Читать книгу The Human Factor - Ishmael Jones - Страница 12

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Training Days

Two months of training crammed into a year.

Anonymous

We were assigned fictitious names to use during training. Although they were throwaway aliases meant only for the course, they stuck and we tended to use them throughout our careers among our friends and colleagues in the Agency. I was called Ishmael. My enthusiastic new class began its great adventure by gathering in a set of offices in a low-rise office building in the Washington, D.C. area. This was a training “safe house,” specifically chosen not to be connected in any way with the State Department, and thus presumably better cover for the training of non-State Department officers.

A psychologist visited during the first few days of our training and discussed the psychological and personality tests we’d taken before joining. He said that we’d been selected because those tests had showed in us a mixture of extrovert and introvert. We could work well with others but were also capable of spending extended periods alone. I asked him about some of the tests’ more bizarre questions, like, “Are you being followed?” and “Do you sometimes just want to hurt others?” They’d seemed too obviously designed to weed out crazy people; surely no one would be so foolish as to answer “yes.” He replied that some people really do believe they’re being followed, and some really want to hurt others. Such people don’t find anything unusual about the questions, so they do, believe it or not, answer “yes.”

The psychologist also explained that the Agency sought to weed out anyone who had a strong belief in unquestioning obedience, because our work would require us to break many foreign laws. We’d have to guide ourselves by our mission and our judgment, not a foreign country’s rules. “We want people who question,” he said, “people who would have made poor concentration camp guards.”

Roger welcomed us on this, our first official day, by saying, “This is the best class we’ve ever had.” I assumed there must have been an assassin’s bomb, or a knife fight with a terrorist, behind those missing fingers of his. “Nah,” said Max, one of my new classmates. “He lost those to a lawnmower.”

Our chief instructor, Harry, welcomed us to the course, also saying, “This class is vastly superior to previous classes, much more highly qualified.” Most of the speakers who followed him also congratulated us on how much more qualified we were than previous training groups. All the speakers emphasized the Agency’s push to move away from embassies, and how we represented the future of the Agency.

The first week was a “Hell Week” of cruelty far worse than the mere push-ups and abuse of a Marine boot camp. For ten straight hours each day, with rare breaks, we sat in an airless conference room—shades drawn, of course—as a procession of Agency employees talked about themselves, their day to day lives, their opinions and feelings, and their past assignments. Each speaker arrived late, which was of no consequence, since the previous speaker usually hadn’t finished talking yet. None of the speakers used notes or had organized their talks in any way. They arrived, got a cup of coffee, sat down, and spoke in a monotone. I penciled a note to my classmate Max, asking for an explanation. He replied, “Welcome to the Agency speaking style. The highest-ranking guy in the room gets to talk for as long as he wants. The lower-ranking guys sit and listen.” It was excruciating.

Getting to know my new classmates, I learned that my hiring path into the Agency was unusual. Most of the new hires had come in through personal connections—or through “blind ads,” newspaper ads for employment at unnamed companies geared to people with experience with international business, foreign languages, and foreign travel. I’d sought out the Agency as a patriotic duty, so I was wary of that hiring method. Blind ads respondents hadn’t come to the CIA out of a feeling of obligation; they were mostly unemployed people looking for jobs. My classmate Jonah, a tall, red-haired man, had answered a blind ad and described the process. “Just imagine how I felt when I found out who it was behind that blind ad!” he said. After being hired, Jonah had first worked as a desk officer at HQs.

Max, however, had been recruited from the paramilitary branch of the Agency and called himself a “knuckle dragger.” He had a hard, military look, complete with a flattop haircut. He didn’t fit the typical profile of someone who traveled a lot and spoke foreign languages, but he was confident and had a lot of Agency experience. We had similar military backgrounds and soon became friends.

Given their prior employment within the Agency, Max and Jonah knew their way around. I asked them for an insider’s view of the polygraph. My own exam had taken almost a whole day. Max said, “That’s nothing.” He explained that when he’d first joined, they used the Box to filter out homosexuals. His Box operator didn’t like his reactions to that set of questions and thought he was concealing something. The operator put him through a new test based only on questions about homosexuality, among which was the question, “Have you ever held another man’s penis in your hand?” After the test, the operator still didn’t believe him, but let him into the Agency anyway provided that he sign a special form confirming that he was not a homosexual and promising not to engage in homosexual behavior. “I think you got off easy,” Max said.

For me, the Box had been a grueling all-day affair. It had taken Max two days to complete. Jonah’s experience was different. He boasted, “From the moment I saw the operator until the time I left, I took twenty-five minutes.”

Our instructors were retired case officers, mostly with careers in Western Europe. Harry had spent time in East Asia and the Middle East, and had been the chief of station in a country during its revolution. I’d been there as a child at the same time. We even realized that we had a few acquaintances in common.

