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Through the Looking Glass | 263 Pelton debriefings. The debriefing sessions, which went on for fifteen days, were from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. In them, Pelton managed to recall Project A, a joint NSA-CIA-navy operation in which subma- rines surreptitiously tapped into Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected to the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s mainland headquarters at Vladivostok. Pelton received another $30,000 from the KGB. “Did the information in his head prove valuable?” I asked. “As long as the NSA didn’t know the tap was compromised by Pelton, we could use the cable to send the NSA the information we wanted it to intercept.” He said that while actual NSA documents would have proved more useful than someone’s memories, “Our job is to take advantage of whatever we can get.” Two years later, Pelton was again flown to Vienna for another debriefing to see if he could recall any further details. According to Cherkashin, the KGB’s job was to leave no stone unturned when it came to the NSA’s sources. In 1985, the KGB’s task ended when Pelton was arrested by the FBI. Like Ames and Hanssen, Pelton was ) sentenced to life imprisonment. © Looking at his watch, Cherkashin politely excused himself. I subsequently spoke to Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who had been a foreign intelligence officer in the KGB between 1958 and 1985 and continued his intelligence work until recently as chief counterterrorism expert of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. Over a leisurely coffee in the bar of the Hotel National, he told me that many “walk-ins” who contacted Soviet officials in his time were emotionally disturbed, but all of them had to be assessed for possible intelligence value. “Our job was to find espionage sources,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “The Internet has changed the espionage business since secret documents can be massively downloaded by an unhappy employee,” he said, “but they still need to be assessed by a professional.” Through the eyes of the KGB, a penetration of American intel- ligence was clearly opportunistic. If these practices continued, they put Snowden’s situation in a new light for me. If Russian intelli- gence considered it worthwhile to send a former civilian worker at the NSA, such as Ronald Pelton, two thousand miles from Washing- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 263 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019751