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Comment by stordoff | Hacker News Reader

This setup reminds me of operation PIMLICO:

> Every Tuesday, shortly after 7:00, a British MI6 officer would take a morning stroll at the Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow. He would pass outside a designated bakery at exactly 7:24 a.m. local time. If he saw Gordievsky standing outside the bakery holding a grocery bag, it meant that the double agent was requesting to be exfiltrated as a matter of urgency. Gordievsky would then have to wait outside the bakery until a second MI6 officer appeared, carrying a bag from the Harrods luxury department store in London. The man would also be carrying a Mars bar (a popular British candy bar) and would bite into it while passing right in front of Gordievsky. That would be a message to him that his request to be exfiltrated had been received.

https://intelnews.org/tag/operation-pimlico/

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Just read the same in Wikipedia. This is extremely strange. Harrods bag and Mars candy in 1985 Moscow would be a telltale the size of Kremlin tower. Kutuzovsky avenue was a KGB owned turf, lots of Communist apparatchik lived there, including late Secretary General Brezhnev.

It reminds me a joke about Soviet spy arriving in Berlin and caughting stares from everyone around. What's wrong with my cover? Is something gives me out? Maybe it is a parachute? Or AK-47? Ah, it should be blue Slavic eyes! And he wears a sunglasses just in case.

> Harrods bag and Mars candy in 1985 Moscow would be a telltale the size of Kremlin tower. Kutuzovsky avenue was a KGB owned turf, lots of Communist apparatchik lived there, including late Secretary General Brezhnev.

I took it to mean that the MI6 agents were under diplomatic cover. It would not be strange for British diplomats to carry or eat British things, right? And it's also a decent defense against an accidental signal, since non-agents would naturally not have Mars bars nor bags from Harrods.

This is correct. The KGB had several known agents working out of their embassy during the Cold War. Diplomatic cover gave them protection for their activities.

Like I said, Kutuzovsky avenu was (and probably still is) under massive state surveillance. English MI6 agent with diplomatic (under)cover will be spotted in minutes and their engagement and eye contact with highly ranked GRU officer will not pass below radar.

I think choosing a street chock-full of high level Soviet functionaries might have been genius. How many of them would the MI6 agent "interact" with during a walk down the street? Would opening the Mars bar wrapper as he passes some general be the signal? Or the bite in front of the bakery? Or disposing the wrapper? Or the cough as the agent crosses paths with a Soviet diplomat? That's a very high noise floor. I suspect counter-intelligence would never figure it out until long after exfiltration was completed, unless they knew exactly what the signal was.

Now, that makes sense. I didn't think of it.

The whole point of this signalling scheme is to prevent eye contact, or any engagement. To an observer who's unaware of the system, it just looks like a local embassy official out for a stroll. Or doing some other routine thing that a lot of other diplomats also do. Meanwhile, Gordievsky is probably never even at that bakery. Or he is, but at random times that rarely overlap with British diplomats in the area. The only reason he would visit it at 7:24am on a Tuesday would be to signal for exfiltration. If and he's doing that, then the risk is worth it.

It's also only once a week that the timing is enforced, so they can vary things up throughout the week to hide that pattern in noise.

And the candy bar/Harrod's bag doesn't come into play unless Gordievsky needs an exfiltration. So it's not like they're noticing this weird thing where British diplomats always eat Mars bars every Tuesday. It would only happen once at most.

They know they're being surveilled. They can't change that. So they make their signal as mundane as possible.

Not every agent has to conceal their national identity, the UK had an embassy in the USSR so there were plenty of known Brits wandering around for one to randomly walk through the area. Embassies are classic points to run out of because there's an official reason for being in the country and some protection against retribution.

This seems either unlikely or questionably competent. Gordievsky was well known to the KGB and loitering pointlessly outside a bakery would only have aroused suspicions - which would have been confirmed by the second agent, because anyone carrying a Harrods bag in Soviet Moscow would have stood out like a very obvious person of interest.

It could be a matter of routine: Leave your house at 7:00AM every morning. Walk 15 minutes to the bakery. Order and be out the bakery door by 7:20AM. In normal circumstances, you just leave and go about your day. Only once would you stand around for an extra 4 minutes - say reading a paper, or eating what you just bought. Otherwise it looks like a normal routine.

That was poorly conceived. They'd have to keep those things stored somewhere for as long as the spy was active. What if a rat ate the last Mars bar at 6:00am?

Tell the rats that the Mars bars are off limits and they can stick to the Cadbury chocolates.

Obviously HN always knows better, this reminds me of the Dropbox post.

There's a great book that covers every single aspect of this escape, "The Spy and the Traitor" by Ben Macintyre. Rest assured that the British embassy had plenty of Mars bars and Harrods bags for this signal!

I've read that the embassy folk have nothing to do most of the time so they spend months planning and preparing for this type of thing

I'm sure international spies are competent enough to keep the rats out of their tactical mars bars.

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