It is not good for the Christian health
To hustle the Asian brown
The Asian smiles, the Christian riles
It weareth the Christian down
The end of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased
And the epitaph drear “A fool lies here
That tried to hurry the East.”
—Rudyard Kipling
Southwest Asian Seaport, Early 1970s
• The first time I saw the subcontinent, I was on an urgent exfiltration case. Flying into the international airport, “David” (my fellow tech ops officer) and I had to be especially alert because we were traveling as tourists and not carrying official passports. In this region, if we were caught assisting the escape of a Soviet defector, we could go to jail.
The Air France 707 shuddered as we descended through the turbulent darkness toward the runway. I gazed out the window, expecting to see the lights of satellite towns and highways near the large seaport. After all, this was one of the most densely populated regions of the subcontinent. But besides the occasional crawling vehicle light, the landscape was pitch black.
The plane touched down and slowed. It seemed as if we were completely engulfed by the “smit,” which Jacob had warned us would be especially repulsive this season. Smit was an acrid pollutant when mixed with diesel and two-stroke jitney scooter exhaust in a sprawling city like this.
Indeed, my eyes were watering as David and I edged our way through the humidity and crowds enduring that local form of torment known as Arrival Formalities. I had grown accustomed to East Asia and Indochina, where people kept a physical distance from Europeans, if not from each other. But in this even more congested part of the world, the concept of personal space did not exist. The people here certainly thought nothing of assaulting each other with their limbs and luggage.
As we made our way across the terminal, I tried to ignore the heat, the wafted stench from the W.C.s and open sewers, and the voracious flies. As in any foreign airport, it was our job to analyze the local security controls. But we had reason to be especially vigilant here: If all went well, the operation would bring us back to this airport with the defector in a few days.
Experience had taught me that a practiced eye could ascertain the pecking order among the bureaucrats at any international border. Here, Immigration was clearly at the bottom of the heap, with Customs at the top. Security was somewhere in between, overtly represented by stern policemen in starched khaki shirts and shorts, with military puttees over their bare calves and sandaled feet. They brandished wooden batons and projected that aura of tired scorn common to police from Moscow to Sydney.
But Jacob had informed us that the uniformed ranks of the Ministry of Interior were of little concern to us. Our “real opposition,” he had cautioned, would be the plainclothes officers from Special Branch (SB), responsible for national security and counterintelligence. Several had to be in the terminal now, watching the passengers arriving from international flights, but I did not know how to spot them in the exotic mixture of saffron turbans, sweaty gray Nehru jackets, and travel-worn purple saris. This area of the subcontinent was obviously a complex human matrix, and I was filled with curiosity.
I had to remind myself that David and I were not here for cultural enrichment—we had pressing practical matters to attend to. We would be briefed at the local CIA base on the subtleties of the Special Branch before the actual exfiltration, so I wasn’t too worried.
We had valid tourist visas and diligently completed all the entry forms presented to us. Immigration did not probe for what our real purpose might be beyond the word “tourism” we both scrawled on the paperwork.
Our purgatory in the Immigration line was relatively brief compared to Customs, whose inspectors knew their jobs very well. They didn’t seem particularly concerned with Westerners, but they were obviously well-trained in spotting their own citizens who might be of particular interest. The locals were among Asia’s most notorious smugglers; here at the country’s commercial heart, the incoming and outgoing illicit flow of gold or hard currency was the main attraction. Consequently, customs inspectors meticulously examined travelers’ airline tickets and studied the immigration cachets in their passports to decide whom to question in detail, how many bags to open, and whether to subject the unfortunate soul to a secondary inspection in the airless back room.
With the local currency officially pegged at eleven to the U.S. dollar, but going for twenty to one in Hong Kong and Bangkok, smuggling their own money was quite lucrative. Large denominations of the more desirable and compact U.S. dollars were an especially handy way of conducting business in this country, where profits could be exported to overseas accounts beyond the reach of tax collectors.
While I amused myself trying to memorize the exact sequence of formalities in this sweltering mob, David was clearly on the brink of losing his self-control. He was one of the best documents men I ever worked with, but he liked his creature comforts, and there was little comfort that night in the stifling arrivals hall. Neither of us had slept much in the last day and a half. The jostling, heat, and stench were annoying to both of us, but we couldn’t leave the line; the currency form was mandatory. Although it seemed to have been printed in microscopic type on smeared newsprint, it had to be completed in multiple copies, using worn-out scraps of carbon paper. Every time we changed dollars during our stay, we had to have this form stamped by another platoon of bureaucrats. The most important aspect of this whole frustrating procedure from our point of view, however, was that Customs did, in fact, require this crucial document form to be processed both upon entry and departure from the country.
More than two hours after we arrived, David and I had completed all the formalities, only to discover we had yet another painful process to endure, Tourist Assistance. We hadn’t had time to book hotels in advance (and certainly didn’t want the local CIA base making reservations), so we had to fall into yet another line.
It was almost four A.M. when we got our hotel reservations, retrieved our bags, and left the terminal. The turbaned Sikh who ran the official taxi rank stepped up and directed us to the cab at the head of the line. I noted that the car that slid in behind it, a yellow-and-black Hindustani Ambassador, an almost comic caricature of a 1950s sedan, was driven by another Sikh. I graciously allowed three Japanese tourists behind us to take the first car, while David and I piled into the second. Call it paranoia or good tradecraft; traveling as we were, it was not wise to take the first taxi assigned to us.
If our driver was an SB agent, he lived his cover very well. Tall and lean with a splendidly waxed handlebar mustache and a full black beard tightly rolled into a chin net, he deposited our bags in the boot and made sure we were safely seated before climbing behind the steering wheel.
“Panorama Hotel!” I shouted in response to the driver’s mumbled question. He drove with wild élan, leaning on his chirping little horn and bellowing curses at other vehicles swarming in the road around us. While David tried to sleep, I watched the bizarre spectacle emerging slowly from the smit as the road raced by. Occasionally, we overtook a lumbering truck laden with gunnysacks, or an oxcart with tall wooden wheels that shrieked against the rough concrete. Except for the motor vehicles, I knew that the scene around us had not changed for centuries.
Our slow progress gave me time to contemplate the urgent nature of this exfiltration mission. It had started like so many other similar assignments, with a late-night phone call announcing that an IMMEDIATE NIACT cable had just arrived and been decoded. “Shower, shave, and pack your bag,” my Okinawa boss had said. “You and Dave are going on a trip.”
