Читать книгу The Human Factor - Ishmael Jones - Страница 13

★ 3 ★

American Apprenticeship

Must I not serve a long apprenticehood

To foreign passages, and in the end,

Having my freedom, boast of nothing else

But that I was a journeyman to grief?

Shakespeare

The next phase was an on-the-job training tour at an Agency post within the United States. We were now certified case officers, so we’d be able to work on espionage cases, but only under close observation by our domestic offices’ management.

Before I joined the Agency, I’d read that the CIA and the FBI essentially split their operations, with the CIA operating in foreign countries and the FBI operating within the United States. Americans didn’t want a domestic spy agency that could become a threat to liberty, a potential Gestapo or KGB.

In fact, most of the Agency’s offices and people were located in the United States, at HQs and countless stations, bases, and other offices throughout the country. Some employees located in US offices made occasional and brief trips to foreign countries, but most spent the bulk of their careers operating within the US. Eighty-five percent of Agency employees are located domestically at HQs at 24 unmarked offices within the United States, according to one author.¹⁰ I suspect the percentage of Agency employees in the US is higher—more than 90 percent. Years later, after 9/11, the number of US offices grew dramatically. Today it is certainly much higher than 24.

My family flew to our new city and I drove our car, stuffed with household odds and ends. In making a move, bank accounts have to be changed, a rental lease signed, the car put in good shape, the home furnished. The mundane chore of moving from one US city to another is the same for a spy as for anyone else, involving a series of small tasks requiring measured amounts of self-discipline. Before 9/11, the Agency treated its employees located in the US the same as any other federal employees. It paid some moving expenses, but the bulk of the move was on the employee’s dime.

Making a move is relatively simple, but some case officers have trouble getting their families settled properly. If the family is unhappy or insecure at home, it is hard for a case officer to deal with the challenges presented by espionage cases.

After a year of training, I was full of restrained energy. Early in the morning I left my family at our temporary home, a motel, and got to my new domestic post. I stood outside the office, the same kind of nondescript complex as back in D.C., waiting for someone to arrive. The first person came in at 0800, a woman named Sylvia, big and blonde. She was in charge of communications and various administrative tasks in the office. “Who the flock are you?” she said.

She showed me to my office, a cluttered jumble of mismatched furniture and office equipment. I’d have to share it with several other trainees who’d been at the post for several months already. They arrived an hour later and briefed me on their operations.

My fellow trainees showed me the office’s safe room. Each safe contained a drawer stuffed with files on foreigners living in the US: nationality, address, phone number, and occupation. These files were the Holy Grail, the real Glengarry leads. Sitting down at a table in the safe room, I sorted them into piles to explore further (Chinese diplomats, Iranians studying nuclear science) and piles to re-file or shred (Swedish ballerinas and Nicaraguan gardeners).

By mid-morning I was ready to grab the phone. In the Marine Corps I’d learned a sense of urgency and on Wall Street I’d learned how to “make the call.” Success depended on it. I believed that in the Agency it meant this: Make contact with intel targets or Americans will die. After a year of sitting in dimly-lit conference rooms, listening to the droning voices of instructors, I was well beyond ready. I leapt for the phone and began making calls.

My calling created a commotion in the office. My fellow trainees enjoyed the commotion, which unsettled the older employees. The deputy chief was out of the office running an errand, so someone sent the word for the chief. But the chief remained behind his closed door.

“Have you done traces on these leads before calling them?” a woman asked.

“Have you run these leads by the referents? Do you have HQs approval?” asked her husband.

“Ishmael is ‘cold calling’ in there,” said one employee to another.

The hubbub surrounding the door to my office increased, but I kept on smiling, dialing, and setting appointments with potential human sources. Sylvia laughed. “You’re a crazy flocker,” she said.

Finally the deputy chief returned from his errand and the older employees ran to him.

In a calm and gentle way, he took the phone from my hand and hung it up. He asked me to come to his office, where he explained the process for approaching intel targets. It required a written plan and then approval to make the call, both well in advance. Obtaining the approval was a complicated task involving the coordination of many layers of management.

To make a call to a person from China, he explained, I’d first have to go to a “referent,” the man in charge of all things Chinese. Then I’d need to go to that man’s wife, who handled liaison with the FBI, in order to clear it with the Bureau. Then on to the deputy of our office, and then to the boss. The boss would send it to HQs, which would reply within a few weeks. If everything went smoothly it usually took at least a month to get approval to make that first contact.

