[CW] Agent Radio Operation
n7dc
n7dc at comcast.net
Tue Aug 3 13:44:15 EDT 2021
Well said. The original special forces (green berets) radio ops no only kept up the forces commonly links, but were responsible to train in country friendly troops as agents, to remain when we pulled out of an area. One SF team dropped in, trained a battalion of friendlies, then moved on. Each member had his own MOS. and was a back up to another member with a different MOS. Thus trained in two, and sometimes 3 specialities. I was battalion Sgt in charge of commo, plus provided B team commo. We spent more time training than almost any other units. We also were being trained in Spanish, until the day they came with new orders, to learn Vietnamese. Just so happened my enlistment ran out the next day, and was headed to Seattle to work at Boeing. We had thought we were going to drop in on castro. How quickly things change.Sent from my Galaxy
-------- Original message --------From: "David J. Ring, Jr." <n1ea at arrl.net> Date: 8/1/21 5:01 AM (GMT-05:00) To: CW Reflector <cw at mailman.qth.net> Subject: [CW] Agent Radio Operation
Thanks to Steve, W5BIB ex USN
Radio "Spook" 1964-1972 for bringing this to my
attention.
Agent Radio Operation
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.
=30=
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