[ISN] The CIA Burglar Who Went Rogue

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-CIA-Burglar-Who-Went-Rogue-169800816.html

By David Wise
Smithsonian magazine
October 2012

The six CIA officers were sweating. It was almost noon on a June day in 
the Middle Eastern capital, already in the 90s outside and even hotter 
inside the black sedan where the five men and one woman sat jammed in 
together. Sat and waited.

They had flown in two days earlier for this mission: to break into the 
embassy of a South Asian country, steal that country’s secret codes and 
get out without leaving a trace. During months of planning, they had 
been assured by the local CIA station that the building would be empty 
at this hour except for one person—a member of the embassy’s diplomatic 
staff working secretly for the agency.

But suddenly the driver’s hand-held radio crackled with a 
voice-encrypted warning: “Maintain position. Do not approach target.� It 
was the local CIA station, relaying a warning from the agency’s spy 
inside: a cleaning lady had arrived.

> From the back seat Douglas Groat swore under his breath. A tall,
muscular man of 43, he was the leader of the break-in team, at this 
point—1990—a seven-year veteran of this risky work. “We were white faces 
in a car in daytime,� Groat recalls, too noticeable for comfort. Still 
they waited, for an hour, he says, before the radio crackled again: “OK 
to proceed to target.� The cleaning lady had left.

Groat and the others were out of the car within seconds. The embassy 
staffer let them in the back door. Groat picked the lock on the code 
room—a small, windowless space secured for secret communications, a 
standard feature of most embassies—and the team swept inside. Groat 
opened the safe within 15 minutes, having practiced on a similar model 
back in the States. The woman and two other officers were trained in 
photography and what the CIA calls “flaps and seals�; they carefully 
opened and photographed the code books and one-time pads, or booklets of 
random numbers used to create almost unbreakable codes, and then 
resealed each document and replaced it in the safe exactly as it had 
been before. Two hours after entering the embassy, they were gone.

After dropping the break-in specialists off at their hotel, the driver 
took the photographs to the U.S. Embassy, where they were sent to CIA 
headquarters by diplomatic pouch. The next morning, the team flew out.

[...]


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