Sarah

She wore the old style of hose, those that required a garter belt and had a seam that ran down the back.  She dressed as thou she was auditioning for a part in an old movie, a 2 piece suit with skirt that came to her calves, jacket with large lapels and pull over blouse that showed no cleavage.  Cap this with black shoes of the same era that would be described as “clunky” by any modern fashionista and you would have Sarah’s outfit to a “T”!

The real oddity about this is that Sarah was not an 80 year old reliving her youthful years, but a 36 yr old highly trained CIA agent on a deep cover mission in Moscow.  Her mission, begun over 2 years prior, was to obtain specs for the Russian rocket that had only recently been written of in world papers.  The CIA had known of the work that the Russian scientists had been doing for the past 10 years and Sarah’s job had been to get those specs so that the US scientists could ascertain the validity of Russia’s superiority claims.

Sarah’s cover had been established over an 8 year period.  First attending and graduating from the Aerospace Engineering Department of Moscow University, then, with the help of professors for whom she clerked during school, getting a job in the rocket works lab and working her way up in the Russian department of Aerospace Exploration.  Six months ago, she’d become the primary lab assistant to one of the scientists working on the rocket.

She’d accumulated pieces of the data asked for by the CIA bits at a time, rather than risk trying to get it all at once and now had the entire specs encoded on a thin plastic strip, as thin as fishing line, about 2 feet long.  Now, how to get it out.

The knock on her apartment door and the subsequent entry by the KGB was unanticipated, but not surprising as she was always aware that her position was under surveillance as were all of those who worked in the Aerospace Engineering department.   As Sarah had just completed the gathering of the purloined specs, she’d had no time to get them to a contact, nor to dispose of them.

The KGB team was very thorough in going through her things, analyzing any equipment, looking for the slightest evidence of subterfuge on her part, scanning her clothes and jewelry for microfilm.   

3 months elapse:

Her request to visit her great Aunt, now 93 and living outside Albany, New York on a 2 week holiday had been granted.  The KGB had picked up her luggage the morning before her flight, so that it could be scanned and thoroughly processed before being allowed to leave the country.  At the airport, she had been subjected to a thorough body search before boarding her Aeroflot flight to JFK.

Sarah thoroughly enjoyed her stay in Albany with Great Aunt Anastasia, planning to request a return trip for the next year, before returning to Moscow and her job in Aerospace Exploration.

Back at the CIA lab, the operative opened the package that she’d picked up from the locker in the Albany airport.  In it was a pair of old fashioned hose, the kind that required a garter belt and had a seam that ran down the back.