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THE DAY THE SPOOKS STEPPED ON MA BELL
By: Donald E. Kimberlin
There's nothing in Bell advertising to dissuage the public
of its common notion that Bell runs the entire realm of
telecommunications worldwide. The extent of this misapprehension
shows in items like the widespread news report that bombing of
the telephone building in Baghdad was "the AT&T building" proves
our press knows no better than to continue to mislead the public.
AT&T isn't about to help, either, when it publicizes its
placement of earth stations in the Gulf War zone, never telling
the public it rented them from Alascom, a firm with no ownership
by AT&T.
But people in other nations know AT&T doesn't rule the roost
of telecommunications. Sometimes they just have to let yet
another stubborn Yank learn the hard way, one more lesson at a
time. Sometimes that stubborn Yank is one like me.
My lesson occurred in 1963, while employed by AT&T in one of
the three shortwave radio operations they ever built. It was in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the plant operation providing the
communications channels they public used to Central America and
the Caribbean.
Few today even give a thought to how they got telephone
connections to other countries in a time before there were
satellites and underseas telephone cables. To the outside world,
no one knew a crew of us was on the scene behind what they heard
was the "Miami Overseas Operator." That operator just pushed
plug into a jack on a switchboard and spoke to an operator in the
other country. That jack was just wired to us at Fort Lauderdale,
where we launched the voices off to bounce from the ionosphere
via high-powered transmitters and rhombic antennas to other
nations. In the other nation, the operation and people all
belonged to the telephone company of that nation ... independent
and soveriegn in their domain as Bell is within its domain.
The independent other nation in this story was Costa Rica,
and its international operation was Compania Radiografica
Costarricense, a nationalized descendant of the "banana republic"
era operations started there by Tropical Fruit Company of Boston
before World War I. Radiografica was one of the best, most
stable points we worked, and even if one had the notion of
talking via "shortwave radio," their operations with us were so
good that most of the time, you'd never know it.
For many years, we had only two channels to San Jose from
the U.S., and Radiografica also operated links to other Latin
American nations such as Mexico. These were, of course, multiple-
channel independent sideband radios, so two channels meant we
were interested only in having clear radio spectrum "space" only
three kiloHertz above and below the carrier frequency. We would
have to change carrier frequency two or three times a day, to
higher frequencies in the daytime and lower frequencies at night.
One of the best frequencies we enjoyed with San Jose was 15580
kHz, a spot now used by international shortwave broadcasters. It
was assigned the call letters TIW 55 to Radiografica by the Costa
Rican government.
In that summer of 1963, Radiografica opened up two
additional channels with us. This meant that the added channels
would occupy radio spectrum "space" out to 6 kHz either side of
15580 when TIW 55 was on the air. by and large, this was clear
space and we had two added channels all day free of any noise or
interference.
Except ... the day we started using the additional space, a
Morse code transmission popped up low into the new Channel Four.
It just called somewhere else over and over, sending, "JW de IQ,"
or something of the sort. It was about 1 kHz inside our channel,
producing very clear Morse code in the telephone circuit between
San Jose toward Miami. Every afternoon, for a couple of hours,
it continued on and on. It never sent anything else; it never
seemed to make contact with whoever was on its other end.
I often was assigned to the group of channels that included
Costa Rica, and we enjoyed excellent relations with our
coordinates there. They spoke perfect English for our benefit,
and it seemed there were things they knew that we didn't know, at
least in this case. We of course, could not use the interfered-
with channel for a public telephone circuit, so we would cut it
off, waiting for the interference to clear, leaving the other
three for the Miami operators to use. But, since the traffic was
so heavy, Miami wanted the circuit. Our alternative, to shut
down all four momentarily and use some other frequency that might
produce four channels, but noisier, was not attractive.
Whenever there was interference, we performed an
"observation" of who it was. We had all the good tools - elegant
receivers, radio direction finder, spectrum analyzers and
demodulators for every kind of telegraph and facsimile. There
wasn't much we couldn't identify and pin down to its source.
And, there's a whole system of rationalization for settling
territorial disputes on radio between countries. It's called the
International Frequency Registration Board, a function of the
Comite Consultatif Internationale des Radio (obviously not a French
name for our francophone readers - it's a modern Swiss
bastardization of French), an arm of the International
Telecommunications Union. Drawing its authority from treaties
all United Nations members sign, the IFRB is the repository of
registrations each nation sends to Geneva, with seniority claims
of use, so interference complaints between nations can be
arbitrated when they occur. Our "tool" was a copy of the multi-
volume International Frequency Register, IFRB's computer printout
of every radio transmitter licensed by every nation in the world
... except for military, intelligence and clandestine operations.
The source of my problem, even though it could be clearly
heard, was of course not listed in the IFRB books. I made out a
report each day, and it didn't go away. I asked our San Jose
colleagues, and they immediately showed signs of knowing it was
there, but offered no information about who it was. I asked if
they could contact it, as my direction finder had showed it was
coming from somewhere near their direction, and all San Jose
would say was they "would try." Nothing happened, and we
continued to lose a couple of hours on that channel each day. I
suggested to the San Jose staff that if they knew who it was, if
they would just slide down the band about a kilohertz, they would
fall in between our channels and we could co-exist with them.
San Jose said they "would try." Nothing changed, and we kept
losing channel time.
Finally, my Yankee sense of fairness and my short temper
combined to make decide to take some definitive action. That was
to make a complaint via official channels, in this case the FCC
Field Monitoring station (then) at Fort Lauderdale. Because AT&T
is not in charge of the world, any officially-registered
complaint through IFRB channels has to be observed by them, and
forwarded by them. We talked to the FCC monitoring station with
fair regularity, so it only took a local phone call.
Again, somebody else knew more about the interloper than did
I or Ma Bell. As soon as I mentioned the frequency and the call
signs, the FCC duty officer replied, "Oh them? Are you really
certain you want to file a complaint?" I asked what was wrong
with doing so, and he said, "Oh....nothing, I guess. But maybe
you don't really want to make a complaint." He certainly knew
who it was, but he wasn't going to tell me, nor would he advise me
there was any adverse result to doing so. I insisted, so pressed
on to file a complaint.
Nothing happened for a couple of days. We used TIW 55 daily
for many hours, except for the couple of hours interference to
that one channel each afternoon. Then, on the third day, at
about 9 or 10 AM, I asked San Jose to change frequency to TIW 55,
I found out what had happened.
Just 48 hours after my going on record with the FCC, my
colleague in San Jose said, "I'm sorry to tell you the Costa
Rican government has cancelled our license to operate on TIW 55.
You'll have to choose another channel, Old Man."
The spooks indeed stepped on Ma Bell that day.