Spy vs. Spy

It was another bright, beautiful, boring Sunday afternoon on Kwajalein.  I had nothing to do.  I ended up riding my bicycle around the perimeter of the island, then stopping for a while at the Super Radot (SR1).  The small, square, one story building had a 16 ft. fiberglass dome on top, surrounded by a steel deck with a rail.  It was a good place to sit and look at the ocean.  Being on the northeast shore, SR1 was at the leading edge - where the island meets the prevailing tradewinds and currents.  Standing at the rail, facing into the wind, it was easy to imagine that I was on the bridge of a gigantic ship, on a steady course to the northeast through an infinite, brilliant ocean.

I kept my portable shortwave radio in the dome, so I could listen to the world as I watched the vast Pacific.  I had been scanning the waves for a while when a friend of mine named Bruce saw my bike out front and stopped in.  Bruce was a technician at a radar site on one of the outer islands.  I tuned in Radio Moscow for the "news" on the hour, and we sat around for a while listening to it's blatent cold war propoganda, which was always funny and sometimes absolutely hilarious.

Later, one of us noticed an odd looking old trawler on the horizon.  It was several miles to the southeast, steaming north along the eastern edge of the atoll.  In the late afternoon light it's rusted hull took on sort of a coral pink color.  I knew right away what it was.  The infamous old ship had been a frequent visitor to the Kwajalein area, mysteriously appearing to lurk on the horizon for a while before disappearing again into the distance.  I suppose it was observing some territorial limit, because it always stayed several miles away from the islands.  No one had ever had a very good look at it.  And nobody I knew had ever heard the ship's actual name, we just called it "Brand X".

Brand X was a Soviet spy ship.  It was a scavenger - watching, listening, and recording every bit of information it could intercept about the U.S. missile tests at Kwajalein.  Brand X was the enemy.

It made perfect sense for that ship to be near Kwajalein Missile Range, that Sunday.  In just a couple of days the first test flight of a new inter-continental ballistic missile would bring 10 reentry vehicles splashing into the ocean at various points north of the atoll.  This upcoming flight of the MX missile (which had recently been given the misleading name "Peacekeeper" by Ronald Reagan) was no secret to anyone.  Especially not to the Russians, who had been, as always, informed in advance of the upcoming launch (in order to avoid an accidental nuclear war!).

We watched Brand X for a few minutes as it approached Kwajalein Island.  It was too far away to tell much about it, except that it appeared to be a typical merchant freighter/liner, about 300 ft. long.  It was extremely rusty and appeared to be very poorly maintained.

When the ship was just about due east of us I said to Bruce "They're probably watching us now... you suppose we ought to wave at 'em or just go ahead and flip 'em off?  He replied "Too bad we can't look at 'em with the Super RADOT, that'd be cool".  It took me about half a second to realize that we could look at them with the Super Radot!  Of course we could.  The Super Radot was my telescope.  It may have been owned by the U.S Army but I kept it running, I kept it clean and shiny, I tracked missiles with it during the missions, and I had the keys!  I didn't have "official" permission to be playing with the thing on my own time, but it didn't matter.  It never had mattered before.  No one would know; no one would care.  I jumped into the dome and started getting things ready.  Bruce took my keys downstairs and started powering up the consoles and equipment racks.

About a minute later I was sitting at the main console with my hand on the joystick.  The telescope and dome had been parked facing away from the ship, so I found the western horizon so Bruce could adjust the focus and intensity.  The picture on the monitor looked terrible.  The specialized low-light video camera, designed for tracking faint, distant objects against the darkness of the night sky, produced a grainy, "snowy", low resolution image vhen viewing a bright, evenly lit scene.  Grainy or not, at 240 power that ship was going to look BIG!  We were ready to spy on the spies!

A slight nudge on the joystick brought the telescope rapidly spinning around to lock onto and track the target.  We figured they'd probably notice the dome and telescope swinging around to peer at them.  Bruce made a mocking gesture, imitating an excited bridge officer announcing "Kapitan, Kapitan...Americanski telescopic surveillance!"

The view through the telescope was incredibly close!  I had to scan back and forth, and up and down, to see the entire ship, since only a small part of it would fit into the telescope's field of view.  But I could see quite a bit of detail, and I could watch people on deck and tell what they were doing.  Brand X didn't have it's name painted on the bow, but on the side of the hull amidships a set of large, faded white characters proclaimed it to be "CCB 464".

They did notice the telescope, they noticed it right away, and within a few seconds Brand X was executing a hard turn to starboard, away from the island.  I thought they would continue on out to sea now that they were being scrutinized, but the ship continued it's turn until it had reversed it's course!  Now it was headed south, and would be once again passing to the east of Kwajalein Island.

In my haste to view the enemy I had decided not to bother with threading a tape onto one of the big 1" reel to reel video recorders on the console.  I eventually remembered the brand new Betamax recorder we had just installed, popped in a cassette, and let the tape run for a while as we scanned the ship.  I tried to make sure that I had a good image of every visible part of it.

