DARPA made a tool that turns bugs into remote-controlled cyborgs

Editor’s Note: This is part two of George Hand’s story about his Special Forces team operating in Alaska. Read the first part here.

I admit I have a pretty decent eye in this Patrol Base (PB). I ate cold food because I just don’t care, and heating food is so tedious in the field. I heated up a canteen cup of coffee and of course we had plenty of water thanks to the run to the babbling brook.

I took my shift towards security, which sat for a couple of hours in a wiretapping / observation post (LPOP) a few hundred meters behind our PB, being quiet, listening and – you guessed it – watching. It was the usually tearful boredom, except for the herd of caribou, which meandered about 700 meters. I had binos around my neck tucked right into my jacket, which made for a closer look at the herd.

When I was relived, I went back to the PB and helped set up the explosive cutting charges to dismantle the RF tower. We didn’t want to promote these in hiding because it is bad policy to plan any work on a hiding location other than shutdown, downtime, and freezing.

To cut the cylindrical steel at the base of the tower, we built diamond charges – shaped like an elongated diamond and dueled with detonation caps at both ends of the short axis:

(Diamond explosive charge made from high-explosive steel [photo courtesy of the author])

In a simple block form, C-4 formed the other two charges that the support cables were supposed to cut off. Our plan was to tie all three charges together so that they explode as close as possible at the same time. I caught the slightest whiff of burning time fuse. Another team calculated how long the fuse would burn. They cut a length of fuse, burned it and timed the burn so they knew how long it took the fuse to give us three minutes to get away from the tower once the fuse went off.

Gosh, a breeze was picking up and when God is my witness I saw a piece of paper go by that looked like a page of Cryptography One-Time Pad (OTP) … and it was! I rushed to grab it. Our Commo Sergeant must have just been encrypting his next message transmission to our Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Anchorage.

I moved to his location and I’m sure he sent a message:

“Hey, tail … do you think you will need this?”

“What … woah – where did you get that from?”

“Oh … it just came over.”

“Bullshit! Give me that!!”

He grabbed it, lit a lighter under it, and burned it – a thing he should do before ever putting it down.

“Here, sign that, tail!”

He passed on his burning protocol for my signature as a witness to the burning of the crypto site. He was the best commo man I ever knew, just had some housekeeping issues. He set about building his quarter-wave doublet antenna; At that time we used the high frequency bandwidth (3-30 MHz) and our radio signal bounced off the ionosphere. It had to shorten its antenna length to match the frequency on which it would transmit.

(An example of a Crypto One-Time Pad [OTP] page [photo from the author])

I find it interesting that the army hasn’t used the RF band in so long, depending on satellites and internet for most of their communications. Nowadays satellites are deliberately jamming and the military is actually reverting to the reliable RF band for backup communications. It was used during the attack by the Russian Mercenary Wagner group on US forces in Syria. This battle ended with around 250 dead Russians.

We left our patrol base and slipped quietly through the tundra to our hiding place. Occasionally, as we approached, we could see the target of the RF tower through openings in the bush. Team Daddy stopped us and laid us down while he walked forward with an engineer sergeant to conduct an exploration of the terminal’s hideout area.

He was gone long enough for us to freeze again. He led us to the area where we lay down and put up our skins: we stretched camouflage nets deep to the ground. We spread foliage on the top and the sides were also obscured. Once inside, there was only enough room for two men to lie prone.

At our front there was an open field about 100 by 75 meters. We had just returned from the edge of the field where the guards could see the tower and the support building. It was made of concrete with a pickup truck parked near the door – someone, probably a technician or maintenance man, was in there.

It was time to be cold for the next 24 hours. I went out with our commo man to help him build an antenna and get his commo shot. He couldn’t do it from our hiding side; We had to push back a thousand meters and sneak the gear back to the FOB. It was great to be out of hiding and moving around.

24 hours later, we tore off our skins and packed up our backpacks. We left the backpacks behind, took six pipe hitters – half of our Green Beret division – and crawled through the field in front of us to the tower. The other six pipe hitters surrounded the target and provided tactical security for the demolition teams. One of the security teams blocked the access road in case the pickup returned, prompting them to pull it out of the vehicle and hold it until the destination was destroyed.

Our diamond cargo went smoothly and I paid out explosive chains to the cable teams. Everyone went together without fail. We returned to our hiding place, leaving a man to file the charges and fire. The security remained. Team Daddy often looked at the clock and ended up lifting his walkie-talkie:

“Bergie, this is Tango Lima, over …”

“Tango Lima, this is Bergie, ready to shoot, over …”

“Bergie, stand ready to shoot in pipe, war, tree, two, one – fire!”

Even from our distance we heard the soft popping of the two M-60 detonators. After about a nervous minute we saw Brother Bergie, the trigger man, who was quietly approaching. He had stayed a while to make sure he had a good backup fire. I admired his commitment in this case. He went to his backpack and lay down to wait with the rest of us.

Team Daddy typically watched his watch and shouted his hand to the security teams:

“Standby for the detonation in Fife, Fo-War, Tree, Two, One …”

And there was a deafening * CCCRRRRAAAACCCCCKKKKK * from higher order C-4, expanding at 24,000 feet per second, followed seconds later by a floor-shaking cacophony of steel that slammed to the ground with sheikhs and moans of twisted steel.

“Security, breakdown to hide the website,” called Team Daddy, seconds later came the gasping pipe hits from the security area. We threw our backpacks open and deftly stepped 90 degrees out of our original aiming azimuth.

(Destroyed tower [photo courtesy of the author])

About 20 minutes into the walk, our Senior Medic Team pulled Daddy aside to get some bad news. He’d left his handheld radio back in its hiding place – a big mistake. How could we possibly get back to our destination so soon after the destruction? We just had to, that was just the way it was.

Team Daddy had the men form a PB while he, the medic, and I went back to the radio. The sun had fallen steadily lower to the horizon. Darkness would be to our advantage if we turned to approach the hiding place in front of the bush rather than the open field.

Doc found his radio as soon as we got there. There were a number of first responder vehicles scattered across the destroyed target site with men loitering in them. We scurried back toward the patrol base like rabbits. With Team Daddy in front and me in the back, Doc kept turning around from the middle with awe on his face.

“What’s the matter, doc?” I finally had to ask him.

“It’s going up again! The sun is … it’s rising again! It fell deep, but it never fell below the horizon and I swear to you it’s going up again !! “

“Well, yee-haw, Daktari … so you saw it too, yeah? You saw how the sun didn’t go down – was that cool or what? “

(“It fell deep, but it never fell below the horizon and I swear to you, it’s going up again!”

[photo by Ms. Anne Castle])

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