Spycraft - Melton [12]
By contrast, Lovell, rather than recruit engineers and scientists into government service and build laboratories from the ground up, sought out private companies with the technical expertise and manufacturing capabilities to produce the needed gear, either from all original designs or by modifying existing consumer products for clandestine work. Traditionally clever artisans turned out one custom-made clandestine device at a time. Under Lovell’s leadership the new generation of spy gear would be engineered and produced using modern manufacturing techniques.
American industry and Lovell were particularly well suited for the mission. The advances in science and engineering since World War I were broadly integrated into the nation’s manufacturing and technical infrastructure and Lovell offered OSS far more than just management and technical expertise. As a scientist and businessman of the post-World War I generation, he arrived at his task with a lifetime of business and research contacts. These personal relationships with executives and scientists would prove invaluable for OSS.
Producing clandestine devices required a mind-set on the part of the designer and motivation on the part of the manufacturer quite different from other wartime industries. Work on spy gear was highly secretive, specialized, and the dollar value of the production runs relatively small. Compared to wartime contracts for millions of canteens or boots, the OSS might require only a few hundred clandestine radios or few thousand explosive devices. To recruit contractors and their technical talent, Lovell would need to appeal to an owner’s patriotism and personal history, more than profit.
In the months following his meeting with Donovan, Lovell and his OSS/ R&D branch developed an arsenal of special weapons and devices with which to “raise merry hell,” along with increasingly inventive schemes.24 Time-delay fuses for explosives were needed, so agents or saboteurs could safely leave the area before detonation. Building on the work of the British SOE, Lovell’s engineers developed the Time Delay Pencil, a copper tube containing a glass ampoule of corrosive liquid and copper wire connected to a spring-loaded firing pin, which could also be used to ignite incendiary devices. Small and reliable, the Pencils were color-coded to indicate different timing intervals.25 A pocketable cylinder called a Firefly, developed by Lovell’s team, mated a small explosive incendiary device with a self-contained time-delay fuse for a saboteur to drop into a car’s gas tank.26
Another explosive device called a Limpet, named after the mollusk that fastens itself to rocks, was specifically designed to attach to the sides of ships beneath the waterline and blow a twenty-five-square-foot hole through either steel plates .27 The Limpet featured an delay detonator that could be set for hours or days or rigged to set off multiple detonations sympathetically with the concussion of one timed explosion triggering the others nearly simultaneously. 28
OSS scientists discovered that explosives in powder form could be mixed with wheat flour and safely shipped, shaped, and even baked until needed for sabotage operations. The “explosive flour” could pass inspection as ordinary flour except under microscopic examination.
The Limpet’s delay relied on acetone to eat away a celluloid disk and trigger the detonation. While the timing of the explosion varied with the water temperature, it still offered a marked improvement over a British version that used aniseed balls—a traditional