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.
2. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
Southeastern Virginia 1962
My JOT training marked the first of two stints at the Farm. Before they sent us back to headquarters they also gave us a glimpse of covert and paramilitary operations and how those activities fit into the range of options the agency could provide the president.
The field intrigued me, especially the paramilitary aspects. Young and single, I thought it would be exciting. So when we received the opportunity to take an intensive, four-month course, including parachute training, I volunteered, as did eight others in my class.
The agency also offered us the chance, following our training, to volunteer for a six-month temporary duty—called a TDY—serving as paramilitary advisers in Laos. Four of us—André Le Gallo, Mike Deuel, Ralph McLean and I—accepted.
After a week’s leave over Christmas to visit my family, and several weeks at headquarters beginning to familiarize myself with our Laos efforts, I reported back to the Farm to begin paramilitary instruction in early February 1962.
The group included two of my MacArthur Boulevard housemates, and in preparation the three of us had been running each morning before work. It wasn’t much fun, but part of the incentive was the opportunity to visit a group of young women in a neighboring house. We had struck up a friendly relationship with them, something destined to go nowhere because of our impending departure. But no matter; for young men interest in a member of the opposite sex dies hard.
Each morning the women would invite us in for coffee after our run.
