Читать книгу The Human Factor - Ishmael Jones - Страница 14

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Perseverance and Soothing Language

Let what will be said or done, preserve your sangfroid immovably, and to every obstacle oppose patience, perseverance, and soothing language

Thomas Jefferson

I spoke to Max on a secure line between our domestic posts.

“I now hold the record,” Max said.

“What record?”

“The record for the earliest recorded ‘Christmas holidays’ excuse. It’s June, and a man from HQs just told me he might not be able to get my overseas assignment approved, what with the holiday season coming up.”

“June! Not bad, Max. June will be tough to beat.”

Max and Jonah had been assigned to domestic OJTs in a part of the country where there weren’t many good targets. Still, they were such hard workers that they managed to call just about every target country foreigner in their region and made some decent recruitments.

Max put Jonah on the phone.

“Acute attacks of diarrhea stand between me and service to my country in an overseas assignment,” Jonah said. The man responsible for processing Jonah’s overseas paperwork suffered from intestinal problems. “A bad attack will keep this guy out of the office for three weeks at a time. I’m trying to figure out ways to get the process moving. Maybe I need to create a crisis. Government employees never act until a crisis forces them to act.”

We were eager to get to our overseas assignments. Members of our training class had begun to quit the Agency. All of us sensed that the oft-repeat delay “two more weeks” could go on for years. Most of us were in our late twenties or early thirties, eager to achieve. As we looked over the sad sacks at HQs, we asked: “Is this what I want to be?” To them, time meant nothing; each day was just another one closer to retirement.

Max and I were just as frustrated by this Kafkaesque process of promise and delay, but we also saw the enormous potential for achievement—for America’s security—once we finally did get overseas. We’d been through plenty of “only the strong survive” courses in the military and figured that this was just another obstacle we’d endure. Not many trainees felt this way, however, and there were numerous resignations.

An OJT trainee came into our office one day to resign. He brought his spy gear to turn in and Sylvia pointed him to our office, where he dumped it off. After the man left, my colleagues and I looked at each other quizzically for a few moments and then blurted out, “Everything in this office is spy gear.” So many employees had quit that our office had become a dumping ground for equipment.

A new trainee, Martin, arrived. Soon thereafter, he did a commendable job of recruiting a valuable human source, a visiting government official considered important by HQs. The foreign official was a member of a powerful and wealthy family. Such connections were important in the source’s country, and he loved to talk about his ancient and influential line—descended from royalty, naturally. As far as we knew, all that he said was true. Yet the man rolled over for the customary $1,000 per month. I would see this again and again, a source who claimed to be connected to great wealth and influence, yet was willing to sell his country for a song. Martin had built his relationship with the target through scuba diving, bungee jumping, deep sea fishing, and duck hunting.

IʹD HELD OUT A LONG TIME against the temptation of resignation. When the cycle continued, I thought about what Jonah had said: Government employees never act until a crisis forces them to act. The next written message I sent to HQs said, “I have completed the training course and compiled a good recruitment record in my domestic post. There are no obstacles to my overseas deployment. Please get organized and do your duty. Do the job you have been assigned to do and approve my overseas assignment.”

They fired back, “You should watch the tone of your messages. They’re vituperative. Be patient. Your overseas assignment should be all set in about two weeks.”

That about did it. I telephoned Roger. “Bullshit,” I said. “You people are lying. You’ll say ‘two more weeks’ until the end of time. I’m moving back there to Washington, D.C. right now to sit on top of you until this gets done.”

Roger lost his mind over that. “You can’t come back here without orders! You have no authorization to come back here! We won’t pay for your travel!”

A calmer “good cop” voice got on the line: “Look, Ishmael, we’re doing what we can do to get your assignment arranged. There are a multitude of managers who need to sign off on your assignment first. If you come back here, you’ll upset a bunch of people, and that won’t help you.”

“I understand that I’m going to offend people at HQs. I don’t care. I won’t allow myself to wind up like all the sad sacks waiting around for you to act. You’ve already caused the resignations of some of the members of my training class, all of them good people. We have missions in this Agency and I want to get them done.”

I made good on my threat to HQs.

I MOVED MY FAMILY BACK to the HQs area. Like an Okie headed for California, I drove a car crammed full of household goods. My wife and children went by plane, and we moved back into a hotel room.

As soon as I reached HQs, I confronted the management about my assignment.

The files they’d supposedly kept on me were empty. They hadn’t done a thing during the year I’d been away. Each time they’d told me they were working on it, they’d lied.

The Worst Spy in the World came by the office to see me. “I know you’re frustrated about the slow pace. Perhaps we should pause a moment and pray.” He leaned over and took my hands in his.

