Authors: Ronald Kessler
“I went around the table at the morning meeting with twelve senior people of the agency, and I said, ‘Let’s get this straight. How many of you are Ivy League?’” William Colby, director of Central Intelligence from 1973 to 1976, recalled. “There were three. Two hadn’t gone to college.”
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Before being sent to spy overseas, CIA operations officers—known colloquially as spies—are trained at Camp Peary, the legendary center outside Williamsburg, Virginia, whose existence is still supposed to be a secret. There, members of the Career Trainee program are given courses in the detection of explosives, surveillance and countersurveillance, how to write reports, how to shoot a variety of weapons, and how to run counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and paramilitary operations. Most important, they are taught how to recruit and run agents, the foreign nationals who provide CIA officers with secret information.
In the spy business, the distinction between
officers
and
agents
is crucial: the CIA officers are staff employees who are patriots in their own country; the agents are the people recruited by the CIA officers to betray their own countries. Invariably, the press mixes up the two, calling anyone who works for the CIA an agent.
Paramilitary training is conducted at Harvey Point, North Carolina, and in such places as Panama or the mountains of Arizona, where officers must hike through snake-infested
swamps or freeze during overnight treks. Each year, the CIA bangs up hundreds of old cars in a defensive-driving course that teaches officers what to do if terrorists set up blockades on the road.
The training in running agents is designed not only to teach officers tradecraft but also to make them think. For example, in one role-playing exercise, a CIA employee pretending to be an agent arranged to meet a female trainee in a movie theater. During the movie, he placed his hands on her dress and tried to kiss her. The female officer objected. The man persisted. She finally got up and left.
A subsequent critique criticized her because she had made no plans to get in touch with the agent again. Moreover, officers are not supposed to meet agents in a movie theater. It’s dark, and an officer cannot take notes.
In another exercise, the CIA trainees kidnap other trainees and take them to a secret location to get them to break down and confess to being CIA officers.
“You are in your apartment at two
A.M
.,” a former operations officer said. “Someone knocks on your door. You are in your pajamas. Three or four big guys grab you and wrap you in a sheet, put you in a van, take you to a site near National Airport, put you in a plane, and fly you off.”
The trainee is untied in a cell and interrogated. Unknown to him, the questioning is done by other trainees undergoing their final exercise. Days go by, and the trainee is given little sleep. He is allowed out of his cell only to take a cold shower. Some trainees become distraught, break down, and confess they work for the CIA. Others do not. Nothing happens to those who confess: it’s just a training exercise. CIA officers are taught that faced with torture, they will eventually spill the beans anyway.
Including assignments to different directorates to gain experience, the training takes a year.
Usually, CIA operations officers work under government cover. Most often they pose as State Department officers. They may also masquerade as military officers or civilians or as other government employees. They never use the Peace Corps as a cover. In most cases, CIA officers have diplomatic
immunity, meaning that if one of them is caught spying, he can only be declared persona non grata and expelled by a foreign government. However, host governments often rough them up before releasing them, claiming they were not aware they had diplomatic immunity.
The CIA also fields several hundred operations officers who work under commercial cover, meaning they pose as entrepreneurs or employees of private companies. Called nonofficial cover, this is a far riskier assignment than working under government cover, since CIA officers without diplomatic immunity can be arrested and imprisoned for spying. It is also far more expensive to maintain a CIA officer in this capacity. While they usually use their real names, their true affiliations are concealed. Elaborate cover stories must be devised to establish their false backgrounds. The top officer of a company knows they are with the CIA. Depending on the size of the company, one or two others may know their true identity. Ideally, the CIA officer is the company’s only representative in a given geographic area. That way, he has no supervisors who are aware of what the officer is doing each day. Sometimes, CIA officers under commercial cover do so well in their jobs that the companies offer them real jobs at double what the CIA was paying.
Decades ago, CIA officers under commercial cover were used to spot and recruit agents. That was far too risky and not always necessary. Today, they are used more to communicate with agents who have already been recruited, particularly sensitive ones who should not be handled by anyone connected with the local embassy.
“It’s a program that has never been enthusiastically supported,” a former operations officer said. “You go to the trouble of getting someone into a company, and it costs a lot of extra money. . . . Only in the last twenty years has there been a shift to using them for sensitive people who cannot have contact with Americans.”
Besides staff employees, the CIA maintains contract employees, who are typically employed for two years with salary and benefits. They may be hired to perform specific tasks such as undertaking paramilitary activities. Together with part
time employees, the CIA has 4,000 such employees in addition to its 22,000 regular employees. Retired CIA people are often rehired for specific projects as well. They are called independent contractors or annuitants and are usually paid on a daily basis as consultants. All must sign a secrecy agreement.
The job of operations officers is to recruit people—known as agents or assets—in foreign countries to spy for the CIA. Typically, 10 to 15 percent of a station’s overall budget goes to pay agents.
In the old days, even CIA officers who did not work for the clandestine service were told that, if asked, they should say only that they work “for the government.” Everyone in Washington knew what that catch phrase meant.
When Sen. Patrick J. Leahy was elected to the Senate in 1974, he rented a town house in McLean, Virginia. Because he did not want his children to put on airs now that their father was a senator, he told them that if anyone asked, they should say their father worked for the U.S. government.
Soon, his Vermont license plates, “Senate 2,” arrived in the mail. A few days later, Leahy pulled into the driveway of his home just as a neighbor whose children played with Leahy’s children was returning from work. The man came over and looked at the plate, then looked at Leahy.
“Boy, you must have one hell of a cover!” he said.
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Nowadays, unless they work under cover, employees of the noncovert directorates may acknowledge they work for the CIA.
