Spycraft - Melton [142]
The race against the consumer and industrial markets was one that OTS did not always win. Sometimes, developments in the private sector either overtook Agency engineers or shortened the operational life of a device to a surprising degree. In one notable case during the 1970s, OTS needed a better, more compact recording medium and contracted to have the standard-sized cassette shrunk down to allow for a smaller recorder. The contractor successfully delivered the device, but the effort was largely wasted when the first commercial and equally capable microcassette recorders appeared on the market a few months later.
However, the overall trend of technological proliferation in the consumer marketplace also brought operational benefits. With the spread of small, affordable portable devices, technology was becoming ubiquitous and transparent for people in every part of the world. For example, as Walkman headphones, along with low-priced pocket calculators, pagers, and digital watches became common in the 1980s, these everyday products were adapted or disguised for clandestine use. Audio receivers once hidden beneath lifelike molds of the user’s ear could now be disguised as headsets for music or a cell phone.
Sometimes even standard commercial devices could be pressed into clandestine duty without modification. In an unwitting doctor’s office in a European city during the 1980s, an answering machine, a new technology at the time, picked up calls in the middle of the night. Once or twice a month, a case officer would call the office, leave a brief message, and hang up. A short time later, an agent would call the office and tap in the code to access the messages on the answering machine. After retrieving instructions for a dead drop, he would then erase the secret message, leaving no trail back to his handler or even telephone records.
One OTS scientist recalled a conversation with a case officer returning from Europe in the mid-1980s. The case officer offered details of something called a “cellular phone.” “I want to use this. You figure out how I can make covert calls,” he told the scientist.
As a result of the conversation, the scientist linked up with an operations officer with a technical bent and a senior engineer to figure out how to make early cell phone technology an operational tool. The inspiration the three-man team needed came from the criminal world. At the time, drug dealers in major cities were monitoring cell phone calls and hijacking the phones to ply their illegal trade. The team developed similar technology to snatch random caller codes out of the air in selected foreign countries, creating a covert phone system dubbed the “portable pay phone.” Short-duration calls could be placed using a random number to sever any connection between the case officer and the agent. The borrowed number added only a few barely noticeable pennies to the phone bill of its unwitting owner.
“What’s happened is that as technology kept getting more automated, it became smarter and adaptive,” said the scientist. “The more we could do, the more we’re asked to do. New technologies let you do so many things you couldn’t do before but they also made our older equipment obsolete more quickly.”
Circuit boards and computer chips offered OTS miniaturization and flexibility for building equipment. Digital memory, a common component of modern electronic devices, became a blank slate upon which nearly anything could be written. Increasingly, even under close examination, spy gear was becoming indistinguishable from everyday objects.
Digital tradecraft also advanced the concept of the cloaking function in electronic form—as generations of spies had done with concealments and dead drops—by creating spyware buried deep within lines of software code. The process known as