The Brush Pass Interview: The Russian Spies of San Diego
Zach Dorfman 15 Dec 2022
It’s the early 1990s. The cold war has ended, and U.S. counterintelligence agents, though
savoring their victory against the Soviets, are skeptical that the Russians were going to stop spying on the U.S. The old Eastern Bloc–Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and others–had turned decisively toward the West, but the situation in Russia was a lot hazier.
U.S. intelligence officials believed, correctly, that Moscow’s spy agencies were more likely to hedge their bets: the U.S. had been their “main enemy” for decades, and even the collapse of the Soviet Union wasn’t going to change that.
Around this time, Wayne Barnes, a veteran FBI spyhunter, was stationed in San Diego.
Barnes was puzzling over a mystery. Recently, while driving through Balboa Park–a top tourist attraction in the city, most famous for being home to the San Diego Zoo–he had spotted small pieces of duct tape placed horizontally on the poles of street lights.
At first, Barnes thought the tape was a coincidence. Then he spotted another, and another– in all, upwards of twenty tape marks, all within the park.
Most people wouldn’t give these tiny pieces of tape a second glance. But in the world of espionage, this is a classic communications technique used by intelligence officers and their agents to signal that a package has been dropped, or picked up, somewhere known to the other party; they’re also used to request, or confirm, a clandestine meeting or handoff.
“I was astonished,” said Barnes. “It really sets the bee in the bonnet of U.S. intelligence when you see things like that.”
Was there a spy in San Diego?, Barnes wondered. The region was bursting with military targets, including a key naval base. For whom might he or she be working? The nearest Russian consulate was hundreds of miles north, in San Francisco. And the diplomats based there, who were subject to travel restrictions within the U.S., were surveilled closely by the FBI when they took approved trips down to southern California. China had a diplomatic outpost closer by, in Los Angeles, but at the time, Beijing’s spies weren’t generally known to use these kinds of signaling techniques.
The tape marks were worrying, but they also presented the Bureau with a potential opportunity. If the agents spotted the person leaving the marks, they could follow them and eventually identify them. And from there, they might be able to expose an undercover intelligence officer, their American source–or both.
But it’s very difficult to detect someone who, in the middle of a crowded city park, might drive or walk by a marked pole, glance at it instantaneously, and use that signal to complete some espionage activity elsewhere. Even the person putting the tape up, or taking it down, could complete these actions surreptitiously enough to evade notice. In spying hotspots like Washington, D.C., it happens all the time.
Barnes was frustrated. Someone, probably the Russians, was running a spy in his investigative backyard–a spy he couldn’t identify. You need solid leads for a case like this, and it wasn’t even clear how long ago these marks had been placed there. “Some were old and cruddy,” he recalled.
Barnes shared his findings with FBI colleagues, and kept an eye on the park, but the case went cold–not an unusual occurrence in the world of counterintelligence, where the puzzle pieces can take years, or decades, to assemble–if they come together at all.
Then, a few years later, there was a breakthrough.
In the 1990s, U.S. intelligence officials were overwhelmed by the number of Russian intelligence operatives who tried to defect. Former KGB officers and other Russian officials wanted the opportunities afforded by life in the West, and knew that the information they possessed was their ticket to resettlement.
The CIA and FBI often draw on defectors to help them with current cases they’re working on–they can identify and provide context about their former colleagues, and shed light on the modus operandi of their former services, among other things.
And that’s precisely what happened in this case. Barnes, who specialized in debriefing defectors, mentioned the tape marks to a turncoat former KGB official who, over the course of a long career, had spent some time in the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.
Asked Barnes: Did the Russians have a source in the San Diego area? Did he or she work at the naval base, or in some other defense-related position? For how long had this person been working for the Russians?
The Russian defector’s answer blew Barnes away.
No, he said, to his knowledge, Moscow’s spy services did not have an active agent in San Diego, at the naval base or elsewhere.
But there was, indeed, Russian intelligence activity in Balboa Park.
For years, the defector said, Russian spies had driven northward from Mexico City to California, stopping in San Diego. These weren’t pleasure trips. The Russians knew that it was relatively easy to cross the border legally, and San Diego was close to it.
Once in San Diego, the Russian intelligence operatives would get acculturated to the United States–the people, the traffic, the lived environment, the feel of the place. And they’d practice executing key spy techniques, like setting meet-ups using chalk marks, or losing a tail before a source meeting.
They were using San Diego as a training ground.
From the Russians’ perspective, this was invaluable: their operatives–some of whom might
be stationed one day in the United States, or need to travel there on spy business–were gaining critical, hands-on experience running espionage operations in the territory of their top adversary.
The Russians knew that the FBI didn’t devote a lot of resources to counterintelligence work in San Diego–and it was probably easier, all told, for them to practice their operational techniques in San Diego than even in Mexico City itself, which was crawling with Mexican intelligence personnel. But Mexican intelligence wasn’t going to surveil the Russians all the way to the border.
Counterintelligence officials have long grumbled about how America’s open society gives Russian spies, and intelligence operatives from other U.S. opponents, a leg up while conducting business on U.S. soil. It’s much harder to be an American spy in Moscow than a Russian spy in Washington, D.C. (That’s the price of liberal democracy, though, and it’s one that most Americans–including many former FBI agents I’ve known–would gladly pay.)
However, the fact that Russian intelligence had been training extensively for U.S. operations, unencumbered and undetected, on U.S. soil itself, was obviously suboptimal.
I’m very fond of this story because I think it captures, quite nicely, the inherent vagaries of counterintelligence work. It also underlines something long known to intelligence officials: the importance of Mexico for Russian spy work in the Western Hemisphere.
Barnes strongly suspected–reasonably!–that the Russians were running a spy in San Diego. After butting his head against the wall, trying to identify this person, he turned to a defector for help.
This, too, is pretty standard. As some intelligence officials are fond of repeating: it takes a spy to catch a spy. That is, some spooks believe (and not without reason), that unless you’ve got a penetration of an opposing service, or a knowledgeable defector, it’s damn hard to find out who their agents are in your government.
But, in this instance, the defector defied expectations: he knew something highly pertinent to the case, but the entire conceptual framework the Bureau had applied to it was incorrect. It was a spy case, alright, but without an American agent involved. It was something else entirely.
Get in touch at zach@projectbrazen.com or securely at brushpass1@protonmail.com.
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