Permanent Record (14 page)

The next day, I drove my trusty old Honda Civic out into the Virginia countryside. In order to get to the foreign station of my dreams, I first had to go back to school—to the first sit-in-a-classroom schooling I’d ever really finish.

My first orders as a freshly minted officer of the government were to head for the Comfort Inn in Warrenton, Virginia, a sad, dilapidated motel whose primary client was the “State Department,” by which I mean the CIA. It was the worst motel in a town of bad motels, which was probably why the CIA chose it. The fewer other guests, the lower the chances that anybody would notice that this particular Comfort Inn served as a makeshift dormitory for the Warrenton Training Center—or, as folks who work there call it, the Hill.

When I checked in, the desk clerk warned me not to use the stairs, which were blocked off by police tape. I was given a room on the second floor of the main building, with a view of the inn’s auxiliary buildings and parking lot. The room was barely lit, there was mold in the bathroom, the carpets were filthy with cigarette burns under the No Smoking sign, and the flimsy mattress was stained dark purple with what I hoped was booze. Nevertheless, I liked it—I was still at the age when I could find this seediness romantic—and I spent my first night lying awake in bed, watching the bugs swarm the single domed overhead light fixture and
counting down the hours to the free continental breakfast I’d been promised.

The next morning, I discovered that on the continent of Warrenton, breakfast meant individual-size boxes of Froot Loops and sour milk. Welcome to the government.

The Comfort Inn was to be my home for the next six months. My fellow Innmates and I, as we called ourselves, were discouraged from telling our loved ones where we were staying and what we were doing. I leaned hard into those protocols, rarely heading back to Maryland or even talking to Lindsay on the phone. Anyway, we weren’t allowed to take our phones to school, since class was classified, and we had classes all the time. Warrenton kept most of us too busy to be lonely.

If the Farm, down by Camp Peary, is the CIA’s most famous training institution, chiefly because it’s the only one that the agency’s PR staff is allowed to talk to Hollywood about, the Hill is without a doubt the most mysterious. Connected via microwave and fiber optics to the satellite relay facility at Brandy Station—part of the Warrenton Training Center’s constellation of sister sites—the Hill serves as the heart of the CIA’s field communications network, carefully located just out of nuke range from DC. The salty old techs who worked there liked to say that the CIA could survive losing its headquarters to a catastrophic attack, but it would die if it ever lost Warrenton, and now that the top of the Hill holds two enormous top secret data centers—one of which I later helped to construct—I’m inclined to agree.

The Hill earned its name because of its location, which is atop, yes, a massive steepness. When I arrived, there was just one road that led in, past a purposely under-marked perimeter fence, and then up a grade so severe that whenever the temperature dropped and the road iced over, vehicles would lose traction and slide backward downhill.

Just beyond the guarded checkpoint lies the State Department’s decaying diplomatic communications training facility, whose prominent location was meant to reinforce its role as cover: mak
ing the Hill appear as if it’s merely a place where the American foreign service trains technologists. Beyond it, amid the back territory, were the various low, unlabeled buildings I studied in, and even farther on was the shooting range that the IC’s trigger pullers used for special training. Shots would ring out, in a style of firing I wasn’t familiar with:
pop-pop, pop; pop-pop, pop
. A double-tap meant to incapacitate, followed by an aimed shot meant to execute.

I was there as a member of class 6-06 of the BTTP, the Basic Telecommunications Training Program, whose intentionally beige name disguises one of the most classified and unusual curricula in existence. The purpose of the program is to train TISOs (Technical Information Security Officers)—the CIA’s cadre of elite “communicators,” or, less formally, “commo guys.” A TISO is trained to be a jack-of-all-trades, a one-person replacement for previous generations’ specialized roles of code clerk, radioman, electrician, mechanic, physical and digital security adviser, and computer technician. The main job of this undercover officer is to manage the technical infrastructure for CIA operations, most commonly overseas at stations hidden inside American missions, consulates, and embassies—hence the State Department connection. The idea is, if you’re in an American embassy, which is to say if you’re far from home and surrounded by untrustworthy foreigners—whether hostiles or allies, they’re still untrustworthy foreigners to the CIA—you’re going to have to handle all of your technical needs internally. If you ask a local repairman to fix your secret spy base, he’ll definitely do it, even for cheap, but he’s also going to install hard-to-find bugs on behalf of a foreign power.

