Nina asks Oleg whether he was a Pioneer, and he says he was not. Unlike the Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts organizations in the US, all Soviet children joined the Pioneers at age 10 (in 3rd grade), and membership was mandatory. Since Oleg is supposed to be the son of a high-level functionary, his father would almost certainly be a member of the Communist Party. Thus, he would have had to have been a Pioneer, and he would have been a member of the Komsomol and later the Communist Party, as well. Without those steps Oleg wouldn't be able to even dream of his KGB job.
The instrument Larrick uses on the telephone lines is a Tektronix 1502 Time Domain Reflectometer. The TDR is used to measure faults in communication lines and give this distance to the fault. It would reveal the distance from the junction box to the phone. The problem is that it can't be used on live circuits. Connecting it to a live phone line would cause $1000's of damage to the unit. Later, we here a dial tone from the TDR which is pretty amazing since it doesn't have a speaker and has already been destroyed..
A character is given a location of "Corner of Grant Street and Mohawk Lane in Bethesda." Grant Street and Mohawk Lane are adjacent, parallel streets which never meet.
The blue phone that Larrick uses (called a butt phone) is used by engineers to test lines but would be of no help to him in tracing a line. All he could do with it in this context is make an outbound call to a number he already knows in exactly the same way he could from any pay-phone.
Unassigned numbers are by definition not assigned to a circuit. The lady at the telco could not match an unused number to a pair of live cables.
As Larrick disembarks from his mission in Nicaragua due to of a personal crisis. He is clad in desert camouflage gear suited for arid and desert regions. This is not the camouflage pattern worn by U.S. Military "advisors" in a tropical region of the world. In the early-'80s, the military would be wearing a pattern known as "frog-skin", which is a blend of greens dotted with brown splotches.
When Larrick disembarks from a C-130 upon returning from Nicaragua, the plane is a C-130J Super Hercules, introduced in 1999. It is easily recognizable from the six-blade, composite "scimitar" rotor blades on the engines.
Jarrick walks down to a basement to chase a wiring path and walks by a water heater with a big, yellow Energy Star sticker on it. Unfortunately, the EPA didn't introduce Energy Star until 1992, a full 11 years before this scene took place.
Larrick walks down to a basement to chase a wiring path and walks by a water heater with a big, yellow Energy Star sticker on it. Unfortunately, the EPA didn't introduce Energy Star until 1992, a full 11 years before this scene took place.