SECTION III
CHAPTER 7
Adversity is a good teacher.
—Russian proverb
The U-2 spy planes and Corona satellites that produced spectacular new intelligence from their successful first missions overshadowed the slow evolution of technology used by human spies in the early 1960s. TSD chief Sid Gottlieb, who replaced Russell in 1966, remained unwavering in this belief that technology would become an integral role in agent operations. During Russell’s four years in the division, the two officers had become lifelong friends and shared the view that the KGB’s massive security apparatus was vulnerable to U.S. technology. In the predigital, analog environment of the mid-1960s, this confidence in technology was not routinely accepted in the DDP.
Gottlieb continued to rely on George Saxe to bridge the gap between the operations and technology. As case officers began to use the increasing store of TSD equipment available, new problems arose. One recurring dilemma was communications between case officers and engineers. The cultural divide between the pragmatic engineers of TSD and the “liberal arts types” in the DDP was one not only of background, but of language.
Technology brought with it a vocabulary that was not always clear to the outsider. The potential for confusion was compounded by the already colorful espionage vernacular. This was illustrated when a case officer asked TDS to fabricate a “phone tap.” What he wanted was a device that logged the numbers dialed for outgoing calls to identify the contacts of a target. Hearing the words “phone tap,” TSD built a system that covertly taped the target’s conversations but did not collect the numbers dialed.
Gottlieb understood the necessity for operational compartmentation, but technical requirements had to be precisely translated if TSD was to build the right gear. Misuse of words, misunderstanding of technical concepts, lack of clearly defined operational requirements, and excessive application of compartmentation all contributed to operational failures. George’s job was to make sure that SR’s operational needs were well defined and clearly communicated to the engineers of TSD.
One significant step that Gottlieb took to bridge this gap was to invite George, as a representative of the SR Division, to TSD’s annual retreat. Convened at a covert testing and training facility on an island off the East Coast, the event was a chance for senior scientists, engineers, and craftsmen to let their hair down. A seemingly small thing in retrospect, George’s presence caused a stir at the time. “They’d sit in an auditorium in a group and say things like, ‘What I don’t like is that this group over there is not providing me the kind of support I need to do my job’ or ‘We have a new idea with a contractor, and we need fifty thousand bucks, but can’t get the money,’” recalled George. “So when I showed up, guys were pointing at me and saying, ‘Who let him in? An operations guy listening to us talk about our problems? ’ Gottlieb told them, ‘We need to have more trust with operational elements that we support. If he goes back and tells his people we have some problems, what else is new?’ That was an effort by a very smart director of TSD to break down the wall and get a better flow of information. I can’t overemphasize how revolutionary that was to people in TSD.”
The assignment of two senior DDP officers, Everett C. ’Neal and Quentin Johnson, as Gottlieb’s deputies, also served to build bridges between the technical and operational. Johnson had firsthand knowledge of the dangers surrounding denied area operations, having served as one of the principal CIA case officers handling Penkovsky a decade earlier.
As head of TSD, Gottlieb began shaking things up inside the Division. He instituted a program of daily operational briefings in a conference area that became known as “the situation room.” “Every afternoon beginning at about four, the bosses had to go to the situation room,” recalled a chemist. “On one wall hung a huge map of the world with pins representing a tech, somewhere, doing something operational. Those responsible for secret writing would not normally hear about audio because the individual operations and targets were compartmented. But with this briefing, TSD chiefs were forced to think about the problems and requirements faced in other disciplines.”
Gottlieb had little tolerance for personality differences or rivalries within the Division. When long-simmering tensions between two TSD chiefs showed no signs of dissipating, he put them in the same office. “They shared a small office, their desks faced each other, head to head,” recalled a TSD staff member. “Sid was quoted as saying, ‘They may refuse to talk to each other, but by God, they’re going to sit there and look at each other all day.’” Gottlieb’s personal attention to the TSD “family” became legendary. He called staff and officers on their birthdays and remembered spouses and hobbies. “It sounds hokey, but he had a touch with that kind of thing,” said a TSD chemist. “It came across as, ‘The boss knows me.’”
As TSD and Soviet Russia Division were beginning to mesh internally, a bureaucratic and political turf war raged among the CIA’s senior officers. From its inception, TSD had been a part of the Agency’s operational directorate, but with the formation of the Directorate of Research in 1962, the organizational position of TSD became a matter of debate.1 DCI John McCone believed that all Agency technical capabilities should be centralized. Conversely, Richard Helms, Deputy Director for Plans at the time, opposed moving TSD to the new directorate and argued successfully that operations needed a technical component “as their right arm.” Helms then became DCI, and, for the next decade, TSD remained in the operational directorate.