The night of the revolution, my family could hear the small arms fire. The shooting went on all night, rifles and pistols being shot into the air. For all the noise, it was considered a bloodless coup, and few people were hurt. Because my family had just arrived, we lived in a temporary apartment in the city center. My father snuck out the next day to find the family some food. He returned in one piece, and when it felt safe to go outside, we went tentatively into the streets. They were covered with spent shells and, here and there, a ricocheted bullet. In an odd twist on boyhood beachcombing, I filled a box with these mementos. I still have it in my basement somewhere.

THE AGENCY TRADITIONALLY had deployed spies through the State Department, so our training course was still designed to teach us how to work as diplomats. The course, which set our spy activities in the fictitious country of Slobovia, is still the basic foundation of Agency training.

The instructors took delight in inventing and discussing obscure facts about Slobovia: the personality traits of Slobovian leaders, Slobovian historical anecdotes, and so on. The Slobovia scenario had been designed in the 1950s and edited only lightly since then. We paged through a thick binder of information about this fanciful nation. “The best trainees are method actors, people who convince themselves that they really are in Slobovia,” one instructor told us. My classmate Jonah made an intensive study of his Slobovia book, and, later, an ostentatious show of his Slobovian mastery.

The fundamental work of the clandestine service was to find people with access to secret information of interest to the US government and to recruit them to provide human intelligence, or “humint.” The traditional means of meeting new contacts overseas was on the diplomatic cocktail party circuit. Our exercises began by attending a faux embassy cocktail party to meet instructors who role-played as potential human sources.

Moe, a hulking youth, was in charge of our safe-house apartments. The afternoon of our first faux cocktail party, he arrived at our safe house to stock the refrigerator and cabinets with a collection of alcoholic beverages, which Max dubbed “Moe’s Private Reserve.” Moe lined up sample beverage selections on a conference room table and set himself up as bartender.

Max and I arrived at the party, asked Moe for two bottles of beer, and went to work, mingling with our Slobovian “guests.” We’d been assigned specific people with whom to try to build a personal connection, in hopes of making a more private future appointment. I made my way around the gathering, met my target, and got his phone number for a lunch meeting. Max did the same thing with his target. It seemed like a fairly simple introduction to spycraft.

At the safe-house office the next day, Max and I sensed that something was amiss. When Harry spotted us, he barked, “You two, Max and Ishmael, get into the conference room.” There, we found a panel of instructors.

“What the hell were you guys thinking at the party last night?” Harry demanded. The others scowled and grumbled. They were genuinely upset.

“Well, I thought the exercise went well,” I said. “We found our targets, struck up good conversations, and then prepared to set follow-up meetings. I thought everything went fine.”

The instructors’ grumbling increased. When Harry saw that Max and I had no idea what we’d done wrong, he patiently explained that diplomats never drink directly from beer bottles at diplomatic cocktail parties. “I tried to help you out,” said Harry. “Don’t you remember me asking if you’d like a glass?” I did remember: I’d thought Harry was just trying to be nice. Max and I acknowledged our mistake, but the instructors never let us live down our faux pas.

THE INSTRUCTORS LED US in classroom work and exercises on tradecraft and agent recruitment. The classroom portion was most difficult for me, because it meant long hours sitting in a closed, curtained, airless room, listening to Agency veterans drone on. At least they were paid a reasonable hourly rate, nothing like the free-for-all that erupted years later, after 9/11. They were restricted to a thirty-nine-hour work week, without overtime. This meant our training day was usually held between 8 and 5, and night work was rare. Of course, if an instructor hadn’t booked his 39 hours in a given week, he could extend Friday evening by speaking on any topic that tickled his fancy until he hit the mark. As is true of many older men, the instructors loved to talk and to be listened to. It was a blowhard’s dream.

The classroom was a hard slog, and after many months of it I built up an aversion to long talks. To this day, I have trouble accepting dinner invitations for fear of being trapped with a bore.

The instructors had videotaped themselves talking during previous training courses, so if they had an appointment and couldn’t deliver the lecture in person, they’d pop in a video of themselves and torment us from the VCR. We watched Roger present a three-hour lecture on “international finance,” much of which consisted of him holding up foreign currency and saying, “This is a German mark. This is a British pound....”

I considered the training a necessary evil, an obstacle that had to be overcome to get out to an overseas field assignment and protect our nation—anything to make me feel like a genuine case officer. Jonah did a better job of handling the frustration, keeping a look of engagement on his face and asking questions designed to show interest and enthusiasm. Yet every day that I sat in that classroom, I felt weaker. Every day Charlie spent conducting espionage, he got stronger. Time is all we have on this earth, and I knew that I wanted to spend my time battling America’s enemies. I also knew that my instructors were sensitive to “attitude,” so what I needed to do first and foremost was wipe that bored scowl off my face.

I came up with a solution. My foreign language skills were lacking, so each day before work, during breaks and lunchtime, and after work, I drew up lists of foreign words and phrases to memorize. While seated in the classroom, I kept the list in my lap so I could glance down at it surreptitiously. While the instructors prattled on, I memorized. Listening to the lectures and memorizing at the same time, I felt challenged and productive. The bored scowl gradually disappeared.