En route to the Naha airport that morning, I reflected on the IMMEDIATE that Jacob had sent. This was not just some routine exfiltration of a Polish embassy chauffeur or a boozy Czech poultry expert. Instead, a young but uniquely placed KGB First Chief Directorate (Foreign Espionage) officer, stationed at the big Soviet embassy in the diplomatic capital in the north, NESTOR, had decided to defect to the United States twelve days earlier. Working under innocent attaché cover, the man had been given relatively free access to the capital, unlike many of his colleagues who could only leave their embassy compound guarded by security officers.
NESTOR had told his associates he was going to watch a film in an air-conditioned cinema with local friends. In fact, he had been planning this fateful step for months. Making the decision to completely turn your back on your previous life, on everything and everybody you have ever known, was as comforting as stepping over a cliff and falling into oblivion. Once you had taken that first step, it was almost impossible to return, and I understood the danger of the situation into which NESTOR had willingly plunged.
Part of NESTOR’s duties as a KGB officer required that he know the identities of officers at the local CIA station. It was to one of their homes that he went that night, not to the air-conditioned cinema. The American case officer went by the book, requesting that NESTOR return to his embassy and obtain something, a document that would establish his bona fides. Once they were confirmed, the Station would give him instructions for primary and secondary contact sites elsewhere in the country where the exfiltration would begin.
NESTOR had arrived at the case officer’s house with only a national diplomatic identity card describing him as an attaché, hardly material for gearing up a crash exfiltration operation involving the CIA station, bases, and a team of TSD experts. But NESTOR was back at the case officer’s house the next night, bearing intriguing samples of Soviet cable traffic and dispatches. The American officer was convinced beyond any doubt that he had a potentially invaluable defector on his hands. Such a “walk-in” was every case officer’s dream. The American was ready, presenting NESTOR with clear instructions for primary and secondary contact sites, with multiple fallback dates and times for NESTOR to meet with TSD specialists and prepare for the actual exfiltration.
The American also realized the KGB and the Special Branch would scour the city for NESTOR when he did not appear at his embassy in the morning. The KGB was thin on the ground compared to the SB, but the national security forces could virtually saturate every public transport facility in the country in a matter of hours. The American officer offered to move NESTOR to a temporary safe house until secure travel to a contact site could be arranged.
NESTOR declined the offer. “I’ve given this a lot of thought,” he said in his fluent, American-accented English. “I’ll rendezvous with your people in ten days.” He carefully wrote down the date, time, and place in the southern port for the meeting.
Being a competent, Moscow-trained case officer in his own right, he went to ground, drawing on his own resources, a prospect he seemed to relish. Clever and confident, NESTOR could disappear into the local masses and make his way by land to the port, using a convincing native legend. Already tanned from months on his embassy’s volleyball court, and naturally small in stature, he shaved his head to complete his metamorphosis into a native. He bought a cheap bag and loose cotton clothes in the bazaar, then headed off northeast by train, in the opposite direction of his final destination. Having run several nets of local agents, he had two virgin sets of national identity papers.
The first set took him by crowded second-class railway carriage as far as the pilgrimage sites. From there, he doubled back by village buses, finally taking a night train to an industrial town, where he spent three days holed up in a cheap rooming house, living off tinned food and tea cooked over an alcohol stove. On the fourth morning, dressed in baggy white cotton shirt and trousers, he bought a ticket on the late afternoon express to the port, using his second and last set of identity documents.
These precautions had not been too elaborate, given the aggressive nature of the pursuit that the KGB and the Special Branch had mounted. When NESTOR had disappeared from the Soviet embassy, the KGB resident had pulled out the stops, flooding the airport and all the train stations with security men. By the end of that day, the SB had covered every bus station in the teeming capital. The next morning, newspapers across the nation ran stories announcing the “disappearance under mysterious circumstances” of a young Soviet attaché. Each story bore an excellent photograph of NESTOR.
Because of the security situation, all passengers leaving the country by air were instructed to reconfirm their flight in person twenty-four hours before their departure at a local travel office. If this order was disregarded, the traveler would not appear on the flight manifest and could be detained at the airport. Essentially, NESTOR’s defection had triggered one of the most intense and comprehensive security operations in the modern history of this region.
NESTOR was undaunted. When he arrived at the contact site in the port city on the appointed day and hour, he displayed the proper recognition signal—a rolled up copy of The Times in his left hand—and used the parole, or code word, “Igloo.” The case officer was taken aback by NESTOR’s appearance. The Soviet had become just one of thousands of other mixed-blood or upper-class locals, dressed in a flowing white Nehru shirt and a black lamb’s wool cap. It was easy to see how NESTOR had evaded the combined KGB and SB search for the previous ten days.
The CIA base officers immediately whisked NESTOR to a safe house south of the city. They then sent cables requesting Jacob to assemble a team and arrive “soonest” to help mount a risky but vital exfiltration operation.
During NESTOR’s initial debriefing at this safe house, it became clear what a potentially important defector he was. Although only in his thirties, he had spent most of his life in the KGB. Coming from a well-established “Chekist” family with roots far back in the Soviet security services, NESTOR was the first defector from the group that the CIA’s Soviet-East European Division had dubbed the “Junior KGB.” Under aliases, NESTOR had spent some of his teenage years as the “son” of a Soviet embassy attaché in London, and then several more years as the nephew of a GRU (military intelligence) officer in Washington, attending Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. He therefore spoke both British and American English without an accent. Back in Moscow, he attended KGB institutes, emerging with advanced degrees in Asian languages, including Hindi and Urdu. He was on his second tour at the residentura when he defected.
For the CIA, NESTOR represented a treasure trove of information. Not only could he identify the entire generation of “juniors” being trained for overseas assignments, but he could also give us a virtual “wiring diagram” of the KGB’s vast Afghan, Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani, and Burmese espionage operations. Finally, before leaving the embassy, he had collected a nice sampling of classified messages and code-pad materials that would keep the computer wizards at the National Security Agency busy for years.
Safely exfiltrating NESTOR from the tightening KGB and SB noose was a challenge worth the risk.
Unable to doze off in the back of the jolting taxi, I was once again pondering all this information as we entered the outskirts of the target city. We passed endless rows of people sleeping on rope mats scattered on the sidewalks, their cotton garments pulled up over their faces like cadavers. Others were too poor even to afford the thin mats and slept directly on the garbage-strewn streets as goats foraged around them. These chaotic streets gave way to hivelike clusters of shacks next to towering, mildewed tenements and office buildings. I had read that half the population of this city lived in the streets, but I hadn’t been prepared for the visceral reality. Each time we stopped at a traffic light, the taxi was surrounded by beggars, young and old; some were lepers with deformed faces and hands, pawing at the windows. The driver shouted at them angrily, waving a fly whisk. In my fatigue, the wretched creatures appeared like phantoms from a Kipling novel and, while I was intrigued by what I saw, I was relieved when we finally reached our hotel a little after dawn.
