CHAPTER 15
The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
—Dr. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
Espionage novels and movies devote few pages or minutes of screen time to the scientists and engineers who create spy gear. The notable exceptions are James Bond movies and the British gadget-master Q. Acting as the proper British foil to Bond’s more colorful persona, Q invariably anticipated Bond’s technical needs for each mission even as he fussed and fretted over each piece of equipment that left his lab.
Contrary to Q’s uncanny ability to provide Bond with just the right gadgetry no matter how vague the mission, specific operational requirements preceded the design and deployment of OTS devices. In fact, operational requirements drove much of the innovation in the same way competition in consumer products pushes companies to the next level of technological sophistication with their products. Noteworthy is the fact that innovation in clandestine gear is motivated not by market share or quarterly profits, but by the need to ensure the survival of agents and officers. This remains as true today as it was for Lovell and the OSS during World War II.
Through the decades, the Agency had remarkable success in consistently acquiring the required technologies and expertise. By necessity and tradition, OTS sought its devices from a surprisingly wide range of suppliers. Over the years spy gadgetry has been produced by high-profile business leaders and academics as well as obscure inventors. CEOs, attracted by a technical challenge and eager to serve their country, set aside manpower and facilities to establish covert technical units. Nobel Prize-winning scientists and internationally recognized engineers have volunteered to work on OTS projects in their off hours.
However, big ideas were often the products of the smallest companies with highly specialized expertise. A firm with only a handful of employees was just as likely to turn out an amazing piece of hardware as a multinational with nearly unlimited resources. “OTS had long-standing relationships with real garage-shop companies. Sometimes they were no more than ten people. That was the whole company, soup to nuts, including the accountants,” said Gene Nehring, an OTS manager. “We always kidded about some of our suppliers. Some Agency managers would say, ‘You guys deal with every garage shop around.’ And yes, we do, and each one did one little thing better than anyone else, anywhere.”
Perhaps nowhere was this truer than in the case of the T-100 subminiature camera, arguably the most productive piece of Cold War spy gear. Developed and manufactured by a tiny company housed in a nondescript industrial park on the Eastern seaboard, the film-based T-100 was the ultimate spy camera. Unlike the Minox, which was originally designed and marketed as a commercial product, the T-100’s sophisticated optical and mechanical design was so highly specialized and technologically unique there were virtually no uses for the device outside of espionage. It operated like a point-and-shoot camera, but had no viewfinder and required a painstakingly precise process to hand-load the customized film on its miniature cassette. From design to operation, the T-100 had one function: enabling an agent to take a covert, clear picture of the writing, printing, or diagrams on a piece of paper directly in front of him.
“Think about it. That camera, as marvelous as it proved itself, was utterly useless as a commercial product,” said Gene. “It could take a wonderful picture of a single sheet of paper at eleven inches. But it has a depth of field of about one inch, and no other applications.”
The T-100’s assembly was closer to watchmaking than any commercial manufacturing process. The owner of the company fabricated each camera himself under a large magnifying glass and halo light using a device he built specifically for the task. “He had all kinds of things that held the different components in place,” explained Gene, who once witnessed the assembly process. “It was a real Rube Goldberg apparatus, but it allowed him to take these little tiny things and put them together. Imagine tying a trout fly and performing ten steps at the same time in three-dimensional space.”
Because the camera was such a singular device, it offered a high level of operational security. Counterintelligence organizations, after all, cannot guard against a device they do not know exists. However, that same singularity and craftsmanship eventually became a cause for concern. By the late l970s, with the T-100 proving itself such a valued piece of Cold War spy gear, operational managers grew concerned about future supplies of the camera. With the small company the sole source for the device and a single individual the only person able to assemble the tiny components, supplies could be jeopardized by something as ordinary as the owner of the company developing a twitch or injuring his hand.
The owner, recognizing the vulnerability of a national asset, provided the camera’s specifications and engineering drawings to the Agency. The complex lens assembly, made up of more than half a dozen elements layered one on top of another, seemed a logical component for second sourcing. One of the premier optical houses in the country seemed the reasonable place to start.
“We said, ‘Here’s a design, what do you think? Can you make this?’” recalled Gene. “Well, they did their computer analysis of the lens and came back to us and said, ‘Nope, it won’t work. The light won’t focus properly. You’ll never get a picture out of this thing.’ Naturally, we didn’t tell them we already had fifty in stock and they were all working just fine, thank you very much.”