“I don’t want to pray,” I said. “I want to solve the problem.”

“You need to learn to be patient,” he said, and then he left.

Roger approached.

“You haven’t gone to language school. You need to go to language school.”

“I’ve already got the languages. I learned them on my own during training. I have the test scores to prove it.”

“Well, maybe so, but you need to put in the hours.”

HQs had created language schools for case officers. The schools taught difficult languages like Chinese and Japanese by way of a single teacher who met the class daily in an apartment. Unfortunately, the schools had been around long enough for everyone to realize that even after a two-year course confined in an apartment, the students weren’t learning

A linguist colleague suggested the best way to learn a language was to go to the country where it was spoken and actively use it. He had traveled to Japan after graduating from high school. “After I’d been in Japan for a month,” he said, “I was speaking Japanese on a functional level, and I traveled around the country with a group of Japanese friends who spoke no English.”

He visited our Japanese school and spoke to the students. “They’re not learning the language,” he said. “When they do speak, they sound like women. Japanese men and women speak in different tones. Since the teacher is a woman, the students naturally sound like her.”

In the Chinese school, the students decided that their instructor wasn’t good enough and tried unsuccessfully to get themselves assigned another. Tensions mounted, students weren’t getting along with one another, and before long they were at each other’s throats. The frustration led to at least one fistfight.

HQs loved to assign people to language school. It was an easy and risk-free way to keep them looking busy.

“What’s Smith doing,” a senior bureaucrat might ask.

“Smith is in Chinese language school,” came the reply, and everyone would be pleased that Smith was productively occupied learning such an important language. Chances were that Smith would never put this skill to work.

Jonah was back in the HQs area for some meetings and was hanging around a safe-house apartment with one colleague who spoke Japanese and another who spoke Korean. They were waiting to see Roger, to discuss their overseas assignments. Roger arrived and met privately first with the Korean speaker and then with the Japanese speaker.

After the meetings, the Korean speaker said, “Roger just told me that we don’t have any requirements right now for a Korean speaker, and he’s set me up for a two-year language school to learn Japanese.”

The Japanese speaker said, “Damn that Roger. He just told me that we don’t have any requirements right now for a Japanese speaker, and he’s set me up to go to a two year language school to learn Korean.”

Thankfully, my test scores enabled me to avoid the dead end of language school.

Some colleagues made things harder on themselves by demanding certain locations, usually the nicer cities of Western Europe, which severely narrowed the range of possible assignments. Remembering what the Godfather had told me, I made things as easy on HQs as possible by telling them I’d go anywhere overseas. I figured this would mean the Middle East. No one wanted to go to the Middle East. The Middle East wasn’t a nice place to live, and it had been a graveyard for non-State Department officers.

“We only have one officer between Burma and the Atlantic Ocean who isn’t a State Department diplomat,” I said to the Worst Spy. “That’s a stretch covering most of Asia through to North Africa. So we should be able to find a vacant spot somewhere.”

After I made a nuisance of myself at HQs for several weeks, my assignment was finally approved.

HQS SENT ME to another training course, a sort of prerequisite to overseas assignment. Max and I were the only two in this class, and we found ourselves back in Slobovia, land of make-believe. The Agency devoted incredible resources to our training. Much of the instruction involved advanced surveillance detection, and for those exercises there were as many as 30 instructors working on just the two of us.

During classroom portions, we studied the Agency’s problems with a Middle Eastern agent program. Nearly all of the agents had proven to have been doubles or had been exposed and arrested by their own government. As had been the case with Cuba, the Middle Eastern country had fed us massive quantities of false information.¹⁴

We studied the psychologies of some of our rogue state targets. A favorite of mine was a fascinating paper on the psychology of Iranian men. It argued that negotiating skills were so important in the ancient Persian trading culture that personal communication had become a high art. Iranian men were masters of histrionics, able to act out emotions dramatically, and skilled with facial movements such as the rolling and flashing of eyes. Almost all Iranian men could cry at will. The handout said the men were spoiled by the females in the family and grew up with megalomaniac perceptions of their abilities and talents.

We learned more about the polygraph during this course. The Box measures physical reactions: Normal people will react less perceptibly to a question like, “Were you born in Pennsylvania?” than they will to, “Have you stolen money or goods valued at more than $25?” The examiners can fail applicants whose reactions are simply too strong. But what Box operators really seek is some admission of guilt. At times in the Agency’s history, operators have been paid bonuses for each such admission.

