Declassification

Inside the CIA’s Secret Cold War Program to Spy on a Soviet Embassy

There are espionage targets and then there are espionage targets. Getting a source inside the Soviet Embassy in a divided Germany in the early years of the Cold War is the latter — the World Cup of spy games.

So the CIA wouldn’t go into that game without a game plan. And thanks to some declassified documents, we know exactly what that was.

Dubbed the CATOPHAT Project, the documents from 1967 describe the CIA’s use of human and technical sources to steal information from Moscow’s people in Bonn, Germany. CATOPHAT was the cryptonym assigned to the embassy there.

There were three main objectives:

“To develop controlled assets and operational situations leading to direct staff officer contact with target Soviet Embassy personnel for assessment, elicitation and possible recruitment or defection.”
“To acquire counter-intelligence information on the Soviet Embassy and its personnel in order to monitor and, wherever possible, to neutralize Soviet clandestine activity in West Germany.”
“To conduct operations against the Soviet presence in West Germany in order to collect political, economic, military, scientific, and technical information on the Soviet Union and particularly regarding its objectives, relations, and activities toward, with, and in West Germany.”