The deputy studied the appointments I’d made and allowed me to call my contacts back to postpone—except in the case of an Israeli military officer. I had to cancel that meeting. Israel was theoretically an intel target, but in practice we didn’t target Israelis. The deputy explained that the complexities of US/Israeli politics precluded any realistic operations. (Close liaison with Israeli contacts produced one of the Agency’s clearest strategic intelligence successes. An Agency team under the direction of expert CIA officer Waldo Dubberstein¹¹ had provided an uncannily accurate prediction of the starting date, length, and outcome of the Arab/Israeli Six Day War in 1967¹².)

I went back to the OJT office where the other trainees showed me how to use the office’s computer system. Then I spent several weeks drafting messages seeking approval to contact my targets.

OUR OFFICE WAS staffed both by trainees and by case officers ineligible for foreign assignments. Sylvia said she wasn’t eligible for overseas service because of her weight, but the way she back-talked Agency managers may have had something to do with it, too. I found her attitude refreshing, but I wasn’t her boss. The managers in the office, for their part, seemed almost frightened of her. Believing the word “flock” to be technically innocent, she used it liberally, bellowing flock this, flock you, you flockhead.

There were several pairs of married couples in the office. When I’d encountered these OFTPOTs during training, I’d assumed it was just a clever way for an employee to double his or her family income. Later, I realized it was a more complex and often difficult situation. It was harder for OFTPOTs to get overseas assignments because a station had to agree to take both of them. If one had a bad reputation, both suffered. Spouses worked closely with each other. In any working environment there are opportunities to make mistakes and look foolish; OFTPOTs had to look foolish in front of their spouses, as well. Worst of all, there was no respite from the Agency’s dysfunctional bureaucracy: You took it home with you every night. Needless to say, OFTPOTs tended to be bitter.

In later years, whenever I ran into an internal conflict, there always seemed to be an OFTPOT involved.

The deputy and several other employees had health problems which prevented them from further foreign assignments. The chief had done a few tours in the Middle East, but since then his wife had refused to live abroad. He expected to be in the US until he retired. He was so reserved and reclusive that I imagined he’d been through something terrible in the course of his service. Later I learned that he was just naturally shy. What seemed to bother him most about his US assignment was that he made less money than when he was stationed in the Middle East.

AS THE WEEKS PASSED, management’s confidence in me grew as they realized I’d be less likely to cause a flap than they’d first thought. I settled into a routine. I’d create proposals for contact, get approvals from the office and from HQs, and then, armed with a plethora of commercial aliases, plus a beautifully made CIA badge, make appointments with foreign targets at their consular posts, universities, or businesses. I’d meet them to see if they had access to any secrets of interest to the US and if they did, advance the relationship and then recruit them.

I worked from lists of foreign diplomats assigned to consulates in the US, lists of military officers in the US (usually in training courses), and lists of foreign students studying at US universities. Since I was in the Midwest, the quality of foreign diplomats was poor—mostly consular or visa processing personnel. We rarely contacted military officers, as most were in the US for only a few months. The approval process was slow; if we hurried it up, we could possibly get a go-ahead to call a target within a few weeks, but then to recruit him would take more approvals that could drag on for months. Anyone who was in the US for fewer than four to six months just couldn’t be worked through the system.

Typically I sought out graduate students from rogue states whose educations were being paid for by their governments and were studying something useful to the rogue state—such as nuclear science. I marveled at the fact that we allowed these people to come to the US to learn to create the weapons they could turn against us.

Some leads came from other government agencies. At the airport, which I visited often, the INS holding pens were always full of arrivals from Asia. An INS officer explained that illegal immigrants would flush their passports down the toilet on the plane, then arrive with no documents and claim that they’d be killed if they were forced to return. Sometimes they’d cut their wrists, though never deeply enough to endanger their lives. Once, a group of men chained themselves together. The INS would have to release them and tell them to come back again to the office for an interview. Of course none ever did.

Hats in all shapes, colors, and sizes hung from a wall at the airport office. A customs officer saw me looking at them and explained, “Drug dealers always wear funny hats. Whenever we see a guy with a funny hat, we send him to secondary inspection. It often turns out they’re concealing drugs, so when we arrest them, a lot of the hats tend to get left behind. We pin them up on the wall.”

Each day I went to the office in the morning to complete paperwork, then usually headed out for a lunch meeting, then back to the office, then sometimes to an evening or dinner meeting. I kept up my rigorous exercise routine, usually taking a break in the day for a workout or a run.

