The Spy Who Loved My Typewriter

The year 1985 was declared by the press to be "The Year of the Spy."  That year there were a large number of high profile arrests of foreign agents including  John Anthony Walker, Richard Kelly Smyth, Sharon W. Scranage, Ronald William Pelton, Randy Miles Jeffries, Edward Lee Howard, and Jonathan Jay Pollard. (Pollard was actually just unexpectedly paroled so the topic came to mind.) These were Russian spies, Israeli spies, Chinese spies even one from Ghana. But there was another big spying story...

CBS broke the story that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was bugged. This is no surprise to the cynical but the CIA and CBS has to indignantly pretend to be surprised. What was amazing to me was how they were spying. Yes they had the usual "audio bugs" on phones and in rooms but also inside typewriters. Correspondent David Martin reported:

"Soviet agents secretly installed tiny sensing devices in about a dozen embassy typewriters. The devices picked up the contents of documents typed by embassy secretaries and transmitted them by antennas hidden in the embassy walls. The antennas, in turn, relayed the signals to a listening post outside the embassy... Depending on the location of the bugged typewriters, the Soviets were able to receive copies of everything from routine administrative memos to highly classified documents."

In a typewriter? That sounds a bit noisy to me. But CBS was claiming that the Soviets had the technology to back engineer the contents of a document form the sounds inside a typewriter. For the record, the NSA confirmed this was true. [SOURCE] the U.S. had first tried to build an embassy in 1979 and had to quit... there were too many bugs. The apocryphal story is that they were poured right into the concrete. A new embassy was built and while the concrete may have been clean... the US seal on the wall and the IBM Selectric II and III typewriters were not: 1981 IBM Selectric III on the Typewriter Database

Over the next 100 days every electronic device at the embassy was replaced, including all 250 typewriters. The project was assigned the code name GUNMAN and it ran under COMSEC. The removed equipment was examined at Fort Meade with X-ray machines. The project manager Walter Deeley offered a bounty of $5,00 for each found bug. In the IBM Selectrics they found an extra coil on the power switch. It was a bug, A total of 16 were found. Their new project at the NSA was reverse engineering how the bug worked. More here.

Most other models of typewriter had individual metal arms for each letter that swung up to strike a ribbon against the paper to make an imprint. IBM Selectrics,were unique and used a round ball with characters around the outside surface. When a typist struck a key, the ball moved into position over an inked plastic ribbon and dropped to imprint the letter or number onto the paper. In addition to the coil the bugged units had an additional spring lug and screw and interpose latch (bail). The movement of that latch controlled the pitch and spin of the ball. This could be detected magnetically by the sensors concealed in the bar and  converted into a digital electrical signal. The signals were encoded into a four-bit frequency select word (FSW). The bug was able to store up to eight four-bit characters in a buffer. When the buffer was full, it transmitted the data. The bugs used all used burst RF transmissions at 30, 60, or 90 MHZ to send back their data. Amazing.

This kind of work really makes PRISM look ham-handed.

World's Highest Radio Station

The etching reminds me of that iconic photograph "Lunch atop a Skyscraper" probably taken by  Charles Ebbets in 1932.  There postcard above dates to 1923. The idea behind the drawing seems lofty but there were already photographs of men on it's aerials published in Farm Mechanics Magazine later that year. They got it done. The caption here reads as follows:

"Dominating Brazil's beautiful capital and affording a magnificent panorama of the city and it's harbor, Mount Corcovado has hitherto served no utilitarian purpose. But a wireless plant will soon stand on it's summit, over 2,000 feet above the city. This sketch gives an idea of the hazards of the construction and the view offered from the world's loftiest radio station."

Mount Corcovado is actually 2,310 feet high and sits in southeast Brazil overlooking Rio de Janeiro. Today it's better known for the somewhat creepy concrete statue "Cristo Redentor" of Jesus Christ that sits atop the peak today. The statue was unveiled on October 12, 1931. But this too has a peculiar connection to radio history. In the opening ceremony, the statue was lit by a battery of floodlights turned on by radio control by Guglielmo Marconi, stationed 5,700 miles away in Rome (supposedly). So what happened between 1923 and 1931? 

First of all, prior to 1923 the summit wasn't exactly bare. Even in 1918 there was a rail road that went to the summit strictly for the benefit of tourists who wanted to take in the view. There was already at least one radio station SPY, whose call sign is ungoogleable today.  A third easily confused set of calls "SPE" was assigned to Praia Vermelha. So let's go back further... Brazil declared its independence from Portugal in 1822. They didn't get that in writing until 1925 but let's not mince words. To celebrate 100 years of independence they planned a centennial exposition, and they wanted to launch a new radio station over Rio de Janeiro as part of the event. They awarded a contract to Westinghouse, who shipped down the necessary equipment, men and materials and hauled it up the mountain on that aforementioned cog-wheel tourist railroad. More here.

