Spycraft - Melton [208]
The OTS team watched at a distance as the Afghanis attacked the job with frightening enthusiasm. What Mark had estimated as a four-day job was finished in less than one. Before the day ended, the Afghanis had removed more than 2,200 pounds of hard case explosives, including fifty-five 122mm tank rounds and more than a hundred antitank mines from the four hot spots. A fifth hot spot turned out to be empty.
The rooftop IED would be classified as rudimentary, but what it lacked in sophistication, it compensated for in size. Detonation would have reduced the palace to rubble, killing or injuring everyone inside, and in all likelihood taking out the U.S.-occupied structure across the courtyard.
“We’ve heard a dozen times from our paramilitary colleagues and the special ops guys that our entire deployment was paid for in full that first day,” noted a team member.
A few days later, with the components of the bomb piled up outside the palace as a photo op, the local commander called a press conference to announce the find and the successful defusing. A single bored reporter, along with a photographer, listened politely and took notes, but no story ever appeared.
The walk-in was invited back to the palace to receive a reward. Afghan and U.S. personnel staged a semiformal ceremony. After drinking his tea, he was given $1,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He showed little reaction to the reward money, which he accepted graciously, and then offered a short speech, declaring that his only motivation was to help his country.
The OTS team remained in Afghanistan for another six weeks, clearing hundreds of tons of ordnance from homes and remote hideaways. While hiking the rugged White Mountain range with Delta Force operators, they discovered caches of aging explosives crammed into the man-made caves. In one cave, stockpiles of mortars and mines were packed from floor to ceiling, extending far back into the mountains. A B-52 bombing strike was required to detonate the massive cache.
On the outskirts of Kandahar, in the rubble of an al-Qaeda training camp, the team discovered and then destroyed dozens of drums of chemicals used to produce the explosive known as triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. A favorite of suicide bombers, TATP was used by would-be shoe-bomber Richard Reid in his foiled attempt to bring down an airplane in December 2001, and again by terrorists in the July 2005 London bombings. The number of lives they saved may never be known.
Upon their return to the United States, members of the team were awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Star for Valor in a ceremony presided over by DCI George Tenet. They became members of an elite cadre of some twenty techs whose courage and service has earned the honor of receiving the Intelligence Star during the fifty-year history of the Office of Technical Service.
SECTION VI
FUNDAMENTALS OF TRADECRAFT
The prized OTS “Spyman” statuette was awarded to officers for honorable service while assigned to the OTS technical and engineering laboratory, 1991.
Author’s Note by H. Keith Melton: As a young naval officer returning from service in Vietnam in the late 1960s, I continued my interest in the world of espionage. The exploits of famous spies were fascinating, but my engineer’s curiosity focused on the more obscure topic of clandestine technology. Many books, almost all produced by nontechnical writers, chronicled noteworthy spy cases, but rarely could I locate details about the gadgets used to secretly photograph documents, plant listening devices, and accomplish other amazing feats. I