Spycraft - Melton [174]
“As a new TSD officer, I initially thought this was the kind of stuff that happened every day. A person is called in and gets assigned an important and super-secret job,” said Lipton. “We understood there were many things going on up and down the hall that you didn’t know about. It wasn’t until later, when we started to see successes, that I appreciated how valuable the work was.”
The project traced its origins to a single POW, Navy Captain James B. Stockdale. Shot down over North Vietnam on September 9, 1965, Stockdale at first used letters from prison to his wife, Sybil, to communicate the last names of fellow prisoners, employing a simple code, uncharacteristically referencing several “football mates” from his class at the U.S. Naval Academy. In fact, the three men had not played football with Stockdale, but their last names were the same as missing aviators from his squadron whose status was then unknown.37
U.S. Naval Intelligence was presented with the information and afterward asked for Sybil Stockdale’s cooperation in sending a secret message to her husband using a “special picture.”38 Preparing the first images took weeks, but Sybil began by including a photograph in the one letter her husband was allowed to receive each month. The “photograph of the month” ploy was designed to create a routine pattern of the correspondence so the special photo would not be alerting to North Vietnamese censors.39
In the fall of 1966, the special photo was ready and Sybil devised text in the letter that secretly instructed her husband to submerge the picture in water. Once soaked, the photograph’s layers would separate, allowing her husband to read an enclosed message.40 Sybil’s signal involved a photo of a stand-in for her mother-in-law shown enjoying herself in the ocean. Sybil knew that her husband would immediately recognize the woman was not his mother.41
Sybil’s two letters reached Stockdale just before Christmas of 1966 and were handed to him during a filmed North Vietnamese propaganda session intended to show the humane treatment of American POWs. Stockdale instantly knew the photograph was not of his mother, but remained puzzled as to why his wife sent it. Several days after Christmas, in a moment of frustration, he decided to destroy the photo, then thought: “It’s dumb to throw away something from the States without doing more with it; James Bond would soak it in piss and see if something came out.” Stockdale’s middle name actually was Bond.42
In the few minutes of privacy before the guards made their next rounds, Stockdale filled his drinking cup with urine and stuck the picture inside. After a half hour, nothing happened, other than the “cheesy Polaroid paper starting to fray at the edge.” When he pulled at the edge and separated the two white pieces of the photo, he began to see “small specs” emerge. Suddenly, an entire paragraph appeared on a “decal-like thing” on the inside of the photo paper.43 With only seconds before the guards arrived, he tried to memorize the message, which read:
The letter in the envelope with this picture is written on invisible carbon. . . . All future letters bearing an odd date will be in invisible carbon. . . . Use after you write a letter. . . . Put your letter on hard surface, carbon on top and copy paper on top of that. Write message on copy paper with firm pressure but not enough to indent papers below. . . . Best to write invisible messages in lines perpendicular to lines of plain language of letter home. . . . Use stylus directly in invisible carbon if copy paper not available. . . . A piece of invisible carbon can be used many times. . . . Begin each “carboned” letter with “Darling” and end with “Your adoring husband.” . . . Be careful; being caught using