Nipkow's Ghost (continued)
Disk 6
DISK 6
—Introduction to the Television Monitoring Agency (JS)
Campbell asked me to come back on Monday around lunchtime and told me that he would give me a further tour and introduce me to his lieutenants, his crew, the upper echelon folks who built the Television Monitoring Agency into a topflight organization. I had been filled with trepidation over the meeting that entire weekend. I thought of going home for a couple of days, to be spoiled and feted by my mother, but the negative dynamics brought on by my last visit with Dulcinea had upset my already frayed emotional state. My mother was convinced that I had fallen under the spell of some kind of she-devil or reprobate lady of the night and my dad was in a bad, difficult to understand funk, ruminating deeply over matters, very preoccupied, revisiting subjects long forgotten or more appropriately buried. Dulcinea had triggered flashbacks and a rehashing of the hell he experienced during the war. She had touched some other nerve too, I sensed. He needed to keep himself busy, I realized, to keep the demons at bay. My mother knew something of all of this but had not figured out half of it. I really couldn't handle it all at the start of a new job. I felt pretty inadequate and my lack of education and experience magnified all of these insecurities in every respect. I felt that my fears were being broadcast loud and clear to all those around me and to anyone who wanted to listen. Faking it seemed like a hopeless and futile endeavor. Sure enough, Monday rolled around as it always does. I hadn't seen Dulcinea for most of the weekend which heightened my anxiety further. I figured she would give me some moral support so I could at least hold myself up as I walked in the front doors of the TMA.
I didn't really know how to find the place since my last visit was by way of underground passages and tunnels so I waited anxiously for Dulcinea that morning from about 9 AM onward. After two difficult panic filled hours had passed I sat there sweating in my shiny and thread-worn old suit. My one and only suit. Finally in the distance I made out her silhouette and that inimitable and entrancing gait of hers. She moved so fast and with such eye-catching finesse that it always sort of shocked me when I saw her. She was a moving vision of denim and chic elegance. That day she was in one of her signature outfits, super tight tie-dye blue jeans threaded and worn in all the right places, singed and burned by the underlying flesh, the denim almost imprinted by her bulging thighs and tush, her blue jean shirt that she wore tied at the waist and a jean jacket patched and stretched to the breaking point that showed off her lumbar curve and arched back. Sporting her usual platform heels added another three inches to her 5 ft. 11 inch stature. Downtown had come up down as they say, and the heads were turning and twisting. Spraining would be a better word. Her behavior towards me was different today. She wanted to relax me, knowing, or better, seeing that I was anxious, I suppose.
She greeted me immediately with a kiss on either cheek, something she was not in the habit of doing and the Yiddish expression “a groysn tog” — a big day. She also quickly and without any hesitation swirled her hand through my hair and down my neck while squeezing my shoulder, producing the strangest alchemy of the senses that I had until then experienced, both stimulating and relaxing me at the same time. Her touch was knowing but that was another subject I was not prepared to inquire into any further, nor would she allow me to inquire into the subject to be more honest.
In my usual state of tongue-tied awkwardness, curiosity, suspicion and jealousy, I asked Dulcinea where she was coming from and she replied with a coy and sweet smile “from art school.” Discombobulated, I asked if she was “studying” to which she laughed and replied “no, no, I'm a künstler model.” I suppose she could see the confusion on my face so she clarified, “gunz nackt.” The German words with their naughty and forbidden quality darted through me and I felt the heat of my face rising and breaking out into a visible multi-hued physiological state, both uncontrollable and very embarrassing; my virginal status and my crushing interest in Dulcinea overwhelming me simultaneously with terror. She seemed impossibly unapproachable and beyond me. I felt like I was putting a nail in the coffin of ever having any chance with her with every fumbled step and gesture. Could I have made any additional errors? Dulcinea sloughed my reaction off and paid it no heed as she was wont to.
