[As our] spies we must recruit men who are intelligent but appear stupid; who seem to be dull but are strong in heart; men who are agile, vigorous, hardy and brave; well versed in lowly matters and able to endure hunger, cold, filth, and humiliation.
—Sun Tzu
Technical Services Division, 1965-66
• My first practical assignments in TSD Graphics Branch required producing the elements of personal alias documents. These projects went far beyond simply replicating official papers. I learned to work with linguists and area specialists who had studied foreign travel and security controls, often through debriefings of third-country bridge agents (CIA agents building a “bridge” into the target country), and were now much better equipped to design the “families of documents” our case officers needed to operate around the world.
It was tense work. We never knew for sure if we had identified all the security traps a foreign government had hidden in its travel papers or identity cards. This uncertainty caused anxiety among some Graphics people, who worried that agents using our documents might be rolled up. For some, the anxiety never eased, especially when agents entered East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Our counterparts in their security services were always inventing more elusive features and traps, so their documents were becoming increasingly more sophisticated.
Since two of the traditional agent entry routes into Eastern Europe passed through East Germany and Czechoslovakia, it was no coincidence that their immigration control procedures and inspectors were among the most highly skilled and disciplined in the Soviet bloc. Usually, however, Western intelligence could work around this problem by entering or exiting Eastern Europe through softer avenues of approach, such as Hungary or Poland. Once behind the Iron Curtain, a handler might meet an agent traveling east for a rendezvous, rather than west, and thus arouse less suspicion.
But to support such operations, TSD had to constantly collect, analyze, and probe immigration and internal security documents, as well as the procedures governing their use, to develop effective “recipes” to penetrate these controls. Personal identity documents demanded special research and attention to detail, as I discovered on my earliest tasks as a TSD graphic artist. For example, a simple reproduction of an East German border-crossing cachet (typically, a rubber stamp) had to be regarded as a sophisticated security instrument. I remember well when Franco presented me with a stack of travel documents all bearing the immigration cachets of East German railroad immigration police who had inspected travelers from Budapest to Berlin.
“Study them carefully,” he said. “Then tell me what you’ve found.”
Under high magnification, I discovered that the Roman numeral V and the Arabic numerals 7 and 3 each had miniscule flaws, as if the ink had not adhered to the passport. In one or two cachets made on the same day, this was understandable. But these samples from case officers’ and agents’ travel documents accumulated over two years revealed subtle but extremely effective security controls in these impressions. If we tried to replicate this cachet without the intentional flaw, anyone using it in an alias document was likely to be rolled up.
That was just the rudimentary end of the security document business. TSD artists took extreme care in identifying the type fonts used on genuine documents to determine exactly which foundry had produced a particular typeface. The subjective quality of a rubber stamp or printed impression was equally important. Rubber stamps were often pounded, especially by Communist bureaucrats, and the stamps became worn. The riskiest thing we could have done to an agent would be to issue him documents bearing stamp impressions that were too crisp. When we actually applied these cachets, we went to great lengths to get the right look, repeatedly inking the stamp in a rhythmic motion to imitate the pressure that a busy immigration inspector would have used. Composing a page in a travel document with several forged “chops” stamped at slightly different angles—some fainter, some bolder—resembled the act of painting.
Whenever I worked on an immigration cachet, senior artists constantly checked my progress, patiently advising on the right pressure to apply with my fine-tipped crow-quill pen as I stippled ink onto the photo master page, which would be rephotographed and reduced to size. Rick or Franco always carefully inspected my work before sending it down for photo/plate processing. Only after I mastered the cachet jobs was I allowed to handle a “repro” of a secondary document, such as a national ID card or a military driver’s permit. These assignments were more sophisticated and required closer scrutiny and deeper knowledge of the printing process involved so that I could “pick the fly shit out of the pepper.” Fulfilling these demands was not fun. The exacting work entailed neck-wrenching hours bent over the drawing board, gazing through a powerful industrial magnifying lens and wielding a variety of sharp tools with surgical precision.
In spite of the agonizing strain, I have never regretted that apprenticeship in the Graphics bullpen. It taught me that real-world intelligence is not a game, but a highly demanding trade with a terrible price in the event of failure—a human life.
When the shop was assigned a major document reproduction job, the whole team rallied to the effort, with the most senior artists drawing the toughest tasks. But even junior artists like me had to shoulder unusual responsibility and exercise astute judgment, because mistakes made early in the process were often expensive and time-consuming to repair if discovered later.
Harrowing in a different way were the rushed passport issuance or validation jobs. For example, a case officer in the Far East might receive word of a diplomat of intelligence value wishing to defect, which would require a complete set of alias documents for the man and his family, to be hand delivered within a few hours. If I, the artist reproducing and applying the forged document entries under this deadline, made a serious error, it could cost the life of the defector. Later, I applied lessons learned in my years at the Central Building during overseas operations in which the subjects were agents or defectors under hostile pursuit—people who would have been imprisoned or executed if captured.
