Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Working with Haviland’s successor, Gus Hathaway, Jack took on the mission of creating the additional CIA field-training program, the Internal Operations Course (IOC). The IOC would be required, pre-assignment preparation for all young officers, code clerks, secretaries, and NSA monitors assigned to work behind the Iron Curtain and other denied areas. (It had been decided that using experienced operatives was actually a drawback because the KGB likely had identified them already. Therefore only rookie field officers would be used.) Observed and handpicked by all of Langley’s division chiefs, the “first draft” of OC grads always went to the critical SE Division, of which Jack was a veteran. The draftees nonetheless had a large washout percentage in Jack’s grueling IOC, which took place on the streets of Washington, in its suburbs, and in surrounding rural locales.

  Years later, Cowboy Jack summarized his strategy: “I wanted to turn the CIA into a mini Parris Island. The goal was survival, survival, survival. You’re being sent into hell, a police dictatorship. They’ll wreck your car, break into your house, anything. The only way to learn to live with that is to be harassed yourself. I made sure every single one that was going overseas got arrested by the FBI. I said, ‘I want a real arrest, throw them on the fucking ground, put them through a ninety-minute interrogation. Make it as tough as you can.’ Over the years I trained three hundred forty officers, only six were women.”

  Cowboy called them “pipeliners.” They were young spies hoping to be assigned to “the action,” which consisted largely of the Soviet and Eastern Europe hot zones. Pipeliners, more formally called Zephyrs, were an elite group of new operatives selected from the best OC graduates of The Farm. Cowboy enlisted a group of CIA and FBI instructors, whom he referred to as the “Dirty Dozen,” to whip the young ones into shape. Among these instructors were men such as Jim “Horse” Smith, Bob “the Beard” Miller, Gene Lassiter, and even occasionally his Musketeer pal Dion Rankin. Over the course of six weeks, the rookies would dutifully report every morning to the Agency’s Ames Building on North Fort Myer Drive in Rosslyn, Virginia, where they soon learned not to make any personal plans before midnight for the nearly two-month duration.

  On the first day, Cowboy told the pipeliners they were going to be pushed to their limits. It would be harsh, unfair. “You’re going to hate us,” he warned. It would be a crucible. Zephyr Mike Sellers called the course “organized mayhem,” perhaps accounting for the participation of his wife and six-week-old son (Cowboy awarded the infant a “youngest graduate” diploma). Sellers relates an exercise in which his team’s job was to retrieve a milk carton strategically abandoned at a Washington, DC, marina. When he picked it up, “Fifteen FBI guys threw me facedown on the floor. I thought we stumbled into a real drug bust.” Some people couldn’t withstand the trauma of arrest. In the end, there was no course grade, but Cowboy would discreetly meet with his bosses upon the course’s conclusion and inform them who wasn’t fit for fieldwork.

  By far the most important facets of the program involved spotting and evading hostile surveillance (“dry cleaning”); making dead drops, brush passes, and moving car deliveries (MCDs); and defeating harsh interrogation. One of the IOC instructors, Tony Mendez, in his 2002 book Spy Dust, recalled how the Moscow rules were inculcated into the aspiring operatives by making the Soviets “think it was their fault that they had lost you, not vice versa, because KGB officers knew better than to report their own mistakes.”

  Mendez also described how he drilled a mantra into the trainees, a slogan that is prominent in Ian Fleming’s James Bond thriller Goldfinger: “Once is an accident; twice, a coincidence; three times, an enemy action.” The surveilled hoped to emulate Hav Smith’s momentary “gap” from their pursuers, only long enough to drop off a document—or a human. One of the more cinematic evasion techniques Jack taught his charges was the coincidentally nicknamed “jack-in-the-box” (JIB). It consisted of a low-cost piece of gadgetry that Ian Fleming’s Q would never be seen with: a flat cardboard cutout of a human torso that, when a lever was pulled by a vehicle driver, would pop up from a box (or in one real-life case, a hollow cake) and appear to the KGB pursuers, usually trailing two blocks behind, as a passenger. Of course, the operative who had been in the passenger seat would have jumped from the car during a “gap,” whereupon the driver would deploy the JIB, going so far as to pull puppetry strings to make the cardboard move occasionally. The escaped passenger also would have put on a disguise before jumping so, even if spotted by the enemy, he could walk right past them undetected. One soon-to-be infamous pipeliner, Edward Lee Howard, would later admit that he often used his JIB for distinctly non-CIA business: partaking of the Dulles Airport area’s high-occupancy vehicle lanes.