Maintaining our cover, David and I spent ten minutes selecting tourist brochures from the rack at the reception desk before stumbling like zombies to the elevator, looking forward to a well-deserved shower and breakfast before making our first contact call to the local CIA contingent. To the SB observers in the hotel lobby, we were just two more jet-lagged Westerners intent on absorbing as much local “culture” (including visits to high-class bordellos and casinos) as was humanly possible during a short stay.
CLEAN AND FED, but not yet rested, David and I waited in our room until exactly two minutes after nine. Then I called the local contact number, which we had both memorized from the cable.
“Is Sally in this morning?” I asked, as also specified in the cable.
“Not yet, I’m afraid,” a woman answered in a neutral accent that could have been Canadian or American.
As we left through the lobby, David and I stopped at reception again. “If the Nepalese tourist bureau calls,” I said earnestly, “please be sure to take their message. We’re hoping to do some trekking in the Himalayas.”
The efficient Eurasian jotted down some precise notes on his pad. “Without fail, sir,” he replied with Victorian formality. My intuition told me that this tidbit of information would be in the hands of Special Branch before we were a block away.
Clutching tourist maps of the city center, David and I crossed several busy streets, carefully avoiding heaps of garbage and piles of construction debris sprouting shoulder-high weeds. We edged our way through the colorful crowds, which displayed every imaginable stature and complexion, dodging Bedford trucks and orange-and-white Russian buses, all belching diesel smoke. Performing a surveillance detection run in these conditions was simple because we could rely on the ploy of losing our way in the unfamiliar streets and then doubling back.
At 9:45, we had reached the rendezvous, an inconspicuous spot in front of an electrical supply shop on a bustling street. A tan Datsun sedan, driven by a young, red-headed American in a wash-and-wear suit and narrow blue tie, pulled up to the curb and paused only long enough for us to jump in. As we turned off the street, I noticed the elegance of the pickup spot, the ideal place for a rendezvous. It was on a blind curve that could not be directly observed from either corner. Only blanket stationary surveillance posts along the entire street could have spotted us.
The driver took us for a confusing ride through a labyrinth of narrow streets, bursting with honking trucks and three-wheeled jitneys sagging under people and cargo. We crossed a wide boulevard and entered another network of lanes, where dhotis, Muslim beards and turbans, and pajamalike shalwar kamez glided by.
As we made our way toward the hot blue expanse of the sea, I grasped the true purpose of all this elaborate tradecraft. For more than ten days, the KGB/SB hornet’s nest had been stirred up by NESTOR’s disappearance. By now even the lowest-ranking SB officer had to realize a major security problem was unfolding. For senior officials in the Special Branch, NESTOR’s possible defection was a calamity: NESTOR knew where the “local bones” were buried. If the CIA managed to exfiltrate him, we would have gained extremely compromising information. Without question, the SB was as motivated as the KGB to stop us.
The red-haired driver introduced himself simply as “Mac.” From his knowledge of the local geography, I assumed he had been assigned to this area for at least a couple of years. After a fascinating tour of the old quarter, we turned onto a seafront boulevard and drove past a long line of mildewed, whitewashed apartment buildings.
“This part of the beach is famous,” Mac explained. “On weekends, and during big religious festivals, you might find three or four million people along this road.”
He added that these festivals were an ideal time to have brief encounters with assets because the staggering multitude of people shouldering their way among the snake charmers, pony rides, magicians, and food stands selling spicy dishes made surveillance nearly impossible.
Mac then briefed us on the status of the operation. NESTOR was still hidden at the safe house with Jacob and a preliminary debriefer from the Soviet-East European Division, who had flown in two days earlier. The vigilance of KGB and SB stakeouts at the international airports and border crossings had intensified in anticipation of NESTOR’s attempt to escape. SB surveillance around Western embassies and consulates had also increased. Our tentative launch date and time for NESTOR’s exfiltration was April 22 on TWA’s westbound around-the-world flight to Athens, scheduled to arrive at one A.M. and depart an hour and a half later.
That gave us three days to solidify and refine the final exfiltration ops plan, as well as create the false documents and disguise package. We would stay clear of the CIA base, working instead in a commercial cover office, where Mac and his boss, Raymond, would finalize the local end of the ops plan and handle communications. Jacob would put the finishing touches on NESTOR’s disguise at the safe house, while Mac would be the key cut-out, or liaison, between the office where David and I would work and the safe house where NESTOR was hidden. Therefore, Mac had to be particularly careful on his trips to and from the safe house, changing cars in discreet garages, using circuitous routes, and altering his profile with an array of hats and hairpieces. A simple one-way trip from the office to the safe house might take as long as three hours—an inevitable nuisance, but the price of good security in any case.
Since David and I would be involved in the airport departure phase of the exfiltration, we had to maintain our tourist cover, stay “clean,” and could not be seen again with Mac, because he might soon come under surveillance. Further, Mac explained, we had to immediately change hotels because the Panorama was frequented by East Germans and Czechs—and almost by definition, the KGB. These gentlemen would be on a high state of alert, with their antennae searching for any suspicious Americans who had just coincidentally arrived in town while NESTOR remained free. In their present state of anxiety, the KGB was hardly likely to dismiss coincidences, and we had to remind ourselves of the power of Murphy’s Law.
Only three days, I thought, trying to shake off my fatigue and plan my next steps in the operation as logically and efficiently as possible.
Mac left the seafront and turned onto a winding road that snaked upward through a densely forested hill. A stone wall on the left enclosed a lush park, but there was a foul stench in the air. Shadows crossed the windshield, and I looked up to see hundreds of vultures circling above the trees.
“This is the Parsee cemetery,” Mac said, and went on the explain that the Parsees were descendants of Persian Zoroastrians, who believed earth, water, and fire were sacred and should not be defiled with human remains. They therefore placed their dead on stone pillars in this preserve, where the vultures came to feed each day.
“Cheerful place,” David muttered, rolling up his window to shut out the repulsive breeze from beyond the wall.
This detour along this desolate road assured Mac we were not being followed. He dropped us off near the base of the hill so that we could emerge onto a busy street brandishing our tourist maps and catch a taxi to the neighborhood of the cover office. We asked the taxi driver to stop at a travel agent office, two blocks short of the address Mac had given us, where we picked up some dusty brochures about the old Himalayan hill stations. Then we strolled up the street and turned abruptly into the office building entrance, right past the chokadar gatekeeper, as if we entered this lobby every day.
