See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (3 page)

The personal history statement was the longest, most detailed form I’d ever seen in my life. Besides every conceivable question about my current circumstances, there were several pages asking about my extended family, friends, clubs, associations, and political affiliations. It took me two weeks and a lot of telephone calls to fill it out. A psychological questionnaire had arrived along with it. I remember one question about bed-wetting.

The written exam, which was given at the Federal Building in San Francisco, was a cross between the SAT and the Foreign Service exam. The other people taking the exam looked older than me but normal enough. I wondered if they, too, were taking the test mostly out of curiosity.

In truth, I figured I’d never hear from the CIA again. Sure, anyone could take the entrance exam, but even if I aced the test, my personal history statement was sure to weed me out. Even apart from my lefty mother, I had absolutely no experience. The last regular job I had held down was washing dishes in Georgetown.

I was wrong. One morning, about a month after the test, I received a long-distance call from a woman asking if I would be available for an interview. She gave me the time, the address of a downtown hotel, and the name of a man I was supposed to meet - Jim Scott. It wasn’t until after I hung up that I realized she hadn’t said she was calling from the CIA, but since I hadn’t applied for any other job, it stood to reason.

The night before, I was nervous, not because I was serious about going to work for the CIA but because this was my first interview for a real job. I wanted to do well. I dug my only suit out of a trunk, hung it up in the bathroom, and ran the shower on hot to steam out the wrinkles. I paced the apartment, trying to imagine what Jim Scott would ask me and how I would respond. I didn’t even have a number for him. What if I’d gotten the name of the hotel wrong? I had no way to call the CIA, except the office in Lawndale.

The next morning I called Scott’s room from the hotel lobby, right on time. He told me to call back in thirty minutes. That’s strange, I thought. It was only nine, and he couldn’t possibly be in another interview. I waited in the lobby imagining all sorts of things. Maybe someone was watching me to see if I was alone. When I called back a half hour later, Scott told me to come on up.

With his slicked-back hair, tweed coat, and club tie, Jim Scott looked more like a college-football recruiter than how I pictured a CIA agent. I noticed that the bed in his junior suite was made up and there wasn’t a suitcase in sight. He must have spent the night somewhere else. There was no way anyone could see in the window, but he still closed the curtains so that the only light came from a bedside lamp.

We sat down on either end of the couch. A wafer-thin manila folder sat on the coffee table. It must have been my file.

‘You probably already know a lot about the CIA, but I think it would be helpful to give you a quick overview,’ Scott started.

I wasn’t about to admit that I knew next to nothing about the CIA.

Scott must have given the same spiel a dozen times a week. Essentially, the CIA is divided into two houses: the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence. There are other directorates, he said, but they play mostly supporting roles. The Directorate of Intelligence - or the DI, as it’s called inside - is made up of analysts: regional experts, psychiatrists, physicists, sociologists, and so on. As the name suggests, the DI analysts evaluate information and put their conclusions on paper. Information collectors, on the other hand, run the Directorate of Operations, or the DO. They are called case officers. Working mostly overseas, they gather information from their sources - agents, as the DO calls them - and pass it to the DI, where it becomes grist for the analysts.

Scott opened up the manila folder. ‘I see you’ve applied to Berkeley’s graduate school in East Asian studies. It seems like you might be a possible match for the DI.’

In fact, I had applied to the University of California at Berkeley after making a cursory survey of San Francisco’s job market and deciding the best thing to do was punt and go back to school. I’d even started a Mandarin Chinese course and found a part-time job as a night teller at the Bank of America in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. It didn’t pay much, but the hours would be perfect if Berkeley accepted me.

‘You’d love the DI,’ Scott went on in his even, soothing, friendly voice. He was a good recruiter. I didn’t realize it at the time, but our meeting was my first lesson in how it was done. ‘It runs very much like a university. An analyst reads the same books as a graduate student or a university professor. He keeps current in his specialty by reading periodicals and newspapers. And being in Washington, D. C. is a special advantage. He can walk in and take out books from the best library in the world, the Library of Congress.’ What’s more, he told me, DI analysts get to travel a lot, learn new languages, and go to conferences. They go on sabbaticals, too.

