How a CIA Spy Camera From 1973 Is Affecting the Netanyahu Administration Today

by Steven I. Weiss

Of the countless fascinating stories of CIA intrigue, only the most interesting about how technology changed the world of spying made it into Spycraft, which just came out in paperback. And one of the most important technological advances by the CIA is having an impact on Israeli governance that’s still felt today.

Aleksandr Ogorodnik was just another economist in the Soviet hierarchy, working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With his particular expertise in Latin America, he was temporarily sent to Colombia for diplomacy and research. That’s where CIA agents got him to turn, and spy for the United States.

But just a few years earlier, the most important intelligence asset in CIA history, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, had been “rolled up” by the KGB, and publicly tried and executed. The severe incapacity of CIA technology to safely handle intelligence collection and communication was largely responsible for Penkovsky’s being exposed, and if the CIA was to make a serious effort at developing new spies in the Soviet Union, technology would have to be upgraded.

And so a new era of leadership in the CIA’s Technical Services Division began to develop methods and technologies that would put them a few steps ahead of the KGB. And the economist Ogorodnik was their first major test case.

For the first time, a spy like Ogorodnik wouldn’t meet his case officers face-to-face; he’d speak to them through microphones hidden in trees. He’d go to locations to receive packages based on complex and pre-determined coding protocols. And he’d gather and share intelligence using the latest that technology had to offer.

Ogorodnik was considered such an important potential asset, that when it came to training him, one of the major innovators in CIA technology, George Saxe, was brought in to personally train Ogorodnik. They only had one month to train Ogorodnik — code-named TRIGON — in methods that CIA agents spent years learning, and in particular to train with a new miniature spy camera that would tip the balance toward the U.S.

Where earlier spies for the CIA had relied on the best technology produced by consumer-oriented companies like Minox, the cameras they used were far from “spy” cameras. The CIA didn’t need its spies walking around with cameras to take snapshots, they needed specialized gear that could be used with exactly one goal in mind: duplicating Soviet documents.

That’s how they developed the T-100:

Just one-sixth the size of the Minox issued to Penkovsky a decade earlier, its small size and cylindrical shape allowed the T-100 to be integrated into a wide array of personal items, such as pens, watches, cigarette lighters, or key fobs.

A jewel of watchmaking mechanical precision and optical miniaturization, the camera’s 4-millimeter diameter lens was made up of eight elements. Tiny, precisely ground glass elements, some only a bit larger than a pinhead, were exactingly stacked, one on top of another, to achieve clarity in photographing a standard 8 1/2-by-11-inch page.

“The craftsmanship and the technology that went into making the lens assembly was something that may never be repeated,” said George [Saxe], more than three decades after the camera was first introduced.

The T-100’s film, lens, and shutter mechanism were housed in a single aluminum casing that measured one and a half inches long and three-eights of an inch in diameter. As each picture was snapped, the film automatically advanced from one tiny spool inside the cassette to another, making it the world’s smallest “point and shoot” camera. Under optimum conditions, the camera’s 15-inch filmstrip could hold approximately 100 exposures.

Find the film that could fit inside that camera was difficult; nothing off-the-shelf would do. Finally, researchers came upon a solution they already had: the film used in spy satellites, which was already extremely thin, because of the need to reduce weight in sending the packages to space. Ultimately, though, they needed to reduce the amount of film in the camera to make it more manageable, and that’s why the camera TRIGON eventually used was called the T-50 — because it shot 50 exposures in a roll instead of 100.

Saxe trained himself on the camera around CIA headquarters and at his local library, perfecting his ability to immediately hold his hands the required 11 inches from the subject to get a perfect exposure. In public, or with other agents around, he perfected hiding it and appearing to read casually, so that he could both get those perfect exposures and ensure no one was any the wiser that he was covertly copying documents.

That same rigor was then applied to training TRIGON in Colombia. Saxed holed himself up in a hotel room, waiting for TRIGON to knock on his door and say he had 15 minutes where he wouldn’t be noticed missing, in order to continue his training.

Then TRIGON got ambitious: before his training was complete, a top-secret document came to the Colombian embassy, detailing Soviet policy on China. For those who even had the clearance to view the document, gaining access to it involved heading to a special room called the referentura, “signing out the document from a custodian, then reading it while a guard observed the room through a small viewing port.”

Though Saxe didn’t push TRIGON to copy the document, TRIGON unexpectedly came back one day, proclaiming “I think I’ve got it.” The pen-camera was given to an agent in Columbia, who hand-carried it on the next flight to Washington. When it was developed, Saxe received a report stating that 48 out of the 50 frames were legible.

All significant contents of the policy paper had been captured. With more than twenty years in Soviet operations, this was, to his knowledge, the first time that top-secret documents had ever been photographied by a CIA agent inside a Soviet embassy’s referentura. TRIGON had more than proven he could use the T-50 operationally.

The report added that the information had gone to the “seventh floor” at Headquarters from whence the DCI hand-carried it to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was quoted as saying that the copied document was “the most important piece of intelligence that he had read as Secretary of State.”

TRIGON became an invaluable asset for the CIA in the coming years. He’d receive packages with half-a-dozen pre-loaded T-50 cameras, shoot secret documents in Moscow, and secure them in “dead drop” locations for his case officers to obtain.

One thing that made this operation so good was the utilization of Martha Peterson, whom the KGB failed to profile as a potential CIA agent: “A young woman, dressed in the latest fashions and doing a woman’s administrative job was not how the KGB envisioned a CIA officer.”

The KGB couldn’t detect TRIGON’s spying, or Peterson’s supplying. It was the perfect operation, seemingly invulnerable to failure.

Until one day, KGB officers were at a dead drop location first, when Peterson arrived. When they found she was a woman, they were even more shocked.

Peterson was also searched and the KGB found, Velcroed to her bra, and OTS-developed frequency scanner used to intercept surveillance radio transmissions. Peterson’s “necklace” was the scanner’s induction coil antenna. [...] Throughout the ordeal, the small receiver Peterson wore remained undiscovered.

TRIGON, it turned out, had been dead for more than a month, having swallowed a suicide pill during interrogation.

So how did this perfect operation come apart? From the inside.

Karl and Hana Koecher were a married couple and Czech nationals who claimed to have fled their home country when they arrived in the United States. “Karl earned a degree from Columbia University, and then landed a translator job at the CIA.” The whole time, however, they were spies for the Czech intelligence service, which shared information with the KGB. That’s how the KGB came to expose TRIGON.

The husband-and-wife spy team inside the CIA had exposed on of the most important spies the U.S. had in the Soviet Union. In the process, they also exposed one of the most capably-covert case officers in Peterson. And the arrest of TRIGON and Peterson by the KGB, and the discovery of the technology they were using with which to spy on the Soviets, put the KGB on notice that they were dealing with a new era of CIA technology and spycraft.

What happened to that married couple of spies? Well, Karl Koecher was arrested in 1984, charged with conspiracy to commit espionage.

And this brings us to our connection with the Netanyahu administration. Koecher served less than two years in prison, because he was used in a prisoner swap for a Soviet dissident.

That dissident was one Anatoly Borisovich Scharansky, aka Natan Sharansky, just elected head of the Jewish Agency at the urging of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.