The base maintained a commercial cover office in this busy building as a convenient site, for “nonofficial” contacts. The port was a regional business center, and it wasn’t unusual for foreign bankers and commercial reps to visit throughout the year. The fact that this particular block of offices stood among thirty similar buildings intensified its anonymous nature. The nearby sidewalks and lobbies were well salted with British expats, Europeans, and a fair number of Americans. Even the vigilant Special Branch and the KGB could not monitor every foreigner passing through this district.
Following Mac’s instructions, we rode a creaky old elevator to the top floor of the six-story building, three floors above our actual destination. After taking the stairs to the third-floor landing, we waited several minutes to make sure no one was watching us before we entered the cover office at the rear of the building, with a convenient escape route across the flat concrete roof of an adjoining office block. Mac introduced us to “Raymond” and “Jane,” the local case officers who had been working virtually nonstop since NESTOR arrived. Raymond, the senior, asked Jane to get on the phone immediately and find us new hotel rooms near the central city beachfront. Twenty minutes later, she came back to the rear office shaking her head.
“No good,” she said. Apparently there was an international agricultural equipment exposition in town, and wealthy farmers had come down to enjoy the beach as the heat mounted in the interior. Then, Jane remembered an old beach cottage that expat friends kept out near the Southern Paradise Resort, west of the city. She made one phone call and secured the cottage for us. We felt confident with her choice; it was unlikely that the SB would spread their net that far.
Despite the unappealing prospect of vacating a comfortable, air-conditioned hotel room in the afternoon heat, David and I sat down at a table with the case officers, braced ourselves with several cups of soothing tea, and began to flesh out the exfiltration operations plan. The initial planning lasted all day.
The next morning after a fitful, mosquito-plagued night at the beach cottage, we employed more surveillance evasion procedures on the way into town, around the office block, and up the elevator. Once safely inside with Mac and Raymond, we tackled the serious work of preparing NESTOR’s forged travel documents.
Since the case was so challenging, and failure unacceptable, we had to prepare more than one option for NESTOR while we awaited Headquarters’ final approval on our ops plan. At some point during the debate that was now raging between Headquarters and the field, everyone would agree on a primary and secondary alias identity for the subject, as well as a primary and secondary exfiltration route. We could then begin entering the “back travel” cachets in the passports NESTOR might use and “issue” some of the backup documents. But we couldn’t stamp the forged cachets into the passports indicating NESTOR’s ostensible route into the country, nor could we complete the bio-data pages, until we knew what he would look like after Jacob transformed NESTOR into his disguised alias persona.
Raymond spread a sheaf of cable traffic on the table, which indicated that the discussion between all concerned continued unabated. No one could decide exactly how this exfiltration operation should proceed, and later, after I had run a dozen of these harrowing jobs, I would come to call this state of paralysis the “committee effect.” The cause of this phenomenon was a matter of both tradecraft and trust: No experienced case officer could accept the idea of turning an untested asset, especially a very important agent or defector, loose in an airport under any circumstances. It didn’t matter that NESTOR himself had been trained by some of the world’s premier street espionage experts at the KGB’s Red Banner Institute for the First Directorate, or School 101 for spies, in Moscow.
There were factions in every operation—and this case was no exception—who believed that slipping the subject into the trunk of an official American diplomatic car and driving him out of the country “black” (a scenario in which the American spy, not the asset, would do the talking to get them out of a jam if challenged) was the most effective course of action.
“Sounds good in theory,” Raymond grumbled. “But there you stand, with the American flag draped all over you when the border police open the trunk. What happens to plausible deniability if the guy’s a KGB dangle and sings to high heaven?”
Jane poured more tea to calm us down, but she, too, seemed anxious. “If the SB even suspects NESTOR is hiding on American diplomatic property, they’d march right in and grab him, the Ambassador be damned, so they sure as hell wouldn’t think twice about opening the trunk of a sedan with U.S. dip plates.”
Their point was well taken. The KGB would turn this into a major international diplomatic and media scandal, then proceed to send even more bogus defectors against us to score more points. The case officers on the scene argued persuasively against the land route using an official car, and we then waited on the final word from Headquarters that morning.
But we were unable to ignore other black options. “I suppose the special ops types will try to sell us on a submarine or a helicopter,” Mac quipped.
I saw his point, having spent the past few years among the Agency’s paramilitary operators in Indochina. They were doing a fine job there, but in this part of the world it would be enormously amusing to the Soviet opposition and the world media if the local navy discovered a U.S. submarine run aground on the nearby shoals or an “oil company” helicopter down on the beach with engine trouble. It was therefore clear to me that the black option simply wasn’t appropriate for NESTOR’s case. But later that year, this type of solution did prove to be our salvation when a Communist Chinese diplomat, stationed in a remote South Asian country, defected to us. There were few roads in and out of the more mountainous region, so we borrowed the local USAID helicopter to fly our man to an isolated tiger-hunting camp. We provided him with a disguise and an alias there, then moved him aboard an elephant down through the rain forest and over the border, where he was met with a Land Rover and was eventually sent on to the West by quasi-legal means.
Whether the route is commercial or black, an essential goal of any exfiltration operation is to break the trail so that the opposition has no idea what happened. It is always more desirable when the escapee simply vanishes forever; besides disquieting the opposition, such a clean operation also plants the idea among the enemy that they, too, can avail themselves of our services if they wish to defect. In the case of NESTOR, if he ended up missing without a trace, there would definitely be a few heads rolling in the local KGB residentura, and retribution might extend to the SB as well.
A quasi-legal departure, effectively using TSD wherewithal and a good operations plan, on board a scheduled airliner (preferably a U.S. carrier) bound for friendly territory, presented the style, efficiency, and finality we sought. Over the coming years, as I went deeper into sophisticated exfiltrations, our motto was “There’s nothing so exhilarating as hearing the wheels come up.” We found that we could always grab the attention of local case officers by presenting this argument: “Exfiltrations are like abortions—you don’t need one unless something has gone wrong. But if you do need one, don’t try to do it yourself. We can give you a nice clean job.” It was precisely the kind of tongue-in-cheek bravado that case officers loved, and it served as our distinctively audacious calling card. But there was a serious underlying principle involved. Ideally, an agent would remain productive, and a walk-in defector such as NESTOR would become an agent-in-place; neither would require ex-filtration, unless their cover was about to be blown or they were under hostile pursuit. At that point, “coming in from the cold” meant something had gone very wrong.
