Spycraft - Melton [95]
The Thing arrived at the TSS lab in 1952, but the audio engineers had no point of reference against which to assess the device or understand how it worked. Data on covert listening and transmitting devices, comparable to research on military weapons systems or private sector consumer products, simply did not exist. Cataloging data on technical collection devices was a new concept for American intelligence and the Soviet passive resonator technology exceeded anything TSS could even attempt.
However, like all “finds” (discoveries of clandestine devices), The Thing revealed certain key capabilities of its host service.23 The first was the cleverness of design. The Thing demonstrated that Soviet intelligence possessed a technical expertise not matched by the CIA. Second, the construction suggested that the Soviet engineering approach relied on creating one-off custom-made pieces specifically produced for each operation. The device was not mass-produced or made in a serial production of fifty or a hundred identical units with interchangeable components. To the TSS engineers, The Thing looked to be expertly crafted and built entirely by hand.
The Thing underscored deficiencies in U.S. technical capabilities compared to the Soviets as well as highlighting some Soviet weak points, such as a lack of technical innovations spurred by a consumer-based economy. Without private industries to offset some of the costs of building laboratories or production facilities, the Soviets’ intelligence service had to underwrite all the costs for developing spy gear. This contrasted sharply to the OSS tradition of recruiting private industry to support intelligence. There could also be little doubt that The Thing was the product of Russia’s long involvement with espionage dating back to the time of the czars while America’s espionage capability, particularly in the technological sense, was still in its infancy.
The engineers at Indian Head recognized the huge gap as well as the larger, more basic and immediate question facing them: Precisely, how do you go about building a better bug?
The state of available technology in the 1950s limited the CIA’s audio operations to little more than running a microphone wire or a telephone line to a set of headphones. Even among the war surplus equipment there was little of real value. The OSS technical staff had concentrated its efforts on creating special weapons and explosive devices for equipping partisan forces and operatives behind enemy lines. Few of the wartime agency’s resources were devoted to technical aids for agent operations and even less to developing eavesdropping equipment.24 The U.S. Army Signal Corps had produced a bugging kit but, at more than a decade old, it was sorely outdated.
While some equipment such as microphones and amplifiers was available on the commercial market, these devices were bulky and generally not suitable for covert duty. As a result, the Agency’s supply of devices was limited to obsolete military surplus and whatever Kurt and his colleagues could scrounge, assemble, or modify from the telephone company or recording industry.
There was also little experience among the TSS staff. Most of the engineers, like Kurt, were just out of college, and in their mid-twenties or a little older if they had served in the war. The older TSS engineers’ wartime experience tended toward equipment like radar, sonar, and large shipboard systems rather than clandestine audio surveillance. It would take the young engineers time, and trial and error to learn the new business of covert audio operations. And the world was on the verge of a technological revolution that put them in the right place at precisely the right time.
In 1947, scientists at Bell Labs demonstrated the germanium transistor and patented it the next year. By 1952, transistors were being