About Mike

This Storie Has been Waiting to be told

Mike Storie was born in the Palouse wheat country in Eastern Washington State where his grandfather owned a blacksmith and welding shop in the small town of Colfax. Mike started working for him as a teenager and learned the fundamentals of that trade, as well as a common-sense approach to life in general. Mike’s parents moved to Seattle during WWII where his father worked for the war effort. After graduating from high school, Mike attended Washington State University where two years of ROTC were required. He was an accomplished clarinetist and while in school, he played in the All-City Band, the All-State Band and the All-Northwest Band.

In his sophomore year of college, he injured his neck in a weightlifting accident and had to drop out of school. Because he was of draft age and not in school, he received a draft notice but assumed that because of his injuries he would not pass the physical exam and be exempt. The Army was seriously looking for operatives for the Army Security Agency (ASA) and in a surprise to him, he scored so high on his 1.0 and aptitude tests that they overlooked his injuries and drafted him into the Army in early 1960.

After basic training at Fort Ord, California and Electronics and Morse Operations training at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, he was posted to West Berlin, Germany where he worked gathering Soviet and East German intelligence for three years starting about one year before the Wall was built. This book is a memoir in words and pictures of this very interesting time in the early Cold War.

After the service, Mike completed his engineering education and was heavily involved in the early days of computer applications. He has worked in the fields of Naval Architecture, Environmental Research, Laser Research and Econometric Research. He helped found a startup company specializing in localare, computer networks and for fun has sailed 50-foot cutter-rigged sailboats between the Northwest and Ha-mai on six occasions, and for twenty years produced the comic operas of Gilbert & Sullivan in Seattle.

He is married to Rachel Garson, who assisted immeasurably with the production of his book

Storie Time

About the Book

This book is narration in words and photographs of my experiences in the service when I was in my early twenties. It is from the perspective of a draftee who the Army thought to be pretty well suited for a military career but while keeping my nose clean with the officers and non-commissioned officers, I made it clear that I had other plans for my life – Thank you very much.

Book Review

I first met Mike Storie as a member of the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society, having no hint of his other life as a military intelligence officer. But then that’s the sign of a good spy, right?  I knew him as someone who could build a medieval castle out of canvas and Styrofoam, as well as magical special effects like a collapsing wall, working fountain and very convincing pyrotechnics. Having now read this chronicle of his days as a spy, it all makes perfect sense.

In “Spooks in the Woods,” Mike takes us back to cold-war era Berlin and the Top-Secret world of Morse code intercepts and radio location. Human intelligence outpaced artificial intelligence, and spies were just ordinary people with a job to do – albeit with some really cool equipment.

Berlin was the spy capital of the world in the 60’s, and Mike’s job, along with 600 other spooks, was to monitor and decode Russian radio signals. There is a certain thrill in sitting at the controls of an old-school vacuum tube radio receiver with its meters and dials and plucking signals out of the air (especially if they’re signals you’re not supposed to understand) and then using your skills to make the gibberish gel into information on your enemy.

Mike turned out to be pretty good at it.

He was there for the landmarks of the Cold War – including eavesdropping on the first Soviet satellite, the chatter during the Cuban missile crisis, the Gary Powers spy exchange, JFKs speech in Berlin, and of course, the building of The Wall.

Unlike the anodyne digital monitoring today, the tools of spycraft in the 60’s tended to be Goldbergian gadgets –like the Soviet code transmitter that used crank-driven hole-punches in perfectly good 35 mm film to send code bursts. As he describes these contraptions you get the sense that you’re reading a Top-Secret document which, if you’d been caught with it in the 60’s would probably ruin your chances of running for president.  Especially the paragraph on page 201 explaining exactly how encryption worked.

And as elite as the operation was, as in any workplace, the 280th Army Security Agency Company had its share of office personalities – including the overworked spook who fell asleep on a subway train and ended up in East Berlin where he was arrested as a spy and promptly surrendered a lot of confidential information. Needless to say, he was never seen again. Not unlike office firings today.

By the way, if you ever need to pick out the guy in the room who’s working as a spook:  look for someone who doesn’t have a name tag, has no unit patch, has long hair, wears un-shined boots and is working on a piece of equipment you’ve never seen before. Then keep your mouth shut.

It’s all illustrated with Mike’s own photographs and a sense of humor that even the Russians would have appreciated. Although I warn you, the chapter covering Mike’s dislocated shoulder is not for the faint of heart.  It ends with a picture of his full body cast, and it explains why Mike will never be a starting pitcher, even for Oakland.

Fortunately, he was fully awake and on the West side of the Wall when it happened.

Dave Ross

KIRO Newsradio

Mike Storie

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Mike Storie currently resides in Seattle, WA

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