‘If you were to go to work for the DI, you could even continue to study Chinese,’ Scott said. ‘But the DI is a lot better than a university. Do you know why?’

I had a feeling Scott was setting the hook, but I didn’t care. The DI was starting to sound better and better, maybe even a place I might really want to work. It was like getting paid to go to school.

‘DI analysts not only have access to libraries, magazines, and newspapers, but also to a lot of information not available to universities - like reports from embassies, from CIA offices overseas, and from other agencies that have access to ‘indispensable’ information unavailable to a university. DI analysts have access to the Truth, and not just part of it. You can’t claim to be an expert on a subject unless you have all available information.’

Scott paused a second to let it all sink in. ‘But that’s not all. There’s something else unique about the DI. The DI has a very special reader. Do you know who that is?’

Scott didn’t bother waiting for an answer.

‘The President of the United States.’

He paused again to make sure I completely understood what he’d just told me.

‘The president,’ Scott went on,’ more than anyone else, needs to know the truth about the world. But it isn’t possible for him to be an expert on every country in the world or every subject. And that’s where the analysts come in. They are his fact book, reference, and adviser. How can you do better than the president sitting at your elbow, listening to you explain a complicated problem?’

It was, as I would find out one day, the purest sort of baloney. Pigs will fly before the president sits down for a cozy one-on-one with a DI analyst. Intelligence passes from Langley to the White House through a tight political screen. But, as I said, Jim Scott was a good pitchman, and at the tender age of twenty-two, I was a perfect mark. As he talked, I pictured myself walking the president through some knotty international crisis. I would do my best not to sound too pedantic, maybe even introduce a bit of humor. Who knows, maybe the president would take a liking to me and bring me over to the White House permanently.

Scott interrupted my thoughts: ‘Would an analyst’s job interest you?’

‘Absolutely’ I shot back.

Scott picked up my application again and silently leafed through it. He looked back at me and cleared his throat.

‘Frankly, it’s a long shot. Without a Ph.D. or even a master’s degree, I’m pretty certain the DI can’t use you right now. After Berkeley, maybe. But in any case I’ll pass on your application.’

Oooof. The wind came out of my sails in a rush.

‘But let’s go back to the DO,’ he went on, almost without missing a beat. ‘It’s a different kettle of fish entirely’ I detected a change in his voice, an enthusiasm that hadn’t been there before.

‘Case officers run the DO,’ Scott said. ‘They’re CIA staff employees who run agents. Agents are almost always foreigners. Being foreigners, they go places where Americans, our case officers, can’t go, like inside their governments or their countries’ secret scientific establishments. At the case officer’s direction, the agents steal secrets, plans, documents, computer tapes, or whatever. In other words - let me be blunt - agents are traitors.’

Scott had dropped his voice so that I had to strain to hear him - as if he were afraid someone was eavesdropping on us.

‘And what do I mean, exactly, by spying and secrets? Let’s take a hypothetical: Pearl Harbor. It’s 1941. Assume there was a CIA back then, and you were in it. You’re assigned to Tokyo. One night in late November you’re working late. You’re about ready to go home, dead tired from a long day at work. The telephone rings. The caller apologizes for dialing the wrong number. But you know it’s not a wrong number. You recognize the voice. It’s one of your agents, an ensign in the Japanese navy who works in naval headquarters. He’s just signaled that he wants a meeting.’

‘At first you have a hard time following the agent as he rambles on in Japanese. He’s excited. Then, all of a sudden, you realize what he’s telling you: Japan is preparing to attack Pearl Harbor. He hands you a top-secret document. It’s the plan for the attack, he says.’

‘You rush back to the office, wondering if your agent has lost his mind. You get down to translating the document. It’s all there, just as he described it. You fire off an encoded message to Washington. The US Navy disperses the fleet, and you’ve just altered the course of history.’

‘Knowing about the Japanese attack is information that cannot be obtained anywhere other than from a human being, an agent. There’s no way we could have known with this precision about the emperor’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor as early as November 1941, except from the ensign or another agent like him. Satellites and intercepts can’t see inside someone’s head. You need a person to do that. Agents and the secrets they steal are the crown jewel of American intelligence. It is what the intelligence business is really about.’