As a result, TISOs are responsible for knowing how to fix basically every machine in the building, from individual computers and computer networks to CCTV and HVAC systems, solar panels, heaters and coolers, emergency generators, satellite hookups, military encryption devices, alarms, locks, and so on. The rule is that if it plugs in or gets plugged into, it’s the TISO’s problem.

TISOs also have to know how to build some of these systems
themselves, just as they have to know how to destroy them—when an embassy is under siege, say, after all the diplomats and most of their fellow CIA officers have been evacuated. The TISOs are always the last guys out. It’s their job to send the final “off the air” message to headquarters after they’ve shredded, burned, wiped, degaussed, and disintegrated anything that has the CIA’s fingerprints on it, from operational documents in safes to disks with cipher material, to ensure that nothing of value remains for an enemy to capture.

Why this was a job for the CIA and not for the State Department—the entity that actually owns the embassy building—is more than the sheer difference in competence and trust: the real reason is plausible deniability. The worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage. The old explanations for why a country might try to maintain a notionally sovereign physical presence on another country’s soil faded into obsolescence with the rise of electronic communications and jet-powered aircraft. Today, the most meaningful diplomacy happens directly between ministries and ministers. Sure, embassies do still send the occasional démarche and help support their citizens abroad, and then there are the consular sections that issue visas and renew passports. But those are often in a completely different building, and anyway, none of those activities can even remotely justify the expense of maintaining all that infrastructure. Instead, what justifies the expense is the ability for a country to use the cover of its foreign service to conduct and legitimize its spying.

TISOs work under diplomatic cover with credentials that hide them among these foreign service officers, usually under the identity of “attachés.” The largest embassies would have maybe five of these people, the larger embassies would have maybe three, but most just have one. They’re called “singletons,” and I remember being told that of all the posts the CIA offers, these have the highest rates of divorce. To be a singleton is to be the lone technical officer, far from home, in a world where everything is always broken.

My class in Warrenton began with around eight members and lost only one before graduation—which I was told was fairly uncommon. And this motley crew was uncommon, too, though pretty well representative of the kind of malcontents who voluntarily sign up for a career track that all but guarantees they’ll spend the majority of their service undercover in a foreign country. For the first time in my IC career, I wasn’t the youngest in the room. At age twenty-four, I’d say I was around the mean, though my experience doing systems work at headquarters certainly gave me a boost in terms of familiarity with the agency’s operations. Most of the others were just tech-inclined kids straight out of college, or straight off the street, who’d applied online.

In a nod to the paramilitary aspirations of the CIA’s foreign field branches, we called each other by nicknames—quickly assigned based on eccentricities—more often than by our true names. Taco Bell was a suburb: wide, likable, and blank. At twenty years old, the only job he’d had prior to the CIA was as the night-shift manager at a branch of the eponymous restaurant in Pennsylvania. Rainman was in his late twenties and spent the term bouncing around the autism spectrum between catatonic detachment and shivering fury. He wore the name we gave him proudly and claimed it was a Native American honorific. Flute earned his name because his career in the Marines was far less interesting to us than his degree in panpipes from a music conservatory. Spo was one of the older guys, at thirty-five or so. He was called what he was called because he’d been an SPO—a Special Police Officer—at the CIA’s headquarters, where he got so bored out of his mind guarding the gate at McLean that he was determined to escape overseas even if it meant cramming his entire family into a single motel room (a situation that lasted until the management found his kids’ pet snake living in a dresser drawer). Our elder was the Colonel, a midforties former Special Forces commo sergeant who, after numerous tours in the sandbox, was trying out for his second act. We called him the Colonel, even though he was just an enlisted guy, not an officer, mostly out of his resemblance to that friendly
Kentuckian whose fried chicken we preferred to the regular fare of the Warrenton cafeteria.

