Deadly Deceits (4 page)

An audible sigh of relief and a happy buzz of conversation greeted this announcement. We were to be directing spies around the globe. The news was great. We were to be in the forefront of America's battle against the scourge of the international communist conspiracy. After the group stopped congratulating one another and quieted down, the instructor continued: “Another directorate is the Directorate for Intelligence (DDI). It collates and analyzes intelligence and is responsible for coordinating the dissemination of all finished intelligence. The third directorate is the Directorate for Administration (DDA). This directorate consolidates the management functions of the two other directorates.” He then proceeded to explain the organizational breakdown of the three new directorates, but who could pay attention to all the meaningless initials? Time and experience would teach us what we had to know.

The orientation course featured melodramatic, frightening movies on communism. One concerned an FBI penetration operation into the American Communist Party and was titled, appropriately enough,
I Was a Communist for the FBI
. Another with about the same theme was called
Walk East on Beacon Street
, and we again saw that excellent training film, the FBI's “White Shoes.” But these were just the preliminaries. The grand finale, the last word on communism, was to be heard in a lecture scheduled for the last day of the course.

As the time approached, we could tell that this was to be something special. A number of important-looking officials jammed into the already crowded room. The course director introduced the guest speaker. “Mr. Smith [all instructors used aliases] has just returned from a European nation where he successfully monitored and helped counter the efforts of the Soviets to use the local Communist Party and its front groups to subvert the government. While he was in Europe, he was involved in several dangerous incidents, and he has been recalled temporarily for his protection. We are most fortunate to have Mr. Smith here today to speak to us about
communism.”

The eyes, minds, and hearts of the students opened wide to this man who so represented the ideal we all hoped to achieve. Mr. Smith, a conservatively dressed man of medium height, had sharp eyes and a close-cropped head of curly, rusty-colored hair. His every movement and gesture epitomized intensity under control. He looked at the audience and gave the impression that he was sizing them up. Standing behind the podium, he spoke in quiet, modulated tones. He presented the history of communism from the overthrow of the Czar in Russia to Mao's defeat of Chiang Kai-shek's government in China. He summarized events in the Soviet Union: “The ruthless Stalin has used the secret police to purge millions, sending multitudes off to Siberia to die a death of forced labor and starvation. Stalin has conscripted millions more and is preparing his armies for world domination. He has prohibited religion in the Soviet Union and has persecuted those who only want to worship God.”

As he talked, his speech gathered momentum and his voice hardened. He moved out from behind the podium and strode back and forth across the stage while his eyes seemed to challenge any in the audience who might doubt. “Not satisfied with conquest of his own countrymen,” he continued, “this monster has set forth a master plan for world conquest. Through the International Communist Movement he has created havoc in Iran, Greece, and Turkey. He slammed the Iron Curtain down around the countries of Eastern Europe. He uses
agents provocateurs
to subvert the labor unions and governments of Western Europe!”

Mr. Smith angrily described the functions of the Communist International Department (COMINTERN) and its direct control over the Communist parties of the world. He elaborated on the deceits of Stalin in appearing to dissolve the COMINTERN and replacing it with the so-called Communist Information Bureau (COMINFORM). He said the change was a devious attempt to confuse world opinion. “But the COMINFORM,” he said, “continues to control foreign Communist parties just as tightly as before.” He pounded his fist into his hand and asked what could be done.

His speech had me sitting on the edge of my chair, and I looked around to see how it was affecting others. Most were
sitting bolt upright and intensely following his words. They seemed mesmerized.

“The Soviet Union preys on lonely, shy, antisocial outcasts in this country and recruits them into the American Communist Party. These people have no friends, no links to decent society. The Soviets brainwash and exploit those undesirable humans to the point where they plan to violently overthrow our government.”

I thought back to a movie I had seen, possibly as part of the course. It portrayed a shy young man such as Mr. Smith described. After a traditional childhood he had left home and returned a changed man—an obvious victim of Communist brainwashing. He challenged all family, religious, and government authorities and traditions—he was a thoroughly despicable person who deserved to be put away.

“The Soviets attack our flag and our country. Stalin is fighting to destroy all religion, our allies, and our way of life.” Mr. Smith paused here and seemed to look each one of us in the eye, and then said, “You here in this room are not going to let that happen.”

We all jumped up, spontaneously shouting and cheering our commitment. I was deeply moved and transformed by his stirring speech. I sat down, drained of all emotion, but finally joined a group that slowly adjourned to the adjacent cafeteria. There was none of the usual banter. We quietly discussed how we could defeat this scourge. Thinking about it years later, I realized that the purpose of the course was to fire us up emotionally to fight communism rather than educate us about what communism was and how it operated. As I was to learn later, we and the nation would have been better served if the Agency had made us study the subject seriously rather than simply trying to indoctrinate us.

After we completed the orientation, most of the men received further training to become case officers—American staff officers working at all levels in the Directorate for Plans who served as intelligence gatherers, propaganda writers, or covert operators. The women, on the other hand, went to work as secretaries or intelligence assistants, handling routine
paperwork, running file traces, and doing other tasks the case officers did not wish to do. Until recently the Agency followed a strict policy against using women as case officers. The policy was based on tradition, the perceived inability of women to operate in foreign male-oriented societies, and probably a strong dose of pure sexism.

I was among about 50 from the orientation who went on to the basic operations course given in a World War II temporary building near the I-J-K-L complex. The trainees were all young and Caucasian.

The basic operations course taught, among other things, how to pick locks, how to take photographs undetected, and how to open letters and reseal them without leaving traces. A major portion of the course dealt with the principles of clandestine communications with an agent—an agent is the classic spy, a foreign national who agrees to provide information to the CIA case officer. The techniques ran from secret writing to radio codes and included leaving messages or packages in an opening behind a loose brick in a wall (a dead drop), giving them to a person who traveled regularly from one place to another (a live drop), or sending them through the mail to an address that would prevent a direct link between the sender and the recipient (a mail drop)—not too different from the way some firms use post office boxes.

