Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.
—Attributed to Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson,
c. 1929
Washington, D. C, April 1965
• The bus from Baltimore Friendship Airport dropped me at the airline terminal on the corner of 12th and K streets on this bright spring afternoon. I paused for a moment on the curb, a pilgrim in his mid-twenties, trying to absorb what had been a memorable day. Not only had the American DC-8 flight from Denver been my first ride in a jet, it had also been the first time I’d flown. Now I was standing at the taxi rank, only blocks from the White House, my mother’s worn leather valise at my feet, about to head across the Potomac to the CIA’s Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The sun was warm and trees were budding. How nice it would be to stroll toward the monuments on the Mall, I thought. Until that moment, they had only existed in my mind as images from magazines and television.
But I felt a sense of duty. The letter I’d received inviting me to an interview had been clear: I was to report to CIA Headquarters at nine A.M. on Tuesday, April 20. Now I wanted to find a room in Langley and try to get a good night’s sleep, if my excitement permitted.
“Langley, Virginia,” I told the black cab driver, who wore a colorful, geometrically patterned shirt with billowing sleeves. It was the first time I had ever encountered an African.
“Where in Langley, mister?” He removed his toothpick and gave me a dubious glance in the rearview mirror.
“Any motel near the Central Intelligence Agency,” I said.
“You say the CIA, mister?” The driver shook his head in mild amusement.
We cut onto Constitution Avenue and rolled along the Mall with the rush hour commuters streaming toward the Virginia suburbs. I couldn’t help rubbernecking as we passed the Washington Monument, then the Lincoln Memorial, rising through the blossoming trees ahead. To me, this was infinitely more exciting than diagramming circuits at the Martin plant in Denver. I felt as if I was finally being lifted from the isolation I’d known as a kid, and the tough times I’d endured as a young artist, into an exotic world of adventure.
But as the taxi weaved among the commuters crawling on the George Washington Parkway on the other side of the Potomac, the mundane returned to quash my sense of adventure. “You got a name for that particular motel, mister?” the driver asked with a wry grin.
“Anywhere near the CIA,” I replied, trying not to sound like a naive tourist.
He cut up the steep road beside Chain Bridge and turned onto Route 123. I assumed we were in Langley, but there was nothing but miles of newly budded oaks, maples, and sycamores. “Down there is the CIA,” the driver said, proud of his knowledge. I could barely make out what appeared to be a high security gate and a white concrete-block guardhouse, half-hidden by tree trunks, about three hundred yards down a curving, two-lane road. A small sign at the shoulder read simply: VIRGINIA HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT. I was suddenly shaken by uncertainty. Had all this business—the mysterious ad, the bizarre interview with Ryman, and now this taxi ride to nowhere—been a hoax?
“Where’s Langley?” I looked around anxiously. “Where’s the town?”
“Don’t know that there is one,” the driver said, his smile widening with the knowledge that he, an immigrant, knew more than a native son. “We will have to have a look up here by McLean.”
An hour later, we were still searching for a motel, but the driver, who revealed he was a “very good Ghanaian Christian man,” had assured me I wouldn’t be charged more than the standard fare from the District to McLean. Finally, in Falls Church, we spotted an old Victorian house with a white gingerbread porch and a small blue sign that read ROOMS FOR RENT. We were a good five miles from the entrance of CIA Headquarters. Could I get a cab in the morning, or would I have to hitchhike?
“The city bus to the CIA stops right here at the corner,” the landlord said. I paid my Ghanaian driver a generous ten dollars for his trouble and unpacked the suitcase in my temporary base of operations, a second-floor bedroom shielded from the street in a quiet neighborhood—my gullible idea of the operational security this first visit to Agency Headquarters required.
But the next morning, I was again dragged back to the commonplace that lies beneath so much of the cloak-and-dagger sensationalism of the intelligence profession. The municipal bus was crowded with commuters. At the CIA stop, I got off with about a dozen people, some carrying brown-paper lunch bags, and trudged along toward the security hut. I noticed that nobody looked like James Bond. The shapely Miss Moneypenny was also nowhere to be found.
As we rounded the curve, however, I got my first look at the immense white limestone monolith of the Agency’s new Headquarters, reputed to be the second-largest office building in the world after the Pentagon. I had no reason to doubt that this massive, seven-floor structure dominating a green campus, although invisible from the surrounding roads, was in fact 1,400,000 square feet. The clean sweep of the roof was broken by clumps of antennae. An enormous fiberglass igloo, which I guessed must have sheltered satellite dishes, stood to the right of the building. Suddenly, I forgot about the brown-baggers and thought about the cryptic messages streaming to and from this building. As I waited in line at the uniformed-security guard station, my sense of awe and excitement returned.
