I pull into a spot in the suburban Panera parking lot. I’m driving a training car, a rented Dodge Stratus, designed to safeguard my cover from any real-world surveillants sent by the Russians or Chinese to get a jump on identifying the CIA’s next cohort of spies. Fair enough—my rust-bucket Jeep is pretty identifiable. I glance in the rearview mirror. This is going to be our first graded exercise. My reflection doesn’t inspire confidence. Blotchy skin, nervous eyes, the puppy chub of childhood still in her cheeks. Every movie I’ve ever watched suggests this is not what spies look like. But then, I guess spies who look like spies don’t get very far.
Inside Panera, a line of Sunday brunchers snakes toward the door. I scan the room over the top of a menu, feeling vaguely ridiculous. The weekend yuppie crowd sprawls across tables and chairs. No sign of a cranky case officer posing as a Kazakh informant, pretending not to know I’m there. For a minute I wonder if I’ve dreamed the whole thing, the way crazy people always think they’re surrounded by the CIA. And then I see him. Sitting in the back at the coffee bar, shoulders hunched, as if he’s nursing a finger of whiskey.
This is it. My first opportunity to mess something up so badly I get kicked out of the program. I draw breath and head toward him. The stool next to him is free—a courtesy for a new student, I’m pretty sure. I sit down and set a laptop and a book on the bar. He’s waiting for me to make the first move. I let him wait. In part because I’m terrified. And in part because I think it seems more natural that way. I open my laptop to an e-mail template and begin typing a fake note. “Thanks for the heads-up,” I tap to a fictional correspondent. “Given my connections in Washington, I feel a responsibility to help—I’m sure you understand.” I leave the cursor blinking there for a minute. I can feel him stealing a glance at my screen. I force myself not to look for his look. Instead, I sigh. Wait a beat longer. Then hit the keystroke combo to lock the screen.
“Do you mind?” I ask him. He looks startled. “Watching my things,” I say. “Would you mind keeping an eye on them while I use the restroom?” He glances at the laptop, the book, back to me. He nods. The book is a prop I’ve created by wrapping a novel in a handmade cover that reads: Rat Pack Chic: Glamour, Freedom, and the Advent of American Cool.
In the bathroom, I pull the door shut and start counting: One, two, three. I look in the mirror, examine my reflection again: Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. She looks better this time. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. Like maybe she just might make it through this thing alive. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. I open the door and clock him right where I left him, eyeing the picture of Dean Martin and Sinatra in mid-croon.
“Thanks,” I say and sit back down. We fall silent for a beat. It’s unbearable, the waiting. Then finally, he says, “Those were the days, huh?” and nods toward the photo on the book’s cover like a spurned lover gesturing toward the girl who passed him by.
“Weren’t they, though,” I say. “I’ve always kind of wished I were born back then. I collect their letters.” I give him a shy smile. “The Rat Pack. You know, I mean I buy their letters and things when I get the chance.”
His face brightens. “I’d love to see those sometime.” He’s making this easy.
“Well, I’ve been planning to digitize them, you know, make them available online. Seems like such a waste for them to be in my desk drawer. But I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
“That’s too bad,” he says, and I can hear the opening in his voice.
“But, you know, I’d be happy to give you a look. You’ve been so kind, watching my things and everything. And I love meeting other people who appreciate the good old times. When things were…” I pause. Glance at the television screen in the corner. “Simpler.”
“There, I also know what you mean,” he says as the news anchor turns to talk of terrorism. “I’d be happy to have an hour’s escape in the company of Frank Sinatra.”
I smile. “It’s a deal, then. How can I reach you?”
He begins to give me his phone number, then stops and stares at me for a second.
“Helluva first meeting, kid.” He’s broken character. This is how the exercise ends, I guess. The Kazakh evaporates and only the case officer remains, with the Brooklyn still in him. “Nice approach, asking me a favor. Most of your idiot comrades just sidle up and blurt out some awkward conversation starter like they have geopolitical Tourette’s. Why the Rat Pack?”