The course presented the concept of targeting individuals, groups, or organizations having access to the information needed by the Agency. We were taught how to spot, assess, recruit, use, and terminate agents. To assess an agent, various investigative methods were employed to learn details of his motivations, especially his exploitable weaknesses. Once identified, his weaknesses were used to recruit him as our spy.

Working with the agent required the techniques of flattery, cajolery, discipline, and pressure. Because of his cooperation with you, blackmail was always the unspoken threat. When an agent was no longer useful, he was subject to termination, an ominous word that merely meant how one fired or retired him without creating a fuss.

After this intensive six-week course there was another narrowing down of the number of trainees. About 30 of us were chosen for further instruction in paramilitary (PM) topics. The approximately 20 others went on to assume their
new jobs.

We did not know it at the time, and it was years later before we fully comprehended the various differences in personnel types, but we, the paramilitary officers or PMers, were most definitely not the elite. We were tagged with such pejorative nicknames as knuckledraggers, mesomorphs, and gorillas. The stratification of Directorate for Plans personnel began during World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt asked William J. Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer, to establish a wartime intelligence and special activity organization called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). To head this new government agency, “Wild Bill” Donovan recruited many of his friends from Ivy League schools, from Wall Street, and from the corporate offices in New York—earning it the nickname of Oh So Social. Many of these people stayed in the intelligence business, and when the CIA was created in 1947 they assumed most of the top positions in it. Years later they were called the Bold Easterners.

Other individuals who joined the Agency in its formative years and gradually moved up through the ranks ultimately became known as the Prudent Professionals, although there was some overlap and movement between them and the Bold Easterners. The Bold Easterners in the 1950s concentrated their interest on the Soviet Union and Europe, whereas in the 1960s much of the Agency's attention swung to operations in Third World countries. Many of these operations involved large-scale programs directed by the Prudent Professionals.

The PMers came at the very bottom rung, and virtually none rose to any position of consequence within the CIA. The low status of the PMers did not mean that they were relegated to unimportant activities—quite the contrary, since PM programs predominated in the Far East from 1953 on. But it was the Prudent Professionals who assumed all the top positions in these programs, not the workmen PMers.

The paramilitary training was held at Camp Peary, the Agency's training base located in Tidewater, Virginia, within a few miles of Williamsburg. Camp Peary had been a Naval training base during World War II but was handed over to the CIA after the war. Even though the sign over the entrance to the base said “Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity,” the official version, everyone in the Agency called it the
“farm.” The camp buildings were nestled in 10,000 acres of pine forests surrounded on three sides by a 12-foot-high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, with the north border protected by the York River.

Of the approximately 30 students, about half had played college football and some, like myself, had tried out or done brief stints with professional football teams. The Agency, it seemed, liked to recruit football players for its “burn and bang” paramilitary operations because football players liked the active life and were not overly intellectual. Many of the rest of the PMers had either military backgrounds or some special talent needed for paramilitary activities.

Most of us were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and displayed all the enthusiasm expressed by the term “gung ho!” We were young, well-conditioned, eager, caught up in the mystique—of just what we were not quite sure, but we were ready and willing to learn and give it our best. One student seemed to epitomize all of the characteristics that the Agency desired in our group of PMers. I will call him Jimmy Moe. He was gaudy, noisy, in superb physical condition, and not a man to worry about subtleties. Jimmy was a refugee from Hungary and an ex-Marine noncommissioned officer who had been wounded at Iwo Jima. I had first met Jimmy at the orientation course, where he was always in the company of the only older woman in the class. When we teased him about this, he said: “Give me an older woman any time; they never know when it will be their last.” He apparently had few inhibitions when it came to sex and made ribald comments about the joys of varied sexual approaches.

In accordance with the DDP's mission at the time—primarily paramilitary activities in Korea and Communist China and in Eastern Europe—our group was trained in all aspects of working in and with local resistance movements: parachuting, clandestine radio communications, map reading, survival, explosives, escape and evasion, small unit tactics, and the genteel art of killing silently. To get us in the proper military mode, we had to wear military fatigues, march in rank to all classes, eat in the cafeteria, and bunk in barracks. Because of the busy schedule, few of us left the camp to visit our families on the weekends, and all were forbidden, for security reasons, from visiting nearby Williamsburg.

Every morning during the three-month course we were forced to attend physical conditioning workouts that included, among other things, the hellish obstacle course. Our instructor for this segment, whom I shall call Rob Carson, also taught the arcane skill of dirty fighting—how to kill, disable, or disarm an opponent with a knife, a wire, a silenced gun, or a variety of other devices.

One night Rob assigned an exercise where we were to sneak up on dummy sentries and quickly disarm them. Jimmy Moe got into the spirit of the exercise and disemboweled the straw-filled sentry. His violent attack on the inanimate dummy made some of us a little queasy.

The parachute training taught us how to exit a plane, how to steer a chute, and how to land. In this training we used a mock-up door of a C-47 and a 34-foot-high jump tower. We had to exit from the door of the tower harnessed in parachute straps and hooked to a suspension cable. I dreaded this tower, as did many of the other students. The close perspective of the ground and the height of more than four floors made it most difficult to force yourself to jump. I never did get over my fear of the infernal exercise, and several trainees dropped out after refusing to jump. Jimmy Moe found it a joy and clamored for more than his share of turns. His exuberant “Geronimo!” as he leaped as high and hard out of the tower door as possible could be heard at the cafeteria a mile away.