Undercover operations officers who say they work for a particular agency such as the Defense Department are given cover telephone numbers, a briefing on their cover, and a written description of the office they allegedly work for. For example, if they are based in Washington, they may have a cover office that sounds like a real Pentagon unit but does not actually exist. They are given telephone numbers with Pentagon exchanges that are answered at the CIA. There, special operators pretend to be secretaries for the officers and take messages for them.
Often, CIA officers who work under government cover are suspected by friends, neighbors, and family of being in the
CIA. Whether that is good or bad depends on their neighbors’ perceptions of what the CIA does. A 1979 Opinion Research Corp. poll found 62 percent of all Americans had a favorable opinion of the CIA, while 24 percent had an unfavorable opinion. Fourteen percent had no opinion. Unfavorable opinions were highest among Americans who were college educated and had higher incomes.
Simply not knowing what someone else does can lead to negative reactions. In America, said Robert R. Simmons, a former CIA officer who is now a Connecticut state representative, “Americans as a people generally are open about things—especially good things. So something secret is considered something bad. We as a country want to be a city on a hill for all to see. If something is secret, we assume it must be immoral or illegal.”
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CIA officers must also be willing to break the laws of other countries and lie.
“Violating laws in other countries has never bothered me,” David D. Whipple said. “Violating their laws is part of our business. Laws in America are violated every day by foreign agents. Therefore, it’s important that we collect information in this way. You need clandestine information to go with the other information we collect. It’s very necessary for us to understand situations in other countries—the motivation of people, why are they doing it, what their intentions are. That’s not easy to collect by open, legal means. It’s not the whole story, but it is an important ingredient.
“We don’t think of it as living a lie. We think of it as a necessary thing,” Whipple said. “You have to protect your identity in order to remain effective. It is necessary that others cooperate with you in protecting your identity. It’s as if you were a slightly different person.”
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Most people think the Directorate of Operations spies only on hostile targets, such as the former Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, dozens of commentators began questioning whether the CIA now had any purpose. They did not realize that even at the height of the Cold War, only 10 percent to 12 percent of the CIA’s budget—excluding development
of satellites and other technical systems—was devoted to the Soviet Union and the East Bloc.
Even more important, the commentators did not understand a crucial fact about the CIA—that it spies in friendly countries as well as in hostile ones. By agency policy, CIA operations officers may commit espionage in any country of the world. The only exceptions are Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. By CIA thinking, no country is completely friendly. Any country may turn against the U.S. and its interests or may have elements within it that may turn against the U.S. Thus France has engaged in stealing American technology from the European branches of such companies as IBM and Texas Instruments, even breaking into hotel rooms of American businessmen in Paris to copy corporate documents.
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And Israel, one of America’s closest allies, recruited Jonathan J. Pollard to obtain an entire roomful of classified documents for the Jewish state. The fact that Iraq, which was supported by the U.S. during its war with Iran, could so quickly threaten American interests by seeking to control more than half the world’s supply of oil illustrates why the CIA needs to know what is going on in every country.
“They [other countries] have their own priorities, their own view of the world, and it often doesn’t coincide with ours,” a former operations officer said. He quoted Charles de Gaulle: “A state worthy of the name has no friends—only interests.”
“Espionage is illegal basically in most places,” a former CIA officer said. “So you have to break the law, as long as it’s not your own law. . . . When I recruit a citizen of that country, he accepts the idea he will break his laws.
“You’re after classified information,” the former officer said. “Or paying off a minister. . . . One thing you don’t do, whatever country you’re in, is you don’t worry about the local laws. If you did that, you basically wouldn’t function.” He added, “Almost every country in the world has government people on the payroll of the CIA. Some countries we don’t care about.”
“The CIA has to violate the laws of any country,” said Thomas Polgar, a former CIA station chief in Saigon, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires and a former consultant to the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence. “Every country has laws against espionage and conspiracy, and our job is to engage in a conspiracy to get secrets which the foreign government wants to protect. You do it through false pretenses, you do it by encouraging treason. In effect, you direct a conspiracy for the purpose of stealing something.... If you are an officer under diplomatic cover, you are protected. But the local [agent] who gets caught is not.”
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The types of crimes committed by CIA officers overseas range from paying a local telephone company employee to hand over long-distance toll records to breaking into an embassy to steal the codes to its communications. The CIA keeps carefully hidden the fact that it spies in friendly countries. In most cases, CIA officers are not caught. On those few occasions when they are caught, the matter is usually disposed of without any publicity or punitive action. The officer may be quietly expelled, and a complaint filed with the State Department. Often, both countries are too embarrassed to do anything.
“Usually, you have sort of a gentleman’s agreement,” Polgar said. “‘You do it to us, and we do it to you, and if we have an operational accident, we settle it in a friendly way without anyone getting hurt too badly.’”
“When they break the laws of friendly countries, it’s always handled in an ad hoc way,” a former National Security Council staff member said.
“‘Does this name mean something?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘We have reason to believe . . .’ ‘Of course, he would be a renegade.’ ‘We know you wouldn’t.’ ‘Of course not,’” a former CIA officer said in describing how such an incident would be handled.
One of the CIA’s goals in friendly countries is to determine if they are developing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Nearly forty countries currently have these weapons or are trying to develop them. Once the CIA learns that a country is engaged in such a program, diplomatic or economic pressure can be applied to stop it.
The amount of attention paid to a country depends on its importance and the current orientation of its government. African or Scandinavian countries get relatively little attention.
France, because of its frequent opposition to U.S. policies, gets more attention. Japan, as a major economic competitor, is a target as well. Israel gets some attention. When James Angleton was in charge of the CIA’s counterintelligence program, he also acted as liaison with Israeli intelligence. Spying in Israel was then off limits, but not anymore.