Spycraft - Melton [135]
However, big ideas were often the products of the smallest companies with highly specialized expertise. A firm with only a handful of employees was just as likely to turn out an amazing piece of hardware as a multinational with nearly unlimited resources. “OTS had long-standing relationships with real garage-shop companies. Sometimes they were no more than ten people. That was the whole company, soup to nuts, including the accountants,” said Gene Nehring, an OTS manager. “We always kidded about some of our suppliers. Some Agency managers would say, ‘You guys deal with every garage shop around.’ And yes, we do, and each one did one little thing better than anyone else, anywhere.”
Perhaps nowhere was this truer than in the case of the T-100 subminiature camera, arguably the most productive piece of Cold War spy gear. Developed and manufactured by a tiny company housed in a nondescript industrial park on the Eastern seaboard, the film-based T-100 was the ultimate spy camera. Unlike the Minox, which was originally designed and marketed as a commercial product, the T-100’s sophisticated optical and mechanical design was so highly specialized and technologically unique there were virtually no uses for the device outside of espionage. It operated like a point-and-shoot camera, but had no viewfinder and required a painstakingly precise process to hand-load the customized film on its miniature cassette. From design to operation, the T-100 had one function: enabling an agent to take a covert, clear picture of the writing, printing, or diagrams on a piece of paper directly in front of him.
“Think about it. That camera, as marvelous as it proved itself, was utterly useless as a commercial product,” said Gene. “It could take a wonderful picture of a single sheet of paper at eleven inches. But it has a depth of field of about one inch, and no other applications.”
The T-100’s assembly was closer to watchmaking than any commercial manufacturing process. The owner of the company fabricated each camera himself under a large magnifying glass and halo light using a device he built specifically for the task. “He had all kinds of things that held the different components in place,” explained Gene, who once witnessed the assembly process. “It was a real Rube Goldberg apparatus, but it allowed him to take these little tiny things and put them together. Imagine tying a trout fly and performing ten steps at the same time in three-dimensional space.”
Because the camera was such a singular device, it offered a high level of operational security. Counterintelligence organizations, after all, cannot guard against a device they do not know exists. However, that same singularity and craftsmanship eventually became a cause for concern. By the late l970s, with the T-100 proving itself such a valued piece of Cold War spy gear, operational managers grew concerned about future supplies of the camera. With the small company the sole source for the device and a single individual the only person able to assemble the tiny components, supplies could be jeopardized by something as ordinary as the owner of the company developing a twitch or injuring his hand.
The owner, recognizing the vulnerability of a national asset, provided the camera’s specifications and engineering drawings to the Agency. The complex lens assembly, made up of more than half a dozen elements layered one on top of another, seemed a logical component for second sourcing. One of the premier optical houses in the country seemed the reasonable place to start.
“We said, ‘Here’s a design, what do you think? Can you make this?’” recalled Gene. “Well, they did their computer analysis of the lens and came back to us and said, ‘Nope, it won’t work. The