It had only been three minutes since I spotted Dulcinea on the street and I was already depleted and exhausted and I hadn’t even walked so much as ten feet, never mind having walked through the intimidating front doors of the Television Monitoring Agency. How am I going to get through this day, I asked myself. Dulcinea understood everything as she always did. She calmed me by saying, “ales iz gut” (everything is good). At least she was with me and she would get me in the door and provide me with some brief moral support. I needed that. Without her I think I would have gone back to the apartment and simply hidden under my blankets and let the day pass. Without further ado she said, “let's get on with it.” So we strolled above ground to the network office. Dulcinea's towering figure on those platform shoes drew attention wherever we went. Flagrant staring and catcalls preceded her. She took it all in stride but could in a moment strike fear into some hapless admirer that lingered a second too long or got in her way in any fashion. These moments could be charged and not particularly pleasant for the person on the other side of the transaction.
We arrived after a forty-five minute walk at Rockefeller Center, and Dulcinea seemingly knew the routine. She informed security that we were here for an appointment at the TMA. The security guards then went through a routine of automatic calls after which we were told to go to elevator number four and enter code 31415. Below parking level number four there was an unmarked button, which Dulcinea pressed. This caused all of the floor lights to start blinking at which point Dulcinea entered the code she was given by pushing the various elevator floors as if they were part of some combination lock. The lights then stopped flashing and the elevator began what seemed like a quick descent, down many flights, perhaps as many as six or eight floors underground. The elevator doors opened and an armed guard escorted us into a corridor where we went through further security and an air-lock, something I had never seen before apart from on Star Trek. Powerful jets of air and ultraviolet light scanned us, removing any foreign or biological material, sterilizing our clothing, I suppose. Finally, we were in the waiting room of the TMA. A young receptionist in a very controlled voice politely asked us to sit down and made us some coffee and there we sat for twenty very difficult, fearful and anxiety-wracked minutes. I felt that this was a life changing moment but I questioned myself. What could I possibly contribute? How could I make a difference? What did I really know about anything? It’s strange to think that I would spend forty years give or take in this place and that I would make a stronger mark on the TMA than anyone other than its founders whose visions and ideas would inform mine over the coming decades.
After an interminable wait, the receptionist got a call and said it was fine for us to enter, at which point a buzzer rang on the door. Dulcinea knew the routine and immediately got up and gently held my arm to give me some confidence and a boost, I suppose. The doors opened and then we went through another set and then down a circular staircase where we entered the hangar and control center, a huge room with giant monitors lining the walls, television programming running on all of them. The place looked different from my last visit, larger and more complex. The bustle and activity was incredible. The people sitting at the monitors were mostly young men; there were just a few women which didn't really surprise me, but in retrospect, years later it stands out in my mind. The all-male environment seemed to amplify Dulcinea's presence greatly and her effect on the opposite sex was immediate and drastic. As we moved up and down the aisle, a few of the men acknowledged her, having met her on previous visits. She would acknowledge those she knew with a quick touch or connection which would elicit a strong response. It appeared that I wasn't the only person that would have involuntary reactions on seeing Dulcinea. A shock wave preceded and followed her. Coffee cups spilled, pencils snapped, occasionally the odd individual seemed to be gasping for air or choking. I kid you not. I’m not exaggerating any detail. I didn't put the pattern together at the time, but I would later realize the tell-tale signs of sex-starved young techies and the baleful effect this had on the evolution of the tech scene and the excesses that followed in later years. I suppose that she was both a Playboy goddess and a fearful foreign alien and a Bond Girl of some sort. As their imaginations were set racing the productivity of the workplace plummeted. Campbell would later tell me that she was good for morale, like the USO Camp shows he attended in Europe, while admitting that she was devastating to the functioning productivity of the agency. Television watching wasn't something from which you could avert your eyes for a few minutes. Alertness is what matters when glued to the tube.
