[CW] Agent Radio Operation

[David J. Ring, Jr.]

​

Thanks to Steve, W5BIB ex USN Radio "Spook" 1964-1972 for bringing this 
to my attention.

*Agent Radio Operation* <https://www.smecc.org/agent_radio_operation.htm>
//


  RADIO STORY

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*AGENT RADIO OPERATION DURING WW-II*

by Tim   E-mail: tcb at hasher.demon.co.uk
Via Military Collectors Radio List

*Forward*

"Studies In Intelligence" was a CIA published in-house magazine that was 
classified for many years. Last year, Pete McCollum obtained through the 
Freedom of Information act, several of their now declassified articles. 
The following is one of those articles. It is interesting in that it 
includes some examples of enemy clandestine radio operation rather than 
just those of the Allies for which much has been printed.

During World War II the use of clandestine radio for agent 
communications was widespread. Literally hundreds of agent circuits were 
operating during the war. On the enemy side they ranged in type from 
highly organized nets involving German diplomatic installations to 
single operations in such widely scattered places as Mozambique and 
isolated locations in the United States. On the Allied side there was no 
part of Axis territory where we did not have clandestine communications 
representatives --- "Joes," as they were called. It was almost 
impossible to tune a communications receiver of an evening without 
running across signals which were so obviously not what they were trying 
to seem that you wondered why they were wrapped up the first time they 
came on the air.

On both sides the signal plans (call signs, frequencies, and times of 
transmissions) and procedures used by agents were for the most part of 
the utmost simplicity. One service was also easily distinguishable from 
another by their different characteristics. The random contact times and 
frequent changes in wavelength considered to be essential today were 
represented by uncomplicated regular patterns simple to reconstruct. In 
many cases the rota--the cycle in which the plan repeated itself-- was 
of only a week's duration. Often only the list of call signs was carried 
out to a 31-day rota.
The agent was generally given a reasonably good range of operating 
frequencies, usually between five and ten, to help protect him from 
detection and arrest, but he was often his own worst enemy. Certain 
times and frequencies, because they afforded better operating conditions 
either radiowise or from a personal standpoint, became his favorites. Almost
nothing his base could say or do would convince an agent he was 
endangering himself when he abandoned even the simple non-repetitive 
pattern of his signal plan in favor of the convenience of operating day 
after day on the same frequency at the same hour. It must be said, in 
all fairness, that in some cases this practice was almost unavoidable 
because of the agent's need to live his cover. In others, however, it 
was stupidity, laziness, or complete incomprehension of the need for 
good radio security. Security laxness was particularly foolhardy of 
those who operated alone without benefit of "watchers" to warn when 
enemy personnel were approaching.

Four types of agent radio operators can be distinguished--those who 
operated in metropolitan areas in concert with well organized watcher 
organizations; those who operated on their own in cities; those who were 
with the guerrilla groups; and those who worked alone in isolated rural 
areas.

*The City Mouse*

In cities a variety of techniques were employed to protect the operator. 
In one case as many as five operators in widely separated areas were 
geared to function as one station. All had transmitters on the same 
frequency and copies of the traffic for a given schedule. If the enemy 
approached the vicinity of a particular operator, he would stop 
transmitting when signaled by his watcher, and at the same time another 
operator in a remote part of the city who had been listening to his 
colleague would, with hardly a perceptible pause, continue the 
transmission. As necessary, a third would take over from the second and 
so on, much to the frustration of the opposition. In another instance 
long-abandoned telephone lines were used to key distant transmitters, 
whose remoteness from the operator greatly increased his security. These 
and other sophisticated devices were employed successfully in target 
areas where an extensive and highly organized underground was able to 
create the conditions for them.

In the main, however, a less imaginative but equally effective means of 
protecting the operator was used--teams of watchers strategically placed 
in the streets around or on the roof of the building in which the agent 
was working his set. When the enemy direction-finding trucks or 
personnel with portable sets were spotted approaching, a signal would be 
sent to another watcher either in the room with the operator or close 
enough to warn him to stop transmitting. Usually the warning was enough; 
but one agent was so intensely anxious to get the traffic off that he 
repeatedly ignored the warnings of his watcher on the roof above him. A 
string had to be fastened to the man's wrist, with the roof watcher 
holding the
other end, so that he could literally yank the operator's hand away from 
the key!

