• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 941 0

recognition. Before leaving for foreign assignments, case officers were trained to apply a variety of false appearances and function normally while in disguise. Each received a “light disguise kit” tailored to the officer’s gender. The kit typically included items like false mustaches and beards, hairpieces, a fake wart, planar lens eyeglasses, hair coloring, collapsible canes, reversible coats, shoe lifts, and dental appliances.28 Some officers, whose assignment required a more elaborate disguise, received full or partial head and face disguises individually sculpted and tinted to blend fully with the wearer’s skin and hair color.29 Because surveillance teams relied heavily on visual indicators to track a target, quick changes in an officer’s appearance—adding or removing a hat, letting hair down, putting on or taking off glasses, or reversing the color of a jacket—might cause surveillance to lose their target in crowds or on busy streets.

In the cat-and-mouse game between surveillance and countersurveillance,the edge traditionally went to the side controlling home territory. For the CIA this meant that they were always at a disadvantage when meeting and handling agents in high-risk or denied areas. Agents had to communicate with their handlers, and defeating surveillance was the key to their protection. Whenever OTS developed a new gadget or disguise that offered an advantage against the ever-present watchers, it would be only a matter of time before its tactical superiority was lost. There had to be a better way for agents to operate and communicate without exposing themselves to hostile surveillance and for OTS the new technology arrived in the form of digital zeros and ones.

CHAPTER 24

Covert Communications

We are surrounded by a world of secret communications . . .

—Eric Cole, Hiding in Plain Sight

America’s intelligence services (CIA, FBI, and some military elements) recruited foreign spies with the access and opportunity to procure (which is to say, steal) secret information considered vital to U.S. national security. However, without an ability to communicate securely with his handler, the spy and his purloined secrets are worthless. Spies were most vulnerable to being caught not while procuring the information, but when attempting to pass their secrets to a third party. Every agent required his own tailored covcom that fit his circumstances and the kind of information he collected. A film cassette filled with photographs of classified memos represented a different covcom problem than passing printed pages of a radar system’s operating manual or the actual circuit board from a missile guidance system.1 Information exchanges between agent and handler must be both secure and secret. Codes and ciphers provide levels of security while digital steganography hides the encrypted information in a cloak of electronic invisibility.2

In the last half of the twentieth century the “Holy Grail” of covcom was envisioned as a secure system of two-way, reliable, on-demand exchange of voice, text, and data 24/7 from and to any location. The message need not necessarily be encrypted, but the communication process must present a low probability of detection and interception. Once concluded, the exchange would leave no record of having occurred or any telltale electronic footprint. Such a system would be used “from anywhere to anywhere” in the world for an agent to “talk” to his handler, CIA Headquarters, or even the President of the United States.

Every CIA covcom system, from the personal meeting between handler and agent to a multimillion-dollar satellite link between an agent and the DCI, consisted of three primary segments: the field set (what the agent used either to receive or send), the transmission backbone (such as shortwave, high-frequency broadcasts that carried the message), and the receiving element. Personal meetings between agent and handler required comparatively less technology while covcom through satellites was dependent on technology. 3 Regardless of the system, each involved