President Nixon moved to replace Helms by nominating James Schlesinger in December 1972 as the successor. Schlesinger became DCI in February 1973 and almost immediately initiated a major reorganization of the Agency. TSD was realigned from the DO to the DS&T.2 The move also brought TSD a new name: Office of Technical Service (OTS) and a new chief from the DS&T, John McMahon. Gottlieb retired in May 1973.3
The internal turbulence was soon matched by controversy on Capitol Hill. When OSS veteran William Colby followed Schlesinger as DCI, political clamor about the CIA’s activities in the 1950s and 1960s erupted.4 In December of 1974, The New York Times’investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed evocative CIA “crypts” (cryptonyms), like MHCHAOS and MKULTRA, and described past operations within the United States.5 One of the most damaging revelations was the Agency’s involvement, along with the FBI, in opening the mail of U.S. citizens.6 As a result, both Congress and the Ford administration conducted investigations. The Church Committee in the Senate, the Pike Commission in the House of Representatives, and the presidential-appointed Rockefeller Commission each examined past CIA activities deemed illegal, improper, or misguided.7
Intent on making a full disclosure, Colby released sensitive and previously closely held operational details referred to as the Agency’s “family jewels.”8 Ordered by Schlesinger, the “family jewels” documents had been hastily compiled in 1973 during the Watergate inquiries. Colby made the highly classified material available to a Senate committee headed by Frank Church. He then unintentionally provided an impromptu visual coup for the Church Committee on September 16, 1975, by displaying an ominous-looking pistol called a Nondiscernible Microbioinoculator. The press dubbed the weapon “the CIA dart gun.” In fact, it was not a CIA device, but the result of a Fort Detrick research and development program. The weapon, along with others developed by the Army, had been sent to Langley and other elements of the intelligence community for evaluation and comment.9 Colby had taken the pistol to the committee meeting, thinking it would be of interest as a curiosity, a miscalculation that inadvertently and permanently linked the Agency to the weapon.10
Information about CIA activities from reports of the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission provided a more complete picture of post- World War II U.S. intelligence than had ever been seen. Several OTS officers were investigated or subpoenaed as a result of their participation in drug testing projects, assassination planning, mail opening, or support to Nixon’s “White House plumbers” in the Watergate break-in. Eventually all of OTS’s activities were found to have been part of approved operations, and not a single OTS officer was found guilty of any wrongdoing.
While Washington was preoccupied with the politics of scandal, technology was advancing at lightning speed. Personal computers, called “micros” in the parlance of the day, were entering the mainstream. Once the domain of hobbyists and large organizations, these new systems, with their unwieldy five- and eight-inch floppy disks, pointed toward an unexplored world of digitally stored information. The future could also be glimpsed in the hands of teenagers playing a video game called “Pong” from a new company with the strange name: Atari. In U.S. research labs, scientists were laying the digital groundwork for the “wired world.” ARPANET, a Department of Defense-distributed computer network, was quietly expanding into a communication system that would evolve into the Internet within two decades.
For OTS, the question was, how quickly could viable and reliable spy gear be built integrating this new technology? Like their OSS R&D counterparts, OTS engineers recognized that technology flowing from private industry could meet intelligence requirements. Technology for espionage seemed poised to match the imaginations of screenwriters who dreamed up fictions such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission: Impossible. A “pen communicator” or a “self-destructing” taped message seemed plausible. The transistor, which had revolutionized audio surveillance operations a decade earlier when it supplanted the vacuum tube, was now being replaced by the microchip. The reliable, affordable Xerox copier ended the labor-intensive need for OTS techs to photograph, develop, and print copies of sensitive documents agents secretly lent to case officers. For OTS, the question became which one of the technologies to pursue.
Early in 1975, an OTS scientist was invited to the lab of an engineer in another part of the Agency. “I have a technology you guys really ought to look at,” explained the engineer. At the lab, the OTS scientist saw an experimental setup that allowed for storage and retrieval of relatively large amounts of digital information in a very small sphere. Aptly named “bubble memory,” the storage technology could be used to create a new short-range agent communications (SRAC) device.
At the time, SRAC systems could store and transmit only a limited number of characters. With bubble memory, it might be possible to store and transmit entire pages of data. The scientist proposed the project as a practical solution to the communication problem. A few days later, he received an estimate of fifty thousand dollars to build a bench model of a bubble memory module for a SRAC device. Even more quickly, the answer came back—“That’s too much money”—and the project wilted. Eighteen months later, funds appeared, but too late for bubble memory, which was already overtaken by the inexpensive and adaptable Read Only Memory (ROM). Literally, technology was advancing faster than the government’s funding process.
Another compelling technology quietly emerging was the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) developed by researchers at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. Originally conceived as a memory storage device, each CCD chip is made up of an array of light-sensitive capacitors. As photons hit the CCD, an electron is dislodged, creating a small electrical charge to form a pattern that varies in degree to the intensity of the light. By focusing light through a lens, the pattern becomes well defined, similar to the chemical reaction of photographic film. A software program that “remembers” where individual charges are located creates the picture. Instead of the image’s resolution being determined by the size of the silver grains on the film, the number of capacitors (or pixels) defines detail. In 1974, OTS began building its first digital imager. Rather than copying documents with film cameras, the idea was to replace film with a linear array of imaging sensors from the emerging CCD technology. With a modest investment through a classified contract, OTS engineers worked with a team of scientists at a leading American electronics company to develop a “camera” that would work as well in an agent’s hands as the KH-11 imagers (cameras) worked from space.11
It would take more than ten years for a product to emerge, a remarkable black box called a “filmless camera” that captured and stored digital images. More important for clandestine operations, the “black box” contained a feature for digital transmission of the electronic images, turning the camera into a two-way covcom device. By 1989, OTS had a piece of spy gear that worked like a cell phone’s digital camera.
Advances in technology both radically reduced size and increased capabilities of spy gear. Size reduction expanded possibilities for concealment, minimized power requirements, and improved an agent’s ability to conceal it, carry it, dead drop it, and use it. “Can’t we make it smaller?” and “Why is this so big?” may have been the most frequently asked questions of OTS engineers.