I have to admit that I was absolutely engrossed by this work. It was not just the technical challenges, but the full scope of clandestine operations that intoxicated me. I was confident that I could master quickly the skills required in the overseas program, but realized I was woefully low in the pecking order for a coveted assignment abroad. I decided to demonstrate my capacity to work hard and tackle mundane jobs while seizing every opportunity I could to contribute to the most demanding projects.
Soon after I came on board, I began carpooling from the Virginia suburb of Falls Church with “Wilhelm,” one of the most talented artists in the bullpen, and managed to absorb a great deal of the subtle intricacies of our craft directly from this veteran. Wilhelm, his wife, Nancy, and their children lived near Karen and me, so this older couple became our unofficial mentors. This cooperative atmosphere was typical of the Agency, which remains a very collegial business. I have heard that other government departments are notorious for backstabbing and careerism among officers scrambling over each other’s backs like Maryland blue crabs in a basket. My perception of the culture of the Agency, however, was similar to the camaraderie encountered in elite military units.
I quickly developed the habit of eating lunch at my drawing board, which, I noted, was also Wilhelm’s custom. Sometimes during lunch hour, a hot job requiring immediate attention would be brought in. Perhaps a courier was leaving that afternoon, and a TSD authentication officer in the field needed one more piece of agent documentation to complete the legend or even assist in an exfiltration under hostile conditions. On these jobs, I worked with Wilhelm or one of the other experienced artists, which was both exciting and very instructive.
Roy and Doris, artists who had been in Graphics the longest, told me colorful stories of their early years in TSD, when the Agency had been smaller and the workload less pressing. In those good old days, some of the European-educated artists would bring in their violins, clarinets, and oboes and entertain the second floor with chamber music. Other artists had set up their easels and worked on abstract paintings or landscapes, rather than on the mundane but exacting tasks of espionage graphics.
I can attest that all had changed by the time I arrived. We had to account for every hour of our working day with a personal job chart. Rick, the deputy chief, picked up “the hours” each afternoon and entered them in a ledger. While others chafed under this sweatshop approach to production, I found it challenging to see how many jobs I could complete as quickly as possible. In a way, I felt as if I was in Denver, hustling for myself to make ends meet.
One of Rick’s habits rubbed me the wrong way. He always arrived earlier than everyone else and inspected their work in progress, often marking perceived errors in the art work with small blue arrows, thus forcing the artist to begin all over again. Rick, I soon learned, had a mean-little-kid streak, and reminded me of the journeymen plumbers for whom I had once worked—grown men with little sympathy for the new kid on the block. They would send me to the truck on a wild scavenger hunt to find the “left-handed pipe wrench” or the “glass stretcher.”
Then there were the pressmen and photoengravers who clung stubbornly to their crafts’ union pride and were eager to put an apprentice artist like me to the test. One afternoon, I entered the pressroom and found Ralph mixing a large batch of ink on a slab of polished limestone, an art that dates back to Medieval Europe.
“Ink gets hot when you mix it like this,” he muttered. “C’mere and feel it.”
When I took the bait and held my hand over the ink, Ralph grabbed my forearm and pressed my palm into the gooey mess. “Feels hot, don’t it?” he said with a laugh, tossing me a rag.
Tricks like these were all part of the initiation process. If I could put up with this type of prank, I knew I could handle more stressful situations.
UNLIKE OTHER GOVERNMENT departments, there were no guarantees of advancement in the CIA. Promotion to a higher grade was not based on time in service but on competitive evaluation. We all worked at the “pleasure” of the Director of Central Intelligence and could have been fired without protracted Civil Service appeals. But I also realized I could advance at my own pace if I showed initiative and rapidly improving skills, keeping an unwavering eye focused on an overseas assignment as an artist.
But my time in the Graphics bullpen was not all drudgery. On payday, the whole crew went out for lunch to favorite haunts such as Peugeot’s on Connecticut Avenue or One-Step-Down on M Street. These restaurants were frequented by most of the Clandestine Service, not just people from TSD. You could spot the CIA people immediately; they kept their neck-chain ID cards hidden inside shirt or blouse pockets. It was possible that the KGB bloodhounds from the Soviet embassy on 16th Street also bellied up to these bars to eavesdrop two Fridays a month. But I never once heard an Agency employee even whisper a fragment of operational information in public.