I also rose early each day to exercise, running in parks near my home or working out on a weight set I kept in the basement. I saw the poor physical condition in the faces and bodies of colleagues, especially graduates of mid- and late-1980s training classes, and I wanted to keep myself in top shape. I did exercises I could measure, like distance running, pull-ups, and resistance training, to keep track. If the numbers stayed the same or increased, at least I knew that I wasn’t falling apart.

Training outside the classroom involved meetings with instructors role-playing as agents or potential agents. We’d perform surveillance detection by car, public transportation, walking, or some combination, until we arrived at the meeting, usually held in safe houses, hotel rooms, our houses, instructors’ houses, restaurants, or parks. Afterwards we’d write it all up in proper Agency format. The Agency had strict writing standards. Spelling and grammar were always to be flawless.

On exercise days, when there was less classroom work, I often wound up with free time to study languages and to be with my family. I did my best to complete exercises in three hours. Some of my classmates, particularly Jonah, claimed to be putting in twenty-hour days. Concerned that I was missing something, I studied their written after-action reports and was relieved to see that they were the same quality and length as mine.

The instructors urged us to create highly detailed written reports about our meetings. After a role-playing rendezvous with an instructor at the instructor’s house, Max described the interior: The instructor was “a pack rat”; his house was “filthy, with stacks of papers and piles of refuse all over the place. A real pigsty. Can we rely on an agent who keeps his house in such a mess?” The instructors read Max’s write-up, passed it around, enjoyed it immensely, and teased the messy instructor mercilessly. They’d all been to the house at one time or another and agreed with the “pigsty” verdict. When the pig’s wife found out about the incident, she made him throw out all his hoarded piles of stuff, then made him pay for expensive remodeling.

OUR INSTRUCTORS LED US in candid discussions of the harsh realities of human source operations. Ever since “the Lord commanded Moses to send spies to report on the land of Canaan,”³ good leaders have recognized the value of human intelligence. My experience in the CIA was limited to human intelligence collection within the clandestine service, or Directorate of Operations.

The skeleton in the clandestine service’s closet was that the CIAʹs primary mission since its founding had been to recruit Soviet spies—and that the Agency had never succeeded. The methods used during our recruitment exercises seemed valid, the instructors dedicated and intelligent, but Soviets were immensely difficult, even impossible, to recruit. Our instructors admitted this. They told us that the only Soviet spies with whom the CIA had worked were volunteers.⁴

Our case officers had encountered Soviets at social and diplomatic functions and had documented those meetings in writing. “After each social contact with a Soviet,” a veteran instructor said, “we just kept making those files thicker and thicker.” Knowing that our instructors had never really mastered the skills they taught added a slight but inescapable friction to the classes in which we studied our new trade.

The act of volunteering was a challenge. “In two of the most important Cold War cases involving Soviet volunteers, Popov and Penkovsky, these two Russian GRU officers literally had to throw themselves at Western officials before their offers to spy were taken up.”⁵

Information provided to the KGB by CIA case officers Edward Howard, Aldrich Ames, Harold Nicholson, and by FBI agent Robert Hanssen later led to the execution or imprisonment of most of the later volunteers. In April and June 1985, Ames gave the KGB information on all Soviet cases run by the Agency.⁶ (The KGB morphed into the SVR and the FSB during the 1990s, but for simplicity’s sake I continue to call it the KGB. The GRU is the Soviet military intelligence service, a counterpart to the KGB.)

In the 1950s, the Agency sought intelligence about the Soviet Union by digging a tunnel from Berlin into East Germany, and by tapping into Soviet communications cables. Harry was proud of the work he had done on the Berlin Tunnel.

“I cut my teeth—” He paused, relishing his audience’s rapt attention, “—on the Berlin Tunnel.”

Max asked, “Wasn’t the Berlin Tunnel a failure?”

Harry explained that although the Soviets had learned of the tunnel from George Blake, their own human source within the British SIS, well before the tunnel was even built, the Soviets chose to let us continue the project in order to protect Blake’s identity. Some information gained from the tunnel operation had been useful, but it had also been given up willingly. (Several CIA memoirs, including those by Hitz and Helms, rate the operation as a strong success. I would rate it more soberly as an expensive, low-risk, and people-intensive operation.)

The Soviets eventually staged an accidental discovery of the tunnel, at a point when they felt that they could shut it down without blowing Blake’s cover.

Our instructors’ experiences varied by the locations of their assignments. An old hand with a lifetime of service in Third World countries had made countless recruitments, or “scalps”—a sign of achievement and prowess, or so we thought. He didn’t agree that they were good measure of anything. “Shake a tree and the President’s cabinet would fall out,” he told us. “Get all the scalps you want. Or go find the President of the country and pay him and he’ll tell you everything he knows.”

WE LEARNED TO CREATE disguises suitable to our various features. Max’s appearance changed dramatically when his flattop haircut was hidden with a wig and his clean-shaven appearance masked with mustache and glasses. Jonah was harder to disguise because he already had bushy red hair, large glasses, and a mustache: He employed hair colorings and gels.

