See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (6 page)

Every six months CIA employees assigned overseas would send in what was known as an XXXXXX - a cable enumerating your close and continuing contacts or a certification that you had none. It was always a tense time. You knew that if some security puke was having a bad day and decided your close and continuing contact was a threat to national security, he could yank you back to Washington, lash you up to a polygraph, and consign you to years in security limbo. On the other hand, if you didn’t report a contact and security stumbled onto it, things would be a lot worse.

One of the odder cases I ever heard about involved a Hindu employee who was sleeping with his mother and sister. It was discovered during a routine polygraph. The hatchet man was about to fire him when the employee invoked his First Amendment rights. He argued that it was a caste thing: He couldn’t find a wife from his caste in the Washington area. That threw the case into the general counsel’s office, which eventually decided to fire him anyway. An extreme case, but those are the kinds of issues the CIA had to delve into to preserve its cult of secrecy.

After two weeks imprisoned in the safe house, signing forms and listening to headquarters officers drone on about what they did for a living, I was overjoyed to head down to the Farm for the operations course. I knew I would be exchanging one prison for another, but this one was more in the nature of a country club, and at least I would be getting some exercise again.

Although the Farm has been described in numerous books and shown from the air in television documentaries, the CIA has asked me not to reveal its location or cover name. All I can tell you is that it is situated in Virginia’s Tidewater, on a XXXXXXX. It’s supposed to be a restricted military base, which is just what the guards will tell you if you should ever stumble upon the front gates with their flashing yellow lights and draw barriers.

Inside the gates, the Farm did resemble a country club, at least in part. There were tennis courts, an indoor swimming pool, fishing boats you could take out on the river, and several bars. There were even recreational skeet and trap ranges. The students were assigned individual rooms in dormitories. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, either. The instructors lived on base in white clapboard houses.

The Farm liked to project the image of a small, rural college, but it was a very peculiar college indeed. As soon as we had checked in, it was announced there would be a XXXXXX that evening, hosted by an imaginary foreign government. I can’t remember the name of the country they used, but the capital was called Wilton. The instructors played the roles of local officials, and the students American visitors. Our job was to devise a cover for our presence in the country. The purpose was to teach us how to work a social event and elicit information from people - the CIA’s version of cotillion.

I picked out a short, bald, sagging, and myopic instructor who looked as if he should have retired a few decades back. Add in the martini he was sipping, and I figured he was an easy touch.

I stuck my hand out. ‘How’s it going?’

He kept his hand in his pocket and just looked at me.

‘I’m an American, and I’ve just arrived in town,’ I said, still grinning like a monkey.

‘That’s curious,’ he said in a not particularly friendly voice. ‘We don’t see many Americans here. What do you do?’

‘I work for an American gas company. We’re hoping to drill some fields in your country.’

‘Are you a geologist?’

‘No.’

‘Well, perhaps that explains why you don’t know we have no gas reserves in our country,’ he said as he turned and walked away.

As soon as I got back to my room, I looked through the briefing book for the mock country. It stated very clearly that it had no hydrocarbon reserves. The next morning when students assembled in the auditorium, I could tell I wasn’t the only one who had failed to do his homework.

At exactly eight-thirty, a six-foot-three-inch man built like a rock entered the auditorium and walked deliberately to the podium. With his weather-beaten, ruddy face, he looked like he’d spent a lot of time in the desert.

‘My name is Joe Lynch. I’m the course coordinator. Who got a follow-on meeting last night?’

You could have heard a pin drop. No one raised a hand.

Lynch walked up the middle aisle and stopped next to my desk. The blackboards, Formica-top desks, and bare walls made me feel like I was back at Georgetown University, but this man didn’t look or sound like any professor I had ever had.

‘Does anyone have any idea why we are here?’ His voice boomed through the auditorium.

I knew I didn’t. I was relieved when an older woman raised her hand. She looked like she could have been in the CIA for a while and was now being recycled into a case officer.

‘We’re here to learn how to become intelligence collectors,’ she said.

Lynch didn’t even acknowledge her. He looked around the room and then took his place back behind the podium.

