Spycraft - Melton [254]
Because SRAC could be initiated by the agent, the CIA then had a reliable capability to receive time-sensitive reporting and could immediately retask the agent with follow-up requirements.46 When military tensions between Greece and Turkey were at the flash point during the 1990s, senior CIA officers credited the near-real-time agent reporting through SRAC systems with preventing war between the two countries. SRAC was the principal covcom link between the CIA and General Dimitri Polyakov when the latter actively spied for the United States during the 1970s in Moscow, and later played a critical role in Colonel Kuklinski’s successful 1980 exfiltration from Poland.
The SRAC device used by Kuklinski was prepared for him under an OTS project code-named DISCUS and was known at the Warsaw station under the code name ISKRA.47 It was described as follows:
The size of a pack of cigarettes, it weighed about half a pound and had a keyboard and memory. Kuklinski could type in a message at home, place the device in his pocket, and carry it somewhere else. There he could push the transmission button without removing the ISKRA from his pocket. The device had a small window through which a single line of text could be read, from an outgoing or incoming message. If he transmitted directly into the embassy, an alarm would sound in the Warsaw station. As a rule, Kuklinski was asked to leave a signal in the morning that he would transmit in the night, and an officer would take another ISKRA outside to receive the message.48
The OTS SRAC systems were an early form of text messaging. In the 1980s, receive-only digital pagers were introduced to the consumer market, and later enhanced in the 1990s with the capability to both transmit and receive messages. Once text messaging over cell phones was developed, the use exploded globally, with hundreds of millions of messages being sent daily. Both pagers and cell phones offered new potential for covcom and possessed added advantage that the agent did not require dedicated spy gear to communicate. However, these systems were particularly vulnerable to counterintelligence detection if not operated with the disciplined tradecraft needed to maintain their clandestine use.
As early as the mid-1960s, the CIA recognized the potential for using satellites for agent communications. The idea was that an agent with a small handset could beam his information to an orbiting satellite, which, in turn, would relay the data to a receiving site. By combining a satellite-send system with his OWVL, the agent could transmit and receive secret intelligence inside his home country without personal contact with a CIA officer. The capability, first deployed in the late 1960s under the codename BIRDBOOK, used low-earth-orbit satellites as “bent-pipe” relays for the agents’ messages.49
Unfortunately, field realities limited the operational use of BIRDBOOK. Agents had only a five-to-seven-minute window to “shoot” the message to the satellite as it arced across the sky. Success also depended on a clear line-of-sight transmission path as well as the precise orientation and positioning of the transmit antenna. 50 Hostile counterintelligence services learned of the system and developed means to intercept the signal and triangulate the agent’s position using direction-finding techniques.
Despite its limitations, BIRDBOOK