Читать книгу The Craft We Chose: My Life in the CIA - Richard L. Holm - Страница 5

My career with the Central Intelligence Agency began unofficially just before Thanksgiving 1960 when I drove my black Volkswagen convertible from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to the recruiting office on 16th Street, Northwest, in Washington, D.C. I had purchased the VW during my stint of nearly two years at Camp Bussac, north of Bordeaux, France, where I had worked in the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps.

During that time, for reasons I’ll explain, I became interested in joining the CIA after my discharge. But when I mailed in an application they responded by informing me that I could not apply from overseas. So when I arrived at Fort Dix I resolved to drive down to Washington and apply in person, which I did, on an overcast morning in late November.

After I filled out the forms and took the requisite tests the interviewing officer said I could start work immediately—in the file rooms on the night shift. He added that if I performed satisfactorily I could begin advancing through the ranks. But I found the prospect of night work and a long, slow climb to a meaningful assignment disappointing. So I pushed a little, mentioning that I was a college graduate with military experience.

“Oh, this is standard,” he responded.

“But it isn’t what I was hoping for. Aren’t there any other possibilities?”

“There’s Junior Officer Training—the JOT program—but I’m not sure there are openings just now.”

“What’s that program like?”

He explained that JOT prepared promising young candidates for operational assignments abroad.

That sounded more like it and I filled out another application.

The interviewer cautioned me that JOT’s standards were high. Suddenly I regretted the hours I had spent back in college playing basketball and bridge instead of studying in the library, and I wished my grade point average had been higher. On the other hand I had done well on my Graduate Record Examination, enough to earn a slot in the master’s program in economics at Washington University in St. Louis. But given my draft status it was also something I hadn’t pursued. Still I thought it might help my chances.

JOT acceptance or not I decided to wait out the verdict by visiting my family in Kansas City where my parents had moved the summer after I graduated from high school.

I was born on June 20, 1935, in Chicago in the middle of the Great Depression. My parents were both children of immigrants. My father, Carl Willard Holm, was the eldest of three sons in a Swedish family. My mother, Constance Cecilia Laux Holm, was one of eleven children descended from a Prussian grandfather who had made his way to America at the turn of the 20th century.

Both families had modest means and my parents married in 1934 with minimal fanfare. Dad graduated at the top of his class at Lane Technical High School, one of Chicago’s best. He was offered and happily accepted a job with the Illinois Bell Telephone Company, where he was one of about 20,000 employees at the time. In the mid-1950s Dad transferred to AT&T where he helped in the early effort to develop area codes.

When I was about 7 years old, in what was considered at the time a bold move, Dad signed a mortgage and bought our house, a brick bungalow in Elmhurst, a small, quiet, middle-class town about 25 miles west of Chicago. No one on either side of the family had ever left the city but each workday Dad commuted to Illinois Bell’s office by train.

My parents were splendid role models for me and my two brothers, Bob and Greg, and my sister Diann. My childhood in Elmhurst was idyllic and I retain fond memories of my life there, of my friends, of Boy Scouting, and then as now, of sports.

Sports were my passion. We played football in the autumn, baseball in spring and summer, and basketball almost year-round. In the process, as all children do who participate, I learned about winning, losing and playing on a team—I preferred winning.

I resumed my basketball passion a bit when I returned home on that pre-CIA visit. Along with reading as much as I could about the world of intelligence, I played in a lot of pickup games at the local YMCA in between enjoying Mom’s home cooking again.

In February my parents introduced me to a neighbor who had recently fallen into a decent inheritance. When he learned that I had just returned from France he asked me to guide him on a trip to Europe, in return for which he promised to cover all of my expenses. I accepted but told him that I wouldn’t be able to leave until I had heard about the job in Washington.

That news arrived in early April when the agency’s interviewing officer called to tell me I had been accepted. A separate letter arrived a week later instructing me about where and when to report. I would start my training in June along with 25 other JOTs.

My immediate future assured, I took off with my neighbor for Europe. First stop, England, where I bought myself a present: a brand-new, Triumph TR3 convertible in British racing green. We broke the car in over the next six weeks driving through France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland, and then I shipped it home duty-free.

