2.- PROBLEMÁTICA

The operative word in “surveillance team” is team. Coordination is critical, and coordination means communications. How do members of a surveillance communicate with other members, and how does the team chief control the team?

The Command Post

During a surveillance, the team chief is like an infantry platoon leader in combat. He or she must have all available information instantly, must make instant decisions, and his or her orders must be instantly received and understood by the team. The command post must therefore be able to monitor the surveil- lance continuously. This is not always easy when, for example, a pair of targets split and one part of the team rides a ferry beyond walkie-talkie range or disappears up the elevator of a tall build- ing, while the other part finds itself parked in a cafe. Choosing where to locate the command post is always partly guesswork (in a safe house, in a taxi, in a hotel lobby, in a delivery van, in Communications

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a helicopter?). You have to compromise between what you have available (helicopters? vans? not today, sorry) and where you guess your target will go (out on the lake in a rowboat? over to the Ritz for high tea?).

Sentinel Points

If you have hunted crows in an American forest, you may have noticed that every flock of crows has a sentinel who posts him- self in a tree where he can watch the terrain below and call out signals to the other crows in the flock. If you can spot the sentinel and shoot him first, the other crows will not fly away but stay exposed to your rifle. If you miss the sentinel, he will warn the others and off they go. Every surveillance team should have its sentinels posted during every surveillance, invisible to any rifleman.

One of my secretaries in a certain city used to complain when I took her away from her desk and put her at a pay phone with a pocketful of coins or on a park bench with a walkie-talkie hidden in her handbag. Her temporary job was to be a sentinel

point, watching for countersurveillance and relaying messages

between the people doing surveillance and the team chief ’s command post. She hated it. Another of my secretaries used to beg me to assign her to such work, because she liked getting away from the office. (The first is still a secretary; the second is now a senior CI officer.)

Sometimes the team chief can be his own sentinel point, but in a large surveillance, especially when there is more than one target and the targets are likely to split off in different direc- tions, he will have to use subordinate sentinel points.

Telephone

Using pay phones to call the command post is an obvious way to communicate if you don’t have to worry about telephone

security, but in most parts of the world you do. A command post whose phone is likely to be monitored had better not use phones for communications, especially these days when so much telephone traffic actually goes by microwave or single- sideband radio.

Short-Range Radio

World War II gave us the walkie-talkie, which could transmit and receive for a distance of several miles, but could not be concealed in a pocket or handbag. The semiconductor chip and various improvements in antennas later produced small radios that could be hidden in a wallet or a hearing aid. Then came metal-coated balloons that could be put up over a city, when the wind was right, to reflect a high-frequency voice transmission from one side of town to the other. Still later came orbiting reflector satellites, which increased the range of small radios to just about any distance a spy would want. But the radio has not been devised that can select its receiver uniquely and evade in- terception. (Those which come closest to that goal are hideously expensive, far beyond the budget of the average surveillance team.) The security problem of radios in surveillance, therefore, is like that of telephones, magnified.

Intelligence stations, especially the hostile ones in our major cities, spend a lot of money and time monitoring the police fre- quencies and all those frequencies that carry surveillance traffic. Be aware of this when next you put a Soviet or Czech second secretary under surveillance.

One wonders how, nineteen hundred years before telephones or radios were invented, the surveillance teams used by the Im- perial Roman CI service in the Roman Province of Palestine managed so well against the insurgency of Barabbas and the spies of the Parthian Empire. They must have relied heavily on hand signals.

Hand Signals

One of the several reasons that federal plain clothes detectives used to be notorious for always wearing hats was that the tilt of a hat can be a code—tilt to left, “keep away from me, I’m under cover”; tilt to right, “get reinforcements”; hat under arm, “meet me at the rendezvous,” and so on. Two, three, or more surveil- lants working together have to have an inconspicuous system for signaling each other: Move ahead of the target, drop back, check in to the phone point, quit and go back to base, and the like. All kinds of props can be used, the more visible the better, so long as they are natural—handkerchiefs for blowing the nose or wiping the brow, pipes for lighting or knocking out or reaming with a pipe cleaner, eyeglasses for wiping, newspapers for rolling or carrying folded, handbags for women surveillants to carry by the strap or under the arm. Each team works out its own set of hand signals to fit the task at hand, then practices and rehearses; there must be a lot of practice and a lot of rehearsal. The hand signals used are more complicated and more numerous than those used by a catcher to a pitcher in American baseball.