“You…he…collects old U.S. baseball cards. I figured having some of those was a bit too on the nose. But, y’know, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe, Sinatra—it felt like the same vibe somehow. Servicing some sense of nostalgia. Some yearning for a world that he worries has disappeared.”
The guy’s laughing at me now. “Regular Dr. Freud,” he says with a shake of his head. “But you’re right. A good case officer is as much psychology student as he is James Bond.”
“Or she,” I say.
“Indeed.” He pulls an assessment paper out of his back pocket. There are a dozen or so categories students are to be judged on. Beside each, there is a box to check: Satisfactory, Less Than Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory. There is no Good. In this business, it’s survive or not. Thrive is not an option. He clicks open his pen and draws a straight line down through the Satisfactory column. At the bottom, in the section for notes, he writes, “All aces. A velvet hammer. Might just have found her calling.” Then he folds the page in quarters, hands it to me, and walks out.
My two closest Agency brothers—Mike and Dave—are waiting for me at Ireland’s Four Courts, a mock old country pub along northern Virginia’s commuter corridor. They also passed, but each with a smattering of “Less Than Satisfactory”s, or “Lesters,” as they are lovingly known. We peruse each other’s assessment sheets as we drop shots into our pints of Guinness. “The velvet hammer, eh?” Dave asks. And from then on, that is what he calls me.
As the pace of training quickens, we meet up after every exercise, full of stories and bluster. Anthony joins us sometimes. He adds a certain British humor to our boozy debriefs. Everyone likes him. I like him. But slowly, and then quickly, we are leaving him behind.
He doesn’t understand our acronyms, doesn’t get the punch lines of our jokes, isn’t cleared to know the tradecraft we’re learning on the street or the threats we’re analyzing back at HQS. He is on the far side of a veil designed to keep outsiders at bay, and I begin to understand why everyone dates inside the Agency. I get home from midnight exercises to find him sitting on our Arlington apartment floor, eyes closed, opera blaring, and a half-empty whiskey bottle beside him. He asks me to get him an interview—believes that if he can just join us….And I try—but it doesn’t really work that way.
At the end of the course, my boss calls me into his office. I’ve been fast-tracked to undergo advanced operations training, despite being a year shy of the formal age threshold of twenty-five. That means six months on a secret base with no communication home. My friends and family will all believe I’m on a consulting gig for the boring multinational. “My advice is to get drunk,” my boss tells me, “then get some sleep, then spend some quality time with the people you love. Because in three weeks, you’re going to disappear.”
I laugh. “For six months or forever?”
He answers with a wry smile. “Depends how literal you are.”
* * *
—
On a clear, cold winter day, Anthony drives me to a gas station on Route 123 a little before dawn. I kiss him, then leave him standing there, raw and stoic, in the empty gas station forecourt, his hands thrust into his peacoat pockets as he watches me climb into the warm camaraderie of a crowded beige van.
Jokes masking our nerves, we drive through the familiar gates at Langley, pile out of the van and into the blacked-out bus that will deliver us to the Farm—a simulated Truman Show set in a fictionalized country called the Republic of Vertania (ROV), where w
e are to undergo the most demanding espionage training on earth. We are to play the roles of first-tour case officers assigned to the U.S. embassy in the ROV city of Womack. We each have training names—aliases to protect our identities from one another. But other than that, everything feels real. There is an actual embassy building, with an American flag fluttering out front, on an actual town square with a wooden gazebo. There’s a cable news channel, like CNN, that reports the news of this fictional universe: Prime Minister Carlin did this or the Sons of Artemis blew up that. There are diplomats visiting from neighboring countries, including a North Korea–style rogue state called the Democratic People’s Republic of Vertania (DPRV).
Just like in Panera, every citizen of the ROV, every newscaster, every bombastic DPRV diplomat, every person we interact with in this giant game of make-believe, is played by a CIA operative, assigned to the Farm for a tour as an instructor. And every one of them has a thousand stories—like that time a highly sensitive source brought a six-piece mariachi band to a covert meeting in a back alley at midnight. They have pro tips, too, about things not covered in the training curriculum, like carrying Rolaids to make signal marks on brick because it’s less incriminating than chalk, in case of capture and search.
