To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
—Sun Tzu
The Blue Ridge Mountains, Maryland, July 1974
• Since I had been assigned to an indefinite tour at Headquarters as the Agency’s new Chief of Disguise, it was time to plant some permanent roots in America. I was almost thirty-four, Karen thirty-one, and the bland suburbs of northern Virginia that we had left seven years before were no longer a sanctuary from drugs and crime. The energy crisis and riots in the cities had also caused us to question the safety and stability of urban life. We wanted our children to learn how to live closely with nature and be active members of a family, not quasi-boarders at some heavily mortgaged townhouse in Fairfax or McLean.
So Karen and I decided to spend our home leave cutting trees and building a cabin on forty acres of the Blue Ridge mountainside we owned near Harper’s Ferry. Choosing to pioneer these wooded hills actually made practical sense. We hoped to finish the cabin by fall, then live there while we worked on building our main house further up the hillside. I would commute to Washington each morning by train. The children would attend a simple country school and, we hoped, pass through the shoals of adolescence shielded from the riskier temptations of the 1970s, which had already disrupted the families of several colleagues we’d known overseas.
In Asia, I’d served a valuable apprenticeship under true operational experts, especially Jacob. Those years had also coincided with dramatically innovative breakthroughs on the technical side of clandestine documents and disguises. Because I had been directly involved in several notably successful operations, including the secret debriefings of PASSAGE in Vientiane and the harrowing exfiltration of NESTOR out of the subcontinent, I’d gained experience and earned rank faster than usual, even in an elite corps like the Clandestine Service. But I knew I would be entering an entirely different theater of operations when I reported to Headquarters in August, and I needed to be physically and mentally prepared.
The Nixon administration and the Agency were in the middle of a major upheaval. The war in Indochina was clearly dragging to a grim conclusion as North Vietnam’s Soviet and Chinese allies relentlessly dominated the battlefields with war materiel now that American ground forces and air power had been almost completely withdrawn. The White House, reeling from the Watergate scandal, was near collapse, and, sadly, the Central Intelligence Agency had become ensnared in both these disasters.
Nixon had fired CIA Director Richard Helms, a career officer, in January 1973, for refusing to obey his order that the CIA block the FBI’s Watergate investigation. The Director who replaced Helms, James Schlesinger, served only four months before becoming Secretary of Defense. But in those sixteen weeks, he left his brand on the Agency. Distrustful of the Clandestine Service, Schlesinger initiated a house cleaning in which the Monopoly pieces were shaken in a bag and redistributed. Schlesinger had a deep suspicion that an OSS-covert operations “old boy” network wielded too much influence in the Agency, so he bureaucratically distanced the Technical Services Division and its main customer, the Clandestine Service (Directorate of Plans), renaming the DP less euphemistically as the Directorate of Operations (DO). TSD was reorganized to become the Office of Technical Service (OTS) and placed under a newly formed Directorate of Science and Technology.
But Schlesinger’s greatest impact on the CIA was the “major purge,” as Bill Colby, the Director who replaced him, later described the bloodbath. Seven percent of the CIA staff, most of whom were experienced officers from the Clandestine Service, were fired outright, or pressured to settle for early retirement. Colby, who was, ironically, a decorated World War II OSS veteran and covert action operative par excellence, had served as Schlesinger’s trusted confederate throughout this brief but dramatic upheaval. Now he was Director of Central Intelligence and seemed intent on enforcing the unprecedented “reforms” that Schlesinger had unleashed.
The waves left in Schlesinger’s wake swept throughout the new OTS. Our bag of alleged “dirty tricks” had been linked in the news media to the Agency’s assumed guilt in the Watergate mess. In fact, several former Agency officers, including E. Howard Hunt, were part of the White House’s notorious Plumbers unit, and they had received some sanctioned technical support from Agency resources. The most notorious assistance came from an OTS disguise officer, who provided the “ill-fitting red wig,” which Hunt had used and may also have worn during the most incriminating incident: the burglary of the Los Angeles office of Pentagon Papers author Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Even after a year had passed, the dust had still not settled on that episode.
I knew some elements of OTS were undermined by bad morale, bitterness, and a resistance to change that pervaded the hierarchy. That negativity simply did not exist during the camaraderie I had known in my first nine years at the Agency.
