From: military-radio-guy Full-Name: Dennis R Starks To: military radio collectors#1 Fcc: Sent Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 07:12:11 Subject: MILITARY COLLECTOR GROUP POST, Mar.2/99 Message-ID: <19990303.071116.16087.3.military-radio-guy@juno.com> X-Status: Sent X-Mailer: Juno 1.49 MILITARY COLLECTOR GROUP POST, Mar.2/99 Index: INTERROGATION OF A RETIRED CIA COMMO VETERAN; by Pete McCollum MEMBERS WRITE; Motorola MX, Cliff Want's British Furgeson Company Info & Pin-Palls, NEW MEMBER; Derek Oldenburger HUMOR; *********************************************** INTERROGATION OF A RETIRED CIA COMMO VETERAN; by Pete McCollum Forward: The following is a collection of anecdotes was collected from a retired CIA commo veteran by Pete McCollum. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent him this info in a series of e-mails sent/received over a several week interrogation period. Pete has compiled these in an assemblage of order for our benefit. Pete has also bombarded his source with several volleys of questions for which he is still searching for some answers. Readers should note that very much of the early information presented here has been apparently gleaned directly from early publications such as "The War Report of the OSS" by Kermit Roosevelt(and co authored by many others) which is the official account ordered to be written by Donovan himself just after WW-II, for which some passages are repeated here almost word for word. Other original source material seems to include those accounts of the R & D team members who designed the SSTR-1. Their stories have been posted here in their entirety, along with additional data, and can be found in Backmail #39 (SSTR-1; From the Horses Mouth, parts I, II, & III). Readers should consult these original sources before forming any permanent opinions. Collaborating material can also be found in Backmail #43 "GRC-109/RS-1; What, Why, When, Where" originally published here in six parts and co-authored by Pete & myself. A great deal of additional data on the GRC-109, RS-1 and it's variants have also been compiled by Pete and presented here via our group post. This data has not yet been transferred to our Backmail files and can yet be found in our Back Issues. Lastly, Pete has spent many years in a fanatical search for every possible detail on the RS-1, GRC-109, RS-6 and Delco 5300/PRC-64 and all their variants. Much of this data we have been made privy to by him via this post, and the balance has been included in a lengthy paper written by him which is available in hard copy or via his new Web Site(more on that later). That material where Pete's source recounts his personal experiences are very accurate, and should provide us with a greatly enhanced understanding of the equipment that was used, how, where, and when. Even a few here-to-for unknown types will be presented along with some detail of data that before we could only speculate on. My sincere thanks to Pete for his diligence in researching this material, and sharing it with us. Dennis Starks, editor Military Collector Group Post. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- These anecdotes are Copyright 1999 by Peter McCollum. Permission is given to reproduce this material for non-commercial purposes, as long as credit is given. As you can imagine a large percentage of personnel in the OSS "Commo" branch were recruited from within the ranks of the amateur radio operators since they were already qualified and the vast majority very proficient in handling Morse code traffic and since most of the hams in those days built their own equipment and were constantly testing and coming up with field expedient solutions to technical problems they were high on the list of potential personnel to OSS recruiters. In the private sector companies engaged in supporting the war effort jealously guarded their technical personnel and arranged for deferments of essential personnel. While OSS did manage to attract some of these technical people away from industry they relied, by and large, on the hams. Although many professional Morse operators from ships and land wire services were recruited for base station assignment the vast array of liberty ships took a lot of these fellows. The actual "communications branch" was created by order of General Donovan on 22 September 1942. The R&D division was also set up about that time (sometime in November I believe) and they acquired a small lab. One of the first projects was to develop a lightweight portable transmitter/receiver/power supply for clandestine commo. The British already had in use a suitcase type clandestine rig. I'm sure that examination of this unit by the OSS fellows had an effect on their efforts to produce a unit of like size and capability. This evolved into the SSTR-1. An earlier model was produced and I am told it did not perform satisfactorily but was used as a stop gap measure until the SSTR-1. The first set used a crystal oscillator and two tubes in the final. I don't know the tube types but I do know that they were 35-volt filament types which made it impracticable for battery operation. Sometime along the way a separate final amp was produced for the SSTR-1 using the TR-1 as the driver. This unit had it's own power supply and antenna tuning network. The final was an 815 and I believe we loaded it up to about 50/60 watts. During the cold war a lot of made-do units, systems and techniques were used. The One-Way-Voice links (OWVL) were used a lot to send message traffic in to the agent and he in turn used secret writing for his reports. As a rule they used a commercially available receiver. If the agent knew Morse we sent out broadcasts in Morse at slow speeds. We also used "cut-numbers" both to and from the agent. 