The Rat Who Came In From The Cold… And Went Straight Back Out Again
Mistakes were made, mostly by a CIA case officer who couldn’t tell a KGB colonel from a Chilean torturer.
CIA Station Buenos Aires, log entry, 11 September 1973. A black bag team is tasked with a simple records snatch at the Chilean embassy. The target: files on DINA, Augusto Pinochet’s new secret police, which the Agency has decided it wants copied and returned before the originals are even missed. The job goes sideways. The team, jumpy after Pinochet’s coup against Allende that same day, grabs the wrong file cabinet. A diplomatic car arriving unexpectedly sends them scattering out a window with a haul of documents pertaining not to DINA’s nascent organisation, but to agricultural trade attachés and fertiliser subsidies.
An inventory of the stolen material is taken. It is found to be 98% useless. The haul consists of soil acidity reports from the Atacama, projections for copper futures, and a truly heroic number of receipts for pisco sours. Buried in the mess, however, is one item of interest: a coded signals ledger. Langley, assuming it’s a DINA book, throws their best cryptographers at it. It takes them three weeks to break the encryption, a laborious process involving reams of paper and a truly obscene quantity of coffee, only to discover the one-time pads are not Chilean at all. They are Soviet. Specifically, they belong to the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, the Kremlin guard.
The decrypted traffic reveals something spectacular: a highly-placed KGB mole inside Pinochet’s junta, codenamed ‘ALTIPLANO’. This asset has been feeding Moscow everything from the General’s medical records to the private phone numbers of his ministers. The CIA now has the identity of a prize Soviet source, handed to them by their own incompetence. Standard procedure would be to quietly turn the asset, use him to feed disinformation back to the KGB, and generally make a nuisance of oneself. This is not what happens. The Station Chief, a man whose primary qualification was marrying an ambassador’s daughter, decides to prove his mettle. He orders an immediate, unsanctioned approach.
The man they approach is not, however, Colonel Valery ‘ALTIPLANO’ Grigorovich, the KGB officer serving as a ‘personal security advisor’ to Pinochet. The CIA team, working from a blurry surveillance photo and the mistaken belief they’re looking for a Chilean, instead roll up on… Álvaro Larrondo, DINA’s new head of internal counter-intelligence. A man known inside the service as ‘El Carnicero de Las Condes’ for his imaginative use of car batteries. Larrondo, who is not a Soviet spy but is a paranoid psychopath, correctly assumes this must be a loyalty test from Pinochet. He plays along, accepts the CIA’s offer of asylum, and promptly reports the entire encounter to his boss. Pinochet, furious at the American meddling and now convinced his entire staff is compromised, orders a purge. Colonel Grigorovich, watching the chaos unfold, quietly requests emergency exfiltration. He is back in Moscow by Christmas, leaving the CIA with nothing but a bill for 2,000,000 Argentine pesos in relocation costs for a torturer they didn’t want and a diplomatic crisis they absolutely did not need.
