Spycraft - Melton [50]
Information about CIA activities from reports of the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission provided a more complete picture of post- World War II U.S. intelligence than had ever been seen. Several OTS officers were investigated or subpoenaed as a result of their participation in drug testing projects, assassination planning, mail opening, or support to Nixon’s “White House plumbers” in the Watergate break-in. Eventually all of OTS’s activities were found to have been part of approved operations, and not a single OTS officer was found guilty of any wrongdoing.
While Washington was preoccupied with the politics of scandal, technology was advancing at lightning speed. Personal computers, called “micros” in the parlance of the day, were entering the mainstream. Once the domain of hobbyists and large organizations, these new systems, with their unwieldy five- and eight-inch floppy disks, pointed toward an unexplored world of digitally stored information. The future could also be glimpsed in the hands of teenagers playing a video game called “Pong” from a new company with the strange name: Atari. In U.S. research labs, scientists were laying the digital groundwork for the “wired world.” ARPANET, a Department of Defense-distributed computer network, was quietly expanding into a communication system that would evolve into the Internet within two decades.
For OTS, the question was, how quickly could viable and reliable spy gear be built integrating this new technology? Like their OSS R&D counterparts, OTS engineers recognized that technology flowing from private industry could meet intelligence requirements. Technology for espionage seemed poised to match the imaginations of screenwriters who dreamed up fictions such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission: Impossible. A “pen communicator” or a “self-destructing” taped message seemed plausible. The transistor, which had revolutionized audio surveillance operations a decade earlier when it supplanted the vacuum tube, was now being replaced by the microchip. The reliable, affordable Xerox copier ended the labor-intensive need for OTS techs to photograph, develop, and print copies of sensitive documents agents secretly lent to case officers. For OTS, the question became which one of the technologies to pursue.
Early in 1975, an OTS scientist was invited to the lab of an engineer in another part of the Agency. “I have a technology you guys really ought to look at,” explained the engineer. At the lab, the OTS scientist saw an experimental setup that allowed for storage and retrieval of relatively large amounts of digital information in a very small sphere. Aptly named “bubble memory,” the storage technology could be used to create a new short-range agent communications (SRAC) device.
At the time, SRAC systems could store and transmit only a limited number of characters. With bubble memory, it might be possible to store and transmit entire pages of data. The scientist proposed the project as a practical solution to the communication problem. A few days later, he received an estimate of fifty thousand dollars to build a bench model of a bubble memory module for a SRAC device. Even more quickly, the answer came back—“That’s too much money”—and the project wilted. Eighteen months later, funds appeared, but too late for bubble memory, which was already overtaken by the inexpensive and adaptable Read Only Memory (ROM). Literally, technology was advancing faster than the government’s funding