The people in line flashed blue laminated badges, and the guards waved them through. I had my interview letter open like an eager scholarship boy on the first day of school. “I have a nine o’clock appointment with personnel,” I told the guard, handing over the page embossed with the CIA seal. He glanced at the letter, then directed me to the swooping glass-and-marble front portico. Walking past the mysterious igloo, which I soon discovered was actually the auditorium, I imagined agents punching digits into tiny burst transmitters, just as I’d read in Len Deighton novels. This mental Ping-Pong match between the exotic and the workaday existence of bureaucracy had only just begun.
Standing on the polished gray granite floor of the vaulted marble lobby, I gazed at the imposing seal, thirty feet in diameter. The words CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA were inlaid in multicolored granite characters, surrounding a shield topped by the profile of a fierce eagle. The center of the shield was emblazoned with a sixteen-point compass rose, symbolizing the far corners of the world where the Agency operated. High on the marble lobby wall was the passage from John 8:32,…AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YE FREE…If the architect intended to impress people with this lobby, he had succeeded in my case.
“Your first appointment is at the West Out Building,” the personnel officer told me, consulting a neatly typed schedule. He wore glasses with heavy black frames and kept a water glass filled with at least a dozen precisely sharpened pencils on his spotless desk blotter. Slender and balding, the man did not fit my image of a spymaster. “You’ll have to catch the Bluebird at the stop out front,” he said.
The Bluebird was an unmarked bus that swung by the Pentagon before crossing Memorial Bridge, making a couple of intermediate stops at anonymous buildings, then depositing me at 15th and Independence on the Mall. It was another bright spring day, and I was once more torn between my sense of obligation and my desire to soak up the sights. But I wasn’t prepared for the ranks of dingy prefab “temporary” buildings dating from World War II that sprawled across this slope of the Mall and certainly never made it onto tourist postcards.
The West Out Building was standard red brick government from the nineteenth century, a gritty facade broken by rows of windows too narrow to have offered much relief to the bachelor clerks in celluloid collars sweating at their desks in the decades before air conditioning. From the sidewalk, there was no way to discern the building’s current tenants; it could easily have been a branch of the nearby Bureau of Engraving and Printing. But in fact, it was the front office of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). Here I would have to pass my initial screening before being led across borders of secrecy into the concentric circles of security guarding the Agency’s clandestine heart.
That morning’s interview was with two gentlemen I will call “Phil” and “Franco.” Phil was the chief of the Graphic Arts Reproduction Branch of TSD, and Franco headed the Art Department. These two men had the power to determine my future.
Phil held up the art samples I had sent him with my initial application, including some rather elegant oriental calligraphy. “Why were you interested in this type of thing?” Franco asked, keeping his voice neutral.
It was obvious they were intrigued with my samples, and I certainly didn’t want to be deceptive. “I saw the recruitment guidelines during my Denver interview,” I admitted. “So, I figured part of this job might involve, well, reproducing foreign writing.”
Both men offered cautious smiles. Was I being resourceful or too clever? Maybe both were attributes the Agency desired, I silently hoped.
“That explains it,” Franco said, stacking the pages neatly in a folder. “Not many artists send in Chinese grass writing or a watercolor of a Bulgarian postage stamp. We wondered if you were particularly insightful or some kind of a con man.”
Franco was a large, jolly man with a few surviving wisps of hair. Now his smile was genuine. “It appears you’re aware of what we do here.”
“I read that you call it authentication and validation,” I offered, referring to a book I’d borrowed from the Denver library about the CIA and the Technical Services Division.
Phil, a dour no-nonsense type, nodded, impatient to cut through the pleasantries. “You understand that you will be reproducing documents, then?” His cool eyes locked on mine. “That doesn’t leave much creative latitude. Your lettering and line weight will be critiqued with a microscope.”
In other words, a major part of my job would be duplicating official documents of foreign governments, ranging from ration books to letterheads to military identity cards. If I did that type of work on American soil with U.S. documents, I’d be in line for a ten-or twenty-year vacation in Leavenworth. I sensed that Phil was probing to see if I had the stomach for intelligence work in general; he was also testing my ability to surrender artistic freedom and succumb to the drudgery of providing the forged documents needed to sustain the Agency’s clandestine operations. I remembered the oft-quoted phrase of former Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, who was reputed to have said, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” when he effectively shut down American intelligence operations in 1929.
Things had changed. The Cold War was entering its twentieth year. Not only was I willing to read the mail of any Soviet gentleman I might encounter, I was eager to take a crack at forging some, if it furthered my country’s interest. “I understand creative problem solving, which is what I think you’re doing here,” I told Phil. “The mechanical processes involved are incidental. The real creativity is in the planning and management.”
That particular kernel of wisdom had come from one of the bullpen artists back at Martin Marietta, who had been studying for a management degree.
“Well, all right, then,” Phil said, nodding to indicate he’d made his point. “I just don’t want us to have any misunderstanding.”
I knew I had passed the first hurdle.
