Spycraft - Melton [106]
The physical environment of a target represented a constant in the operational equation. When any physical features of a facility had to be altered, it was done temporarily and only if it could be meticulously reconstructed. Scratches, dents, chips, holes, odors, debris, sawdust, mismatched paint, wet varnish, rearranged furniture, cabinet doors ajar, foot tracks on the carpet, or tools left behind—any of these things could compromise the operation.
OTS techs carried paint-matching kits and used odorless, quick-drying paints and varnishes so that neither the look nor smell of a wall restoration would leave clues behind. The number of items in the tech’s installation kit was memorized and each item counted before leaving a job. During the work tools were laid out on a cloth or rubber pad to avoid the possibility of leaving telltale oil or stains on floors and carpets and to keep all gear in a single location should an emergency bug-out (rapid departure from the site) be required.
Africa often offered the opportunity for creative solutions to problems encountered in the field. During one bugging job in a West African capital, the installation required surreptitious entry at night into the vacant building and extensive drilling for the mics and wires. The case officer and the techs faced the practical problem that sounds of drilling in an empty building at night would likely be considered unusual by neighbors. A means of masking the drill noise for an hour or more was required.
“How about bullfrogs?” the chief suggested.
The techs were confused. What possibly could bullfrogs have to do with the operation?
“I think that’ll work,” the chief continued. “The bullfrogs around here make an awful racket at night. We’ll have our staff collect several sacks of bullfrogs and when you guys go in to do the job, we’ll release them around the building. Their croaking will drown out your drills.”
A dramatic technical breakthrough for audio problems appeared in 1961 with a new generation of radio transmitters. The SRT-3 addressed almost every operational deficiency of the SRT-1 and its rarely deployed cousin, the SRT-2.5 For a clandestine transmitter, the SRT-1 had been a bulky, unstable, and power-hungry affair that comprised a hybrid stew of transistors and peanut vacuum tubes.6
Now came the model 3. About the size of a pack of cigarettes, with an all-transistor design, it transmitted on a hard-to-detect frequency above that of television station transmissions and was powerful enough to reach several hundred meters to an unobstructed line-of-sight listening post.
On a visit to Headquarters in 1961, a field tech noticed a little black box sitting on the desk of one of the audio program officers. Curious, he asked one of the women working nearby, “What’s that?” With surprise, she replied with her own question, “You’re putting in audio and don’t know about this?” The tech admitted he did not and spent the next hour learning about TSD’s new SRT-3, the first all-transistor transmitter, battery powered with a five-milliwatt output to the antenna. For the tech, it was love at first sight.
The system was not perfect, the SRT-3 had limitations, such as the amount of power consumed, the size of the battery pack for extended operation, and the fact that its unmasked signal once activated could not be remotely switched off. It transmitted a clear continuous signal until the battery died. However, the overall impact of SRT-3’s reliability and performance revolutionized the CIA’s audio surveillance program. For techs making audio installations, the SRT-3 was a thing of technological beauty and an operational joy. Housed in a plain, black metallic case, there were screws on the top to access the circuitry by sliding the top or bottom off and inputs for the mic, battery, and antenna.
Because the SRT-3