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.

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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.

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