Espionage!
Author © Scott D. Zachary

       The Iron Curtain intact, the Berlin Wall rigidly caging the East Berliners, the Cold War intensified by the Soviet Union’s ceaseless hostility toward the free world, the early fall of 1987 opens another curtain in my life—one of cloak-and-dagger dubiety. I had been working in Norway for nearly two years as an Air Force Captain designing the Command and Control Information System for the Northern European Command. I collaborated with a multi-national team of NATO analysts and programmers deep inside Kolsås Mountain, a few kilometers from Oslo.

       On this particular Thursday afternoon, I walked out of the mountain and down the hill to the Air Force Admin Office to check my administrative mailbox. I walked past Lieutenant Colonel Baer’s office. “Captain Zachary!” he hollered. “Just the man I was hoping to see.”

       What’s that conniving weasel want now? “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

       “Chief McNichols has a communications computer program out there on his mountain that nobody can fix. His program is riddled with bugs. My wife is a computer analyst with Esso, a Norwegian division of Exxon, and she tried her best to figure it out. Lots of other programmers tried and failed, too. I hear you’re the best. Are you up to a challenge?”

       “Yes, sir, you secured my initiative when you said nobody could fix it. Sure, the Chief can count on me.”

       “Good, I’ll tell him, and you two can work it out.”

       I left work late the next evening and stopped by the Admin Office where I found a computer listing, a cassette tape, and a brief note from Chief McNichols in my mailbox. The fact that no one had stamped the listing with its classification struck me immediately. Chief McNichols was in charge of maintaining all communications infrastructure inside Kolsås Mountain, and all communication systems inside the mountain are classified. Even if they had marked it, the listing shouldn’t have been sitting in my insecure admin box.

       Finding this unsecured communications software document was the third thing that bristled my suspicions. The second was when Colonel Baer had said his wife, a civilian without a clearance, had been viewing communications software for Kolsås Mountain. The first was just knowing Colonel Baer. If I had to pick an animal that best described Colonel Baer, weasel paints a physical likeness; a snake in the grass kindly depicts the rest. Old ladies could take gossip lessons from him; Davy Crockett could’ve learned immensely about the art of wielding a hatchet from Colonel Baer.

       Six o’clock, and Colonel Baer had already left for the day. I nearly took that computer listing back up to my office in the mountain to secure it in the classified safe, but I didn’t.

       I stood there and perused the Chief’s listing of computer source code. It was the worst jumble of spaghetti logic I had ever seen. If you’re a programmer, then you’ll know what I mean when I say that there were several statements on every line and GOTO statements galore diverting the logical flow in every direction. The variable names gave no clues about the program, and it contained no comments. I was amused when I discovered that the program had been written in the Basic programming language, which at that time was considered a substandard language. I had seen enough Basic code to recognize it, but I hadn’t worked with it.

       Before leaving the base, I drove by the library to see if they had a book on Basic programming. I checked out the only one they had.

       I drove straight home to Jar and took a two-hour nap. When I woke up at nine o’clock that evening, I put on a pot of coffee and sat down in my recliner with Chief McNichols’ computer listing, the Basic programming textbook, several sharpened pencils, and assorted colored highlighters. For the next ten hours, I wasn’t aware of anything in the world outside of that wretchedly tangled program logic. My task was similar to solving a Rubik’s Cube with all the cubes being the same color. Undaunted, I had learned in Advanced Calculus that it’s purely a matter of going over it, and over it, and over it until everything clicks. Much like a skilled hiker in the wilderness, I annotated and highlighted landmarks to familiarize my findings within the logical terrain.

       It’s 7:00 a.m. EUREKA! I mastered it, and in the process, taught myself the Basic programming language. I discovered that the Chief’s program was converting back and forth between two character sets, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and some other unfamiliar character set. There were bugs in that conversion routine for which I penciled fixes. I also corrected numerous errors in the user-interface logic. I even programmed several useful enhancements, although I still didn’t know how the program was being used, nor for what purpose. Again, I considered taking Chief McNichols’ program listing to my office at Kolsås NATO Base to secure it. My anxious vanity chomping at the bit to parade my programming prowess overruled my concern for the security of this classified document. I couldn’t wait for the accolades I had earned by resolving all those nasty bugs.

       I took a shower and called Chief McNichols at home. “Hello, Chief, this is Captain Zachary. I hope I’m not waking you up too early.”

       “I’m on my third pot of coffee, Captain Zachary. What are you up to on this beautiful Saturday morning?”

