Virginia
1984
I returned to the United States after three plus years of fighting a secret war to find a new sense of normalcy and see what it would be like to be a family man living at home again. Just before I’d left for the CIA, I met a young woman named Carmen at a party back home in Miami. At the time, I was recently divorced and living in the same apartment complex as my cousin. We were two drinks into a bottle of vodka when this work friend of my cousin’s wife showed up.
I was captivated by her from the first moment I saw her. I asked my cousin who she was. Carmen asked my cousin’s wife who I was. It did not take long for an introduction. Sparks flew, and we saw each other a few times before I went off to Honduras.
We wrote each other frequently, and in those letters, we got to know each other in a way I’d never been connected to anyone else. Of course, she didn’t know I was with the Agency then or that I was in the middle of a war. But the essentials of who we were as people? We shared a great deal of that in our geographical separation.
I went home briefly in 1982 and proposed to her. When she accepted, I read her into my life with the CIA. Of course, the Agency had to do a background check on Carmen before we could actually get married. I returned to Miami for the wedding, just before we began training my Barracudas. Carmen planned the entire thing.
We returned to Honduras together. Carmen was also Cuban-born and had come to America via the Freedom Flights. Her father was college-educated and quite a strict gentleman. Until we married, she’d never left home.
Our marriage gave Carmen the E-ticket ride of her life. We soon moved into a Tegucigalpa neighborhood near other members of Ray’s team. But for the first few weeks, while I was off training the Barracudas, I had to leave Carmen at the Hotel Alameda. Needless to say, my disappearance for almost a month right after we got married provided the first of many tests to our love.
After I got back, we saw each other usually only on the weekends. The rest of the time, I was in the jungle with the Contras. To fill her time, Carmen read books and started learning how to cook (talk about a marital challenge!). She’d worked in a bank in Miami when we met, living an average American life. Now, she was the wife of a CIA officer helping to orchestrate a covert war against a communist foe. To her, all of this was an incredible adventure. I loved that she loved it as much as I did.
Halfway through our tour in Honduras, Carmen became pregnant with our first child. Our first son was born nine months later.
Our return to the States gave us a chance to live a more normal married-couple kind of life. We rented a little house in Virginia, and I started the accelerated program at George Mason University. I had enough credits already for about two years’ worth of a bachelor’s degree. The other two years I crammed into one hell-bent-for-leather nine-month period. I studied harder, worked harder, than I ever had academically. I took classes on religion, geopolitics, geography, and history. Ultimately, I graduated after writing my senior thesis on counterterrorism.
None of my professors knew I was CIA. After graduation, my real education began.
With my fresh degree in hand, I received orders to attend the Agency’s legendary Operations Course at what is popularly called the Farm. Here, career trainees, mostly young college graduates, are introduced to the dark world of espionage and intelligence gathering as part of their development into case officers. A case officer, or operations officer (OO), is a frontline warrior in the intelligence-gathering war. Their job is to work overseas to develop and run spies. Agency personnel are never agents. We are operations officers. The locals we develop to spy for us are called agents. Hollywood always gets this part wrong.
The case officer’s job is to cultivate, maintain, and protect those agents, meeting with them when necessary or finding clandestine ways to exchange information. There are many ways to gather intelligence these days—via satellite, aerial reconnaissance, intercepted radio transmissions, cell phones, wiretaps, and so on. They all give us puzzle pieces of information, but none of those things are nearly as useful as human eyes and ears in key places. Human intelligence, or HUMINT, is the essence of our work. Because of that, the case officers play a significant role in defending America.
I’d already been a paramilitary officer (PM) for four years, working within the Special Activities Division (SAD, more recently, Special Activities Center), Ground Branch. To have a true career in the Agency, all PM officers needed to be fully operational case officers as well. In the early days, some went to the Farm just to punch that ticket, then returned to the paramilitary side of the house. Others developed into versatile operations officers with a full understanding of both intelligence gathering and covert operations. With the onset of what became the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), SAD-homebased officers became very popular and successful. Many went on to fill key, senior positions in the Directorate of Operations.