The potential for another source arose after the Agency allowed a friendly intelligence service to borrow some of the prized cameras. Not long afterward, the service requested permission to build its own version. The CIA agreed to share the specs with the understanding that this overseas production run would become the needed second source. After a few months, the friendly intelligence service returned with news that they too had failed to duplicate the camera.
The inventors themselves could be as unique as the devices they created. One of the stranger meetings Gene remembered was in tracking down an inventor of a new type of long-lasting battery at his upstate New York home. “On a February day, I go flying up there,” recalled Gene. “I’m picked up at the airport and as we’re driving out to the house, my colleague says, ‘This isn’t your ordinary contractor. He’s a little eccentric.’”
Not knowing what to expect, Gene arrived at the suburban home of the inventor to find him in the backyard digging a trench with a backhoe. After he completed his digging, the inventor jumped on a small Bobcat bulldozer and filled the trench in before beginning work on another. The trench, as it turned out, had no specific purpose. Digging holes and refilling them was his hobby.
After initial introductions and pleasantries, the inventor invited the two officers to his workshop for a tour. “We went into the cellar, and he had welders, drill presses, all of these tools, and everything said CRAFTSMAN on it. It was like walking into a Sears’ tool department. He had one of everything,” Gene said. “And that’s where he’d assemble these little batteries by hand, in his basement with all of these Craftsman tools. But they were one-of-a-kind and met our needs.”
Eccentricity was not limited to outside contractors. One of OTS’s legendary engineers, Brian Holmes, is remembered as much for his personal style as his remarkable brilliance and creativity. Although Holmes’s engineering work was unsurpassed, what drove managers and colleagues to distraction was Brian himself. Every week seemed to bring Holmes another security violation for leaving classified papers in the open or misplacing materials. Invariably these lapses triggered a broader review of security practices that disrupted the entire division.
“Brian was a nightmare, a wreck. He barely got his clothes on right, except the sonofabitch got medal after medal for coming up with things that nobody else could make,” said Greg Ford, an OTS senior manager.
To make matters worse, Holmes’s immediate supervisor, a by-the-book administrator, was nearly the exact opposite of the brilliant but disorderly engineer. That the bureaucratic fates had placed this odd couple in such close proximity was either funny, tragic, or both. Finally, at the end of his rope, the supervisor appealed to Ford in the plainest possible terms. He just could not take it anymore.
“I had to tell him, ‘You’re the best division chief I’ve got, but if I lose you tomorrow morning, I can replace you by the afternoon. If I lose Holmes, I can’t replace him,’” said Ford. “‘So we have to find a way to deal with this.’”
After giving the problem more thought, Ford hit on a solution. In another part of the OTS complex were several ultrasecure room-sized vaults built to hold equipment too large for the Agency’s standard three-drawer office safes. These windowless rooms featured secure steel doors along with good lighting and ventilation. Ford moved Holmes’s desk and equipment into one of the cavelike rooms, making it his new office and laboratory.
“He loved it, absolutely loved it,” said Ford. “He had all his shit laying around on tables and everywhere else. He knew where everything was. It suited him. And at the end of the day, he didn’t need to put anything in a safe, all he had to do was secure the vault door before he left. Naturally, I’d always have someone else check on it.”
For Ford, the untidy Holmes fell into that rare and precious category of engineers he labeled “inventive bastards.” A valued asset, they were aggressively recruited and then given enough freedom to work their magic. “Let me put it that way, if I have a hundred thousand Chinese, a hundred thousand Russian, and a hundred thousand American engineers, there’s going to be about a hundred and fifty of these creative types in each group,” said Ford. “One of my jobs was to find and convince them to work for OTS, and then protect them.”
