Gleb Bokiy. Bokiy’s success largely stemmed from the recruitment
of foreign code clerks, who betrayed their countries and provided
code books to Moscow. In the 1930s the NKVD was receiving code
material from two British code clerks and had access to the British
ambassador’s diplomatic codes in Rome. And there was an agent in-
side the British embassy in Paris. This combination of human and
signals intelligence that began in the 1930s lasted through the history
of Soviet sigint.
Soviet code-making and code-breaking developed rapidly during
the 1930s and 1940s. While the Soviet Union apparently did not break
the codes of the German Enigma machines, they did make codes that
were unusually secure. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet security
services developed a “one-time pad” as a means of encrypting mes-
sages. The pad consisted of a list of random five-digit number groups
which when added to already enciphered figures made a totally secure
code. For example, if 12345 in the code book meant Moscow, and the
five-digit group was 11111, Moscow would be enciphered as 23456.
The system was secure as long as Soviet clerks did not use the one-
time pads more than once. When code clerks repeatedly used the
same one-time pads during World War II, their mistake allowed
American and British code breakers to decode messages.
During the Cold War, responsibility for Soviet sigint was divided
between the Eighth and 16th Chief Directorates of theKGBand the
GRU’s Space Intelligence Directorate. Major Soviet successes had to
do with recruitment of signals intelligence officers and code clerks of
Western powers, such as Bernon Mitchell and William Martin in the
1960s, and Ronald Peltonand John Walkerin the 1970s and 1980s.
In the late 1960s the KGB scored another major coup against its
Western opponents with the recruitment of Geoffrey Prime, who
worked for a Royal Air Force sigint station in Berlin. The KGB re-
portedly was also successful in recruiting code clerks from France
and Italy.
Both the KGB and the GRU collected signals intelligence from in-
stallations inside the Soviet Union and abroad as well as from Soviet
diplomatic and trade facilities. According to the memoirs of a former
KGB archivist, by the early 1980s all KGB rezidenturaspossessed
an intercept post. The largest foreign installation was located at Lour-
des in Cuba, where both of the Soviet services intercepted messages240 •SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE (SIGINT)06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 240