Scott got up and went to the minibar and got us two Cokes.

‘You’ve got to admit, that’s a goddamn exciting job,’ he said when he sat down. ‘But I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t have its downsides. In fact, there are very few jobs in the world tougher than a case officer’s. First of all, almost every case officer has two jobs. There’s his daytime job, his cover job, what he does between eight and five. More than likely it’ll be a boring, routine, meaningless job. You might very well be sent overseas as a shipping clerk working for an import-export company; let’s say in Penang, Malaysia. You’ll have some dreary office in the port. All day long you’ll fill in import applications. Occasionally, you call the home office, let’s say in Passaic, New Jersey. The person who answers the phone will have only the vaguest idea where Penang is, or even care. Everyone will take you for a ne’er-do-well. You can never tell anyone what you really do for a living. It’s a thankless, anonymous job.’

‘And there’s another downside, a lot worse than the hardship of living your cover - getting caught committing espionage. Espionage is illegal in every country in the world and, in all but a few, a capital crime. Let’s go back to Tokyo in 1941. If you’d been caught meeting your agent, you’d be lucky to go to jail. And, incidentally, your agent would have been put up against a wall and shot. Sure, the CIA would have done its best to try to get you out. But it wouldn’t have been able to do anything until the end of the war. Four years rotting in a Japanese jail. The same would go for Penang. A mistake in this business is unthinkable.’

For a moment, I considered the possibility that Scott was trying to talk me out of the job.

Giving me some time to think, he stood up, walked over to the window, and opened the curtain, letting in the bright midday light as if it would somehow help me make a decision.

‘So, what do you think about the DO as a career?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Well?’

‘Sure,’ I finally said, faking all the enthusiasm I could muster. ‘I’d be real interested.’ I might have been able to see myself at the president’s elbow, but I was way too immature for the job Scott had just been describing. I also couldn’t stop picturing myself in leg irons, chained to the wall of some dank, foul-smelling Malaysian prison. Then again, the longer I could keep the application process going, the more I could dine out on the story for years to come; and surely the nation’s supersleuths would come to their senses sooner or later.

Wrong again. In March 1976 I was invited to Washington for more interviews and to take the dreaded polygraph.

Ironically, or maybe intentionally, I was put up at the Holiday Inn across from the Watergate, the same Holiday Inn the ex-CIA Watergate burglars had used as a listening post when they bugged the Democratic National Committee headquarters. In quick succession, I went through a half-dozen interviews and exams; a couple of DO case officers, a shrink, and a security officer; and a French and German test. All the meetings took place in my hotel room. I was never brought into a CIA building.

The most impressive person I met was Don Gregg. Don would go on to be security adviser to then vice president George Bush, and ambassador to South Korea when Bush became president. Back then, though. Gregg had just been reassigned to Washington from Seoul, where he’d been XXXXXXX chief. For most of the two hours we talked, he described what it was like to live overseas for most of one’s adult life: the isolation, the alienation from family and country, the physical hardship. Gregg was curious about my background and asked a lot of questions about the time I had spent in Europe. He wanted to know how I adjusted and whether I made friends. For the first time I had a sense that the DO might be interested in me for my overseas experience, an interesting legacy from my mother.

The polygraph was held on the next-to-last day in an apartment complex several blocks from the Holiday Inn. I found the name Scott had given me on the lobby directory - Dr. Jarmen, third floor. A balding man, about thirty-five, greeted me when I knocked on the door. With his solid white shirt, lime-green tie, and pocket protector, he looked like an accountant. He showed me into a room that was meant to be a bedroom. In the middle was an oversize plastic-upholstered easy chair, a Formica table, and a straight-back chair positioned across the table from the easy chair. Dr. Jarmen, or whatever his real name was, seated me in the easy chair and hooked me up to three pairs of wires and sensors leading to the polygraph. My right index finger was attached to a metal electrode, my chest to a respirator tube, and my upper right arm to a cuff monitor.