body-of-secrets-anatomy-of-the-ultra-secret-national-security-agency-2002

morale: he created a photomontage of pictures taken by crewmembers inthe various houses of prostitution they had visited while on their manyNSA Sigint voyages. "Crewmembers would take photos in thewhorehouses and bring them back where another crewmember woulddevelop the film," he said. "I would swear them to secrecy that theywouldn't show it to anyone on the ship, especially the officers, and Iwould keep an extra print of the good stuff. I kept it locked away, a placenobody could find. It was in a big metal can up in an air vent in thephoto lab."So after this happened [the orders to Vietnam], I was talking to someof the guys, and they said why don't you make up a big poster board ofall these pictures and try to raise the morale a little. I said, 'I can't dothis, I'll get killed.' So I went to the captain and I told him what my ideawas and he said, 'Well, if they're not really bad, explicit photographs itprobably won't be a bad idea.' So I went to each guy and asked if theywould mind and nobody really minded. And we put it up in the messdeck one afternoon. And I'll tell you, it kind of brought the morale up alittle bit. It was from photographs of guys with women in Durban, theCanary Islands; I had some from the Caribbean, even. And there weresome from the Zurich Hotel in Valparaiso, Chile."In Asia, as elsewhere, all information concerning the Oxford wasconsidered very secret. Unfortunately, that made life difficult for thosewho were sent from the United States to join it. One of those was JohnDe Chene, who was trying to get to the Oxford from California. "Theytried to keep the Oxford movements very highly classified," he said. "Firstwe went to Subic Bay, Philippines, because that's where they had theOxford listed. We arrived at Clark Air Force Base and took a bus for fourhours over back roads to Subic. Once there, they told us it was actuallyat Yokosuka, Japan. So we took the bus back to Clark and flew toYokosuka, only to be told they'd never heard of the ship. Later, however,someone said the ship was now off Saigon. So we flew to Saigon and theysaid no, not here, she's now at Subic. We went back to Subic and itwasn't there. Finally they sent out a fleet search. Well, it had been sittingfor two months in dry dock in Sasebo, Japan. So they flew us in to aMarine base in Japan and then we had to take a Japanese train all theway down to the lower islands and got to Sasebo the next morning andthere she was. We were probably in transit about a week."Once out of dry dock, the Oxford sailed to its assigned station in theGulf of Thailand, a remote area near An Thoi on the southern tip of PhuQuoc Island. "We generally spent two months on station at our positionon the border of Cambodia/Vietnam, copying and recording allcommunications, both foreign and friendly," said De Chene. "A lot of thetime we were only about two miles off the coast." It was a very goodposition to eavesdrop on and DF [direction-find] the hundreds of units in271