The next appointment on my sheet was with a fellow named Glenn who headed a new TSD program bearing the acronym TOPS (Technical Operations Officer Generalist). He explained that the Agency’s technical operations had always been a vital part of our espionage efforts, dating to the CIA’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). But, at its inception in 1942, the “Oh, So Social” had in fact drawn a lot of its officers from the prep school-Ivy League network, while their sergeant radio operators, interpreters, and demolition men had often been patriotic blue-collar draftees. Since the Agency had originated in 1947 at the start of the Cold War, Glenn assured me, any sense of class difference between case officers and the TSD had disappeared.
I would soon learn more about the TOPS program, which assigned certain qualified TSD officers overseas to work side-by-side with their case officer colleagues. For example, a case officer might be skilled or lucky enough to recruit an agent willing to plant a listening device in the desk drawer of a sensitive department of a foreign government. Building the device and training the agent in its use were the TSD officer’s jobs. TOPS officers could handle most urgent jobs, but they knew when to ask for help.
“I see you’re working on spacecraft electronics, have practical experience in construction, and have even run your own fabrication and design business,” he said, checking off items on my sixteen-page application. “There might be a TOPS assignment for you in a few years.” I later realized that Glenn was assessing my potential for what was known as a more exciting “singleton” assignment overseas—the forward deployment of tech ops (technical operations) officers as TSD firemen. They were expected to fly in on short notice and provide the technical support that case officers might need in a fast-breaking operation, perhaps in a remote area.
That was good news because I didn’t relish the idea of spending my entire career hunched over a drafting board, forging military train passes for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. I also wanted to see such documents actually being used.
After lunch I met with Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, the Deputy Chief of TSD. As I entered his high-ceilinged office, I couldn’t help thinking of the apochryphal Q in the James Bond sagas. A huge framed replica of Goya’s The Nude Maja hung on the wall behind him; on his desk was a tiny plaque reading THINK BIG. Gottlieb looked more like a tanned, athletic college professor than someone who worked in a basement laboratory, dreaming up smoke-screen dispensers for gleaming sports cars, or cunning devices used to eavesdrop on telephone lines without leaving a physical trace. Little did I know…
Hardly stuffy, he sat with me in front of his desk with his shirt sleeves rolled up. I was conscious of his careful grooming and deliberately casual manner. “I like to meet with everyone who’s being considered for employment with TSD,” he said. After asking about my family, he looked at me thoughtfully and paused for a moment. “How would you feel about telling a lie for the good of your country?” he asked. There was a probing intensity to his question. I resisted the urge, natural in a young man with his foot in the professional world for the first time, to give a glib answer. “A lie can be a deceitful way to hurt people,” I finally said. “Or it can be a necessary form of deception in time of war. I think we’re engaged in a war, and both sides are using deception.”
I sensed that my answer met his demanding criteria.
At the end of my interviews in the West Out Building, Manny Fontana, TSD’s chief of personnel, wrote out a brief note on an Agency form. “Report back to Headquarters tomorrow morning for a polygraph and a full physical,” he said. I suppressed the urge to grin, having survived the first row of hurdles. Manny added that if I successfully passed the physical and polygraph, I’d be offered a position in the TSD Art Department at the level of GS-9/1 for the princely salary of $8,672 per annum. But, he cautioned, the offer was contingent on a background investigation, which would take a few more months to complete.
It was mid-afternoon when I walked out of the old brick building and onto the sunny grass of the Mall. Now I could smile and hoot in delight—I was elated. The wider world of daring exploits that I had dreamed of as a kid those nights in Caliente, listening to the scratchy voices of London and Cape Town on my beat-up old radio, seemed to lie open at my feet. I spent the rest of the afternoon at the National Gallery of Art, awed to be in the presence of Rembrandt, Titian, and Picasso.
THE ROOM WAS small, quiet, and softly lit. I could have been in the empty waiting room of a heart specialist. Instead, I was sitting in a comfortable blue recliner in one of the Agency’s polygraph suites on the second floor of Headquarters. I tried to relax and breathe normally, but I was conscious of the elastic respiration band across my chest and the wired pads clipped to my fingertips. Worst of all, the inflated blood pressure cuff clamping my left biceps was so painfully tight that my arm was going numb down to my fingertips.
“Is your name Antonio Joseph Mendez?” The middle-aged man sat at the small table close to the left arm of my chair, concentrating on the machine before him. A paper scrolled from a spool in the polygraph, its surface a network of smooth wave lines from the sensor scribes. The man’s voice was soft and kind but carried a sense of purpose.
“Yes,” I answered, thinking, What a bizarre question. Then I realized I could have been there under false pretense. What better way for a foreign intelligence service to penetrate the CIA than to have one of its own people assume the identity of an American who contrived to have himself hired? In addition, answering such a straightforward question was probably designed to establish a baseline of truthfulness, a hunch that was confirmed when the polygraph operator asked me to verify my address in Colorado and my place of employment.
In the same cordial tone, he shifted his approach. “Are you working for any organization hostile to the United States?”
“No.”
“Have you ever told a lie?” His voice was completely devoid of confrontation.
Obviously I had. “Yes.” The man didn’t even look up from his chart.