Box sessions are essentially interrogations disguised as interviews. The operator’s favorite technique is to encourage the examinee to confess a seemingly minor offense so as to “clear up” the exam and allow the applicant to pass. He states outright that most aberrant or criminal behavior is of no consequence: “Look, we don’t care if you once stole $20 from someone. We’re after big stuff: Did you rob a bank? Have you committed a murder? That’s what we’re after here.” Of course, the examinee probably hasn’t murdered anyone, but there was that time he shoplifted a pair of underwear from a department store. He sheepishly confesses, and with that, he’s out of a job. If the “minor” admission truly is inconsequential, the operator focuses on persuading the interviewee to make a larger one.

Edward Lee Howard, one of the first of the CIAʹs turncoats, admitted during a Box that he had stolen $12 from the purse of a woman sitting next to him on an airplane. Howard was fired. The Agency had been preparing him for an assignment to Moscow and he’d been briefed on the identities of several important Russian agents. He sold this information to the KGB.

The Agency suspected Howard of having gone to the other side, so the FBI put him under surveillance. Eluding it, he made his way to Moscow. Years later, Max spotted Howard walking in a park in Budapest. Ideas of capturing him, putting him in a bag, and spiriting him back to the US ran through his mind, but Howard quickly disappeared from view—probably for the best. He was a broken alcoholic by then. He lived in Moscow until he supposedly died by falling down and breaking his neck—the cause was murky—in 2002. He was 50 years old.

Listening to CIA employees talk about their Box sessions can be as boring as listening to people talk about the dream they had last night. Most employees were believers in the machine’s quasi-magical infallibility. “Then, finally,” they’d say, “I remembered the time I had taken a quarter too much out of the office coffee fund, and I admitted that to the examiner. My reactions cleared up!” There is no scientific evidence that the Box actually works, but it has had so many successes in extracting admissions of guilt—“I have been having sex with dogs for the last twenty years”¹⁵—from applicants and employees the Agency will probably never get rid of it. It is a great interrogation tool—though, given the power of suggestion, hooking someone up to a photocopier might be just as effective.

MAX AND I alternated exercises, morning and afternoon. If the instructors put me through one in the morning, they’d put him through the same one later in the day. Naturally, we kept in touch about this.

I’d tell him, “The Slobovian agent had information about a planned coup against the regime. Then he got up and went to the bathroom. He left an envelope on the table. I think we’re supposed to open the envelope to see what’s inside and then put it back as if we hadn’t looked at it.”

He did as I said. The envelope contained dates, times, names of the leaders of the coup.

The next day he called back. “The agent threw a tantrum. He’s worried that his status as an agent may have been exposed. I calmed him down and we reviewed our emergency plans. I think that was the point of the exercise.”

A couple of weeks into the course, my phone rang. It was an instructor. I wondered why Max hadn’t called. “Go to 23 Washington Street,” the instructor said. I’d never been to that address before.

When I arrived, I saw some burly fellows in the parking lot. As I walked through the lot, they angled to intercept me. I slightly altered my direction, and so did they. They were law enforcement officers, without a doubt. At last they threw me to the ground, then hauled me into the building for questioning.

The interrogation lasted for hours, which was evidently why Max hadn’t been able to call. After the interrogation, they evaluated my conduct and gave me pointers:

“Con men know to look you square in the eye and give you a firm handshake, so a steely gaze and a firm handshake have no validity as measures of a person’s truthfulness.

“A person’s curiosity is a good test—if a person is innocent, and knows nothing of the accusation, he’ll ask a lot of questions about why he’s been arrested.

“The suspect might seem angry, but we can tell when the anger is false. False anger is a good indicator of guilt. Another is falling asleep—sometimes we’ll leave the suspect alone in the interrogation room for a while to see if he’ll fall asleep. Guilty people have been under a great deal of worry and pressure for some time already, so once arrested and left alone, they tend to go to sleep. They’re exhausted and know that a lot lies ahead. The innocent tend to pace back and forth, trying to figure out what’s happening.

“If you’ve been found with an illegal item, and the only course is to deny that it’s yours, then do so, but don’t suggest that the policeman must have planted it. Never insult them or they’ll take a personal interest in getting you.

“Always keep a cool temper. It’s hard for an interrogator to get worked up if you stay cool. Talk a lot, but don’t give any facts. Don’t move backwards, stay where you are even if the interrogator’s nose is in your face. Act as if you are not a criminal suspect but an innocent person. You understand that the police have made a mistake. There are no hard feelings, and you will help them find the right person. Remember that the interrogation situation was created to make you feel helpless and to get you to confess.”

The Agency had taught us to use the concept of “cover within a cover,” in which we were prepared to admit to a lesser crime in order to avert suspicion from the larger crime. For example, if I were picked up by the police while standing on a dark street corner and accused of being a spy, after interrogation I might break down and admit that I was looking for a prostitute.

