Spycraft - Melton [104]
About the time of the scuttled May 1960 summit, the chief of TSD stopped by the bench of one of the lab engineers. “What are you working on?” the chief asked.
“A new concealment device,” came the reply.
“What’s it for?” the chief continued.
“I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” said the tech, “I don’t know. I have a requirement from operations and I’m just making what they want.”
Another tech who served during the same time agreed. “We had an operational culture that emphasized the need not to know about what our equipment might be used for and what results were obtained, and that’s the way we did our jobs.”
Failure rates in the field of early audio installations were unacceptably high, sometimes reaching 50 percent. Two primary reasons became apparent. First, on the production end, there were no protocols for testing and certifying performance of components or the integrated systems in place. Manufacturer certification of component performance was accepted as “final” and considered sufficient. Second, differing field conditions, particularly the temperature and humidity extremes of desert, subarctic, and tropical regions played havoc with electronic components.
Testing was an ad hoc affair in TSS’s early years. Informal and unofficial systems developed. Engineers in the lab or the contracting company performed what they believed were good tests and then unofficially shipped a new device to a tech in the field. “They’d say, ‘Don’t tell anybody, but try this out,’” recalled one engineer. “‘If it works we’ll tell everybody. If it doesn’t work, just tell me.’”
Typically, field techs received individual components from headquarters such as batteries, transmitters, microphones, and recorders, then covertly assembled them into complete systems in locations that could range from a government storeroom or hotel room to the office above a target’s conference room. In many instances, the assembly at the target site was the first time all of the components of a device operated together. Too often, the techs discovered the system didn’t work.
Changes were implemented within TSD to ensure that the design and packaging of clandestine audio equipment would operate under widely varying conditions. However, field conditions were neither stable nor consistent. Engineers in the lab needed to imagine a hot, cold, rainy, dry, humid, dusty, pristine, muddy place in which their device would be plastered, glued, screwed, or bolted into position after being dropped, kicked, crushed, and adjusted by a hammer.
Kurt, by then a lead engineer, recalled the early equipment problems. “Equipment failure in the field usually pointed back to design or testing failure in the lab. We had to learn how to test our stuff. There were no manuals that said, ‘Follow these test procedures for your new, improved bug.’ Nobody else in government was building these bugs. We had to think it out for ourselves. And it took us a few years to set up test and evaluation procedures; then we could give equipment a stamp of approval. It is one thing for an engineer in the Washington lab to say ‘it works.’ But that wasn’t enough. How do we know it is going to work in Ouagadougou?”
The test protocols themselves were not without problems. On an African operation, a tech needed batteries for recorders in the listening post monitoring a bugged embassy. The tech requested and received six batteries from headquarters, each about the size of a car battery and weighing forty pounds apiece. They promised enough power to run the post for years. The tech hooked up the first battery but nothing happened. Nothing happened with the second, third, fourth, or fifth. And the sixth, too, was apparently dead. The operation had to be put on hold.
Still angry when he returned to Headquarters a week later, the tech made a beeline for the TSD warehouse determined to get to the cause of an embarrassing, time-wasting incident. Why would six batteries