[104-10210-10068.pdf — page 139]
227. ### ABIDIAN'S Letter MailingsDuring the 1962 meetings in Geneva, NOSEIKO reported KGB knowledge of one type of operational task performed by ABIDIAN in Moscow in addition to his recruitment of (see above). This task, NOSEIKO said, involved mailing at least three clandestine letters, in each case to KGB double agents.According to NOSENKO on 11 June 1962, the KGB detected all the letters mailed by ABIDIAN: he said that this was achieved through the use of retka: "Stop mailing letters from the Embassy, by Embassy employees. After LANGELLE you didn't mail letters for a year and a half, and then you begin again. ABIDIAN mailed several." ABIDIAN, John ABIDIAN the Embassy Security Officer. Listen, we have this cold /i.e. complete coverage of clandestine mailings/. We have a machine, and the machine finds the letters which are mailed. Without surveillance. The machine itself. This is a big, big secret. Here's how it works. They enter your room - you live in Moscow, work and even live in the Embassy. They /Soviet maids/ clean us the room and simply pour a powder or apply it with a reg /to your clothes/. A rag, even like a handkerchief. There is no smell. They put it in the pockets where you might put a letter. And there is a special little machine at a station in Moscow... All letters which are mailed in Moscow pass through this machine, under a fotoapparat /literally a camera; NOSENKO probably means some sort of light-sensitive device/. We now have 12 /machines/ and hope to have 100 in Moscow. And all the letters pass through the apparatus and the machine itself selects the letter which was mailed by you or him. Do you understand? The machine itself finds it... This is how it was with the letters that ABIDIAN mailed. We had them all because this machine gave them /to us/. I even would phone surveillance and say: 'He's out walking around. ABIDIAN is out walking around, checking, checking.' I would say: 'Drop him. But give me all the letters today.' The machine determines whether there is a special letter there."Three days later, at NOSENKO's fifth and final meeting with CIA in 1962, he was asked whether he knew to whom these letters were addressed. NOSENKO replied: "To whom did ABIDIAN mail letters? First he mailed a letter to a guy in Odessa. Then ABIDIAN mailed one to still someone else. He mailed two or three letters. One letter was to the Baltic area. The same kind, that is we had planted this man on you. I think it was to Riga, to our double agent. And still, I think, two or three other letters, also to double agents.** But we[^1] NOSEIKO's information is substantially correct. LANGELLE was declared persona non grata in connection with the arrest of CIA agent POPOV in October 1959. Two letters were mailed, one on 9 December 1959 and the other on 22 February 1960 (one of which was to an agent now known to have been under KGB control at the time); no more letters were mailed until 1 April 1961, when John ABIDIAN mailed one, again to a KGB-controlled agent. LANGELLE's arrest, however, was not the cause of this break in letter-mailings; the suspension resulted from other considerations.[^2] In 1961 ABIDIAN mailed three operational letters for CIA, one to an agent in on 1 April, the second to an agent in on 2 July, and the third to a agent on 1 September.TOP SECRET