I soon learned that the Agency was an army that traveled with more than one martini in its stomach. Back at the office, it was an Agency tradition to haul out a bottle of scotch from a desk drawer late on Friday afternoons and discuss the progress of the week’s work in a ceremony called “the vespers,” which dated back to OSS days. But again, I was impressed by the ability of senior artists and officers, especially those who had served overseas, to hold their liquor. In that regard, they were not unlike career military officers I would soon meet in the Far East.
The very nature of working in the Clandestine Service tended to bring not only employees but also their families together. We were not allowed to talk about our jobs to people outside the CIA, so Karen found it especially comforting to have close friends such as Wilhelm and Nancy, who had been in the Agency for years and had served overseas with their kids. Agency employees often socialized with each other, in part because many of us were working under “nominal” cover at other government departments.
My cover legend was tested during my first year in the CIA at a party thrown by a neighbor to celebrate his promotion to air force lieutenant colonel.
“So where do you work?” another guy from the block asked me.
“For the government,” I replied.
Unfortunately, that answer was always a dead give-away to the amateur spook hunters thriving in Washington. “What department?” he pressed.
I responded with my nominal government agency, but he claimed to have friends there and asked me for the exact location of my office. Frustrated, I provided the floor and room of my cover job but a sly, grin spread across his face.
“That’s the mail room,” he proclaimed. “I service the Xerox copy machines in that building.” He lowered his voice. “You work for the Company.” All that was missing from the encounter was a conspiratorial wink. After the James Bond craze, it seemed that everybody wanted to be a spy.
I managed a weak shrug and turned away. I did learn later to avoid such confrontations altogether. There is no perfect answer, but a person can become an artful user of cover—and humility is a powerful tool in the spy business.
Although the FBI ran a pretty effective counterintelligence operation, its agents could not be everywhere. It was simply safer not to advertise that someone like me was the new boy in TSD’s Graphics Branch. Our cover legends mostly served to divert the paper trail in the public record away from the Agency. Therefore, “living” a legend was not only the discipline and duty of the officer, but of his entire family as well. Once a CIA family’s cover was established, in many cases with alias names, the Central Cover Staff at Headquarters became actively involved in their personal lives. The Agency handled credit and real estate references, as well as banking queries. It even vouched for parents’ employment on their children’s college applications. Karen and I were learning to use cover effectively in the States, preparing us for overseas assignments.
After more than a year on the job, however, I started to worry that I might not make it overseas any time soon. The line for artists’ jobs at TSD bases abroad seemed to be getting longer. Finally on an afternoon in May 1966, I heard that TSD was putting together another TOPS class.
That night after dinner, I took Karen aside. “I’m going to toss my hat into the ring for the class,” I vowed.
A week later, I was in Phil’s office. “You weren’t selected for the TOPS class,” he said, with an edge to his voice. “You know the basic requirement for the program is a previous overseas assignment in your primary skill.”
“I’ll keep trying any way I can,” I said. “But if I can get overseas as an artist, that’s fine with me.”
“Artists are a dime a dozen!” he said. “We can always get another artist.”
This statement was foolish, and I challenged him. “It takes a long time to train a TSD artist, and I’m proud to be one. I’d just like to work overseas. That’s one of the reasons I joined the Agency.”
Phil was clearly annoyed by my persistence. “Well, Rick is going to the Far East this year, and next year it’s Joe’s turn. You’ll just have to hang in there.”
Rick was scheduled for his assignment as a senior artist in June, and no one was due back from Europe for a while. I was faced with a stagnation for at least two more years in the bullpen. Leaving Phil’s office, I was more determined than ever to persevere and press for as much training as I could get.
I soon found an opportunity to speak with Dr. Gottlieb, now the chief of TSD. The TOPS program was originally one of his concepts.
“How are things going over in Graphics?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. “But I did apply for TOPS training this year.”
“I know,” he said kindly, “and I hope you keep trying.”
Instead of departing like a schoolboy, I held my ground. “I’d like to get the RCA electronics course out of the way.” This was a correspondence course required of all TOPS graduates. If I could complete it in advance, I’d be ahead of the curve.
Phil was not amused when he learned that Dr. Gottlieb had ordered the course for me. But I told Franco that I needed to advance in the Agency. Trying to raise three young children on my salary wasn’t easy. Karen and I had furnished our small rented house after scouring swap shops and garage sales. Our evening “cocktail hour” meant splitting a single can of beer, and once a month on payday, we took the kids to McDonald’s. Although I had put a workshop and an art studio in the basement, we lived from check to check. The prize money I’d won from two best-of-shows at local art exhibitions had come in handy, but had quickly disappeared.
Then, during the week before Christmas of 1966, Franco called me into his office. “You’re the next artist in line for a PCS overseas.” PCS meant permanent change of station. He smiled broadly. “But you’ll have to hustle through intensive training to join Rick in the Far East next June.”
“How did this happen?” I was flabbergasted.
