December 27, 2005 by admin.

Paint

Home Improvement Agency Style

In about 1972, the house in Plano Texas that we were living in needed some painting done on the interior. What made this more complicated was that some of the old paint in the house was going to stay, so he had to match the old paint exactly. But I hear you saying, so what? Use the color-matching computer at the paint department. Mind you this is 1972 and there is no such animal. So my Dad went to the hardware store and bought several cans of paint.

When he came home, he meticulously painted just selected parts of the interior of the house. If you know anything about paint, it is that the color you buy is not the color when dry. So back then, you had to eyeball the colors and guess. Except in my Dad’s case, he cheated. The new paint when dry matched the old paint exactly.

I asked him how the heck he did that with any hesitation. He said that when he planted bugs and transmitters in the walls of Embassies and Consulates, the Agency provided them with this very cool quick drying plaster and paint kit. He was trained in how to use this kit proficiently. He learned how to match paint colors with his eyeball so that when the patch on the wall or ceiling dried, it would not reveal that someone had burrowed a hole and hid something there. If there were the slightest hint that someone had altered something in the Embassy, his project would have been compromised. So the paint and plaster matching had to be exact.

Tim Allen, eat your heart out.

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December 27, 2005 by admin.

Million Dollar Baby

Do your mercenaries accept cash?

After his retirement from the Agency, my Dad lived in a variety of apartments in North Dallas. One day I took my paycheck to the bank and got all cash, in small denominations. It was not much money back then but it was still cool to have that much cash in my pocket. I happen to visit my dad at his apartment and wanted to show off. So I revealed my small pile of cash. He got this sudden gleam in his eye and helpfully and carefully counted the bills one by one, until the stack was all counted. Then he did the count again. The gleam in his eye was unnatural. I asked him “what was up”?

He finally admitted that it reminded him of the pile of money he saw in Laos. The COS (Chief of Station) Vientiane Laos had one million dollars in his safe of twenty dollar bills. Mind you this was 1968, so one million dollars would go a long way. I could see some Agency man with the temptation to grab the money and disappear and live like a King. He would use his Agency training to escape detection. I am sure that temptation occurred to more than a few. But since the Agency did a good job of screening their candidates, most Agency men would never even consider turning against the Agency or their country. Then my Dad said that when he went on an Agency covert operation, they were given a large sum of cash to operate with, usually a large stack of twenty dollar bills. So his explained why my Dad repeatedly counted of my small stack of bills. It brought back memories of covert operations gone by.

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December 27, 2005 by admin.

Vientiane Laos

Land of Elephants

Laos is a land locked, poor country that was a springboard for CIA operations during the Vietnam War. The Agency built the largest private airline in the world to support the “Secret War”. That airline was called Air America (AA). It predecessor was Civil Air Transport (CAT) Airlines. The Agency also hired and supplied a mercenary army of about 30,000 troops and used them to attack and harass the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail (HCMT) and the Communist troops that used Laos and Cambodia as a sanctuary. The Communists recruited indigenous people of Laos and they were called Pathet Lao (PL). The country of Laos is approximated the size of Utah and is mostly mountains and plateaus. The climate is tropical, with a rainy season from May to November and the dry season from December to April. It floods about 6 feet every seven years, so the local villagers build their huts on 9-10 foot stilts.

We were stationed in Vientiane, the capital, for two long years, from 1968-1969. This time period was the height of the battles, B-52 bombings, and misery in Southeast Asia (SEA).

For an excellent article about Air America (AA) in Laos, please click on this link Supporting the “Secret War”: CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955-1974. This article on the CIA web site by William M. Leary, in the Studies in Intelligence section, gives an informative history of Air America (AA) and its predecessor Civil Air Transport (CAT).

Map of Laos pre 1974

Two other interesting web sites are Secret War in Laos and Air America Homepage

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December 17, 2005 by admin.

Security is an illusion

He forgot his keys. There we were, sitting in the car, looking at a locked house and garage door. Our driveway at the Plano Texas house was in the back and it led up to the two-car garage. But my conscientious Dad that secured the house every time we left had locked it. Except this time I was sure that he had done himself in.

He was his own worst enemy.