A PM officer could blow things up and had an intimate knowledge of dozens of different weapons systems. However, these were cool tools for use only in extremis. Yes, like most PMers, I was a blunt object, and brute force was my stock-in-trade—at least training others to use it anyway. Now, at the Farm, I was introduced to a totally new world. One of intrigue and subtle danger. Blunt objects had no place here. In this new realm, finesse and subterfuge were the orders of the day. We quickly learned that if you had to revert to your martial expertise during an intelligence-gathering operation, you had already screwed up.
The Farm focused on teaching us new case officers the dark arts of tradecraft that would keep our agents and ourselves alive in incredibly dangerous, multi-threat environments. Most aspects of tradecraft are counterintuitive. To understand why those dark arts were so important, we were taught what we would face when up against rival intel agencies. For some of the young college students with little life experience, that was pure culture shock. Having lived in a communist country and witnessed the depravity of such a system, I had a better feel for what to expect from the opposition.
We Americans are generally raised to be law-abiding citizens with an ingrained sense of fair play. The world beyond our borders simply does not function that way. Our adversaries do not adhere to the same rules we enjoy and cherish, which sometimes puts us at a consistent disadvantage against ruthless, unscrupulous foes like the Chinese, Iranians, Cubans, and Russians.
Some of our first classroom lessons focused on the sort of tactics employed by our foes to compromise people and turn them into sources. There are two main ways of doing this: recruit from strengths, or recruit by exploiting weaknesses. Our Agency prefers to recruit from strengths, as those agents tended to be the most reliable sources. For example, say you’re working in a country with a corrupt dictatorship. You find and cultivate a straight arrow inside the government who is seeking a way to change things for the better. The Agency provides him or her with that opportunity. We’re recruiting from strength here, as we’ve developed an asset with a strong ideological commitment.
Some of them even refused our offers to pay them. Those agents weren’t supplying us with information to get rich. They were doing so because they saw a wrong they thought we could help right.
That said, remuneration is an important part of the recruitment process. Being capitalists, we understand that everyone has dreams of a better life for their families, whether a college education for their children or a better roof over their heads. Some in the community joke that CIA stands for Cash in Advance; I say that moniker is raised out of jealousy.
That was our greatest advantage. The Agency, the United States, we were seen at the height of the Cold War as the “good guys.” That sort of moral capital helped us a great deal in the field.
On the flip side, the Russians and the Chinese are not beyond recruiting in a very different way. Instead, they often recruited from weaknesses. They would observe people they were interested in and discover whatever their weaknesses were. Maybe they had a secret gambling problem, a concealed sexual proclivity, or a hidden drug problem. They would detect it and exploit it through blackmail, forcing their target to spy for them.
If they could not find a weakness, they could well manufacture one, which is just as good from their perspective. Many a young businessperson or foreign service officer from country X finds himself or herself inexplicably irresistible to beautiful partners and suddenly find themselves in a “honeypot trap.”
Imagine this scenario: The Chinese, Russian, or Cuban intel service is eager to get economic or technological information out of a married, foreign businessman or diplomat overseas. They watch his patterns, note the bars and hotels he visits while he is overseas, then send this irresistible woman his way. She lures him upstairs to her room, where the target is videotaped or even drugged. The escort vanishes. The intelligence service takes over. The businessman wakes up with his entire life turned upside down. In some extreme cases, they put him in bed with a member of the same sex, often underage, and take photographs while he is out cold.
Whatever the case, the target is now owned by hostile intelligence because he knows if the photos or footage ever see the light of day, his life, family, career, and possibly his freedom will be taken from him.
It is a savage way to do business, but it is often par for the course for our rival agencies. The Farm taught us the nature of the threat—those rival agencies would be gunning for us.
