Spycraft - Melton [141]
The Cold War lacked the immediate urgency of World War II. Convincing a CEO to commit resources and manpower to clandestine endeavors, with the inherent risk of exposure and adverse publicity, became a tough sale. Although research funded by the Agency sometimes gave companies a temporary lead in the marketplace, such as it had done with battery power-saver technology, this ancillary benefit was never assured. In most instances, work for CIA had limited practical application beyond espionage.
In the early 1970s, OTS, in search of a digital device that pushed the limits of memory capacity, assessed the technology used for satellite-based reconnaissance that was moving toward digital imaging. The technology appeared to have clandestine applications. After receiving word that James Early was doing interesting work in the field at Fairchild Semiconductor, OTS sent Ford to investigate. Early, a member of the team that worked for Nobel Prize winner William Shockley on the transistor at Bell Labs, is frequently credited with pioneering efforts in moving the technology into commercial and industrial applications.9
By the time Ford stepped into Early’s lab at Fairchild, the invention of the transistor was two decades in the past and Early, a senior researcher, revered within the engineering and scientific communities. However, Ford found a scientist unwilling to rest on his laurels and showing unrestrained enthusiasm for pushing the limits of digital technology. “I watched him work two blackboards on one side of the room for forty-five damned minutes with more formulas than it took to build an A-bomb,” said Ford. “Finally, I said, ‘What’s it going to take to build this thing?’”
The problem Ford faced was that OTS did not have a budget for theoretical research. Whatever funds were spent had to be committed to a specific device, so Ford instructed Early to build a camera. Early put the price at $25,000 with a completion date of three months. Ford gave him $50,000 and made a mental note the completion date would likely be closer to nine years, rather than ninety days.
Three months later Early was in Ford’s office setting up a contraption consisting of not much more than a small box with a 16mm lens mounted on one side and some wires trailing out from another to a picture tube and power supply. Ford watched as Early switched the device on, and saw one of the first digital images captured by a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD). “The thing worked perfectly. I called a friend of mine over at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and said, ‘I don’t know or care who you have in your office, clear them out, now!’” Ford recalled.10
Packing the device up and with his guest in tow, Ford set up a demonstration in an ARPA office a few miles away. “The ARPA engineer recognized exactly what the impact of this was,” Ford said. “All he asked was, ‘How much money can they sensibly absorb?’”
CCD technology would, in fact, revolutionize traditional tradecraft, make real-time images from space platforms possible, and transform the camera business in the consumer market. “An executive once asked me what was in the presentation that made me believe Early could pull this off,” Ford remembered. “I told him, ‘Nothing.’ The guy lost me after the first foot of formulas on the board. But I’m looking at this sixty-something-year-old engineer, one of the coinventers of the transistor, and he’s jumping around like a twenty-five-year-old kid. I’ll give money to people like that.”
Another problem facing the Agency was the nature of technological advancement itself. The speed at which technology progressed in the three decades after World War II placed OTS engineers in constant competition with consumer and industrial markets. “It’s a race to get my device into the field before every other intelligence service has a countermeasure. Technology is my edge, so I have to get it into my clandestine product quickly,” said one senior OTS scientist.