Spycraft - Melton [97]
The visitor listened for some time, and then abruptly concluded the conversation by saying, “I’m willing to authorize ten times your current budget.” Grant immediately renamed his guest “Mister Moneybags from Headquarters.”
The additional funding, for a new program code named EARWORT, arrived in increments as TSS spent it.28 To the techs, it seemed as if the financial floodgates had opened. Grant’s job turned from scrounging the cheapest equipment possible to talking with development engineers about new mechanical and electronic devices to aid clandestine operations and ordering the most promising. Not every item was successful when put to operational testing, but at long last TSS was seriously in the audio surveillance game.
With new equipment coming online, the need for trained engineers to deploy and service the systems around the world was evident. Prior to 1958, TSS had only a handful of technical operations officers capable of planting bugs and setting up listening posts where the audio take was initially processed. 29 Tech equipment, cameras, microphones, and recorders were typically issued to case officers in the same way as concealments and one-time pads. TSS received an “equipment order,” and then delivered the devices to the case officer along with some basic instruction.
However, the new, more complex—and delicate—devices brought with them the need for an increased expertise. For example, the first over-the-air audio transmitters incorporated glass vacuum tubes in their amplifiers, requiring special care in handling. Something as simple as a bumpy ride in the trunk of a car could play havoc with tubes mounted on a galvanized chassis amid the internal bird’s nest of wiring. If a case officer opened a crate containing a large reel-to-reel tape recorder and found it did not work “out of the box,” the entire system was shipped back to headquarters or a tech dispatched to troubleshoot the problem.
No body of knowledge, experience, manuals or testing protocols, either in-house or with the contractors, existed for those early systems. TSS had no method of documenting or benchmarking electronics destined for clandestine operations. The development and deployment processes were ones of trial and error—with a host both of trials and unforeseen errors. The most frustrating challenges were with technical devices that worked perfectly on the test bench, but then failed when installed for an operation.
In one early mishap, modified reel-to-reel tape recorders intended for telephone taps were designed to accommodate the waiting period between calls by turning the machine off when the line was not in use. In concept, this innovation saved recording tape, limited the need for constant monitoring at a listening post, and improved the efficiency of transcription. The recorders would start when the call began and switch off when the call ended. In testing, the system met the engineering requirements. It was only after deployment was a serious problem recognized. Neither the manufacturer nor the Agency anticipated the long wait times between calls. When a call ended, the recorders turned off the motors that advanced the tape, but did not disengage the magnetic heads. The recording heads, it was discovered, heated up after long periods in the pause mode and eventually melted the motionless recording tape pressed against them.
For an engineer, this was a small problem easily solved with a screwdriver and a quick change of relays to retract the head from the tape when not recording. However, for a nontechnical case officer in South America, the only solution was to call for a traveling tech to change the relays of each recorder at each station.
The installation of concealed listening devices