The first time I had traveled the European continent was on a slow train from Hamburg, Germany, carrying myself and other troops through Holland, Belgium and France. I had been fascinated by just about everything and spent most of the time standing between the rail cars gazing at the passing sights: the signs in foreign languages, the posters, the clothes and automobiles, and the stations. I remember watching some French railroad workers talking with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The cigarettes would move with their lips but never fall out.

My assignment at Camp Bussac afforded me many pleasant opportunities to live and travel beyond the base. The on-site work quickly became tedious, but my occasional forays into the surrounding area or the region were interesting and enjoyable. From time to time I met with liaison officers in Toulouse and Perigueux to discuss, for example, the activities of the Russian and Polish consulates or the movement of Soviet bloc ships into the port of Bordeaux.

Most fascinating to me were the reports I obtained from my sources on and off the base. I had been given the names of several longtime contacts when I arrived. I saw them regularly and developed links of my own. I hesitate to call these people “agents,” because the CIC’s efforts were not very sophisticated. But they were carefully selected, unpaid individuals who knew what was going on in circles of interest to us. They also were pro-American enough to take the time to talk discreetly.

Gathering this information and compiling reports was useful in two ways. First, it enabled me to move around and use my French, because official liaison contacts were part of the effort. Second, it was clearly a learning process. In my discussions with French contacts and by reading the French press I gained a better understanding of the country and its culture.

All of it established a direction for my future. I became interested in the craft of intelligence and in living abroad. Both would become integral parts of my 35-year career in the CIA.

Before I left for Washington my parents told me they felt uneasy about the choice I had made. Dad asked me if I really knew anything about the agency. I told him I had read a lot about it and learned a little more during my time in France. That didn’t seem to satisfy him, but he eventually dropped the subject and apparently accepted my decision.

In any event I was elated as I headed east in the TR3. I loved that little car, particularly then. It fit my mood. My prospects were looking good, I had been accepted into the program I wanted, and I eagerly anticipated training for the start of my professional life.

Back in D.C., I stopped by the JOT office. The receptionist gave me some leads on housing, and soon I settled into an old place along MacArthur Boulevard across from the reservoir in the western part of the city. I lived with five other men, three of whom were also JOTs. Of the two others, one served in the Air Force at the Pentagon and the other already worked as an analyst in the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence. That made many things easier. We often commuted together in town and subsequently to the Farm, the CIA’s training facility in southeast Virginia. With so many things in common we bonded easily, and our friendships have lasted through the decades.

We spent the first six weeks in one of the “temps,” rows of low office buildings that had been erected in haste during World War I to house the War Department—the Pentagon’s precursor—and weren’t removed until the 1970s. Located along Constitution Avenue near the Lincoln Memorial and its reflecting pool, the uniformly dingy buildings ruined the otherwise beautiful setting.

My fellow JOTs impressed me. Twenty-two young men and three young women—plus me—we represented the 10 percent of agency applicants who had achieved the highest standards. Almost all had served in the military, though at the time that distinction was fairly common because of the draft. Many had earned graduate degrees and the group had pursued a broad range of college majors.

Except for four of us from the Midwest and a couple from the West Coast, all were graduates of eastern schools. I felt lucky to be among them. My own service background, plus my bachelor’s degree from Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois, had landed me a spot I never could have imagined while in school.

Our instructors began by giving us the history of World War II intelligence. Then they moved on to the origins of the agency and its four directorates: Plans, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Administration. We all were destined for Plans, which eventually became Operations and then the National Clandestine Service.

Next they presented a detailed look at the intelligence community and how it served policymakers. A review of postwar events followed, including the beginnings of the Cold War, which would continue to dominate the world scene for three more decades. The confrontation between the Free World, led by the United States, and the communist-inspired totalitarianism practiced by the Soviet Union, China and their satellites, would drive all of our efforts.

This wasn’t the first time I had been presented with a clear picture of the communist world. Back in France at Bussac, I had met Tim Lawson, a civilian who periodically sold cars on the base. I bought the VW convertible from him.

