Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (2 page)

In the wake of the weapons of mass destruction scandal, I decided despite my nonpartisan politics to serve on Barack Obama’s intelligence committee in his first campaign. There I had a single focus: to try to protect the historically independent role of intelligence and to resist the use of its capabilities in wrongheaded actions in the war in Iraq or “nation building” in Afghanistan. That said, during Obama’s first term, I publicly and privately challenged the administration for not keeping enough heat on Osama bin Laden and for pursuing a doomed, Soviet-like military strategy in Afghanistan to the chagrin of many in the CIA. I wasn’t surprised when the CIA and U.S. Special Forces finally tracked Bin Laden down and killed him in Pakistan in May 2011, not far from where we might have killed him a decade earlier. I had wrongly assumed that this would have happened in the months immediately following 9/11.

Intrigue drew me to Langley as a young man, and I came across plenty of it, beginning with my first assignment in the basement at headquarters, analyzing cables as I awaited training as a clandestine operations officer. One of my fellow analysts, Rick Ames, would go down a dark and treacherous path that haunted me many years later when we found ourselves together in the Rome station. Training prepared me for a range of missions, but not betrayal by one of our own.

I served under eleven CIA directors. Through all the leadership changes, my colleagues and I remained apolitical and disciplined. We prided ourselves on telling it like it was, not like the White House wanted it to be, and so did our counterparts on the analytic side of the administration. While CIA officers are a microcosm of American politics, fairly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, we all checked our politics at the door and took great pride in our public service. I took quite seriously the words from scripture chiseled in marble in the CIA’s lobby:
AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.

Throughout my career, I always felt I could speak truth to power, inside and outside the Agency. I tried always to do this to the best of my ability, and I was never punished for doing so. My first chief in Central America had a plaque over his door, adorned with two mud-stained pigs and a saying that went something like “If you wrestle with pigs, you’ll end up with mud on you.” He wanted us to know: if you start dealing with unsavory people, or conduct unsavory operations, you should expect to get stained in the process. Back then, I thought it was a rather inelegant way to describe our business, especially by a senior officer. Over time, however, I’ve come to truly value the import of that observation, having wrestled with unsavory characters throughout my career—and ending up in the mud on occasion. Over the years that expression became more and more relevant for me, and I quote it even today.

Ian Fleming’s
Casino Royale
introduced the world in 1953 to the indomitable 007, James Bond, a man dedicated to covert action. But when I think of the top intelligence officers I’ve read about, John le Carré’s greatest character, George Smiley, more often comes to mind. He is cunning but restrained, charming but deeply analytic, and ruthless when need be. He is also patriotic, and loyal to what Le Carré calls the “Circus.” Many of the actual CIA legends I encountered over the years would have felt right at home in Le Carré’s fictional world: Tom Polgar; the “Blond Ghost,” Ted Shackley; Dewey Clarridge, the Latin America chief who once showed up in Venezuela pushing a covert action coup in Suriname; Nestor D. Sanchez, the operative who handled the Cuban point man in the CIA’s plot to assassinate Castro; Milt Bearden, the highly effective and flamboyant chief in Islamabad who was so funny, he could have done stand-up comedy; Clair George, the clandestine chief who blanched at the plan to sell missiles to Iran but still got indicted (and then pardoned) in Iran-Contra; David Spedding, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, who was otherwise known as C, for “Chief”; as well as most of the CIA leaders who I got to know very well indeed over the past fifty years.

My very first station chief, Ray Warren, remains the CIA operator I look up to most. He taught me the importance of tradecraft, and paying attention to the smallest of details, so operations would not be compromised. More important, he stressed maintaining the integrity of our reporting and staying within the lines of established U.S. policy. While simply stated, this is not always easy to accomplish in a very street-tough business where you have to deal with some of the world’s more disreputable characters. We live to recruit, which is a sanitized way of saying we live to convince people to commit treason on our behalf by selling us the secrets of their homelands. This is difficult to do even when an asset has been alienated by his country’s antidemocratic system. But we sign up to this mission because we are deeply committed to protecting America’s national interest and our way of life. To accomplish this, all CIA operatives must become hunters.