       “I spent the night analyzing the communications program that you left in my mailbox. I believe I’ve got fixes for all the bugs, and I’ve got some enhancements for you, too.” Pride stretched my cocksure grin across my face.

       “Wow, I’m excited! Come on out, and we’ll install your fixes.”

       “Where are you?”

       “I’m at home in Asker.”

       Chief McNichols gave me directions to his house. I grabbed his listing scribbled with my logical solutions and headed out the door. Little crossed my mind as I drove down the mountainside to the Oslo Fiord except imagining everyone adulating my brilliance. I turned onto Drammensveien toward Asker, and my mood relapsed into uncertainty, suspicion, and wariness.

       Should I turn around and take this listing to the Inspector General or the Office of Special Investigations? How many people without a security clearance beyond Colonel Baer’s wife have studied it? Colonel Baer is involved, too! Surely, the Chief, with his thirty-some years of handling secret information, would know better than to work on a classified system at his home. Naval Chief Warrant Officer John Walker knew better, too. Could this be a spy ring like the one where Walker persuaded his son, his older brother, and another seaman to aide him in giving highly classified information to the Soviets? They would have leverage on me because I took the listing home with me. Should I proceed to scope out details for the investigation? How far do I go before I become complicit?

       I drove up the long, winding gravel road to Chief McNichols’ house at the top of a mountain. I hesitantly climbed out of my car as the tall, dark-haired, lanky Chief hastened out the front door and across the parking area.

       He vigorously shook my hand as he greeted me. “Welcome to my mountain, Captain Zachary!”

       “Your mountain?”

       Gesturing with a sweeping motion, “This whole mountain is mine. Mine and Sofie’s. You knew I married a local girl, didn’t you?”

       “No, I didn’t. I look forward to meeting Sofie.”

       “See that antenna tower there?”

       My eyes followed the direction of his pointing finger to a hundred-foot tower.

       “I use that one to communicate with Antarctica. See that cable antenna crossing between the tops of those two tall pines? That’s how I chat with Australia.” Turning 180 degrees, “And that one there enables me to talk with Siberia.”

       “Siberia?” Espionage! He IS selling secrets to the Russians! I need to get out of here!

       “Makes for an interesting game of chess.”

       Against my better judgment, I followed Chief McNichols into his house. He led me to a back room filled with communications gear. Electronics equipment lined the shelves covering all four walls from the floor to the ceiling.

       “This is my shack, my secret hideaway where I converse with the world.”

       Secret hideaway? I wanted to run as fast as I could to get away from this treachery, but the Chief’s ostensible trustfulness disarmed me. He pulled the swivel chair away from the desk and motioned for me to sit down. I did, and before me, I surveyed a Commodore 64 personal computer, monitor, and keyboard.

       “I always preferred Morse code,” he stated. “I never got into teletype much—seems to me that it pillages the mystique of being a ham operator. But after several decades of hammering out messages, I thought I’d give it a try. I bought that transmitter module from an electronics company down in Germany so that I could type messages on my keyboard. It came with the software that you spent the night deciphering. The company offered a more robust software package, but they wanted a handsome price for that one.”

       “Ah-h-h-h! Now I see—when Colonel Baer told me you had some software out on your mountain that you needed me to fix for you, he was talking about this mountain, not software from your other mountain at Kolsås!”

       “Of course, didn’t Colonel Baer tell you that I needed help fixing the teletype program for my ham equipment?”

       “No, he failed to mention that.” I laughed, thinking about how embarrassed I would’ve been had I taken this computer listing to the Office of Special Investigations. I chuckled to myself every few minutes as I installed all of my fixes and enhancements to the Chief’s software.

       I let the Chief have my chair so he could test all of my program changes. He used his computer keyboard to chat with ham operators in places such as Montevideo, Uruguay, and Victoria, Seychelles. He was ecstatic about being able to use his teletype without stumbling over all those nasty bugs in his software. Rolling his chair to another desk, he demonstrated his mastery of dots and dashes as he communicated with ham operators around the world, tit-tatting his transmitter key so fast that it almost sounded like one continuous tat.

       The Chief observed my fascination with this brand-new window into the world and thus, gave me tutorial cassettes so I could learn Morse code. He also loaned me a shortwave radio receiver to practice interpreting Morse code messages. Over the next several months, I became proficient in deciphering Morse code messages from all around the world.

       Not surprisingly, I could sense the disappointment in Colonel Baer’s voice when I told him that I had mastered Chief McNichols’ ham operator software.