0 to 9 were sent as a T,A,U,V,4,E,N,D,B,6. In this manner we did not have to use the Latin alphabet and the training was very short. There were all sorts of keyers. One developed by the military used a dial, perferator, and tape; it was called a PAM-keyer and I believe the military nomenclature was AN/UGT-1. There was also a simple one using a pad with electrical contacts under the dit and dah of each character and a pencil type stylus with a wire running to ground was simply pulled down the track for each character (very simple but did work). There were also a lot of sophisticated ones but I will have to check and see if these have been declassified. I imagine so as I am sure that the Russians ended up with every one of them - grin. I have operated many an RS-1. As a matter of fact during the Bay of Pigs I was a part of that bit and was on the aircraft carrier ESSEX for several days. The US Navy was out of commo and until I could get a rig or two going for them I sent all of their traffic, hour upon hour, on the RS-1. Also after the Cuban Missile crisis I accompanied the then Director Mccone to his villa on Cat Key in the Bahamas and provided all of his commo on the RS-1. Re: the headphones [for the RS-1]. As I recall they were "Trimm Featherweights" and did fit nicely in container and could be put away quickly. But [deleted] [see below] is right at the base we preferred the larger types bcause we used to slide them up on our forehead instead of over our ears. Of course we slid em down over our ears for weak signals. Sorry, I don't remember the manufacturer of those lightweight headsets. I do remember that most of the agents I dealt with liked them very much, but I personally always preferred the heavier kind for long stretches - the lightweight ones just didn't seem to do the job for staff commo needs (maybe it was the cushions that could be mounted easily on the heavier sets, even at the cost of some heavy sweating after a long session). I did see one - just one - of the "booster" amplifiers for the SSTR-1. [deleted] had one at the [deleted] in Taipei when he was there with [deleted] (and building a kilowatt BC-610 from scrap parts) and I was in the same city under [deleted] - long, long before the two entities merged. [deleted] wouldn't turn loose of it, however, and it passed from memory until you jogged the old brain cells with your note. I didn't remember the nomenclature and accept your ident on that. I opened Beirut station in 1948 with an SSTR-1 and that was all I had for a couple of months. It had a single 6L6 as a tritet oscillator/final and had 10 watts pwr output. However opening the long slender case the 6L6 was mounted horizontally and could be immersed in a jar of motor oil. Then with a better power supply I could turn this into 50 or more watts. Also with more filtering it would follow a bug at 25 wpm which it would not do so before. There was also an ancilliary unit which was a power amplifier using a single 815 tube and a pi-coupler antenna tuner in the same enclosure. Neat. Engineers from two manufacturers helped in the development of the SSTR-1 and other OSS gear. RDR Corp. in New York City and Pioneer Electric and Research in Forest Park, Illinois. Regards the power for the SSTR-1: the thermocouple device was called a YTB-1 (Yak Turd Burner). The official nomenclature was the SSP-3. The SSTR-1 receiver was noted for drifting. We used to remove the screws from the case and remove the guts from the case just a bit and using a pencil to move the case slightly back and forth it was nudged back to frequency. The rcvr,xmtr and pwr supply were all produced by different companies. The power supply was done by the P.R. Mallory Co. OSS developed equipment as follows: SSTR-1 SSTR-4 SSTR-5 SSTR-6 SST-102 Calibrator SSP-3 battery charger SSP-8 lightweight gasoline engine driving a D.C. generator The SST-6 was part of the Joan Eleanor system, air to ground for agent commo. This later was eventually turned into one of the first UHF systems. Very good since the Germans did not have anything that high in frequency at the time and could not monitor. And I have used a few RS-6 but there was a better one, and I have one in my possession it is a RT-49 transmitter and RR-49 receiver. The first fully transistorized rigs. The RS-6 was designed strictly for agent use. I had no idea it had been used by SAC. We did our own prototypes of all our units ...thoroughly tested by operators and ops officers before having them built outside. Re: RR-49A : The rcvr measures approx 3 13/16 x 2 11/16 x 1 6/16. Freq coverage 3 to 24 mHz in three bands. This set was produced in our lab and was the first to use sandwiched technology by us. We had a very fine clean room where prototypes were produced. Both sensitivity and selectivity are good and it is quite stable. Our clean room was staffed by a bunch of little country ladies ..small nimble hands that were used to all kinds of needle work. Good workers but when they had a "poof" when working on a board they teared up a bit. The RT-1B came out in about 1950. I never loaded this up to more than 100 watts. A better version known as the URT-11 came out shortly thereafter [Note: this is NOT the same as the military URT-11.]