Yes, stealing the computers would be more difficult than a number of other solutions. The general idea is that if bribery doesn’t work, they’ve got to look for someone else to bribe. Also, most people don’t like to think of themselves as traitors, but a little zapodlo (‘shady business’) is familiar to everyone in a planned economy, and taking a bribe for allowing a racketeer to confirm what someone trying to be hired as his bodyguard says about their military service might not sound like something which should fundamentally alter the self-image of records clerk.
It might mean taking a round-about way to the objective, working through actual Soviet criminals, but those are probably their best bets as ‘reliable’ contacts, anyway. Fortunately, a couple of the defected KGB officers whom the PCs’ paymasters also employ have contacts on the other side of the law. Some of those contacts, indeed, were informing on their fellow criminals, which means they might have a rather flexible view on loyalty, but should also mean that as long as they cannot get at their former handler to somehow betray all those who have knowledge of their complicated loyalties, there is formidable leverage at hand to ensure they do not turn against the PCs.
Theoretically, at least. Some criminals have been known to have low impulse control. That is one of those risks which must simply be accepted, in certain fields of work. Some find religion helpful. Or fatalism.
In the event that no amount of social engineering or bribery can turn up information which they can trust fast enough for their purposes, there are tech support people who can try to gain access.
One has years of experience with IBM System/360 programming, but only a few months to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and what the Soviets decided to call things in their version of the System/360 OS. Still, a few months are enough to learn quite a bit, and working with a crib sheet, I wouldn’t think it was impossible for them to perform the necessary searches. The fact that it would take him years to read all the results is irrelevant, a fluent Russian reader can read enough to confirm the results, watching him work.
Granted, the other options are even less ideal. Hana Khon reads Cyrillic fluently and is a genius with computers, but all of them much more advanced than IBM System/360 or the ES EVM ‘Ryad’ reverse-engineeed from them. She will have had a briefing on ES EVM computers and has been tasked with translating their many quirks into manuals designed to allow other people with technical knowledge to perform very specific searches on encountered ES EVM computers. At present, however, she has not yet encountered one of those computers herself and won’t until she begins her summer break in Geneva.
Amir Abelman (his hippie parents named him Faramir, but he refuses to introduce himself to strangers that way) was born in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1964. He grew up a rabid fan of Star Trek and other science fiction, played with computers, went to MIT and graduated, despite wasting a lot of time doing things like attending conventions and publishing a fanzine. I don’t know whether he would ever have encountered an IBM System/360 or not, but even if he did, Mr. Abelman’s talents do not lie in the way of linguistics. He’s struggled mightily with Hebrew ever since making aliyah, despite a lot of help and organized teaching, not to mention intensive training during his IDF service (as a clerk in a finance department, where he understood the numbers, even if he struggled with the language) and if anyone tells him he has to study another new alphabet, he might possibly lose all hope.
Nika Tomić was not recruited for her tech support skills, but rather for her language skills. She speaks native Serbo-Croat, decent Russian, good German and good French. Well, she was recruited for her language skills and because of the company she kept. She had a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Belgrade and turned down a scholarship to Baumanka in Moscow, preferring instead to study at TU Berlin for a doctorate. As it turned out, she never finished her doctorate, but she did put her chemistry knowledge to good use.
When she went home to Yugoslavia one summer, she didn’t return to Berlin, but drifted instead, illegally, briefly through Italy, then over the Alps, into Austria and down again into West Germany. Where she set up shop making amphetamines which she supplied to criminal groups, gangs and motorcycle clubs in France and the Benelux countries. She was arrested in Belgium and Germany, on the basis of the testimony of criminals who’d been caught with her product, but denied everything and had nothing illegal on her. The German witness recanted his testimony in court, claimed he only repeated what the detectives wanted him to say, but the Belgium witness never turned up to court and she was acquitted.
In France, she was arrested with her boyfriend, Jules ‘Le Brigand’ Delhaize, a member of the Belgian motorcycle gang “Outlaws MC” (at that time not affiliated with the Chicago-based US club of the same name). While he claimed to own all the drugs and weapons in the motel room, the claim was unlikely to be believed in court, especially when the magistrate heard about the previous arrests. Both of them were likely to face a long time in prison and things got even worse when Nika was attacked while in jail waiting for trial, by two women, both bigger than her, armed with improvised shivs.
Nika sustained bad cuts to both arms defending herself and a stab wound in the back which punctured a lung, but when correctional officers broke up the fight, she had managed to put both of her opponents on the ground. Their injuries were not severe, more bruises, some damage to the wrist joint and a some pulled muscles, but the jail staff was all abuzz about such a tiny slip of a girl managing to defend herself at all, against two much stronger women, gang-affiliated and with multiple violent offenses. It was a couple of weeks later when a French official had a quiet word with the prosecutor to try only Delhaize, but defer a decision in the case of Nika Tomić.
As a result, Nika owes what she correctly guesses to be an intelligence or security service in France a favour. Well, actually, once she recovered from her wounds, they’ve been behaving as if they own her services in perpetuity, which does not please her at all, but her handler, Chrisic, has hinted to her that if she does well enough for the next few months, she might have enough knowledge DGSE does not want becoming public to continue her chosen career without having to jump at their every whim.
Nika is certainly no computer genius, but she has actually used an ES EVM computer, both at the University of Belgrade and at TU Berlin. She can barely program at all and takes a long while to do things on the thing, but she has used it for actual tasks, she reads Cyrillic and has the devious mind of a born criminal.
It might be that their best option will be the person they recruited mostly as an interpreter and to deflect surveillance. Of course, she will be trying to figure out some way to use it to escape her odious position of having to obey orders, if the PCs are forced to rely on her in any way.