In the popular Soviet TV series "Seventeen Moments of Spring," Stirlitz's courier, Professor Pleischner, delivers the encrypted message of a Soviet intelligence officer in a capsule, which he hides in his mouth. In case of danger, the small capsule should have been swallowed, but the professor did not notice the "flower" signal on the windowsill and he himself transmitted a secret message to the enemy. So the Soviet viewer was clearly shown one of the real caches with a container for the delivery of an important spy message.
In the history of special services, hiding places and containers are rightly assigned one of the places of honor. Young "Stirlitz" in special academies without fail study the basics of the correct choice and practical manufacture of containers, their competent operational use for communication with their future agents. The containers contain hidden cavities, access to which is closed with special locks with special secrets. In the twentieth century, to open containers, as a rule, a sequence of unnatural twists, turns, pressure was used, for example, left-handed thread was especially popular. A hiding place is a pre-agreed place in the city and countryside where a container is hidden for an agent or operational intelligence officer.
AGENTURE "BOLT"
As veterans of the CIA write in their memoirs, in American intelligence, containers were divided into active and passive. The active ones had an explicit working function, such as a lighter, and then a fountain pen with a T-100/50 microcamera for the CIA agent Ogorodnik, which he used to shoot secret documents at the Soviet embassy in Bogotá and later in Moscow, working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
A passive container, such as a figurine, has no function, but contains a cavity for storing important documents. The CIA practiced the delivery of cipher-notepads inside inexpensive souvenirs that did not have any locks, but were simply broken to get an attachment. Such containers were called disposable; they were prepared individually for each operational officer and agent.
In the midst of the Cold War, the CIA station in Moscow, actively using containers and caches, made a fundamental decision to abandon bricks and wooden blocks as "disposable" or, as they were sometimes called, "waste" containers, and replaced them with fake hollow stones. The Americans rightly believed that practical Muscovites, in the conditions of the then shortage of building materials, would certainly pick up a weighty piece of board with intelligence materials inside, which could not be allowed. And therefore Martha Paterson, a young CIA officer, to lay a cache on Krasnokholmsky Bridge, was already carrying "in her bosom" not a piece of wood, but a large plastic container-"stone", which consisted of two halves fastened together with screws and rubber glue.
"STONE" FROM LANGLI
Construction and contents of the "Stone" container. Photo courtesy of the author
Long-term storage containers were made of high-strength alloys with waterproof lids. As a rule, they were used by illegal immigrants and especially valuable agents, when, upon receiving a signal of danger, it was necessary to urgently change documents and quickly stock up on a decent amount for an emergency escape to another country or back to his home. One such cache, full of documents and money, neatly buried in a quiet place, disappeared in the most banal way, because a freeway was soon built over it, completely blocking the path to the cache, for which the intelligence officer who was responsible for its safety and who was unable to get acquainted with it in time road expansion plans.
In Moscow, in the Museum of the Russian Border Guard Service, you can see diplomatic suitcases-containers in which the Japanese tried to transport persons valuable for intelligence, however, not in very comfortable conditions. In 1965, the Egyptian special services wanted to secretly take Israeli agent Mordechai Lauk out of Italy in a special suitcase, pumping him with drugs. The agent could have suffocated during the flight, but his life was saved due to the delay in the flight and the vigilance of the Italian customs officers, who found a groaning man hanging inside a suitcase on special straps. During the Cold War, Western intelligence services prepared special refrigerated boxes and car cavities for the secret transportation of a person weighing up to 110 kg and growing up to 2 m. In such containers, a person could stay up to 8 hours using bags for urination, absorbent sponges, food, water, bags with ice, heating elements and fans. The main limitation was the supply of oxygen for breathing.
Throughout modern history, it has been fashionable to dig tunnels, dig tunnels, hide and work in special shelters and caches. An excellent example of conspiracy, ingenuity and skill is the underground printing house of the Bolsheviks, which was never deciphered by numerous agents and provocateurs of the tsarist police. In 1925, the Georgian communists, using their own money, restored the printing house as a museum, which is now carefully preserved in Moscow, on Lesnaya Street, by the staff of the State Museum of Contemporary History of Russia from the influence of time and from active attempts of neighbors to throw away "this old stuff" and finally open it here. a real and modern urban “masterpiece” - a boutique, sauna or massage parlor.
Bolt container.
For covert photography, there was a large arsenal of a wide variety of containers for installing photographic equipment - from brooches, buckles and buttons of coats to radios, umbrellas, books and even thermoses with coffee.
