LUCKY IN CYPRUS: Russian Jammers And A Visit To The CIA Base

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If Nikos was right and the gods and goddesses were everywhere in Cyprus, then they must have had a macabre sense of humor.

Assuming it really was the Goddess Athena - in the guise of an owl - who had hooted spells of good fortune for Lucky that perfumed night of kisses and blooming flowers, she delivered her promises in a ship whose seams were decidedly leaky. It was true that after that night Lucky experienced a brief interlude of relative peace, both at home and at school. It came with both a blessing and a curse.

Peace at school came at the cost of a major electronic attack by the Soviet Union on all radio communications in Cyprus. Peace at home came at the awful price of Lucky’s grandfather putting a shotgun into his mouth and pulling the trigger.

The two events oddly dovetailed together. For if Lucky’s father hadn’t been distracted by the suicide of his stepfather, the Russian attack would have made things much more difficult at home. At work, the senior Cole was the epitome of a former submariner. His fellow agents frequently remarked about how "easy in the saddle" Lucky’s father was during times of crisis. At home, however, the stress of those same crises brought on drunken hallucinations of the ghosts of friends who’d died during the undersea war. And when Lucky’s father finally passed out he relived the depth charge attacks on his submarine and filled the night with terrible shouts.

When Lucky put it all together later, it seemed to him that he’d been playing a minor role in some Homeric tale: like the fall of Troy, or the trials of the wandering Odysseus. Perhaps the gods and goddesses of old had picked their favorites in the world’s current major battles and Lucky just happened to win the lukewarm affections of one of the deities. After the gods drove Lucky’s grandfather mad with grief, they took pity on the grandson. Gifting him with pubescent true love, a truce at school and a temporary confounding of his father’s more brutish senses.

The Russians first:

Lucky knew that in the Middle East, Cyprus was the Western alliance’s most important intelligence hub in its Cold War with Russia. Not only did all communications in the region pass through the island, but black operations deep within the Soviet Union were monitored and commanded through the huge communications bases maintained by both the British and the Americans.

These facts were common knowledge to every CIA dependant. After all, the bases were an important part of family life. For instance, during their fathers’ tours of duty, most of their sons and daughters visited at least one of the command centers. There were regular family days and small parties at the bases to celebrate ordinary successes, such as promotion and raises, that could not be mentioned outside of the CIA’s extended family. Plus, most bases had commissaries where luxuries from home could be purchased or ordered quite cheaply.

There were two CIA bases in Cyprus at that time. One was located about ten miles from Nicosia. The other, larger base, was high in the mountains - about half-a-day’s drive - and was nestled in one of the most picturesque settings on the island. Both were made of bomb-proof concrete and all but the roofs were built below ground. If a person looked at either base through the heavily guarded fences surrounding them, they would have had a hard time understanding that they were gazing upon the facade of an enormous installation. For the only thing visible was the oddly shaped rooftops - designed to shed even an atomic bomb - that stretched out across the field.

At both bases, the rooftops were about seven feet above the ground and they were socketed with many air conditioning units whose intakes were supposedly designed to filter radioactive air. There were no windows or apertures of any kind to let in natural light. The locations of the two bases were an open secret. The general population was ignorant about them, but those canny people whose business it was to know such things knew damned well where they were and a good deal about their purpose. When Lucky was still living at the hotel he’d overheard the Colonel mention the mountain base and so he figured if the Colonel knew, everybody who was halfway involved with the spy business knew.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when the Russians launched their massive electronic strike to harass CIA communications. As a matter of fact, before it happened Lucky’s father had mentioned the possibility when he’d taken Lucky on a tour of the base closest to Nicosia. His father’s purpose was to illustrate some lessons in electronics.

Working under his father’s supervision, Lucky had built several breadboard radios - each more complex than the other. The final effort was a short wave radio that could both send and receive signals hundreds of miles. With the proper antenna and on a clear night, the range could be extended to nearly half the globe.

