The branch research conference scheduled for November of 1986 fit my plans perfectly. I was very grateful to the predecessor of Stroganov for his efforts to organize this conference. A year later I personally felt very sorry for him when I was forced to suggest he leave his job. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing for him to do when we really started working at the PD ITR Department. The qualifications of the retired Colonel Stroganov, a veteran of the front lines who had served at Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site for a long time, were just not right for laboratory work. He even had trouble writing because his hands were always shaking.
The bulky “top secret” general instruction manual, approved by the Military Industrial Commission of the Central Committee of C.P.S.U., stipulated the objectives and tasks of the PD ITR, and the rights and responsibilities of its agencies. One of the most important tasks was the development of methods of permanent control over the activities of defense organizations and enterprises, in order to control the activities of foreign technical intelligence. This gave me the right to study all scientific and technical documents and plans of the scientific departments and laboratories.
All planned technical tasks for implementing scientific, technical, and design work were required to comply with a section of the specifications on PD ITR and had to be signed by the head of the PD ITR Department, among others. So there was a lot of paperwork, but I found a good way out of this. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Svyatoslav Sokolov, a senior scientific assistant, was also working in my department. After graduating from Moscow State University, he worked at the KGB Scientific Research Institute, and he was the head of the Physical Chemistry Laboratory there, so he understood scientific questions quite well. Svyatoslav Sergeevich was intelligent, had gentle manners and, therefore, he was the ideal person for communicating with the heads of research subdivisions at GOSNIIOKhT. Unfortunately, he was past his prime and, despite all his efforts, he couldn’t work at the laboratory of the department that I soon put into order. Work there required both manual labor and the skills of a specialist. Still, for a long time, Sokolov helped me out by attending numerous committee meetings in my place, as the head of the PD ITR Department, and by inspecting the documentation.
On the sixth floor of the GOSNIIOKhT’s modern new administrative building (the picture of this building was published in many articles devoted to my “case”), there was a room near my office that received all the bugged phone calls. All the telephone lines went through there, including the ones for internal use. With the help of the switchboard, it was possible to intercept telephone conversations so that people talking didn’t notice anything, and tape-recorders were installed there, too.
One of our employees sat at the control panel and monitored this dirty work. Before I was appointed head of the department, I heard in passing that there was such a service, but I really didn’t want to believe that it was true.
I decided to get rid of this unpleasant burden at any cost. The briefs I studied didn’t mention the use of such underhanded strategies of the PD ITR. I went to Ministry of Chemical Industry, to Krasheninnikov and Tkachenko, in order to get more precise explanations. They confirmed that tapping telephone conversations was outside our area of responsibility. It was done at the request of local KGB agencies. The head of the PD ITR Department at the Redkino subsidiary of the scientific industrial company (NPO) “Khimavtomatika”, who was present during our conversation, said that he had this service transferred from his department to someone in the First Department.
The responsibilities of PD ITR included the technical protection of the telephones from tapping by foreign intelligence services, but that was a very different matter and we took it very seriously and even helped the Main Department of Ministry of Chemical Industry with that.
We had to develop measures against taping conversations, meetings, and scientific conferences, as well as the meetings of the science councils and their sections. According to the recommendations of the department, the office doors of the heads of departments and laboratories were provided with acoustic protection. Additionally, a large part of our work was devoted to protecting GOSNIIOKhT’s computer center and the computers from electromagnetic radiation, which could be a source of information for foreign intelligence. It was possible to eliminate information leaks through an electric cable by installing a special transformer. However, it was very difficult to provide protection from external radiation. This work required considerable expense. The walls of GOSNIIOKhT’s two-story computer center (with a total area of several hundred square meters) were covered with a fine-steel net. There was another system of steel nets to protect the windows and doors. Together, these nets encased the building.
From time to time, the PD ITR Department checked the efficiency of this protection with special instruments. However, we didn’t have the necessary equipment to gauge the leakage of radiation on certain frequencies, so a special service of the PD ITR Department at “Khimavtomatika” at Redkino did this work. It was the only institution in the system of the Ministry of Chemical Industry that had the right to examine rooms with electronic computers.
Such serious protection was required after we found out that information could be read on foreign computers with the help of the specially implanted “bugs”, which were practically impossible to detect. According to the rumors, some specialists who were repairing a minor breakdown in the 1980s accidentally found a “bug” in a powerful computer that was made in Japan and installed at Gosplan (State Planning agency of the U.S.S.R.) This “bug” had been transferring information to foreign intelligence agencies for a few years, and according to a certain schedule, it “shot” the accumulated information to a spy satellite.
In principal, it was possible to spy without using a “bug”. It was enough just to record the electromagnetic computer radiation from a certain distance with the right equipment. That is why so much attention was paid to protection. Nobody wanted to be counted among the negligent workers.
For protection, we could use “jammers”, noise generators which were supposed to make it impossible to use electromagnetic radiation for obtaining computer information. Our industry manufactured such “jammers”, but the “noise” they created made the operation of foreign computers impossible. Primitive computers like the “Robotron” made in East Germany could tolerate the noise of a “jammer” and you could work on them with secret information in any specially equipped room.
By a twist of fate, after my arrest in 1992, I saw a “Robotron” computer on the desk of Victor Shkarin, a KGB investigator, when I was brought to his office. It had no “jammer” and I noticed that his office had no special protection. Moreover, from time to time, the investigator opened the window to air out the cigarette smoke from his cramped office. I teased him, saying that he was violating the PD ITR instructions for handling top-secret matters, but the captain was very serious. I got the impression he didn’t appreciate my sense of humor.
The question of protecting computers at GOSNIIOKhT was very important, because a number of imported instruments couldn’t go through the entire cycle of processing the information they received by themselves. This was the case, for example, at the Physical Chemistry Department, where they couldn’t use the computers with the NMR and chromatomass-spectrometer, devices for identifying chemical compounds made in the USA. This was beyond all common sense and I immediately settled this problem. There was a good excuse. The instructions stated that no special protection was required if secret information did not exceed 15% of the total volume of the processed information. But who could check the percentage of secret information, which was processed at facilities with, for example, chromatomass-spectrometers?