Spycraft - Melton [138]
Nevertheless, the Agency found ways to tap America’s engineering and scientific talent. The OSS model of collaborating with private companies that served America’s intelligence effort well during World War II continued to provide TSS and OTS a window into leading-edge research. Eventually, this partnership model provided a decisive advantage over the centralized Soviet system, a fact not lost on some Soviet leaders. “We lack R-and-D and a manufacturing base,” said Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD. “Everything relies on a single supplier, Elektrosyla. The Americans have hundreds of companies with large manufacturing facilities.”3
The Soviet Union, by contrast, handled its need for engineering talent decidedly differently. Its engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who showed particular brilliance or promise were singled out and channeled into advanced studies. If they measured up, they were put to work in intelligence, the most talented sometimes held as virtual captives in KGB-controlled sharashka (prison labs).4 From such facilities The Thing, along with some of the Soviet Union’s most advanced weaponry, aircraft, and rocket technology, including early nuclear devices, emerged.5 Russian aircraft designer A. N. Tupolev was held in one such prison in Bolshevo outside Moscow,6 as was the physicist P. L. Kaptisa. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book The First Circle,7 immortalized his own experiences in the sheraska known as the 01 Institute, which coincidentally also held Leon Theremin, inventor of The Thing.8
The Soviet scientists were left with little choice as to where to apply their talents. “Leave them in peace,” Stalin was reputed to have said of the imprisoned scientists. “We can always shoot them later.”
However, if Beria imagined all of America’s industrial technology focused on defense or intelligence, he was mistaken. Post-World War II industry was largely geared for profit in consumer or industrial markets, and the trick, OTS discovered, was in adapting the innovative commercial and military technologies to clandestine use.
TSD’s inventiveness encompassed aircraft as well as listening devices. The North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo in January of 1968 became the backdrop to one of its most ambitious aviation projects. One of the frustrations facing both the Johnson and Nixon administrations was the seemingly limited options available to avenge such incidents short of declaring war. Responding to the White House, in the spring of 1970, TSD was tasked to develop a means to infiltrate intelligence or paramilitary teams into hostile and otherwise inaccessible areas. “The project got started because of comments attributed to Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger,” recalled one of the principal officers. “We understood he wanted a covert capability to access strategic North Korean targets if we ever decided to attack and destroy them.”
Because the likely military or economic targets would be accessible only by air, a “silent” aircraft operating at night could potentially reach the targets covertly, thereby hiding the U.S. government’s hand in the operation. From an intelligence perspective, such an aircraft could have the additional capabilities for deploying covert sensors for intelligence collection and conducting hostage rescue missions.
The initial requirement called for an aircraft that could fly 1,000 miles without refueling and carry a two-man team along with