It was a volatile time to be returning to Headquarters. I was a field-seasoned technical officer who had begun his career as a humble artist in the Graphics bullpen less than ten years earlier. Now I would be handed the reins of the Disguise operation, a section in transition, and must attempt to transform the way business was done at a time when most prudent bureaucratic heads were retreating into their turtle shells, waiting for the long knives to finish their work.
I was tense and anxious about the future, but I reminded myself that I had worked hard and done well. In my arrogance, I felt certain that there was no other officer in the Agency better qualified to be Chief of Disguise. That sense of confidence was not just a weak attempt at bravado. For example, an operation in South Asia the year before had been one in a series of major intelligence victories, where I had played a key role by introducing improved GAMBIT disguise technology. The American people would probably never hear of it, but my initiatives had raised my status in OTS and, perhaps, throughout the Agency as well. I sometimes relived every detail of those gratifying experiences, knowing I would need as much self-assurance as I could muster for what lay ahead.
A South Asian Capital, Summer 1973
• “This guy is going south on us, fast,” the Chief of Station, “Simon,” explained, leaning over his desk and speaking with a crisp but soft precision that was barely audible above the chugging air conditioners. “It’s up to you to save the operation. If he doesn’t buy the disguise option, he’ll surely quit.”
The blinds were tightly drawn against the mid-afternoon desert glare. On Simon’s desk lay the SECRET case file of his most valuable agent, a senior official in the local government, code-named “HONOR.” I studied the assortment of news clippings and surveillance photos of the agent, a portly, distinguished, middle-aged man wearing the well-tailored flannels of a British academic. Since independence, HONOR had risen to the high ranks of his government, with assignments in several European and Middle Eastern cities.
By late summer 1973, HONOR had assumed a vital national security position in his capital. Because of family and political connections, he was highly respected by his peers and superiors, none of whom suspected he had also been a well-regarded CIA agent, providing vital intelligence for years. We considered him a long-term, high-level, unilateral penetration into the host government, privy to its most sensitive military and political secrets. But he had mostly been posted overseas throughout his clandestine relationship with us.
In many ways, the main problem in HONOR’S case was similar to the difficulties we had overcome with PASSAGE in Vientiane. While HONOR had served in his country’s embassies, his debriefings had taken place in lavish private rooms of elite clubs and restaurants in London or Paris whenever he could slip away for a brief holiday. In those encounters, he had felt secure enough to pass over extremely valuable diplomatic cables and dispatches, and to discuss in detail the nuances of the constantly shifting alliances within the Soviet-dominated, “nonaligned” group of nations, of which his country was one of the unofficial military leaders.
In other words, HONOR was not just another “fat cat” Asian official, but in fact possessed vital insight into the heart of political and military relationships that radiated out from South Asia into China, throughout the Middle East, and on to the Soviet Union. Because we had paid him well, he had made it a point to ferret out all the sensitive information that the Langley analysts presented on their shopping lists. Consistently that information had been accurate.
Then, much to our dismay, HONOR had been kicked upstairs to become a senior national security adviser to the cabinet. He could no longer meet with his case officer in a discreet back room in a St. James club, or a private dining alcove of a Quai d’Orsay restaurant. Now he had to conduct weekly clandestine rendezvous in this dusty little capital, where local security was ubiquitous and jealous unofficial spies in his own ministry dreamed of seeing him hurled from his pedestal.
“His feet aren’t just cold,” Simon noted. “They’re frozen solid.”
I flipped through Simon’s latest debriefing notes in the 201 file. HONOR was terrified about getting caught here in his own country because he clearly recognized the consequences: Not only would he be brutally interrogated, then most likely executed, but his family might face the same fate. Even if they survived, the considerable “unofficial” fortune he had accumulated would be confiscated.
Because his intelligence value to the United States had only increased since his return from overseas, veteran case officers like Simon were not about to let him slip away without a fight. HONOR’S country was actively negotiating with the Chinese on a highly sensitive and secret arrangement that would allow a few Chinese intermediate-range nuclear missiles to be stationed in the country. This arrangement would counterbalance a similar Russian rocket threat, which a neighboring nation was suspected of developing.
But there was more. HONOR’s national air force provided unofficial mercenaries throughout the Middle East who were especially active in Egypt. As defense adviser, HONOR had begun to hear ominous reports that the Soviets had moved tactical nuclear weapons into Egypt to be used against the Israelis, in the event of yet another Arab-Israeli war.