We practiced impersonal communications, such as dead drops, brush passes, and secret writing. I constructed concealment devices from small branches found in the park, which, when hollowed out with a knife, could hold tiny rolled-up messages. Max and Jonah scoffed at my little branches and built huge, sloppy devices, complete with glued-on pine needles and leaves. They mocked the “laziness and ineptitude” of my humble devices; I rejoined that their elaborate messes revealed simple minds.

Our secret writing materials didn’t work. The instructor figured they must have been “on the shelf” too long. In any case, I never ended up conducting much “impersonal communication.” Those techniques always seemed to be geared to agents operating in Soviet states, rather than in the conditions that prevailed around the world today. It was always more important to me to meet informants, or “agents,” in person and to receive their information in a businesslike situation, such as in an office or a hotel room. This was especially important because the agents and I usually spoke different native languages; there wasn’t a lot that could have been communicated well using impersonal methods.

We didn’t practice breaking-and-entering. The Agency’s breaking-and-entering operations were done by technicians who had undergone extensive specialized training. Max had met one of these specialists. During a period of financial strain combined with feelings of idleness and boredom, the specialist had started breaking into banks during his spare time. Max said he’d actually robbed a few before he was caught and sent to prison.

In the entryways of our safe houses, in an attempt to look like an ordinary business office, Moe had placed IN/OUT boards with fictitious names. Max rearranged the letters in the names to form new names that he found amusing. The instructors were enraged. Jonah didn’t think it was too funny, but kept Max’s identity secret. The instructors sought to deal with the name-changing by mocking the immaturity and childishness of the anonymous perpetrator. This had little effect; the names continued to change. Then the instructors threatened mass punishments; finally, they surrendered and endured it, until Max just lost interest.

JONAH OFTEN BROUGHT HIS COMPUTER in to the training safe house on weekends to work. The safe house had a burglar alarm. One Sunday, Jonah arrived, set his computer down, opened the door, set off the alarm, then realized he’d left the alarm system’s disarm code in his car. He ran to his car to get it, but when he returned the police had already responded to the alarm.

The police saw the computer outside the door, which made the situation look like a theft in progress. They tried to arrest Jonah.

“It’s okay, officers,” Jonah said. “I’m authorized to use this office. This computer belongs to me. I just forgot the alarm code and had to run back to my car to get it.”

“Can you show us some ID, sir?”

Jonah showed the policemen his identification.

“Can you show us anything that proves you have legal access to this office? Can you show us your desk?”

The policemen looked inside. Each desk was bare and the office was empty of any personal objects. There was nothing in the office that could be connected to Jonah.

“Which one are you?” The policemen pointed to the IN/OUT board that listed the names Ben Dover, I. P. Lowe, etc.

The police put Jonah in their squad car and drove him to the precinct. Fortunately, he had a phone number for Moe, who rushed down to the station and convinced the police that Jonah did have legal access to the office.

A rumor spread through HQs that Jonah had been caught trying to steal a computer. Max and I pointedly squashed the rumor whenever we heard it repeated.

SINCE WE WERE ALWAYS TO DENY that we were diplomats working for the US Department of State, my classmates and I were given details of a light cover company for use during our time in the US, prior to overseas deployments. The cover company consisted of a mailing address in a high-rise office building, plus telephone and fax numbers. When a couple of friends asked for my business contact information, I gave them these numbers. Later, a friend called one of the numbers and reached something called “Acme Office Solutions.” He asked for me.

Long pause. “Please hold.” Another pause. “No Ishmael here.”

“Well, Ishmael gave me this number. Are you sure he’s not available?”

“Sorry, no Ishmael working here.”

When I heard about this, I resolved that in the future I would test and evaluate cover company numbers before handing them out.

We prepared and practiced cover stories. If we were meeting an agent, we always had to have an excuse ready to explain why. The instructors said we had better beware, though. We might have a great cover story, but a KGB officer observing us might not even bother to ask for it. He might just see us with the agent together and figure it out.

This point was based on the apocryphal story of an American case officer working for the State Department as a diplomat who was having lunch with a Soviet weapons scientist. Their children went to the same school; his cover story was that they were discussing the school’s sports program. A KGB officer happened to walk by the restaurant, saw the American diplomat and the Soviet scientist having lunch together, and didn’t bother to look at the sports and school brochures the case officer had arrayed on the table. He saw an American diplomat meeting a Soviet scientist. It was all the information he needed to reach the correct conclusion. The KGB bundled the Soviet scientist off to Siberia.