  But not even a JIB could protect Howard and his wife, Mary, from the searing pressure of Jack Platt’s training course. On one occasion, the Howards were tasked with engaging in a dead-drop pickup of valuable microfilm near a Washington marina. FBI agent Courtney West was assigned to observe the Howards, and he did so undetected. “We chased them down to make the arrest, when all of a sudden, Howard floors it on the George Washington Parkway, eventually going over one hundred miles per hour,” recalls West. “Suddenly, he spins around, making a one hundred eighty degree U-turn and races past us, yelling ‘Fuck you’ through his open window.” That’s when Cowboy Jack got on the radio and ordered West to “Pull that bitch over!” Eventually, Howard was captured and hauled down to the Washington Field Office in Buzzard Point.

  The couple was separated and aggressively interrogated. “Through all this, Mary remained tearful but silent,” says West. “Even when the FBI agent came into the interrogation room with the ‘results’ of the lab tests of the powder that indicated pure heroin, which came with a lengthy prison sentence, Mary did a great job and didn’t break cover after her arrest. But her husband was a different story.” West remembers that, under interrogation, Mary began wheezing, the result of an asthma attack. She asked West to obtain the name of her medication from her husband, who was being questioned in another room. West was stunned by Howard’s icy reply: “Fuck her.” Mary may have never broken cover, but the terror of that confrontation never left her, even after she was informed that the ordeal had been an exercise. “I remember Edward Lee Howard very well,” Cowboy recalled. “I trained both he and Mary. I liked Mary a lot.” West remembers that Cowboy wrote a negative report on Edward Lee Howard. “They never should have kept him at the CIA after that report,” West says. Had the Agency dismissed Howard, lives would have been saved and the Moscow Station wouldn’t have been set back twenty years.

  On occasion, case officers who had experienced Moscow rules firsthand lectured the Zephyrs, and one of the most notable was Martha “Marti” Peterson. Thirty-five-year-old Marti Peterson had been the CIA’s first female field officer stationed in Moscow, in 1975. Like Cowboy, she had lived in Laos, where she was the wife of John Peterson, a former Green Beret who joined the CIA after his discharge. While stationed in Laos for the Agency in 1972, John was killed in action in a helicopter crash. (One of the stars on the CIA’s hallowed Memorial Wall is for John.) At just twenty-seven years of age, the crushed Marti was already a widow. In part to honor her hero husband, she joined the Agency in 1975.

  In Moscow, Marti encountered Moscow rules at their worst, and Cowboy had her impart what she had seen on the Zephyrs. She talked about the nonstop harassment, including phones ringing at all hours of the night. The US Embassy, where she had had a cover job in the clerical pool, was bombarded with microwave radiation to jam electronic communications, resulting in a number of deadly cancers contracted by Marti’s fellow officers. It was also a lonely job since all officers were forbidden from having contact outside the station.

  Marti spent eight hours a day at her cover job, where embassy clerical work was mostly performed by women. She likely hadn’t known that she had been handpicked for the Moscow posting precisely because she was a woman. The station chief had concluded correctly that, due to the overt
sexism of the time, all the KGB officers would assume Marti couldn’t be a spy. That allowed her to use her lunch breaks and after-work hours to make covert drops and pickups with one of the CIA’s greatest assets ever. Code-named TRIGON, KGB agent Aleksandr Dmitryevich Ogorodnik over the last few years had given the “main enemy” huge caches of photographed secret diplomatic cables, providing key insights into Soviet policy and negotiating positions. Many of his purloined documents were sent to the Carter White House daily. Among other things, Marti had also arranged for TRIGON to receive a special pen that contained a cyanide capsule for use in the event of his capture.