The TMA was in a kind of generational shift as I looked around. It was mostly an all-white and an all-male environment with a small number of different ethnicities, some Eastern Europeans mostly Hungarians, Brahmin caste East Indian and a few young women, many of whom looked like math or physics whizz kids. The clothing and hair contrasts were also pronounced. A few of the younger people were wearing colorful clothes, bell-bottom jeans and sporting long hair and beads. There was also a slightly older element that looked like very young Republicans; McCarthy and Nixon-like for a lack of a better word, their hair in tightly clipped brush cuts, their suits conservative with starchy white shirts and polished shoes of black leather. It was like an old garden with new colorful plants sprouting up everywhere; an invasive species. A new kind of foliage was taking over and there was a new fragrance in the air.
Not only were all of the television stations being monitored but all of the radio stations were being monitored as well. And then something a little mischievous happened, letting me know that this place was not as dusty and dated and anachronistic as it seemed. Somebody was monitoring a rock ‘n’ roll radio station; every radio station in North America was being monitored actually, and on this one station, somewhere in America, Manfred Mann's Blinded by the Light was playing. Instantaneously, someone ported the song to the main speakers and its rocking tune filled the entire chamber with a blaring sound. Was this an effort to embarrass Dulcinea or me or both of us for that matter, I wondered. Maybe it was just an effort to highlight Dulcinea's sexy presence amongst the sweaty-palmed geeks and loved starved dwellers of this electronic man cave, or maybe just a cue to her, a callback to the other “appearances” she had made. Who really knows? But with the first chord of the song and its opening lyrics, “blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce,” all eyes shifted towards Dulcinea as if they were expecting her to shrink like a violet but they got a very different reaction as she threw herself into a full strutting and dancing routine. Grabbing a microphone, she voiced-over the song while dancing, she sang: “I’ll turn you son into something strong, play the song with the funky beat and go-go Mozart.” The entire place erupted into a thronging cacophony. The boys wanted to play. No sooner had this unexpected party broken out than I heard an ear-shattering siren and the booming voice of Campbell telling everyone to cut it out and get back to work. Across the room I could see Campbell in his kilt, followed by six or seven other people.
Campbell approached Dulcinea directly and said, “I see you've made your usual entrance,” to which she replied, “I Like to give the boys a show. You know that.”' Campbell greeted Dulcinea by touching her right arm gently and Dulcinea responded with her usual combination of chutzpah and physical demonstrativeness by rubbing her hand over his rather large and protuberant belly saying, “kummerspeck,” —working too hard. I don't think Campbell knew what she meant but he smiled and kind of understood that his ever-growing belly and hard work and worry were all connected in that one word. His momentary anger faded and then he grabbed my arm and said, “Cohen, I want to introduce to you the finest special operations crew ever assembled,” and we all followed him into a large boardroom that contained display cases of electronic devices, coding devices, I would later learn. It was a collection that I would cherish and add to over the years as my resources waxed and waned.
I knew next to nothing about codes and ciphers but I went on to immerse myself in the subject and what a history and what a story it was, going all the way back to the Ceasar codes. I was fascinated by the 15th century Alberti Cipher and the fascinating Vigenere codes with their interwoven Caesar encrypts but what mostly intrigued me were the beautiful mechanized rotor encryption machines, sculptures of engineering prowess, the mechanical polyalphabetic cipher coders; not just the famous Enigma machine, but the incomparably beautiful SIGTOT, a one-way tape machine for encrypting teleprinter communications. Campbell quickly pointed out each machine like a great art connoisseur showing off his prized collection, and there they were, all beautifully restored and functional, the TYPEX, the SIGABA, and the Japanese PURPLE MACHINE, which he said deserved its own book and whose cracking owed something to the people who were gathered here, he said, with great pride and admiration. And there were many other machines not to be overlooked, the ADONIS, and the LORENZ SZ 40/41 and the Halske T52. Each one was encased in its very own glass case, each one represented untold intellectual efforts to both construct and an equal and opposite effort to break and reveal their secrets. Encryption, Campbell would say, is not a science or engineering discipline but an art form whose practitioners are artists not technicians.
