Spycraft - Melton [111]
“A water-based system, like the mercury cell, can give off hydrogen or hydrogen and oxygen gas. The hydrogen is the bad actor,” explained Linn. “If you get into a mode with gas escaping, leakage of the electrolyte results. This is corrosive and can change the paint color on a wall. We needed to be able to package every cell so it didn’t leak liquid or emit gas.” Balancing the laws of physics, audio engineering became a game of technological and operational horse trading, often conducted under the urgency of the “crisis de jour.”
The technical trade-offs with operational requirements were seemingly endless. How long does the device need to remain operational? If only for a few hours in a hotel room, commercial D-cells could work, but bugging a foreign embassy’s conference room for five years required a completely different technology. How large can the device be, including antenna? That answer was never the same depending on whether the antenna needed to be installed in a less-efficient horizontal position as opposed to the preferred vertical configuration to radiate the signal. What is the window of opportunity for the operation? If it must be done in the next five days, the tech ops officers had to use whatever equipment was available. Given an operational window of six months or a year, however, TSD engineers could redesign or adapt equipment and technology for a specific application.
“You’d get a call, ‘Hey, listen, we’re doing something, can you come to a meeting at three o’clock?’” remembered Parker. “So I’d say, ‘What are we going to talk about? I’ll bring the data I have on that.’ And we’d all show up, sit down, and try to figure it out. Some of the ops people were very well versed and others wouldn’t know an electron from a trumpet. They came in all flavors. But most of them you wouldn’t want any other way. The guys who didn’t have the technical knowledge sometimes had a whole lot of tradecraft knowledge they could bring to the party. One of the things I always used to say: There were enough problems to solve, so when somebody presented you with a solution, you left your pride at the door and said, Thank you.”
CHAPTER 14
The Age of Bond Arrives
If you give me a target, I’ll get audio in it.
—OTS audio tech, 1970s
The 1970s were heady years for audio techs in the field and scientists in the lab. The demand for audio ops in every part of the world accompanied the introduction of integrated circuit technology. With the new generation of miniaturized components capable of transmitting greater distances for longer durations, audio concealments seemed limited only by the tech’s imagination. Installing audio in walls or wood blocks represented a “passive” concealment operation. The techs, however, also recognized that miniaturization and tiny electronic components offered opportunities to embed audio devices or cameras in hosts that continued functioning as they were designed. The devices were now small enough to implant into electronic concealments such as clocks, calculators, and radios. Expertise that OTS craftsmen applied to dead drops was now put to use in creating audio concealments. Watches and cigarette lighters were candidates for “active” concealments. With these concealments, the techs hid the spy gear in everyday objects an agent could carry, wear, or use for their intended purposes.
Audio devices were concealed inside furniture, books, cans of shaving cream, clothing, and in one case, a construction worker’s hard hat. Maids or visitors leaving a gift or exchanging the desk lamp for a modified duplicate, could introduce audio bugs into rooms. CIA defector Phillip Agee featured on the cover of his autobiography a photograph of the lid of his typewriter case filled with sixty “poker chip” batteries, alleging they were part of a CIA operation to bug him as he fled around the world.1