late afternoon, it was usually jammed with employees from the half-dozen or so defense plants in the area, CIA men from the Project and personnel from the sprawling nearby Air Force Space and Missile Systems Organization complex, which had evolved from the old secret organization that began in the Inglewood parochial school.
The Buckit offered inexpensive food, cheap beer and nonstop dancing on two runways by young women wearing G-strings, shoes and nothing else. Intelligence analysts who spent the morning reviewing photographs of Soviet missile pads taken from space could relax at noon by studying the bobbing breasts of young girls. Over beer, and against the noisy background of strident recorded music and customersâ cheers and whistles at the girls, Norman regaled Chris, as he had earlier, with stories from Vietnamâabout the whores, the combat and the constant killing, giving Chris a much more personal view of the war than he had received via the nightly news. One of Normanâs favorite stories was how he and other Marines had taken Viet Cong soldiers up in a helicopter and then tossed them outâsometimes if they didnât answer their questions, sometimes after they did. Chris didnât believe the stories at first. But as they were repeated with additional horrifying details, he began to believe them, and it gave him still another perspective on his country.
Another person whom Chris could not help getting to know better was Laurie Vicker. She was apparently a whiz at computers, but she didnât seem too bright to Chris. Whenever her work load was light, or she just got a whim to do so, she came into the vault and tried to make conversation with him. Laurie wanted more than anything else to get married and move out of the home of her parents. She liked marijuana, Valium and amphetamines; the last, she said, were necessary to dampen her appetite so that she could lose weight.
During these first few weeks Chris learned other things about Laurie: she liked her sex in threesomes and, sometimes, accompanied by pain, and she delighted in talking about it. She said she enjoyed wearing black leather outfits during her sex and flogging men who got their sexual kicks that way. Chris wasnât sexually interested at all in the lusty, overweight girl; she was too coarse for him, and her graphic invitations to join her group-sex sessions embarrassed him. But, as he discovered, he was clearly in the minority.
Each station in the Central Intelligence Agency network of which Chris was now a part had a designator, or âslug,â that identified it. It was an address cited on each message. For instance, CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, appropriately was called âPilotâ; TRW was âPedalâ; Canberra, the capital of Australia, was âCasino.â Chris learned that he was to operate two cryptographic systems between TRW and the CIA headquarters and, with Langley as an intermediate relay point, to Australia and other stations around the world.
The first of the machines was the KW-7. It worked exactly like a teletype machine except for one thing: when Chris typed a message on the keyboard, a computer scrambled the sequence of letters, words and sentences he typed into an incoherent stream of electronic pulses. Conversely, when messages arrived from Pilot, the machine reversed the process, transforming incoherent pulses from the CIA into plain English. The messages sent over this encoded teletype system were called TWXâs, like ordinary teletype messages. The second machine he operated, the KG-13, scrambled voices into meaningless gibberish to prevent eavesdropping on telephone and radio conversations between TRW, Langley and any other stations plugged temporarily into the circuit. When TRW or CIA representatives needed to hold what they called a âsecureâ conversation, certain not to be penetrated by the KGB or other foreign agents, they spoke over the KG-13 from the
The Buckit offered inexpensive food, cheap beer and nonstop dancing on two runways by young women wearing G-strings, shoes and nothing else. Intelligence analysts who spent the morning reviewing photographs of Soviet missile pads taken from space could relax at noon by studying the bobbing breasts of young girls. Over beer, and against the noisy background of strident recorded music and customersâ cheers and whistles at the girls, Norman regaled Chris, as he had earlier, with stories from Vietnamâabout the whores, the combat and the constant killing, giving Chris a much more personal view of the war than he had received via the nightly news. One of Normanâs favorite stories was how he and other Marines had taken Viet Cong soldiers up in a helicopter and then tossed them outâsometimes if they didnât answer their questions, sometimes after they did. Chris didnât believe the stories at first. But as they were repeated with additional horrifying details, he began to believe them, and it gave him still another perspective on his country.
Another person whom Chris could not help getting to know better was Laurie Vicker. She was apparently a whiz at computers, but she didnât seem too bright to Chris. Whenever her work load was light, or she just got a whim to do so, she came into the vault and tried to make conversation with him. Laurie wanted more than anything else to get married and move out of the home of her parents. She liked marijuana, Valium and amphetamines; the last, she said, were necessary to dampen her appetite so that she could lose weight.
During these first few weeks Chris learned other things about Laurie: she liked her sex in threesomes and, sometimes, accompanied by pain, and she delighted in talking about it. She said she enjoyed wearing black leather outfits during her sex and flogging men who got their sexual kicks that way. Chris wasnât sexually interested at all in the lusty, overweight girl; she was too coarse for him, and her graphic invitations to join her group-sex sessions embarrassed him. But, as he discovered, he was clearly in the minority.
Each station in the Central Intelligence Agency network of which Chris was now a part had a designator, or âslug,â that identified it. It was an address cited on each message. For instance, CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, appropriately was called âPilotâ; TRW was âPedalâ; Canberra, the capital of Australia, was âCasino.â Chris learned that he was to operate two cryptographic systems between TRW and the CIA headquarters and, with Langley as an intermediate relay point, to Australia and other stations around the world.
The first of the machines was the KW-7. It worked exactly like a teletype machine except for one thing: when Chris typed a message on the keyboard, a computer scrambled the sequence of letters, words and sentences he typed into an incoherent stream of electronic pulses. Conversely, when messages arrived from Pilot, the machine reversed the process, transforming incoherent pulses from the CIA into plain English. The messages sent over this encoded teletype system were called TWXâs, like ordinary teletype messages. The second machine he operated, the KG-13, scrambled voices into meaningless gibberish to prevent eavesdropping on telephone and radio conversations between TRW, Langley and any other stations plugged temporarily into the circuit. When TRW or CIA representatives needed to hold what they called a âsecureâ conversation, certain not to be penetrated by the KGB or other foreign agents, they spoke over the KG-13 from the
Similar Books