“You’ve been doing a great job, and management thinks you’re the best qualified. Besides, Rick requested you.”
Overseas! I had trouble containing my excitement and couldn’t wait to tell Karen. But as I entered the bullpen, I saw Joe watching me. I’d managed to surpass him not through backroom deals, but through hard work.
He smiled and offered his hand. “Congratulations. You deserve the assignment.”
“Camp Swampy,” Virginia, March 1967
• “The Farm” was a sprawling ten-thousand-acre facility of prime tidewater real estate near Williamsburg, Virginia, where I took the OPS FAM (Operations Familiarization) Course. It was the place where Agency officers headed overseas learned their tradecraft. Although shorter than the Operations Course that case officers had to pass, OPS FAM also had the intensity of elite military training. For six weeks, we would be in isolation, learning to walk in the shoes of agents and their case officers during CIA field operations. To heighten the somewhat spartan atmosphere and the serious purpose of the course, we worked in alias and wore military uniforms.
“Arthur Masters,” the man in Army fatigues behind the counter said, staring at me. It took me a second to remember that this was the alias I’d been assigned. Thirty-some students were standing in line at the uniform warehouse, where the bus had dropped us off on this first day. The supply clerk handed over a pile of highly starched khaki he’d assembled based on the size slip I had submitted.
“What size boot?” he barked.
“Nine and a half,” I replied, an octave too high. I could have been a seventeen-year-old private in Marine boot camp.
The bus took us back to the BOQ area, where we changed into our khaki uniforms and assumed an even murkier identity than our aliases. Since there was a case officer OPS course already under way, the sense of being part of a much larger clandestine effort was enhanced.
Our lectures and tradecraft demonstrations took place in Arena A and Arena B, modern brick buildings hidden by trees in this “school for spies” that stretched across several colonial farms. There were also older buildings, ranging in style from a Virginia planter’s manor house to 1930s tar paper. The instructors and staff lived in these old farmhouses, and the nicely restored older buildings were available to senior CIA officials for weekend getaways and private conferences.
The Farm had also inherited several graveyards from the previous residents. Although outsiders were not allowed into this severely restricted training base, there was special consideration made for grave visits, during which students were kept out of sight. With hunting forbidden, the Farm was overrun with deer, including some spectacular bucks, and coveys of quail shielded from the local gentry with their Purdy shotguns.
Although it has not been generally discussed, the Clandestine Service was not an Equal Opportunity Employer, even after Affirmative Action. Several of my fellow students at the Farm were women, and only a few were ethnic minorities. The CIA was still dominated by an “old boy” ethos that impeded flexibility. Later, as a manager and senior officer, I would help reverse this situation.
We weren’t marched around by drill instructors inflicting abuse, but we were expected to walk fast and toughen up in general. Unlike diplomacy, espionage is a mentally and physically demanding business. Overseas, we learned, when the diplomats were falling into bed relieved after a long evening of cocktails and dinner, the case officers, who had attended the same parties, were out on the street, heading to their meetings or sending late night cables. CIA employees could be easily identified from the cars parked at the office on weekends.
I found the tradecraft instruction even more fascinating than my training in Graphics. Somehow, over the course of only six weeks at the Farm, the instructors managed to provide detailed practical classes on writing cables and reports using manual typewriters; conducting and evading surveillance; making and placing “dead drops” (caches where material may be left for others); casing a site; debriefing a source quickly and efficiently; preparing and issuing a secret agent’s communications plan; and all the other taxing requirements involved in spotting, recruiting, and handling an agent or “asset.”
Certain classes at the Farm remain vivid in my memory even after more than thirty years. Clandestine communications is one. We were taught to use the one-time pad, an ingenious enciphering method dating back at least to World War I. As the name implies, one-time pads were meant for a single use. The ciphers were composed of thousands of blocks of digits, selected by complex mathematical formulae to ensure maximum randomness. In the 1960s, our best computers were used for this task; today, one-time pads are produced by the most advanced computers in the world.
One-time pads were printed in only two copies, one for the agent or man in the field, the other for either the case officer who issued the pad or for use at Headquarters. To encipher a message, the agent or case officer selected a page on the pad and converted the clear text into the cipher digits, which could then be transmitted in several ways, even by commercial telex or telegram in countries where that practice was permitted, or more often through clandestine means.
The person deciphering the message simply went to the precise page and line of the pad to transfer digits to letters. For even greater security, the commo network could double encipher the message from one page of the pad to another.
But the crucial security factor in this system was that the pages used were always destroyed after the enciphering and deciphering at both ends. Pads came in many sizes; some were tiny Torah-like scrolls on specially treated “flash” paper that would flare up and instantly burn at the touch of a match. Other one-time pads could be concealed within the covers of books or notepads, or as latent images on a variety of substrates or carriers. In the Agency, TSD was responsible for continually upgrading both the efficiency and the security of one-time pads.
