EPILOGUE
For 50 years OTS [officers] stood ready to serve whenever and wherever America’s leaders needed their talents.
—President George W. Bush, letter to CIA, August 24, 2001
John McMahon had more connections to OTS than any other senior CIA officer. In May 1973, he became its first director when TSD was moved from the Directorate of Operations to the Directorate of Science and Technology and renamed. McMahon relied on OTS for technical support as Deputy Director for Operations (1978-1981) and directed the CIA’s technical programs as the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (1981-1985). He was an informal advisor to OTS directors after leaving government service and served as the honorary chairman of the Fiftieth Anniversary Committee.
On September 7, 2001, McMahon addressed an audience of 500 retired and active CIA officers who gathered to celebrate OTS’s golden anniversary in the Agency’s auditorium. “Technical services [are] driven not just by advances in technology, but more importantly by the innovation of the technical officers to capture the potential of technology and bring it to application in operation,” McMahon observed. Turning to how the CIA’s operations officers used spy gear, McMahon said he detected a recurring fifty-year pattern: “Build it and they will try it—make it work and they will come back.”
McMahon’s remarks encompassed a half century of OTS contributions to clandestine operations. OTS forgers had fabricated documents for agents to infiltrate the Soviet Union in the early 1950s and created alias cyber-identities for case officers five decades later. OTS chemists made undetectable secret inks when writing was a primary means for clandestine communications, and its electrical engineers seized technology to develop radios whose millisecond transmissions were almost impossible to intercept. OTS psychologists evaluated the motivation and courage of a would-be agent. Mechanical engineers hid audio bugs in lamps to capture private conversations. These were the scientists, engineers, and craftsmen who built America’s gadgets and disguises. They bugged embassies, trained saboteurs, and tracked down terrorists. When an operation went awry, they sat in foreign jails. When others were held hostage, they came to help.
From its beginning, OTS understood that supporting operations was its mission. Whether the operational requirement needed research, development, engineering, production, training, or deployment, OTS acted, driven by a philosophy of unapologetic responsiveness to national security needs. No constraints were placed on the imagination of the Agency’s technical wizards. “If we can think it, we can do it. Our boundaries are the limits of what we can imagine, and, sometimes, the laws of physics,” said a tech who devoted thirty-five years to OTS. This philosophy of limitless possibility produced an organization of a few thousand technical specialists who gave U.S. intelligence its decisive Cold War technical advantage and continue to equip the CIA for its battle against terrorism.
If not attempted during rush hour, the eight-mile drive from CIA Headquarters in Langley to Capitol Hill takes no more than fifteen minutes. The route, south along the George Washington Parkway across Memorial Bridge and down Constitution Avenue, provides a tourist’s view of famed landmarks—the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the White House, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and, finally, the Capitol dome.
On such trips, I found myself moved by the familiar yet singular symbolism of these monuments to liberty. I passed those landmarks scores of times as Director of OTS to meet with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Responsible for congressional oversight of the CIA, these committees needed to know the requirements and problems of Agency components and I was determined that they hear about them firsthand from OTS. The conversations, held in secure rooms in the Hart Senate Building or the south wing of the Capitol, were frank, detailed, and not broadcast by C-SPAN or leaked to the newspapers.
Speaking with members of Congress and their staff, I defended and advocated funding for OTS programs. In some years, I sought survival money for critical capabilities and, under other circumstances, I made the case for resources to launch programs for new capabilities. I always carried OTS toys to show the latest innovations of the office. These devices were usually small enough to put in my coat pocket and briefcase, yet impressive in illustrating the ingenuity and skill of OTS engineers, craftsman, and contractors. The toys might include dead drops or concealments, tiny batteries, prototypes of advanced beacons, or covert communications systems. Customarily, the devices were passed among the committee members and their staffs, and each person wanted to examine the component or the gadget up close.
Invariably, the committees were amazed at the small size of the devices and that otherwise ordinary objects had been modified to perform extraordinary clandestine functions. It was not difficult to imagine how Stanley Lovell and other OTS directors similarly captivated Presidents, Senators, or Congressmen with examples of ingenious devices of their era. William Donovan, it was reported, was so proud of the silenced Hi-Standard pistol produced by Lovell that he demonstrated it for President Roosevelt by firing into a sandbag in the Oval Office while the President talked on the phone.1
As remarkable as the technological progress of spy gear since World War II and the days of Penkovsky may seem, the impact of digital and materials technology on clandestine operations during my seven years at OTS was revolutionary. Paralleling the technology change was a dramatic shift in the intelligence battlefield from the dominance of a Soviet strategic threat to a demand for tactical intelligence to defeat terrorist plots and disable their weapons. In responding to post-Cold War operational requirements, OTS had adopted digital technologies that radically changed the size and capability of our equipment. By 2001, the seemingly limitless ingenuity of OTS and its contractors made many of the toys I had taken to Committee briefings in 1996 technological antiques.
On my final trip to Congress as Director of OTS in the summer of 2002, I displayed our most advanced tracking and communications equipment. My purpose was to talk about OTS’s substantial role in operations against terrorism and al-Qaeda. As the committee members and staff looked over the devices, I pulled from my pocket another item that I believed spoke eloquently to the future of clandestine technical support.
“I fear that my successor OTS directors may no longer be able to show you so many neat gadgets and bugs,” I said, as I held up a compact disc purchased at Radio Shack that morning. “I expect this is the spy gear you will be seeing in the future because the most significant espionage equipment will be embedded in software. This disc is spy gear, but it does not have much of a gee-whiz factor. It appears so everyday and common that its importance can be easily overlooked. We will need to learn to communicate to you and the American public that twenty-first-century digital ‘spy gadgets’ are as necessary as Buster and the T-100 camera were for their time.”
Six years later, that compact disc is already obsolete.