By DUANE SCHRAG

Salina Journal

LINCOLN -- Arlene Abram had no way of knowing what would eventually become of the sweet little first-grader who liked to wear blue jeans and red suspenders.

"He was a real cute little guy," she recalled. "This was my first teaching job. I was just 19 years old."

That was a teaching position at the grade school in Barnard, it was 1950, and the real cute kid was Robert Wallace. By the time the grade school closed in 1977, the kid was working for the CIA.

On Saturday, Arlene -- now Arlene Murray -- stood in line at Village Lines in Lincoln to get her autographed copy of Wallace's latest book, "Spycraft -- the Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to al-Qaeda," which he co-authored with H. Keith Melton.

She wasn't really surprised that he went on to head the division of the CIA where those high-tech gadgets used by spies are imagined and developed.

"He was a sweet kid," Murray said. "He was eager to learn."

Wallace retired from the CIA in 2003. Before leaving the spy agency he was director of the Office of Technical Service. Here is how former CIA Director George Tenet describes the office.

"The concept they enacted was simple and brilliant -- CIA would apply the full force of America's technological ingenuity, whether sponsored by government or industry, to solve the problems of clandestine operations," Tenet wrote in the foreword to Wallace's book. "From that idea, the Technical Services staff emerged, and its successes became legendary."

Not all the solutions were high-tech. At the book-signing Saturday, Wallace pulled something furry out of his briefcase and tossed it onto the table.

It was a rat carcass.

"Oh my goodness!" gasped a woman in line.

The rat, Wallace explained, is a solution to an age-old espionage problem: where can messages/money/items for the spy be left while minimizing the risk they will be picked up by someone else.

It turns out that in pretty much all cultures, people let dead rats lie.

"You can actually put a lot of stuff inside the body cavity of a rat," Wallace said.

The CIA used white rats, which were freeze-dried and then colored (using off-the-shelf hair coloring) to a hue matching the rats indigenous to the particular location. Tabasco sauce made them less palatable to cats.

Often the office really was on the leading technological edge, he said. He showed a miniature camera that could be stowed inside a fountain pin. It would hold a strip of film, 5 inches long, that could capture 100 images.

"It was the camera that let us photograph secret Soviet documents," he said.

At one point, the CIA tried to find a second source to build the cameras. It took the blueprints to a certain major American camera maker. Some time later, the manufacturer responded.

"'We're sorry, this design isn't possible. You can't make the optics work,'" the company told the CIA. "We didn't tell them we had 50 already in stock."

Wallace graduated from Barnard High School in 1962, got a bachelor's degree in political science from Ottawa University in 1966, and then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Kansas. There was, he pointed, a draft in place that was sending young people to Vietnam.

"Getting an education deferment was a good idea," he said.

In 1968, he received a master's degree in political science from KU.

"The deferment ended," he said. He spent the next year with Company E, 75th Infantry Rangers in Vietnam. Not long after he was honorably discharged he was offered a job with the CIA.

"They wanted my combat experience from Vietnam," he said.

The constant stream of people who came into Village Lines on Saturday morning was evidence that, while Wallace has lived in the Washington, D.C., area for more than 35 years, he still has strong ties to Lincoln County. His brother, Al Joe Wallace, is a county commissioner and still farms the family place. Even a grade school girlfriend, Nancy Watson (and her husband, Dan), came to get a copy of the book.

And while people with job titles as exotic as Wallace's don't drop in on Lincoln every day, he's hardly the most famous to sign books at Village Lines, which specializes in selling Kansas products.

Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary for President Ronald Reagan, did the same thing.

"We had him here twice, actually," said Marilyn Helmer, owner of Village Lines.

Wallace had considerable difficulty getting his book into print. Before enbarking on the book, he discussed it with the agency; no problem. He wrote a couple sample chapters and presented them for review; no problem.

When the first draft was completed, he sent it in.

"They sat on it for six months and then responded that 740 of the 770 page were inappropriate for public display," he said. "They rejected the two sample chapters."

What had happened is the CIA had been embarrassed by some recent disclosures. And there had been some major leadership changes -- Porter Goss came in to replace Tenet and was promising to remake the agency.

"I could not have submitted it at a worse time," Wallace said.

While the manuscript disclosed no classified information, taken as a whole, it posed a problem for the agency, he was told.

Goss headed the CIA for less than two years. In 2006, he was succeeded by Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of National Intelligence. Wallace's book was cleared for publication.

"Ultimately, I changed virtually nothing from the original manuscript," he said.

n Reporter Duane Schrag can be reached at 822-1422 or by e-mail at dschrag@salina.com.