These officers, however, noted that “most criminals, especially drug dealers, use ‘cover within a cover.’” The officers continued: “When a law enforcement officer sees ‘cover within a cover,’ it really gets his attention and he focuses even harder on the suspect. Better to just stick to your original story.”

It was advice like this that made the interrogation exercise the best in the course. I was disappointed to learn, however, that most of my colleagues had not realized it was an exercise until it was over.

NORMALLY, large surveillance teams were available to train us, but today they had been sent to Baltimore to handle an unexpected “requirement” there. Without our teams, Max and I had no exercises.

Our instructors went to HQs and rounded up a bunch of guys who looked like they weren’t doing anything. The instructors piled these unfortunates into vans, gave them a few rudimentary instructions, and drove them to Old Town Alexandria to be our surveillance team for the day. The Agency and the FBI both used Old Town Alexandria for this training because there was a great deal of foot traffic in the town.

I set out on my run, beginning at the old Torpedo Factory building in Alexandria. Walking my route, I couldn’t detect any surveillance. It started to rain. I tried every trick but still couldn’t see the surveillants. The fundamental principle of surveillance is to see one’s pursuers but not to let them know you do. If the surveillants see you looking, they’ll think you are a spy, because ordinary people don’t imagine that they’re being followed. It’s easy to detect surveillance by backtracking or looking behind, and it’s easy to evade surveillance, but if you do any of that, you’ll be as good as made.

But I couldn’t detect the team. I stood in front of a restaurant on King Street taking shelter from the rain. I eyeballed the area, eyeballing more than I should have. A man standing next to me buying takeout said, “You guys aren’t very good, are you?” The Agency and the FBI did so much surveillance training in the neighborhood, even the locals had become sensitized.

That evening the exercise drew to a close and we met our instructors to discuss the day’s work. The instructors asked us how we’d done. Max and I said we hadn’t seen a single thing all day.

“Neither did we,” the instructors said. “After we released that surveillance team on you, we never saw another one of the surveillants ever again.”

THERE ARE TIMES when it’s necessary to look at surveillants—for instance, when they’re right in front of your face. A colleague who was under close and continuous surveillance, with surveillants waiting outside his door and walking next to him every time he left his apartment building, continued to obey the “look without looking” principle. But this was foolish: If they’re right in your face and still you ignore them, they’ll know you’re a spy. Any sane person would assume he was being stalked, and notify the police.

Our chief instructor told us to surveil any car we saw bearing diplomatic plates with the letters ʺFC.ʺ ʺFCʺ meant the car belonged to the Soviet diplomatic mission. Our instructor insisted that the FBI had chosen FC as short for “f-ing Communist.” He wanted us to surveil them just to give them a hard time. I happened upon FC plates twice. On both occasions the FC car was able quickly to recognize me as a surveillant, and evaded aggressively, by doing illegal U-turns and accelerating to high speeds.

The instructors wanted us to go off to our foreign assignments in a proper spirit of awe and respect for the abilities of a good surveillance team, so they gave our team copies of our pre-planned routes. Sometimes we went through an entire route without seeing the surveillants because they weren’t there, having not bothered to show themselves that day. But in theory, we’d been under surveillance the whole time. “Wow,” we were supposed to think, “we were under surveillance the whole time but didn’t see a thing! I sure learned respect for surveillance!”

As a corollary to “look without looking,” our instructors taught us to go easy on our shadows. “Remember, surveillants are ordinary people working for a salary. Don’t make life difficult for them. If you’re under surveillance, make it easy for them to keep up with you. You don’t want them to hate you. Surveillance teams will knife your car tires and put dirt in your gas tank if they think you’re giving them a hard time.”

Teams from the FBI and the Agency followed us during our exercises. The after-action critiques from the FBI teams were methodical and professional, while those from the Agency teams tended to be emotional and accusatory. The Agency instructors wanted to impress us with the capabilities of surveillance, so they never loosened up, badgering me mercilessly for my ineptitude in the exercises, especially a vehicle surveillance exercise that took place in the Leesburg area of Virginia. I’d felt ill that weekend, because I’d tried to repair a sewage backup in our rental house myself instead of hiring a plumber. The problem wasn’t easy to solve, and I soon was covered in raw, black sewage.

My wife felt sorry for the ribbing I was taking and sought to help out by interjecting, “Oh, but you don’t understand, Ishmael was suffering from a terrible case of diarrhea during that exercise.”

The crones on the surveillance team cackled and sneered. “Oh, poor thing, were you unwell? Is that going to be your excuse when you’re overseas, too?”