‘Apparently, no one got a second meeting. Did one of you at least get a telephone number?’

About half the students raised their hands.

Lynch turned to a student in the front row with his hand up.’ Was it an office number?’

The student nodded.

‘So what are you going to say when his secretary answers the telephone and asks who you are? If you’d read your briefing book, you’d know Wilton is hostile to the United States. Unreported contact between Americans and government officials is forbidden. By calling your friend at his office, you’ve just screwed him.’

Lynch swept the room with his gaze.

‘To go back to my question about what you’re doing here. The US government is spending millions of dollars to turn you into wolves, predators. Last night you were supposed to separate one of the lambs from the flock, the one who knows secrets, and lead him down the path to betrayal - of his country and everything else dear to him - and at the same time not let on what you’re doing.

‘If you joined the CIA as a shortcut to becoming a Foreign Service officer, drinking free booze at cocktail parties, or taking an extended vacation in Europe, I recommend you go back to headquarters and look for a desk job.’

I think it was only at that moment that I finally understood the CIA was deadly serious about sending me out into the world to spy. So much for skiing in Switzerland on the agency’s nickel.

For the next five months the instructors did their best to turn us into predators. Working pretty much day and night, we learned the esoteric skills of spying - spotting, assessing, recruiting, and running agents, all in the framework of the mock country ruled from Wilton. On the surface, it seemed like some weird Kabuki play, but the stakes were high. A thumbs-down at the Farm meant you weren’t certified as a case officer. Uncertified, you couldn’t go overseas. You’d be permanently assigned to headquarters, and back then it was preferable to resign.

Not surprisingly, the hardest part was the actual recruitment, or the ‘pitch,’ as it was called. After you’d determined that your target knew secrets the CIA wanted to know (spotting), you then had to dope out whether he had any weaknesses that made him vulnerable to a recruitment pitch (assessing). The general rule was, you went after the weakest person - someone with money problems, a deep grievance against his country, an alcohol problem - but some of the best agents recruited by the CIA did it simply because they loved America. The point, and it was hammered into our heads, was that you had to be absolutely sure you knew your target’s vulnerabilities before pitching him. Waving a . hundred-dollar bill in front of someone who didn’t care about money just got you into trouble.

A couple of classes after mine, the students at the Farm learned firsthand about the tragic consequences of a pitch gone bad. The story began in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a Soviet diplomat whom a case officer wanted to recruit. When it came time for the case officer to leave at the end of his tour, he still hadn’t pinpointed a vulnerability to hang his pitch on. Instead, he lobbed the diplomat a softball about the need for the Soviet Union and the US to get to know each other better. When the diplomat agreed, the case officer proposed introducing him to his replacement so they could ‘exchange views.’

Too bad that wasn’t the way the case officer described it in his report. He claimed he had recruited the Soviet, and his replacement, Bob XXXXXXX, took him at his word. At his first solo meeting with the Soviet in a restaurant, Bob asked him for classified documents. The Soviet turned red, slammed his fist on the table, and started shouting. No one in the restaurant misunderstood what was going on. The incident turned into such a cause celebre in Kabul that Bob was sent home to the Farm to teach. Deciding his career was over, and no doubt suffering from other problems, Bob shot himself on Christmas morning on the front porch of his house with his wife and children inside.

Another thing the DO pounded into our heads from day one: There’s nothing more important than your agent’s life. Just as a Secret Service officer is expected to take a bullet for the president, so case officers were to do anything to protect an agent’s life - lie, cheat, steal, or worse. Very few people outside the business understand the nature of the bonds between a case officer and an agent, but to look at the scenario in cold institutional terms, if the word got out that the DO didn’t protect its agents, no one would ever spy for the CIA again.

Sometimes a mole would betray agents and blow entire networks, but more often, agents were lost when they were spotted meeting their case officers. Accordingly, the DO spent millions of dollars training its officers to spot and beat surveillance. During our stay at the Farm, we spent almost a third of our time running foot and vehicular surveillance runs, mostly in Richmond, Virginia. Sometimes we’d follow the instructors; sometimes they’d follow us; sometimes the students would follow one another. It was all an elaborate cat-and-mouse game, and it was only a warm-up for the main event - the internal operations course, held in Washington, DC.