Tim was the kind of guy you instinctively didn’t trust too much. At the time I had no doubt he was making money in other ways—some probably illegal. He had served in the Army and was stationed at Bussac from 1955 until 1957, the year before I arrived. He decided to stay in France after his discharge and found the car-sales job after bumming around a bit. He was living with a French woman, appeared to have lots of local friends, and knew quite a bit about happenings in the little towns around the base. I often had trouble sorting out his rumors from facts, but I joined Tim for a cup of coffee once in a while.

I can’t remember how we had raised the subject, but on one such occasion he suddenly launched into a long tirade about the 1956 Hungarian uprising. I was in college at the time, and though I had heard about it from news reports I was far from well-versed.

Tim told me that shortly after the uprising began, he and some of the other soldiers in the motor pool—where he was serving as a truck driver—heard via shortwave radio the Hungarian freedom fighters calling for help from the United States and Western Europe. Send them weapons and they would do the rest, they said. As the situation grew worse and Soviet intervention seemed imminent, the freedom fighters continued to plead for assistance from the West.

Tim said he became so agitated and frustrated that he actually had considered stealing a motor-pool truck and driving it to Hungary to fight at the side of the rebels. He insisted that others, including some young Frenchmen he knew, would have gone with him. But in the end no one went. The Russians invaded and crushed the uprising, and the freedom-fighter broadcasts stopped abruptly.

What struck me at the time was Tim’s outrage, which seemed entirely heartfelt. Although he had no understanding of the international politics involved—nor did I—he still felt angry, three years later, at the Western governments for not responding.

Tim’s anger had sprung from several questions—obvious ones:

Why would President Eisenhower, a military man, refuse to act?

Why would he allow the freedom fighters to be slaughtered, particularly because he knew the Europeans would follow his lead if he decided to counter the crackdown?

And how could the Russians be so brazen? How could they openly smash a rebellion in another country when the Hungarian people clearly opposed their government?

I was no expert, but given the Cold War and the geopolitical situation that prevailed, the answers seemed self-evident. The Reds had shown no restraint in brutalizing their own people, so they couldn’t be expected to do so in Hungary. And the West, still war-weary in the mid-1950s, had forsaken a military response, which might have escalated into another global conflict.

Tim would have none of that, which was why he said he still felt pained that the Free World had allowed Soviet tanks to shred the Hungarian revolt.

Listening to Tim’s rants forced me to think, more than I ever had before, about the Cold War, communism and the international situation in general. Sure, I had grown up with a sense of patriotism and a belief that the American position was right—whatever it was. Communism was bad, the Soviets were bad, and what happened in Hungary was just awful. It reinforced my negative feelings about communism and the efforts by its practitioners to spread their ideology so forcibly around the world.

Though I didn’t realize it then, that conversation laid the groundwork for my decision to spend a career in intelligence, working to counter the communist ideology. It had made me think differently about why I was in Europe and why a U.S. base like Bussac was essential. If the Russians ever did attack Western Europe we would need every military asset we had there.

We attended several weeks of classes on international communism, presented from scholarly and historical perspectives as well as from intelligence-gathering and operational viewpoints. I had studied communist and socialist economics in college but I knew little about the politics.

Learning about the organization and inner workings of a communist cell gave us much food for thought, and we discussed it at length during breaks. Communism was a lousy system that needed to be resisted. Despite our varied backgrounds we agreed that communism had no merits.

We also began learning how to write intelligence reports and how to master the prevailing style. It was a little like newspaper writing: straightforward prose that emphasized precision and detail, and no opinion unless clearly labeled.

Some of the nuances about writing, evaluating and disseminating reports we learned from someone who would later figure prominently in my life: Wallace R. Deuel. Wally had started his career in the late 1920s after graduating from the University of Illinois. He accepted a teaching post at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon. He met his wife Mary there as well.

Wally later joined the Chicago Daily News and worked as a foreign correspondent. The paper assigned him to Rome during the early and mid-1930s, and then to Berlin during the latter part of the decade. But he grew so intensely opposed to Hitler that he left Germany in 1939.

Based on his experiences Wally wrote a book titled People under Hitler, which he first published in 1942. He also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, our wartime intelligence agency and the CIA’s predecessor. He later helped to write a history of the organization. When the Cold War began he recognized the need to resist another totalitarian movement, so he joined the newly established CIA to help stop communism from taking over Europe.

