hotel rooms, our houses, instructors’ houses, restaurants, or parks. Afterwards we’d write it all up in proper Agency format. The Agency had strict writing standards. Spelling and grammar were always to be flawless.
On exercise days, when there was less classroom work, I often wound up with free time to study languages and to be with my family. I did my best to complete exercises in three hours. Some of my classmates, particularly Jonah, claimed to be putting in twenty-hour days. Concerned that I was missing something, I studied their written after-action reports and was relieved to see that they were the same quality and length as mine.
The instructors urged us to create highly detailed written reports about our meetings. After a role-playing rendezvous with an instructor at the instructor’s house, Max described the interior: The instructor was “a pack rat”; his house was “filthy, with stacks of papers and piles of refuse all over the place. A real pigsty. Can we rely on an agent who keeps his house in such a mess?” The instructors read Max’s write-up, passed it around, enjoyed it immensely, and teased the messy instructor mercilessly. They’d all been to the house at one time or another and agreed with the “pigsty” verdict. When the pig’s wife found out about the incident, she made him throw out all his hoarded piles of stuff, then made him pay for expensive remodeling.
OUR INSTRUCTORS LED US in candid discussions of the harsh realities of human source operations. Ever since “the Lord commanded Moses to send spies to report on the land of Canaan,”3 good leaders have recognized the value of human intelligence. My experience in the CIA was limited to human intelligence collection within the clandestine service, or Directorate of Operations.
The skeleton in the clandestine service’s closet was that the CIAʹs primary mission since its founding had been to recruit Soviet spies—and that the Agency had never succeeded. The methods used during our recruitment exercises seemed valid, the instructors dedicated and intelligent, but Soviets were immensely difficult, even impossible, to recruit. Our instructors admitted this. They told us that the only Soviet spies with whom the CIA had worked were volunteers.4
Our case officers had encountered Soviets at social and diplomatic functions and had documented those meetings in writing. “After each social contact with a Soviet,” a veteran instructor said, “we just kept making those files thicker and thicker.” Knowing that our instructors had never really mastered the skills they taught added a slight but inescapable friction to the classes in which we studied our new trade.
The act of volunteering was a challenge. “In two of the most important Cold War cases involving Soviet volunteers, Popov and Penkovsky, these two Russian GRU officers literally had to throw themselves at Western officials before their offers to spy were taken up.”5
Information provided to the KGB by CIA case officers Edward Howard, Aldrich Ames, Harold Nicholson, and by FBI agent Robert Hanssen later led to the execution or imprisonment of most of the later volunteers. In April and June 1985, Ames gave the KGB information on all Soviet cases run by the Agency.6 (The KGB morphed into the SVR and the FSB during the 1990s, but for simplicity’s sake I continue to call it the KGB. The GRU is the Soviet military intelligence service, a counterpart to the KGB.)
In the 1950s, the Agency sought intelligence about the Soviet Union by digging a tunnel from Berlin into East Germany, and by tapping into Soviet communications cables. Harry was proud of the work he had done on the Berlin Tunnel.
“I cut my teeth—” He paused, relishing his audience’s rapt attention, “—on the Berlin Tunnel.”
Max asked, “Wasn’t the Berlin Tunnel a failure?”
Harry explained that although the Soviets had learned of the tunnel from George Blake, their own human source within the British SIS, well before the tunnel was even built, the Soviets chose to let us continue the project in order to protect Blake’s identity. Some information gained from the tunnel operation had been useful, but it had also been given up willingly. (Several CIA memoirs, including those by Hitz and Helms, rate the operation as a strong success. I would rate it more soberly as an expensive, low-risk, and people-intensive operation.)
The Soviets eventually staged an accidental discovery of the tunnel, at a point when they felt that they could shut it down without blowing Blake’s cover.
Our instructors’ experiences varied by the locations of their assignments. An old hand with a lifetime of service in Third World countries had made countless recruitments, or “scalps”—a sign of achievement and prowess, or so we thought. He didn’t agree that they were good measure of anything. “Shake a tree and the President’s cabinet would fall out,” he told us. “Get all the scalps you want. Or go find the President of the country and pay him and he’ll tell you everything he knows.”
WE LEARNED TO CREATE disguises suitable to our various features. Max’s appearance changed dramatically when his flattop haircut was hidden with a wig and his clean-shaven appearance masked with mustache and glasses. Jonah was harder to disguise because he already had bushy red hair, large glasses, and a mustache: He employed hair colorings and gels.
We practiced impersonal communications, such as dead drops, brush passes, and secret writing. I constructed concealment devices from small branches found in the park, which, when hollowed out with a knife, could hold tiny rolled-up messages. Max and Jonah scoffed at my little branches and built huge, sloppy devices, complete with glued-on pine needles and leaves. They mocked the “laziness and ineptitude” of my humble devices; I rejoined that their elaborate messes revealed simple minds.
Our secret writing materials didn’t work. The instructor figured they must have been “on the shelf” too long. In any case, I never ended up conducting much “impersonal communication.” Those techniques always seemed to be geared to agents operating in Soviet states, rather than in the conditions that prevailed around the world today. It was always more important to me to meet informants, or “agents,” in person and to receive their information in a businesslike situation, such as in an office or a hotel room. This was especially important because the agents and I usually spoke different native languages; there wasn’t a lot that could have been communicated well using impersonal methods.
We didn’t practice breaking-and-entering. The Agency’s breaking-and-entering operations were done by technicians who had undergone extensive specialized training. Max had met one of these specialists. During a period of financial strain combined with feelings of idleness and boredom, the specialist had started breaking into banks during his spare time. Max said he’d actually robbed a few before he was caught and sent to prison.
In the entryways of our safe houses, in an attempt to look like an ordinary business office, Moe had placed IN/OUT boards with fictitious names. Max rearranged the letters in the names to form new names that he found amusing. The instructors were enraged. Jonah didn’t think it was too funny, but kept Max’s identity secret. The instructors sought to deal with the name-changing by mocking the immaturity and childishness of the anonymous perpetrator. This had little effect; the names continued to change. Then the instructors threatened mass punishments; finally, they surrendered and endured it, until Max just lost interest.
JONAH OFTEN BROUGHT HIS COMPUTER in to the training safe house on weekends to work. The safe house had a burglar alarm. One Sunday, Jonah arrived, set his computer down, opened the door, set off the alarm, then realized he’d left the alarm system’s disarm code in his car. He ran to his car to get it, but when he returned the police had already responded to the alarm.
The police saw the computer outside the door, which made the situation look like a theft in progress. They tried to arrest Jonah.
“It’s okay, officers,” Jonah said. “I’m authorized to use this office.
