KGB’s schemes. He also identified Americans who were working for the Soviets but not necessarily providing them with classified information that would result in prosecution for espionage.
    It was a counterintelligence officer’s dream—to be able tofind out from the inside what the opposition was planning to do before it did it.
    “We knew everything,” said an individual who read the material from the debriefings. “Stuff wouldn’t happen unless we knew about it.”
    The fact that the recruitment occurred in Washington, where numerous sensitive agencies are prime KGB targets, made it even more important. The recruitment is but one of hundreds of similar CIA successes, most of them still secret. In some cases, KGB officers recruited by the CIA have retired in place without their country’s ever knowing that for most of their careers, they were traitors. Nearly all of them were recruited not in Washington but in the CIA’s stations overseas.

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Falling in Love
    T HE CIA HAS STATIONS IN 130 COUNTRIES . T HEY RANGE IN size from one-person stations in some African countries to sixty-person posts—including support