Case officers could send their agents these enciphered messages by radio without resorting to the old open-broadcast voice codes of World War II. Standard short-wave transistor receivers, available worldwide, could be modified to receive these signals on the edges of normal broadcast bands. Naturally, the opposing security forces had equipment to intercept these messages as well, but what they recorded was gibberish.
To reply using a one-time pad, an agent could encipher his message and leave it in a one-time dead drop “mail box” serviced by the CIA on a precise schedule. Or the agent could employ secret writing techniques (some involving invisible inks) in messages mailed directly or delivered through an accommodation address or “cut-out” (an intermediary step separating sender and recipient) such as a lateral series of agents, or “live drops.”
Learning the art of street work in a hostile environment was equally intriguing. Mr. O’Brien, our instructor at the Farm, was an experienced case officer who had operated in many of the spy capitals of the world, including major Soviet bloc cities. He was the quintessential “little gray man”—short, balding, dressed in a drab business suit with a cheap tie and nondescript shoes. His raincoat and blue porkpie hat were equally unremarkable, but the cap was the only hint of color any of us ever noticed about him. He was the kind of person you might never notice in the first place, someone whom you would forget two minutes after he passed you on the street or rode with you in an elevator.
“Always assume the hostile service is omnipresent and alert,” he cautioned us. Indeed, O’Brien presented evidence that the best Soviet bloc security services and their protégés in the “nonaligned” third world devoted substantial resources to street surveillance. They often ran internal exercises, keeping their people at a high state of readiness, especially the Egyptians, Algerians, and Indians.
He taught our OPS FAM class surveillance techniques and showed us several films that illustrated the basics. Then we were allowed to reclaim our civilian clothes and were turned loose on the sunny spring streets of Richmond in a game of hide-and-seek, trying to maintain discreet surveillance on Mr. O’Brien, while he tried to both detect and evade us.
One day I was assigned to a three-student, ABC-formation surveillance exercise that attempted to follow O’Brien from the slope of the State Capitol building through the downtown streets, just as the lunch-hour crowd was spilling onto the sidewalks. We were going to play a real game of fox-and-hounds: He knew he was under student surveillance, but he hadn’t been briefed on the composition of our team.
“Little gray man” that he was, he blended in seamlessly with the crowd, wearing a beige raincoat on this warm March day of sunshine and showers. With myself as the tail man and my two teammates running point and wing, we formed an arrowhead of “pedestrians” surrounding the target, which rotated in a precise order. O’Brien’s beige raincoat and the rumpled blue cap were easy visual cues, which I tried to keep in my line of vision, along with the dark blue sportscoat of my point man, who was weaving through the crowd ahead of me, trying to maintain a safe distance from O’Brien.
He appeared to offer no real challenge to our pursuit; although moving at a comfortable pace, he was certainly not trying to outdistance us in any obvious way. In fact, he paused to buy a newspaper on one corner, then cut back across the street to duck into a Walgreen drug store and quickly buy a pack of Winstons. The point man had easily detected all these movements.
I glanced across the street at our wing person as she strolled along, a nonchalant window-shopper. So far, so good. We had followed O’Brien more than four blocks and had been told to expect his “brush pass,” a brief encounter with an agent, a half-mile from the Capitol. Only two blocks to go, I thought, feeling triumphant.
But when I looked ahead again, I no longer saw O’Brien’s blue hat bobbing in the crowd. I caught up to the point man, who now stood transfixed on the sidewalk.
“Where did he go?” the point man whispered in anguish.
“I thought he was right there ahead,” I answered, looking at our wing across the street, but she just shrugged, signaling she didn’t have a clue either. We paused in the flickering movement of the sun and shadows, fledgling bloodhounds who had lost the scent. Then I scanned the street ahead and saw O’Brien emerging from a department store. He paused briefly to put on his cap and raincoat, and strode purposefully down the street once again. Slippery rascal! We’d failed the exercise because the pass must have occurred in the crowded department store, when O’Brien and the agent had “brushed” by one another and exchanged packages, or dropped a message in each other’s pocket or shopping bag, undetected by our surveillance team.
In the critique of that exercise, O’Brien recited the exact composition of our point, wing, and tail formation, describing in detail what we wore and our blatant actions, which we had thought had been so subtle. While we had been trailing him, he had conducted his own skillful SDR (surveillance-detection run). Pausing to buy the newspaper, he’d spotted both the point man and myself freeze on the sidewalk like startled deer, then try to look nonchalant in vain, as we treaded water to maintain a safe visual distance. As he crossed the street to buy cigarettes, O’Brien had caught sight of the wing, who had automatically turned her back on the target, and watched his reflection in the window (an old gangster movie ploy). None of us had “gone with the flow” and kept up with the crowd.