Since the NESTOR operation was my first “exfil,” I was about to learn from more experienced colleagues, principally Jacob, that running such an operation properly is one of the major criteria by which the professional level of an intelligence service can be judged.
Historically, the Nazi Abwehr and the prewar Soviet NKVD had been past masters at infiltrating and exfiltrating illegal agents. The various Jewish resistance underground groups that arose during the calamity of the Holocaust and its postwar aftermath in the Israeli war of independence had learned fast, hard lessons about illegal border crossing; by the 1970s, the Mossad was the best in the business at moving people in and out of denied areas. The raid on Entebbe will always serve as the premier example of a perfectly planned and executed rescue operation, which is basically what an exfiltration boils down to.
Soviet intelligence had always worked steadily to perfect the practical methods and demanding techniques required in the illegal movement of officers, agents, and defectors. The CIA, via the OSS, had come late to the business. It was a matter of honor that we learn from our mistakes and overtake the field. After my initial lessons in South Asia, I became part of our effort to maintain a perfect record of success, and helped conduct more than 150 such operations during twenty-five years of service in positions ranging from junior TSD Graphics artist to senior Agency officer. That flawless record remains intact, to the best of my knowledge.
This achievement was not incidental. We were always ready for the day we would have to bring one of our assets (and their extended families, if necessary) in from the cold. Although many assets did not escape because they had already been arrested or compromised before we could try to rescue them, once we undertook to do so, it was an effort that never failed. The inventive “clandestine means” we used to survive urgent situations have often been disparaged in the press, but they were a source of great pride and confidence for us.
Correctly appraising the strengths and weaknesses of border controls, such as those employed at the airport, was vital to overcoming the exfiltration challenge. David and I had just obtained the most current knowledge of the entry procedures. We would have to rely on the experiences of the local officers and Jacob for the exit formalities, acknowledging the possibility that we might have to run a prober through the exit controls at the last minute to determine if there were any new wrinkles. While awaiting word from Headquarters on the cover and route issues, we began preparing two sets of documents for NESTOR, one to be used at the international airport for the primary option, and the second to function as a fallback set, which could be used elsewhere if a final reconnaissance of the terminal revealed an unacceptably high surveillance presence.
NESTOR turned out to be an ideal subject. He was fluent in English and spoke excellent German, allowing us to choose from a variety of nationalities. TSD Headquarters had sent an adequate supply of third-country documents, including passports, driver’s licenses, and national ID cards. We also had plenty of “window dressing,” such as business and personal correspondence and stationery, and the absolutely essential pocket litter, supplied by the local base, to which we added domestic travel materials, such as the brochures David and I had collected at the hotels and travel agencies. Since the bio-data pages of the passports and identity documents were blank, we had tabulae rasae on which we could build a new persona—a rare advantage in defector cases, where time constraints and remote locations usually forced us to play the few cards we were dealt.
Once Headquarters approved an option, however, we’d have to address the problem of airline tickets in two identities, showing the ostensible cover itineraries for travel into the country, as well as the primary and secondary out. But, given local currency restrictions and the intense surveillance of airline offices, we couldn’t risk purchasing tickets here. We needed time to arrange a “hand carry” from another city along the route of NESTOR’s cover legend. Having such a valid swatch of tickets provided the details to which local customs officials would be extremely alert. Since NESTOR might very likely come face-to-face with a KGB security goon who knew him, creating an effective disguise that would hold up to the relentless heat, as well as the physical and emotional stress of his passage through the airport, was an especially daunting task for Jacob. The disguise had to use a minimum of “spooky” materials, which were in danger of coming undone at the critical moment. At the same time, Jacob had to make significant changes in NESTOR’s most distinctive characteristics; a great deal of the challenge lay in Jacob’s ability to gain NESTOR’s confidence and convince him that he could adopt a completely new personality that would not appear wooden or contrived under stress. This would require Jacob’s most astute assessment of NESTOR’s true self, which could only be achieved by quickly establishing a bond of trust.
LEAVING TOWN THAT night, our taxi dropped us at the bazaar near a red brick Mogul fort, a combination of a multistall junkyard and a counterfeit luxury-goods assembly line, where we were offered “genuine” Gucci or Chanel purses for five dollars U.S. Again, this break in the taxi ride gave us a chance to make sure we were not under vehicle surveillance. While David purchased mosquito coils, I bought some Agfa portrait paper so that the photos I would print for NESTOR’s documents would appear to have been made in Europe.
When we entered the delicious air-conditioning of the Southern Paradise Resort lobby for dinner, I was struck by an idea. Neither of us wanted to feed the mosquitoes in the stuffy little beach cottage again.
“Let’s see if they have a room,” I suggested.
David shook his head in dejection. “Already tried.”
But I strode confidently to the front desk. The haughty young clerk shook his head before I finished my question. “I am truly sorry, sir. We have nothing available, and unfortunately, there is no chance.”
I slid my hand over the polished marble, palm down. “My friend and I are going into the bar for a drink. Perhaps there will be a cancellation.” Opening my fingers slightly, I revealed a rolled banknote, the equivalent of ten dollars.
The money vanished with a subtlety that would have impressed a professional magician. “Certainly, sir. Please check with me shortly.”
An hour later, David and I were installed in a VIP suite facing the beach, having enjoyed real showers featuring unlimited hot water. I poured the scotch, while David tried to find an English-speaking channel on the antique television set. All we had to watch for the moment was a local quiz show and a scholarly lecture given by a Muslim professor. We decided it was time for dinner.
Having again feasted on the seafood buffet, accompanied by a chilled bottle of Portuguese wine, we both felt invigorated. The nearby nightclub seduced us with the mesmerizing beat of drums and tambourines. Groping our way through the sultry darkness, we were fascinated by the voluptuous young bellydancer on stage, an Anglo-Indian by the looks of her, shimmying in the spotlight. All around us, the eyes of Asian gentlemen dressed in conservative European suits were fixed on the woman. Her stage name was Heather, according to the blaring marquee, and she peeled off one veil after another, finally revealing her generous endowments as she danced in only the skimpiest halter and G-string. The spectacle was certainly racy stuff for the subcontinent, but I imagined that the luxury tourist hotel’s location on the outskirts of the city gave the nightclub a more permissive atmosphere.
The small band picked up the tempo and Heather skirted the edge of the stage, trying to lure one of the customers to join her in the spotlight. They steadfastly refused.
