"Moscow Rules" - The 10 Commandments of Cold War Espionage
Thoughts on Tony Mendez's List of the "Moscow Rules" of Espionage
Earlier today I was reading a Substack article by National Security journalist Sasha Ingber where she linked to the Spy Museum’s list of “Moscow Rules” — a list that is taken from my CIA colleague Tony Mendez’s book “The Moscow Rules.” Tony was the CIA’s legendary “Master of Disguise” and he worked closely with Jonna Mendez, his wife and partner in all things. I had the opportunity to work with him on my Moscow assignment in 1985=86, where disguise played a very large role in what I did. He didn’t create the “Moscow Rules” concept, but his list is a good starting point for exploring what it meant, particularly to those of us who operated on the streets of Moscow at the height of the Cold War.
The Spy Museum page notes that in his book, The Master of Disguise, Tony observed: "Although no one had written them down, they were the precepts we all understood. They were dead simple and full of common sense.”
He’s right that no one ever wrote them down. In fact, the way I and the other Moscow team officers thought about it —it was mostly just a broad concept that referred to operating in a “total surveillance” environment where you had to apply the working assumption that at any given moment the opposition was surveilling you, or at least trying to surveill you, until or unless you did something to change that.
Now — having said that, let’s look at what Tony came up with and talk about them. I’ll say at the outset that all of his rules make sense and my comments aren’t meant to be argumentative — just add some context and clarifiction.
Here are the Moscow Rules according to CIA’s “Master of Disguise” Tony Mendez, along with some commentary by one who lived them:
1. Assume nothing. I think here he means to never assume anything favorable, and I agree with that. Don’t be lazy. Don’t assume it’s safe to do anything. But there was one big assumption we did make: Assume they are surveilling you 24/7 everywhere except inside the secured confines of the CIA enclosure in the Embassy. Assume they are with you, listening in and watching, wherever you are whether it’s in your car, in your apartment, in bed with your wife—KGB is watching and listening so behave accordingly.
2. Never go against your gut: I see where he’s coming from with this one and in most respects and contexts I would agree with it. But when it comes down to the actual moment of truth in an operation — that moment when you’ve spent four hours escaping surveillance and making sure they are still not there, just as you’re about to put down or pick up a drop, or hand off a package, or meet and agent on the street —at that crucial moment, I found that the mantra had to be “trust your training”, not “trust your gut”, because in the hypervigilant, agitated internal state that was inevitable at that moment, your gut lies. Your gut tells you that you missed something; that the lady in a phone booth near the site is KGB; that the two guys walking through the park with sports bags are KGB surveillants; that other unseen eyes are surely watching you. In this moment, trusting your gut leads to a decision to abort the operational act. You had to trust the training, remind yourself that you had done all the things that the training required, and that if the training process, carried out ont he streets of Moscow, produced “I’m clean” then you have to stick to that unless you see something at that last moment that is irrefutable, like a militia truck parked next to the site. But those scary “ghosts” who could be casuals or could be surveillants—don’t trust your gut or you’ll never get the job done.
Another piece of this is that when we would get back to the CIA enclosure and write up the operation—all those “ghosts” that bothered you at the end of the run would be duly noted so that if anything later came up, there was a record of what you saw, what decisions you made, and why.
3. Everyone is potentially under opposition control. Agreed. Absolutely true at least as far as any Soviets were concerned and I think that’s what Tony meant. That much is obvious. What’s less obvious is — should we have had this attitude towards our CIA team members or other official Americans? As of 1985 we didn’t know that Ed Howard, a colleague we all knew who had been slated for a Moscow assignment but fired, had already started cooperating with the KGB and would defect to Russia in months. We also didn’t know tht Aldrich Ames had, as of April 1985, walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and was betraying our operations to the KGB. But as far as “Moscow Rules” went — in those days, it did not include “suspect your colleagues.”
4. Do not look back; you are never completely alone. I interpret this to mean “Don’t do anything provocative to find surveillance — it’s there, you just may not be able to see it.” In any event you didn’t look for surveillance “with your head on a swivel” — the process was much more careful and subtle than that, and involved making multiple sightings of the same car or individual in different locations at different times in a run.
5. Go with the flow, blend in. Agreed. This was particularly true when an officer was on an operational outing, in disguise, trying to blend in with Soviet Citizens. It wasnt’ easy and required a completely local wardrobe down to your shoes, and a certain amount of attitude to capture the vibe of being a local Muscovite. But I’ll also say — possibly the most exhilirating part of the work was to be on an operational outing, kitted out as a Muscovite, riding on trams and buses and subways in the midst of Muscovites without anyone realizing there was an interloper among them. Moscow was such a unique environment, just being a “fly on the wall” of a bus full of Soviet citizens was fascinating.
6. Vary your pattern and stay within your cover. Agreed. These two items are somewhat contradictory but they make sense. Vary your pattern means don’t do the same thing every day all the time, but “stay within your cover” meant dont’ do anything that is wildly out of pattern or inconsistent with your established patterns. For example, if you establish a pattern of going to Russian movies and art exhibits, a sudeen outing to a sporting event might be alerting to surveillance. This is also good advice anywhere, not just Moscow.
7. Lull them into a sense of complacency. Agreed. The key to managing surveillance is to make them relax and don’t alert or alarm them. I came from a film/tv background, and to me it was always like a bit of performance art in which I was trying to tell them a story that would a) bore them a little, and b) make them like me. I wanted to show interest in their culture, respect for my surroundings, and respect for them. I remember, for example, getting lost and going down a deadend street. Realizing someone would follow me and potentially get burned (and annoyed) when I turned around, I pulled over, pulled out a map and held it up in front of my face, reading it intently, while giving them time to get situated. Then slowly, I worked my way out of the cul-de-sac without getting a “cheap look” at any of them. Another way of thinking of this is just professional courtesy. They had a job to do, and so did I. My job was to “make” them by identifying who my surveillants were without being obvious about it, so I could manipulate them if needed, but not “burn” them in a way that would cause them to feel I was cheating at the surveillance game we were both playing.
8. Do not harass the opposition. Agreed. Very much so, in fact. There were plenty of cases of people who had harassed or irritated the opposition, and as retribution, received “bumper-lock” harassing surveillance, slashed tires, things like that. (I should add that during my personal tour of duty this didn’t happen to any of our officers—but historically it had happened.)
9. Pick the time and place for action. Agreed. This is sort of an understatement Each operational act was carefully scheduled and was the product of a great amount of teamwork in the planning, and a very complicated approval structure at the division chief level in CIA Headquarters, and sometimes — for example in the weeks before a Presidential summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev—required “Presidential Approval.” Nothing happened without a great deal of planning and layers of approval. This also points to the fact that while the KGB had a massive personnel advantage — literally thousands of surveillants and counterintelligence personnel against our handful of officers—we had the advantage of choosing the time and place to act. They had to keep us under control 365/24/7 — we only needed to fool them on specific dates, times, and places.
10. Keep your options open. I’m not sure how to interpret this. One way I could see it applying was, for example, that when we put together a “commnications plan” for a Soviet agent, it included primary dates for scheduled operational acts, secondary dates, and various other mechanisms so that if circumstances didn’t permit doing the act on the date planned, there were always other options. But this was more in the planning and case management side of things — not actual streetcraft.
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A final word of thanks to Tony and Jonna Mendez, for all that they contributed to Moscow operations “back in the day.” Tony left us a few years ago but Jonna is here and a friend, and carries on his legacy.