“Have you ever divulged a confidence?”
Yes, who hasn’t? But I answered, “No.” After a moment’s reflection, I changed my mind. “Yes.”
“Have you ever divulged a confidence?” he repeated, ticking a corner of the scroll with a colored pencil.
“Yes.” These last two questions, I saw, were also probably intended to assess how a lie might register. Only a saint could answer “no” with a straight face, and the way I replied probably gave him a good indication of how one of my true, positive responses registered on the sensors that day.
Over the next twenty years, I would be regularly “boxed,” as were all employees of the CIA, and I would come to learn why polygraph evidence is not admissible in a court of law. The “box,” in the hands of a skilled polygrapher, could at best detect patterns of deception, not consistently distinguish individual lies from truthful statements. But as a screening device for recruits, both American officers and foreign agents, a well-run polygraph exam probably remains the best technique available to unearth deceit, some notable failures notwithstanding.
“…and what were you thinking when I asked if there was anything else you wanted to tell me?”
I chuckled, in spite of the painful grip of the blood pressure cuff. “I was thinking about the TV show The Fugitive. I’m not sure why, it just popped into my head.”
Five minutes earlier, he had asked me if I’d ever stolen anything, and I’d admitted stealing a bale of hay from a barn when I’d been a kid. This, he proclaimed, was “of no consequence.”
Now he switched to another tack. “Have you ever used any illegal or controlled substance?”
In 1965, where I came from, this could mean only one thing—marijuana. “No.”
“Have you ever been involved in sexual activity that might be used against you for blackmail or coercion?”
“No.” The chart purred softly off the machine.
“Criminal activity?”
“No.” I thought of my minor scrapes with the law as a kid in Denver. I even remembered peddling day-old newspapers on the Union Pacific. But apparently, my answer had been satisfactory.
He bent over to remove the cuff and the galvanic skin-response pads from my fingertips. “Now,” he said, with a kind smile, “is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
“Yes,” I answered, rubbing my numb arm. “I’ve heard that if someone takes certain drugs they can beat your machine. Is there any truth to that?”
The polygrapher pursed his lips, then smiled, probably trying to decide if I was just a youthful go-getter or someone salting away potentially valuable information for the future. “No,” he said emphatically. “That’s simply not true. If you take drugs before the test, the machine will register abnormal bodily responses rendering the test invalid.”
I found myself irresistibly drawn to spy lore, which was infinitely more satisfying than the James Bond concoctions then available to the public. “And what about a report I read that said the Communists have a special school in Czechoslovakia for their agents on how to beat the polygraph?” I persisted.
In retrospect, it was incredibly presumptuous for a twenty-five-year-old TSD recruit to ask these questions. I hadn’t even signed my secrecy agreement yet.
Still, the polygrapher was friendly and professional. “They might have,” he allowed. “But we’re fairly confident of our ability to detect any attempt at deception. It really is a matter of the examiner’s skill, not just the technology of the machine.”
Leaving the polygraph suite that morning, I had the feeling that this particular examiner would have been hard to deceive, and after a rigorous physical exam, I concluded that everybody I dealt with at the Agency had been thoughtful and professional.
Before heading home to Denver, I met with a CIA security officer, who briefed me on final procedures. “What have you told your family and friends about your interviews here?” he asked.
“I told them I was going to interview with the CIA,” I answered.
He briefly considered this information. So far, there was no security problem: Thousands of people, including many of the brown-baggers on the commuter buses, openly worked for the CIA, assigned to logistics or administrative jobs, or to the Directorate of Intelligence, which analyzed the daily avalanche of information arriving from open and clandestine sources worldwide. The Technical Services Division of that time was part of the thinly disguised Directorate of Plans (later named the Directorate of Operations) and generally called the Clandestine Service. People working for this Directorate did not acknowledge their affiliation, but I was not yet sworn in. “It’s fine for your immediate family to know you’ve had these interviews,” the security officer said. “But you should tell anybody else that you didn’t take the job offer from the CIA. Explain that you interviewed with other U.S. government departments while you were here and will probably accept a job offer with one of them if it comes through. We’ll let you know which department.”
THE POTOMAC RIVER ran seven miles from Chain Bridge near CIA Headquarters at Langley, through the limestone palisades separating Georgetown from Arlington, and under the bridge named for Teddy Roosevelt. Near the base of the bridge on the District side, the bluff rose again to encompass a small campus of unremarkable neoclassic limestone and brick buildings set in a quadrangle, the east side of which was the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine compound on 23rd Street NW, fronting the State Department. In October 1965, the west side of this complex hung over a sheer drop down to an enormous, teeming construction site spanning a thousand yards along the Potomac, the future John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
When I arrived in the quadrangle on a crisp fall morning, I stood for a moment quietly taking in the buildings. They had been the Headquarters of the OSS during World War II, taken over from the National Institutes of Health. To a fledgling spy, the OSS was legendary. The service combined both intelligence-gathering functions with covert action teams operating behind German and Japanese lines. The term “cloak and dagger” originated in nineteenth century Europe. It came into common usage in wartime propaganda films and press accounts describing OSS exploits.
Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the OSS commander, was one such heroic figure. Awarded the Medal of Honor for World War I valor, Donovan built his wartime service into a global network, operating from bases in Britain, the Mediterranean, and South and Southeast Asia. He’d been a man of remarkable energy and innovation, attracting thousands of brave young Americans to his exotic unit. Beyond the Ivy Leaguers, there had been young infantry officers such as Bill Colby, who led a JEDBURGH team into Nazi-occupied France to rally resistance units after the Normandy invasion, and who later became Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in 1973. Hollywood actor Sterling Hayden had run his own small squadron of armed fishing boats across the Adriatic to support Yugoslav irregulars pinning down several German divisions. Julia Child, who later taught America how to master the art of French cooking, served in the OSS in China. Popular lore also suggested that the OSS talent pool had included professional counterfeiters, con men, and safecrackers.
For me, the OSS represented initiative and bravery. Its operatives had engaged in daring acts of sabotage, subversion, and tactical deception against the Axis powers. Some had survived months behind Nazi lines, tracked by the Gestapo, living on their wits, audacity, and meticulous sets of personal effects and false documents contrived by the OSS predecessor-components of the TSD. Indeed, much of the structure, operational methods, and procedures of the CIA, created in September 1947, had evolved directly from the OSS.
It was a proud heritage. Years later, I discovered a photo of General Donovan in elaborate disguise, wearing a cleric’s black cape and a primitive version of one of our more sophisticated devices, and I recognized that I had become part of an honorable legacy. Even on this fall morning, at the beginning of my new career, I felt a definite sense of professional kinship to my OSS predecessors. As I was entering on duty (EOD’ing, in Agency parlance), I sensed that I was taking up the baton passed to me by a team of older warriors in the long battle against totalitarianism.
World War II had been the greatest calamity in human history. The battered survivors on all sides had welcomed the end of the bloodbath. But perceptive leaders in the West, influenced by Winston Churchill, were forced to admit that a system of tyranny equaling Nazi Germany in its dehumanizing strength existed beyond the Iron Curtain. The KGB’s predecessors, such as the notorious NKVD, did not herd people into gas chambers and kill them with Zyclon B; they packed them into cattle cars and sent them across Siberia by the millions to the frozen hell of the Kolyma mines, then worked them to death on starvation rations.
Although both Hitler and Stalin were dead by 1965, world Communism had established a terrifying record of conquest and enslavement. In the 1950s, when people in East Germany and Hungary had revolted against the puppet rulers whom the Soviets had installed following “liberation” by the Red Army, Russian troops and tanks massacred them. The Korean War had been a naked act of aggression launched at the behest of the Kremlin. Communist China, although moving away from its earlier alliance with the Soviet Union, was itself a vast, soul-crushing tyranny. East Germany was a police state that would have made SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler proud.
In fact, the Soviet overlords of “Democratic” Germany had been compelled to build the Berlin Wall in 1961—a glaring symbol of their failed system—to prevent a refugee exodus that would have depleted much of East Europe’s most promising youth. That primitive, concrete-and-barbed-wire barrier, more than any other tangible entity, came to symbolize the geopolitical fault lines of the Cold War. As long as the Wall stood, the world was divided. This struggle was not merely an economic dispute; it was a war.
As the ten terrifying days of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 had shown, the Cold War could easily have flared into an exchange of thermonuclear weapons capable of incinerating cities across the world and poisoning the biosphere for millennia. There was also clear evidence that the Soviet Union and its surrogates, including the Cubans, were intent on spreading their form of liberation throughout the vulnerable wreckage of Europe’s empires in the Third World. My generation of young adults, who came of age in the 1960s, were acutely aware of our tenuous world situation.
Was I proud to be enlisting, albeit in a seemingly minor capacity, on our side in the Cold War? You bet. Would I have preferred being a world-class painter living in New York or Paris, watching my kids grow up in a safe and peaceful world? Of course. But if I was going to become a cold warrior, I intended to be the best one I could.
The Technical Services Division front office had moved into the South Building from its site on the Mall since my initial interviews in April. Making my introductions among TSD offices that morning, I kept my eye out for any of the more exotic World War II OSS vets, but no one seemed to fulfill the swashbuckling image I had in mind. What I did find was a group of highly competent language specialists, artists, engineers, technicians, and versatile craftspeople capable of responding to bizarre requests from the field on a tight deadline. TSD also had its share of physics and chemistry Ph.D.s, as well as professional psychologists who could have thrived on any major American campus. The whole place seemed to resonate with competence and esprit de corps.
My orientation now complemented the brief introduction to this branch I’d received during my initial interviews. Many clandestine operations, I learned, drew heavily on authentication and validation capabilities, an elaborate way of describing the creation of alias identities and forged documents. TSD also “maintained” these identities through regular updates and renewals of documents, an unglamorous but vital facet of espionage.
