Spycraft - Melton [116]
Some techs excelled at solving problems with their own inventions to meet specific operational needs. Although of little use beyond covert operations, the devices were invaluable for making installations. The Nail Pusher, or Silent Hammer, was used for restoration work on baseboards and molding. Essentially the device was a hollow tube with a plunger-type mechanism to reinsert nails silently without leaving traces of a hammer mark.7
One innovation that earned its inventor a unique, if dubious, reputation among his fellow techs was a new microphone housing. Techs had long been beleaguered by the challenge of securing a mic into position within the hole drilled to reach the target’s wall. Too often after the tech carefully positioned a microphone in the hole against the pinhole, it slipped slightly away from the tiny air passage before being firmly anchored. If unnoticed at the time, the smallest misalignment produced a degraded sound. The tech’s clever solution encased the mics in a sheath of pilable latex that fit snugly into the three-eighths-inch-diameter hole leading to the pinhole. Because of the phallic appearance, techs named it the Peter Mic.
As intelligence flowed through audio’s reliable equipment, so did the audio techs’ confidence in their tradecraft skills. Among the techs, and even case officers, the thinking became, “If access could be obtained, almost any target was vulnerable.” In some respects, this was “spiral development.” Hard targets required greater tradecraft skills and, as those skills were acquired, they were applied to even harder targets.
The increased sophistication of bugs and a willingness to take on the tough operations required better equipment. For instance, drilling holes represented a core skill for audio techs. Holes for bugs were drilled down from ceilings, up from underneath floors, and horizontally in walls. When the techs could not physically get inside a room to install a bug, they drilled through a common wall. The danger of such an operation lay in the fact that the techs were literally blind to what or who was on the target side of the wall.
These drilling operations had two major security risks: noise and unintended breakthrough. Electric drills were fast, but so noisy they were not an option for use in the middle of the night or with the target room occupied. Hand-turned drills were slow and difficult with harder construction materials. To drill quietly usually meant drilling so slowly an installation could require days, especially if multiple bugs were being installed.
In a typical operation, techs preferred to start with a three-eighths-inch drill bit (the hole had to be large enough for the circumference of the microphone) until reaching the final half-inch of material in the target’s wall. At that point, depending on the size of the microphone head, drill bits of less than .050 inches were used to drill a breakthrough pinhole. The tiny hole created enough of an air passage for clear audio pickup while virtually invisible to normal observation.
With blind drilling techs never knew how close they were to the breakthrough point. Even for the best drill tech, it was a matter of guess, estimate, feel, and experience. Wrongly judged, the drill’s breakthrough would leave a noticeable hole in the target’s wall and debris on the floor. “If we don’t know the thickness of the wall, then we don’t know for sure when we are close to the other side,” explained one tech. “So if we punch through a wall with a three-eighths-inch hole, somebody is going to notice. Sometimes when we did inadvertently drill through, we joked that our audio operation became a video operation.”
Over the years, more than one tech accidentally broke through a wall, then looked into the hole only to see a curious eye peering back. During one operation, a tech drilled a larger than intended hole