WASHINGTON — Seven blocks on R Street in Georgetown are all that separate the rise and the fall of American intelligence, from the mansion of World War II spy master William "Wild Bill" Donovan to the mailbox where CIA traitor Aldrich Ames left signals in chalk for his Soviet handlers.
David Major calls it "Spy Street," and it's one of the attractions on the "SpyDrive," a tour of 30 Washington espionage sites that twists and turns through most of the major spy cases of the past 50 years, with running commentary by Major and his sidekick, Oleg Kalugin.
Major spent a career chasing foreign spies for the FBI, ultimately becoming counterintelligence adviser at the Reagan White House. Kalugin was a Soviet spy in Washington — the youngest major general in KGB history.
The SpyDrive is a commercial spinoff of a tour Major started running several years ago for corporate executives and U.S. government personnel to make the point that the nation's capital has long been a major playground for all manner of foreign spies — and still is.
"Russian espionage is now on the rise," says the small, dapper Kalugin, now a permanent resident alien who works as an instructor at Major's training firm in suburban Alexandria, Va., the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies. "The U.S. used to be Enemy No. 1. Now it is Priority No. 1."
There is, of course, no more famous monument to espionage in Washington than the old Soviet Embassy on 16th Street, now the Russian ambassador's residence. Kalugin calls it "the hub of intelligence operations in this country."
Major points to the front door that three of the most damaging American spies — Ames, Navy warrant officer John Walker and National Security Agency employee Ronald Pelton — walked through to begin their careers in treason. Then he directs attention down an alley north of the embassy at the back door, where the Soviets spirited Walker and Pelton out of the building to avoid detection by an FBI surveillance team.
On K Street in Georgetown, famous espionage terrain, the tour passes Chadwick's, the pub where Ames handed over seven pounds of top-secret material to his KGB handler, including the names of 20 CIA assets in the Soviet bloc, 10 of whom were subsequently executed.
Just a block up Wisconsin, there's Au Pied de Cochon, the French bistro where KGB defector Vitaly Yurchenko bolted from his CIA handlers in 1985, walked to the new Soviet Embassy at the top of the hill and un-defected — a route retraced by the SpyDrive bus.
On R Street — "one of the spy streets in Washington," Major says — the bus slows in front of the former home of "Wild Bill" Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, during World War II.
At 37th and R is the famous blue mailbox: Ames' "signal site." The CIA malcontent, who started spying in 1985, would mark the box with chalk so the KGB would know to check a prearranged "dead drop" for a new cache of top-secret reports. It's just a plain blue mailbox now.
What makes the SpyDrive an intriguing jaunt through town is its mix of buildings like Alger Hiss' row house at 2905 P St. NW, and monuments like a spot on Sheridan Circle — "right where that red car is right now," Major says — where a car bomb planted by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's intelligence service in 1976 killed former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt.
There's Mitchell Park, where fired CIA officer Edward Lee Howard sat for hours in October 1983, pondering whether to betray his country, before walking to the nearby Soviet Trade Mission and formally becoming a spy. And at 2800 Wisconsin Ave. is what Major calls the "Jennifer Miles tryst apartment," named after the South African intelligence officer who spied in Washington for the Cubans in the late 1960s before the FBI caught her and kicked her out of the country.
The tour passes the embassies of Hungary and the Czech Republic on the edge of Rock Creek Park, which Major says presented a particularly difficult surveillance problem for the FBI during the Cold War. Isolated in a wooded ravine, he says, there was no place to park a surveillance van and eavesdrop on the two aggressive communist spy services.
The solution: the quaint, charming old stone building called the Art Barn by the park, where local and emerging artists exhibited their work. During the Cold War, Major explains, the Art Barn's attic was a major intercept station, full of antennas and other sophisticated listening devices.
As the bus heads back downtown, Kalugin ranks the former Soviet bloc spy agencies, rating the East Germans as the most efficient, the Bulgarians as the most obedient and the Hungarians as the least effective.
But the more things change, he says, the more they stay the same.
"The Cold War is over," Kalugin says at tour's end. "Some of the old practices of the Cold War are no longer with us. On the other hand, it would be nave to believe that since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., espionage has stopped. In fact, espionage will go on as long as national interest exists. This is a never-ending story, and you have heard only part of it."