Spycraft - Melton [239]
For microphones hardwired to the listaning post, OTS developed special tools to aid in their invisible installation. A small, easily concealed aluminum crowbar was developed for quickly prying baseboards away from the wall to hide wires, as was a special hand-held fine-wire kit that used a razor blade to slice a small slit in a wall, insert a pair of tiny wires, and finally seal the opening using a pencil eraser. The device could lay wires across a painted surface without leaving a trace.12 For audio installations involving damage to woodwork or walls, OTS engineers created special quick-drying putties and odorless paint to hide signs of construction. The tech could complete his installation and cover all traces of his work during a single entry into a target site.
The listening or observation post received and recorded signals from the transmission link for processing. A typical post could contain several recorders, each paired to an implanted collection device. Advances in digital recording created a virtually unlimited recording capacity.
The radio-frequency transmitter became the CIA’s most frequently used device for sending a stolen signal out of a target location. Although the transmitter required batteries or another power source, its signals had an advantage in that they could be monitored anywhere within a kilometer of the installation and farther with the use of repeaters. Since the early 1970s CIA surveillance systems have included the capability for remotely turning the transmitter on and off at selected times to conserve battery power, and storing collected conversations for a remotely programmed transmission at a later time.
For the hardest targets, exotic systems were developed to collect audio via lasers, infrared light, or fiber-optic cables. More technically complex and difficult to maintain than the radio-frequency transmitters, these systems were limited in use but effective in situations where a target employed aggressive technical countermeasures to block, identify, or neutralize a radio-frequency transmission link. Transmitting signals via infrared or laser reduced vulnerability to traditional TSCM “sweep” techniques.
MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson described the difficulties experienced in an operation to bug the penthouse apartment of a suspected Russian intelligence officer in Lisbon. A loft space above the apartment provided a suitable place for hiding the small microphone, but a problem arose in linking the microphone to the recording equipment located in another apartment below. Use of a normal radio link was ruled out for technical reasons, so the alternative was to link the two areas by running a small wire “through a convoluted drainpipe that wound its way down the building.”13 Technical officers experimented with various mechanical crawlers in an effort to thread the wire through the bends of the drainpipe to no avail before hitting on the idea of using a mouse. Tomlinson describes the operation:
Using a fishing line they could dangle the mouse, harnessed to the end of a fishing line, into the top end of the drainpipe. They would then lower it down the vertical section of the pipe to the first right-angled bend. From there the mouse could scurry along the horizontal part of the pipe to the next vertical section and so on, down to the bottom of the pipe where it could be recaptured. The wire could then be attached to the line and pulled through the pipe.
Trials of the mouse-wire delivery system on the Century House drainpipes, using three white mice borrowed from the chemical and biological weapons research establishment at Porton Down, proved reasonably successful. One mouse, nicknamed Mickey, was a natural and scampered through the pipes enthusiastically. A second, Tricky, tried to climb back up the fishing wire when dangled, but once in the pipe,