A breadboard radio was exactly that. A radio built on a piece of well-sanded wood meant for cutting home-baked bread. Following a schematic and his father’s directions, Lucky had first drawn out the circuitry with a soft-lead pencil. Then, using a hand drill, he’d cut holes of various sizes where the tubes and other electronic paraphernalia were meant to mounted. With a soldering iron and color coded charts for the wiring, the radio would rise up rather quickly. And after not too many weeks of steady evening work, the plug would be inserted into the wall, the tubes would glow into warm life, and voices and music and far away Morse code signals would crackle through the big main speaker.

Considering his volatile temperament, Lucky’s father was a remarkably patient teacher. He used the breadboard radios to teach the boy Ohm’s Law, along with formulas that could be worked out easily with a slide rule. They’d even built a little core winder out of wood, so they could make their own electronic parts. The wooden device extruded copper wire under precise tension and - with the proper depths of rows indicated by the formulas and slide rule - father and son would patiently wind the copper wire around an iron core to produce the exact part they needed.

The construction of those radios and various devices were among the few treasured hours Lucky had spent with his father. Perhaps his father enjoyed them as well.

Whatever the case, when Lucky’s father took him into the electronic heart of the communications base, he carefully pointed out that what he was showing his son was merely a gigantic version of a breadboard radio transmitter. This was before the transistor revolution had replaced glass vacuum tubes with tiny parts and printed circuits. Obsessed with miniaturization, the CIA was already experimenting with several electronic devices that used transistors - although Lucky’s father and his colleagues didn’t call them that.

In those days the most powerful computer - which Lucky’s father had described with the bright-eyed glee of a cutting edge CIA engineer - was the UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer). The machine was enormous and filled an entire room. It used magnetic tape and punch cards - cards with precisely placed holes in them. What excited the CIA engineers about the UNIVAC was not just the speed of its calculations, but the idea that someday it would be miniaturized into something they predicted would be about the size of the watch worn by the Sunday comics hero, Dick Tracy. And, they said, the computer would be far more powerful that the UNIVAC.

Lucky’s father explained these things as he led him through the gigantic room that housed the heart of the CIA base’s communications center. The brightly lit chamber - whose cement floor, walls and ceiling were painted a dazzling white - was filled with huge glowing vacuum tubes. Most were at least six feet high, big enough to barely put your arms around, and were enclosed in gray metal cabinets with doors of smoked glass.

The tubes and other huge electronic components were set in boxes fixed in concrete and Lucky’s father explained that they were joined by cables and wires running in tunnels beneath the concrete. Very much like the wires connecting tubes, power supply, resistors, etc. that ran beneath Lucky’s breadboard short wave radio.

Then he took Lucky up on a catwalk overlooking the chamber, pointing out the pattern the tubes were placed in and Lucky saw the breadboard radio analogy leap out before his very eyes. The pattern was similar to the one he’d used for his transmitter/receiver back home.

Many rooms led off of the main chamber, but the only one Lucky’s father was allowed to take him into was the transmitting center. This was about a third the size of main chamber, but it was so crowded with strange, clattering electronic machines that it seemed more like a very noisy hall closet. The machines all spurted out long thin rolls of punched out paper tape.

Only one white-painted wall was clear of those machines. It was partly covered with light corkboard paneling, attached to the concrete. Hundreds of curved, metal hooks jutted from the paneling - running top to bottom in vertical rows that started about waist high and shot up six feet or more. Each hook had tightly wound rolls of punched paper tape hanging from it – presumably produced by the machines. A rolling library-style ladder on wheels was posted beside the board for easy access to the top rows of hooks.

At first glance the wall seemed a mass of paper confusion. But then Lucky’s father explained that the vertical rows of hooks farthest from the clattering machines held tapes with communications that were the least urgent. The closer the rows came to the chattering, paper tape spooling machines, the more urgent they were. Lucky’s eyes widened when he realized that the "least urgent" hooks held only a few rolls of tape. While the "most urgent" hooks were overflowing with tapes. It was a stunning visual reminder of just how many troubles plagued the world he lived in.