Along with his impressive background Wally was an articulate and entertaining public speaker with a wry sense of humor. An expert on the subject—he had developed many of our rules for writing reports—he influenced some in the class to pursue careers as reports officers and analysts.

Wally’s son Mike was one of our classmates, so with his dad at the lectern we maintained our interest. I’m sure Mike was quite proud.

Wally also focused on what was called the requirements process and its impact on collecting information in the field, something we all would be doing someday.

Any part of the executive or legislative branch of the federal government may request information from the agency, and the agency is required to respond. Over the years the requirements process has been continually refined and restructured, but even back in the early 1960s many government entities were using it.

In theory, federal officials would pose their question in a neutral manner and the agency would respond objectively. In practice, some officials tended to structure their questions to elicit answers that supported their views.

On our end, the requirements staff passed along the requests to the appropriate people in the intelligence community and returned the answers to the requesters. Despite the obvious potential for politics it was a reasonable system that helped members of the federal government develop U.S. foreign policy.

On Sundays during those early weeks in Washington, groups of us, mostly the bachelors, would congregate on the National Mall or on the Ellipse, the large oval lawn just south of the White House grounds, to play touch football. Other young men would join us as well.

I mention this because I noticed a distinction in those games early on. Whenever we would choose sides, almost invariably the outcome would be an agency team versus a foreign-service team. Granted, we tended to choose our friends and fellow trainees, but there was more to it than that.

There seemed to be an intangible difference. We were all bright, well-educated, personable men, but our respective choices for career paths revealed contrasting viewpoints and approaches. Agency trainees, particularly those aiming for the Directorate of Plans, in general were more action oriented, while our foreign-service counterparts tended to be more reflective and analytical.

That distinction would mark all of us throughout our professional lives. In my experience, agency officers and foreign-service officers rarely saw eye to eye. Those differences spawned a mutual lack of trust and confidence that consistently marred our exchanges.

The conflict persisted all the way up the ladder. The two arms of the executive branch constantly competed for the president’s ear. Based on my encounters at those casual football games, each side suffered from a lack of real understanding of the other’s role. We were different kinds of people, something for which there is no easy solution.

Moreover, the problem wasn’t unique to us. Throughout my career, working with various allied services—particularly the French and the British—I noticed the same difficulty afflicting the bureaucracies.

In July 1961, we got to meet Allen Dulles, the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence. He enjoyed a solid reputation because of his war record with the OSS and his long history in the community. He had been DCI for eight years—longer than anyone else—and he was highly respected in Washington. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was President Eisenhower’s secretary of state. His welcoming remarks included telling us war stories and emphasizing the need for good intelligence during the Cold War.

Neither Dulles nor any of us mentioned the disaster the agency had suffered in the Bay of Pigs covert operation just three months earlier, back when I was savoring my acceptance as a JOT. The operation, conceived under the previous administration but approved by President John F. Kennedy, involved the invasion of southern Cuba at a location called Playa Girón, the Bay of Pigs. It failed and many men were killed, partly because Kennedy at the last minute had withheld air cover—another case of a U.S. president refusing to order the military to resist a communist takeover of a nation.

At the time our intelligence indicated a good chance of sparking a general uprising against Castro as soon as a beachhead was established. But the point was rendered moot by the unsuccessful invasion. To this day Kennedy’s hesitation remains a sore point among some agency veterans.

Speaking of whom, after about 20 minutes Dulles’s secretary entered the office and announced that the president wanted to see him at the White House. The message impressed us youngsters. That his secretary may have done the same thing each time a group of JOTs met him did not occur to us—and it probably wouldn’t have bothered us if true. I instantly liked Dulles and considered him sincere in his efforts to sustain a strong intelligence community and an active clandestine service.

I cannot say the same for some of my other twelve directors.

Six weeks later and the groundwork laid, the agency dispatched us to its training facility in southeast Virginia. The Farm, as it is known, is about a three-hour drive from Washington. The facility would become our home away from home until Christmas. Located on a former military base, the Farm boasted few amenities. We lived in Quonset huts, Spartan style, in rooms with shared lavatories and tabletop fans, but we stayed too busy to complain about accommodations that we used mostly for sleeping.