Then to our surprise, she arrived at our table. Since we were supposed to be tourists, I figured we should act the part. I was up on the stage gyrating with Heather when she suddenly loosened my tie and began to unbutton my shirt. Leaning close, she called over the noise of the drums, “This doesn’t bother you?”
I felt her cool hand sliding over my chest. “Not really,” I lied.
Then she leaned even closer and spoke into my ear. “Asian gentlemen can’t do this kind of thing, you know. At least not in public.” Before the song finished, my jacket was off and my shirt was peeled down to the waist. The crowd was aghast, but no one had left the room.
Back at the table, Heather extended a whispered invitation for me to visit her dressing room. An alarm bell rang in my head—maybe I was being paranoid, but for all I knew she could have been part of an elaborate, hidden-camera scheme. If I went to her dressing room, she might strip to obtain compromising photos before I could bolt. Then she would be in a position to threaten blackmail or extortion, not to mention an attempted rape charge.
I countered by inviting her to join David and myself in our suite. Surprisingly, she did so, and even drank a scotch with ice, sitting primly on the edge of the sofa wearing a skimpy wrap. She was indeed an Anglo-Indian, from Calcutta, and said that she had a good Christian upbringing. David and I made a point of praising the tourist marvels we had seen that day in the city and mentioned the sites we planned to visit the next. To this day, I have no idea what Heather’s true motive was. She could have been just a lonely young woman looking for company, or she might have had a permanent assignment from SB to probe potentially suspicious foreigners. In any event, David and I kept our cover (and our virtue) intact.
WHEN WE ARRIVED at the cover office the next morning, much better rested, we learned Jacob was coming in from the safe house with Mac. Jacob spent the first hour carefully reading the thick pile of cable traffic that had accumulated since the operation had gone into full swing. Out at the safe site, he hadn’t been able to monitor all the messages and had instead relied on Mac for summaries.
“All right,” Jacob said, stacking the yellow cable forms in order. “We can’t keep twisting in the wind, waiting for Headquarters to pull the stick out.” Now he spoke emphatically. “Our young subject simply cannot take much more of this marking time.”
Jacob explained how he had spent two late-night soul sessions with NESTOR, fueled by the generous supply of Stolichnaya vodka Mac had supplied from operational stores. It was Jacob’s approach to bonding with NESTOR and assessing his true character. Jacob decided that the Russian combined intelligence and initiative with ambition—an unfortunate combination of characteristics for a Soviet espionage officer.
“He’s also Russian to the core,” Jacob noted, referring to the almost mystical connection the Russian typically feels with his Motherland. This inextricable bond made it very difficult to convince Russians to abandon their entire life and begin again in exile. NESTOR’s situation was even more awkward because of his family ties, people he loved dearly, whose careers would be damaged in the best of cases, or who would suffer worse punishment if the KGB implicated them in his defection.
“The lad is wobbly at the knees, I’m afraid,” Jacob confided. “I’ve had to bring him back from the brink more than once. He and I are going to have to go trunk and tail through the terminal and onto the plane.”
Everyone in the office grasped the necessity of Jacob’s bold suggestion, even though it potentially undercut the need to maintain deniability. If NESTOR were caught in the airport with Jacob nearby, the Russian might unintentionally compromise him. However, it was an unavoidable risk. Jacob would simply have to run interference through exit formalities while maintaining a certain distance from the subject.
Another vital issue was raised: We would have to reconfirm both NESTOR’s and Jacob’s airline reservations so they could be certain to appear on the flight manifest. In the tightening procedures after NESTOR’s disappearance, the Special Branch had continued to insist that all travelers personally go to their airline office with their tickets and travel documents; no reconfirmation would be accepted by telephone.
But now we realized that, given Jacob’s skill and experience in dealing with the narrow bureaucratic mentality of the culture, we might be in a position to take advantage of his presence at the airport and finesse this problem. He would arrive for the flight and insist that no one had told him the necessity of reconfirming his reservation, adding that he knew for certain that there were plenty of seats on board the aircraft—a detail we quickly verified through Raymond’s local airport contact. Once Jacob determined that he had convinced the clerks at the airport check-in counter, he would signal NESTOR to approach. On the other hand, even if Jacob was unsuccessful and was bumped from the flight, we would still have time to abort the operation without exposing NESTOR.
Jacob’s plan to run interference at the airport demonstrated a very important principle of exfiltration tradecraft: When some minor aspect in the security procedures is uncertain or cannot be included in the document package, always err on the side of omission; act innocent, ignorant, and indignant. Jacob would coach NESTOR on how to stubbornly insist that no one had told him to reconfirm his reservation or had issued him a currency declaration form on arrival. Jacob always advised his subjects accordingly, based on personal experience as a TSD expert who routinely pushed at the boundaries of the opposing bureaucracy. He was out of necessity acquainted with many of the officials at the major airports in the region, and he also knew that the tactic of deflecting blame to “those bloody fools up north” might sit well with the local airport authorities, given regional rivalries. In any event, accepting the face-saving excuse was certainly an easier path for the local officials to follow than challenging an outraged Westerner.
“Time to give Headquarters a fait accompli,” Jacob announced.
It was clear he had decided to proceed with the operation. Raymond and his team concurred.
Jacob sat down and drafted a complete final operations plan, describing in exquisite detail how we would proceed in the exfiltration of NESTOR. Jacob would act as the escort officer through airport controls and onto the TWA flight to Athens scheduled to depart after midnight on Sunday the twenty-second. NESTOR would be transformed into a German-speaking salesman for a European agricultural equipment firm. We would prepare a fallback identity as an English-speaking tourist, to be used if he had to go to ground again due to unforeseen problems at the airport. But if we had to abort, it was more likely we’d put NESTOR on ice for a long time, and there was no telling what contingency we would then use.
“Better make it right the first time,” Jacob said, after editing his draft.
The plan also detailed how we would deploy at the airport. I would be on the terminal rooftop observation deck to determine if our exfil-trees made it aboard the TWA flight, then pass a signal to Raymond by telephone. David would drive one getaway car for Jacob if he needed to flee the airport. We needed another officer from out of the country to drive a second getaway car for NESTOR, because we knew that neither Mac nor Raymond could be seen anywhere near the terminal; both were on the SB’s list of local suspected CIA operatives.
The necessity for a third officer worked to our advantage, for he could bring in the airline tickets from Bangkok. This fit the cover story that NESTOR had been called while in Bangkok to proceed to the target city, via the capital, before returning to Europe. The first two coupons on NESTOR’s tickets would reflect the date of his “arrival” in the country from Bangkok and the subsequent flight south. After I had made the appropriate markings, I would remove the coupons, so that the red carbon transfers would appear on the unused coupon, as if he’d actually traveled on the tickets. A supposed departure from Bangkok would also provide Jacob with a set of tickets reflecting the same itinerary, so he and NESTOR would be booked on the same TWA flight to Athens.