The course was designed for case officers going to places like Moscow and Peking. The idea was to fire them in the crucible, replicating as nearly as possible what it was like to work against a hostile, determined, two-to-three-hundred-man surveillance team. I’ll call the instructor Martha. She was a pert blonde, about thirty years old, who had just been thrown out of the Soviet Union after she was caught meeting an agent in Moscow as part of a KGB setup. Martha had been picked to instruct the internal ops course because she’d proven herself on the streets and held up to a nasty KGB interrogation. Beating surveillance wasn’t something you learned in a lecture or by reading a book.

On the first day she dismissed us early. ‘Go home, pay your bills, and do anything else you need to clear up whatever it is you do in your life,’ she said ‘because the next six weeks, you’re mine. ‘Since I wasn’t married or otherwise attached it didn’t take me long.

Martha meant it. During those six weeks, for sixteen hours a day, we were never off the streets of Washington. We put down dead drops (packages for agents), chalk marks on the walls (these were signals to agents), and took long counter surveillance routes - they turned into a blur. The teams covering us were good. Sometimes they used what’s called ‘dolphin surveillance’ - now you see us, now you don’t. For two or three days they’d be all over us; we couldn’t miss them. And then the next day we wouldn’t see anyone. After a while, we would start to see ghosts.

Other times they employed what’s called ‘waterfall surveillance,’ in which the team walks directly at you rather than following from behind. A good waterfall surveillance requires hundreds of people and cars. As soon as a surveillant passes his target (called the ‘rabbit’), he turns down the first cross street, walks to a parallel street, and catches a van that drives him ahead of the rabbit so he can rejoin the flow, often wearing a change of clothes.

This went on for day after day without letup. Teams and techniques were switched at random. The objective was to wear us out and force mistakes. Just when we thought we couldn’t take any more, they would turn up the heat. One night when I’d pushed it to the limit, a team picked the lock on my car and stole my notes. Sure enough, a surveillance team was waiting for me at the next drop site. It was a mistake I would never make again.

The course did more than teach us to detect surveillance, though - it also taught us to beat it. Anytime you’re in motion, whether walking around a city or driving in the country, there comes a point where you’re out of sight. And it is during that moment, whether it’s a dip in a country road or a blind spot between buildings, that you do whatever you need to do. Chances are, you’ll have only a split second. Preparation is everything.

Toward the end of the course at the Farm, it was pretty clear who would pass and who wouldn’t. Lynch loosened up and joined us one night at the student bar.

‘I know it’s been five months of hell. Do you think any of you are ready for the field?’

No one said anything.

‘I’m happy you’ve figured at least that much out down here,’ Lynch said. ‘You’ve just scratched the surface when it comes to this profession.

‘If there is one thing you should have learned, it’s that the opposition is out to get you. It has the resources and patience, too. I don’t care if it’s in Moscow or Paris. Wherever you end up, there will be a million pairs of eyes watching and waiting for you to make a mistake.

‘You know what I do first thing every morning when I wake up overseas? I go through my pockets. I fan the pages of the book I was reading the night before. I check my briefcase. I look under the bed. I’m a man obsessed, looking for that telltale scrap of paper with the agent’s name on it, his telephone number or address - anything that could possibly compromise him. I just have to assume that the moment I leave my house or hotel the opposition will show up to rifle through my things.’

Lynch ordered another pitcher of beer. A couple more students pulled up chairs to listen.

‘But let me tell you something else. It’s not just discipline. If you slavishly follow the rule book, you’ll fail. Let’s say it’s one-thirty in the morning and you’re finishing up with your agent. You’re dead tired, and the only thing you can think about is climbing into bed. You’re about ready to stop and drop off the agent when you see a pair of lights in the rearview mirror. Until then there’s been almost no cars on the road. A coincidence? You can’t know for sure. Another ten minutes and the lights are still there. What would you do?’