HONOR’s frostbitten feet, however, had not moved him to the last scheduled clandestine meeting, nor to the alternate meeting. He was obviously on the brink of “heading south,” as Simon put it, just when American intelligence needed him more than ever. If tensions in the Middle East again reached crisis level, America was going to need every reliable intelligence source with knowledge of the region it could possibly find. Simon simply could not afford to lose HONOR now.
I returned the thick case file to Simon’s desk. Given the gravity of the situation, I had to find a way to convince HONOR that we could provide a disguise so foolproof that he could remain an active member of the operation and work virtually under the nose of the local security service in this claustrophobic little city.
“Got any good ideas how you’re going to bring this guy along?” Simon asked skeptically.
Simon was what we techs called a “James Bond” case officer; when he went operational, he favored black turtlenecks, Italian driving gloves, and expensive Harris tweed. His graying brown hair was cut in the collar-length British style and, whenever he took off his sportscoat, I half expected to see a Walther PPK slung in a shoulder holster. Although his sleek appearance might attract too much attention on a surveillance detection route through narrow back streets, he was a highly competent officer.
“I do have a couple of ideas, Simon,” I said, suppressing a smile. “First, the best way to convince HONOR to use the new GAMBIT disguise is to actually deceive him with it, to put him in the place of his own security service and show him how well it works.”
“Let’s give it a go,” Simon said.
THE CRUCIAL TEST came just after sunset two days later. I strolled through the cool, deepening twilight under the jacaranda trees surrounding walled diplomatic and expatriate villas. It was certainly not unusual for a Westerner to be savoring the early evening breeze after enduring the arid heat of the late summer day. As I crunched up the gravel path of the well-maintained park and entered the murkier shadows beneath the acacia trees, I knew I had been walking for some time with no one behind me.
It was ominously black under the branches as I groped my way to the stucco wall of the villa at the far end of the park. Reaching out in the darkness, I immediately touched the slim package that “Carol” had placed there from her garden on the other side of the wall. She was a seasoned case officer used to operating under an innocuous cover in the backwaters of the world, and she managed to maintain a convincing legend at this tasteful villa, where she often entertained diplomats and local officials.
I followed a circuitous route toward the glow of the streetlamps beyond the trees on the other side of the park. Satisfied that there was no one nearby, I slipped the GAMBIT from the black bag and applied the disguise, working easily by touch alone in the shadows, just as I had done on so many practice runs in my darkened hotel room. I checked each prominent part of the disguise and completed the look with a colorful cravat, tucking it in by running my right finger around the collar of my dark cotton shirt. Satisfied that my transformation was complete and that looked perfectly natural, I strolled along the gravel path on the opposite side of the park from which I had entered.
Now back on the sidewalk, I passed the occasional lone figure or couple walking in the pleasant evening coolness. People nodded politely, and one man even offered a cordial greeting in English: “A very good evening to you, sir.”
I returned his nod but dared not risk a response, which could have been distorted by the disguise.
The couple passed, and I breathed easier. Thankfully, the improvements that Jerome Calloway and the TSD technicians had made in the GAMBIT disguise, based on suggestions that I had forwarded through channels, were more effective than any of us had hoped. As I continued strolling, my encounters with local people beneath the glaring mercury-vapor lamps illuminating the street were relaxed and pleasant. In spite of the exercise, I wasn’t even sweating. This is going to be apiece of cake, I thought after a fifteen-minute trial run through the neighborhood.
Then, I saw a Westerner in wrinkled tennis whites walking a huge black Belgian shepherd coming straight at me down the sidewalk. The dog was a massive creature, tall and barrel-chested, with a head like a wolf’s. This beast was, without a doubt, a very effective watchdog. But how the hell would he react to me? Despite Jacob’s constant warnings to think of every possible contingency, none of us had even considered this particular development. GAMBIT worked well in both natural and artificial light, but we never asked ourselves how the disguise might look to a fierce black dog, marching along with nothing but a choke collar restraining him.
I could bolt across the street, of course. But that was not normal behavior for a Westerner, especially one whom GAMBIT had transformed into an almost stereotypical, pink-faced Brit expat, who should by definition be a dog lover. So I held my ground on the sidewalk, trying to remember everything I had been taught as a kid back in Nevada about animals being able to sense human fear. As a ten-year-old in Caliente, I’d always followed those lessons whenever I encountered menacing strays on the street: Look ’em in the eye, keep your shoulders squared, and walk right past them.
