SPOOKS IN THE WOODS: A Picture Memoir of Cold War Berlin

By: Jon M. (Mike) Storie

In Cold War West Berlin in the early 1960s, it seemed that every third person you met was some sort of spy. These were the days before the Berlin Wall, when President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev were going head to head over the spread of Communism in Europe. It was also the days before computers, data banks, cell phones and the other electronic marvels that helped replace human intuition with automated surrogates.

In this rarified atmosphere, the National Security Agency (NSA) desperately needed well trained, highly intelligent operatives to intercept and analyze the communications of the Soviet Union and East Berlin.

They trapped into a well-established resource, the Army Security Agency, or ASA, to train and supply Electronic and Communications (ELINT and COMINT) Intelligence Specialists to intercept and monitor the electronic and voice communications between the Soviet Union and East Germany.

Mike Storie had been forced to drop out of college due to a neck injury and thus became eligible for the draft. After completing the Army aptitude and intelligence tests, they concluded that he would best serve the country as an ASA agent.

After the obligatory basic training, he was sent to Fort Devens for eight months of electronic intercept training. His class standing was high enough that he was allowed to select where he wanted to be assigned. He chose Germany and was sent to Frankfurt and then to Berlin.

Starting as a Private, he rose to the rank of a Specialist E-5, equivilent in those days to a Sergeant, and was put in charge of a group of men intercepting radio communications of Soviet agents.

One of his hobbies was photography and this book contains some 200 photographs taken by him with commentary (often humorous) about his involvement with the Army and the National Security Agency.