Less is known about the singletons who operated alone in the cities. 
They lived lonely, frightened lives, particularly tense during their 
transmissions. Frequently they had the feeling that the enemy was just 
outside the door waiting for the right moment to break in, and sometimes 
he was. The most grateful moment in the singleton's day came when he 
heard the base send ""Roger. Nothing more." Sometimes the base operator 
would impulsively end with the letter GB ES GL--"Good bye and good 
luck"--even though he knew it was against the rules. The lone agents who 
survived owed their lives to a highly developed sense of security and 
intelligent use of the resources available to them. They went on the air 
only when they had material they considered really important and they 
kept their transmissions short. They either were or became such good 
operators that they approached the professional level in skill. 
Sometimes they were able to change their transmitting procedure from 
what they had been taught to one which enabled them to greatly reduce 
their time on the air. They took advantage of unusual operating 
locations and moved frequently. In addition, they undoubtedly owed to 
good fortune: many who were caught were victims as much of bad luck as 
of enemy action.

One German agent in Italy who had most skillfully and successfully 
evaded Allied apprehension over a long period was caught only with the 
casual help of an Italian woman. After watching with curiosity the 
efforts of a DF crew in the street for some time, she finally approached 
the officer in charge and diffidently offered the suggestion, "If you're 
looking for the man with the radio, he's up there."

Some singleton agents who were unable to live alone with their secrets 
were spotted because of their inability to keep their mouths shut. Their 
compulsion to tell a sweetheart or a friend or to draw attention to 
themselves by living or talking in a manner out of keeping with their 
covers resulted in their apprehension. And yet they sometimes got by with
incredible indiscretions. There was one case in which the base, having 
taken traffic from a "Joe" in northern Italy, was to close down when 
Joe, in clear text, asked if it would take traffic from "George," an 
agent who had been trained and dispatched from a completely different 
location. The base operator was flabbergasted, but took the transmission 
and then asked the man in the field to stand by for a short message, 
which was being enciphered, to the following effect: "Where did you get 
that traffic and where the hell is George?" his answer was prompt and 
again in the clear: "From George, he's on leave." For several days Joe 
continued to send in George's messages, evidently prepared in advance, 
as well as his own, until George showed up on his own schedule and 
resumed business as usual. To the best of our knowledge these two agents 
remained unmolested and free of control; they were contacted regularly 
until Allied troops
overran the area.

*The Country Mouse*

The radio operator with a guerrilla group came in for his share of 
difficulties too. First of all, he usually arrived at his destination by 
parachute. Often his equipment was damaged in the drop. Many times he 
had to lug it over almost impassable terrain in a wild scramble to 
protect it and avoid capture. Sometimes he never got on the air at all, 
and he and
his teammates would be the subject of melancholy speculation on the part 
of his comrades at headquarters until some word trickled back as to what 
happened to them. The radio man was expected to do his share of the 
fighting when the situation demanded it; and injured or sick, he was 
supposed to keep at his radio as long as he was strong enough to operate 
it.

The singleton in the country was usually no worse off than his 
counterparts in other situations, and sometimes much better off; 
occasionally he was an honored guest. But his status varied with the 
moods and political views of the so-called friendly leaders of the area, 
and at times he was viewed with suspicion or open hostility. The agent 
or agents he was supposed to retrain often resented him and added to his 
difficulties. He developed skills beyond those he had brought with him: 
equivocation, tact, flattery, subterfuge, and downright dishonesty 
became abilities essential to the doing of his job. His one thought was 
to get it done and get out in one piece and on to the next assignment.

Occasionally the agent operator interjected into his otherwise anonymous 
transmission burst of temper, directed or eloquent disgust. Usually 
these outbursts were spontaneous profanity, unenciphered, directed at 
the quality of his signal, the base operator's poor sending, or some 
other immediate cause of annoyance. They most often came in the agent's 
mother tongue, but a certain group of German clandestine agents used to 
swear at their base operators with great eloquence in beautifully 
spelled out English.

Not all such expressions of opinion were sent in the clear. Over the 
years, enciphered messages have been generously spiked with agent 
invective and profanity. One such message received during the war, a 
marvel of succinctness, spoke volumes on the subject of what makes an 
agent tick. The agent in question had been trained as a singleton. It
had been planned, with good reason, the he should be dropped several 
hundred miles ahead of the bulk of his equipment, of which there was a 
great deal, and he should make his way to it later. The operation went 
according to plan except in this respect; all the agent's gear was 
dropped with him. In due time the base heard him calling, established 
contact, and took a brief but carefully enciphered message, which when 
decoded was found to consist of one extremely vulgar French word. The 
agent was never heard from again.