I swallowed hard and continued strolling casually, trying not to betray my apprehension. I pictured this unpredictable monster wheeling suddenly, its jaws snapping to attack, but a moment later, the dog and its owner passed close by without incident.
Trying to relax I approached the turn at the front gate of Carol’s house. My next challenge was to walk past her chokadar, who was squatting in the middle of her open gateway with three of his friends, enjoying a few crumbs of hashish in a clay pipe, which they passed among themselves in the crisp night air. The watchman looked up and nodded with a snaggle-toothed grin, offering a serene salaam.
As I stepped inside Carol’s gate, I made a mental note that we had just achieved a professional milestone. On two other operations, we had used these new disguises at night on individuals riding in vehicles—the PASSAGE debriefings in Vientiane, and a series of equally productive agent-case officer meetings in a neighboring South Asian country. These latter debriefings were of military officers with detailed knowledge of newly delivered Soviet weapons, including T-62 tanks, the latest variant of MiG-21 fighters, and, most important, the new upgrades to SAM-2 antiaircraft missiles. American pilots in Indochina and our South Vietnamese allies were confronting these same weapons on the battlefield, and the knowledge we gained about their technical properties helped defeat the enemy during the Communist Easter Offensive of 1972 and the bombing of Hanoi in December. All of the agents wearing the GAMBIT disguises had passed the scrutiny of suspicious local police and even trained counterintelligence officers as they rode in our cars disguised as Westerners. However, we had not considered GAMBIT at that point in its evolution to be practical for the type of operational environment HONOR faced.
In other words, if an agent or case officer needed hours of painstaking preparation at the hands of an expert to pass close scrutiny in ordinary light, then routine use of disguise was not practical. And, before our meetings, we would not have the luxury of sitting down with HONOR for such protracted periods of time because his new position made him inaccessible. For this reason, the success of tonight’s “moist” run, dead-drop pickup of the disguise was extremely crucial. Dead drops were quick, safe, and tested elemental tradecraft; they could be constantly changed, and, if chosen well, were hard to detect. Dead drops usually served as clandestine mailboxes for messages, but working with Calloway and TSD, I hoped to perfect a GAMBIT disguise that could be folded neatly into a flat black bag and applied in the dark in a few minutes without adhesive, mirrors, or expert hands. My evening promenade around the well-lit streets of this prosperous neighborhood, including the unexpected encounter with the watchdog, proved that our increasingly paranoid but valuable agent HONOR could be taught to disguise himself with a GAMBIT he retrieved from a dead drop.
This strategy was an essential part of making our operation convincing, secure, and feasible. Obviously, an agent who had already grown nervous would never even consider hiding something as incriminating as the GAMBIT disguise at his home, where its discovery would not only compromise his own safety but that of his entire family. Nor would we want to leave such an obvious piece of spy gear in his care.
As I walked up Carol’s winding drive between hibiscus hedges, she came down the front steps to greet me, smiling as if I were an old friend. The chokadars squatting over their pipe were not particularly interested in the distinguished Western gentleman calling on the memsahib after dinner. She often hosted late evening bridge games during the warm months, and a new partner aroused no suspicion. It was an excellent cover because we were already planning for HONOR to become a true connoisseur of the game.
Once we were inside, I faced Carol. “What do you think?”
I purposely avoided using the words “look” or “disguise,” a habit we all followed out of discipline, assuming as we always did that any location might be bugged.
“Fabulous,” she said, shaking her head in wonder. She peered more closely, her smile widening. “I never would have guessed it.” We went into her living room, where Bokhara carpets were spread tastefully on the muted tan tiled floor.
“Have a seat.” Carol pointed to a handsome leather chair in a corner. “Simon should be here shortly.”
I sat down, crossed my legs comfortably, and inspected the cigarette case and ashtray on the copper table beside the chair. “When he comes in with his friend, I’ll be sitting here smoking a cigarette and drinking a gin and tonic, just as we discussed,” I murmured to her under my breath.
When she came back from the kitchen with the drink, I placed it on the table, then reached up to adjust the angle of the lamp on the other side of the chair. The room was dotted with pools of light from similar lamps. Carol stood there watching as I lit my cigarette and sat back in my chair.
“Still okay?” I asked again.
“Smashing,” Carol said with a giggle. She disappeared into her bedroom, where she would remain until our visitors were gone.
