Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (3 page)

In the end, Sandy and I shared the view, over the last sip of tea, that Ames had been the perfect storm waiting to happen: family issues, financial pressure, excessive drinking, underperformance at work, and an inflated ego accompanied by a gravely exaggerated evaluation of his superior intellect. Still, he might not have volunteered himself to the Russians if his job had not provided a pretext for regular contact with them. To their credit, they played him like a violin and appealed to his psychic needs.

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As you enter CIA headquarters at Langley, there are two statues, each commemorating spies. One, outdoors, is a fairly inconspicuous tribute to Nathan Hale, the first American spy to give up his life for his country, during the American Revolution. (We shouldn’t dwell on the fact that he met this fate due to poor preparation and shoddy tradecraft.) The other, depicting General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, looms large in the lobby, and large in CIA history. When World War II broke out, the U.S. government decided it needed a professional intelligence service, which became known as the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. It was led by Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer whom the journalist Thomas Powers has described as “a man of enormous crude energy and the open, adventurous mind which was to characterize American intelligence until the Bay of Pigs.”
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Donovan is still held in great esteem by the employees of the CIA.

Across the lobby, also etched in marble, are stars representing CIA officers who have fallen in the line of duty. Sadly, I have watched these stars increase in number each year. Many remain anonymous because of their covert status.

Because secrecy is so critical to everything the CIA does, the people who work there become obsessed with betrayal. At its worst, this obsession can lead to paranoia, like that demonstrated by the Agency’s legendary spy hunter James Jesus Angleton, who came to believe that nearly all our agents were “moles” penetrating the CIA. Angleton himself had fallen victim to betrayal by the infamous British defector Kim Philby. The two had worked and lived together in Italy and had shared many confidences through the years. Philby’s defection to the Russians hit Angleton hard and probably distorted his view of mankind and the intelligence business.

Hunting for moles is a staple of the business, and the counterintelligence staff has to be directed at carefully observing where cases go wrong. However, you can’t allow this to paralyze your initiative. As with many aspects of spying, you need to keep at least two compartmentalized disciplines in your mind simultaneously, operations and counterintelligence. To emphasize only counterintelligence can lead to a form of paranoia that can be very debilitating to an aggressive intelligence service such as the CIA. We spend a great deal of time training at the knee of experienced officers, learning the proper balance between valuing our agents and command alertness when looking at issues of betrayal.

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My early training was a mix of classroom study and fieldwork. It lasted nine months and was split between spying and paramilitary instruction. It included agent targeting and recruiting, surveillance, technical operations, clandestine meeting preparation, and communications programs. In the second half, we underwent paramilitary training in arms use, jungle survival, jump training, and demolitions. While the training was rigorous, it had its comic moments.

One of the more embarrassing occurred when I was attempting to make a brush pass, which is handing over a document to an agent in an undercover manner, a quick walk-by scenario. From my perspective, I had selected a particularly clever spot for the pass, which involved brushing past the agent as he entered a revolving door in a downtown hotel near the training center. It would have been virtually impossible to see the handoff from any angle. I executed it without a flaw, but the agent, one of our instructors, refused to put out his hand to complete the pass, which meant that I would have to repeat the exercise at a different time and location. In my annoyance, when I reached the bottom of the steps outside the hotel, I turned and directed an obscene hand gesture toward the instructor’s back.

That night back at camp, the trainees were assembled for a critique of the day’s performance. The commentator announced that they had a special treat for us: they had secretly videotaped selected meetings throughout the day, a viewing of which would prove entertaining and instructive to the entire class. We were all caught off guard. This was the early days of clandestine video; we had not been exposed to it before. My graphic gesture was first on the docket, and it looked even worse than I remembered. The room howled—at my expense. I learned an unforgettable lesson that night: all my operational activities in the future could be videotaped. And I learned this, too: if you’re trying to go unnoticed and maintain your cool, obscene gestures in public won’t cut it.

The operational aspects of the clandestine training course finished up with a field exercise designed to bring together all we had learned. The class was divided into several teams, each sent to a different location in a major northeastern city. My team ended up at one of the most prestigious hotels in town. I assume our CIA instructors had chosen it because the Agency had ties to the hotel’s security office and would be able to ensure that none of us would be scooped up by the police if our strange behavior were reported. My team passed with flying colors its debriefing and surveillance exercises against multiple targets, role-played by our instructors. The rub came when we had to surreptitiously place an audio device in a hotel room. The placement went well enough, and our team transcribers diligently waited for the surveillance team to report the arrival of the target. The large reel-to-reels were running; earphones were on. Everything was going smoothly—until a maid walked in without knocking to turn down the bed. The transcriber had forgotten to lock the door! The maid, startled, beat a hasty retreat to the security office. The room was soon visited by hotel security—and our instructors. The embarrassing lesson was etched in my memory forever: when performing a clandestine act, lock the door behind you.

Finally, after working for months on tradecraft, we headed off to a special, still-secret facility for paramilitary training and courses on explosives and bomb making. (You can’t do this work in just any neighborhood without upsetting the locals.) The program began with a briefing by an instructor straight out of Central Casting. When he took to the podium, we held back a collective gasp. A jagged V-shaped scar covered a good part of his forehead. If that wasn’t enough, he was missing a couple of fingers. He extolled the excitement of working with explosives. He also stressed the need for caution when handling such materials. Looking at him, I didn’t need convincing. After that presentation, I was determined to leave the course with head and fingers intact.