Because they would have ostensibly arrived on the same flight as the officer from Bangkok, we could use his original international airport arrival cachets as the template for the forged entries I would place in NESTOR’s and Jacob’s documents. Such a “parallel probe collection operation” would ensure that the actual cachets, inks, and immigration officer’s handwriting were valid for that day and flight.
After the final operations plan was filed by IMMEDIATE cable to all the field and Headquarters participants, Jacob gave David and myself final instructions for finishing the documents package. He also made sure he had all the necessary components for NESTOR’s disguise and travel ensemble, borrowing my Spotmatic to take photographs of NESTOR in disguise for his alias documents. Just before leaving, Jacob noticed I had a handful of long Cuban Churchill cigars, which I had bought at the duty-free counter in Hong Kong, and he immediately seized a few with enthusiasm.
My curiosity later turned into admiration when I realized that the grand master of the complex game was able to see many moves ahead.
The next morning, Mac brought the film of NESTOR in disguise. After I processed and printed it, I compared the Russian’s picture from his national diplomatic identity card to the photographs taken by Jacob. My teammate had done an understated but skillful job. He had adapted an expensive, custom-made wig, ordered earlier for a local case officer, from one of our best Hollywood wig-makers. Since NESTOR had already shaved his head, refitting the wig was easier, but Jacob still had to trim the silk base to fit NESTOR’s head contours. The hairpiece was well cut, with a ventilated Vanhorn lace front that conveyed a fashionably conservative European look. The color was dark brown, with salt-and-pepper graying at the temples, a style completely different from the Nordic blond, Mickey Rooney pompadour that NESTOR had sported as a Soviet embassy attaché.
In his alias photos, NESTOR’s eyebrows had been darkened, and he had been given a slight shadow beneath the eyes to produce the effect of age bags. Clearly Jacob had carved some soft cotton dental rounds into subtle “plumpers,” which he had inserted inside NESTOR’s cheeks below the gum lines to distend his youthfully lean Slavic cheeks and enhance the middle-aged sag of his face. This technique helped alter the tone of his German-accented English, a key element of his new persona.
In the full-figure record shots of the disguise, the nicely tailored suit that Mac had contributed, along with expensive “elevator” shoes, created the illusion that NESTOR was three inches taller and much lankier. Jacob had finished the disguise with a pair of 18-karat gold Rodenstock, German-made glasses. The beige tint to the lenses masked the blue color of NESTOR’s eyes.
David and I set to work entering the disguise changes in NESTOR’s height, age, and coloring onto the bio-data physical-description blocks of his alias documents. I then saw that Jacob had surpassed even his own genius. He had furnished us with other photographs of NESTOR wearing a slightly darker wig cut in a different style, posing in a variety of clothes against diverse backgrounds, in both natural and artificial light. These snapshots provided impressions of a man at successive stages of life. We would use them on documents that had allegedly been issued many years earlier to help support his legend as a Western European.
I printed these shots on different photo papers, which I then “aged” by soaking them in a cup of strong tea before drying them with a steam iron. We then completed the aging process by bending the documents appropriately, working by touch. We knew that the subjective feel of the documents was even more important than the data they contained. An experienced immigration officer was more likely to respond to the “feel” of the passport and the demeanor of the bearer than to the accuracy of the data; a good customs officer made an assessment of travelers by the time they were within twenty feet of the checkpoint.
THE DAY BEFORE the exfiltration was a Saturday. David and I worked into the afternoon, putting the final touches on the documents and reviewing our operations plan checklist. The three others had left the office before midday so that the movements of several foreigners on a weekend would not arouse suspicion. Raymond had explained how to exit the floor by opening a combination lock on the sliding metal grate at the end of the corridor.
With each of us carrying one complete set of NESTOR’s exfiltration documents concealed on us, David and I left the office around four and made our way through the poorly lit hall to the metal grate. The combination lock opened easily, and we strode toward the glint of daylight at the end of the hall that marked the staircase.
But we nearly panicked when we reached the doorway to the landing and were confronted by another, unexpected metal grate and combination lock blocking our way out. Who the hell can I call to reach Raymond with a discreet message? I thought, unable to breathe for a moment. We had to assume the phone lines to the U.S. Consulate and Raymond’s home were tapped. If I called and said we were locked in the building, we were basically lighting a flare for the SB.
Worse, if this building employed any type of efficient watchman, he might spot us fumbling with the lock and call the police. A search would reveal that we each carried a separate set of travel documents bearing NESTOR’s disguise photograph. Whatever happened to us, the exfiltration would be in serious trouble.
Leaning close in the faint light, I tried the same combination on this lock. Much to our relief, it sprang open. We groped our way down the stairs, avoiding fresh, blood-red splotches of pan juice that the char force had spit out along the route. With Murphy’s Law in full effect, we found the’ doorway into the lobby was also secured with a grate and combination lock.
“Three times for good luck,” I muttered to David, entering the same combination. Once more the lock sprang open—a hopeful sign that NESTOR’s exfiltration would indeed be a success.
THE EXFILTRATION TEAM converged on the international airport just before midnight on April 22. Jacob and NESTOR arrived in an anonymous Hillman Minx driven by the case officer with whom they’d shared the safe house for the previous week. I came in a car driven by “Pete,” the officer from Bangkok who’d flown in two days earlier with the airline tickets. We were trailed by another car that David had driven. Pete and David would stay in the airport parking lot with these two cars, motors running—escape vehicles to be used in the event that Jacob and NESTOR had to leave the terminal quickly.
My position was to be on the observation deck of the terminal rooftop, supposedly waiting for someone on an incoming flight. From there, I could watch Jacob and NESTOR leave the departure gate, cross the tarmac, and board the flight to Athens. When I had confirmed that the plane had departed with or without them on board, I could pass on the appropriate signal, using a wrong-number voice code, to the telephone at Raymond’s home, where he and Mac were sweating out the operation.
There was a disciplined logic to all these procedures. No suspected CIA officer who might have aroused Special Branch surveillance was anywhere near the airport that night. Our entire team was from out of town. Moreover, if Raymond or Mac had been under active surveillance, the fact that they were enjoying a late dinner might have served to dampen any SB suspicion that NESTOR was in the city.
But if I telephoned Raymond with the bad news code, announcing that NESTOR and Jacob had bolted, he and Mac would leave his home in separate cars to meet the escape vehicles at predetermined locations, and then try to break the trail.