  For over a year, Marti conducted successful dead drops for TRIGON around the city, often of spy-camera film. On July 15, 1977, after she returned from a late-night drop, more than a dozen KGB men jumped from a van, threw her in, and took her to the dreaded Lubyanka Prison for three hours of harsh interrogation. Although male KGB officers groped her until they found a radio receiver in her bra, she was released, having admitted nothing. The next day, Marti took the first flight out of Moscow, never to return.

  Hours of deceptive maneuvers, including entering and exiting three subways and walking miles to shed any surveillance, still hadn’t been good enough, or so Marti had thought. Years later, the CIA discovered that the operation had been sold out by a crooked CIA contract translator who had given information to the KGB about a traitorous diplomat fitting TRIGON’s profile. Thus TRIGON, whom Marti had never actually met, was also rolled up, and when he was forced to sign a confession, he grabbed the pen Marti had supplied him with and bit down on it, breaking the cyanide capsule hidden inside. He died instantly.

  At Cowboy’s SE Division, many tears were shed for their lost asset. Marti would eventually receive the William J. Donovan Award, an intelligence honor named for the founder of the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, and the George H. W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism.

  Drawing on her experience, Marti put Cowboy’s trainees through a simulated arrest and interrogation. “Part of what you don’t know about yourself, until the time comes, is how you’ll react in a bad situation,” she told them. She also advised, “Always speak English so you know what you’re saying—and remain calm.” But by far the lasting impression left on the Zephyrs was the bone-deep sorrow they would endure if one of their assets were to be lost.

  After the basics had been taught, the rookies were assigned a test mission in the field, where their performances would be graded. Zephyrs usually operated in husband-wife teams since that was the preferred deployment overseas. Typically the teams would be instructed to arrive at a package drop-off point, after having spotted and shed any surveillance over many hours of movement, pick up a package, and deliver it at another drop-off point, again undetected. The difficulty lay in the fact that some two-dozen men and civilian surveillance experts (from the Special Surveillance Group, or SSG)—often retired FBI agents disguised as the most unassuming shoppers, elderly couples, sailors on leave, etc.—were placed along the route between the Ames Building and the package location (frequently the CI-4 hangout Gangplank Marina).

  Occasionally Cowboy and instructor Bob “the Beard” were not present for the 8 a.m. release of the pipeliners. That’s because they would stop by Rockville High School to take the Platt twins, Michelle and Diana, out of class for a seemingly reoccurring family problem. The actual reason was not some domestic melodrama but Cowboy’s desire to have extremely hard-to-detect spotters—kids—chasing down his rookies. The SSG participants were great at disguises, but none of them could look like actual sixteen-year-olds. The logic was that no one would suspect a kid of being a spy. Cowboy would admonish his IOC students for having the preconceived notion that spies were white males of military bearing.

  Diana Platt grins broadly as she remembers her father exploiting her twin-ness to train and test his students. The students who realized they had been followed got a bronze star. The students who realized they had been followed by a young girl got a silver star. One student, however, sheepishly reported back to Cowboy, “I think I was followed by a young girl and… um… this may sound crazy, but I think she may be twins.” Cowboy was delighted, and this student got a gold star for his perceptiveness.

  Michelle and Diana never busted an actual package retrieval, but they had other successes against the Zephyrs, getting close enough to overhear their strategies. “We overheard conversations they should not have been having,” Michelle recalls. “They discounted us due to our age.” The girls, of course, had a blast playing hooky from school in order to play spy versus spy on the streets of Annapolis or Georgetown. As for their father, he had to keep this ploy secret not only from the pipeliners but also from his CIA superior Dave Forden, and even more so from his ultimate superior. “I remember that Dad was very emphatic about one thing,” Michelle says. “Do not tell your mother!” As for Cowboy’s employer, Michelle opines, “The CIA would have been pissed that Jack was using his kids for surveillance. But it was this risk taking and flouting of the rules that made him effective. And you could take risks like that back then—there wasn’t constant oversight and political correctness the way there is now.”