But creating human identities was only part of TSD’s responsibility. The Division also developed several types of seagoing vessels, large and small, a diverse array of aircraft, and a few basic spy cars, equipped with secret compartments for hiding officers or agents.
Some of TSD’s most innovative mechanical inventions were probably the shipping containers equipped with automatic cameras dispatched from Hamburg to Hong Kong, via the Trans-Siberian Railway. When the thousands of clandestine photographs were developed, they revealed crucial details of the logistics system supporting Soviet nuclear weapons facilities in areas closed to foreigners.
TSD prepared other necessary spy gear, such as remote listening devices, the “bugs” of popular novels, and more sophisticated forms of “audio.” TSD specialists traveled to aid clandestine officers on agent recruiting and rescue operations by crawling into attics to install audio devices, and meeting with agents to instruct them in the use of miniature spy cameras and invisible writing techniques. TSD later assumed responsibility for making compact radio transmitters that sent encrypted messages in almost untraceable bursts.
As former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms noted in his speech at the Agency’s fiftieth anniversary ceremonies, at which I received my Trailblazer Award, there is no doubt that TSD work overseas can be hazardous. Helms cited three of the Division’s officers, who were released in 1963 from Cuba’s Isle of Pines Prison, where they had been held for two years and seven months. They had suffered repeated interrogation under torture, and survived only because the U.S. government managed to negotiate a prisoners-for-tractors exchange following the failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
One of the reasons they had lived through their ordeal was the quality of their alias documents and their ability to sustain their cover story during prolonged interrogation. These officers had been captured in Havana in 1960 while engaged in an audio penetration operation; soon after their arrest, it became clear that the new Castro government was a Communist-led Moscow proxy. Even in that notorious prison, however, the three managed to run a successful intelligence collection operation, working with the grim knowledge that they might be tortured to death (the fate of many of Castro’s prisoners) had this brazen effort been discovered.
During its first fifty years, the Agency awarded only fifteen Intelligence Crosses, its highest decoration for valor. Three went to these brave TSD officers. Former DCI Richard Helms asked one of the surviving members of this team to lay the memorial wreath for all the CIA officers lost in action over the first five decades. Three of the fifty Trailblazers honored at this ceremony were former TSD officers. I am the only Trailblazer who holds the Intelligence Star for Valor, but several of my TSD colleagues have also earned this coveted medal.
When I came on board in 1965, TSD was organized under a Chief of Operations and a Chief of Development and Engineering. Since we were the technical arm of the Agency’s Clandestine Service, we focused on assisting clandestine (that is, secret) information collection—material of interest provided by agents. CIA case officers assigned abroad work under official or nonofficial cover, as do the intelligence officers of many countries. A case officer might recruit an agent who operates alone against his government or goes on to become a principal agent, running a compartmentalized network of subagents. These agents might need technical support in the form of clandestine communications gear, spy cameras, and other specialized equipment.
Covert action propaganda printing, ranging in level of “plausible denial” by the U.S. government—from white to gray to black—was also a TSD responsibility. A white propaganda operation in the 1960s was merely promoting and packaging Western policy and culture, as with Voice of America programming. Gray propaganda might have involved writing and printing election campaign materials for a foreign political party friendly to the United States, or could have included planted news stories or editorial columns written for foreign press assets cooperating with the CIA.
Former veteran case officer Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge has written about a black propaganda operation he conducted from his base in Madras, India. Clarridge used a non-Indian agent borrowed from another Asian country to convince the publisher of a local pro-Chinese Communist newspaper to run a series of increasingly virulent editorials, which eventually discredited the entire Indian Communist movement, both pro-Moscow and pro-Peking.
Black propaganda had been in use for decades by the time I joined the CIA. Soviet overseas intelligence officers, dating back to the KGB’s predecessors, were experts at this nasty business. During the social and economic turmoil of the 1930s, the NKVD ruthlessly spread rumors of government corruption, backed up by forged documents, designed to inflame class divisions in Western Europe. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets considered “disinformation” one of their important strategic weapons.
Equally cunning, American intelligence during the Cold War found it useful to encourage similar unrest among the workers at an arms plant in a Soviet-occupied country by circulating well-forged, ostensibly confidential official documents calling for an increase in labor quotas and a decrease in food rations. TSD/Graphics was especially adept at black propaganda operational support that made good use of our forgery capabilities.
Was this an “honorable” undertaking? In my opinion, it was justified. Our opposition practically owned the extreme left labor movement in a number of NATO countries and resorted to the same techniques. The KGB and its controlled intelligence services at the time were also actively engaged in “wet” operations—the assassination of political opponents in Eastern Europe and defectors who had sought asylum abroad.
