He Went From a Farm Boy to Government Spy

Steve Clark, now of Rice Lake, was born in 1938 and was positioned right in the middle of eleven brothers and sisters.

His father had worked in a war plant in South Beloit, Illinois that provided the government’s needs during WW2 and once the war was over, Dad moved his growing family back to northern Wisconsin to the tiny town of Exeland.

He bought a farm the kids referred to as the “Rock Pile Farm” where Dad farmed, and did custom carpenter work and welding to keep food on the table and the kids attended a one room country school; one room, eight grades. 

Steve remembers his dad as being productive, honest and decent, and also a bit of a hard nut. His mother was the softer one and the one that taught the kids about God.

When Steve finished the eighth grade he dropped out of school for two years to help out on the farm. Life was hard and everybody worked hard, very hard. He eventually went back to school and by the time Steve was seventeen and a half, he had had it. 

He knew farming so he went back to Illinois to work on another farm and meanwhile his three older brothers had all joined the Air Force. The service sounded like a good idea, so six months later, when he was eighteen, he decided to be different and joined the U.S. Army.

It was 1956, and even though no peace treaty or surrender ever occurred to end the Korean War, there was an end to the fighting. To this day, he stated, “Korea is still in a ‘state of war’”.

Korea was the country where he was stationed after basic training and this is when his career as a spy began, along with his promise to his government that he would never reveal what he had done during his four years in service, or give any information whatsoever to anyone, even the woman he eventually married.

The only reason he’s talking today is due to the Honor Flight he took two years ago. Each veteran on the flight is assigned a person to take care of them and during the trip he was asked what he had done during his years in the service. He demurred and made something up. When pressed a few more times he finally had to say that he was unable to share what he had done, seeing he had worked for the National Security Agency and had a higher top secret crypto clearance back then than Hillary Clinton had as Secretary of State. He lived and worked strictly obeying the rules of no talking about what he did, which also included not visiting certain countries. 

For over fifty years he has kept the vow he made to the government and never spoke to anyone about what he did during those four years.

Even when he returned to northern Wisconsin after his tour of duty was over. He never said a word but went back to what was familiar, hard physical work. 

He tried logging. When he started in 1960 he had a 1955 Mercury car and several hundred dollars. In less than a year he decided the job was not for him because all he had left to show for his hard work was a used chainsaw, nothing else.

Illinois seemed to be where the money was so he headed to Waukegan and got a job with U.S. Steel. Not only was it a good paying position, but his boss liked him. 

Because Steve never finished high school, his goal was to get his GED as soon as possible and he signed up for the correspondence course. Meanwhile, his boss said some jobs were opening at the plant and he encouraged Steve to sign up for the electrician apprentice position, which was a five year program.

 Soon he was on his way to getting his GED and he was firmly established as an apprentice electrician. He was living at the YMCA and attending a church where he met his future wife, Leah.

Ten years later he moved into a position at the Zion Nuclear Power Plant as an electrician, going in as a helper and ending up as the top electrician. 

The years passed, two boys were born, and it was time to think about the distant future and eventual retirement. They bought 35 acres of land in Birchwood and built a house. No sooner established, they returned south where he took several more jobs serving as an electrician, even receiving several years of free tech training in robotics.

His final position was at the World Headquarters for Abbot Lab in North Chicago where he stayed for ten years.

Now it was time for this hard working country boy to return home to Birchwood. Back to the quiet of the country, back to the home they built. But, they found that most of their time was spent traveling the half hour it takes to get to Rice Lake; for church, shopping etc. They finally made the decision to rent out their place in the country and move to Rice Lake.

This is where they lived when he took his Honor Flight and found out that after 50 years of silence, he was now released from his secrecy and able to share anything he wanted about his four years working in the Electronic Countermeasure Search and Analysis department for the government under the National Security Agency. Being a man who likes things on the up and up, he researched online and discovered the man had been right; he could now share anything he wanted about his service career that he got after a lengthy investigation into his past. He had signed up to be in the electrical repair and maintenance program, but they made him an operator instead. 

They sent him for three months of training to become a “Spook” at an Army Fort that was surrounded by barbed wire fences and had guard dogs, which trained him for a position on a mountain in South Korea, just two miles south of the border with North Korea, in order to sit in a room with 12,000 knobs and dials and scopes that allowed him to take pictures and record any and all activity.

“Today,” he says “the equipment that’s used is tiny compared to what we had because those were the days of large equipment filled with tubes.”

They monitored aircrafts and Morse code or any other coded messages with a motto of “You talk-We listen”. He worked a 24/7 shift for three weeks, drove trucks for a week and then back to listening. They also recorded everything. In fact, he was the first person to record and report the flight of the first Russian-made and launched missile, Sputnik in 1957.

At that time North Korea was arrogant and there were Russian ships right off the New Jersey shore and the world had changed because of the Korean War, leaving three countries divided into two pieces, Vietnam, Korea and Germany.

During his shift, he was in charge. They called the position being the Trick Chief and his orders, if there was a serious threat to their position; was to destroy the equipment, all of it. His crew never had to do this, but, “Sadly this action wasn’t carried out later by the Navy in January of 1968 on the USS Pueblo, a Navy Intelligence spy ship that was doing the same job we were. When the ship was captured by the North Koreans, they were charged with spying and violating territorial waters and for some reason; they did not destroy their equipment which gave North Korea very valuable information.”

He has “Done things few other people have done and seen things other people have not seen.” But for fifty years was unable to talk about any of it. 

 He even saw Johnson Island.

In 1935, personnel from the U.S. Navy’s Patrol Wing Two did some destruction and some construction to an island 860 miles south west of Hawaii that would serve as a secret missile base, a refueling depot, and airbase with runway and it also served as a nuclear and biological weapons testing area along with being a space recovery area providing emergency landing out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for the space shuttle if needed.

Steve Clark, a farm boy with a good work ethic, saw parts of the world he never would have if hard work hadn’t been a motivating factor in his life and it makes him sad to see America going downhill. “Education,” he says, “is very poor compared to the Korean Kids I saw back in 1957 and we are forgetting the basic Biblical principles and our constitution.”

He qualifies for the Gray Beard Program which entitles him to take a ten day free trip back to places like the DMZ and South Korea and he can’t wait to go.

Meanwhile, he’s still a very busy man owning 3 homes, 2 as rental properties; he’s a member of the Silver Sneakers; he’s in the Veteran’s Honor Guard and is deeply involved with his church, the Providence Reformed Baptist Church in Rice Lake which includes a weekly men’s breakfast.

Now that he’s able to talk about what he did during his time in the service, there is no doubt he’ll share it more and more; how he went from a poor farm boy to a government spy.