Two 125 foot masts were erected and a 153 foot, 6-wire aerial for the 750 watt station. It was assigned the call letters SPC and operated on 450 meters. The inaugeral broadcast opened with a speech by President Pessoa. A telegraph line was run so it could broadcast speeches and operas from the city below. The station was originally planned to be temporary but it was so popular that it's life was extended. It was broadcasting as late as April of 1923. RadioWorld, Wireless Age and many other radio publications marked the debut of the station. More here.

But since 1920 a religious group called "Catholic Circle of Rio" had it's eyes on that peak. The group organized an event called Semana do Monumento "Monument Week" to collect money for the building of the statue. Construction supposedly began in 1922. It makes it difficult to account for the SPC broadcasts described in April of 1923. Regardless, the station was decommissioned by that Spring at the latest.

The Spy Who Loved Radio

This is one of those stories in radio that seems a bit too strange. But on the face of it, numerous other public figures, and even politicians have owned media outlets. So maybe it's not that improbable that once, in the 70-year history of the CIA, a known spook happened to also buy WINS-AM in New York City in 1953.

Let's start before he was in the CIA. Lt. Col. John Elroy McCaw was from from Aberdeen, WA.  He founded the first radio station in Centralia, WA: 1440 KELA-AM, in 1937 and owned the Lewis and Clark Hotel where it was originally housed. Years later McCaw also bought station 1260 KYA-AM (with John D. Keating) in San Francisco, 630 KPOA-AM in Hawaii [SOURCE] and 1010 WINS in New York.
 In 1953 In FCC docket 9041 in an Aladdin radio and Television application the bureau listed off a long series of McCaw's facility ownerships and their relative percentages over the prior 20 years:

Call Letters	Frequency	City	State	Percentage
KRSC-AM	1150	Seattle	WA	100%
KORC-AM	1140	Mineral Wells	YX	100%
KELA-AM	1440	Centralia	WA	50%
KYA-AM	1260	San Francisco	CA	50%
KYAK-AM	930	Yakima	WA	33⅓%
KALE-AM	960	Richland	WA	33⅓%
KALE-FM	106.1	Richland	WA	33⅓%
KPOA-AM	630	Honolulu	HI	50%

It appears that most of his large acquisitions involved Keating and/or Charles Skouras. His company in that acquisition was Gotham Broadcasting Corporation. In the book Big Deal: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Digital Age author Bruce Wasserstein praises McCaw's work but not his paperwork, calling him a "freewheeling entrepreneur." One of his wife's obituaries refers to his "his handshake deals."  But he was very successful despite that undercurrent of chaos. I'll quote Wasserstein:

"He converted New York station WINS to the country's first rock station in the middle 1950s, and within 9 years flipped the station for twenty times more than he had paid. At his height, Elroy McCaw owned interests in dozens of radio, television and cable television companies."

His wife Marion was no slouch either. After the end of WWII she started her own radio station KAPA-AM in Raymond, WA. None of this mentions that he had another job. It's not the kind of job you put on your resume, and not the kind of job where you can always tell people what you did at work today. Information is scant. But we know that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed at least officially in 1942 by President Roosevelt. Lacking cooperation from existing U.S. agencies, early agents were trained by the British. President Truman dissolved the department in 1945, but it's functions were divided between the War Department and the State Department. By the end of the year the term "Central Intelligence Agency" was appearing on documents to describe the collection of intelligence groups, and by 1947 it was official. He has no entry in Wikipedia except in the biographies of his now wealthy heirs. But one of his wife's obituaries get's into the details. [SOURCE].

Throughout the war, she [Marion] commuted from Washington D.C. when necessary while Elroy served at Army Air Forces Headquarters in the Pentagon as Executive Officer and Special Assistant to General McClelland, head of USAAF communications. He was also McClelland’s liaison to OSS.

His exact involvement as you expect, is unknown. I've never filed a FOIA request and I don't intend to. But I have to admit I'm curious. Many businessmen served in the military during wartime— notably Robert S. McNamara who left Harvard to serve in WWI, then left Ford to serve as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy. Very few figures would be so high profile. An issue of the The O.S.S. Society seems to bear a note from son Bruce McCaw looking for more information from retired OSS members about his fathers life. (The operations referred to involve radio controlled ships.)

"My father, Lt. Col. John Elroy McCaw, worked on OSS Special Projects known as operations Aphrodite, Simmons, and Javaman. He worked with OSSers John Shaheen and Jim Rand and is particularly interested in Javaman, which called for blowing up the tunnel connecting Kyushu and Honshu prior to the invasion of Japan.”

Another obituary notes that the family moved to Seattle in 1953. Several sources note that he died in 1969 suddenly, after a brief illness. [Nothing suspicious here, moving along] The cause is never listed but it's clear that his finances were in disarray due to his informal business practices. When his estate was cleaned up, all that remained was a single cable company with fewer than 30,00 subscribers. His sons built that up and bought heavily into cell networks as Cellular One, then sold out to AT&T. It was renamed renamed AT&T Wireless. Today most of them are listed by Forbes. More here.