Our chief instructor had trained Edward Lee Howard, and had liked him a good deal more than he liked us. “Eddie did the exercise this way,” he’d say, or, “Eddie liked this exercise best.”

A fellow officer, William Loman, had gone overseas only to be blown right back after about six months, having lost a briefcase containing sensitive papers. He’d left it on a bus; the Agency never saw it again. Loman and his family moved into the Oakwood and would be going through the lengthy process of securing a new overseas assignment. It would be a rough road for him with many extended delays.

With nothing for Loman to do, HQs assigned him to oversee some of our surveillance training. Suddenly he wasn’t our colleague, but our boss, and a most domineering boss he proved to be. His fraught years with the Agency had turned him into a terrible martinet. Max and I served as his personal toadies for weeks. “You guys don’t get it,” he said. “There’s something missing in your thinking process. I can’t figure out what it is, but I don’t think you two should be allowed to go overseas.”

We debated how to solve the Loman problem. I couldn’t ask the Worst Spy or Roger for help, having burned both of those bridges. “Let’s put a bag over his head and beat him with telephone books,” Max said.

“I think Loman’s bullying us, so I’m also leaning toward a confrontational solution,” I said, playing straight man.

The next day we carried out a series of exercises Loman had invented, then stood around our cars in the parking lot of the Tysons Corner shopping mall, reviewing our performance. “You guys need a lot of work,” Loman said. “I’m not sure you’ll pass this course. I’m enjoying my new management role, though. I’m good at it.”

Loman’s wife drove up and got out of her car. We’d met her before, and said hello. The day’s exercises were over, and she asked Loman if he would go into the mall and do some shopping. She tore off a list of things for him to buy. They made plans to meet up in the mall and he walked off. She paused until he was out of hearing and said, “Hey, I just wanted to thank you guys for dealing with Loman these past few weeks. I know he’s been a handful. He worked hard to get his overseas assignment and then losing it was really hard on him. He’s had a hard time adjusting to being back in the US. It’s meant a lot to him to be able to work with you guys all day.”

We realized he was in a bad way and deserved our sympathy. “We like him, too,” Max said, “but don’t let him give us any trouble.” Our feelings toward him slightly softened, we buckled down and endured the rest of the course.

Max and I and our wives next attended a “crash and burn” course in rapid escape and how to deal with attackers and terrorists while driving. We used a fleet of battered cars and raced around, ramming them into each other. Everyone enjoyed this course immensely. We did a lot of “nerfing” by hitting a car in one of its rear wheels, causing it to spin off the road. The instructors had just finished teaching a group of highway patrolmen how to do it. Nerfing is an excellent way to get another car off the road, far more effective than ramming it in the side.

One of the points of the course was to learn how to cause damage to cars when necessary. Chauffeurs in particular can freeze up during a terrorist attack, as they’ve spent years making sure their car doesn’t get scratched and aren’t prepared for the moment when it’s time to let all hell break loose.

AT THE END OF the driving course, HQs invited me to join the Counterterrorism Center (CTC). Combating terrorism sounded like the perfect use of my time, so I went ahead with it. At the CTC I found rows of TV sets tuned to various news stations, with people watching them attentively.

A friend of mine worked in the CTC. He told me privately that just the previous week, a cable had come in saying that a terrorist group in Lebanon was planning to kidnap a US citizen upon his arrival at Khartoum airport that day. “I walked the cable around here, trying to get permission to warn him,” he said, “but the managers didn’t want to do anything. They said they didn’t like the source, and anyway, it was almost 5 o’clock and time to go home. The next day, the US citizen was indeed captured and held hostage by the terrorists. Luckily, he was able to convince the terrorists that he meant them no harm and was on their side, and they let him go, all by himself. But no one in the Center was reprimanded. In fact, no one ever said anything more about it.”

CTC was, in fact, an early and innovative attempt to break through the Agency’s geographical turf barriers, with the authority to track terrorists through different countries.¹⁶ But CTC couldn’t grant overseas assignments because the geographical divisions controlled those.

Max and I graduated from our final training course on the evening the first Gulf War began. Several Agency mandarins attended our graduation cocktail party, including the chief of the Middle East division. They’d been taken aback to hear that the US military had begun the war. Nobody had bothered to let them know.

Max and I were euphoric at having at last finished our training and domestic service. We were sad to have lost so many of our classmates, though. Most had quit. Max, Jonah, a fourth classmate, and I were all that remained of the original group. The people who quit were all well-qualified, and I remember them fondly.

As it happened, I was the first of my class to land approval for an overseas assignment, and my family and I packed up happily to head for the Middle East.