During the second world war, American military technicians tried to improve their bombardment of the Japanese fleet by strapping cats to the underside of their bombs. In theory, as Tiddles plummeted towards the Pacific ocean from the belly of a B-52, the natural feline aversion to water would steer both puss and payload towards the warm, dry surface of the enemy’s warships. According to the co-authors of Spycraft, “Initial tests proved cats were ineffective and the concept died as quickly as the first test subjects.”

Spycraft, the first complete history of the CIA’s department for clandestine military gadgetry, known as the Office of Technical Services (OTS), is packed with such nuggets of experimental enthusiasm. It’s a testimony to the comprehensiveness of this chronicle of bombs, bugs, poison pills and exploding cigars (and to Washington’s bureaucratic witlessness, which the authors capture in full) that this book took nearly two years to be cleared by security for publication.

It emerges that America’s spyware history began sluggishly in the second world war — hampered by a belief that relying on technology and subterfuge was un-American, and best left to the more naturally sneaky British. There were some wartime successes, though, notably smuggling exploding coal to the French resistance, to blow up German trains. But as the cold war warmed up, America languished far behind the technocrats of Soviet Russia — the KGB had a bug inside the Great Seal of the United States, hanging on the wall behind the desk of the American ambassador to Moscow, and Russian dedication to fieldwork included cracking American diplomatic safes with an x-ray machine that slowly killed its operators with radiation.

The “techs”, as America’s spying scientists were known, slowly regained lost ground throughout the 1960s, through such innovations as fake tree stumps, packed with listening equipment, planted outside Soviet airbases, postcards of Red Square with missile diagrams hidden in the surface gloss, and the famous T-100, the first real spy camera, small enough to fit inside a pen. While rightly awed at the ingenuity of the techs in this golden age (they resolved text messaging in 1973 and started work on the personal digital camera in 1974), Robert Wallace and H Keith Melton also give an airing to the moments when the OTS “disintegrated into Keystone Cops comedy”, notably when trying to kill Fidel Castro. We all know about fatal cigars, but poisoned boots, hallucinogenic air-conditioning and booby-trapped seashells?

The romantic, James Bond-ish heyday of spyware was brief, though, and from the 1970s onwards the drudgery of audio surveillance seems to have taken over. The techs could bug anything, from coffee cups to ballpoint pens — they even built robotic fish to drop into tanks in hotel rooms and (clearly dog people) embedded microphones inside family cats.

Such seedy work seems to have contributed to the ultimate ethical decay of the techs, about which Wallace and Melton are in more obvious denial (Wallace is a former director of the OTS). They defend as “approved operations” the CIA’s illegal surveillance of its own citizens under Richard Nixon, and are reduced to Newspeak by the role of the OTS in Vietnam, which apparently included planting homing devices that facilitated America’s “precision air attack” of Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam. By the time the OTS was caught mining the harbours of left-leaning Nicaragua in 1984, because Ronald Reagan wanted “to disrupt the country’s economy”, the rot had clearly set in. It’s notable that the two catastrophic intelligence failures towards which the CIA was heading — 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction — get precious little investigation in this overly defensive volume.

Nevertheless, if you lay the context aside, this is an intriguing history of ingenious men and women, who could invent a talking tree, an inflatable airplane and an exploding rat — but ultimately struggled with the mechanics of a moral compass.

Spycraft by Robert Wallace and H Keith Melton
Bantam £12.99 pp548

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