The instructors taught us the Agency’s history with Cuban agents, a case study in bad tradecraft. The Agency had run dozens of Cuban agents over the years and in the end nearly all turned out to be double agents. Those who were real agents had been captured and imprisoned or executed by the Cuban government.⁷

Our case officers handled Cuban agents by connecting them in networks. This meant that bad agents had access to the identities of legitimate agents. Some legitimate Cuban agents were infiltrated on missions into Cuba straight into the arms of double agents, where they were immediately arrested. The Cuban double agents then used the communications gear of the legitimate agents to communicate false intelligence back to the Agency. The legitimate agents had been instructed to include signals within their communications to indicate they were not under duress. The signals, appearing in the communications, would mean that all was well. When communications from these agents did not contain the duress signals, thus indicating something had gone wrong, the Agency figured the Cuban agents had just forgotten them. Refusing to believe that there might be a problem, the Agency continued to send agents to their imprisonments or deaths in Cuba. When the double agents realized the Agency had figured out at last that they all worked for Cuba, their last messages to their case officers were words to the effect of “Die, capitalist pigs.”

In the aftermath of the Cuban debacle, the Cuban government produced a TV documentary. We watched it during our training class. It showed our case officers, as members of the State Department, driving around Cuba servicing dead drops, doing surveillance detection routes, and leaving signals. The Cubans had rigged cameras in trees and bushes at the places where these clandestine acts were to occur. Our people looked around furtively as they picked up or dropped off items. The documentary was narrated in a light-hearted style: “Here is John Smith from the US interests section! He is taking a walk in the woods. Why is he looking around nervously? Lo! What did he just pick up?”

The Cuban programs were among the most important that the Agency ran during the Cold War. Many case officers earned promotions and awards based on their handling of Cuban agents. As time went on, many of these officers became Agency mandarins. No promotion or award was ever rescinded, no accountability ever enforced.

Vast amounts of false intelligence were fed into the system by the Cubans. Although a scrub of the system should have erased a lot of it, our instructors felt that because there had been so many Cuban doubles and such a large volume of production over a long period, a great deal of the false intelligence remained in our databases. All of the Cuban double agents had passed polygraph examinations.

Criticism of the operations was open and refreshing. Our instructors didn’t pull any punches on the Cuban program and felt it was important to analyze the past to learn how to avoid repeating mistakes.

In this analysis, HQs looked back on the cases and tried to find clues that could have shown these agents were bad. If an agent took a long time to respond to instructions, or was late for a meeting, it might mean that he had to check in first with his real handlers. In meetings, agents were scrutinized with an eye toward whether they were trying to control or manipulate the proceedings. Some speculated that the Cuban government prohibited its double agents from reporting to the Agency on certain restricted areas of information, even if the information they intended to report was false.

FOR TRAINING IN RECRUITMENTS, we studied the motivations of a human source and the rewards necessary to gain his cooperation. Usually the motivator was money, but it could also be the desire for praise, or the dictates of personal ideology. Playing to the natural human weakness for praise and attention, the KGB was reputed to take its agents, dress them in Soviet military uniform, promote them to general, and pin medals on them. Then, for “security purposes,” the uniform and medals would be taken away for safekeeping. Kim Philby, an infamous British spy for the KGB, was told that he was an official KGB officer. When he fled to Moscow, however, his uniform and full access to KGB headquarters were denied.⁸

A parade of speakers visited our safe house throughout the course to give valuable tips picked up during their careers. Later, we had the opportunity to meet informally with them. I enjoyed meeting one veteran officer in particular—a gregarious and charismatic man with the personality of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul. The Godfather was one of the Agency’s best recruiters.

“Aim at getting overseas,” the Godfather said. “Take any assignment you can get, just get overseas. Don’t be picky about location. Don’t be picky about the mission you’re assigned, either. Once you’re overseas, you’ll be able to figure out ways to work on the important targets, regardless of the initial intent of the assignment.”

That evening, following his visit to our safe house, the Godfather gave me some tips privately, over drinks, on working the system. The Godfather, for example, often married and divorced women who were not US citizens. Marrying a foreigner could get an officer sent to a cubicle at HQs for five years or more, while the Agency pondered what to do or just waited until the wife could get US citizenship. The Godfather’s solution was simple: Just don’t tell anyone. He’d never told his wives or ex-wives about his Agency job, and he’d never told the Agency about his wives and ex-wives. As a result he’d been able to remain overseas for many years.

A retired officer named Two Dog Dave dropped by our class periodically, always to give us the same disturbing prescription for life in a foreign country: Get two dogs. “This way,” he explained, “if a burglar tries to feed poisoned meat to your dog, one dog will eat the poison, but the other will still be ready to bark and bite.”

A visiting speaker described a recent breakdown in an overseas station. The station chief accused the deputy chief of being a wife-beater. The deputy in turn accused the chief, a woman, of sexual harassment and sexual misbehavior. The Agency charged the chief with sexual misbehavior, removed her from her position, and sent her back to HQs to an unimportant job. She sued the Agency, which settled out of court and paid her $410,000. She later became a lawyer specializing in litigation against government agencies.⁹

In the past, most of the Agency’s employees had been men. The case officers had all been men, and the wife’s role had been to support her husband and the family. Our instructors’ wives had never worked for the Agency. But by the early 1990s the Agency was about 40 percent female and by 2007 the gender ratio was about one to one. An increasing number of HQs employees were married to each other and were called “tandem couples.”

