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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