His father showed him how the system worked. When coded signals were received from operatives deep within the Soviet Union, those signals were transformed into punched holes in the paper tape. It was a bit like the system used in player pianos, for when the tape was run through a special machine the coded signals could be heard - and recorded. But a message might be quite long - and its very length would be suspicious to the Russians if they happened upon the frequency it was being transmitted on.

Although all messages were encrypted in various sophisticated ways, Lucky’s father said with time any code could be broken. So to further protect the messages from Russian ears, the messages were played and recorded several times - each time at a higher speed so that finally all that could be heard was a tiny bleep, or a short burst of static. On the receiving end, the bleep was slowed down until it was a coherent message again. Confounding the enemy even more, the bleeps were never transmitted on the same frequency. A computer (not the UNIVAC) changed frequencies constantly in a coded pattern that was new each shift. The agents at the receiving end, of course, also knew this coded pattern and another computer kept the whole thing in sync.

Lucky was impressed. "That’ll stop the Russians," he said.

His father shook his head. "Hardly," he said. "They have some very sophisticated minds in Russia working around the clock to trip us up. Just like there isn’t a lock ever built that some thief can’t eventually figure out, there isn’t a code that can’t be broken. If it’s made by a man, then somewhere in the world there’s at least one other man who can decipher it." He shrugged. "Besides, there’s easier ways to give us hell. For instance, they could always jam us."

Lucky frowned. "What do you mean?"

His father explained: "You remember when I told you that the reason radio programs sometimes go off the air for a few minutes is because of sun spots? And all you can hear, then, is a lot of howls and static?" Lucky nodded. "Well, that’s also what happens when an enemy broadcasts a very powerful signal that blows your signals right off the air. It’s called jamming. It happened all the time during the war. And it’s happening now in Korea. There’s ways around that and so far jamming hasn’t been much of a problem with the Russians. Except… well… there’s nothing secret about it, so I can tell you. There’s a long article that was in one of the stateside magazines that’s being passed around the station. Basically the article says the Russians are working on some new super jamming equipment that’ll beat anything we’ve got."

Lucky was alarmed. "What’ll we do then?" he asked.

His father grinned. "Now, that’s a secret!" he said. "But you wouldn’t have to study on it too long not to figure out that we sure as hell are wracking our brains trying to find someway around them."

Not long after this conversation, the Russian jammers struck full force. It started on a Sunday night - about 7 p.m. Lucky was listening to one of his favorite radio programs on the big consul model Yorgo provided.

The radio cabinet was made of fine wood finished to a gleaming ebony. It was about four feet high and two feet across. At the bottom was a silk mesh screen that covered a large speaker that delivered the best radio sound Lucky had ever heard. In fact, the speaker was so powerful that even Brosina, who was deaf, liked to sit near the radio when she had time. She said she could feel the music vibrating through her feet and for proof you could see her hands tapping out the time in perfect rhythm to drums and bass instruments.

In the center of the radio cabinet was a glowing glass face with numbers and letters marking the various frequencies. Big knobs made of carved wood operated the vertical indicators that moved across the glass.

Television hadn’t come to Cyprus yet and for rich and poor, radio was everyone’s main entertainment. Besides the Cypriot and Greek stations, which mostly played music, British Armed Forces Radio maintained a station on the island devoted to entertaining and informing its military personnel and their families. There was music, BBC news, and rebroadcast British programs - dramas, comedies and information shows. As a courtesy to their American guests, the British also rebroadcast several programs that were popular in the States. Among them were "The Shadow," "The Whistler," "Inner Sanctum," and "Gang Busters." All of which were Lucky’s favorites. These programs were broadcast on a regular schedule: Sunday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. There were also some American children’s programs offered on Saturday morning for two hours. Like the "Big Bill And Sparky Show." ('Plunk your magic Twanger, Froggy... Boing... 'Hiya Kids, Hiya, Hiya!')