I had just lit my second Dunhill 100 when Simon and HONOR arrived. Simon ushered the agent into the living room and asked him to take a seat diagonally across the room from me. The dapper, plump gentleman was clearly flustered from his ride across the city, crouching on the floorboards of Simon’s ops vehicle (his personal, English racing-green sports car). Simon had picked him up in an obscure alley, and HONOR had succumbed to this nerve-racking indignity in order to avoid being spotted in the company of the American “diplomat” widely rumored to belong to the CIA. I saw immediately that Simon had been right: Here, indeed, was an agent on the verge of quitting.
Tonight, Simon was again playing the role of the glamorous Ian Fleming spymaster. He had, most likely, terrified our agitated agent, who squatted suffocating in the narrow space in front of the passenger seat as Simon careened through traffic with his usual flamboyance.
Turning to leave the room, Simon smiled benevolently at HONOR. “I’ll be right back.”
But, as planned, Simon did not introduce me or even acknowledge my presence before he left. HONOR, an old-school diplomat who observed a rigid social code, was left stranded, sitting in a room twenty feet away from a complete stranger, who silently smoked and drank a gin and tonic without even glancing in his direction.
Simon returned, leaned over HONOR’S chair, and spoke quietly before turning toward me.
“Arthur,” Simon said, using HONOR’S pseudonym, “I would like to introduce Dr. Anderson from Washington, who came here to meet with you tonight.”
HONOR rose somewhat nervously as I approached him.
“It’s a great pleasure to meet you, sir,” I said respectfully as I shook his hand.
“It’s my pleasure…” HONOR never finished his deferential responses. He gasped as he watched me bring my hands up to my face, and, within seconds, the GAMBIT persona evaporated as I emerged like a butterfly from its chrysalis. He recoiled with a mixture of shock and delight, recognizing me immediately from an earlier meeting. Although he had witnessed what had happened with his own eyes, it was clear that he could not fully comprehend how we had managed to pull off such an incredible act of sorcery.
“Amazing,” he finally muttered. “Simply incredible.”
No more discussion was needed. We followed Simon into another room, where I set to work on the fitting of the GAMBIT disguise designed expressly for HONOR. The training in its application and removal took less than half an hour. He was so delighted with the realism of the disguise, however, that he spent a whole five minutes in front of the mirror, experimenting with different facial expressions and launching into an impressive imitation of the corrupt prime minister for whom he worked.
I then showed HONOR the diagrams of the areas in the park where Carol would drop the GAMBIT twenty minutes before scheduled meetings. We asked him to memorize street maps of the routes he would take to and from the park, and then on to Carol’s home for “bridge games.”
My GAMBIT training work with HONOR ended that night. Simon, Carol, and their highly valued agent continued with their mission. From that point on, HONOR voiced no qualms about meeting Simon for extended face-to-face debriefings on vital intelligence matters.
As we had suspected, HONOR’S intelligence work became essential that October when Israel and its Arab neighbors collided in the tragic bloodbath known as the Yom Kippur War. For more than two weeks, the Israelis fought hammer-and-tongs with the Egyptians and Syrians, with unprecedented losses of men and equipment on all sides. Threatened with defeat early in the conflict, Israel put its small nuclear missile force on alert. With their respective allies crumbling, both the Soviet Union and the United States conducted massive sea and air lifts to re-supply the opposing sides.
But intelligence reports from all sources reaching Headquarters, including those from Soviet bloc stations, indicated that the Soviets were doing more than just replenishing the supply of MiGs, tanks, and SAM missiles that their Egyptian surrogates had lost in combat. There were signs that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev planned to counter the defensive Israeli nuclear alert by sending Strategic Rocket Forces teams, equipped with nuclear warheads, to support the Egyptians’ Scud missiles, already aimed at Israel. Once again, the Agency issued an all-points alert to stations and bases, with urgent requests for more data.
I happened to be back in the same dusty Asian capital when Headquarters’ message reached the Station. That afternoon, Simon sent HONOR an emergency meeting signal: a small “X” hastily scrawled in charcoal on a gaudy cinema poster, plastered on a mud-brick wall near a kebab stand. HONOR went to the suburban park that night, found the GAMBIT in its drop site, and emerged from the shadows, a Westerner sauntering confidently through the chilly autumn evening to join an impromptu bridge game at Carol’s villa.
As I adjusted and repaired HONOR’S disguise, which showed signs of intensive use, Simon relayed the Agency’s urgent request for information.
“We have to know if the Soviets have already shipped nuclear weapons to Egypt,” Simon said, his voice strained.
