Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  The CIA also fields several hundred operations officers who work under commercial cover, meaning they pose as entrepreneurs or employees of private companies. Called nonofficial cover, this is a far riskier assignment than working under government cover, since CIA officers without diplomatic immunity can be arrested and imprisoned for spying. It is also far more expensive to maintain a CIA officer in this capacity. While they usually use their real names, their true affiliations are concealed. Elaborate cover stories must be devised to establish their false backgrounds. The top officer of a company knows they are with the CIA. Depending on the size of the company, one or two others may know their true identity. Ideally, the CIA officer is the company’s only representative in a given geographic area. That way, he has no supervisors who are aware of what the officer is doing each day. Sometimes, CIA officers under commercial cover do so well in their jobs that the companies offer them real jobs at double what the CIA was paying.

  Decades ago, CIA officers under commercial cover were used to spot and recruit agents. That was far too risky and not always necessary. Today, they are used more to communicate with agents who have already been recruited, particularly sensitive ones who should not be handled by anyone connected with the local embassy.

  “It’s a program that has never been enthusiastically supported,” a former operations officer said. “You go to the trouble of getting someone into a company, and it costs a lot of extra money. . . . Only in the last twenty years has there been a shift to using them for sensitive people who cannot have contact with Americans.”

  Besides staff employees, the CIA maintains contract employees, who are typically employed for two years with salary and benefits. They may be hired to perform specific tasks such as undertaking paramilitary activities. Together with part time employees, the CIA has 4,000 such employees in addition to its 22,000 regular employees. Retired CIA people are often rehired for specific projects as well. They are called independent contractors or annuitants and are usually paid on a daily basis as consultants. All must sign a secrecy agreement.

  The job of operations officers is to recruit people—known as agents or assets—in foreign countries to spy for the CIA. Typically, 10 to 15 percent of a station’s overall budget goes to pay agents.

  In the old days, even CIA officers who did not work for the clandestine service were told that, if asked, they should say only that they work “for the government.” Everyone in Washington knew what that catch phrase meant.

  When Sen. Patrick J. Leahy was elected to the Senate in 1974, he rented a town house in McLean, Virginia. Because he did not want his children to put on airs now that their father was a senator, he told them that if anyone asked, they should say their father worked for the U.S. government.

  Soon, his Vermont license plates, “Senate 2,” arrived in the mail. A few days later, Leahy pulled into the driveway of his home just as a neighbor whose children played with Leahy’s children was returning from work. The man came over and looked at the plate, then looked at Leahy.

  “Boy, you must have one hell of a cover!” he said.8

  Nowadays, unless they work under cover, employees of the noncovert directorates may acknowledge they work for the CIA.

  Undercover operations officers who say they work for a particular agency such as the Defense Department are given cover telephone numbers, a briefing on their cover, and a written description of the office they allegedly work for. For example, if they are based in Washington, they may have a cover office that sounds like a real Pentagon unit but does not actually exist. They are given telephone numbers with Pentagon exchanges that are answered at the CIA. There, special operators pretend to be secretaries for the officers and take messages for them.

  Often, CIA officers who work under government cover are suspected by friends, neighbors, and family of being in the CIA. Whether that is good or bad depends on their neighbors’ perceptions of what the CIA does. A 1979 Opinion Research Corp. poll found 62 percent of all Americans had a favorable opinion of the CIA, while 24 percent had an unfavorable opinion. Fourteen percent had no opinion. Unfavorable opinions were highest among Americans who were college educated and had higher incomes.

  Simply not knowing what someone else does can lead to negative reactions. In America, said Robert R. Simmons, a former CIA officer who is now a Connecticut state representative, “Americans as a people generally are open about things—especially good things. So something secret is considered something bad. We as a country want to be a city on a hill for all to see. If something is secret, we assume it must be immoral or illegal.”9

  CIA officers must also be willing to break the laws of other countries and lie.

  “Violating laws in other countries has never bothered me,” David D. Whipple said. “Violating their laws is part of our business. Laws in America are violated every day by foreign agents. Therefore, it’s important that we collect information in this way. You need clandestine information to go with the other information we collect. It’s very necessary for us to understand situations in other countries—the motivation of people, why are they doing it, what their intentions are. That’s not easy to collect by open, legal means. It’s not the whole story, but it is an important ingredient.

  “We don’t think of it as living a lie. We think of it as a necessary thing,” Whipple said. “You have to protect your identity in order to remain effective. It is necessary that others cooperate with you in protecting your identity. It’s as if you were a slightly different person.”10

  Most people think the Directorate of Operations spies only on hostile targets, such as the former Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, dozens of commentators began questioning whether the CIA now had any purpose. They did not realize that even at the height of the Cold War, only 10 percent to 12 percent of the CIA’s budget—excluding development of satellites and other technical systems—was devoted to the Soviet Union and the East Bloc.