I joined the ranks of TSD in an atmosphere of continual crisis. The watchwords were “Operations first,” and “Can-do,” meaning that the small TSD staff often had to respond with intense urgency to address breaking situations in the field. When an IMMEDIATE NIACT (“Night Action”) cable requesting alias documentation for a fast-breaking operation hit DIRTECH (TSD) from an overseas station or base, people from Authentication and Graphics were often called in to work all night. In addition, we had to maintain over fifteen thousand alias identities at any one time.
That first day on duty, I was taken to the Art Department in a second-floor corner suite overlooking the courtyard and the Kennedy Center construction site below. There were about a dozen artists with various specialties crowded into a single bullpen. Franco, the Art Chief, and his deputy, “Rick,” had small offices off the bullpen. We were located in only one section of the Graphics Branch, which occupied two of the Central Building’s three floors.
Franco completed my introductions around the Branch. The offices on the first floor once housed the Institutes of Health’s research animals and were known as the Zoo because some of the rooms still had cage doors. These rooms now held printing presses of all descriptions, a bindery, storage with climate controls for specialized paper, and alcoves for offset and letterpress platemaking. The process photo darkrooms, ink and textile labs, and the remainder of the World War II steel-plate engraving and die-sinking operations were spread haphazardly around the second floor.
During that war, printing near-perfect replicas of foreign documents—and enemy currency—had been a major part of the OSS graphics operation. Of the talented people who worked here, OSS legend Allen Dulles would later declare proudly, “Any intelligence service worth its salt should be able to make the other fellow’s currency.” That attitude was certainly a big stretch from Secretary Stimson’s disgust at the idea of reading another gentleman’s mail.
By the end of World War II, the OSS banknote engravers had completed the reichsmark and were almost finished with the Japanese imperial yen, which would have been used to debase the Japanese currency prior to the scheduled invasion in November 1945, had the atomic bomb not ended the war. But we could not counterfeit Soviet currency: Counterfeiting another country’s money was officially an act of war, and the Cold War was not a declared conflict. In any event, by 1965, most of the world’s currencies, including those of the Soviet bloc, were based on dollar reserves, so undercutting their value made no sense. Consequently, the two engravers remaining from those wartime days worked on specialized foreign identity documents, and occasionally designed and engraved the CIA’s special citations and certificates for both officers and valorous foreign agents. In contrast to the artists, they had a huge workshop dominated by a massive, unused transfer press rivaling a steam locomotive in size, which had been used in making currency.
Because so many of the people in Graphics had been around since the war, they had seen thousands of interesting jobs flow through the shop. They had helped document hundreds of Allied agents and even anti-Nazi turnaround German POW agents, whom the OSS had parachuted behind enemy lines to locate buzz bomb and V-2 missile launch sites. During the Korean War, the Graphics shop had produced reams of bogus Red Chinese Army field orders in a covert action printing operation. Courageous agents working under American control managed to insert these documents into the Communist command system.
Each person in Graphics was expected to be a master artist in some specialty. In fact, many were bona fide eccentrics. Several had served overseas, and there was always a lot of talk on the floor about life abroad. Banter about traveling on the SS United States to Naples or attending Oktoberfest in Munich made the atmosphere in the bullpen very heady. The old hands would draw us new recruits aside and whisper, “The inequities of the job are more than made up for by the boat trips.”
As I dived into my work, I became keenly interested in the operational purpose and goals of each project. I quickly discovered that this kind of curiosity was unusual among some of my colleagues, who were accustomed to producing a “job” skillfully on a very tight deadline and had little interest in precisely how the documents they were so artfully replicating would ultimately be used. Such details might have been too disquieting to hear.
Certain Graphics people did not always mesh with their TSD colleagues. Although I had been hired as a GS-9, others in the Art Department worked on “wage board” standards and had their pay raised when the unions at the Government Printing Office got theirs. This gave some of the employees a slight blue-collar attitude. In fact, my being hired on the professional GS scale was an attempt by TSD managers to undercut the union mentality among the photographers and pressmen of the Central Building. Certainly Ian Fleming never wrote about such pedestrian concerns, and neither did the more sophisticated John Le Carré. However, this was the gritty reality of American intelligence.
As it turned out, there was no way management was going to convert the pressroom workers to the Civil Service scale. Working under wage-board guidelines, some members of the Graphics Branch already made more than the Chief of TSD, who was a supergrade GS-18. This was because the wage-board system paid generous overtime, including double-time for weekend jobs. Civil Service employees had much more stringent overtime provisions.
After the standard orientation courses for new employees, I volunteered for area studies classes and strategic seminars in order to widen my perspective. In these courses, I became acquainted with people throughout the Agency, including the CI (Counterintelligence) staff, headed by James Jesus Angleton, the legendary “Gray Ghost.” Angleton had been badly burned by the treachery of the Soviet’s British agent Kim Philby and was obsessed with the idea that the CIA had been penetrated by a highly placed Soviet “mole.” Unfortunately, his theories were so convoluted, and his methods so Byzantine, that he was forced to resign in 1974. Besides the occasional oddball, however, I found members of the CI staff relatively free from paranoia.
