Spycraft - Melton [120]
Three days later the engineer’s anxiety had turned to excitement. The operation went smoothly with the engineer personally operating the Grit Drill during its first use in an audio installation. Now with an operational success as part of his briefing, he visited other techs in the region demonstrating the drill to interested audiences. But it was the thrill of the clandestine work that stayed with him. Like his scientist friend, he had been hooked by the excitement of clandestine operations. Back at Headquarters, after completing the show-and-tell TDY, the engineer transferred from his lab assignment to the cadre of audio tech officers.
As the audio surveillance equipment improved and inventories of transmitters, power sources, microphones, and installation tools grew, the techs themselves required additional training to configure and test equipment. The era of the “tinkerer” had ended. The days of on-the-job, trial-and-error audio training gave way to more rigorous and formal instruction aimed at greater professionalism and broader knowledge of increasingly complex equipment.
“If we weren’t doing this, we’d be robbing banks,” said Antonio J. “Tony” Mendez, one of the three OTS technical officers honored in 1997 as a CIA “Trailblazer.”9 No element of an audio operation created a more intense adrenaline rush than a surreptitious entry into a secure and guarded target. Surreptitious entry, defined as “an entry by stealth,” accompanied almost every clandestine audio installation.10 In most instances, the techs entered the premises or property of the target and then made additional entries into luggage, mail, or vehicles. Due to the risk involved, surreptitious entries were thoroughly scripted and rehearsed prior to the operation.
During World War II, the OSS created a surreptitious entry capability by enlisting former second-story men with prior experience in burglary, lock picking, and safe cracking. OSS created and issued a small “lock picking knife” containing “picks” instead of blades, that could be conveniently carried in the operative’s pocket for quick access when needed. The original OSS surreptitious-entry manual cited the purpose for their work as helping the agent solve his problem:
He wishes to obtain access to secret documents, copy or memorize their contents, and leave the premises in the same condition as he found them. To arouse suspicion that the entry had been made, would in many cases be as fatal as being caught in the act of rifling the safe. The agent should therefore learn thoroughly the technique of surreptitious entry, so as to adapt it, as the occasion requires, to a similar job in enemy territory.11
The reasons for conducting entry operations did not change after World War II, only now the “enemy territory” became the guarded official missions of America’s Cold War adversaries scattered in countries throughout the world. While all the audio techs were trained in the basics of surreptitious entry, a handful of officers specialized in the work.12 These techs were skilled at climbing ladders, bypassing alarm systems, picking locks, cracking safes, and performing room searches as well as installing devices. These entry specialists demonstrated that, if given sufficient time and resources, virtually any lock could be opened and any alarm system bypassed, though there were always limits on time and the amount of equipment that could be deployed at the job site.13
Regardless of how easy lock picking was represented to be on television and in the movies, the techniques of manipulating locks required skill and practice. At best, picking remained more art than science. One TSD tech remembered sitting at home in a European capital in the late 1960s working through the weekend to “get the feel” for opening a new brand of foreign lock. The first successful attempt required more than twelve hours, but, once he had acquired the feel, he could open the lock in less than five minutes.