Spycraft - Melton [137]
For Ford, the untidy Holmes fell into that rare and precious category of engineers he labeled “inventive bastards.” A valued asset, they were aggressively recruited and then given enough freedom to work their magic. “Let me put it that way, if I have a hundred thousand Chinese, a hundred thousand Russian, and a hundred thousand American engineers, there’s going to be about a hundred and fifty of these creative types in each group,” said Ford. “One of my jobs was to find and convince them to work for OTS, and then protect them.”
Finding, retaining, and protecting these engineers and scientists became an obsession for Ford and the Agency. After World War II and throughout the Cold War, the value of technology to intelligence operations steadily increased as devices grew smaller, more portable and concealable. “Science as a vital arm of intelligence is here to stay. We are in a critical and competitive race with the scientific development of the Soviet Bloc, particularly that of the Soviet Union, and we must see to it that we remain in a position of leadership,” wrote Allen Dulles in the early 1960s. “Some day [sic] this may be as vital to us as radar was to Britain in 1940.”1
Others shared Dulles’s assessment of technology’s importance to espionage and warfare, including MIT professor Dr. Vannevar Bush. During World War II, Bush served as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), the organization into which Lovell was recruited and from which OTS would eventually emerge.2
Even as the war was winding down, Bush was thinking ahead. Looking toward the future, he authored a seminal essay on science and engineering, “As We May Think,” which appeared in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. His insights would prove prophetically accurate. “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it,” Bush wrote.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanizedso that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Bush’s memex could be called the personal computer, though elements of his predictions would eventually turn up in cell phones, PDAs, notebook computers, and even the Internet, all of which serve as supplements to our memories.
In a second paper, this one written for President Roosevelt that same year, titled “Science the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President,” Bush argued that science is a vital resource of the United States, in peacetime and war:
It has been basic United States policy that Government should foster the opening of new frontiers. It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers. . . . Although these frontiers have more or less disappeared, the frontier of science remains. It is in keeping with the American tradition—one which has made the United States great—that new frontiers shall be made accessible for development by all American citizens.
The quandary the Agency faced from the 1950s onward was in identifying applicable new technologies and recruiting the right engineers and scientists. This was no easy task. Men and women with technical skills were becoming highly valued, emerging as the superstars of the post-World War II generation. At Bell Labs, they designed transistors and then integrated circuits. Xerox revolutionized computing by transforming an obscure government-funded project into the first computer with a mouse and graphical interface. Plastics and synthetic materials, jet engines, and televisions were making industrial engineers wealthy and changing the way Americans lived.
Even when the modest starting salary was not an obstacle