Spycraft - Melton [98]
While the case officers designed the nontechnical elements of every operation, their limited understanding of the technical requirements for a successful installation did not pass without notice. “What are the two biggest lies techs tell?” went the question, followed by the punch line, “The time of my commute to work and the amount of time we tell the case officer the installation will take.”
Most problems boiled down to understanding the capabilities and limits of the technology. Nontechnical case officers, seeing new technologies emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, were prone to either underestimating capabilities or overestimating benefit. Impractical operations proposed by case officers soon became part of the unofficial lore of techs who diplomatically described the most fanciful of these operations as “high-risk options.” One courageous case officer suggested a bugging operation that would have had him lowered by helicopter onto the balcony of the target’s apartment in a major European city. Although dramatic—even movie worthy—it failed the basic audio operational standard that surreptitious entry be clandestine. A helicopter hovering in central Madrid with a case officer dangling from a rope ladder would likely be noticed. Another proposal involved a tunneling operation in which the managing case officer suggested that the tons of dirt and debris generated could be flushed down toilets and carried away by the city’s sewer system.
The growing awareness that technical devices offered enormous potential for intelligence collection demanded a new type of case officer-technical officer interface. If case officers were not qualified for the technical phase of most operations, engineers in the lab were equally untrained and unsuited in the basic tradecraft required for field operations. Laboratory engineers had neither the training nor experience to plan surveillance detection routes or select usable dead drop sites.
As more audio operations were conducted in the 1960s, case officers and audio techs found themselves dependent on each other’s skills. Audio techs planting bugs were often in apartments without the knowledge of the resident or on the property of another government. They usually worked under time constraints and the stress of possible discovery. Mistakes and miscalculations were costly because second opportunities for an entry were rare and no traces of their work could be left behind.
Installations of audio devices also frequently called for technical improvisation when the operation was not accurately described in the planning phase or if equipment simply failed.30 Troubleshooting a short-circuit in the bug with a voltmeter at 0200 hours in the basement of a foreign consulate, then cobbling together a fix from a limited selection of spare parts required a special personality. What the Agency needed was a hybrid of the technically oriented, creative, street smart, and pragmatic individual who thrived on adventure.
TSS cast its net wide, seeking out likely recruits among telephone companies, military bases, technical schools, and commercial radio stations along with the emerging television industry. They placed ads in popular technical and science publications without identifying the prospective employer. 31 While these first tech recruits may not have known how to design a new audio device from scratch, they knew how to read a schematic and their way around a soldering iron. They were natural tinkerers who grew up taking radios and cars apart, and then putting them back together. As kids, they played with erector sets and read magazines