Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (8 page)

Recruiting—asking a foreign national to betray his country and work for Uncle Sam—is one of the most difficult tasks for a spy to pull off. There are many people who are very good at developing relationships, but few who have the instinct to close a deal. Timing is crucial. If you wait too long to make your pitch to an asset, when your relationship has become too close, you end up seeming manipulative and to be betraying a friendship. If you pop the question too soon, you run the risk of rejection and of causing a political flap if the potential asset reports the recruitment attempt to the authorities. Some people come by recruitment naturally, others need to be prodded, and everyone gets better with experience. Nailing down your first recruitment is a milestone in any case officer’s career.

Truth be told, recruiting did not come naturally to me. As a young officer, I was by nature reserved, if not socially awkward, and (I came to realize) rather intimidating-looking. I’m six foot five and tend not to smile in business settings, so my natural demeanor appears stern. I wasn’t aware of the impression I was giving until my boss told the ambassador he wanted me in on a sensitive meeting, and the ambassador replied, “You mean the big, sinister-looking guy?” Up until then, I had never quite looked at myself that way. Years later, a foreign intelligence service gave me the nickname Easter Island Man because of my supposed resemblance to the famous statues there. I actually was grateful for this rather gentle description, especially since one of my predecessors abroad had been called the Poison Dwarf! I got off lightly. Still, it did reinforce a growing perception that I hadn’t fully appreciated: to recruit, I would need a whole new skill set.

Once more, and not for the last time, the highly social Pat became my most valuable asset. She is as diminutive as I am tall and as outgoing as I was seemingly introverted back then. She would literally lead the way, walking in front of me at parties, engaging the guests, and asking them, “You know Jack, don’t you?” In time, her sociability rubbed off on me, and eventually I moved rather easily through the social banter at cocktail parties and the disco parties we threw at our home, hoping to recruit Soviet agents. A dance called the Hustle was all the rage at that time, and I couldn’t help but think how appropriate it was when our house was packed with prospective foreign targets dancing the night away.

*   *   *

As I settled into my assignment in Santiago, I was mixing it up well with many of the locals, but I was having difficulty positioning myself for a recruitment. Fred Latrash, the deputy station chief, sensed my hesitation and he appropriately leaned on me. The spy business is a trade, and the process of spying is often referred to by insiders as tradecraft. In its ideal form, tradecraft is learned at the knee of a master journeyman. While much can be taught in the classroom and in training exercises, there is no substitute for working in the field under the leadership of an experienced professional. I was most fortunate in my early career to work for such a master journeyman. Fred was a flamboyant, experienced operations officer with extensive experience in covert operations in the Middle East and Africa. The word was that he had been sent to Chile to take more aggressive action than the more cerebral chief Ray Warren, whom I looked up to and tried to emulate in managerial and operational style. They made a good team. It was better that Ray was calling the political shots, but I also valued what Fred taught me about recruitment. He suggested that I recruit a senior Communist Party official whom the station had had periodic contact with for a number of years but had not put on the payroll. Our “cutout,” or go-between, with this official was a local businessman, who agreed to set up a lunch at his home for me and the official so I could make the pitch.

I was apprehensive, but our host tried to put me at ease. He graciously served us a local delicacy, a deep dish of
erizos
, raw sea urchins. I can handle just about any exotic dish, but this was tough to get down. Fortunately, he accompanied the
erizos
with an excellent bottle of Santa Rita 120 white wine. After every spoonful of
erizos
, I had a big gulp of wine. Before too long the
erizos
started to taste better and the target seemed more amenable to cooperation. Nevertheless, I was taking too long to get to the point for our host, who finally blurted out, in so many words, “How much money are you going to give this Communist for his cooperation.” I immediately suggested a thousand dollars per month, he accepted, and my first recruitment was behind me. In retrospect, I’m convinced that it was somewhat of a setup by Fred to get me over the hump of making a recruitment pitch. It is much easier to make the second pitch, even if the first one is a cakewalk. This is a classic example of the journeyman-apprentice relationship when it works well.

I wish I could say the road was smooth from there on out, but the learning curve was steep. During one of my very first meetings with an asset, I climbed into his car and we drove slowly around a small city park. Unexpectedly, the asset handed me a sheaf of documents. I had to decide whether to take them, knowing that my cover could be blown if I were caught with them on the street. But this was a onetime offer, and my car was parked nearby, so I grabbed the papers and cut through the park on foot—only to find myself chased by five wild dogs. Imagine the scene: a very tall CIA spy, secret documents in hand, running from a pack of snarling canines. As I turned a corner, I remembered that one of my colleagues lived nearby, and I headed straight for his front door. By then the dogs had decided to rest, but when my colleague and I drove back to my car, there they were, waiting like sentries. They looked incredibly ferocious, but when my colleague approached one of the four-legged assailants and held out his hand, the dog started licking it. “I bet you have cats,” he said to me. It took me a while to live that one down.

Several weeks later, I handed over a substantial amount of cash to another asset—this time a man from a Chilean newspaper opposed to Allende. Since the CIA is, first and foremost, a large bureaucracy, I needed a receipt to send back to Langley at the end of the month. And since I was just out of spy school and wanted to try some of the high-tech gear I had been exposed to in training, I wrote out the receipt and had the asset sign it in invisible ink, which had been touted in training as a means to protect an agent’s identity if a document fell into unfriendly hands. The asset was, needless to say, impressed by such tradecraft. I then went back to the station and applied the magic chemical meant to expose the ink. Everything worked perfectly. There was only one problem: when I went to file the asset’s expense account several weeks later, I discovered that the invisible ink had eaten through the paper. I had to go back to my source and beg for a new receipt, this time signed with a Bic pen.