Jonah envied these tandem couples and called them One For the Price of Twos or OFTPOTs. He wanted to put his wife on the payroll, too, but she’d refused. Equality of men and women in the workplace became a tool used by many Agency employees to double their household income. In most American workplaces, it’s an enormous challenge for both parents to work full-time jobs while raising their children. In the government, with a relaxed eight-hour day of chatting and coffee, it’s not a problem. OFTPOTs could use “flex” time, in which one of them might work from 0700 to 1500 and the other from 0900 to 1700, so that one of them could be there to see the kids off to school and the other could be home when the kids returned. Both would have plenty of energy left over to play with the kids and help with their homework.

In theory, there were rules meant to prevent conflicts of interest—that is, rules prohibiting wives and husbands from working in the same office. But the OFTPOTs were often the same age, grade, and specialty, and given the Agency’s love of bureaucracy, it wasn’t unusual for a husband and wife to end up as two distinct layers of management within a single office.

DURING THE TRAINING COURSE, one of our children was born. Babies have a way of arriving at inconvenient hours, and this one came at about 0300. Later, at about 0800, I made a series of phone calls to family members to give them the happy news, and to my instructors to say that I wouldn’t be in that day. At noon I got a call from Harry.

“Where the hell are you?”

“My wife had a baby early this morning,” I said. “I called and left a message.”

“You get in here now,” he said. He was not impressed. “This is a demanding course and we can’t afford to be falling behind like this.”

The baby and my wife were resting and I wasn’t needed at the hospital, so I obeyed the order. Harry was waiting for me with a document.

“Sign the document,” he said.

“What’s it about?”

“By signing this document, you acknowledge your failure to report for training this morning. We’ll keep this document in your training file.”

I signed the document. Harry filed it in his briefcase, then assigned me an exercise that took a couple of hours to finish. I shrugged it off. It would have been nice to be with my family, but a couple of hours of training exercises before returning to the hospital wasn’t so terrible.

THE NEXT WEEK, Max had a car pickup meeting with a role-playing instructor. He picked up the instructor and they drove around, talking. Max noticed the instructor looked a little gray, and as the meeting wore on the instructor started to make choking, gurgling sounds. Max stopped the car and the instructor opened the door and made more gasping noises, then vomited a bit, mostly spitting and noise. The instructor said he’d been out too late the night before.

After Max’s exercise, we all met up in a local bar, and his instructor, feeling better, told stories about his past operations. The stories were windy and incoherent. I signaled the others to join me in another bar, the Vienna Inn, a place in Northern Virginia popular with Agency employees. The instructor didn’t seem to notice us slip away, one by one, until only Jonah remained, listening attentively to his stories.

At the Vienna Inn, a friend of Max’s joined our group. Max had known the man in the Agency’s paramilitary program. The man assumed Max had left the Agency and that none of us worked for it. After downing half a dozen glasses of beer, the man whispered that he had something to show me. He pulled out his wallet and showed me his CIA identification card.

“That’s who I really work for,” he said. He gave me a proud, boozy smile.

“Wow, you’re a secret agent? That’s really something.”

“You got that right.”

THE INSTRUCTORS, all of whom were retired, had had solid careers. Some of them had been high-ranking managers. Our active duty HQs managers, though, were more of a mixed bag. Some of them were officers who’d gotten in trouble overseas and, after receiving their one-way tickets home, had been assigned to managerial positions at HQs.

One morning, a chief from HQs came to speak to us—a chief whom a previous class had nicknamed “the Worst Spy in the World.”

The Worst Spy in the World had been assigned to a US ally. After meeting with an agent, he sat in his hotel room typing up the results on a computer. He heard a knock on the door of his hotel room, so he shut down his computer and got up to answer. A cleaning lady had come to deliver clean towels to the room. He took the stack of towels, thanked the cleaning lady, and went back to work.

A few minutes later there was another knock at the door. Figuring it was the cleaning lady again, he left his computer on with his notes visible on the screen, and went to answer the door. This time a squad of policemen surged in, pinned him down, took his computer and notes, and hauled him down to the police station for questioning. The country, though a US ally, was not an ally of Israel. The Worst Spy had used an Israeli-sounding alias, so the police thought he might be a Mossad spy. They spoke to him in harsh tones. After a few minutes he responded by breaking down and confessing to his CIA affiliation.

“Well, why didn’t you just say so!” the police said, relieved.

Everyone was all smiles, and the police gave him a ride to the American embassy. The embassy gave him his one-way ticket back to the US.

The Worst Spy, true to his moniker, was a whiner: “After all I’d been through, as soon as I got back to HQs, the first people who came to see me were from Accounting. They demanded that I account for the missing $100,000 in cash I’d been given for my revolving fund!” The Worst Spy’s personal finances and Agency accountings were in disarray when he returned to the US, so he picked up a paper route to help make ends meet. He arose early each morning to deliver newspapers before reporting to his job at HQs.