. I used one of these in Belgrade in 1951 communicating daily with a base station in Nicosia Cyprus. This unit was used in a great number of embassies when CW was king. The RT-1B had some keying problems due primarily to the keying relay. I changed this on mine to grid block keying which was clean and could also be used with a 300 wpm keyer. The old relay limited you to 60 wpm but was sluggish at 25 wpm. The URT-11 also had this problem in the beginning. The URT-11 was used to drive a 400 watt unit which we called the RT-4 [a bigger xmtr using a pair of 4-125's in the final]. I remember installing one at our Embassy in Tel Aviv in 1952. Once the networks began changing to radio teletype we started using all commercial gear for anything over 100 watts. After we ran out of a lot of the military hand-me-downs such as the Hallicrafters BC-610 (military HT-4) we used a lot of the TMC GPT-750 since it could be used key down at around 500 watts 12 to 14 hours at a time. It was a big old thing with three big pull out drawers. It was complete with it's own frequency shift exciter. Only problem was it required a good remotely tunable antenna, otherwise a high standing VSWR was reflected back to ground thru the filament transformer. In emergencies I used to put the transformer on styrofoam blocks, lifting it above ground. Of course I locked the bottom drawer to prevent some poor soul from getting electrocuted. About the RT-1B. Back to 1946 when Truman couldn't get msg traffic from his Ambassador in Tehran. The job was given to CIG to establish a station there for this purpose and since CIG (to be CIA in Sept 47) was given the task of establishing a diplomatic network. Tehran was our first base station and I participated in that. We had old military hand-me downs ..transmitters were WILCOX 96-C and a BC-339 and receivers were Hammarlund super-pro (military BC-779 I believe). Every thing was CW so we really didn't need the power for the field stations. The most powerful transmsitter was located in Baghdad and it was a Collins 16-F. Since this time period was before the RS-1 we usually used the Collins 32-RA which was a 100 watt rig (rugged and had 3 each 807 in parallel in final. It was 4 channel xtal control but had a slug tuned VFO..pi coupler and would tune to anything. They wanted us to be very inconspicuous with limited power and low visibility antennas which were usually a couple of long wires (actually random length wires). The RT-1B and later URT-ll was good to have around for field expedient stations as we were always prepared to push off at a moments notice and activate a station during times of crisis (and there were plenty of these). Later we built a base station in Cyprus. There we had large rhombic antenna fields at both xmtr and rcvr sites (they were separated by 13 miles) and with Collins 231-D (3KW) rigs. The philosophy was push the signals out and suck them in. We linked the sites by Farinon PT-150 vhf link and I believe we had an AN/TRAC-4 at one time. Yes the RT/A-3 was a part of the BN-2 beacon. The British SARA was much better and got more use in drop zones. You had a query about why 22 to 30 mHz [RT/E-3]. As things changed in the war some of the circuits were necessarily long haul and during certain sun-spot numbers frequencies could be as high as what is now CB. Also, after WWII but during the cold war Ionospheric sounders were used to predict FOT. You would be surprised that the MUF's between Miami and Havana were often above 22 mHz. The GN-58 was a good old lunker but during transmission when the key was pressed it was a groaner. Took a lot of muscle. Regards Village Radio the first units (HT series) were all AM. They were later manuf as FM and were FM-1, FM-5 etc. The "Village Radio" was, in my estimation, a joke. The FM-5 base station and the FM-1 hand portable were designed by Paul Katz of USAIDE and farmed out to Hallicrafters. They were cheap (and I don't mean in-expensive). One of my Filipino techs that worked for me in the Middle East is working for me here. He worked for Paul in Viet Nam on the Village Radios. He says the HT series was used for about two years before the FM series came into use. He says the front end of the receivers were real problem areas but the transmitters were very stable. One of the major problems were dirt and mud as they were thrown around a lot. ed) The source has confused FM with HT in the first part of this passage. Though the FM series went into service only a couple years after the introduction of the HT series(AM modulated) they did not replace those radios. Both remained in service for many years. Paul Katz worked for OPS(Office of Public Safety, itself a front organization for the CIA) he was farmed out to Radio Industries which was a division of Hallicrafters at the time. Hallicrafters itself would change hands several times during the lifetime of the OPS series to such as Wilcox, Northrop, and Breaker. The front end of these FM VHF portables were indeed a problem. They had a tendency to self oscillation if not aligned just perfectly and even then prone to act up if/when bounced around. Most other statements made are right on the money and have been mentioned here several times, more data can be found in our Back mail files. It is planned to tell the complete story of the OPS series radios(which included HF, AM, and SSB radios built by both Hallicrafters and others), and this mysterious organization in a future article as part of the "Para-Military Radio" series. