Spycraft - Melton [108]
The lack of small, long-life batteries constrained full operational use of the transmitters. After all, why launch an operation to bug a room if the bug transmitted for only a few days? In most cases, replacing the batteries was either impossible or added considerable risk of compromising the operation.
“Electronics and solid-state hardware rapidly moved ahead of battery chemistry,” explained an OTS chemist. “Before transistors the majority of the power going into a piece of electrical equipment was to keep the filaments hot in the tubes. That’s where power consumption was, burning volts in there. When the first transistor radios arrived, even the crummy batteries available gave acceptable life for the consumers.”
But technology acceptable to consumers was not necessarily acceptable for clandestine operations. Standard U.S. consumer batteries were too large, provided inconsistent performance, and offered life cycles either too short or too unpredictable. For an extended-life (several months or longer) audio operation, dozens of batteries were sometimes required—each one adding weight and volume to a concealment or installation.
Commercial battery options in the 1960s did not resemble those nearly half a century later. A consumer going into the local drugstore could select from only a limited number of battery types. There was the D-cell to power flashlights and the rectangular 9-volt for the transistor radio. There were also large cylindrical dry cells sold in hardware stores for special uses, such as powering camp lights.
Compared to transistors and integrated circuits, batteries possessed little sex appeal as a technology. Research in private sector companies producing batteries was directed toward lowering manufacturing costs as opposed to developing and improving the science of the battery itself. Published manufacturer ratings that estimated power output of individual batteries were often imprecise or significantly flawed. Battery makers invested little effort studying or improving long-term performance of their products because few—if any—customers cared whether a cheap battery lasted one month or six weeks. The typical consumer did not require significant improvements in performance or reduction in size. With their low prices, consumer batteries were disposable and replaceable.
The techs found ways to work with the commercially available batteries, despite their limitations. They assessed the amount of space available to conceal the bug and put the device in with whatever number of batteries could fit inside. Wiring the batteries in “parallel,” in contrast to “serial” wiring, did not alter the net voltage powering the device, but extended its operational life significantly.
“With commercial batteries we never knew for sure what their lifetime would be,” explained Kurt. “I would make my best guess and tell the case officer it would run this many hours and that’s it. Based on that, he would make the decision to do an installation or not. Sometimes, when we were lucky, the batteries ran 15 percent more than my estimate. But sometimes they ran 15 percent less and then there was a problem. If the audio was valuable and more was needed, the ops guys were faced with a decision of whether it was worth the risk to send us in again to replace the batteries. We had to learn to manage the expectations of the case officers. That became tricky when we weren’t sure how a piece of equipment would perform.”
This situation led a small cadre of TSD battery scientists to focus on mercury cell technology as offering the greatest potential for long power-life in a small package. In the mid-1960s, TSD established an extensive battery test program that