Lucky was sprawled in front of the speaker, shivering in delight at spooky sounds of the huge creaking door that introduced each episode of "The Inner Sanctum," when the speaker suddenly emitted a high-pitched eardrum-piercing howl. Started out of his wits, Lucky tumbled away from the radio - covering his ears with his hands. Brosina, who was sitting in the corner spinning woolen thread, ran to Lucky’s side, crying out incoherently. She couldn’t hear the howling noise and thought Lucky was having some sort of horrible fit. Then the sound became even more shrill, making the windows rattle.

Lucky’s mother burst into the room, shouting "What’s that awful noise?" She hurried to the radio and clicked it off. "What did you do to the radio?" Helen demanded, sure that Lucky had been fooling around with the machinery again.

"It wasn’t me, mom," Lucky protested.

He hesitated. Lucky’s wits had returned with the welcome silence. He knew exactly what had happened.

"It was the Russians!"

Helen was scandalized that her son would tell such blatant lie. "The Russians!" she hissed. "Don’t you give me Russians. You were tinkering with the radio and broke it!"

No matter how Lucky tried, he couldn’t convince her that he hadn’t been up to some mischief. Finally, she called a friend who reported that her radio was also making mysterious howls and shrieks. After Helen hung up, she went to the radio and turned it on again - with the volume set low. Faint howls rattled the speaker.

"Sunspots," the engineer’s wife diagnosed.

"No, mom," Lucky said, "it’s the Russians, I’m telling you. Dad explained the whole thing to me the other day. He said the Russians were working on some new thing to jam the airways." He indicated the radio. "Guess they figured it out."

Suddenly Lucky found himself getting really angry. How dare those damned Commies jam "Inner Sanctum!" His absolute favorite program. Of all the atrocities committed by the Russians that he’d heard about, this was the first time he’d been personally wounded. To him it seemed that Russia must be most evil country in the world to ruin a guy’s Sunday evening like that.

He was about to rant on to his mother, but he was saved from humiliating himself by the ringing telephone. It was one of his father’s assistants, telling Helen that her husband wouldn’t be home for awhile. An emergency, he said. The last of Helen’s doubts about Lucky’s diagnosis of the problem vanished and at the same time, Lucky’s anger drained away and he started to feel like a thumb-sucking infant. Considering what was at stake, losing his little radio show was less than zero, as far as harm went.

At school the next day, the Russian assault on the island’s communication system was the sole topic of conversation among the boys and the teachers. Everyone was angry. Every radio station on Cyprus had been knocked off the air. It was as if an enormous blackout blanket had been flung over the region, cutting the island off from the outside. Even telephone service suffered, with sudden shrieks bursting from the ear piece. People felt like Stalin had personally reached across the world to slam Cyprus with his fist and everyone was angry and scared. The older boys talked about pooling their taxi money and going down to one of the British bases and lying about their age so they could enlist in the army and fight back.

What made the jamming attack even more maddening was that it was intermittent. The radio would play normally for a few hours, then the violent howls would begin - lasting for hours on end. And there was no way knowing when the jamming would begin, or when it would stop. Everyone wondered what Stalin’s purpose was. No one believed it was simple harassment. Nor did it occur to anyone that the attack was aimed at the allied intelligence centers.

"They’re planning an invasion, that’s what!" Lucky heard one of the boys say at lunch.

"Of Cyprus, you mean?" asked a frightened younger boy.

The comments that followed didn’t ease that boy’s fears. Some said the main body of the invading forces would move across Europe into West Germany. Others said the jamming was the prelude to a nuclear attack. The one thing everyone agreed upon, Cyprus would most certainly be hit because of its military importance.

"You mark my words," one of the older boys predicted. "It’ll start with the bloody Greeks. They’ll be coming at us with axes and knives, like the Mau-Mau in Africa. Then the Russians will land a big force and take over the whole island."

"Thank God for our Turkish bobbies," somebody else said. "They’ll put the stick to them!"

Only Lucky knew the true target of the jamming - the CIA and British intelligence communications bases. But naturally, he didn’t say anything.

The jamming continued for many weeks - all the way through Christmas and beyond. And during all that time, the school bullies left Lucky alone.

Even so, he didn’t forget Derek’s warning.

NEXT: Suicide Is Definitely Not Painless

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