The nuts and bolts of CI training was fascinating. We were shown photographs and diagrams of captured Soviet bloc listening devices embedded in a diplomat’s shoe, in the spine of a book presented to an American officer overseas, and even in the Great Seal of the United States, which the Soviets had offered as a “good will” gesture to our ambassador in Moscow. I came away from these classes with the knowledge that the shadow battles on the Cold War’s espionage front would be fought relentlessly, with great cunning, for years to come.
With this in mind, I tried to absorb as much as possible about the actual impact of the Graphics operation. I learned that our products had to withstand the severe scrutiny of hostile services that had been at this business longer than we had. Much of what we produced was agent and officer documentation, which went beyond simple identity cards to include entire families of documents—birth certificates, school records, military service dossiers, the full gamut of paper needed to authenticate an alias identity, or “legend.” Early in my Graphics assignment, I discovered that the paramount challenge facing us with respect to documentation was embodied in the question: “How good is good enough?” The best way to answer that question was with another: “Would I use it myself in hostile territory?”
By the 1960s, the Agency had learned the painful lesson that running agents behind the Iron Curtain was a lot more difficult than working with resistance groups in the Nazis’ Fortress Europe in World War II. Unlike the OSS, we could not parachute an agent into Hungary, Poland, or Rumania to be supported by a sympathetic and effective underground. That sad lesson was again learned with the Bay of Pigs disaster. An armed and organized resistance simply didn’t exist in Soviet bloc democratic republics as it had in countries under Nazi occupation.
On many early cross-border operations into the Soviet bloc, agents were “rolled up”—seized and perhaps never heard from again—or “doubled back”—taken under Soviet control—or simply disappeared, never having intended to spy for the West in the first place. The extreme security systems of the Communist governments (the East German Stasi being the most notorious example), coupled with decades of indoctrination, made entire populations suspicious and willing to spy on neighbors or coworkers for the collective good. Although the fascist governments had never been able to penetrate the fabric of the societies they occupied, the Soviets, working with security services such as the Stasi, virtually controlled the societies of their satellite empire for decades.
This made running intelligence operations in those countries extremely difficult and hazardous. We now know, for example, that the Stasi operated vast networks of informants, many of them reporting on one another, often family members, even husbands and wives. Under Soviet guidance, the Stasi trained “fraternal” intelligence organizations, such as Cuba’s DGI. During my career, the Stasi and the DGI were responsible for some of the most successful double-agent operations run against Western intelligence. We learned a lot more about those relationships after the fall of Communism.
The first decades of the Cold War taught the Agency in general, and TSD in particular, some harsh lessons about cross-border operations. We had been able to reproduce sophisticated and complex materials such as international travel documents and internal identity papers. Only rarely, however, could we “backstop” them by having trustworthy agents in place in the issuing offices to plant the file supporting the false items. This meant that if one of our agents was apprehended because of his flawed demeanor—or Murphy’s Law—his or her false documents could be exposed within hours. Therefore, we had to find out much more about the minute practical details that legal travelers to those countries faced in order to move freely without undue suspicion. For example, did a Latvian soldier in the Soviet Army need special military and civilian papers to ride a train to visit his “aunt” in the Russian Republic?
Our tradecraft was slowly evolving to become more adept at building neutral, “third-country” cover legends and aliases that were more innocuous and difficult to detect, even without backstopping. This level of spycraft requires years of patient preparation and had long been used by sophisticated services such as the KGB in their “illegals” (spies with nonofficial cover) program, which infiltrated hundreds of bogus “refugees” from Europe and South Africa after World War II. But the Agency was still mastering the “neutral” alias approach when I came on board.
I absorbed much of this lore from both training courses and colleagues. What I found especially fascinating was the combination of intricate sophistication and massive deployment of manpower that the KGB expended on the espionage front. Beginning with the Cheka in the early days of the Revolution, and which was well established in Britain by the 1920s, the Soviets steadily deployed spy networks throughout the West. Their recruits had penetrated the British intelligence services before World War II, had several key agents recruited in the OSS hierarchy and, as we now know, had crucial spies in the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the atom bomb. Their networks were run by known KGB officers operating out of their residenturas under diplomatic cover, and by an unknown number of illegals, such as Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, who operated under deep cover without diplomatic immunity.
In 1946, Abel had made his way to Canada, documented as a German refugee, then simply slipped across the border into the United States. Living in New York under the alias Emil R. Goldfus, he controlled a large KGB agent network that stretched from Canada to Panama. He was discovered only when a drunken subordinate defected to the West and he was traced to an artist’s studio rented in his “real” (i.e., alias) name—a major breech of tradecraft. Today, knowing so much more about the KGB’s practice of redundancy, we can only speculate how many other Colonel Abels there were who didn’t make such blatant errors.
As I settled down to my work in the Technical Services Division, I experienced a growing sense that, like the agents and their case officers working overseas, I had left the world of normalcy and entered a domain of shadows.