Thursday, October 21, 2010

DISCUS

A small, portable transmitter that could transmit and receive an alphanumeric message, designed by the  Central Intelligence Agency to squirt encrypted signals of up to 2,300 characters over distances of up to a mile in a burst transmission lasting less than three seconds in order to minimize the risk from hostile interception. The device, developed in the Short Range Agents Communications (SRAC) project, was first publicly acknowledged as having been used to assist communications between the CIA station in Warsaw and Col. Ryszard Kuklinsky in Poland, but was also used by Adolf Tolkachev in 1979.