At first there didn't seem to be much activity on Brand X, but after a couple of minutes some of the crewmen ran out onto the aft deck for a spontaneous and carefree game of volleyball.  "Attention all hands... This is the Kapitan, we are being monitored by the evil capitalists, DEPLOY THE VOLLEYBALL TEAM!"

The thing really didn't look much like a spy ship.  I had sort of expected to see lots of exotic tracking and telemetry dishes nestled among a bristling of bizarre antennae, and maybe some cameras or telescopes.  But aside from a few whip antennae atop the superstructure and one odd looking dish on a mobile trailer, it just looked like any other run-down old freighter.  Some months earlier I had toured the American version of "Brand X", which had stopped at Kwajalein for a couple of days.  The USNS Observation Island was a beautiful, bright white ship with several large golf ball shaped domes topping it's superstructure and a large phased-array radar on the stern.  Our spy ship looked like a NASA tracking ship, their spy ship looked like a derelict.  State-of-the-art versus the state of the Soviets, such was the nature of the Cold War.  Such was the appearance, anyway.

Before long the (somewhat less) mysterious Brand X slipped away over the horizon.  "The enemy" was gone.  We had actually spied on a real Soviet spy ship.  Since we were on our own time we were amateur spies, Sunday spooks!  As it turned out, it hadn't been such a boring Sunday after all.

After supper that night I was riding my bicycle, making another loop around the island.  As I passed through the housing area I saw Nan and her husband, Jim, out with the kids on their bikes.  Nan was the site engineer at SR1, she and I were the SR1 crew.  We talked for a couple of minutes.  Sometime during the conversation I mentioned that I had looked at Brand X with the Super RADOT that afternoon.  She seemed impressed and asked if she could see the tape on Monday.  I soon continued my ride, and didn't think about Brand X anymore.

A few minutes later, Nan ran into John, the Optics Deptartment supervisor.  Word of my Brand X tape had begun it's climb up the chain of command, quickly soaring to heights I would never have imagined.

I arrived at work at 7:30 the next morning to find Nan and John waiting there with two of the big bosses from administration and three strange men.  They were all waiting for me.  For a split second I thought maybe I was in real big trouble, but none of them had big trouble looks on their faces.  As it turned out, the three strangers were "spooks" from the Defense Intelligence Agency, and they wanted to see my tape of Brand X.  I don't know where they had travelled from, but they appeared to have rushed to Kwajalein from some distant part of the world where suits and ties and shiny leather shoes were appropriate, most likely the Pentagon.  I thought maybe they were going to confiscate my tape, but they consistently treated it as my personal property, politely asking my permission to watch it and then to make some copies.  They were as friendly as they were mysterious.

But it was obvious that the three of them were experts on Brand X, and that they knew everything that was known (outside of the Soviet Union) about "CCB 464".  They said the name of the ship was the "Zabaikayle", and they gave me a copy of the page in "Jane's Fighting Ships" that listed the ship (shown at left)..  They watched my tape over and over, rewinding and replaying various scenes.  One of them had a briefcase full of 8 by 10 color glossy photos of the same ship, taken some months earlier from an Army helicopter.  Every scene of my tape was compared and contrasted with the photos from the helicopter.  They were excited about having such a close view from such a low angle, since the helicopter photos were all looking down from above.  And the strange mobile dish was something they hadn't seen before!  One of them pointed out the ship's bridge, which was not at all where I had thought.  What I had thought was the bridge was actually a box shaped fiberglass or plastic radome, containing unknown equipment.

They thought there might have been something important on the port side of the ship.  But of course, we'll never know if there was or not, since I didn't have the video tape running then.  I only saw the port side of the ship for a few seconds, but I didn't remember seeing anything "unusual" there.

The spooks had brought their own video recorder, so after they were satisfied that they had seen every frame of the tape at least eight times they made a copy for themselves.  And then, with expressions of deep gratitude, they were gone.

It was only one small piece of the Soviet puzzle, but everyone was happy and everyone was impressed.  The spooks were thrilled with their new tape.  Everyone else was just having fun being involved in such a unique incident.

That evening as I was walking to the chow hall I saw Bruce, and I told him about the spooks coming to see the tape we had made.  "Aw man!  Some people have all the luck!  I was right there with you, but you get all the glory.  How is it that you always end up with the best of everything?"

It was an excellent question, but one I didn't really have an answer for.  I couldn't deny that I really did always seem to end up riding the crest of the wave.  I had begun to notice it more and more often.  How it came to be so was beyond me.  I said something vague like "I don't know man, I just try to flow with it all, to go where the universe takes me.  I'm not very good at it."  I explained to him that I had repeatedly mentioned his name during the spook visit, but he was unconsoled.  I told him that he hadn't missed all that much.  He had, after all, spied on a Russian spy ship with the Super Radot telescope.  How many people in the world had done that?  Only two!  And the spying had been the real adventure, the spooks were just more confirmation of the uniqueness of the experience.