We dressed in military fatigues and combat boots and ate in a mess hall that served copious amounts of food. We had no complaints there, either. Each morning we walked a short distance from our quarters to a gym for physical training. Some took the PT in stride; others did not. I didn’t mind. Excluding my two years in France, I had always tried to stay in good physical condition. When time permitted some of us played basketball in the gym before dinner.

The PT and occasional basketball games constituted our only distractions. Security people patrolled the fenced perimeter, keeping unauthorized individuals away. We trained in isolation and purposefully so. The instructors expected us to concentrate on our training, which we did. As a result time passed swiftly. The range and depth of subjects we covered kept us busy up to 18 hours a day throughout our five-month stay.

We began learning the art of tradecraft, the methods employed to manage an intelligence operation. It is an art because of the nuances involved and it is not easy to learn. Some, lacking the required personality traits, can never master it. The rest of us, in our limited time at the Farm, received only an introduction. We needed actual experience to perfect the techniques needed to engage, say, a Swiss banker or a Jordanian camel driver, because in a given situation both can provide vital information.

Eventually the training, new and different from anything we had experienced, took on a life of its own. The people running the Farm allotted blocks of time to cover specific subjects, and we plowed through each one: agent recruiting, agent handling, clandestine communications, surveillance and countersurveillance, report writing (good writers, we continued to learn, enjoyed a distinct advantage), cover, security, liaison operations, covert operations, counterintelligence, debriefing and eliciting, and the art—it is likewise an art—of asking probing but non-threatening questions to obtain information.

The lectures covered the philosophical, ethical, psychological and academic aspects of every subject. But training was always hands-on. Practical exercises followed the lectures. They required us to perform, at least several times, everything they had taught us. To each class member they assigned a mentor, an experienced operations officer who monitored his or her charge’s progress, observing strengths and promptly addressing any weakness that surfaced. If a trainee’s skills fell short in any area, the mentor arranged remedial exercises.

The program’s standards were preset and high, and every trainee had to meet or exceed them. We regarded even the training sessions with utmost seriousness. We had to. Agents’ lives and diplomatic incidents detrimental to our country’s best interests were at stake.

This isn’t to say that our time at the Farm was devoid of lighter moments, at least for the single guys. On weekends the husbands usually returned home to D.C., but the rest of us sometimes sought companionship.

Once, four of us drove to the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, where we entered a girls’ dormitory and tried to ingratiate ourselves with the housemother. It wasn’t exactly our Bay of Pigs, but our invasion failed. She ejected us, and as we were leaving we heard one of the male students ask, “Who the hell were those guys?”

While we labored through the fall trying to master the principles of tradecraft, the agency changed leadership. A respectful seven months after the Cuban invasion disaster, Allen Dulles resigned. He had dutifully taken the rap. Following an intensive search to find “the right man,” President Kennedy named John McCone, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to succeed Dulles as DCI.

It was said that Kennedy had chosen McCone, a staunch Republican, to emphasize his conviction that CIA director was not a political position. Like Kennedy, McCone was a Roman Catholic and an intense cold warrior who regarded communism as evil.

When we heard about the switch, some lamented Dulles’s role as scapegoat, but the event minimally impacted our busy lives. Like frogs looking up from the bottom of a well, we had a limited view.

Our trainers staged the final three-day exercise in Baltimore. There we attempted to employ the full range of clandestine techniques we had learned. Acting as intelligence collectors we were pitted against FBI trainees in counterintelligence mode.

Stressful at times it was also fun and challenging, because it involved trying to evade and outwit our FBI counterparts. They were supposed to keep us under surveillance while we tried to meet with a designated contact.

Our collective inexperience showed. In my case, working with one colleague, we couldn’t quite shake the FBI guys entirely, and they couldn’t be discreet enough to avoid our detection. The exercise ended in a stalemate.

With one exception the entire class completed the course, our individual strengths and weaknesses duly recorded in our files. The exception was a trainee who dropped out shortly after we started. We learned that he had departed the agency to become an Episcopalian minister, a decision that puzzled the rest of us because of the vast differences between the two career paths.

Our joint training with the FBI had helped to underscore how important it would be for us to acquire sound tradecraft—something most of us would pursue in much greater detail in the field.