We later learned that the Worst Spy had first come to the attention of the police because, while riding a bus to a meeting, he’d discussed his religion with his fellow passengers. They were drug smugglers. Feigning interest in his nattering, they distracted him while filling his suitcase with cocaine. This would make their border crossing less risky. Since the police at the border knew that his traveling companions were drug smugglers, they followed him to his hotel.

As the Worst Spy finished his sorry tale, another manager came by to tell his story. He’d been on a foreign assignment for a few months when he began to suspect that he was under surveillance. He hadn’t been able to confirm it, but he’d spotted furtive movements by people on the street. He begged HQs for help and advice.

HQs thought he was seeing “ghosts”—incidents that look like surveillance but aren’t. But his persistence convinced them, and they spirited him back to the US. Later, the Agency learned that he had indeed been under surveillance and that his host country had been on the verge of arresting him for espionage.

“Bet you don’t have any plans to go back to that country on vacation,” Max said. “Probably don’t want to get on any airplanes that plan to make a fuel stop there, either.”

MY TRAINING CLASS enjoyed hearing that we were the best and most qualified they’d ever had, but there was a definite edge to the praise, a hint that there was more to the story. We eventually learned why.

The Agency had been promising to separate itself from the Department of State for years. Today, intelligence targets, human sources in WMD programs, or members of terrorist groups are all inaccessible to American diplomats. Everyone admitted that our Department of State diplomats weren’t getting the job done and that the Agency needed to find new ways of doing business. But it was hard for a bureaucracy to change.

During the early 1980s, Director William Casey ordered the Agency to increase its non-State Department capabilities. In response to his orders, the Agency hired and trained large classes during the mid- and late-1980s. My class entered shortly after this, and we had front-row seats for the aftermath.

The individuals in these classes encountered strong bureaucratic resistance, with a failure rate of nearly 100 percent. Within a few years, only a few of these non-State Department officers were operating successfully overseas, and most had left the Agency. A few continued to work at HQs in other jobs, and a few switched over to become diplomats with the State Department. The official explanation within the Agency was that Casey had pushed the Agency too hard and too fast, so that it had had insufficient time to properly evaluate the new people before hiring them.

We saw these forlorn individuals wandering our safe-house apartments, and we listened to their sad tales. They looked like they’d been through a rough time physically: out of shape, unsmiling, bags under their eyes. Andy, a member of a class of about twenty recruits during the mid 1980s, said that most of his fellow trainees were qualified but a few were indeed a bit strange. Several of them barely spoke English. One man made loud snorting noises and occasionally grabbed his crotch.

Another had an odd habit of repeating the last few words he heard spoken in a sentence. If the instructor said, “Today we will talk about surveillance,” this fellow would mutter, “About surveillance.” During a break, the man went outside, lit a cigarette, and then put the entire cigarette in his mouth and chewed. Then he pulled his trousers down to his knees and fell to the ground in a trance. When he awoke a few moments later, he didn’t remember anything about what he’d done. It turned out that he had a medical condition which had led to a fit and seizure. The instructors transferred him into an HQs job.

Andy said a fellow classmate had approached him and said that she planned to have a little plastic surgery done, and would he be so kind as to pick her up at the doctor’s office afterward, as she might be feeling a bit woozy. When Andy arrived at the hospital, the minor work turned out to have been a major facial reconstruction. The woman was bloody and semi-conscious. The doctor said, “So, you’re the boyfriend,” and showed him how to insert the anal suppositories that she would need to control her pain. She was bedridden for a week, and he nursed her back to health.

Bad luck haunted this class. Once, while filing out of a safe-house training site, the class was photographed as a group by a man who passed by in a car. The class noted the car’s license number and traced it. The plate had been stolen from an elderly woman in Iowa. A few days later it happened again, with a different car, and this time traces revealed that that license number did not even exist.

A rumor circulated at HQs that some of these trainees’ IQ scores were quite low. Another had it that one of them was an ex-convict.

Day after day in the airless and artificially-lit classrooms, tension mounted between the mid-1980s classes and their instructors. The trainees spiked their instructors’ coffee with Ex-Lax and let air out of their tires. The instructors fought back by flunking several trainees. A lawyer in an office below the safe-house apartment noticed the odd comings and goings and began telling clients that the CIA lived upstairs. When the office’s location became widely known in the neighborhood, the Agency closed the office and moved the training class to a different location.

Two decades later, the Agency was still pointing to the debacle of these training classes as a reason not to push the Agency to separate from the State Department. Officers who’d entered before or after this period were careful to point out that they weren’t part of that big hiring wave.

I’d met a lot of the people from the mid-1980s classes, and thought that most of them could have been successful if properly led. None of them had joined thinking, “I’d like to be a failure.” Bureaucracy thrives in office environments, and Casey had pushed upon the bureaucracy a whole bunch of case officers who would be operating in a freewheeling way. I figured the mid-1980’s classes had been eviscerated by the bureaucracy because they presented a threat to them.

