Spycraft - Melton [64]
Youthful officers provided another, though unexpected, operational benefit. The baby boomers were, compared to the earlier generation of officers, comfortable with the pace of technological innovation. They had grown up with consumer products being regularly introduced, updated, and drifting into obsolescence. In their experience, one technology always supplanted another. Every gadget got smaller, more reliable, and less expensive. If a transistor was better than a vacuum tube, then a printed circuit board was superior to a transistor, and another advance could be expected within a few years. This expectation carried over from consumer products to a constant demand for newer, smaller, and more reliable spy gear.
Just as the class of scientists that entered OTS in the 1960s found technology in the lab lagging behind what existed in private research centers, the new case officers entering the DO in the 1970s discovered that their expectations of “spy gadgets” outpaced the reality. The fantasy of 1960s TV spy shows such as Get Smart and Mission: Impossible, together with the popularity of the James Bond movies, had changed expectations about the role technology played in supporting operations. Ops officers began to believe that the “magic” of engineering and spy gadgetry they saw in Q’s laboratory might be, at least on some level, real.1 Senior OTS officers recall temporarily reassigning techs to telephone duty to handle inquiries on the day following the airing of new episodes of Mission: Impossible. Most of the calls were from operations officers who wanted to know, “Could OTS do that?”
Case officers did not need to understand the physics that put Neil Arm-strong and his crew on the moon. It was enough to know it was possible. The same was true about the science behind a dry secret writing carbon paper or a battery that would last twenty years in an eavesdropping device. All that mattered was that it worked, was reliable, and met the operational requirement at hand.
As technology advanced, CIA scientists began designing large-scale, highly sophisticated technical collection platforms. In many cases, these plans were so imaginative they led to a conflict between the technically possible and operationally realistic. A technically viable operation from the perspective of a Langley laboratory could represent an unacceptably high risk for the case officer facing KGB surveillance in Moscow. Another problem arose when sophisticated equipment that performed flawlessly in the lab proved impractical to maintain and service in the field.
To resolve these conflicts between technology and operations in Moscow, the TOO became the trusted intermediary between the cadre of scientists at Langley and the case officers in Moscow. The TOO’s role was that of translating case officers’ requirements into the technical language of engineers and making technical constraints understandable to the ops planners. Case officers needed to appreciate the limitations, as well as the capabilities these advanced systems offered while the design engineers had to recognize the clandestine realities of the denied area.
“Back in the late seventies and early eighties the DO and OTS regularly received proposals for technical collection operations in denied areas,” recalled one tech who served in Moscow. “A scenario could require getting someone fifty kilometers outside the city, carrying eighty pounds of equipment, then climbing a tree to a height of about a hundred feet, putting a collection package up there and aligning the antenna to within a degree or two, while evading surveillance the entire time. Well, as valid as the target