Mfr Nara- T8- Neads- Crane Richard- 10-28-03- 00774

UNCLASSIFIED COMMISSION SENSITIVE

MEMORANDUM

FOR THE RECORD

Event: North Eastern Air Defense Sector (NEADS) field site visit Type of event: Informational Interview with Richard Crane Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 Special Access Issues: Clearance check Prepared by: Geoffrey Brown Team Number: 8 Location: Commander's Conference Room, Building 102 Participants - Non-Commission:

Richard Crane, Technical Representative of General

Dynamics to NEADS Participants - Commission: John Fanner, John Azzarello, Miles Kara, Geoffrey Brown

Purpose of meeting: Commission staff met with Mr. Crane to discuss the recording capability of telephone lines and radar images in the Operations Floor at the Battle Cab ofNEADS. Capacity to record: Crane explained to Commission staff that in the operations room all of the consuls are recorded. There is also the capability to have other lines recorded at the commander's direction to General Dynamics. Crane noted that the Dictaphone service has the capability to record mission recordings as well as record lines per the Commander's direction. An AvTec Consul is recorded, and has its own line to the Dictaphone recording. Since there is an operations side and an operations tech side to each consul, each consul has two lines. There is an overlapping capability for the recordings to have 96 lines recorded. There is no record of what was recorded on September 11,2001 (9/11). According to Crane, the only way to tell what was recorded is to look at the DAT lines themselves to see what channels are noted to be recorded. There is a hard-drive that has the capacity for 320 hours of recording, and then two DAT tapes. Since 9/11 the hard-drives have been recorded over. Crane expressed to Commission staff his opinion that the DAT tapes should have been copied immediately given the importance of9/11, but that General Dynamic does not have the capability to copy DAT tapes. Crane notes that Dictaphone does. Since 9/11 it has been discovered that a DAT sent to Dictaphone can be put onto a DVD for $150 dollars.

COMMISSION SENSITIVE ·UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED COMMISSION SENSITIVE According to Crane's understanding, the procedure for handling the tapes works "quite well". The non-secure lines in the Battle Cab can be recorded by request, though to his knowledge no phones other than those already programmed to be recorded were recorded on 9/11. It is his understanding that the McGuire officer who was responsible for transcribing the tapes made a mistake in the process and thus damaged one of the DAT tapes. Recommendation: The Dictaphone recorders have been installed in Alaska with the capability to transfer the recording to a DVD format. His suggestion is for NEADS to also have this DVD capability.

COMMISSION

SE"NSITIVE

lJNCLASSIFIED