The way these people were abused by the bureaucracy was tough on their families as well. They’d go to a domestic office for six months and then get sent back to HQs. Those few who got an overseas assignment were usually given a one-way ticket home within a few months, only to remain indefinitely in temporary housing. Some spent years with their families in the Oakwood, a popular temporary housing complex in the Washington, D.C. area. There’s nothing wrong with the Oakwood, a clean and efficient housing service, but to be in limbo there was to be in a kind of hell. I swore to my wife that we’d never do time there.

One man had returned to the US after deciding, he said, that the intelligence service in his country of assignment was on to him. (I doubted this story: The country in question was a terrible place to live, and I suspected he’d just done it for his family’s sake.) When he left the country with his family, he didn’t bother to let HQs know where he was or what he was doing. He took a ship, a train, and a plane on a circuitous route out of the country, so it took him several days to get back to the US. HQs was panic-stricken. The man and his family got themselves stuck in the Oakwood for a year and a half. Surely its use as an instrument of punishment says something about the desirability of a long visit there.

IN THE WANING DAYS of our training course, a manager at HQs belatedly realized that Max had once been a paramilitary “knuckle dragger” with the Agency and suggested that this made him unfit to be a non-State Department officer. The manager wanted him removed and sent back to the paramilitary group. Max wanted to stay, and he put up a fight.

While he negotiated with the bureaucracy, he continued his training. In the “building inspector” exercise, a trainee meets with a role-player acting as a Slobovian agent. During the meeting, a knock comes at the door. It is another role-player acting as a Slobovian building inspector. It’s an easy exercise. The correct thing to do is to stay relaxed and ask what you can do to help the inspector, to prevent him from developing suspicions and potentially calling the police.

Max felt that he’d put up with enough play-acting foolishness. He said, “Go away. I don’t have time for you.”

The building inspector went berserk and tried to force his way in. Max placed his hand on the instructor’s face and pressed him out of the room, screaming, “Get out of here, you geezer.”

Max earned a failing grade, but the violence of his response so frightened the instructors that their criticism of his conduct was surprisingly subdued.

Perhaps by coincidence, he convinced HQs to let him stay in the program.

TOWARD THE END OF the training course, Max was convinced that there would be a climactic final exercise involving days and nights of challenges—something to push us to our limits and beyond. He was eager for it. I didn’t see why the course, having flowed like a lazy river so far, should suddenly get any more difficult. As graduation loomed, I taunted him: “Three days left, Max, how tough do you think it’s going to be?” Finally the course ended with a big blah.

At our graduation ceremony, Roger said, “You know, you guys were a good bunch, but you ought to see the next training class. Those guys have some amazing qualifications. They’ll be the best we’ve ever had.” Thanks, Roger. We all could have seen that one coming.

The director of the CIA and some other HQs mandarins attended our ceremony as well. The entire class graduated. We didn’t have a final ranking as far as I knew, but at a celebration that evening at a nearby bar, a classmate took me aside and said, “The instructors ranked me first in the class.”

Another classmate confided, “Harry told me I was the top graduate in the class.”

A late-arriving classmate: “Just got done talking to Roger. He says I was ranked number one in our class.”

Coming out of the restroom, still zipping up his fly, Jonah said, “Hey, Ishmael, you know I was ranked at the top of the class?”

I decided that if so many people were at the top, surely I must be at the bottom. “I learned today that I was ranked last in the class,” I said.

Word spread to Max that I’d been ranked last. Confronting me in front of a group of our classmates, he jabbed me in the chest and said, “Sir, you are a liar. I was ranked last in the class.”

“My friend, I am sorry, but you are mistaken. None other than the director of clandestine operations told me that I was ranked last in the class.”

“Ishmael, stop the lies. I have been personally informed by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency that I was ranked last.”

The next day, we said goodbye to our instructors. They’d taught us everything they knew. I thought the training course could have been quite a bit shorter, but the instructors meant well. My training class was assigned to stations located within the US for “on the job” training (OJT). I left immediately for my assignment, eager to pursue better living through espionage, but my classmates hung around the area for a few more days.

Jonah, finding himself alone in the empty safe house with our only female classmate, backed her into a corner and said, “You know you want it!” He’d sensed her signals of desire throughout the training course; now was their opportunity. It turned out she hadn’t sent any signals. Shoving him away, she fled the office. She was engaged to be married. We’d all met her fiancé.

At the end of the course, I took a State Department language test in German and on the scale of one to five, in which three is fluent and five is native, I scored a four-plus in reading. (Sometimes I’d challenge my wife to open up the German dictionary and try to find a word I didn’t know.) My understanding score was three, my speaking score a two, but I hadn’t had anyone with whom to practice. Encouraged by these test results, I turned immediately to the study of Arabic.

The training year hadn’t been too bad. I’d made good progress in two foreign languages, completed the case officer course, made some good friends, and had a new baby in my family. Still, all I could think about was getting to my new assignment and doing real case officer work.