Stationary photo containers were also practiced, one of which, created by inventive employees of the 7th KGB Directorate in a flower box on the balcony of the upper floor, made it possible to photograph the texts of secret documents, carefully filmed by the spy Penkovsky on the windowsill at home. These photographs of the "seven" became one of the main pieces of evidence in the case of the agent of the two intelligence services.
Secret information was especially carefully hidden when delivery was necessary, for which many various containers with destruction were developed. A very original example was shown by the Czechoslovak intelligence, having made a container in the form of a plastic case for soap. Inside this "soap dish" an undeveloped film with classified information was wound on a flash, which was triggered when the cover was opened without a key-magnet and instantly illuminated the film. Polish intelligence placed thin-walled aluminum microfilm cassettes with information inside a regular cigarette, which could be destroyed by lighting a cigarette.
The legendary illegal scout Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was armed with numerous containers for storing and delivering intelligence information. The most famous were opening coins, as well as cufflinks and special, hollow inside nails and bolts, where he kept microdots - tiny flakes of film measuring 1 by 1 mm, on which images and texts, reduced many times, were photographed from a sheet of A4 format. It is known that in search of microdots and hiding places with information, the FBI officers broke even his favorite guitar to pieces during the arrest of Abel.
"COIN" WITH A CAVITY FOR A MICRO POINT
In 2006, the FSB showed a documentary about the use by British intelligence in Moscow of an "electronic cache" hidden in an artificial stone. The receiver, transmitter, computer and power supply elements were located inside. Passing the "stone", the agent secretly transmitted his report using only the keypad of a standard cell phone or other personal electronic device. In advance, after preparing the message, the device was put into transmission mode. When the agent passed near the "rock", the device continuously sent out a low-power radio signal from the agent's pocket. Then the device automatically received a confirmation signal from the "stone" and transmitted encrypted information to it in a high-speed mode. If the “stone” contained messages for the agent, they were also automatically transmitted to the device in his pocket, if the agent was in the near zone from the “stone”.
With visible convenience in such an electronic cache, it is necessary to periodically charge the batteries or change the batteries, as well as completely replace the "stone" itself for repairs, which forces British diplomats, as can be seen in the FSB film, to wander in the dark at the side of the road, disguising themselves as homeless people collecting branches for a night fire. It can be assumed that Her Majesty's intelligence officers will be able to reduce the electronics of the "stone" to the size of a matchbox and even less, but the power supply unit, if desired, should be energy-intensive and therefore large enough, and besides, the whole structure should be sealed, shockproof and frost-resistant container.
Despite the active advance of digital technologies, it is difficult to imagine another way of transferring documents, special equipment and money to an agent without a classic cache in the secret activities of special services. And therefore, the most exciting literary episodes of the capture of spies describe an ambush by counterintelligence near the place of laying a cache in an effort to determine the identity of the agent who must confiscate this cache.
And this is how an extremely flat container looked like, which had a special cavity inside. Illustrations courtesy of the author
During a training trip with outdoor clothing at the end of the day, the author of the article was shown the foreman, who had been adorned with gray hair beyond his years. It turned out that the brigadier was recently awarded a government award for having decided to cover a strange figure with a piece of cardboard, which a foreigner, who was a "duty" outdoor object that day, was trying to imperceptibly draw on the pavement with his boot. The brigadier, as best he could, persuaded the leadership to organize covert surveillance of this place, and then, when it seemed that all conceivable and inconceivable terms of an ambush had already passed, the box was as if by accident pushed aside by a modestly dressed "rural worker", who later turned out to be an engineer of a defense enterprise located in the province. And the figure drawn by a foreign boot on the asphalt, at first glance, strange at first glance, was a signal mark, which signified the laying of a cache. Further active development of the "worker" by counterintelligence made it possible to neutralize the agent who supplied the foreign intelligence officer with military secrets of the USSR.
In another episode of the Cold War, the ambush at the cache was not so successful. In 1985, an FBI officer picked up an empty Coca-Cola can, which was left on the side of a suburban highway by a former US Navy ransomware, John Walker, who had supplied Soviet intelligence for 17 years with highly classified documents about military encryptors and cryptography systems. Walker left the bank as a signal to lay a cache for a Soviet intelligence agent, whom the FBI planned to take red-handed at the time of the seizure of a package of classified documents prepared by an agent. The young American counterintelligence officer mistakenly mistook the can for Walker's container, took it and, thereby removing the signal about the readiness of the cache, saved a Soviet employee from capture, who did not see the signal bank in its proper place and returned back to the station.
It remains to wish the future employees of Russian intelligence and counterintelligence observation, patience and diligence, resourcefulness and reasonable initiative, and "Lady Luck" will be on your side.