The word processors in the office were linked, so messages could be passed from computer to computer. Messages which were to be sent to HQs were revised as they went through the layers of management in the office, each manager making changes as the message came through. After a while, I had a large number of proposals and requests in the system still waiting for forward motion. I began to feel the same frustration I’d felt during the training course. Several layers of management, I saw, did nothing but process and edit the cables created by the OJT trainees.

As my operational proposals and requests for approval to meet foreigners built up, the system seemed to freeze up. I filled the time—and vented my frustration—by turning once more to language study, this time Arabic. As with the German I’d practiced during training, I could memorize Arabic unobtrusively by occasionally glancing at lists of words.

The cable, having passed through many layers of management, rarely read as it had going in. It was like a game of Telephone. Many “editors” seemed to make changes to suit their personal agendas. My cables often mutated into something shapeless, flaccid, and always risk-free.

DURING MY DOMESTIC ASSIGNMENT I worked with a professional group of FBI agents. The FBIʹs work was easier to measure than the Agency’s—either they caught criminals or they didn’t—and I thought this gave their organization a clearer sense of purpose. They weren’t perfect. A key FBI manager I dealt with was suing the Bureau for passing him over for a promotion—due, he believed, to his country of origin. He tended to be brittle and he was especially sensitive to any suggestion that the Agency knew the intelligence business better than he did. For the most part, however, FBI agents struck me as forthright and professional.

An immense tension existed between FBI agents and Agency officers because there was an overlap of mission—both were trying to recruit foreigners in the US. Many Agency officers incorrectly believed that FBI agents were little better than unsophisticated cops, good at catching bank robbers but inept at intel work. FBI agents, for their part, felt snubbed by Agency officers.¹³

At a joint conference of FBI and Agency officers I attended, the Agency speaker talked down to the FBI without realizing it. “You FBI agents don’t operate in the intelligence realm a lot, so naturally we know more about these topics that you do. You guys can’t concentrate on this stuff because you are out doing bank robbery investigations.” In protest, FBI agents began getting up and walking out of the conference. Eventually, only Agency employees remained. The speaker and the other Agency people present seemed oblivious that the FBI agents had just walked out.

Agency officers were supposed to check with the FBI before doing any operation involving the more important targets such as Soviets, Iranians, and Chinese. Anything with a possible criminal angle required coordination with the FBI. Working with the lower-level FBI agents was more effective than having our managers talk to their managers, so I got a badge that enabled me to roam the FBI building at will, and it was very useful in building relationships with my counterparts.

USING FALSE DOCUMENTS and a cover company’s address and phone numbers, I contacted a rogue state citizen doing graduate research in nuclear engineering at a local university. I expressed interest in his field. His education was sponsored and paid for by his government. I left him my phone number.

The next time we spoke, he said, “I tried to call you, but your number did not work. They say you are not working there.”

“Of course that’s my number. It must have been a temporary secretary who answered the phone when you called.”

“But she was forceful. She said she worked there a long time, in a very small office, and she knows everyone, but not an Ishmael.”

It had taken me two experiences to learn an important lesson: Never rely on the backstopped phone numbers issued by the Agency. From then on I used my own answering services.

I’d cleared all my routine Agency and FBI approvals to contact the scientist, but the local FBI office in his small university town wanted to be notified personally prior to any meetings on his turf. It was a one-man office. The other OJT trainees had dealt with this agent before and they instructed me in how to deal with him: “He never picks up his phone, so you have to go there in person to talk to him. He’s usually asleep at his desk, with the window shutters closed, so you have to knock. Knock softly so as not to startle him, but knock persistently. If he thinks you might go away, he won’t answer the door.”

Softly but persistently, I repeated to myself. There was something absurd in all this, but at least it turned out that when correct procedures were followed, the agent in question invariably granted his approval.

My scientist was a suspicious fellow, and I had little doubt that he’d been briefed by his government to expect someone like me to give him a call. CIA officers, traditionally working as part of the US Department of State, usually posed as government employees, so I hoped that my approach as a businessman would be more plausible. I planned to ask him to help me solve a technical problem. I’d say that his help might lead to my offering him a job.

I rented a car using my alias identification and credit card, then traveled to the pretty campus where the rogue state scientist studied. We’d planned to meet in the cafeteria. Within fifty paces of it I could feel the heat from the eyes of American graduate students loitering in the area. Several of these scruffy kids followed me as I entered the cafeteria. They affected a studied nonchalance; they were the worst surveillance team I’d ever encountered.