Finding, retaining, and protecting these engineers and scientists became an obsession for Ford and the Agency. After World War II and throughout the Cold War, the value of technology to intelligence operations steadily increased as devices grew smaller, more portable and concealable. “Science as a vital arm of intelligence is here to stay. We are in a critical and competitive race with the scientific development of the Soviet Bloc, particularly that of the Soviet Union, and we must see to it that we remain in a position of leadership,” wrote Allen Dulles in the early 1960s. “Some day [sic] this may be as vital to us as radar was to Britain in 1940.”1
Others shared Dulles’s assessment of technology’s importance to espionage and warfare, including MIT professor Dr. Vannevar Bush. During World War II, Bush served as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), the organization into which Lovell was recruited and from which OTS would eventually emerge.2
Even as the war was winding down, Bush was thinking ahead. Looking toward the future, he authored a seminal essay on science and engineering, “As We May Think,” which appeared in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. His insights would prove prophetically accurate. “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it,” Bush wrote.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanizedso that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Bush’s memex could be called the personal computer, though elements of his predictions would eventually turn up in cell phones, PDAs, notebook computers, and even the Internet, all of which serve as supplements to our memories.
In a second paper, this one written for President Roosevelt that same year, titled “Science the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President,” Bush argued that science is a vital resource of the United States, in peacetime and war:
It has been basic United States policy that Government should foster the opening of new frontiers. It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers. . . . Although these frontiers have more or less disappeared, the frontier of science remains. It is in keeping with the American tradition—one which has made the United States great—that new frontiers shall be made accessible for development by all American citizens.
The quandary the Agency faced from the 1950s onward was in identifying applicable new technologies and recruiting the right engineers and scientists. This was no easy task. Men and women with technical skills were becoming highly valued, emerging as the superstars of the post-World War II generation. At Bell Labs, they designed transistors and then integrated circuits. Xerox revolutionized computing by transforming an obscure government-funded project into the first computer with a mouse and graphical interface. Plastics and synthetic materials, jet engines, and televisions were making industrial engineers wealthy and changing the way Americans lived.
Even when the modest starting salary was not an obstacle for prospective hires, OTS faced other special problems in recruiting. Because of the classified nature of the work, CIA employees were prohibited from publishing papers or obtaining patents. By working for the CIA, they could be assured of earning less than in the private sector and receiving no professional prestige that would otherwise accompany publication or publicity of a technical breakthrough. The necessities of security demanded that their hard work, though frequently invaluable, would remain secret. Finally, they might never know how, where, or if their labors had paid off in field operations.
Nevertheless, the Agency found ways to tap America’s engineering and scientific talent. The OSS model of collaborating with private companies that served America’s intelligence effort well during World War II continued to provide TSS and OTS a window into leading-edge research. Eventually, this partnership model provided a decisive advantage over the centralized Soviet system, a fact not lost on some Soviet leaders. “We lack R-and-D and a manufacturing base,” said Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD. “Everything relies on a single supplier, Elektrosyla. The Americans have hundreds of companies with large manufacturing facilities.”3
The Soviet Union, by contrast, handled its need for engineering talent decidedly differently. Its engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who showed particular brilliance or promise were singled out and channeled into advanced studies. If they measured up, they were put to work in intelligence, the most talented sometimes held as virtual captives in KGB-controlled sharashka (prison labs).4 From such facilities The Thing, along with some of the Soviet Union’s most advanced weaponry, aircraft, and rocket technology, including early nuclear devices, emerged.5 Russian aircraft designer A. N. Tupolev was held in one such prison in Bolshevo outside Moscow,6 as was the physicist P. L. Kaptisa. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book The First Circle,7 immortalized his own experiences in the sheraska known as the 01 Institute, which coincidentally also held Leon Theremin, inventor of The Thing.8
The Soviet scientists were left with little choice as to where to apply their talents. “Leave them in peace,” Stalin was reputed to have said of the imprisoned scientists. “We can always shoot them later.”
However, if Beria imagined all of America’s industrial technology focused on defense or intelligence, he was mistaken. Post-World War II industry was largely geared for profit in consumer or industrial markets, and the trick, OTS discovered, was in adapting the innovative commercial and military technologies to clandestine use.
TSD’s inventiveness encompassed aircraft as well as listening devices. The North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo in January of 1968 became the backdrop to one of its most ambitious aviation projects. One of the frustrations facing both the Johnson and Nixon administrations was the seemingly limited options available to avenge such incidents short of declaring war. Responding to the White House, in the spring of 1970, TSD was tasked to develop a means to infiltrate intelligence or paramilitary teams into hostile and otherwise inaccessible areas. “The project got started because of comments attributed to Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger,” recalled one of the principal officers. “We understood he wanted a covert capability to access strategic North Korean targets if we ever decided to attack and destroy them.”