Once he discovered that he had no house keys on him, he walked up to the garage door, removed something from his shirt pocket, bent down just slightly, and inserted something into garage door lock. About 8 seconds later, the handle turned and the garage door slid up at his fingertips. I was dumbfounded. How did he open the garage without a key? He finally told me.
He habitually carried a open ended leather comb case with a metal comb in his shirt pocket. But next to the metal comb was two lock picks and a tension bar. The metal comb kept the picks from getting bent and held the picks in the case. Turns out that he could open most American locks with just two types of picks and a tension bar. I asked how he picked the lock so fast. He said that the U.S. Treasury had trained him as an ATF agent to pick locks and that the Agency gave him even further training. He had picked thousands of locks over the years and many different types.

It was as natural to him to pick a lock as it was for me to turn a doorknob and walk in a room. And I had seen many movies and TV shows by that time that showed spies and criminals picking locks by crouching down and looking into the keyway as they picked. I asked why he did not do that crouching method. He said that he was trained to walk up to a door and pick it in the same amount of time and appearance as if he had a key. He could feel the pins in the keyway with the pick and manipulate them at will. Most good locksmiths can pick locks but not in such an innocuous manner. When he was in the field, he did not want to give even the hint that he was picking a lock, because he would have drawn unnecessary attention to himself.

I asked the next logical question, were the lock picks illegal to own for a private citizen that was not a locksmith? His answer was yes, but then he said how often would a police officer search his comb case since he had a clean criminal history and would not give the officer any reason to search him. Besides, his law degree from the University of Minnesota came in handy when debating legal issues with law enforcement officers.

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December 17, 2005 by admin.

Concealment is a good friend

One day my Dad bought a lounge chair recliner and put it near the built in the wall bookcase in the living room of our Plano Texas home. He placed the chair so that it was facing the fireplace. The problem was that the lighting in the house did not reach that corner of the living room adequately, so he decided to add a track light or single bulb spotlight to showcase the fireplace.

He went to the hardware store and purchased a very nice single bulb spotlight. When my Brother and I were away from the house he installed the light and did not tell anyone. When we arrived home, he sat in his recliner and said, “Look at the fireplace”, which at that moment was the usual dark corner. We did not realize that he was doing a magicians misdirection trick on us. As we watched the darken corner, suddenly the fireplace bricks were awash with bright light. We looked up to the ceiling in amazement. Behind a ceiling timber near the fireplace was a concealed spot light, illuminating that dark corner. The next logical question was how did it turn on while we were standing there. My Dad just sat there with the biggest Cheshire cat grin that I have ever seen on his face. My Brother and I both ran around the room looking for the switch that turned on the light. But our search was in vain. Finally in a moment of desperation, I decided to trace the wire from the lamp to the source, but to no avail. He had concealed the wires between the ceiling and the ceiling timber. We were both totally stunned and baffled. And my Dad’s face was glowing with pride. Even knowing what we looking for, we still could not find the light switch.

In 1972, technology was very space age and we just knew that he had some kind of voice activated switch or laser beam contraption. You see my Dad always went overboard when it came to electronics. Move over Tim the tool man Taylor, ha. So anyhow, my Dad would have my Brother and I look at the fireplace and zap, the light would go on or off seeming at will. As soon as the light came on or off, we would instantly glance over at Dad and he always appeared to be relaxing in his chair and not reaching for anything. But since I was an amateur magician, I knew that the hand was faster than the eye. So we had Dad get out of the chair, we took turns sitting in the chair, desperately looking and feeling around for the switch.

Nada.

By then we were hoping mad and frustrated. Were was the switch? With great flair, he sat in his chair, had us looking at him, and then he reached just a few inches, to something on the underside of the a shelf in the bookcase next to him. Click, the light on the fireplace went on. We were stunned. It was a simple toggle switch, 59 cents worth, but hours of work to conceal it. He had strategically placed the switch at arm level to his chair, attaching the switch to the underside of the self, about four inches in. At that height and depth, someone standing next to the bookcase, you would never see the switch. Standing across the room, you could not even see the switch. He ran the wire from the switch to the light through the back of the bookcase, up the wall, into the small crack between the ceiling timber and the ceiling. Not a wire was visible to the naked eye. And since the bookcase was built into the wall, we never suspected that he could have rigged it. After that little demonstration of concealment, that was just for fun, I knew that the bad guys never stood a chance when TSD did their thing.

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