They break character to share these gems with us for only a few hours each night in the sanctity of our SCIFs, the small room-sized safes where five of us work on our cables and intelligence reports under the watchful eye of our advisers. The rest of the time, they stay in character, talking about the impact of the upcoming fake elections on the value of the country’s fake currency, speculating about weapons proliferation across the fake border with the DPRV, and worrying about threats from fake terror groups like the ever-more-violent Sons of Artemis.
We go to embassy parties, bump our targets, recruit our assets. We drive off the base in cars tricked out with concealment compartments for our notes and dread unannounced searches at the roadside, our knees in the gravel and our graduation dependent on not having anything incriminating lying about in the cup holders.
The crises ramp up quickly. Soon our every night’s sleep is interrupted by urgent walk-ins reporting imminent threats and simulated terror attacks. We’re under constant surveillance, pitted against one another, tested well beyond our limits. Sleazy instructors grope the female students in the name of preparing them for harassment in the field. Aging instructors shout at any student who uses the Internet or, God forbid, a cell phone. Division chiefs from Langley go undercover as instructors to identify the best talent in the crop, then secretly undermine their own picks so other chiefs won’t notice them.
A multilayered game takes hold. On one level, we recruit the fictional characters played by instructors in the world of the ROV. On a second, we recruit the real-life instructors who will decide who graduates. All the while, we continue to play a third, long-distance level, recruiting chiefs back at HQS to ensure the best real-world assignment if we do make it. All without ever breaking character.
It’s exhausting. And like the running millipede, we learn to avoid thinking about how we do it all for fear of tripping up.
Every so often, we are given a free weekend. I don’t tell Anthony that. I can’t face him. The realness of him. The questions he’ll ask and the shedding of so many fictional identities that I’ll have to endure to answer them. Instead, I meet up with classmates at random clusters of Holiday Inns and Red Robins. We revel in the anonymity of American suburbia. We see movies in cineplexes. We eat pancakes at Cracker Barrel. And sometimes, most times, we have sex.
* * *
—
As the Farm weeks wear on, we take targets through the entire recruitment cycle: spot, assess, develop, recruit, run, terminate. Spotting is spy-speak for noticing people with interesting access at the embassy parties or events around “town”—access that could prevent an attack or give insight into an adversary’s plans. Assessment is the dance we go through with HQS to confirm that access, then determine whether the target might be sympathetic to approach and, if so, what kind. Development is where the time and talent come in. Building a relationship with the target over weeks, months, years. Finding genuine commonality. Nurturing trust. Slowly revealing more and more of the truth about having “special access to Washington.” Testing the waters. Until, finally, recruitment—the money shot. At its worst, this is a transactional pitch, buying access to information in exchange for access to something else—medicine, a visa, the cash to clear a debt. At its best, it’s one of the most soulful, vulnerable moments two humans can share. A leap of faith to make the world a little safer, while putting their lives, their families’ lives, in each other’s care. Those are the relationships that last decades, that end wars, that prevent attacks. Those are the relationships that change history.
At HQS, there is a row of three trees beside the front entrance. Each is dedicated to a different Soviet asset, still unnamed, who shared that kind of relationship with the operative who handled them. Each played their unsung role in preventing nuclear war. Without them, none of us might be here at all. Their courage is the reason the training is so hard. If we screw up, they pay the price, and with every passing day, I see more classmates learn the cost of one of their mistakes. A bullet in their asset’s head as he sits at a red light. A photo of their child bound and killed. All fake, of course, in this world of training pretend, but real enough to lodge deep in my amygdala, real enough to replace roadblocks and prison and torture to become the greatest fear of all.
