Spycraft - Melton [136]
The potential for another source arose after the Agency allowed a friendly intelligence service to borrow some of the prized cameras. Not long afterward, the service requested permission to build its own version. The CIA agreed to share the specs with the understanding that this overseas production run would become the needed second source. After a few months, the friendly intelligence service returned with news that they too had failed to duplicate the camera.
The inventors themselves could be as unique as the devices they created. One of the stranger meetings Gene remembered was in tracking down an inventor of a new type of long-lasting battery at his upstate New York home. “On a February day, I go flying up there,” recalled Gene. “I’m picked up at the airport and as we’re driving out to the house, my colleague says, ‘This isn’t your ordinary contractor. He’s a little eccentric.’”
Not knowing what to expect, Gene arrived at the suburban home of the inventor to find him in the backyard digging a trench with a backhoe. After he completed his digging, the inventor jumped on a small Bobcat bulldozer and filled the trench in before beginning work on another. The trench, as it turned out, had no specific purpose. Digging holes and refilling them was his hobby.
After initial introductions and pleasantries, the inventor invited the two officers to his workshop for a tour. “We went into the cellar, and he had welders, drill presses, all of these tools, and everything said CRAFTSMAN on it. It was like walking into a Sears’ tool department. He had one of everything,” Gene said. “And that’s where he’d assemble these little batteries by hand, in his basement with all of these Craftsman tools. But they were one-of-a-kind and met our needs.”
Eccentricity was not limited to outside contractors. One of OTS’s legendary engineers, Brian Holmes, is remembered as much for his personal style as his remarkable brilliance and creativity. Although Holmes’s engineering work was unsurpassed, what drove managers and colleagues to distraction was Brian himself. Every week seemed to bring Holmes another security violation for leaving classified papers in the open or misplacing materials. Invariably these lapses triggered a broader review of security practices that disrupted the entire division.
“Brian was a nightmare, a wreck. He barely got his clothes on right, except the sonofabitch got medal after medal for coming up with things that nobody else could make,” said Greg Ford, an OTS senior manager.
To make matters worse, Holmes’s immediate supervisor, a by-the-book administrator, was nearly the exact opposite of the brilliant but disorderly engineer. That the bureaucratic fates had placed this odd couple in such close proximity was either funny, tragic, or both. Finally, at the end of his rope, the supervisor appealed to Ford in the plainest possible terms. He just could not take it anymore.
“I had to tell him, ‘You’re the best division chief I’ve got, but if I lose you tomorrow morning, I can replace you by the afternoon. If I lose Holmes, I can’t replace him,’” said Ford. “‘So we have to find a way to deal with this.’”
After giving the problem more thought, Ford hit on a solution. In another part of the OTS complex were several ultrasecure room-sized vaults built to hold equipment too large for the Agency’s standard three-drawer office safes. These windowless rooms featured secure steel doors along with good lighting and ventilation. Ford moved Holmes’s desk and equipment into one of the cavelike rooms, making it his new office and laboratory.
“He loved it, absolutely loved it,” said Ford. “He had all his shit laying around on tables and everywhere else. He knew where everything was. It suited him. And at the end of the day, he didn’t need to put anything in a safe, all he had to do was secure the vault door