Spycraft - Melton [6]
Over the next three hours John described a remarkable inventory of TSD devices, technologies, inventions, gadgets, and tricks that he and others used in Moscow and throughout the Iron Curtain countries during the forty-year Cold War. He recounted fascinating tales about the leadership of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the cleverness of the TSD engineers, the inventiveness of the field techs, and the determination shared by TDS and Soviet Division case officers to break the stranglehold of the KGB on the CIA’s operations in Moscow.
“You should do something,” John urged, “to get this story recorded before all of us who were involved are gone and the inevitable organizational changes at CIA obscure this history.”
Two years earlier I had met H. Keith Melton, a lifelong student of intelligence history and private collector of espionage devices and equipment. Keith lent the Agency hundreds of artifacts from his private collection of espionage equipment for display during the CIA’s fiftieth anniversary in 1997. Subsequently, I assisted Keith in transforming the display into a permanent Cold War exhibit in CIA’s Original Headquarters Building. On September 7, 2001, OTS celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a gala dinner highlighted by Keith’s presentation of the international history of spy gadgets and technical espionage.
Shortly after I retired, Keith and I had dinner during one of his visits to Washington. As we shared our admiration of the creativity and courage of the engineers and technical officers whom we had come to know, Keith asked if I had considered writing an account of my tenure as OTS Director. I had not, but his question reminded me of John Aalto’s admonition four years earlier and sparked the idea of writing a public history of OTS from the accounts of retired technical officers. It would be a true espionage story that, combined with Keith’s wealth of knowledge and images of historical spy gear, could be a valuable addition to intelligence literature. Keith agreed, and Spycraft was born.
We understood the obligations from my CIA employment to submit writing about intelligence subjects to the Agency for prepublication review to preclude the inadvertent release of classified information. I anticipated no particular difficulties with such review. Before beginning the project, I met with the CIA’s Publications Review Board, outlined the concept, and received encouragement to proceed. In July 2004, the board approved a detailed outline of a proposed “popular account of OTS adventures and contributions to U.S. intelligence” along with the two sample chapters we had submitted. Relying on that approval, we contracted with Dutton, an imprint of Penguin USA, for publication, with full expectation of delivering a properly Agency-reviewed manuscript in late 2005. We submitted our 774-page manuscript under the title An Uncommon Service, to the board on September 6, 2005. Agency regulations specify manuscripts are to be reviewed within thirty days.
After six months, on March 13, 2006, the board issued us a letter stating: “except for Chapters 1-3 your manuscript is inappropriate for disclosure in the public domain.” The Agency had approved only the first thirty-four pages, all of which discussed equipment from the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) World War II inventory. The 740 “inappropriate” pages included the previously approved detailed outline and sample chapters. No specific classified material was identified. Rather, the Agency applied a previously discredited “mosaic theory” of redaction, contending that a compilation of unclassified information becomes classified when written by someone at my senior level. The board’s letter asserted that “in the aggregate the manuscript provides so much information . . . it would be of immense value to our adversaries.” There seemed to be no awareness that adversaries read English and have the same Internet access and Google tools we used in our research.
During my previous seven years with OTS, I reviewed several books and