Because the likely military or economic targets would be accessible only by air, a “silent” aircraft operating at night could potentially reach the targets covertly, thereby hiding the U.S. government’s hand in the operation. From an intelligence perspective, such an aircraft could have the additional capabilities for deploying covert sensors for intelligence collection and conducting hostage rescue missions.
The initial requirement called for an aircraft that could fly 1,000 miles without refueling and carry a two-man team along with a modest 150-pound payload. Primarily because of its range, the Hughes OH-6 helicopter was identified as the platform for the project. OTS acquired an “off the shelf” OH-6 and went to work reducing its operating noise.
“First we slowed the tip speed down on the main rotor,” said Jack Knight, the TSD officer who headed the project. “That required we change the rotor, so we made a five-blade version rather than four to get the same lift pattern. We could move the same amount of air at a lower RPM and maintain the same lift. We also changed out the tail rotor, going from two blades to four.”
The engine noise presented a different set of problems. An initial attempt with a muffler failed when a contractor designed one weighing nearly 400 pounds, far too heavy for the OH-6. However, Knight had heard that a commercial aircraft manufacturer was running a program to quiet its jet aircraft and paid the company a visit. “There was a guy working on a ‘quieting program’ for a long haul passenger plane and we went to talk to him,” said Knight. “We asked to borrow him for a few months, but the company had other plans for him. So that was a disappointment. But on the way out the door, he handed me a business card with his home number written on the back. I called that night and he said he’d work on the project during his off hours. He eventually designed an engine quieting system that weighed about thirty pounds, a perfect fit for us.”
What the engineer did, explained Knight, was identify the sound frequencies coming from the engine making the most noise and attacked them by creating a series of sophisticated acoustic chambers. Just as high-end audio speakers are designed internally to acoustically enhance certain frequencies, the engineer’s design performed the opposite function, trapping the sound waves in a carefully constructed series of baffles.
With the rotors and engine silenced—or at least quieted—Knight and his team next targeted the noises coming from the chopper’s other moving parts. First, the transmission was quieted, and then they turned their attention to the converters (small generators) that provided auxiliary power, which were found to be extremely noisy. Their studies eventually led to converting the OH-6 over to solid-state electronics that required less power and smaller, quieter generators. “Then all of a sudden we found a real noisy valve in the fuel control system,” remembered Knight. “You never hear it in a normal helicopter, but it was a screamer. I took it back to the manufacturer and told them to quiet it down. They looked at me like I was a nut case. But they did it using silicone insets to cushion the moving parts.”
From start to finish, the project was completed and delivered in less than two months. The result was an OH-6, operating in “quiet mode,” that could not be heard on the ground as it passed over at 500 feet. Flying at the optimum “quiet” speed of 85 knots, the helicopter was less fuel-efficient, while higher speeds increased the noise but improved fuel efficiency.
Richard Helms, the DCI at the time, followed the progress of the silenced helicopter with great interest. He called Knight in for personal briefings on the project as it moved through various stages, the conversations frequently focusing on the difference between “quiet” and “silent.” One day, Lawrence Houston, Helm’s senior lawyer, called Knight. “I want to go to California and hear this thing,” Houston stated.
Knight obliged, taking Houston out to the Culver City Airport late at night to stand in the center of a darkened runway. Knight ordered a fly-by of a standard OH-6, which was audible from one end of the runway to the other. Houston and Knight stood on the runway tarmac as the sound faded and then vanished altogether. After a few minutes, Houston asked when the quiet helicopter would be coming. “It just did,” Knight replied, and then radioed the pilot to make another pass and illuminate the helicopter when overhead.
“That sonofabitch is quiet!” Houston exclaimed. His report to Helms settled the question of “quiet” versus “silent.”
The second major requirement for the quiet helicopter was a capability to “see into the night.” Knight and his TSD team needed a Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) system that would allow night flights at low altitude. Knight discovered that the smallest system available weighed several hundred pounds and produced poorly defined images that often resembled blobs.
In principle, infrared “sees” not the gradations of light like a video or still camera does, but differences in temperature. It picks up heat emanating from an object, much like a camera records light reflected from an object. At the time, FLIR was a new technology, somewhat comparable to early “tintype” photography during the Civil War.
When Knight asked a military components company to help with the FLIR problem, two recently graduated electrical engineers, both in their mid-twenties, were identified. Knight, listening to their ideas, did not leave the meeting until long after dark. With more enthusiasm than funding, the engineers saw in Knight and the Agency the opportunity to put their theories into practice.
