RID and the Spies

At an open hearing last week, Congress got its first detailed report on RID. The report laid back many Congressional ears.

RID is the Federal Communications Commission's Radio Intelligence Division. Not to be confused with FCC's FBIS (Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service), which monitors foreign broadcasts, RID is a detective agency working solely with the U.S. Army, Navy, FBI and State Department. Its business is counter-radio-espionage.

Since it went to work on July i, 1940, RID has discovered and closed 361 illegal radio stations. RID had very little left to do last year. But it could point with pride (backed by loud praise from the military*) to a solid record of detection in the Western 'Hemisphere, and even in Africa and Europe.

Suspicious Signals. The man most entitled to take the bow is rumpled, bashful George Sterling, 49, a native of Peaks Island, Me., who built his first radio station in 1908, assisted in organizing a U.S. Signal Corps radio intelligence section in France in 1917, joined FCC in 1935, became RID's boss in 1940.

Sterling and his technicians from the Department of Commerce had the peacetime experience of tracking down radio-using rum runners, smugglers, gamblers, practical jokers. Their prime weapon was the Adcock Direction Finder (built and perfected by Sterling and his men), which has a long antenna on a 40-ft. tower and gives the approximate point of origin of any radio signal. RID now has 30-odd Adcocks in the U.S., Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

Two days after Pearl Harbor, RID's Portland, Ore. listening post picked up a suspicious signal, communicated it to Washington. Within six minutes, seven Adcocks throughout the country, fixed it somewhere in the District of Columbia. Next day, when the illegal transmitter came on again, RID tracked it straight to the German Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue.

"Snifters." For such close searching, RID has mobile direction finders. It also has "snifters," portable, one-man sets for smelling out the very room in which a transmitter is hidden. Several other useful instruments have been improved and developed by Sterling's group.

RID located a gang servicing Axis submarines in the Caribbean in 1941. Twenty collaborators were arrested. RID found a Nazi station in West Africa which the British then put out of business. In 1942 RID sent personnel and radio direction finders to Brazil. They discovered an extensive German radio network there, helped round up 200 Nazi spies.

"QSA-O QSA-O." After almost four years of operation, RID has a secret file of every call letter heard on the air in that time. It also has a "very good'' picture of the total organization of Nazi radio espionage. This picture often helps to relieve RID's biggest headache: hearing, for example, a station that it knows to be Nazi espionage headquarters in Hamburg saying "QSA-O, QSA-O" day after day, RID realizes that Hamburg is calling one of its spies and getting no reply. When Hamburg does get through to its man and starts talking, all of RID's resources go into the job of discovering the spy's wave length--a kind of counter-espionage unknown before this war.

*Which has saluted RID's worth in supplying emergency bearings to more than 400 aircraft lost in all kinds of weather over the U.S. and its approaches.

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