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
