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By Root 680 0

and metal and fabric. It was expected that the techs would be masters of the fabrication skills required of their craft, but they constantly challenged each other to reach the next level by making materials do things they were not intended or expected to do. The best CDs used materials in ways not done elsewhere and possibly never done before. Fabrication skills were one part of creating an illusion; the thought process for the initial idea was of equal importance and an indispensable step in designing a device. Concealments worked because people assumed what they observed was the only reality. A person looking at a lamp could not imagine that illumination was its secondary feature. The primary function of the lamp was storage—storing the hidden camera that was taking the observer’s picture. For clandestine operations, illusion and CDs worked together because people want to believe what they see. The OTS techs succeeded brilliantly in fabricating concealments from physical materials; in time, their next challenge would be to do the same with electronic software.

CHAPTER 23

Clandestine Surveillance

He was now “black”—free of surveillance. Moscow was his.

—Milt Bearden in The Main Enemy

The word “surveillance” comes from the French surveiller, to watch over. The CIA broadened the definition to “watching from anywhere” and relied on TSS and its successor organizations to build and deploy special equipment for surveillance and countersurveillance operations. The CIA has used surveillance for both offensive and defensive purposes by secretly collecting information about the movement and activity of recruitment targets and using countersurveillance to protect CIA officers engaged in clandestine acts.

Surveillance operations employ stationary (fixed or static) or mobile assets as needed. “Stationary surveillance” refers to sustained observations made from fixed sites, which can be apartment buildings, cafés, airports, or intersections. The monitoring attempts to identify either the people transiting the site or the type of activity conducted at the location. The target site would be observed from an observation post manned by trained surveillance personnel using still and video camera systems. As the capability and reliability of visual surveillance equipment improved, unmanned observation posts that recorded and transmitted images to a control point significantly reduced the number of personnel required for multiple fixed-surveillance sites.1

“Mobile surveillance,” conducted primarily by foot, automobile, or airplane, tracks a person or other moving target, such as a vehicle or shipping container. OTS supplied concealed surveillance cameras, disguises, and specialized communication equipment for mobile teams. Mobile surveillance becomes particularly important when terrorists are identified and their movements need to be observed and plotted.

The Fiberscope is composed of a pistol-grip viewer and a flexible shaft designed to enable inspection of remote or inaccessible locations. A panoramic view was obtained by drilling a .315-inch hole in the adjacent wall or ceiling, or by sliding the tip through the target’s keyhole or under the doorway, circa 1968.

Surveillance photography serves dual operational purposes: to establish positive photo identification of a target and operational acts, such as meetings, exchanges of documents, and payoffs. The quality of the photography depends on selecting the right camera for the operational environment. In a stationary observation post, typically located inside a building, camouflaged cameras are prepositioned to photograph a target and can be controlled manually or remotely. Inside an apartment or hotel room with a common wall to the target, covert photographs can be taken from behind a ventilation grille, through a pinhole lens, or using a pre-installed camera “port.” Images from digital cameras may be immediately transmitted to an operational base. In the early 1990s, film cameras began to be replaced by high-resolution digital cameras. At first, images