“Oh, they have,” HONOR replied casually as if he were discussing the price of lamb in the bazaar.
“How do you know that?” Simon demanded.
HONOR calmly recounted that his office had received an intelligence report a few days earlier from one of its military officers assigned to the Egyptian forces along the Suez Canal. As the officer deployed to a forward base, he encountered small clusters of Soviet troops at Egyptian missile sites and concluded these Russian soldiers were guarding camouflaged concrete bunkers containing nuclear warheads for the Scuds.
Simon and I exchanged a tense glance. HONOR’S information was shocking. If the fragile cease-fire on the battlefield was broken and heavy fighting resumed, the war could quickly surpass the nuclear threshold. It seemed that World War III, or at least something dangerously close to it, was about to explode in the wastelands of the Sinai and Negev deserts.
Simon quickly left Carol’s house and sent a FLASH precedence intel cable, attention DIRECTOR. After integrating HONOR’s report with other intelligence indicators, the CIA urgently informed National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who advised President Nixon to immediately order American military forces to DEFCON 3, a high state of nuclear alert. It was a long night for the National Security team in the White House situation room. DCI Colby was in constant communication with Langley. American Polaris submarines refined the targeting data of their ballistic missiles, while our lumbering B-52 bombers held their orbits in the Arctic and Mediterranean, awaiting orders to proceed toward Soviet airspace. The Middle East powder keg seemed ready to explode. Indeed, the global security situation had not been so precarious since the Cuban missile crisis.
But the Soviets backed down. They canceled the orders of their airborne troops preparing to fly to the Middle East, withdrew the nuclear warheads already positioned at the Egyptian Scud sites, and recalled their ships. Two days later, when the White House was convinced of the Soviets’ new intention, Nixon rescinded DEFCON 3. In the ensuing confusion, Nixon’s many critics accused him of orchestrating this crisis to divert the nation’s attention from the heightened Senate Watergate investigation.
I did not learn all the inside details of this frightening confrontation until late 1974, when I attended the Agency’s Mid-Career course for promising officers of middle grade. My roommate in the course, “Bob,” was from the Directorate of Intelligence and had been the “duty” analyst on the line with DCI Colby during the tense days of the confrontation. Bob related to the class that Colby had been installed in the White House Situation Room, as all signs indicated that Brezhnev had sent warheads to Egypt and that the United States and the Soviet Union stood face-to-face, with their nuclear weapons cocked and ready to fire.
“It seems we were that close to a thermonuclear war,” Bob told us. “But the Sovs knew that we were onto their nukes in Egypt, and we weren’t bluffing. They had no choice but to back off.”
I was secretly proud of what my colleagues and I had accomplished, and I was more determined than ever to enhance our operational capability, as long as the Agency supported my efforts. I felt this resolve in the face of weakened morale and a strong sense within the ranks of the CIA that we had to fend off attacks not only from our Soviet bloc opposition but from many in our own government and the public. We were in a state of siege.
DESPITE THE GLARE of unflattering public scrutiny in the mid-1970s, important members of OTS and the Agency considered the HONOR case to be a breakthrough in the evolution of the GAMBIT disguise, partly because it had served to convince a vital agent that we would spare no expense and explore technical frontiers in order to protect those like him. In addition, we soon found that there was a marked increase in the need for enhanced disguise technology in other third world capitals as we struggled to keep up with the rapid spread of Communist influence in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Because of operations like the HONOR case, I was considered the de facto expert in disguise operations, which called for the invention of startling new techniques and materials, as well as the subtle perspective and touch of the artist. Even before I left Bangkok, I was keeping Headquarters apprised of how improved disguise and related tradecraft might be employed in other areas so that our case officers could conduct personal meetings with agents. Such a possibility was especially important to explore in cases where agents brought in cumbersome Soviet weapons manuals, which were most efficiently photographed with large fixed cameras best used in more secure facilities.
The traditional East-West geopolitical issues of the Cold War were merging with other global problems, such as terrorism and international narcotics trafficking. Our case officers might find themselves debriefing a Soviet GRU agent one day and a source with information on the German terrorist Bader-Meinhof gang the next. As had been the case with HONOR, all agents vacillated, fearful about the risk of compromise. Ultimately, we hoped, we could make disguises so realistic, comfortable, and easy to use that case officers worldwide would automatically turn to us for our services. I recognized, however, that this vision was very ambitious.