Spycraft - Melton [92]
Luxury or business traveler hotels tended to boast large, attentive staffs that would notice an American businessman leaving late in the evening and returning in the early hours of the morning with traces of plaster dust on his shoes or paint flecks in his hair. On the other hand, tech hotel staff conveniently overlooked the comings and goings of their guests. If an American departed in the early evening and returned just before dawn with his hair matted with sweat and in need of a bath, it would not be the first time such a thing happened.
One technical operations officer realized he had ventured too far down the hostelry pecking order when the desk clerk asked incredulously, “You mean you want the room for the entire night?” Another tech found his own limits of frugality tested when he and his partner checked into a hotel offering a double bed for $3.50 a night. “You know, if we shared a room, we could cut the cost in half,” the aggressively thrifty tech suggested.
As for their reputed penchant for beer—well, beer just tasted good and made other deficiencies seem less important. It was also safe. In countries where drinking the local water was a health risk, beer served double duty as thirst-quenching beverage and “water” for brushing teeth. During one operation that confined six techs in a target facility for several days, the team member in charge of providing food provisioned generous quantities of beer, canned tuna—and nothing else. In the sweltering heat of the empty warehouse, the odor produced by a sustained diet of tuna and beer led to a unanimous vote to prohibit that particular tech from outfitting the team with provisions again. Ever.
Despite living and working in these austere conditions, techs brought “technical magic” to operations. Their sophisticated gear tapped into secrets hidden behind the high walls and closed doors of secure installations. Their equipment combined with expert installation captured the private conversations of people to whom the Agency had no other access. The moods, personal doubts, and aspirations of potential recruitment targets held on reels of audiotape offered case officers a unique peek into their professional and personal world. Recordings of official discussions of policy and diplomatic strategies provided CIA analysts and policy makers with well-sourced, hard strategic intelligence as well as tactical counterintelligence that supported law enforcement.
None of this was lost on the techs themselves—neither the excitement of the operations nor the value of the intelligence take. “If it ain’t audio, it ain’t shit,” became their unofficial motto and was proudly displayed on the desk of the audio chief during the 1970s. They were the “top guns” of the OTS and none of them doubted it for a second. However, the colorful tech culture, the technology, and the intelligence that flowed from it did not materialize overnight. The advanced technology, like the tech culture, evolved over two decades. The devices as well as the expertise to make them work were built from the ground up.
The Technical Services Staff was not a year old in 1952 when the CIA received information about an alarming audio discovery in Moscow. During an electronic sweep, the countermeasures team discovered a device secreted in the wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States that hung behind Ambassador George Kennan’s desk in his residence at Spaso House, barely a mile from the Kremlin, at No. 10 Spasopeskovskaya Square.4 The seal had been hanging there seven years, after a group of Soviet Young Pioneers presented it as a token of friendship on July 4, 1945, to then U.S. Ambassador, W. Averell Harriman. The gift, presented by smiling children in neatly pressed uniforms, concealed a listening device that would baffle and frustrate the Agency for years. “The Englishmen will die of envy,” Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin’s personal translator, whispered to Ambassador Harriman during presentation.5
That the Soviets bugged the U.S. Ambassador’s office should have come