With humor and patience, O’Brien explained how we should have handled the exercise. “You shouldn’t have stopped moving when I bought the paper,” he told the point man and myself. People freezing abruptly in a continuous stream of pedestrian traffic are easy to spot. “Don’t turn your back suddenly while you’re window-shopping,” he told the wing, suggesting that she should have continued walking right past the Walgreen, then positioned herself down the block. When she protested that he might have slipped out the back of the store, he smiled. “How many Walgreens do you know that let customers out the back door? That’s why exact area knowledge is vital.”
Once he was certain the surveillance team consisted of only three, he was able to shelter himself in the crowd, quickly fold his cap into his raincoat, and, in a matter of seconds, slip naturally into the department store, which was crowded and had multiple exits. But we had been so fixated on his blue cap and raincoat that we had failed to grasp a fundamental principle of surveillance: A good street professional could change color like a chameleon. “Follow the target person,” he reminded us. “Don’t focus on their superficial appearance.” This was a lesson I never forgot.
THE ROOM IN the BOQ at the Farm was lit only by a small desk lamp, and both the blinds and curtains were drawn tight. I sat waiting on the military-issue desk chair for what seemed like hours. Finally, there came a faint tapping at the door, and then a disheveled little man darted into the room.
“Can you close the door, please,” he asked in a heavy Slavic accent, casting a furtive look down the corridor. Very quietly, I latched the door and invited the man to take a seat.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
His hands were shaking as he lit a cigarette. His eyes were bloodshot, and I could smell alcohol. In just a few minutes, the pressing reality of the situation had struck me full force. “I’m the Second Secretary of the Embassy of the Republic of East Sorbornia. I am here to request political asylum.”
He leaned forward, eagerly searching my face.
The man possessed such impressive acting skills that I almost forgot my instructions for handling this type of situation. A “walk-in” defector of any value was a prize in the spy business, but sometimes these plums came on thorny branches. A provocateur could launch a propaganda scandal by claiming to have been kidnapped by the Americans, or a potentially valuable defector might become intimidated after a bungled first contact with the Agency.
“What have you got to demonstrate your bona fides?” I asked, perhaps too harshly.
He reached into his suitcoat. “I have my diplomatic identity card, and I have brought along a confidential dispatch and a cable from my embassy that might interest you.” He handed these documents over to me.
The identity document looked genuine. The diplomatic correspondence (in English for this exercise) was stamped “Most Secret,” and the text appeared very intriguing, based on my quick scan.
“Do you have any information about an impending attack on a person or place of interest to the United States government?” This was the second item on my mental checklist—the mandatory Early Warning question. After all, he might have defected because war was imminent.
He frowned. “No. I have no information about that.” If this man was lying, I thought, his performance was worthy of an Oscar. I was convinced he needed help.
“Who else knows you’re here?” I asked.
“Only my wife and son, Sasha. They are waiting for me down the street, in the café on the corner.”
“Can you go back to your embassy and remain there a while longer?”
Our lecturers had emphasized the importance of this approach. Some of the best intelligence sources in history had been volunteers who were actually able to remain “defectors in place” for years following their initial walk-in contact.
“Yes,” the man mumbled. “I think I can stay there safely for several more weeks.”
Bingo! My part in this simulation exercise had been successful, and I was relieved.
One of my most important tasks as a TSD officer overseas would be to maximize defector readiness for safe exfiltration out of our operational area. If U.S. Intelligence could keep a man in place long enough to collect valuable information, then successfully exfiltrate him and his family (perhaps after planting some audio souvenirs in his embassy), we would have earned our pay.
Exfiltrations were the most exotic application of my specialty as an espionage artist. One of the most effective ways to persuade a defector-agent in place to walk this dangerous tightrope was to assure him that there were convincing alias identities and exfiltration disguises for immediate use if necessary.
Another TSD support tool for walk-ins or an agent in place was prepackaged standard espionage tradecraft—language cards used to describe clandestine communication plans; training in dead drops; and procedures to make debriefing sessions possible at safe houses.
Perhaps the most important lesson I took away from my six weeks at the Farm was the visceral knowledge of what it was like to walk in the shoes of agents and their case officers.
The final lecture in the OPS FAM course was delivered by George Kesvalter, the Agency’s only supergrade case officer, who had earned his rank handling Soviet GRU (military intelligence) defectors-in-place, including Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky had provided some of the most valuable intelligence of the early Cold War before he fell prey to faulty tradecraft and was subsequently arrested and executed in Moscow.