The whole scene and environment was intimidating. I felt my sense of anxiety growing and multiplying by the minute. What was I doing here? What could I possibly contribute to this team of daunting and brilliant people? I knew next to nothing. I don't have any working experience, never mind any real experience doing anything. The only thing helping me to maintain any stability or confidence was Dulcinea's presence by my side. Her association anointed me, I suppose, in front of the desperate and love deprived technical staff, creating the impression of manly strength. Little did they know that I had no sway over her or even that I truly knew her at all on any level and that I was in as much fear and awe of her as they were. It didn't matter. It was all perception and there she was beside me and with me as far as they could tell. But what about these guys and gals? How could I approach these people? Their faces and body language spoke of battles fought, courage shown, medals earned, heroism, secret missions, long years of a common battle, loyalty forged in shared hardship and suffering. These people had all faced terrible losses as well as victories, one is not possible without the other. Who was I? I was a soft kid from the suburbs, nothing more. Barely educated. Anyway, I said to myself, I have one thing going for me— my age. I was five, maybe ten years younger than the next kid in here. What had they done by my age anyhow? There was one thing I knew and that was television, all about television, on the show side and the technical side. And I knew it like nobody else. But what did that really mean here?
At that moment, Campbell said to me, “Cohen, I want to introduce you to our A-team, one of the finest groups of officers, soldiers and gentlemen ever assembled. Very few new recruits are ever given the privilege of meeting the assembled executive, so treat this as a special honor. It signifies something of what we expect from you.” I was taken aback by this attention, and felt immediately uneasy, sweating profusely and confused as to why Campbell felt I deserved such respect. Had Dulcinea whispered something illicit in his ear or swayed him somehow with her incredible wiles and ways? A pang of suspicion and jealousy rushed over me. Did I remind Campbell of himself as a young man? Was it some kind of wartime experience? Do Scotsman and Israelites have some strange affinity that no one has ever told me about? Various scenarios raced through my mind as I tried to keep track of everything to explain this attention. Was there something truly precocious in my manner or character? The assembled group listened raptly as Campbell spoke, each and everyone’s face an inscrutable mask. This is what years of combat and veteran experience grants you; the ability to listen and think your own thoughts with no external intrusion, I thought to myself. I could feel the cold hard glances of the collected group assessing me, scrutinizing me, looking me up and down, registering my soft ‘unhardened’ features, with momentary and fleeting glances at Dulcinea who would return and bat away any uninvited glances with her burning rapturous gaze. How could I ever join the company of real men? World War Two veterans, those who fought and had lived through that experience were marked for life. This is something that would always be palpable to me. They had learned something about human nature, the dangers of the world, the evil that is so easily unleashed on innocents. Those who were not there could not understand. I would learn many years later that Campbell was in the advanced troops that broke through to the first concentration camps; it is said that this changed him in a way that he never recovered from. Maybe this was something that would underlie our strange relationship and that would only grow stronger over the years. Maybe it was this very same sentiment that shaded his strange and odd relationship with Dulcinea. It was something that I would never figure out. Some secrets are never revealed to you. We live in a world full of secrets.
Campbell started his introductions by going around the table counterclockwise. I can still hear his words and his introductions after all these years. To my right and my right hand man is Satoshi ‘Go for Broke’ Hasshaku Sama. I need not dwell on Satoshi’s war credentials, he said, I think it is enough to say that he was a Captain in the 442nd Regimental Combat brigade, the most decorated brigade in the entire war. None of this rang familiar to me. I had thought that the Japanese had been imprisoned during the war, I hadn't known that they had also fought and were among the most distinguished units in the whole US Army. Indeed, they were. The fourteen-thousand Nisei of the 442nd Regimental brigade as they were called, second-generation Japanese citizens, won four-thousand Purple Hearts, four-thousand Bronze Stars and no less than eight Presidential Unit Citations. Their motto, I understood, was ‘Go for Broke’ and that is exactly what Satoshi did, winning all three of the most prestigious awards. Campbell continued, ‘Go for Broke’ using his nickname, “is my right hand man, and my point man, anything and everything goes through him before going to me, and any order from ‘Go for Broke’ is the equivalent of an order from me,” he stated in a no-nonsense tone. “His security grants him access to every system with the exception of ordering full-out military counterattacks and strikes from the TMA to any outside party.”