Stakeouts

A few weeks ago in an American city, I happened to step into a newspaper kiosk for shelter from the wind while I lit my pipe. Standing behind the attendant, I noticed that he had a sort of log-book in front of him, and that he was watching a doorway across the street, which was the entrance of a haber- dashery. When anybody entered the shop, the attendant made an entry on the log: “#7 IN 1417.” When the same person came out, the entry was: “#7 OUT 1428.” I had once gone into this haberdashery myself to buy some socks and had noticed that the prices on men’s clothing were hugely above normal and that the volume of business done by the shop seemed very small. I bought no socks at the price demanded, and I was not

astonished to read in the newspaper a few days later that the haberdashery had been raided by police and its staff arrested for dealing in narcotics. The newspaper kiosk had been a “stake- out,” a “static” or “fixed” surveillance of a front for a narcotics dealership. The attendant was either a policeman under cover, or more likely a man recruited and paid by the police to watch the target of the investigation. If the target had been a suspected espionage live drop or safe house, the use of the kiosk would have been the same.

Sometimes a stakeout must be semimobile. Some of my old colleagues of another nationality will recall a case in a European city in which two Allied services worked together to confront and double back an enemy spy. We knew that he had left town to make a meeting with the enemy service but did not know when he would return. Our task was to surveil his residence without being noticed by his neighbors or by the local authori- ties. We managed to acquire use of a large residence a half mile from his house and then to mount from there a drifting sur- veillance by a sizable number of staff officers, men and women, who singly and in pairs casually strolled past his address each hour or so in different changes of clothing. About the third day of this time-consuming exercise, one of our girls saw him go into his house carrying his luggage, and within an hour we had recruited him.

Limpets

A car with a skilled driver is hard to follow through city traffic and is hard to follow on the open road without becoming con- spicuous. Maybe it was the fish-and-game people who gave CI officers the idea of limpets. The rangers who study the migra- tion and breeding habits of grizzly bears and other such elusive beasts use miniature battery-powered transmitters embedded in their hides after they have been tranquillized with a dart Communications

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syringe. A vehicle does not submit to tranquillizing, but when unattended will accept a magnet to which is attached the same kind of beeping transmitter. The surveillance team with the proper small receiver need never come in sight of the target to follow it; indeed, the target can often be tracked on a map back in the office or safe house. The trick is to get inconspicuously near the vehicle for a few moments while you slap the limpet under a fender.

During the Cold War, in Soviet Bloc countries, the State Security Services made extensive use of limpets for surveillance, including some they contrived to attach to warm bodies. How? Well, think of your shoes, for example, that you just sent out for repair in Budapest—is the new heel hollow? Does the Alpen- stock you bought in Prague for hiking radiate when you put it next to a frequency meter? Is there something funny sewn into the tail of your new Polish raincoat, the one you bought in order to be inconspicuous on the streets of Warsaw?

V EHICLES

Bicycles and helicopters and skateboards and scooterbikes and powerboats, as well as plain automobiles, can be used in surveil- lance. (I always wanted to use a blimp but didn’t know how to get hold of one.) The one thing surveillance vehicles have in common is radio, short-range wireless communications.

Seldom is one vehicle enough, because in a surveillance of a target who is using a car, the tailing car is easy to spot, easy to evade—more so than a foot surveillant tailing a pedestrian tar- get. So, as in foot surveillance, you have to have alternate tailing vehicles, and for that you need a fleet. Obviously every vehicle in your fleet must look different from all the others. The Toyota must be replaced at intervals by the Ford, which must give way to the Volvo (to fit your own area, substitute the commonest and least conspicuous models used there).

One vehicle must be the control car, the command post, with wireless communication not only with the vehicles in the fleet, and with whatever foot surveillants may be part of the caper, but with the supervising office. Often the control vehicle will also be the photo truck—that is, an ostensible delivery van, television repair truck, or the like—in which a small office can be concealed and which can be rigged for taking surreptitious photographs. These days most surveillance teams are organized around such a vehicle.

Arranging cover and documentation for surveillance vehicles may be the most onerous logistical chore you have. The prin- ciples and problems are the same as those that you encounter in setting up your support apparatus, discussed in chapter 4.