ONE

Inside the Invisible Government

The Farm, 1969

It never occurred to me growing up that I would someday join the Central Intelligence Agency. I was the son of an Irish-Catholic heating contractor. My forebears were weavers and farmers who immigrated to the United States in the wake of the potato famine of 1846, settling in South Philadelphia and joining the building trades and the police department. But somehow covert action was in my DNA, a fact I came to understand in 1966 when my wife, Pat, gave me a book for my twenty-sixth birthday.

The Invisible Government
, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, was intended as an exposé. The reader was supposed to be shocked and outraged by its revelations of a vast and secret intelligence bureaucracy, a CIA that had become so powerful that it threatened the very democracy it had been created to preserve. But a careful reading belied the book’s argument. In fact, rather than an out-of-control intelligence community engaged in clandestine operations that endangered the nation, the book revealed a system of safeguards put in place by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Reading it, I was struck by the sense of mission and vitality of the Agency, and I was so intrigued and energized by the covert operations described in its pages—not to mention the presumed adventure of living and working with foreigners in exotic places—that as soon as I finished the book, I sent off a letter to the Agency seeking employment.

At the time, I was a high school social studies teacher in suburban Philadelphia, and the CIA was the furthest thing from my mind. I supplemented teaching with summertime work loading and unloading trucks at a food distribution center in South Philly, where I got closer to the rock and rumble of life in dangerous foreign settings. I had to join the Teamsters union to work there, and heard Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa speak at the Philadelphia Convention Hall. He reminded me of Castro as he rambled on nonstop for over an hour, but his charisma was undeniable. The Teamsters were a tough lot. Once, I was let off work early to attend the wake of a coworker. When I asked what had happened, I was told in hushed tones that the man had organized a dissident labor group and ended up in a fight that included baseball bats.

This was far from my rather parochial upbringing. My sisters, Anna Mae and Mary Lou, and I grew up in an
Ozzie and Harriet
world. After World War II, our parents moved to the suburbs in Delaware County. Ours was a blue-collar family, and wonderfully loving and secure. I naïvely felt that nearly everyone in America shared this experience.

I met my future wife, Pat, on the beach in North Wildwood, New Jersey, when she and her friend Nancy Paul strolled past my lifeguard stand. After my career in intelligence, that was the best job I ever had. I still spend my summers and weekends at a shore home in nearby Ocean City, and recently I represented the Ocean City Beach Patrol Alumni in the National Lifeguard Rowing Championships with my former CIA colleague Jim Campbell. With the support of fellow guards Joe Grimes and Jack Brooks, we survived the competition. In 2012 I won the championship in the over-seventy age group with the Ocean City legend Joe Schmitt. Pat and I didn’t hit it off at first, but when I removed a splinter from her friend’s foot, she was taken with this act of gallantry. We were married at Good Shepherd Church in Philadelphia in November 1962. From the moment we met, Pat knew me better than I thought anyone could. It is not surprising that four years later she would give me the book that would change our lives.

Some time passed before I received a response to my handwritten letter to the CIA, directing me to an office in Center City Philadelphia for an interview. I was impressed with the Ivy League–looking CIA officer with excellent diction in a tweed suit and wing-tip shoes. Truth be told, the Agency was always more egalitarian than its high-profile cadre of Yale and Princeton men led many to believe. Still, I was relieved when the interview went well, and I was given an entry examination that measured intelligence, writing skills, and psychological stability. This was followed weeks later by much more comprehensive testing in Washington, D.C., including a polygraph examination and extensive interviews. Drugs were not an issue among middle-class America in the early 1960s. Instead, the polygrapher seemed to have a special interest in how much beer I had drunk as a college student and lifeguard. After two grueling days trying to convince the CIA that I was right for them, I returned to teaching. Finally, weeks later, I received a letter inviting me to return to Washington on February 7, 1967, to become a member of the Central Intelligence Agency.

My first assignment was to the Clandestine Service’s Records Integration Office, to become a “documents analyst,” until it was time for me to be sent off to the “Farm” for training as a clandestine operator. In the windowless basement vault of CIA headquarters, I reviewed cables for retrievable data sent back to Langley, Virginia, from officers in Eastern Europe, while ten feet away, my new colleague did the same for those from the Soviet Union. His name was Aldrich Ames. He would go on to become one of the greatest traitors in CIA history.