Terror groups would be gunning for us as well. Middle Eastern groups such as Black September and the Palestine Liberation Organization were deadly effective at times against even the Israelis. Hezbollah, the Iranian terror group, successfully identified, stalked, and kidnapped our CIA station Chief in Lebanon in March of 1984. William Buckley was a highly regarded paramilitary officer in the Special Activities Division, a U.S. Army Green Beret veteran who fought in both Korea and Vietnam. As he left his apartment in Beirut on March 16, 1984, he was abducted at gunpoint. Buckley had been warned he was in danger but had not changed his routine, nor was he carrying his sidearm on his body. Instead, he’d put it in his briefcase.
After he was kidnapped, he was tortured for seven months by Hezbollah operatives. He was either murdered or died of a heart attack while under torture a year later.
Buckley’s horrifying fate was a fresh wound for the CIA while we were at the Farm, a reminder that the tradecraft we were being taught was not an academic exercise; we were learning it so we could protect ourselves. Cold War rules were giving way to “Beirut Rules.” The spy game was being changed forever.
One basic principle drilled into us for our survival in the shadow world was called situational awareness. A popular tool used to convey situational awareness and the different levels of it was a system called Cooper’s Colors. A Stanford-educated, two-war Marine officer named John Dean “Jeff” Cooper developed Cooper’s Colors; his intent was to create the mindset needed to survive in a world full of murky threats. Each color in his system represented a different level of awareness and readiness, ranging from white to red.
WHITE: You’re unaware and unconcerned. You’re not looking for threats. If you’re attacked while in this mindset, you’ll probably be overpowered or killed before you can get over your surprise. At the Farm, we were taught we should never be in White unless we were sleeping, or maybe making love to our spouse. An officer overseas in this level of cluelessness to their surroundings will almost certainly become a victim.
YELLOW: You are aware of what is going on around you. You’re noticing things; your head is on a swivel. You’re checking behind you for any potential threats or tails. You’re looking at higher or lower elevations around you, but you are doing this all in an inconspicuous and relaxed manner. Essentially, you’re taking in the environment around you and trying to discern any patterns or behavior that could indicate a threat.
Yellow was to be our permanent baseline mindset. If you have a pulse, you are always aware of your environment and the people in it. To relax from this standard invites a catastrophe. Like William Buckley did.
ORANGE: This is a more specific alert mindset, where scanning the surroundings has detected that something is not right. A car may appear to be following you. Or persons down the street appear to be nervously eyeballing you. Your job at this point is to identify the threat and formulate a plan of action to deal with it if necessary. Further complicating your decision is the kind of threat you are assessing. Is it criminal? Is it terrorism? Or is it a hostile intel service trying to surveil you? In each case, your decision to act will be very different.
If you conclude it is “only” a hostile service establishing surveillance on you, then you simply note their presence and proceed to bore them with your nonoperational behavior. You try to memorize vehicle makes, license plates, and even faces. We call this tradecraft. Then you have to do the thing you never see Bond or Bourne do in the movies: you write it all up.
However, if you determine the threat is physical—crime or terrorism—then your reaction had better be right and based on reality before you proceed to Red. Again, unlike the dime novels and action thrillers, the real formula is: Detect, Avoid, and only in last resort, Counter. Remember, you are in their turf; they have a plan of action to which you are reacting. Because of that, the odds are always in their favor. Your only hope is to somehow disrupt their attack plan.
RED: While Orange establishes your threshold for action, Red shifts into the mindset to execute that action. You Detected in Orange, now you hope to Avoid while in Red; the best defense when you are flying solo is to Avoid. We called it getting off the X. The attackers have formulated an ideal (for them) plan. Deciphering it and avoiding it altogether is the schoolhouse solution. This could involve surprising behavior like driving through a stop sign or turning onto a one-way road against traffic. Blowing your car horn might be all it takes, depending on the situation. It could be slamming the brakes, hitting reverse, doing a 180-degree turn, and blowing past them in the opposite direction. Something out of the ordinary and unpredictable is the best means to throw a monkey wrench into their operation.