  One time, when she was in her early twenties, Diana was caught by a police officer as she was rustling around in the bushes near an Arlington, Virginia, shopping center. The cop arrested her for solicitation, as it was an area known for prostitution. Witnessing the arrest, Cowboy’s team leader, Jim “Horse” Smith, a tough Marine sharpshooter, intervened and explained to the cop that he had walked in on a CIA training program and had just busted the daughter of a legendary CIA operative. “The cop was pissed,” Diana says, “but he let me go.”

  The trainees had been told how to slip their coverage by running mundane errands, entering large department stores where they might slip on a disguise before taking a back exit, or performing an MCD if they created a slight gap in coverage. All the while, Cowboy and his instructors—like Hav Smith at Grand Central Station years before—would watch the action from above, usually a rooftop. Should the trainees spot a pursuer they couldn’t elude, they were instructed to abort the operation, which was graded highly since it was also the right thing to do in the field.

  Trainee Jason Matthews recalled for Men’s Journal how Cowboy’s instructors also played mind games with the Zephyrs in order to prepare them for hostile KGB surveillance and interrogation. On one occasion, operatives broke into Matthews’s house, defecated in his toilet, and poured anchovy oil in his car’s engine block. “It’s sort of the psychic equivalent of Hell Week for SEALs,” Matthews said—except it lasted for eight weeks. “They want to see who can handle it and who can’t.” Brant Bassett recently said, about training for an assignment in Budapest, “The training was daylong and nightlong. Pressure was applied to see if you’d crack. At the end of a day we’d meet in a bar or restaurant and Jack would tell us how we did.” Cowboy wanted to find out how observant the pipeliners had been: How many agents were there? Could he describe them? What kinds of cars did they use? License plate numbers?

  Jack Lee, Cowboy’s longtime friend and colleague at SE, remembers watching Cowboy at these skull sessions. “Despite a gruff, Marine external demeanor, Jack was disarming to colleagues because he was very understanding of people, empathetic with their problems. People wanted to please him. If you fell short, he would not admonish, he would work to improve you. This contrasted with the tough nature of the Internal Operations Course, which was daunting, but Jack wanted you to succeed. Everybody loved Jack.”

  However, Burton Gerber, who during this time replaced Forden as SE chief, recalled that Jack had trouble restraining himself with his foul language, which was a problem with some of the wives being trained. Nonetheless, Gerber knew that Jack’s IOC was a great success. “Jack was a treasure to the CIA because of his contribution with IOC,” Gerber recalls. “He was energetic and tough but encouraging. In short, he was a great motivator and leader.”

  On their final day of testi
ng, the Zephyrs were even tracked by planes. The IOC was a big-ticket budget item for the Agency, but the cost was an indicator of how much espionage behind the Iron Curtain was a priority.

  For that last all-important IOC mission, the one that would determine if the rookies had the right stuff, the Zephyrs spent eight to ten hours on the streets, running a gauntlet of disguised volunteers in order to lose them, and eventually made their pickups (or aborted the mission if spotted), only to be arrested by the FBI on the way back to Rosslyn. The trainees were handcuffed, thrown onto the floor of a Bureau vehicle, and hauled off to a jail in downtown Washington. The trainees, in fact, were taken not to an actual jail but to the basement of the Washington Field Office in Buzzard Point—something Cowboy hoped they might notice on the way in. Few did.

  Dion (l.) and his FBI team bust Jack’s IOC trainees.

  There, they were informed that the package they had been carrying contained cocaine. Next, the husband and wife were separated and subjected to harsh, often physically intimidating interrogation lasting hours. The men were forcibly strip-searched, and both husbands and wives were told that the other was cooperating. Eventually, Cowboy entered the room and announced that the arrest was part of the training, a KGB-like detention to determine who would crack and say they were CIA. If they had copped to that fact, they would likely become supporting benchwarmers overseas, a major humiliation.

  Jack Lee, an occasional IOC instructor, remembers, “People in [the] IOC often thought a real operation was going down. They didn’t know it was training. [The] FBI would actually arrest people, to see if they’d crack. If you said, ‘I’m CIA,’ thinking it would help you, you failed. You had to keep your cover. Only a few could do it.” The phony arrests were the big secret of the IOC, the ultimate test of a Zephyr’s mettle. “We were sworn to secrecy as far as telling future trainees what happened,” says Brant Bassett.