I was met at the airport by Terry Guernsey, the head of the RCMP's Counterespionage Department, B Branch. With him was his assistant, a Welshman named James Bennett. Guernsey was a lanky Canadian whose outwardly unflappable manner was constantly betrayed by the nervous, explosive energy underneath. Guernsey was trained in Britain by both MI5 and MI6 and returned to Canada in the early 1950s convinced that the RCMP was unsuited, as a uniformed police force, to the delicate work of counterespionage. Guernsey began to recruit civilian intelligence officers and single-handedly built up B Branch into one of the most modern and aggressive counterespionage units in the West. Many of the ideas which later played a major role in British and American thinking, such as computerized logging of the movements of Russian diplomats in the West, began as Guernsey initiatives. But he constantly ran up against the oppressive restrictions of the Mountie tradition, which believed that the uniformed RCMP officer was inherently superior to his civilian counterpart. This was a struggle which ran deeply, not just through Canadian Intelligence, but also in the FBI. Guernsey believed that the British were correct in drawing a distinction between criminal detective work and the entirely different skills of intelligence-gathering, and he fought many battles to ensure that B Branch remained independent of the mainstream of the RCMP. But the effort virtually cost him his career. The Mountie senior officers never forgave him, and he was eventually banished to the UK, where he acted as RCMP liaison with MI5 and MI6, before ill-health finally drove him into retirement.
But in 1956, when I made my first trip to Canada to help plan Operation DEW WORM, Guernsey was still very much in charge. Over dinner that first night he described where the operation stood. The RCMP had successfully recruited the contractor who was rebuilding the Russian Embassy, and had installed RCMP officers under cover as workmen on the site. With the help of Igor Gouzenko, a Russian who had worked inside the old Embassy as a cipher clerk until he defected to the Canadians in 1945, Guernsey had been able to pinpoint the area in the northeast corner of the building where the KGB and GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) secret sections, and the cipher rooms, were located.
After studying the plans I decided that a SATYR operation, using a cavity microphone activated from outside by microwaves, was not technically feasible. The distance from the device to safe ground was too great to be assured of success. It had to be a wired operation. Wired operations have one major advantage. If they are skillfully installed, they are almost impossible to detect. The best plan of attack was to conceal the microphones inside the aluminum sash windows on the target side of the building. Guernsey obtained a sample frame from the contractor. They were friction windows with no sash weight, perfect for concealing a device. There was an air path into the sash where the two pieces locked together, ensuring a good sound quality. The metal window frames would effectively dampen the electromagnetic field emitted by the microphones, making them impervious to sweeper detection.
But the main problem was how to conceal the cables leading to the microphones. The walls of the new Embassy building were planned to be nearly two feet thick, with a fourteen-inch concrete block inner leaf, a two-inch air gap in the middle, and then four-inch-thick stone facing on the outside of the wall. I checked with MI6 for details of Russian electronic sweeper operations. They told me that the Russians never swept the outsides of their buildings, only the insides. The Russians apparently considered it demeaning to be seen to be sweeping their premises. I told Guernsey that the best plan was to lead the cables up through the air gaps, where they would be virtually assured of nondetection through fourteen inches of concrete, especially as MI5 had developed a new thin cable which gave off far less electromagnetic emission.
Once the building work got under way we had to find a way of concealing the cables from the Russian security teams who regularly visited the site to check on the Canadian contractors. We buried large coils beneath each of the eight-foot concrete footings, and cut them into the bitumen coverings. Every night, as each course of masonry was installed, RCMP workmen went onto the site and lifted a length of cable from the coil into the air gap. There were eight cables. Each was labeled at random from one to twenty to mislead the Russians in the event they were ever discovered. It was a nice touch; the sort of joke the Russians would appreciate after they had finished tearing down the Embassy searching for the phantom cables.
The most difficult part of the whole operation was connecting the wires to the microphones. The windows in the northeast section of the building had been successfully fitted, supervised by an RCMP officer to ensure the frames went into the right places. The cables had been painstakingly raised inside the air gaps over months of construction work. But connecting the two together was impossible to conceal. It could be done only by an engineer working outside, four floors up on the scaffolding. The job was given to one of Guernsey's technical men, a young engineer who handled the operation brilliantly. He was a big man, but he scaled the building in pitch dark in a temperature approaching minus forty degrees centigrade, carrying his soldering tools in a shoulder bag. Taking each of the eight microphones in turn, he carefully joined the cables and ensured the connections were solid.
As soon as the connections were made, RCMP technicians began to dig a twenty-yard tunnel from an RCMP safe house next door to the Embassy, through to the coils buried under the footings. The coils were led back ten feet underground to the safe house and the tunnel backfilled with three feet of concrete. The eight cables connected to head amplifiers concealed in the garage of the safe house, with power fed to them over output leads from RCMP headquarters. When the microphones were tested, each one worked perfectly.
But then, just as this almost flawless operation was nearing completion, disaster struck. A workman was installing a fuel tank on the outside wall near the northeast corner of the new Embassy, unaware that just at that point all the cables from the windows above came together to go underground to our safe house. As he drove in metal hasps to support the ventilation pipe, he pushed one straight through the bundle of cables buried inside, completely destroying the connections to all the microphones.
There was no choice but to re-enter the building. But this time the operation was even more risky. The building was more or less complete, and the Russians on the verge of occupation. There was little chance of the Russians believing the undercover RCMP team were just innocent workmen if they were discovered. It was another bitterly cold night when they went back in. They managed to extract six of the eight cables from behind the hasp, rejointed them, abandoning the other two, and built them back into the wall with the hasp. Although two microphones were lost, at least one remained operational in each of the target rooms, so the major disaster was averted.
As soon as the Russians reoccupied their Embassy, we heard sounds from some of our microphones. GRU officers discussed earnestly where they should put their furniture. Then, forty-eight hours later, they suddenly vacated their offices, the Ambassador left for Moscow, and a team of Russian workmen moved in. It was soon clear from the materials the Russians were taking into the Embassy that they were constructing a new KGB and GRU sanctum elsewhere in the building, probably supplied by an independent power generator.