Guardian: The ex-CIA scientist brothers perfecting Halloween

“When I retired in ‘14 I was the senior scientist at the CIA,” Jeff said, “so we got to do a lot of cool things. Things that you would go to jail for anywhere else.”

Brian Park, 75, has longer hair and a big smile. He said getting hired at the office of technical services in the 1970s was “like marrying into an extended Italian family”. Jeff added: “A mafiosa family.”

But before talking about the CIA, they wanted to discuss Halloween.

one early assignment was designing a specialized camera for a now well-known Russian spy for the CIA. “We had to build him a super tiny camera that would digitally store all this stuff so he wouldn’t have to put himself at risk. And so the first technology we used in the camera, the only way you could store digital, non-mechanically, was magnetic bubble memory.”

It was the early days of digital memory. “We did something audacious. We shoveled four chips into one coil set and spent millions of dollars.”

Whatever they did couldn’t protect the spy, whom the Russians executed in 1985.

CIA stories are never far away. Brian was lugging some Halloween display parts in a cleverly made cart, a one-handed wheelbarrow fashioned to distribute weight laterally.

Jeff claimed the cart’s deck, fashioned out of a honeycombed aluminum material, used to reinforce the deck of racing boats he said were sent to the Contras, rigged with machine guns with massive recoil. He pointed at the cart. “That’s what’s left over!”

Speedboats were indeed deployed to the region and provided to US proxies. Some speedboats were used in 1984 in CIA sponsored Contra efforts to mine Nicaraguan harbors, an operation the international court of justice at The Hague declared illegal. It’s unclear if the specific boats the Park brothers refitted were used for that operation.

“the coolest thing we ever did” – was an ambitious plan to destroy scud missiles deployed by Russian client states.

By engineering one key part, the brothers believed that deployed scud missiles would make a U-turn and hit their own launching sites.

“At the time the Soviet Union had come apart and so they were selling off to the black market a lot of the components that are used in Russian missiles,” Jeff said. “And so we basically went out, bought a bunch of them, brought them back to our contractors, modified them with my circuit.”

In the end, the operation never moved forward. He said it was canceled because of resistance from the state department, worried about blowblack.

Jeff described one of their final plots – sabotaging Russian-made batteries, intercepted by the CIA, that Iran planned to install as an underground power back-up system for a nuclear facility.

On this mission, the way he describes it, they went somewhat rogue. “Since it was two days after Christmas, all the bosses were on leave. And so there was just us in there. And so a whole bunch of us got together and we said, ‘Let’s screw the bad guys.’ So I trained a group of 10 people to drill holes randomly in the batteries, the diameter of a sewing machine needle.”

The undetectable holes would slowly leak out the hydrogen and oxygen, to raise the internal resistance, and heat, of the battery to an explosive level.

The brothers retired before they ever found out if the plan worked.