The next morning, when Knight returned to the company, the FLIR manager was decidedly unfriendly. The manager sensed that the young engineers had committed the company to something that could not be delivered and he did not want the corporate reputation riding on an “impossible” project. Knight countered by writing and signing a letter on the spot absolving the company and the manager of any responsibility for the project’s outcome. “I just wanted those kids, because I was convinced they could do something no one had done before,” Knight recalled. “Those kids were going to run my program without interference from experienced nay-sayers.”
Within sixty days, the two engineers had an operating prototype of their system. What they had done was to rethink the way IR receivers processed signals. Typical IR systems processed long, mechanically scanned linear arrays that had wide variations in line-to-line sensitivity. The young engineers reconfigured existing technology to create a single array of fifteen elements stacked together, which constituted a single-point detector with the capability to scan in both the horizontal and vertical planes. The additional elements allowed the system to take in more information, which was then processed into a more detailed image. The result was sensitivity so high that the FLIR scanned at TV rates.
“We told the engineers it couldn’t weigh over eighty-five pounds and they gave us one that weighed fifteen. We were getting recognizable images—not TV quality—but dang near,” Knight said. “People couldn’t believe the world they were seeing was through the eyes of a thermometer. It was so good you could pick faces out just from the sensitivity that registered vein systems close to the surface of the skin. It was so startling, I think it killed every other FLIR program going on in the country at that point.”
Technology and the human agent were becoming interdependent as each gave the other capabilities and security that had previously not existed. Tiny, reliable, long-life audio devices could supplement an agent’s information by remaining in a room after the agent departed. Small, concealable, low-light cameras enabled agents to clandestinely copy documents in supposedly secured areas. Low-power transmitters provided agents with a communications link to a handler he might never meet.
As the complexity of the technology increased, so did the intricacies of hunting it out. Many of the companies that were once little more than Gene’s garage-shop contractors in the fifties and sixties had grown significantly by the 1970s, a few to multinational status. With their growth, some were no longer able or willing to accommodate the small production runs typical of clandestine equipment. The same problem Lovell faced in recruiting businesses into the specialized and marginally profitable field of intelligence thirty years earlier was now confronted by a new generation of Agency managers. However, these managers ran into an obstacle not encountered by Lovell.
The Cold War lacked the immediate urgency of World War II. Convincing a CEO to commit resources and manpower to clandestine endeavors, with the inherent risk of exposure and adverse publicity, became a tough sale. Although research funded by the Agency sometimes gave companies a temporary lead in the marketplace, such as it had done with battery power-saver technology, this ancillary benefit was never assured. In most instances, work for CIA had limited practical application beyond espionage.
In the early 1970s, OTS, in search of a digital device that pushed the limits of memory capacity, assessed the technology used for satellite-based reconnaissance that was moving toward digital imaging. The technology appeared to have clandestine applications. After receiving word that James Early was doing interesting work in the field at Fairchild Semiconductor, OTS sent Ford to investigate. Early, a member of the team that worked for Nobel Prize winner William Shockley on the transistor at Bell Labs, is frequently credited with pioneering efforts in moving the technology into commercial and industrial applications.9
By the time Ford stepped into Early’s lab at Fairchild, the invention of the transistor was two decades in the past and Early, a senior researcher, revered within the engineering and scientific communities. However, Ford found a scientist unwilling to rest on his laurels and showing unrestrained enthusiasm for pushing the limits of digital technology. “I watched him work two blackboards on one side of the room for forty-five damned minutes with more formulas than it took to build an A-bomb,” said Ford. “Finally, I said, ‘What’s it going to take to build this thing?’”
The problem Ford faced was that OTS did not have a budget for theoretical research. Whatever funds were spent had to be committed to a specific device, so Ford instructed Early to build a camera. Early put the price at $25,000 with a completion date of three months. Ford gave him $50,000 and made a mental note the completion date would likely be closer to nine years, rather than ninety days.