But a car chase? Forgetaboutit! That is far too dangerous. Instead, you hightail it to the nearest police station, hospital, friendly embassy, or five-star hotel (these all have security and cameras).
In worst cases where it is impossible to avoid an attack, there are times when our officers have had to draw weapons and defend themselves. We have had officers shoot and kill assailants in a Pakistani street. Later on, you will see two such personal incidents: one in the Philippines and one in a hostile Muslim country in Africa. The bottom line is Red is where people die. Case officers either successfully defend themselves or become victims. Red is the last-ditch defense.
Within the context of Cooper’s Colors, our instructors at the Farm taught us many techniques and tactics we could use to identify, avoid, or negate threats. When moving around a foreign capital, either by car or on foot, we learned to use surveillance detection routes (SDRs) to find anyone tailing us. An SDR is carefully planned series of stops, turns, and changes of direction designed to look totally natural and innocent. It is not. A well-designed SDR will send an officer to a series of errands—say, the store, post office, gym, and so on. At each stop, the officer will search for vehicles or faces he’s seen at previous stops or while traveling between them. Sometimes, we may have the luxury of a second team that will follow the officer executing the SDR. The second team will observe and detect tails from their position behind the officer.
It is the same exact discipline that all other services use. Our own FBI has their hands full trying to identify foreign intelligence activities in our country. The secret to tradecraft is that it is not a secret; it is the showcasing of a benign existence while carrying out your intel collection mission.
We practiced these SDRs in local towns and cities, working with our instructors to spot the surveillance on us. Surveillants are often local police officers or other trained individuals who assist as adversaries during the training. It was intense training right in the middle of American life, just as we would be operating overseas. It was also a reminder that as case officers, our job was to be invisible to those around us. We lived in a dimension of everyday life that few even knew existed around them. We could be sitting at a stoplight surrounded by commuters heading home from work, a few moms taking their kids to soccer practice, and perhaps one KGB agent sitting in a red sedan four cars back who has been ordered to find out who we are and where we are going. If everyone does their job right, the people around will never have a clue of the cat-and-mouse game unfolding right under their noses.
We learned countersurveillance tactics, escape, and evasion. Students go through a mini-SERE school where we learned how to resist interrogation. Our instructors showed us how to identify potential threats from assassins to honeypot traps—beautiful women (or handsome men) intent on seducing us as a method of compromise.
As the basic building blocks of tradecraft were added to our toolboxes, our instructors ran us through exercises in the real world—everything from developing a relationship with a potential asset to finding dead-drop locations where information could safely be exchanged was done both at the Farm and in the towns and cities around us.
It was an intense program that kept us busy for almost fourteen hours a day. We had weekends off, but we often had so much work to do to prepare for the following week that I went home to Carmen and our infant son only twice a month. The other weekends, I would usually start with a couple of skydiving jumps around seven in the morning to get my blood going. Then I’d devote the rest of the weekend to writing reports, making maps, locating spots to exchange information with our role players in upcoming exercises, and so on.
All the school’s teachings came together in a grand, ongoing exercise that had us simulating working out of a foreign location. All the things we’d do overseas as a case officer, we did at the Farm. We reported to our Chief of Station, we worked to cultivate and run agents. We conducted countersurveillance, planned our SDRs. All the while, our reports were being read right alongside the reports of the role players. If we missed anything we should have caught, the role players alerted our instructors.
In this intense operational training environment, I believe my life in the streets paid off big-time. Many of the fresh college grads in our class found themselves out of their depth when they were asked to steal secrets for the first time. In me, they were competing with a guy who had to steal hubcaps to pay for his dates. When they were planning a break-in to a target building to plant bugs, they were competing with a guy who had more than once broken into buildings to escape from the cops after a neighborhood brawl.
