to my car to get it.”
“Can you show us some ID, sir?”
Jonah showed the policemen his identification.
“Can you show us anything that proves you have legal access to this office? Can you show us your desk?”
The policemen looked inside. Each desk was bare and the office was empty of any personal objects. There was nothing in the office that could be connected to Jonah.
“Which one are you?” The policemen pointed to the IN/OUT board that listed the names Ben Dover, I. P. Lowe, etc.
The police put Jonah in their squad car and drove him to the precinct. Fortunately, he had a phone number for Moe, who rushed down to the station and convinced the police that Jonah did have legal access to the office.
A rumor spread through HQs that Jonah had been caught trying to steal a computer. Max and I pointedly squashed the rumor whenever we heard it repeated.
SINCE WE WERE ALWAYS TO DENY that we were diplomats working for the US Department of State, my classmates and I were given details of a light cover company for use during our time in the US, prior to overseas deployments. The cover company consisted of a mailing address in a high-rise office building, plus telephone and fax numbers. When a couple of friends asked for my business contact information, I gave them these numbers. Later, a friend called one of the numbers and reached something called “Acme Office Solutions.” He asked for me.
Long pause. “Please hold.” Another pause. “No Ishmael here.”
“Well, Ishmael gave me this number. Are you sure he’s not available?”
“Sorry, no Ishmael working here.”
When I heard about this, I resolved that in the future I would test and evaluate cover company numbers before handing them out.
We prepared and practiced cover stories. If we were meeting an agent, we always had to have an excuse ready to explain why. The instructors said we had better beware, though. We might have a great cover story, but a KGB officer observing us might not even bother to ask for it. He might just see us with the agent together and figure it out.
This point was based on the apocryphal story of an American case officer working for the State Department as a diplomat who was having lunch with a Soviet weapons scientist. Their children went to the same school; his cover story was that they were discussing the school’s sports program. A KGB officer happened to walk by the restaurant, saw the American diplomat and the Soviet scientist having lunch together, and didn’t bother to look at the sports and school brochures the case officer had arrayed on the table. He saw an American diplomat meeting a Soviet scientist. It was all the information he needed to reach the correct conclusion. The KGB bundled the Soviet scientist off to Siberia.
The instructors taught us the Agency’s history with Cuban agents, a case study in bad tradecraft. The Agency had run dozens of Cuban agents over the years and in the end nearly all turned out to be double agents. Those who were real agents had been captured and imprisoned or executed by the Cuban government.7
Our case officers handled Cuban agents by connecting them in networks. This meant that bad agents had access to the identities of legitimate agents. Some legitimate Cuban agents were infiltrated on missions into Cuba straight into the arms of double agents, where they were immediately arrested. The Cuban double agents then used the communications gear of the legitimate agents to communicate false intelligence back to the Agency. The legitimate agents had been instructed to include signals within their communications to indicate they were not under duress. The signals, appearing in the communications, would mean that all was well. When communications from these agents did not contain the duress signals, thus indicating something had gone wrong, the Agency figured the Cuban agents had just forgotten them. Refusing to believe that there might be a problem, the Agency continued to send agents to their imprisonments or deaths in Cuba. When the double agents realized the Agency had figured out at last that they all worked for Cuba, their last messages to their case officers were words to the effect of “Die, capitalist pigs.”
In the aftermath of the Cuban debacle, the Cuban government produced a TV documentary. We watched it during our training class. It showed our case officers, as members of the State Department, driving around Cuba servicing dead drops, doing surveillance detection routes, and leaving signals. The Cubans had rigged cameras in trees and bushes at the places where these clandestine acts were to occur. Our people looked around furtively as they picked up or dropped off items. The documentary was narrated in a light-hearted style: “Here is John Smith from the US interests section! He is taking a walk in the woods. Why is he looking around nervously? Lo! What did he just pick up?”
The Cuban programs were among the most important that the Agency ran during the Cold War. Many case officers earned promotions and awards based on their handling of Cuban agents. As time went on, many of these officers became Agency mandarins. No promotion or award was ever rescinded, no accountability ever enforced.
Vast amounts of false intelligence were fed into the system by the Cubans. Although a scrub of the system should have erased a lot of it, our instructors felt that because there had been so many Cuban doubles and such a large volume of production over a long period, a great deal of the false intelligence remained in our databases. All of the Cuban double agents had passed polygraph examinations.
Criticism of the operations was open and refreshing. Our instructors didn’t pull any punches on the Cuban program and felt it was important to analyze the past to learn how to avoid repeating mistakes.
In this analysis, HQs looked back on the cases and tried to find clues that could have shown these agents were bad. If an agent took a long time to respond to instructions, or was late for a meeting, it might mean that he had to check in first with his real handlers. In meetings, agents were scrutinized with an eye toward whether they were trying to control or manipulate the proceedings. Some speculated that the Cuban government prohibited its double agents from reporting to the Agency on certain restricted areas of information, even if the information they intended to report was false.
FOR TRAINING IN RECRUITMENTS, we studied the motivations of a human source and the rewards necessary to gain his cooperation. Usually the motivator was money, but it could also be the desire for praise, or the dictates of personal ideology. Playing to the natural human weakness for praise and attention, the KGB was reputed to take its agents, dress them in Soviet military uniform, promote them to general, and pin medals on them. Then, for “security purposes,” the uniform and medals would be taken away for safekeeping. Kim Philby, an infamous British spy for the KGB, was told that he was an official KGB officer. When he fled to Moscow, however, his uniform and full access to KGB headquarters were denied.8
A parade of speakers visited our safe house throughout the course to give valuable tips picked up during their careers. Later, we had the opportunity to meet informally with them. I enjoyed meeting one veteran officer in particular—a gregarious and charismatic man with the personality of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul. The Godfather was one of the Agency’s best recruiters.
“Aim at getting overseas,” the Godfather said. “Take any assignment you can get, just get overseas. Don’t be picky about location. Don’t be picky about the mission you’re assigned, either. Once you’re overseas, you’ll be able to figure out ways to work on the important targets, regardless of the initial intent of the assignment.”
That evening, following his visit to our safe house, the Godfather gave me some tips privately, over drinks, on working the system. The Godfather, for example, often married and divorced women who were not US citizens. Marrying