Despite advances in technical intelligence, including the growing use of high altitude reconnaissance (PHOTINT) and communications intelligence (COMINT and ELINT) satellites, Kesvalter stressed that human-based collection (HUMINT) espionage remained as much an art as a science. Common sense, and the ability to analyze character quickly and decisively, were the intelligence officer’s greatest assets. Kesvalter emphasized his points through a series of captivating, sensitive accounts of successful penetration operations, in which case officers perceptively assessed their agents’ potential strengths and weaknesses and ultimately guided them to safety.
After the lecture, we followed Kesvalter to the bar in the Student Recreation Building, where he continued to regale us with anecdotes and advice. We hung on every word as he reminisced aloud, reciting chapter and verse on the pedigree and bloodlines of the “opposition,” the KGB. The notorious agency of the enemy had evolved from the MVD and its predecessors all the way back to Lenin’s first spymaster, Feliks Dzerzhinsky (“Iron Feliks”), one of the bloodiest murderers of the twentieth century.
Two days later, my OPS FAM course had its last Friday night party at this occasionally rowdy bar. Thousands of Agency officers had passed through the Farm and sweated out their training here; many had soothed their frazzled nerves with alcohol. That night, the mood was jovial and celebratory: Most of us had done well. After several rounds of toasts, we launched into a game of “Carrier Landing,” in which each competitor flung himself down the length of four tables drenched in beer. It was a messy and noisy game, but a great deal of fun.
Unfortunately, the stress of overseas Agency work sometimes led to alcohol problems. In those days, some of the old hands, who had spent years on Soviet bloc streets or in the steamy capitals of Southeast Asia, finished their careers as staff on the Farm, far removed from Headquarters. But that practice ended years ago. Today, the Farm is staffed by many of the Agency’s brightest and most innovative officers, who realize that educating promising overseas officers is one of their most important assignments ever.
South Building Laboratory, Midnight, May 24, 1967
• I held my breath as I peered through the stereomicroscope at the ragged strands of paper fibers. Hunched over the lab bench, a scalpel poised in my hand beneath a high-intensity light, I felt light beads of sweat trickle down my back. I was taking a hell of a chance as I struggled with this last group of surreptitious envelope openings. If I didn’t pass the mandatory Flaps and Seals course, my overseas tour could be delayed or even canceled. But my instructor, Lynn, had specifically told us, “No French openings. We don’t do those. Period, end of discussion.”
A French opening meant slitting the end of the envelope, then gluing the paper back together. Yet there I was using the forbidden technique. If I messed up on this task, I’d be in serious trouble.
Lee, a research chemist from the Development and Engineering side of TSD and the other student in the course, was busy across the lab with his final problem, pretending not to watch me. But he knew I was countering Lynn’s explicit orders, as I slit the bottom envelope fold and removed the contents, careful not to disturb any internal traps she might have laid for me.
I’d been able to conquer the other ten envelopes with relative ease, but I’d been told that the last five would be impossible to open “dry” with one of the tools we constructed out of wooden tongue depressors or the ivory from old piano keys. These last envelope flaps were also designed to prevent a “roll-out.” This old Russian technique, using two knitting needles (or its Chinese variant with a split chopstick) was now considered too risky for intelligence work; it was almost impossible to slip the contents back into the envelope in the exact position where a sophisticated counterintelligence censor expected to see them. But I couldn’t open the flaps either, because they were sealed with rice paste, impervious to mild heat and moisture. High heat and humidity would totally destroy the delicate Japanese paper.
I recalled leading kids into the dead-end box canyons outside Caliente to protect my precious bat guano caves, then climbing out the slippery sandstone chimneys in constant danger of a fatal fall. In the same spirit, opting for my own version of the forbidden French opening might indeed prove fatal to my career. We were supposed to just let these go, but I took a risk. I used a precise scalpel to cut through the bottom fold, reasoning that no one would expect this tactic. The typical method was to slice the much shorter side fold, which was much easier to repair.
Once I had photographed the contents of each envelope, I got down to the other step in my method—reweaving the paper fibers so the fold was completely restored and lacked a telltale glue line. This degree of hand-to-eye skill was not expected of students in the course, but Graphics artists aspired to meet these demanding standards on a daily basis. I now began using small amounts of adhesive to reconstruct the individual microscopic fibers along the cut area. This way the opening would not show even under ultraviolet light, which was used to reveal broken contrast patterns.
Looking up from the microscope, I was surprised to find Lee at my lab bench, grasping one of the restored envelopes.
“Amazing!” he said, thrusting the envelope under the bright light. “How in hell did you do that?”