My nickname—I guess I can’t avoid it—was the Count. Not because of my aristocratic bearing or dandyish fashion sense, but because, like the felt vampire puppet of
Sesame Street
, I had a tendency to signal my intention to interrupt class by raising my forefinger, as if to say:
“One, two, three, ah, ha, ha, three things you forgot!”

These were the folks with whom I’d cycle through some twenty different classes, each in its own specialty, but most having to do with how to make the technology available in any given environment serve the government of the United States, whether in an embassy or on the run.

One drill involved lugging the “off-site package,” which was an eighty-pound suitcase of communications equipment that was older than I was, up onto a building’s roof. With just a compass and a laminated sheet of coordinates, I’d have to find in all that vast sky of twinkling stars one of the CIA’s stealth satellites, which would connect me to the agency’s mothership, its Crisis Communications Center in McLean—call sign “Central”—and then I’d use the Cold War–era kit inside the package to establish an encrypted radio channel. This drill was a practical reminder of why the commo officer is always the first in and last out: the chief of station can steal the deepest secret in the world, but it doesn’t mean squat until somebody gets it home.

That night I stayed on base after dark, and drove my car up to the very top of the Hill, parking outside the converted barn where we studied electrical concepts meant to prevent adversaries from monitoring our activities. The methods we learned about at times seemed close to voodoo—such as the ability to reproduce what’s being displayed on any computer monitor by using only the tiny electromagnetic emissions caused by the oscillating currents in its internal components, which can be captured using a special antenna, a method called Van Eck phreaking. If this sounds hard to understand, I promise we all felt the same way. The instructor
himself readily admitted he never fully comprehended the details and couldn’t demonstrate it for us, but he knew the threat was real: the CIA was doing it to others, which meant others could do it to us.

I sat on the roof of my car, that same old white Civic, and, as I gazed out over what felt like all of Virginia, I called Lindsay for the first time in weeks, or even a month. We talked until my phone’s battery died, my breath becoming visible as the night got colder. There was nothing I wanted more than to share the scene with her—the dark fields, the undulating hills, the high astral shimmer—but describing it to her was the best I could do. I was already breaking the rules by using my phone; I would’ve been breaking the law by taking a picture.

One of Warrenton’s major subjects of study involved how to service the terminals and cables, the basic—in many ways, the primitive—components of any CIA station’s communications infrastructure. A “terminal,” in this context, is just a computer used to send and receive messages over a single secure network. In the CIA, the word “cables” tends to refer to the messages themselves, but technical officers know that “cables” are also far more tangible: they’re the cords or wires that for the last half century or so have linked the agency’s terminals—specifically its ancient Post Communications Terminals—all over the world, tunneling underground across national borders, buried at the bottom of the ocean.

Ours was the last year that TISOs had to be fluent in all of this: the terminal hardware, the multiple software packages, and the cables, too, of course. For some of my classmates, it felt a bit crazy to have to deal with issues of insulation and sheathing in what was supposed to be the age of wireless. But if any of them voiced doubts about the relevance of any of the seemingly antiquated tech that we were being taught, our instructors would remind us that ours was also the first year in the history of the Hill that TISOs weren’t required to learn Morse code.

Closing in on graduation, we had to fill out what were called dream sheets. We were given a list of the CIA stations worldwide
that needed personnel, and were told to rank them in the order of our preferences. These dream sheets then went to the Requirements Division, which promptly crumpled them up and tossed them in the trash—at least according to rumor.

My dream sheet started with what was called the SRD, the Special Requirements Division. This was technically a posting not at any embassy but here in Virginia, from which I would be sent out on periodic tours of all the uglier spots in the sandbox, places where the agency judged a permanent posting too harsh or too dangerous—tiny, isolated forward operating bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the border regions of Pakistan, for example. By choosing SRD, I was opting for challenge and variety over being stuck in just one city for the entire duration of what was supposed to be an up-to-three-years stint. My instructors were all pretty confident that SRD would jump at the chance to bring me on, and I was pretty confident in my newly honed abilities. But things didn’t quite go as expected.