This was still primitive technology, but at that time in the security industry, a lot of us had concerns about tracking and locating people who had been kidnapped. Particularly what was going on in Europe at the time, where we were having Naval officers, even the Prime Minister of Italy, kidnapped. These people were drained of sensitive information, brutalized, or both. One of the goals of the industry was to develop technology that would allow us to track these people or locate them quickly.
I brought this technology to a meeting in a SCIF (a Secure Communication Intelligence/Information Facility) room in Virginia. It was arranged by a friend of mine with the CIA, and Bob, another friend of mine with the State Department, to introduce this technology to, what we thought at the time, were the right parties to use this new technology responsibly. We met in this room, and because of the tight meetings we were involved with, certain people would not introduce… give you their full name or where they came from. I just had to trust that my two contacts had contacted the right parties to be there at the right time and that they would all be responsible individuals.
It was a mistake. After that meeting I discovered that two of the people in the meeting had never been asked there. Yet they knew about the meeting, they knew what it was about, they knew who was going to be there. Later research indicated they worked for the Department of Agriculture, and one of them worked for the Department of the Treasury. What prompted our looking at these two men was the way they asked the questions, the questions they asked, the attitude behind them, even the body language… everything indicated that they had reasons for the use of this technology other than the one that was intended at the meeting. In fact, their largest concern was how fast could we make a couple billion of them, and could we give each one of those a unique identity number. This particular pill-shaped device―very minute―had a lot of flexibility in its capabilities. It was basically a transponder. You would send a frequency to it, and it would respond back with its unique number, which could not be changed once the chip was made. Yet there were a lot of capabilities that could be added to this chip, such as monitoring temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and even wave forms out of the brain. But that was for research down the road.
Years later I read that a lady out east had a chip removed from her body in 1999. They had it blown up on the web site, and it was a slight modification of this chip from Denver, with some of its enhancements. It was put in her, she believes, in either 1980 or 1981.
I learned the gentleman who created the chip never had a worry about money again. He quietly passed on a lot of this technology to somebody we never knew. This concerned my contacts in Washington, because it never went anywhere with them. Somebody else took it and ran with it, and we never knew who it was.
In 1984, I found a professor at the University of New South Wales that had discovered a way to make a microscopic lithium niobate chip. By accident he had scratched it, and he had an RF transmitter there, and he had a receiver on by sheer chance, and he found that on a certain frequency he could send an energy beam to the chip and it would respond back with a number.
We flew him into Denver to our company, Systems Group of Colorado. We did a test. He had some primitive small chips he had brought with him. They are totally passive, and very small―about a thirty-second of an inch, and only a couple thousandths of an inch thick. By etching them, you could create a signature unique to each one. And this one theoretically―depending on the size of it and the size of the etching―could have a unique number in the billions and billions. In fact, the test we did was amusing in that we set up a transmitter and a receiver, based on removing an air grill from our drop ceiling, and plugging up our transceiver into that as our antenna. And we were able to read that thing, glued to a little piece of cardboard, from a hundred feet away with a piece of grill out of a drop ceiling, which is a pretty primitive antenna. We didn’t know what frequency we were dealing with, so we had to come up quite instantly with a generic antenna that could read through thin layers of material, like plywood.
We were so impressed that, again, I felt that this was a technology that truly had some value. Once more I took this, and with a lot more care this time, to a meeting that we had in Virginia at a sub-contractor’s company that I knew did a lot of work for the intelligence community. This time I had the Director of Security of all of State Department along with Bob and a good friend from the CIA.
Yet again, two people walked in the door with the right credentials at the last moment―people we didn’t know who they were exactly. They had outstanding credentials but had never been called by my two contacts. Yet they knew about our phone calls; they knew exactly what time, what place, and what we were going to be talking about. Supposedly, my phone calls were made over secure phone lines.
What concerned me more about this particular event was that―I have in my records again, the name at the time of the Head of Security at the State Department. I got to know him well because I designed the security system, at least a major portion of it, for Mainstay, for the headquarters in Foggy Bottom in D.C. So he and I knew each other very well.
One of the things that Bob wanted to do before he retired was to have his family―particularly his two boys in high school―experience what it was like to live out of the country. So he actually gave himself the job by demoting himself to Head of Security for East Africa. He and his family, shortly after this meeting, moved to Nairobi.
Bob and I quietly kept in touch through our other contact in Washington. We started probing who these two gentlemen were. What really bothered me was that the professor at the University of New South Wales all of a sudden got a giant grant. The technology was transferred, and he never had to work again the rest of his life.
A friend of mine in San Francisco, who I quietly told about this technology―because he was involved with other aspects of National Security and tracking people―he got a project to do a physical security system in this modern FAB―access control, cameras intrusion monitoring, everything, the works. The company, a division of a major European electronics firm―Siemens―was located in Silicon Valley and what he told me was that they were making billions of these chips that looked eerily like what I had described to him.
A year later the company asked him if he wanted to buy the security system back as they were shutting the factory down.
What concerned me was that they had made billions of these chips, and who knows what happened to them―they simply disappeared.
Meanwhile, Bob did not give up trying to find out who these guys were, who they worked for, and what their agendas were. He and I had had long talks about what was really going on in government, who was controlling what, and what concerns he had, because he had come to the realization that there were a lot of things going on that weren’t right. He had supposedly made some contacts to find out more of what was going on, and had contacted our mutual friend at the CIA. This long-term contractor stayed in touch with me and said, “Bob’s got something hot. He’s back in the country again on business. We’re going to get a meeting.”
A few days later, Bob was on his way to work after dropping off his two boys at a private high school in Nairobi when he was broadsided at a stop light, at sixty miles an hour, by a reinforced Land Rover. He was killed instantly. The Brit who was supposedly drunk at seven in the morning, was taken to the hospital and immediately disappeared. And all the evidence he had given in the way of documentation was proven to be phony as to who he was. It was a hit.