Spycraft - Melton [5]
Roy’s briefing supplemented my prior knowledge of OTS from two recent assignments, one operational and the other administrative. For two years in the early 1990s, I served as Deputy Chief for the CIA’s nonofficial cover (NOC) program. There I worked with OTS officers who support NOC officers with documentation, covert communications, disguise, identities, and concealments to assure the NOCs were never identified with the U.S. government. The OTS provided the equipment and documents that enabled NOCs to live a “normal” life as, say, a businessman, freelance photographer, scientist, or rice merchant while engaging in their clandestine work for the Agency.
In the Comptroller’s Office, I encountered OTS from the perch of a budget weenie.3 Beginning in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Comptroller had the unenviable task of managing a declining CIA budget at a time when operations officers were, in reality, being pressed by demands for new, better, and faster intelligence on counterproliferation, counterterrorism, and counternarcotics. OTS, like other components of the CIA, struggled to absorb the impact of reduced budgets without any reduction in demands for spy gear.
For the next three years as OTS Deputy Director or Acting Director, I would deal firsthand with the damage that the budget cuts of the 1990s did to the CIA’s countersurveillance systems, advanced power sources, technical counterintelligence capabilities, and paramilitary-related weapons and training.4 Then, beginning in 1999, as new resources began to be available, I would have the opportunity as Director to lead OTS in creating and reconstituting capabilities for the twenty-first century.
From its formation in 1951, OTS concentrated its efforts on creating devices and capabilities to improve the CIA’s ability to identify, recruit, and securely handle clandestine agents. Whether the operational requirement needed research, development, engineering, production, training, or deployment, OTS responded. Motivated by a philosophy of limitless possibility, a few hundred technical specialists gave American intelligence its decisive technical advantage in the Cold War, a conflict that continues today in the worldwide battle against terrorists.
Collectively, the stories that form the OTS history convey a level of dedication and commitment by officers whose pride in their service to America was more important than personal wealth or individual acclaim. At their best, these experiences are models for successive generations of intelligence officers who would apply technology to agent operations. I cannot imagine a more rewarding responsibility or an honor greater than working with this remarkable cadre of technical officers, successors to the rich heritage of OSS General William Donovan and his chief technical genius, New England chemist Stanley Lovell.
The genesis of Spycraft occurred during an afternoon-long conversation with John Aalto, a retired case officer, in San Antonio in February 1999. I had been appointed Director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service three months earlier. John had joined the CIA in 1950 and spent the next five decades in Soviet operations.
John took note of my recent appointment and with unexpected seriousness asked, “Do you have any concept of what OTS and its predecessor, the Technical Services Division, accomplished for operations?”
Before I could respond, John continued. “I tell you,” he began, “it is because of the techs and TSD that we in Soviet operations eventually won the intelligence war against the KGB in Moscow. And to my knowledge, no one has ever recorded that story,