‘Go for Broke’ looked at me and slightly bowed as the Japanese do to show respect. I instinctively bowed back which resulted in some snickering. Dulcinea's quick shifting of her head about two degrees seemed to put any further reaction and snickering quickly in a bottle. Campbell continued, “beside Satoshi here we have Captain William Martin. Martin is responsible for the protection of the perimeter of the facility and safeguarding the major New York based media assets. William ‘Beach Jumper’ Martin, led, as Campbell relayed, the most decorated US Navy Special Warfare Units, the ‘Beach Jumpers.’ His specialty was deception, and he was the author of ‘Mincemeat.’ There was so little known about any of these WW2 special operations, and if it wasn't evident to everyone in the room that none of this resonated with me, then I would be astounded. ‘Mincemeat,’ was one of these colloquial and tacky code words that would be battered about as if it was common knowledge. It all seemed so alien to me but the names of these operations were like sacred mnemonics and talismans evoking legendary operations that were never to be forgotten.
Campbell repeated, “Yes, Martin was the co-author of the Trout memo, with none other than our great James Bond action writer, Ian Fleming. Isn't that right?” Campbell asked. “You’re darn right, boss,” Martin enthused--“I think a bit of Bond is based on my lesser known high jinks.” “Deception and beating the enemy all comes down to fly fishing,” he continued. “They say there are fifty-four ways to lure a fish with a well made fly and yes indeed there are fifty-four ways to deceive the enemy. And it was the twenty-eighth way, a bit nasty I must say, that we used to fake the Nazis in Operation Mincemeat. Yup, we served up number twenty-eight, dead body and all, and pulled off the invasion of Sicily without a hitch.” Campbell interjected at this point, “yeah, I think Churchill said that they took the fake body and war plans, down, hook line and sinker. So ‘Beach Jumper’ is responsible for the protection of our entire perimeter. No one knows what we are doing here and ‘Beach Jumper’ makes sure that any potential enemies are being fed a good diet of misinformation and other implausible and misleading signals.”
Campbell then introduced the other members of the team. “And this distinguished lady beside ‘Beach Jumper’ is Jennifer ‘Gold Bug’ Gould. ‘Gold Bug,’ as in Edgar Allan's famous story I believe; Jennifer, like David Gerstein, standing beside Jennifer, were proteges of the great William F. Friedman at George Fabyan's Riverbank Laboratories. Jennifer and David are the TMA’S key cryptanalysts. They both worked with Friedman on the codebreaking of the PURPLE cipher; their work gave us the ability to decipher all of the Japanese war plans you know, Pearl Harbour included, but that is a story for another day. These guys are the best of the best and in their spare time they are running all of Shakespeare's works through our mainframes looking for ciphers and resolving authorship questions,” he said. It all flew over my head and was beyond my limited range of intellectual references, but years later I would read with great interest their definitive work The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined and ponder some of the same questions. George Fabayan and his lab was another name that would be battered around the TMA with great respect and admiration and Fabayan's imprint on what we were doing would be as important in some ways as that of Alfred Loomis’s Tuxedo Park laboratory and Manfred von Ardenne's TV inventions. These pioneers shadowed and shaped our activities and direction.
The only other senior female echelon as Campbell called them was Genevieve Feinstein. She was, according to Campbell, one of the great heroes of WW2 and was personally responsible for winning the war in the Pacific and won the Presidential medal of Honour, no less. She had started as a lowly intern decrypting secret messages in the personal columns of the New York Times, the Telegraph and the London Times and had parlayed her abilities to the heights of great power. The personal columns were, according to her, mostly used for coded communications, some of great moment. Something that had never ever dawned on me. She was one of the key codebreakers of the Japanese PURPLE machine and would later mastermind the breaking of the Venona code, allowing for the great signal achievement of Cold War espionage, deciphering the most confidential KGB messages between secret cover operatives and the Kremlin.