  Even more important, the commentators did not understand a crucial fact about the CIA—that it spies in friendly countries as well as in hostile ones. By agency policy, CIA operations officers may commit espionage in any country of the world. The only exceptions are Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. By CIA thinking, no country is completely friendly. Any country may turn against the U.S. and its interests or may have elements within it that may turn against the U.S. Thus France has engaged in stealing American technology from the European branches of such companies as IBM and Texas Instruments, even breaking into hotel rooms of American businessmen in Paris to copy corporate documents.11 And Israel, one of America’s closest allies, recruited Jonathan J. Pollard to obtain an entire roomful of classified documents for the Jewish state. The fact that Iraq, which was supported by the U.S. during its war with Iran, could so quickly threaten American interests by seeking to control more than half the world’s supply of oil illustrates why the CIA needs to know what is going on in every country.

  “They [other countries] have their own priorities, their own view of the world, and it often doesn’t coincide with ours,” a former operations officer said. He quoted Charles de Gaulle: “A state worthy of the name has no friends—only interests.”

  “Espionage is illegal basically in most places,” a former CIA officer said. “So you have to break the law, as long as it’s not your own law. . . . When I recruit a citizen of that country, he accepts the idea he will break his laws.

  “You’re after classified information,” the former officer said. “Or paying off a minister. . . . One thing you don’t do, whatever country you’re in, is you don’t worry about the local laws. If you did that, you basically wouldn’t function.” He added, “Almost every country in the world has government people on the payroll of the CIA. Some countries we don’t care about.”

  “The CIA has to violate the laws of any country,” said Thomas Polgar, a former CIA station chief in Saigon, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires and a former consultant to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Every cou
ntry has laws against espionage and conspiracy, and our job is to engage in a conspiracy to get secrets which the foreign government wants to protect. You do it through false pretenses, you do it by encouraging treason. In effect, you direct a conspiracy for the purpose of stealing something.... If you are an officer under diplomatic cover, you are protected. But the local [agent] who gets caught is not.”12

  The types of crimes committed by CIA officers overseas range from paying a local telephone company employee to hand over long-distance toll records to breaking into an embassy to steal the codes to its communications. The CIA keeps carefully hidden the fact that it spies in friendly countries. In most cases, CIA officers are not caught. On those few occasions when they are caught, the matter is usually disposed of without any publicity or punitive action. The officer may be quietly expelled, and a complaint filed with the State Department. Often, both countries are too embarrassed to do anything.

  “Usually, you have sort of a gentleman’s agreement,” Polgar said. “‘You do it to us, and we do it to you, and if we have an operational accident, we settle it in a friendly way without anyone getting hurt too badly.’”

  “When they break the laws of friendly countries, it’s always handled in an ad hoc way,” a former National Security Council staff member said.

  “‘Does this name mean something?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘We have reason to believe . . .’ ‘Of course, he would be a renegade.’ ‘We know you wouldn’t.’ ‘Of course not,’” a former CIA officer said in describing how such an incident would be handled.

  One of the CIA’s goals in friendly countries is to determine if they are developing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Nearly forty countries currently have these weapons or are trying to develop them. Once the CIA learns that a country is engaged in such a program, diplomatic or economic pressure can be applied to stop it.

  The amount of attention paid to a country depends on its importance and the current orientation of its government. African or Scandinavian countries get relatively little attention. France, because of its frequent opposition to U.S. policies, gets more attention. Japan, as a major economic competitor, is a target as well. Israel gets some attention. When James Angleton was in charge of the CIA’s counterintelligence program, he also acted as liaison with Israeli intelligence. Spying in Israel was then off limits, but not anymore.

  “It’s okay to recruit Israelis, mostly military officers, meaning paying them,” a former operations officer said. “That began gingerly after Angleton.”

  The reason is the CIA wants to make sure that Israel is not taking steps that might suck the U.S. into a war.

  Besides recruiting a key agent with critical information, the greatest success an operations officer can have is penetrating the communications of a country, either by bugging an embassy or obtaining the codes to its communications. Usually these are team efforts, and the plaudits go to many. Soviet successes in penetrating U.S. communications have been well publicized—the bugging of the new and old American embassies in Moscow and the recruitment of former Navy warrant officer John A. Walker, Jr., who provided the Soviets with codes to classified naval communications.

  But what of CIA successes? There have been a number of them, most of them secret. Over the years, the CIA has planted bugs in or obtained the codes of a number of Soviet and Soviet-bloc embassies, as well as the codes of embassies of other countries, to cite just one category. For all the rivalry among the directorates, when cooperation is really needed, they work well together.

  “The goal was to bug all the embassies [of hostile countries],” said a former CIA officer who was involved in providing technical assistance for these jobs. “You try to get it while it’s building. If it is not possible to penetrate an embassy electronically, the next best thing is to recruit someone—the cleaning force or whatever—and have them bring you material from the embassy. A break-in at the embassy would be stupid. If you jimmy the safe and it is discovered, they are alerted. You find someone who has access to it and bring it out each day. That way, life goes on.”

  In penetrating these communications, the CIA has learned of diplomatic initiatives before they are broached, the plans of KGB officers, and identities of Americans working for the KGB.

