At 5:04 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 1989, San Francisco began to shake. The Loma Prieta earthquake caused widespread destruction. Across the region, freeways and buildings collapsed. When the dust settled, 63 people were killed and over 3,700 injured.
A local FBI counterintelligence agent had left work early and was with his kids at a city park when the quake struck. Unnerved but unharmed, the FBI agent quickly dropped off his kids at home, then jumped into his bureau car and sped downtown. Apocalyptic reports wafted over the car radio: Part of the Bay Bridge had collapsed. Buildings were ablaze. It was chaos.
When he got to FBI headquarters, he was told to check on a small, nondescript, two-unit home in San Francisco’s foggy Outer Sunset District, close to the chilly Pacific. The agent drove all the way across town to a quiet block in one of the quietest corners of the city.
The house was still standing. There was no damage. And because there was no damage, the tenant of the in-law unit — an ultra-deep-cover, Soviet bloc spy — would remain oblivious to all the secret FBI surveillance concealed inside his apartment: the bugs recording his every utterance, the video cameras covertly tracking his every move. The FBI’s operation against this deep-cover spy remained hidden, at least for now.
But not for long.
Revealed here for the first time, this tale of a Czech spy — based on conversations with nine former FBI and CIA officials, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about sensitive counterespionage operations — would help spark a burst of intense intelligence diplomacy at a moment when the United States and Europe, particularly the lands under Soviet imperium, were fundamentally reevaluating their relationships and coming together as never before. (Former FBI officials who spoke to POLITICO Magazine, some of whom recounted detailed interactions and conversations between bureau agents and the deep-cover spy, declined to provide the name of the Czech operative.)
Today, the U.S.’s closest allies speak of an irrevocable rupture with Washington. This is a story about another, older America — a superpower capable of restraint in victory. Even, one might say, grace for its ostensible enemies: former Soviet-bloc spies embedded across the country, some of whom blended in so well they became the Americans they sought to imitate.