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pete McCollum ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cliff Want's British Furgeson Company Info & Pin-Palls, Hi Dennis, I would be interested in hearing from anyone in the group having WWII British military radios manufactured by the Furgeson radio company in London. In particular, if the radio has a production or inspection stamp, on the chassis or elsewhere, of "IO", "IFO", or "ILO". Thanks, Cliff *********************************************** NEW MEMBER; Derek Oldenburger Hi Dennis, Your group sounds neat. I have enjoyed ww2 radios since I bought a BC 604 from Fair Radio Sales in l960! I have a general class amateur radio ops license (K9FQO) and a class 1 commercial radio ops license. I have been playing with ww2 radios since 1960. I have a sizeable collection of equipment, parts and manuals. I have no economic interest in my hobby. I am looking for a schematic or a manual for the TRC1 receiver at the present time. I would enjoy participating in your group. I do not have scanner capability at present but hope to in the future as far as copying info for people but do have copy access. I would enjoy being part of your group. Thank you, Derek Oldenburger *********************************************** HUMOR; A car breaks down along the expressway one day, so the driver eases it over onto the shoulder of the highway. He jumps out of the car, opens the trunk, and pulls out two men in trench coats. The men stand behind the car, open up their coats and start exposing themselves to the oncoming traffic. This results in one of the worst pile-ups in history. When questioned by police why he put two deviates along the side of the road, the man replied, "I broke down and was just using my emergency flashers!" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Things you'll hear only in the South: Exclamations... "Well, knock me down and steal muh teeth!" "Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit." Threats... "I'll slap you so hard, your clothes will be outta style." "This'll jar your preserves." "Don't you be makin' me open a can o' whoop-ass on ya!" Good Things/Compliments... "Cute as a sack full of puppies." "If things get any better, I may have to hire someone to help me enjoy it." "Gooder than grits." The Weather... "It's so dry, the trees are bribing the dogs." "It's been hotter'n a goat's butt in a pepper patch." Wintery roads are said to be "slicker than otter snot." Descriptions... A bothersome person is "like a booger that you can't thump off." When something is bad, you say, "That ain't no count." If something is hard to do, it's "like trying to herd cats." He ran "like his feet was on fire and his ass was a-catchin." A hectic schedule keeps you "busier than a cat covering crap on a marble floor." Insults... "She's uglier than homemade soap." "Your momma's so fat, when she stepped up on the scale to be weighed, it said 'To be continued.'" "He fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down." "Uglier than a lard bucket full of armpits." (Note: any insulting statement is always followed by the expression "bless his/her heart.") --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A woman desperately looking for work goes into the employment office. The Personnel Manager goes over her resume and explains to her that he regrets he has nothing worthy of her. The woman answers that she really needs work and will take almost anything. The Personnel Manager hums and haws and finally says he does have a low skill job on the "Tickle Me Elmo" line and nothing else. The woman happily accepts. He takes her down to the line and explains her duties and that she should be in at 8:00 am the next day. The next day at 8:45am there's a knock on the Personnel Manager's door. The "Tickle Me Elmo" line manager comes in and starts ranting about the woman just hired. After screaming for 15 minutes about how backed up the assembly line is, the Personnel Manager suggested he show him the problem. Together they head down to the line and sure enough, Elmos are backed up from here to kingdom come. Right at the end of the line is the woman just hired, she has pulled over a roll of the material used for the Elmos and has a big bag of marbles. They both watch as she cuts a little piece of fabric and takes 2 marbles and starts sewing them between Elmo's legs. The Personnel Manager starts to kill himself laughing and finally after about 20 minutes of rolling around he pulls himself together and walks over to the new employee and says, "I'm sorry, I guess you misunderstood me yesterday. What I wanted you to do was give Elmo two test tickles." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A couple of women were playing golf one sunny Saturday morning. The first of the two some teed off and watched in horror as her ball headed directly toward a foursome of men playing the next hole. Indeed, the ball hit one of the men, and he immediately clasped his hands together at his crotch, fell to the ground and proceeded to roll around in evident agony. The woman rushed down to the man and immediately began to apologize. She said, "Please allow me to help. I'm a physical therapist and I know I could relieve your pain if you'd allow." "Ummph, oooh, nnooo, I'll be all right...I'll be fine in a few minutes," he replied breathlessly as he remained in the fetal position still clasping his hands together at his crotch. But she persisted, and he finally allowed her to help him. She gently took his hands away and laid them to the side, she loosened his pants, and she put her hands inside. She began to massage him. She then asked him, "How does that feel?" To which he replied, "It feels great, but my thumb still hurts like hell." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FOR SALE BY OWNER: Complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. 45 volumes. Excellent condition. $1,000.00 or best offer. No longer needed. Got married last weekend. Wife knows everything. *********************************************** (The preceding was a product of the"Military Collector Group Post", an international email magazine dedicated to the preservation of history and the equipment that made it. Unlimited circulation of this material is authorized so long as the proper credits to the original authors, and publisher or this group are included. For more information conserning this group contact Dennis Starks at, military-radio-guy@juno.com) ***********************************************