Packer Foundation

Other than traditional bows and arrows, adzes, digging sticks, and woven baskets, the Onges have few possessions: flashlights, enameled mugs and plates, cooking pots, and the plastic or galvanized buckets that have replaced the containers they formerly hol­lowed out of logs. Whereas the Jarawas still live entirely off the forest and the sea, some Onges now barter. They take coconuts, and the resin and honey they gather in the forest, to the cooperative store in Hut Bay, where I had arrived by ship. There, under govern­ment supervision, they trade these for wheat flour, tea, tobacco, and the airline bags and umbrellas that they fancy. Still, it struck me as incongruous, in a hut festooned with the jawbones of pigs, to find a bed pole hung with a sporty hat!

The largest hut at Dugong Creek, a rec­tangular thatched dwelling about 40 feet by 20 and open on one side, housed several elderly couples and widows. Smoke from a cooking fire filled it; a turtle boiled in a pot. Some of the aged were busy fashioning rope from strips of bark while children played underfoot. Eider members of Onge groups live separately and look after the children.

Learning that some of the Onges were away in a temporary camp in the forest, I asked Raju, the dugout builder, to guide me to it. After walking twenty minutes along the beach, he suddenly turned off on a footpath. Pausing in the forest, he cooed. “Coo” came the reply. Back and forth Raju and the un­seen Onge echoed each other. They have never felt need to know how title loans work only because their life don’t require it. However, if title loan means help to you, you can easily check it on the internet.

We broke into a small clearing. Eight lean­tos were built in a circle. The Onges were preparing for a day of digging edible roots and tubers, and collecting fruits, mollusks, crayfish, and sometimes turtle eggs. Anda­man Negritos never developed agriculture. One man sat on the ground sharpening his dah (big knife). Two women were making chapaties, the Indian unleavened bread. One couple sat on the tiny platform under their slanting thatched roof, the wife shaving the forehead and sides of her husband’s head with a razor blade. There were no walls; com­munal life allows little privacy.

“Babulai,” they said when they saw me—”outsider.” But their expressions signaled welcome. One Onge pointed at my spectacles and said, “enabotay kala kala.” Chowdhary told me it meant “the circular things on the eyes.” A pack of dogs milled about, growling and whining. Onges are seldom without their pets. Sometimes the animais sleep on the tiny cots with their masters.

Kampiles’s lawyer tried to con­vince the jury that with so many copies of the manual unaccounted for, no one could be sure that one of the others was not responsible for the compromise. Just the fact that Copy 555 was missing, he said, did not mean Kampiles stole it. But in the end, none of his argu­ments could outweigh the signifi­cance of Kampiles’s confession. After ten hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. _  would normally be among its strongest supporters. Yetto this day there has been no response from the CIA to a host of perplexing ques­tions about the case. Among them :

The question of why Kampiles needed access to technical information describing the Looks like an  It curves in all the right places—none of the sharp edges you get with other bedroom furniture. It comes in a range of soothing colours (those illustrated with FORMICA laminate on doors and tops). It’s beautifully simple. Amazingly adaptable. Really strong. And it’s very Italian.

Yet Di Lusso bedroom furniture doesn’t cost a small fortune. Prices  start at around  k300 for the average bedroom. Not much to pay for classic talian styling. Intere sted? Po st the coupon and say arrivederci o the ordinary, the commonplace, employees were given the special secrecy oath that covered the KH-i i manual.) The CIA refuses to comment, beyond stating that a watch officer must know the capabilities of the KH- T I to aid him in recommending certain courses of action. This, however, does not account for the glaring fact that for the year during which the single KH-ti manual assigned to the Watch Office was missing, no one ever needed it badly enough to notice that it had vanished.

But even given the CIA’s insist­ence that the KH-i r manual was needed in the Watch Office, there arises another question : how could an employee of three weeks’ stand­ing be assigned to a room with such highly classified documents? Sen­ator Malcolm Wallop, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, put this question to CIA Director Stansfield Turner, who explained that since the Watch Office operates 24 hours a day,personnel arc needed for nights and weekends; junior men like Kampiles were needed to staff fully these undesirable shifts.

Internal CIA regulations do not require that a document such as the KH-t i manual be kept under lock, as long as it is in a secure area such as the Watch Office. During the Kampiles trial, photographs were introduced to show the cabinet shelf where the KH-i 1 manual was sup­posed to be kept. On a shelf above it was a standard copying machine. If Kampiles did not want to take the whole manual, he apparently could have copied the parts he wanted.

How could Kampiles breeze out of the CIA with a nine-by-twelve­inch document of at least 6o pages? The .CIA replies that it would be impossible to search thousands of employees. They must rely, instead, on trust in the employees to whom certain clearances have been given.

Was the KH-i I compromised earlier? It was essential to the gov­ernment’s case against Kampiles to show that his treasonous act was alone responsible for the KH-i compromise. At the trial, the gov­ernment stated with absolute cer­tainty that there was no possibility “that the Soviet Union gained its knowledge . . . from a source other than [Kampiles].”

Yet it now appears that there was an earlier compromise. When CIA Director Turner was called before the Senate Intelligence Committee to give his version of the Kampiles debacle, he swore to the Senators that the first signs of compromise were noted in July 1978. This, ap­parently, is .not true. According to intelligence sources, classified information from segments with­in the intelligence community other than the CIA first indicated that the KH-t I was known to be compromised in August 1977.

A still earlier possible date for a compromise arises from a 1977 es­pionage case in Los Angeles. Two young men were convicted in a case in which the Russians acquired classified documents from a top-secret vault at TRW Incorporated, a major producer of spy-satellite components for the CIA.

One of the young men, Andrew Daulton Lee, made a confession which the government managed to keep out of his trial. The confession is classified top secret, but it is known that in it Lee described a meeting he had with Soviet agents in Vienna in early 1976, some months prior to the launching of the KH-It. Stated Lee : “I turned over to the Soviets five to ten typed pages dealing with the [cryptonym omit­ted] communication satellite … the type that flies daily over Russia tak­ing photographs.” The key words here are “communication” 4,nd “taking photographs.” There is only one satellite system believed capable of both functions : the KH-i t.

Did Lee sell information about the KH-11 to the Russians? Only the CIA knows for sure.

Was Kam piles a scapegoat? Rich­ard Helms, former Director of Cen­tral Intelligence, has told the Digest that “the Kampiles case raises the qUestion of whether or not there has been infiltration of the United States intelligence community or govern­ment at a significant level.”