Spycraft - Melton [102]
Panic began to spread among the techs and case officer. Had the gardener noticed the trench and was biding his time until the diplomat returned to tip him off? The restoration of the lawn looked flawless to the techs, but perhaps the professional gardener noted a disturbance or saw traces of the narrow channel they dug for the wires. Each day the gardener continued to inspect the flowerbeds with a worried look, but refrained from poking around in the grass. Finally, the case officer decided the only choice was to attempt to recruit the gardener since he clearly had noticed something amiss.
The plan worked. After the gardener agreed to a covert relationship with the CIA, he heaved a great sigh of relief. “Every morning for the last week,” he said, “I come to work and the red flower would be where the yellow one used to be, the blue one was over here.” Because of darkness, the techs did not always recognize the color of the flowers they replanted after digging, and inadvertently rearranged some of the plants. Reassured that he was not losing his mind, the gardener kept the secret and the installation operation came to a successful end.
CHAPTER 13
Progress in a New Era
A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for the first time yesterday at Bell Telephone Laboratories at 463 West Street, where it was invented . . .
—The New York Times, July 1, 1948, last item featured in “The News of Radio”
The first new audio transmitter developed in partnership between TSS and a private contractor arrived in the late 1950s. Designed specifically for clandestine audio operations, the device was dubbed the SRT for Surveillance Radio Transmitter.1 Composed of a hybrid mix of microtubes, sometimes called “peanut tubes,” that dated to World War II, and recently introduced transistors, the SRT-1 was far from ideal, but a significant leap forward in technology.
What operations needed was a concealable, reliable transmitter for audio installations that eliminated the wiring of mic and wire jobs. While the SRT-1 was functional and no longer required wires to connect the microphones to a listening post recorder, it was also the size of a shoebox and required so much power that batteries were impractical in most situations. To make a battery-powered version, the techs tried to modify some of the circuitry, and built in a power converter to turn direct current from batteries into alternating current. However, the converters proved to be even more inefficient in terms of power consumption. The result was, in the words of one tech, “a power hog to begin with combined with an inefficient interface in the middle with a foot locker-sized thing on the back end of it. No wonder the operations guys didn’t want to use it.” With battery power impractical, techs needed to wire the device directly into the target’s power lines to operate for any extended length of time.
The greatest value of the SRT-1 was that it benchmarked many characteristics not desirable in a piece of clandestine equipment. Its dimensions were too large for easy concealment and the “in the clear” signal allowed anyone tuning across the same frequency to pick up the transmission. It offered no “remote on/off ” and broadcast continuously, draining power and making the signal relatively easy to find by hostile technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM) sweep teams.2
However, despite the SRT-1’s shortcomings, the engineers had created a new capability for remote collection against targets some distance away from the listening post. When the first SRTs were replaced with all-transistor units in 1960, covert audio operations multiplied around the