Those American Civilians

In the past 25 years, nearly 50 United Nations soldiers have been killed on peace-keeping duty along Arab-Israeli cease-fire lines. Servicemen who have spent time baking in the tin-roofed shacks that serve as U.N. observation posts do not recommend the job highly. Up to 200 U.S. civilians will probably be manning surveillance stations in the wastelands of the Sinai before too long and Israeli officials are reassuring: they insist that the biggest problem is likely to be sheer boredom.

Whether the hazard be death or ennui, where will these "civilian volunteers" come from? There is only one sizable U.S. training school for electronic battlefield technicians, and that is the military. During the Viet Nam War, the Pentagon trained not only its own intelligence units but also CIA and National Security Agency technicians in the arts of electronic-combat surveillance, and some of them may be available. Reportedly the American technicians will also have to be well versed in the use of "sidearms," which, in the Sinai, usually mean Uzi submachine guns.

Pentagon and State Department sources anticipate no shortage of volunteers. Several former military men who served along the DMZ in Viet Nam are already looking forward to a return to the fascinating twilight world of "dipsy doodle" radar scans and "big bird" spy satellites. They are also looking forward to pay that could add up to $40,000 or more a year.

There is an added incentive: the opportunity to work with an Israeli surveillance system that provides electronic vision from the Gulf of Suez in the south to the Mediterranean in the north, that includes seismic sensors planted as far afield as Lebanon and Syria and that is reputedly far more sophisticated than the old U.S. "McNamara line" along the DMZ in Viet Nam. Among the Israeli improvements on U.S. surveillance gadgetry are:

> A new "over-the-horizon" radar enabling operators to detect targets that are normally beyond radar range.

> A thermal imaging device that can "see" the enemy at extended range in total darkness by picking up infrared responses to heat emitted by either bodies or motors.

> A lightweight rapid-scanning radar that can "hear" men and vehicles moving as much as four miles away and closely estimate their number.

> An Israeli version of the helicopter-borne "people-sniffer" that can "smell" the enemy by detecting traces of chemical salts emitted by perspiration, urine or feces.

As for those tin-roofed shacks, they will almost certainly be air conditioned, if only to keep all the equipment cool.

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