Three months later Early was in Ford’s office setting up a contraption consisting of not much more than a small box with a 16mm lens mounted on one side and some wires trailing out from another to a picture tube and power supply. Ford watched as Early switched the device on, and saw one of the first digital images captured by a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD). “The thing worked perfectly. I called a friend of mine over at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and said, ‘I don’t know or care who you have in your office, clear them out, now!’” Ford recalled.10
Packing the device up and with his guest in tow, Ford set up a demonstration in an ARPA office a few miles away. “The ARPA engineer recognized exactly what the impact of this was,” Ford said. “All he asked was, ‘How much money can they sensibly absorb?’”
CCD technology would, in fact, revolutionize traditional tradecraft, make real-time images from space platforms possible, and transform the camera business in the consumer market. “An executive once asked me what was in the presentation that made me believe Early could pull this off,” Ford remembered. “I told him, ‘Nothing.’ The guy lost me after the first foot of formulas on the board. But I’m looking at this sixty-something-year-old engineer, one of the coinventers of the transistor, and he’s jumping around like a twenty-five-year-old kid. I’ll give money to people like that.”
Another problem facing the Agency was the nature of technological advancement itself. The speed at which technology progressed in the three decades after World War II placed OTS engineers in constant competition with consumer and industrial markets. “It’s a race to get my device into the field before every other intelligence service has a countermeasure. Technology is my edge, so I have to get it into my clandestine product quickly,” said one senior OTS scientist. “For instance, until the mid-1980s there were no cell phones and you couldn’t buy a walkie-talkie small enough to use covertly. So we had to build special stuff. Now anyone can buy most of the devices that we had to invent during the Cold War.”
The race against the consumer and industrial markets was one that OTS did not always win. Sometimes, developments in the private sector either overtook Agency engineers or shortened the operational life of a device to a surprising degree. In one notable case during the 1970s, OTS needed a better, more compact recording medium and contracted to have the standard-sized cassette shrunk down to allow for a smaller recorder. The contractor successfully delivered the device, but the effort was largely wasted when the first commercial and equally capable microcassette recorders appeared on the market a few months later.
However, the overall trend of technological proliferation in the consumer marketplace also brought operational benefits. With the spread of small, affordable portable devices, technology was becoming ubiquitous and transparent for people in every part of the world. For example, as Walkman headphones, along with low-priced pocket calculators, pagers, and digital watches became common in the 1980s, these everyday products were adapted or disguised for clandestine use. Audio receivers once hidden beneath lifelike molds of the user’s ear could now be disguised as headsets for music or a cell phone.
Sometimes even standard commercial devices could be pressed into clandestine duty without modification. In an unwitting doctor’s office in a European city during the 1980s, an answering machine, a new technology at the time, picked up calls in the middle of the night. Once or twice a month, a case officer would call the office, leave a brief message, and hang up. A short time later, an agent would call the office and tap in the code to access the messages on the answering machine. After retrieving instructions for a dead drop, he would then erase the secret message, leaving no trail back to his handler or even telephone records.
One OTS scientist recalled a conversation with a case officer returning from Europe in the mid-1980s. The case officer offered details of something called a “cellular phone.” “I want to use this. You figure out how I can make covert calls,” he told the scientist.
As a result of the conversation, the scientist linked up with an operations officer with a technical bent and a senior engineer to figure out how to make early cell phone technology an operational tool. The inspiration the three-man team needed came from the criminal world. At the time, drug dealers in major cities were monitoring cell phone calls and hijacking the phones to ply their illegal trade. The team developed similar technology to snatch random caller codes out of the air in selected foreign countries, creating a covert phone system dubbed the “portable pay phone.” Short-duration calls could be placed using a random number to sever any connection between the case officer and the agent. The borrowed number added only a few barely noticeable pennies to the phone bill of its unwitting owner.
“What’s happened is that as technology kept getting more automated, it became smarter and adaptive,” said the scientist. “The more we could do, the more we’re asked to do. New technologies let you do so many things you couldn’t do before but they also made our older equipment obsolete more quickly.”
Circuit boards and computer chips offered OTS miniaturization and flexibility for building equipment. Digital memory, a common component of modern electronic devices, became a blank slate upon which nearly anything could be written. Increasingly, even under close examination, spy gear was becoming indistinguishable from everyday objects.
Digital tradecraft also advanced the concept of the cloaking function in electronic form—as generations of spies had done with concealments and dead drops—by creating spyware buried deep within lines of software code. The process known as convergence in the consumer marketplace, in which a cell phone stores music along with a datebook or text messaging function, would become the twenty-first-century technical challenge for OTS.