Spycraft - Melton [140]
The second major requirement for the quiet helicopter was a capability to “see into the night.” Knight and his TSD team needed a Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) system that would allow night flights at low altitude. Knight discovered that the smallest system available weighed several hundred pounds and produced poorly defined images that often resembled blobs.
In principle, infrared “sees” not the gradations of light like a video or still camera does, but differences in temperature. It picks up heat emanating from an object, much like a camera records light reflected from an object. At the time, FLIR was a new technology, somewhat comparable to early “tintype” photography during the Civil War.
When Knight asked a military components company to help with the FLIR problem, two recently graduated electrical engineers, both in their mid-twenties, were identified. Knight, listening to their ideas, did not leave the meeting until long after dark. With more enthusiasm than funding, the engineers saw in Knight and the Agency the opportunity to put their theories into practice.
The next morning, when Knight returned to the company, the FLIR manager was decidedly unfriendly. The manager sensed that the young engineers had committed the company to something that could not be delivered and he did not want the corporate reputation riding on an “impossible” project. Knight countered by writing and signing a letter on the spot absolving the company and the manager of any responsibility for the project’s outcome. “I just wanted those kids, because I was convinced they could do something no one had done before,” Knight recalled. “Those kids were going to run my program without interference from experienced nay-sayers.”
Within sixty days, the two engineers had an operating prototype of their system. What they had done was to rethink the way IR receivers processed signals. Typical IR systems processed long, mechanically scanned linear arrays that had wide variations in line-to-line sensitivity. The young engineers reconfigured existing technology to create a single array of fifteen elements stacked together, which constituted a single-point detector with the capability to scan in both the horizontal and vertical planes. The additional elements allowed the system to take in more information, which was then processed into a more detailed image. The result was sensitivity so high that the FLIR scanned at TV rates.
“We told the engineers it couldn’t weigh over eighty-five pounds and they gave us one that weighed fifteen. We were getting recognizable images—not TV quality—but dang near,” Knight said. “People couldn’t believe the world they were seeing was through the eyes of a thermometer. It was so good you could pick faces out just from the sensitivity that registered vein systems close to the surface of the skin. It was so startling, I think it killed every other FLIR program going on in the country at that point.”
Technology and the human agent were becoming interdependent as each gave the other capabilities and security that had previously not existed. Tiny, reliable, long-life audio devices could supplement an agent’s information by remaining in a room after the agent departed. Small, concealable, low-light cameras enabled agents to clandestinely copy documents in supposedly secured areas. Low-power transmitters provided agents with a communications link to a handler he might never meet.
As the complexity of the technology increased, so did the intricacies of hunting it out. Many of the companies that were once little more than Gene’s garage-shop contractors in the fifties and sixties had grown significantly by the 1970s, a few to multinational status. With their growth, some were no longer able or willing to accommodate the small production runs typical of clandestine equipment. The same problem Lovell faced in recruiting businesses into the specialized and marginally profitable field of intelligence thirty years earlier was now confronted by a new generation