Spycraft - Melton [101]
Positioning himself in the attic directly above the ceiling of the target office, the tech set up his tripod, mounted the camera, and pointed it out the window in the general direction of a church. On the floor was one of the microphones the tech camouflaged to look like a foot switch with a cord running to the camera. As the tech was about to begin drilling through the floor for the microphone implant, he heard footsteps on the stairs. Quickly repacking his audio equipment, he found himself face to face with the porter, accompanied by his entire family, who came in to watch the American take pictures of the city’s churches.
Clicking the camera, the tech explained that today he would be doing “time exposure” photography that required several hours to complete. After politely watching the camera and the tech for a while, the family became bored and left. With the porter and his family gone, the tech positioned the mic above the ceiling of the target’s office and ran the wire from the microphone through the building’s ductwork to the listening post where recorders would be installed. “It worked like gangbusters and, for all I know, it might still be there,” the tech recalled proudly decades later.
Before 1960, bugging operations were primarily “mic and wire jobs” with techs running wires from the implanted microphone to the nearby listening post. In cases where wire could not be run out of a target facility, a concealed recorder was installed and tapes were changed regularly by a support asset, such as a recruited secretary or custodian with access to the target. What the Agency needed was a reliable radio signal transmitter from the target to a listening post.
There were advantages to each system. The clandestine transmitter eliminated the need to run wires, but usually required regular battery replacement, and the radio signal was vulnerable to sweep teams. The mic and wire jobs were difficult to detect since they did not emit a radio signal, but the wires took longer to install, and were susceptible to discovery during a physical inspection of the premises.
In 1963, a case officer arranged for the techs to have access to a Soviet Bloc residence while the diplomat was out of town. The operational plan was to embed mics in the concrete wall of the house, but when the techs began drilling they discovered their hardware store drills were ill suited for the task. They made too much noise for middle of the night work. The techs determined that liberal lubrication at the drilling point would dampen some of the sound and the next day a support officer was sent to the U.S. commissary to buy several gallons of Crisco cooking oil.
After dark, the techs returned to the job, and repeatedly dipped the drills into the Crisco to keep the hole lubricated. They were rewarded with much quieter drills, but as the drill bits heated in the deepening hole, so did the oil that coated them. Soon the poorly ventilated house was filled with the odor of fried food, posing a serious operational compromise should the residents unexpectedly return home.
While the drill team worked on the wall, two other techs were running the microphone wires across the diplomat’s immaculately tended garden and manicured lawn to the nearby listening post. Working only with the available light provided by the stars and moon, the techs dug a shallow trench by hand using bayonets. It was tedious work. Not only did they have to stay on a course plotted across the wide expanse of lawn and flowerbeds in the dark, they also needed to carefully pick up any loose dirt on the grass and replace each piece of sod or flower as they moved along. Progress moved at a snail’s pace as the techs spent the last hour of every night erasing any sign of their presence on the lawn.
“There was a very conscientious gardener who took care of the landscaping,” one of the techs recalled. “We