I found my target and greeted him warmly, but he had a smug look that practically sing-songed, “I know something you don’t know.” Some pouty members of his impromptu surveillance team flopped down at adjacent tables, pretending not to listen, and others lurked nearby exchanging glances and whispers.

I pulled some “litter” out of my briefcase, brochures on Acme Software Solutions products, and launched into a discussion of the products and the technical problem which, if solved, might lead to desired product improvements. I set my voice to a drone, my demeanor suggesting nothing out of the ordinary. After half an hour of this, some of our “neighbors” lost interest and drifted away.

Our meeting concluded, I headed back to my car. The surveillance team had dwindled to one long-haired fellow in a dirty tee-shirt. As slyly as possible, he wrote down the license number of my rental car.

Over the next few months, I continued to meet the scientist on campus. Each time, there were fewer graduate students lurking nearby, until finally there were none. He agreed to move meetings off-campus as we came closer and closer to an intelligence relationship.

IN THE SPIRIT OF COOPERATION, HQs asked our office to maintain better relations with other CIA offices in the city. Our chief followed these instructions with enthusiasm. He visited our colleagues in those offices and invited them to visit ours for meetings and cocktail parties. When HQs required the chief to send a list of our office’s achievements each month, half of our list dealt with these efforts to improve good fellowship.

The chief needed more than that, though. He wanted to recruit an agent. Searching our files, he found a former agent who had worked for us in the Middle East for many years. Eventually, things had heated up in the agent’s home country, revolution broke out, and the agent had been exposed as an American sympathizer. He’d fled the country with Agency assistance and had taken refuge in the US, where, for the last ten years, he’d lived a quiet life.

Our chief contacted the former agent and asked if he’d be willing to discuss events in his home country, and keep an eye out for any of its citizens visiting the US. The agent readily agreed to help. He’d missed working for the Agency, had all but been waiting by the phone for a call.

The chief handled the paperwork as though the agent were a brand-new contact. Each month, our office’s list of achievements contained a lengthy paragraph on this operation. The first month described spotting and locating the target, the next month, assessing his access and willingness to cooperate. Finally, a full paragraph announced that the target had agreed to provide secrets to the Agency. This was the classic recruitment cycle we’d all been taught in training. At each step of the cycle, HQs congratulated the chief on the progress he was making.

THE GODFATHER, the veteran spy and man of many wives, visited our office for a few weeks and used it as a base from which to run an operation. While waiting for his meetings to begin, he amused himself by pulling out a local telephone book and dialing up names he recognized as terrorist tribal names. He’d find a Fadlallah or a Mugniyah, pick up the phone and, without a script, give them a call.

“Hello, this is Hussayn,” he said in Arabic, “is this the number for Muhammad? I have not seen him in many years. I am visiting from Lebanon.” Whether there was a Muhammad there or not, the calls often developed into lengthy conversations. He was able to find someone in the world that they knew in common—and he might even stumble upon a traveling terrorist.

The Godfather didn’t obey many Agency rules, but his charisma and strength of personality kept the bureaucrats at bay. He was a bit like Sylvia in the sense that the bureaucracy didn’t smell fear in him and so didn’t know what to do with him. An uncommonly skilled linguist, he could go to a country and learn its language in a short time: “I went to Spain,” he once said. “I was there studying the language for three months. Then I went to meet a target. Talking to the target, it suddenly occurs to me I’m recruiting him in Spanish after only three months of studying the language.”

The Godfather was so effusively outgoing that he almost never had to wait for HQs to give him a go-ahead. He’d just put on a kaffiyeh , rent a limousine and driver, tell a target he worked for a Saudi prince, and hand him a fistful of money. Then he’d tell him to go home and think things over, and they’d meet again the next day.

At seminars and conventions, the Godfather sat in the front row and clapped loudly when his target gave a speech. The target would smile broadly at the Godfather. After the speech, the Godfather would approach the target to ask if he could help him with his particular problem. The target was always eager to converse.

Because of his gregariousness and high-octane activity, the Godfather had to be careful. His cover was utterly blown. Numerous foreign intelligence services knew he worked for the Agency. Most officers would be sent back to HQs when their covers were blown, but not the Godfather.

I spent a lot of time with Lebanese immigrants to target terrorists and counterfeiters. Lebanese targets are complex because their country contains so many different factions. The Godfather helped me to better understand this. A Lebanese Christian will be eager to assist against terrorism, but may have no ability to do so. A Lebanese Sunni may also lack access. Lebanese Shi’a have potential, but then their loyalties are so diffuse that they could be bitter enemies or close allies of any other Shi’a. During my OJT tour I spent many midnight dinners getting to know Lebanese contacts.