Genevieve listened intently but her face remained entirely expressionless allowing herself only a fleeting smile. Beside Genevieve was Luigi ‘Coke’ Pusateri. Luigi was the resident TV expert. According to Campbell, Luigi had logged more prime time television viewing hours than anyone in the world. He had a vast encyclopedic knowledge of television, particularly arcane trivia. He was massively corpulent, with giant multiple overlapping chins and he always carried around with him a huge bottle of Coca Cola. Dulcinea whispered to me in German, the word "Backpfeifengesicht," an untranslatable expression which could possibly be translated as a "face that only a mother could love." Her humor in the midst of this overwhelming tense presentation allowed me to release some momentary tension, but I felt a tremendous embarrassment that she was possibly overheard or that someone else might know this unusual expression. Beside Coke was Bill Thomas Tutte. Another legend, and a key analyst of the Television Monitoring Agency. Tutte was a mathematician and had worked on high-level codebreaking at Bletchley Park, another famous place that had never crossed my radar, to my embarrassment.
What did I really know about the world? It was becoming more and more evident that I knew very little and my ability to ‘fake it to make it’ was apparently rather limited. Tutte, it appeared, had been instrumental in breaking the Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. His name would be mentioned in hushed tones, I would realize, a giant like all of the others. Beside Tutte was Geoffrey ‘Boffin’ Pyke. A key figure in The Devil's Brigade, a daring WW2 unit and one of the first special operation units. They trained near Helena, Montana, a binational US Canadian regiment. Pike had masterminded the idea of taking over a large glacier, Jostedalsbreen, in the sea north of Norway from which to engage in attacks on covert nuclear heavy water plants in Norway, and was also a key figure in Project Plough, an operation I would never fully understand. Beside Boffin was Stephen Goudsmit, the son of Samuel Goudsmit who led the Alsos Mission to capture key Nazi figures in the Nazi nuclear research program, an operation that I would learn a lot more about over the years along with Operation Paperclip, something that Duclenia would delve into with all of her vengeful fury and desire for retribution. Despite these head-spinning introductions I tried to maintain my composure and balance. Talk ensued about many secret programs, none of which I had heard of but whose intricacies I would learn about in the years to come, operations DUSTBIN, ECLIPSE, SAFEHAVEN, APPLEPIE and it went on and on. It would take me years to organize the whole puzzle and picture of the post World War Two period. My understanding of the historical picture would shift. Did World War Two never really end as Dulcinea' was raised to believe? Was The Cold War an extension of the Second World War? Were the war criminals of the past all around us? It was like a Venn diagram, it seemed. The world of Campbell and the world of Dulcinea overlapped in some bizarre configuration, a crossover realm of intrigue and spycraft, a dangerous intersection of politics and ideology, a place not for the tender of heart or the weak of mind.
This fateful introduction to all of these remarkable people seems so long ago now. A half a century has now passed and these daring, courageous souls are only remembered by their young countenances in the dusty picture frames in the TMA boardroom—heroes so alive and bold. The years of struggling to keep the TMA open and relevant in the post-Cold War period, the loss of our funding, the ridicule over our role and purpose. All of the work that we had invested in preparing for a menace that Campbell only alluded to in the depth of long nights of heavy imbibing would eventually come to fruition with a vengeance. Was I the right man to be selected to face down this terror? How was I selected? Who selected me? Why was this my fate? Perhaps, I was the right man. Maybe Campbell had seen something in me that I didn't see in myself. Of the hundreds of candidates, I was the one chosen to lead the team, to be that person to call the game right when the chips were down. The meeting ended with warm greetings and shots of whiskey, something else that I knew nothing about amongst these hard drinking ex-soldiers. That touching moment of comradery might be responsible for my love of spirits and a high tolerance that for better or worse I would acquire over many years at the helm of the TMA.