Lee was taking the Flaps and Seals class to learn how to resolve some of the problems his branch faced by using enhanced technology. Lee had already seen me bring one innovation to the course by defeating the power of so-called “tamper-proof tape.” The standard method involved delicately peeling back the tape with tweezers, using tiny drops of toxic solvent and a fine brush. But such prolonged exposure to poisonous fumes did not seem healthy or practical under stressful operational conditions. Therefore, when I tackled the exercise, I brought a can of rubber cement thinner and immersed the entire envelope with the tape into a glass lab tray filled with the solvent. The tape immediately floated to the surface, and after placing the tape on a clean glass sheet, I retrieved the envelope. The solvent quickly evaporated from all the materials, leaving them unblemished. I knew from past experience that this solvent would not stain or cause any ink to bleed. The success of this experiment sent Lee to his chemistry books.
“N hexane!” Lee had declared. “Bestine rubber cement thinner is N hexane.” He had just scored a point for his branch.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” I had commented.
After completing my repair jobs, I packed up my envelopes and said good night to Lee, as he sat staring bleakly at his own remaining test envelopes on the workbench.
The next morning at nine sharp, Lynn examined the last fifteen envelopes in my course work. “Perfect,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know how you did it, but it’s a great piece of work.”
I sat back in smug silence. Now Lynn turned to Lee, bleary-eyed from his all-nighter in the lab. His first ten envelopes had only small defects, which she detected using glancing or ultraviolet light. She was following the standard routine of censors in counterintelligence services worldwide, whose job it was to verify the integrity of contents in their official pouches. In many countries, the postal services also employed security inspectors, who surreptitiously opened the suspicious mail of citizens suspected of espionage. In fact, the U.S. Postal Service had been created for that very purpose during the Civil War to serve as a central clearinghouse for mail censorship and counterintelligence against Confederate spies. During World War II, the Allies had a mail clearinghouse on the island of Bermuda. There, FBI and British MI5 counterintelligence censors, alerted by the agent Dusko Popov, first discovered German “microdot” secret writing, which contained densely packed, microscopic information. In fact, the use of earlier versions of microdots could be traced to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. As with the historic practice of prostitution, totally new inventions in the espionage profession were rare.
Lynn shook one of Lee’s final five tissue-thin envelopes, and the end fold split open. “What’s this?” she asked suspiciously as Lee blanched. Then she seized my last five envelopes and thrust her hand inside. My meticulous weaving repairs came undone like zippers, and it was now my turn to cringe. These handmade paper envelopes were controls, meant to show us that there were some letters virtually impossible to open by standard techniques. In the field, if time permitted, the envelopes could be delivered to specialized labs for further processing, but attempting a French opening had been disastrous. Worse, my “innovation” demonstrated poor operational judgment.
“You may go back to your office,” she ordered Lee. “I’ll decide later how to deal with you.”
She turned to face me with a menacing glare. “I ordered no French openings. You broke that order and are going to pay a price.”
Fortunately, that price was not too high: six nights of cleaning the Training Branch labs in the South Building and repairing all of Lynn’s equipment. One unexpected benefit of this penance was meeting with the legendary “Swift” brothers—two bachelor TSD engineers famous for their restless and inventive genius. They were pack rats of anything mechanical or electronic, truly devoted to providing the Agency with the most innovative spy gear imaginable. If anybody fulfilled the image of the Q Department “boffins” of the James Bond movies, it was the Swift boys. Although I got home late each night, the time I spent watching them at work was well worth the trouble.
Lynn kept me hanging for a week before announcing I would pass the course. It was only later that I came to understand what lay beneath her anger. I had violated a basic tenet in a profession where deception is the stock and trade: You never lie to or attempt to deceive a fellow officer in the service. Once you crossed this line, there was no going back. In what has been aptly termed a “wilderness of mirrors,” a solid foundation of trust among colleagues had to exist.
I SPENT A total of twenty-one months at Headquarters. After I won my overseas assignment, I managed to jam an enormous amount of additional graphics and operational training into a brief period of time. In effect, I compressed several years of challenging specialty instruction into about six months—an exhausting experience.
When Karen, the kids, and I reached the futuristic concrete buttresses of Dulles International Airport on a cool afternoon in June 1967, prepared to depart for the Far East, I was tired but felt ready to confront the hostile forces out in that deeply troubled region. We would be living in military-style housing at a secret Agency base on Okinawa, supporting clandestine operations over a broad area.
As friends helped unload our suitcases from the station wagon, I realized the children were still too young to grasp the implications of our new adventure. But Karen’s face bore a mixture of excitement and relief at having survived the chaos of medical exams and inoculations for the entire family, as well as the tedious routine of “packing out” and arranging our air-freight shipments, which would form the nucleus of our household until the larger surface shipment arrived. She had borne the brunt of the complicated logistics of the move; closing a house and relocating to Asia with three children under six was an enormous undertaking.
Somehow, we all managed to settle aboard the comfortable Northwest DC-8, en route for Tokyo and points south. I sensed that my family and I were entering strange, uncharted territory that would change us forever. I was right.