Still, I would become a fervent believer in putting gadgets to work in the field. One of my favorite devices was SRAC, or short-range agent communications. I installed in my personal vehicle, and in the vehicle of one of my top assets, a very low-powered SRAC device that allowed us to communicate while driving around town in relatively close proximity. There were no visible signs of connectivity between us—the perfect cover.

Fred Latrash was even more enthusiastic about technology. He was continually sending messages to the tech staff at headquarters, pointing out some device he had seen in
Popular Mechanics
that could be deployed operationally or was less costly than a similar device in our inventory.

For a time, if we wanted to talk to Fred in his office, we had to use one of his pet gadgets, a Hush-a-Phone. This was basically an upscale variation on the old Boy Scout soup-can-and-string device that kids used to use to talk to each other over a very short distance. The device had a miniature microphone attached to a headset, which in turn was attached to a similar set that Fred wore. Users had to sit ten feet apart and speak to each other in hushed voices, a guaranteed impediment to the free flow of discussion. This was Fred’s solution to the security implications of office conversations, which were indeed vulnerable to audio eavesdropping. The Soviets were always finding creative ways to plant bugs, and we did our share of bugging them as well.

National security officials attempted to solve the bug problem by placing a soundproof plastic room, called a bubble, in virtually every U.S. facility around the world. These were generally located in an inconvenient spot. There simply wasn’t enough time in the day for officers to check into the bubble every time they needed to talk about an operations matter. Fred’s solution, though, turned out to be just as impractical. For weeks on end, we all vigorously avoided conversations with him in his office so we wouldn’t have to use the ludicrous-looking Hush-a-Phone. Eventually, Fred gave up and hung the Hush-a-Phone on his wall—a symbol, he said, of case officer obstinacy in the face of advances in technology.

The truth is that, at least during my tenure, relatively few case officers liked new technology, even though it played an important role in Agency history and is part of the romance of the job—the hidden microphone, the spring-loaded secret compartment, the camera camouflaged in a commonplace object. The very popular spy museum in Washington, D.C., was founded on the public’s enduring fascination with such things. But they truly are just adjuncts to our trade.

The most powerful tools I used in Chile remain the most powerful the CIA has: money and relationships. They were at the heart of my most important responsibility, which was the media account.
El Mercurio
was one of the oldest newspapers in Chile, serving, with the other publications in its chain, more than half the country’s reading public. As a profitable enterprise dedicated to free expression, it was a natural ally in our quest to keep the Allende government from establishing a Marxist regime. The owner legitimately feared that such a government might expropriate its papers and put the media under government control. Our chief of station, Ray Warren, brought me to meetings with his key contacts, and I gradually took over more of the account. It was a first-rate learning experience on how to manage top-level covert action assets.

I hasten to clarify that the CIA had no role in what was printed in
El Mercurio
. The notion persists that the paper was an organ of the Agency. I can state categorically that this is not true. In fact, the editor did not take kindly to outside influence on the paper editorially. We did give them money that enabled them to continue publishing, but we met only with folks on the business side of the paper. Fred Latrash was always harping on the contention that
El Mercurio
needed to be more strident in its attacks on Allende, but Ray and I disagreed; I thought its stance was just right. The paper never used propaganda to deliberately mislead readers about the Allende government’s economic policies, but it did emphasize such issues as the seizure of private property, the illegal and violent actions of certain segments of the ruling coalition, and the specter of economic disaster. It managed to keep its credibility even as it became increasingly antigovernment.

Our involvement in
El Mercurio
was this: we gave the paper roughly $2 million, but our purpose was the opposite of co-opting it. What we wanted was to ensure continued press freedom. True, there was no official censorship by the Allende government; half a dozen dailies in Santiago represented the full spectrum of political opinion, and each operated independently. However, shortly after my arrival, the government blocked
El Mercurio
’s access to newsprint. This, along with cutbacks in advertising and labor unrest, threatened to shut it down, and that would have been a tremendous loss.

One of my first cables from the field was a request for $1 million to keep the paper afloat. A declassified memorandum
10
shows that the request was the subject of a lively discussion in the 40 Committee, the covert action subcommittee of the National Security Council. I knew nothing of this at the time. I knew only that I received an okay to provide
El Mercurio
with an initial sum of $700,000, but it had to be orchestrated through a very complex funding mechanism. It was a valuable education for me in high finance and clandestine funding mechanisms.

We also had sources inside the Chilean military. But the Church Committee overestimated our military ties, which were not nearly as numerous or important as our assets in the media and political parties. We weren’t getting regular information from flag-rank officers, and we didn’t have close ties to any of the decision makers—though not for lack of trying. Fred Latrash had, as his top priority, making friends and recruiting sources in the military. To help with this effort, he joined the military riding club, which was an important social milieu, and even bought an “operational horse” with headquarters’ approval. The horse was named Bismarck. One afternoon, I could hear the normally soft-spoken station chief vigorously dressing down Fred. Though his voice was raised, I couldn’t tell what the issue was, but I noticed on the table outside Ray’s office, where the day’s cables were displayed, a memo explaining that Bismarck had died from lack of use and requesting that headquarters write the animal off as a loss on our books. I surmised the absurdity of writing off an “ops horse” must have driven Ray up the wall.

Fred, nonetheless, was very effective in meeting a wide range of army officers. But, to the best of my knowledge, none of them ended up in the recruitment column. One of his most memorable contacts was General Augusto Pinochet, who would also become one of Fred’s most memorable misjudgments. Fred was unimpressed with him, feeling he was too weak ever to lead a coup. In the end, we had no meaningful relationship with Pinochet before the coup. We did, however, have good insight into the Allende government through our contacts in the Communist Party. Its members turned out to be keen analysts and worthy assets. At one point, they secured for me a typewriter and blank Communist Party letterhead. I never did make use of these things. As it turns out, that was for the best.