While I couldn’t believe I was now working inside the invisible government, my colleague was blasé about it. He had followed a different path to the secret vaulted room. Rick, as we called him, was a CIA brat. He’d spent his early teens hanging around a proper British yacht club in Rangoon, Burma, where his father worked from 1953 to 1955 as a CIA operative undercover. After flunking out of the University of Chicago and setting off on his own as a theater hand in the Windy City, Rick had come back home to McLean, in Northern Virginia. His father, Carleton Ames, then holding down a desk job after his foreign assignment, immediately helped his son land a position at the Agency.

When I met him in the fall of 1967, Ames was just finishing up his degree as a night student at George Washington University. My colleague lacked the savoir faire I associated with spies. He was unkempt, with stringy dark hair and bad teeth stained by the Camels he practically chain-smoked, and his clothes could have been charitably described as thrift shop specials. Still, he was arguably the best-read among us on intelligence, and had already cultivated an abiding interest in Soviet operations and counterintelligence.

In the claustrophobic, fluorescent-lit basement of CIA headquarters, my worldly, cynical office mate and I spent hours in earnest debate over the great issues of our time. Our conversations were worthy of graduate school dialectics. The more I talked on about covert action and Agency derring-do, the harder Ames would shake his head and flash a wry smile. “Jack, the core of the business is counterintelligence,” he said. How ironic.

Ames was several months ahead of me in pre-career training, but we became friendly, finding common ground living on our meager GS-8 salaries. One evening, Pat and I met Ames’s girlfriend, Nancy Segebarth, a pleasant, intelligent young woman working on the analytical side of the Agency, the Directorate of Intelligence, and in May 1969 we attended their wedding, at a Unitarian church in Northern Virginia. There I met Ames’s father, Carleton, who was just retiring after spending fifteen years with the CIA. I could sense that there was some distance between him and his son, which Ames had spoken about in the past. In any case, Ames was about to depart for his first assignment as a case officer in Ankara, Turkey, working for the Soviet/Eastern Europe (SE) Division.

Before he left, and we went our separate ways, we exchanged books. Ames gave me
A Coffin for Dimitrios
, a spy novel by Eric Ambler whose narrator, a mystery writer, descends into a netherworld of double agents and espionage and becomes indistinguishable from the subjects of his fiction. I gave him
Psychopathology and Politics
by Harold Lasswell, about how political behavior is basically predetermined by our Freudian nature. I got the book back many years later. I was surprised Ames remembered who gave it to him, and now wonder how much it applied to him.

Years later, I raised this with Sandy Grimes shortly after her book on Ames,
Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed
, was published in mid-November 2012. She and I met for breakfast at the Palace Hotel in New York and spent an hour over tea puzzling over him. Sandy had spent her career supporting the Agency’s recruited Soviet assets. She joined her coauthor and counter-intelligence officer, the late Jeanne Vertefeuille, on the Ames mole hunt team in 1991. They were the two officers most responsible for finally unmasking Ames in 1994, nine years after he began spying for the Soviet Union. He gave the Soviets the names of our best Russian agents, all of whom were executed after Ames’s betrayal. In
Circle of Treason
, Sandy describes how Ames came into her office as she was beginning the investigation that would ultimately lead to his capture and lectured her on counterintelligence. She and I spent our breakfast that day trying to figure out why he’d done that.

We talked about the impact his second wife, María del Rosario Casas Dupuy, had had on his behavior. She was high-maintenance and clearly liked to present a
bella figura
, requiring that Ames support her in high style. She had come from a family of some standing and wealth in Colombia. Apparently, the family’s net worth had diminished substantially over the years, but Rosario’s self-image had not. Interestingly enough, the initial investigation into Ames erroneously concluded that Rosario came from money and therefore this provided the explanation for Rick’s expenditures. Sandy and I also talked about how Ames had attempted to mask the millions the Russians paid him by buying a used Jaguar, only to pay cash when he bought his home. This would have been a red flag if CIA investigators had been allowed to look more carefully at his personal finances. This limitation has been lifted since then.