We had potential Indian chemical and nuclear targets in the area, but they were tough to evaluate because Agency experience showed that Indians rarely returned to their positions of access in India once they made it to the US. Some of our Agency offices in the US abandoned targeting Indians; one could waste a lot of time courting an Indian only to find he had no intention of returning home.

Dinners and lunches were an important feature of agent development. My Chinese targets couldn’t stand any kind of food except Chinese. They had a visceral hatred of sushi. I also had trouble moving Chinese targets forward because the OFTPOT in charge of Chinese targeting was a sort of James Jesus Angleton character, one who saw the world of espionage as a wilderness of mirrors. The OFTPOT figured that if I’d met a friendly Chinese citizen, he must surely be a Chinese spy trying to recruit me: Any Chinese student in the US had to have an income from the Chinese government.

Several retired case officers worked in the office as contractors. Agency people usually came back as contractors the day after retirement. Prior to 9/11, contractors were paid a reasonable hourly rate. One spent his day chatting and doing crossword puzzles. Another had once been held hostage by terrorists while serving in a foreign assignment. He carried a concealed pistol and swore he’d fill his captors full of lead the instant he saw them. One of the OFTPOT couples in the office sold products in some Amway-style pyramid scheme.

One day, a local FBI agent called. “Ishmael, what the hell are you guys doing over there?” he asked. “I just met the target we’re working jointly with your office, and he told me you guys are trying to sell him consumer goods.” I learned that the OFTPOTs had pitched their products to agents and prospective agents, as well as to US government contacts at the FBI and INS.

DURING MY DOMESTIC OJT assignment, I traveled back to HQs a few times to try to push forward the paperwork for my overseas assignment. The HQs offices were strewn with the carnage of the non-State Department training classes: officers in limbo, officers just back on a one-way ticket from some aborted foreign assignment.

While I’d been on my OJT tour, the recruiting trend at HQs had been to hire people reputed to be from wealthy families. The Agency seemed fascinated by wealth. A recent training class had been lousy with the spoiled progeny of nouveau riche families. Most of their fathers had connections to the Agency as contractors.

One of these trainees required that the Agency hire his wife, and the Agency complied. The couple confided that they were open to assignment in any foreign city, so long as that city had Concorde service. Once the kids found out that working for the Agency wasn’t as much fun as they’d expected, they quit the training course. The husband made it about halfway. His wife stuck it out a bit longer, but the instructors noted that she’d often leave unexpectedly to go fox hunting in Virginia. Nevertheless, come graduation day, both were awarded their certifications as case officers. Other trainees complained, but to no avail. The instructors advised that the trainees had rated certification for their valuable “life experience,” an explanation that satisfied no one. Soon after, the couple quit, making the complaint moot.

I studied the walking wounded hanging around the HQs office, listening to their stories. I wanted to learn from them and avoid the obstacles they’d faced. A Portuguese speaker had been locked into a triangle of Portuguese-language assignment possibilities: Brazil, Portugal, or Angola. He hadn’t gotten along with the people in Portugal so he requested he be sent to Angola, but as soon as he received that assignment, the people from Portugal were sent there, too. There was no escape.

Another officer’s station had given him a list of targets he was forbidden to contact—including every conceivable target in the region. He was on the first plane back to HQs to seek an overseas assignment somewhere else.

One poor fellow got back from an assignment in Southeast Asia. He was married, but he also had a lot of girlfriends. For counterintelligence purposes, the Agency requires officers to report the identities of their girlfriends, which he dutifully did, thereby developing a reputation around the Agency as a ladies’ man.

Time went by and he continued to report his girlfriends, until he was assigned to a chief who thought their quantity indicated a moral failing. In the officer’s annual evaluation, the boss indicated as much, buying the officer his one-way ticket back to HQs. The officer sought to have the dreaded “morals problem” removed from his file. Under pressure from HQs, the boss agreed to remove the comment—but he spitefully replaced it with “this officer cannot be trusted with government funds”—an even more serious charge.

It was around that time that I met Charlton for the first time. Charlton was a no-nonsense officer who didn’t have any complaints, and, if he did, he kept them to himself. He was a foreign national with passports from three countries and excellent native language skills. He was never frustrated, because the Agency bureaucracy wasn’t much worse than the ones he’d dealt with in his home-lands. At the same time, his overseas pay package made him rich by the standards of two of his three home countries, so he wasn’t as tempted as some were by opportunities in the business world.