Checking to see if any surveillance was trailing me, I made a pit stop at the terminal lavatory, which now reeked of carbolic disinfectant that almost masked the stench of the drains. Then I casually inspected the antiquated, railway-style arrivals board and saw that TWA 876 was still due to arrive at one A.M. Having established a plausible reason for being at the airport, I climbed to the observation deck. The flight’s arrival time came and went. Moths and termites tumbled incessantly in the spotlights above my head. The smit was rising from the valleys to join the city smog as other airliners landed and taxied up to the terminal to occupy all the free parking slots. It was now almost 1:45, and I could only imagine the scene down in the terminal.
Later, Jacob would describe in detail the sequence of events. He and NESTOR arrived at the terminal curbside just before midnight, and Jacob entered the building first. As instructed, NESTOR waited five minutes, fussing with the strap of his suitcase, which contained a collection of European clothes and personal effects provided by TSD. Then, he also entered the terminal.
Since we had already verified that there were seats available on this flight, Jacob was not worried that TWA would bump them, even though they were not manifested locally, unless there was undue SB pressure to do so. He confidently employed his best British regimental style with the manager at the TWA counter, explaining that he was “damned sorry about the balls-up” concerning the reconfirmation muddle. He suggested that others from his hotel planning to take the same flight had been equally ignorant and managed to persuade the TWA manager to modify the manifest so that passengers who had made reservations from elsewhere in the country could be included.
Watching for Jacob’s discreet signal to proceed, NESTOR entered the check-in line. He adopted his new persona perfectly. One of his brilliant ad-libs had been to request a soft-sided leather portefeuille to carry his documents and “business” papers, which subtly stamped him as a European. He handed over his passport and tickets nonchalantly as he focused on cutting the tip of the big Cuban cigar Jacob had provided from my Hong Kong stash. Three minutes after arriving at the TWA counter, NESTOR had his boarding pass.
As expected, the first real hurdle came at Customs, where all departing passengers had to have their baggage inspected before it could be turned over to the airline. Jacob cleared the counter ahead of NESTOR. But when the Russian arrived with his suitcase, the inspector, a muscular man in a burgundy turban, flourished a copy of the amended manifest.
“Please remain here, sir,” he ordered NESTOR, then disappeared into a back room with the Russian’s passport and ticket. NESTOR stood there for an agonizing ten minutes, staring at the closed door. A line of other passengers formed behind him, some grumbling, some sheepishly accepting the quirks of officialdom.
Then the door opened and the inspector emerged, accompanied by a husky European in a sweat-spotted dark suit. Startled, NESTOR chomped on his cigar and tried to swallow. The European was a KGB security officer from the Soviet embassy, a man with whom NESTOR had rubbed shoulders for more than two years. He approached the counter and gazed at NESTOR’s face; in response, NESTOR audaciously raised the gnawed cigar and lit it carefully with the gold Dunhill lighter Jane had lent to the operation. He exhaled a cloud of fragrant blue smoke in the direction of his former colleague with debonair calm.
Jacob was anxiously watching this drama from a corner of the echoing terminal, ready to bail out if the Special Branch swarmed from the back room of the customs counter.
The KGB man glared at NESTOR, who met his eyes and drummed his fingers impatiently on the shaft of the cigar. In his new persona, NESTOR was a dark-haired, dark-eyed European more than seven centimeters taller than the Soviet fugitive. The thick-faced man with graying sideburns wore his expensive clothes comfortably, making a point of frequently checking the time on his elegant Seiko wristwatch, then turning to chat with the French couple behind him in the stalled customs line.
Skeptical, the KGB security man checked NESTOR’s passport once more against the manifest. Hours seemed to pass before he finally handed the documents back to the inspector, spun on his heel, and returned to the back room. A moment later, NESTOR’s boarding pass had received the crucial customs stamp.
IT WAS AFTER two A.M. and the TWA flight from Bangkok still had not landed. I had nervously watched a Swissair DC-8 arrive from Riyadh and a Lufthansa 707 from Frankfurt. An Aeroflot IL-62, belching soot from its engines, landed from Tashkent and lumbered up to the gate directly below. There would be even more KGB gumshoes patrolling the terminal, wary of potential defectors, and it was all I could do to keep myself from pacing up and down. Finally, landing lights pierced the brown haze, and the red-and-white TWA Boeing airliner taxied onto the parking ramp.
After a flurry of baggage handling and refueling, a ground stewardess in a purple uniform led the passengers out to the flight. By now the smit was so dense that I could barely distinguish Jacob and NESTOR walking with the other tired travelers, maintaining a disciplined distance from each other. The boarding stairs were withdrawn, the engines started, and NESTOR’s plane took off for Athens.
Groping my way down the murky staircase to the public phone booth, I felt as if I were carrying a rucksack full of wet sandbags. In an hour, I’d be back at the Southern Paradise, sleeping with the air conditioner turned up full blast, but I felt sleep would not come easily because my nerves were so frayed by the ordeal.
I knew I had to send the vital departure signal, and although in reality the old Bakelite phone worked perfectly, I would suffer nightmares for decades about being unable to make the crucial call. I dropped the fat brown coin into the slot and dialed the number: a whir, a click. “Is Suzy there?” I asked.
“No!” Raymond replied, feigning indignation at being awakened in the middle of the night.
I knew we shared the same sense of tired relief and satisfaction. We had just pulled off one of the toughest and most important exfiltration operations in our Agency’s history.
DURING THE FIRST seven years I spent in the field, I grew from being an inexperienced kid with dreams of grandeur to a seasoned professional with a firm grasp of serious realities.
Those years shaped the rest of my CIA career and, indeed, my life. I had been an integral player on tough cases in towns such as Vientiane, Bangkok, and Delhi, and my operational assignments took me to even more exotic countries such as Nepal, Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh, and Ceylon. Serving with officers at those stations and bases during that first, long overseas tour was probably the most rewarding opportunity I could have ever asked for. At the risk of sounding trite, those men and women were truly a special breed. They often operated in complete isolation from colleagues, sometimes under extremely difficult physical conditions. They had to be resourceful, adaptable, and willing to face discomfort and danger with a sense of humor. They reminded me of those I had grown up with in Nevada—people who could turn the most miserable or insecure situation into a daring adventure.
I received my assignment back to Headquarters in 1974. Although Karen and I knew that it was time for our young family to return to the native country they hardly knew, I realized I was actually going to miss the raw emotions and coveted rewards of life in the field. It was a lifestyle I could not easily abandon.