One particular incident boosted my confidence. We were taking turns performing our tasks in an auditorium in front of the rest of our class of spooks. One scenario had us carrying out a dead drop while under surveillance. Walking around the stage using props for screening and flow (meaning to move naturally, unnoticed, undetected), we were to drop a small object into a flower bed for a recruited “asset” to retrieve later. When my turn came, I ran through my movements, and the head instructor suddenly pulled me aside. A crusty veteran of “denied” operations in China, he said, “I’m reporting you to the FBI—you’ve had prior operational training.” He was as serious as a heart attack. I was speechless.
Then he smiled. He said I was a natural and that my demeanor would carry me a long way. Perhaps the good Lord did have a plan for me during my misspent youth!
Ultimately, all of us who made the cut mastered the tradecraft. No matter how scientific our selection process was, every class had attrition. In mine, three failed to cut it. The Agency didn’t like washing out career trainees (as we were called) after heavy investments were made in their development, but it did happen. Just to get into the door required a thorough screening process for the new recruits, starting with background checks, interviews, and even a full lifestyle polygraph test. A good case officer has to have a delicate balance of personality traits and skills. Finding those in young recruits is a lot like trying to find a Pro Bowl–caliber quarterback in the NFL draft. You never really know until they’re tested. In our case, some of the best pedigreed career trainees who seemed to have all the right mix of charisma, charm, and physical strength couldn’t hack it in the field.
A few of those were redirected into admin or analyst careers. A couple eventually graduated provisionally from the Farm at the bottom of our class. One did okay overseas. The other quit after his first tour. In many respects, it was a lot like being in harm’s way: you never really know how you’re going to react under fire until it happens. That level of danger and stress can never be truly modeled in a training environment, because everyone knows the danger is not real. Still, the course at the Farm threw as much stress and tension as possible into the equation to see how we would react to it.
We drank out of this fire hose for sixteen weeks, learning everything from codes and casing targets to photography and building concealment devices for dead drops out of things like fallen tree limbs, within which we could conceal exposed film or data. We learned how to use disguises and aliases and how to cultivate an asset—all within the context of a simulated fully functioning foreign operation. We did everything they did overseas, right down to the paperwork and the forms used for our case reports.
Toward the end of our time at the Farm, we were sent to a U.S. city we’d never worked in before to undertake a series of final field exercises with another governmental agency. Both sides would know when the exercises would start and the initial location, and our adversaries would know who we were.
Our first assignment was to execute a dead drop. We didn’t know the city well, but we had maps and got creative. One of our trainees was a triathlete and an exceptional runner. We decided to exploit that.
When the exercise commenced, our runner emerged from the hotel dressed in jogging clothes. Our adversary’s surveillance team had parked outside the hotel in a black sedan, wearing suits and wing tip dress shoes.
Big mistake. Our triathlete took off running, made a few turns, and went up a one-way street. The surveillance team couldn’t follow in their sedan, so they bailed out and gave chase. In wing tips.
They never stood a chance.
Boy, were they pissed in the after-action review on that one!
As the training continued, we learned that the locals overseas consider every American a spy until proven otherwise. At the same time, we would be operating right under the noses of foreign intelligence agencies doing everything they could to ferret out and compromise our case officers. We would have to detect those watching us, shake them, and never tip our hand that we had done so.
It was a guts game all the way. I couldn’t wait to play it overseas. I finished in the top 3 percent of my class and received my first assignment as a case officer: El Salvador. This was a perfect opportunity for me, a country battling its own Marxist insurgency. I could assist in the effort to defeat it before El Salvador went the way of Cuba and Nicaragua.
Our time in Virginia rapidly came to an end. We packed our things and shipped them to San Salvador. But at the last minute, everything changed when an Agency legend asked for me elsewhere by name.