*The Ingredients of Partnership*

What kind of person made a good agent operator? His special 
qualifications required that he be young or old, tall or short, thin or 
fat, nervous or phlegmatic, intelligent or stupid, educated or 
unlettered. His political views were of no consequence. If he had a 
burning resentment at having been thrown out of his country, or having 
lost family or friends, so much the better--or maybe worse: uncontrolled 
hatred could create security problems. He didn't even have to like radio 
very much. About the only attributes he really needed were: ability to 
put up with all the unpleasantness of six weeks of radio training to get 
at least a nodding acquaintance with the project; a willingness or 
desire to go anywhere by any reasonable means of 
conveyance--"reasonable" includes dropping fifty feet from a plane into 
water--and stay for an unspecified period of time; and the abiding 
conviction, in spite of feeling constantly that someone was looking over 
his shoulder that it would always be the other guy who got caught. In 
short, he must come to like his work and take, with the well-educated 
call-girl, the view that he was just plain lucky to get such a good job.

At the base end of a clandestine circuit a good operator was, in his own 
way, different from any other radio operator developed during WW-II. And 
he was proud of it. In the first place he had to learn to live in a 
world of noise, an experience which occasionally resulted in permanent 
psychoses or suicide. The agent transmitter was and is a miserably 
feeble communications instrument, capable under the best of 
circumstances of putting only very small amounts of radio energy into 
the ether. Being illegal it had to compete with jammers, commercial 
telegraph, and broadcast stations, whose signals often exceeded its 
power by tens of thousands of times. If the reader can picture himself 
surrounded by the brass section of a large orchestra playing one of the 
lustier passages from Wagner while he is trying to hear and identify a 
different melody coming from a piccolo played by an asthmatic midget in 
the balcony, he will in soon measure approximately the auditory 
frustration of the base radio operator searching for and copying some of 
the typical agent signals.

Yet this small group of men not only took pride in their work, but 
because they understood the problems of their unseen friends on the 
other end of the line, went out of their way to make sure that their 
agents got the best service possible. Frequently they would become so 
concerned about a certain agent that they would get up during off hours 
at whatever
time of day or night their particular Joe was scheduled to come on, to 
make sure that he would be properly copied, even though the base 
operator assigned to that watch was thoroughly competent. And the 
regular operator never resented this interference with his watch; he 
probably had done or would do the same thing himself.

The devotion and skill of these otherwise apparently undedicated and 
average men was equal to almost any demand. Sometimes as many as five 
operators would voluntarily concentrate on one agent transmission, piece 
together the fragments each made out, so the man could get off the air 
as fast as possible. They learned to recognize the agent's signal as he 
was tuning up, in order to shorten the dangerous calling time. They 
managed to make sense of spastic tappings of obviously nervous agents 
and through their own efforts and example frequently instilled 
confidence in them. If they did not accept with good grace the often 
unwarranted criticism leveled at them by the agent, at least they did 
not reply in kind.

They recognized their special friends by the way they sent their 
characters and were in many cases able to tell when the agent was in 
trouble or had been replaced at the key by an enemy operator. In many 
instances they developed a sixth sense which enabled them to hear and 
copy signals correctly through prolonged burst of static or interference 
and they developed shortcuts which further reduced the agent's time on 
the air. Many of these shortcuts became the foundation for more 
efficient and sophisticated methods of operation. Their patience was 
truly marvelous. When necessary, they set day after day listening for a 
man who had never been contacted or who had disappeared for months. That 
he might be without equipment, drunk, or dead made no difference to 
them. As long as his schedule was on their contact sheet, he was real 
and they looked for him. If he showed up they nearly always established 
contact.

Not every man assigned as radio operator to this type of base station 
made the grade. Some tried and just didn't have it. These nobody 
criticized, and other useful duties were found for them; but those who 
didn't take the work seriously were not tolerated and soon left the 
station. The good ones came from all walks of life. Unlike the agents, 
they were trusted nationalist of the country operating the station. They 
were draftees, professional communicators, amateur radio operators, 
philologists; but almost without exception they had imagination, skill, 
and a deep (if frequently unrecognized) love for both radio and that 
type of radio work in particular. They were in short a new breed, the 
clandestine intelligence service radio operator.


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