One of the exercises involved blowing up telephone poles. Half a dozen students would line up, and each would walk slowly to his individual pole, where he would plant an explosive, ignite the charge (which burned at a specific rate per second), and walk briskly back to the starting position. You were told not to run, because if you ran, there was a chance you’d fall and get hit by the detonation. While that sounded reasonable enough, I decided I wouldn’t take any chances and added several extra inches of detonating cord for each of my charges, which allowed me more time to return to my starting spot. The explosives should have detonated sequentially. But because I’d lengthened my detonating cord, my telephone pole was the last to fall. My instructors didn’t see the humor or the wisdom in what I’d done. I received my lowest grade in this course, and a not-so-gentle note for my file suggesting that I “not be allowed to handle explosives.” The irony is that, in the mid-1980s, I probably handled more explosives than any other CIA officer in history.

Next we headed to Panama for a weeklong jungle survival course that included rappelling down waterfall cliffs and rafting across alligator-infested rivers. It was the rainy season, and we were perpetually drenched. When our team was able to carve out a clearing to camp for the night, we divided up the work assignments: hanging hammocks, collecting firewood, locating water. I volunteered to do the cooking, given that I had a modicum of experience. The instructors provided the food: a bag of rice and a small alligator. I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to cook the alligator, so I cut it up, threw it into boiling water, and, near the end, added rice. When chow time came, everyone was starving and eagerly scooped the gruel into their mess kits. But when I checked the kits later, it was clear that nobody had eaten more than a few mouthfuls, despite their hunger. It was a dreadful concoction.

Early in the course, I learned a lesson that stuck with me ever after: you can’t tell a survivor by his looks. Back at camp, embarking on our mission, I spotted a very self-confident colleague who looked like a former Green Beret and was dressed like Jungle Jim, with a feather tucked in his Indiana Jones hat. I figured his was the team to be on, so I positioned myself accordingly. I noticed he wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to the way we had been instructed to carry a machete into the swamps.

“Why should he?” I thought. “He’s an experienced warrior.”

We were no more than a hundred yards into the jungle when he tripped and slid down on his machete. He let out a shriek and began bleeding so profusely that he had to be evacuated to the medical facility. As the hardships mounted, I realized it was some of the least likely officers who performed best under stress. From then on, I kept this in mind whenever I needed to assemble a team: look beyond the obvious.

The final task in the program was jump training, in which we would be expected to make five parachute jumps from a cargo plane. This was optional, but if you opted out, you were given two weeks of administrative leave. That sounded good to me. By that time, I was weary of training in general. Then, as we neared the decision date, Pat urged me to sign up anyway. She felt I would miss out on the camaraderie and fun involved in jumping from an airplane at fifteen hundred feet. She may have been right, but she wasn’t persuasive enough. The next person who urged me to jump was the commander, an ex-paratrooper colonel. Jumping, he said, is “better than sex.” That got my attention, but I quickly concluded he was missing a bolt or two. By then I’d made up my mind: it made no sense to me to voluntarily jump out of an airplane. Had it been mandatory, I would have done it. But volunteer to do it?

As luck would have it, we had arrived at the point where you selected, or were selected for, a specific line division or staff. I was a little uncertain how covert action programs were organized within the Clandestine Service, so I asked to join the Covert Action staff, a unit within the service that ran political, economic, and covert propaganda operations. Shortly thereafter, I had an interview with its chief, Hugh Tovar. Tovar was a legend. He’d served as station chief in Laos. He was also an accomplished parachutist; his office was strewn with jumping memorabilia.

I walked through his door for the interview. He looked up and said, “Have you jumped yet? It’s the greatest thing a man can do.”

Without missing a beat, I said, “No. But I’m really looking forward to it.”

Off to jump training I went.

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Once I had a better understanding of the difference between the Covert Action staff and the ongoing activities of the Agency’s primary operating units, I switched my interest to the Soviet Division. Near the end of the operation training course, I had a private chat at the base club with Rocky Stone, then chief of that division, during which he encouraged me to sign up with them. Stone was a legend, too. A very charismatic senior official, he suffered from profound hearing loss and relied on a hearing aid, which he supplemented with lipreading and focusing on facial expressions. He had been one of the key players in bringing the Shah of Iran to power in 1953.

My career counselor, a man who had played an important role in the Bay of Pigs operation under the alias Tom Bender, was not encouraging. “You’re too tall for Soviet operations,” he said, chewing on his cigar.

I failed to see the connection between spying and height. The trick was to do everything with sleight of hand in a natural setting, not hiding behind bushes. In any case, Bender was a Latin Americanist and he was recruiting for the Latin America Division. He took me to see William V. Broe, yet another legendary officer, who had joined the CIA in 1948 and served as chief of the Western Hemisphere Division (later renamed the Latin America Division) from 1965 to 1972. I remember Bender telling Broe, “This guy belongs in LA Division”—and hardly because of my height. Theirs was a division that was heavily invested in covert action and therefore just the right spot for me. Not long after, I’d get my first overseas assignment: Chile.

By the time I had completed training as a clandestine officer and joined the Latin America Division in late 1969, the CIA was, by historical standards, still a fledgling agency—just twenty-two years old. We would go through middle age together: I wouldn’t retire until after its fiftieth anniversary in 1997. But at the time of my first posting, it had already matured greatly since its overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s government in Iran in 1953 and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. And by my time, it was already an established arm of the U.S. government—and a lightning rod for criticism, particularly from those on the left concerned about the “invisible government.” This was well understood within the upper reaches of the government and the intelligence community, where the pluses and minuses of espionage and covert action were being critically reviewed.

As I prepared to enter clandestine training, a committee of academics and former intelligence professionals convened by CIA director Richard Helms and called the Covert Operations Study Group submitted its report on “Covert Operations of the United States Government.” It was December 1, 1968, and though they presented it to President-elect Richard M. Nixon,
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I wouldn’t be able to read the document until it became public decades later.