Spycraft - Melton [107]
Like drivers who must test the limits of a new car, the techs took the SRT-3 where audio devices had never been before. TSD’s new device worked best when concealed within a hollow wall or wooden floor. Implanted in the floorboards or behind the wood of a wall with a mic pressed against a nearly impossible to detect pinhole-sized air passage that opened into the target room, the SRT-3 could provide high-quality audio for the life of the battery.
Since the first SRT-3s were not hermetically sealed and were susceptible to humidity, temperature, and other environmental hazards, makeshift fixes, such as wrapping the device in plastic or duct tape, were employed with varying degrees of success. It was all too common for both the techs and case officers to become frustrated when, after a well executed entry and installation, signals could not be sustained. The only means of troubleshooting the system was to make another covert entry, extract the mic and transmitter, replace the device, and send the damaged unit to the lab for evaluation. Time after time, the problem was found to be moisture caused by dampness inside walls. “Climate controlled” buildings were rarely found in the locations TSD worked. Without an adequate field solution, the problem persisted until engineers developed hermetic sealing techniques for components of the systems at the factory.
In Asia, techs received a sobering lesson in chemistry and civil engineering. The operation was to bug the new embassy building of an Eastern Bloc country as it was being built. When reviewing the proposal, Seymour Russell, the TSD chief, expressed his “gut feeling” the operation was not going to be very successful and probably not worth doing. His senior technical ops advisor argued that TSD field techs as well as the DDP officers on the ground thought the target was both worthwhile and vulnerable to an audio attack. Russell allowed his operational inclination to outweigh his doubts and approved.
From beginning to end, it was the perfect operation. The case officer spent months recruiting construction workers who embedded dozens of audio devices into the wet cement at key positions throughout the building. Pinhole openings provided sound channels to the mics. The bugs were tested and planted without security leaks. As the embassy construction neared completion, the time came to switch on the audio. Nothing was ever heard.
New to the game of installing electronics in wet concrete, the techs had not considered that cement dries differently than clay or mud. The moisture did not evaporate from concrete. In fact, when water is added, concrete undergoes complex molecular changes called hydration, a process that produces an exothermic reaction essential in the hardening process. In other words, drying concrete gets hot. In fact, it gets very hot. Within an ordinary sidewalk a few inches thick, temperatures can reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the hydration process. In a wall a foot or more thick, the heat becomes even more intense. Unknowingly, the techs had planted the devices in an oven.
“It’s unbelievable how hot that gets—the trunk of an automobile is nothing compared to what happened inside concrete,” said the tech who made the installation. “Our devices at the time couldn’t withstand the heat.” It was another step in the evolution of TSD’s spy gear. Future packaging of audio devices would give rigorous attention to the physical environment of the operation, such as heat and humidity, comparable to the attention paid to transmitter performance.
“When the battery dies, the operation dies,” became a mantra