Students who lose an asset also lose their place at the Farm. For the rest of us, the recruitment cycle continues. Next comes running—the long sweeping arc of a source’s working relationship with the Agency. For years, sometimes even decades, an asset is run in place—asked to remain in their current job or even progress to a level of greater access, where they can answer the questions our analysts send and warn us of impending attacks. Those questions, known as “requirements,” arrive to us field officers via long cables, jam-packed with clinical-sounding terms and potentially offensive assumptions. It’s our job to pick and choose the most important, massage them into palatable queries, and raise them during our next car meeting or hotel debrief with the source. All our meetings at this post-recruitment stage are clandestine. Arranged via predetermined signals, which are themselves documented for HQS, to ensure that a new field officer could take over an asset in case we disappear, or worse.
We learn these signaling and meeting techniques as we go, with new ones added during each exercise. There are the traditional chalk marks and lowered window blinds, shifts in the physical world made by one of us in a place the other can see during their daily commute. Then there are the newer, more creative ideas. One instructor prefers using Starbucks gift cards. They have a balance he can check by typing the card number into the Starbucks website. He gives one to each of his assets and tells them, “If you need to see me, buy a coffee.” Then he checks the card numbers on a cybercafé computer each day, and if the balance on one is depleted, he knows he’s got a meeting. Saves him having to drive past a whole slew of different physical signal sites each day. And the card numbers aren’t tied to identities, so the whole thing is pretty secure. I like it. But some of the older instructors don’t. We learn quickly which Cold War veterans demand chalk marks from their students and which modern warriors prefer silicon and Wi-Fi.
When an asset signals for a meeting, we head to a predetermined spot—an operational site we’ve cased and scouted, checking to be sure it fulfills the slew of attributes our instructors have drilled into us with endless lists of acronyms. Something as simple as a car pickup site—the spot where an asset knows to stand so we can swoop in and scoop them up—must be shielded from passersby, have a separate entrance and exit, be free of cameras and security personnel, sit sufficiently far from hot spots like police stations or schools, remain accessible twenty-four hours a day, and offer some plausible explanation for why somebody o
f the asset’s position or stature would be hanging around alone, often in the wee hours of morning.
Given all the care that’s gone into selecting the pickup spot, it wouldn’t do to take a tail to the meeting, so we can’t drive straight there. Instead, we embark on long, circuitous surveillance detection routes, known as SDRs. The aim is to identify cars or people who keep popping up over time and distance. If we see the same granny with a yoga mat twice on the same street, she could just be walking in the same direction we are. But see her twice on two different streets, miles and hours apart, and we might have just nailed our surveillant. To spice things up, surveillants work in teams of seven or eight, switching off with one another each time we turn left or right, so that no single surveillant is exposed more than a handful of times over the entire route. It’s a cat-and-mouse labyrinth chase through city streets, and the only way to win is to design a route with enough changes of direction to force surveillance to stick close. Better yet, add in a few stops at a shopping mall or subway station with multiple entrances and exits, to be sure they have to follow us inside on foot. All the while, we have to look nonalerting—just out for a boring old afternoon of errands. Which means designing routes where every change of direction is anchored by some plausible visit to a store or a gym or a mechanic. And ideally those cover stops have to make sense both day and night, because there’s no way in advance to know when an asset will signal for a meeting.
All that need for pickup spots and surveillance detection routes means that our every unoccupied minute of time at the Farm is spent casing the surrounding area for operational sites.
“When I retire,” Dave jokes, “I’m coming back down here to open a restaurant that just happens to have perfect cover and flow. Guaranteed business from every class of students.”
When a source loses their access or just gets to a point where they prefer to call it a day, the recruitment cycle reaches its last stop: terminate. This isn’t the termination you hear about in the movies—the kind with quotation marks around it and blood splatter on the walls. These are dignified, intensely emotional conversations about the end of an era, about gratitude and honor and legacy. Sometimes the source knows they’re finished even when the case officer wishes they’d continue. Sometimes it’s the other way around. But more often than not, it’s a decision they make together, two long-bound dogs of war who know when the battle is through. There’s no way to fully prepare for these terminations when they happen in the field after decades of shared risk and reward. But even in the abbreviated timeline of our year at the Farm, the terminations are the hardest—good-byes to the few people who know and share our truth.
Life Undercover Page 10