  Usually, a break-in at a local embassy is directed by the local station chief. The Office of Technical Service within the Directorate of Science and Technology supplies the bugging devices or other technical paraphernalia needed to do the job—the tools of the spy trade. For example, the CIA may break into an embassy and photograph the key cards that are used each day to decrypt secret messages. In this case, the Office of Technical Service may supply the cameras, lock-pickers, and installers of bugging devices. But for all the technical skill required, the most important ingredients for an operation of this kind are resourcefulness and courage, demonstrated when the CIA bugged a Chinese Communist mission.

  2

  Bikinis

  WHEN THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS AND THE SOVIETS EACH decided to open new missions in Asia, the Directorate of Operations assigned Howard T. Bane to find a way to bug the new offices. Bane is as far removed from the original Ivy League image as one can get. Standing five feet nine and a half inches and weighing 172 pounds, Bane has a florid complexion and a raspy voice. His temper is legendary. He chews tobacco and smokes a cigar. Bane attended Georgetown University but flunked out, then went to a junior college to get his grades up. He eventually graduated from George Washington University with a degree in government and international relations.

  Bane had an exceptional operational mind, intelligence lingo meaning he was a phenomenally good spy. He had intelligence, imagination, common sense, and an ability to foresee problems, solve them, and go on to the next job. He could recognize opportunities when they arose and create them when he needed them. Because of his exploits, he received the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal.

  Like many officers who joined the CIA during the Korean War, Bane did not give his decision a lot of thought. Bane had been a diver in the Navy, and a CIA recruiter considered this useful background for operating in the war. Bane began in 1950 as a GS-5 filing clerk. The CIA soon sent him to Korea as an operations officer under military cover. There, he ran operations aimed at rescuing pilots who had been shot down.

  Bane served in India and Bangkok and was chief of station in Ghana, Kenya, and Amsterdam. Later, he became chief of operations for Africa, special assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations, and finally chief of counterterrorism.

  Not every CIA officer is big on bugging. It takes a tremendous amount of time to plan an operation, operations that can be extremely risky and sometimes yield paltry results. In one infamous effort to install a bug in an embassy in Southeast Asia, the CIA got only the sounds of birds chirping. Nor are telephone taps—as opposed to bugs that pick up sounds in rooms—particularly useful. Often, the local intelligence service helps the CIA by placing wiretaps. They may give an idea of the daily activity of opposing intelligence officers or which ones are vulnerable to recruitment, but they seldom provide much in the way of secrets. Soviets, in particular, tend to be not very gabby, although their wives may be.

  With either bugs or wiretaps, the tapes take time to transcribe. Usually, a translator on site gives a rapid assessment of what is being said, but the tapes are sent to Washington for transcription. Yet for all the trouble, if well placed, a bug—known in CIA lingo as an audio operation, an audio op, or a technical penetration—can do wonders to let the CIA know just what the other side is up to.

  When he was based in Washington, Bane agreed to try to bug the new missions. Since the Soviets and Chinese planned to rent or buy existing buildings, the key would be to determine in advance which properties they might acquire. Bane would then try to bug the buildings before the diplomats moved in.

  Pretending to be a State Department administrative official looking for space for the U.S. consulate, Bane came up with a list of a dozen buildings the Soviets and Chi
nese might be interested in. Meanwhile, Bane arranged for a “quick plant”—a temporary, easily installed bug—to go in the hotel rooms where the Chinese and Soviet officials who were looking for their new quarters would stay. That way, Bane was confident, he would hear them discussing their plans.

  Bane decided the diplomats would have to stay in one of five major hotels in the city.* He and an officer from the Office of Technical Service stayed in each one and waited until maids left their master keys in guests’ doors. The two CIA men made an impression of the keys and sent them to a CIA Office of Technical Service location in Europe. There, technical officers fabricated a master key for each of the five hotels. Using the keys, Bane entered guest rooms and helped himself to lamps from each hotel. He sent the lamps to the office in Europe, which made replicas of the lamps with transmitting devices concealed inside.

  When the Soviet and Chinese diplomats checked into one of the five hotels, Bane exchanged the lamps in their rooms for the bugged replicas. But the effort did not work. Bane could listen to the diplomats’ conversations, but the diplomats never discussed which specific site they would like to acquire for the new missions.

  Meanwhile, Bane had gotten in touch with a local real estate broker whose business included office buildings for diplomats. Bane told him what he wanted and agreed to pay him for the information. Thus, the man became an agent of the CIA.

  Taking no chances, Bane also decided to bug the house of a KGB officer who had come to town posing as a Pravda correspondent. The man spent most of his time helping the Soviet diplomats look for a suitable location.

  When the KGB officer was out, a CIA technical officer surreptitiously entered his house and scraped a sample of paint from the wall in his living room. Later, the technical officer returned and installed a transmitter inside a wall. To conceal the sound of drilling, the officer used a “silent drill” developed by the CIA to mute the sound of drilling with a minute spray of water.