Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  On October 22, 1970, a small group of bungling retired military officers and members of the right-wing Patria y Libertad organization attempted to initiate a coup by kidnapping General René Schneider, the commander in chief, who was a staunch opponent of military intervention in Chilean politics.7 Schneider was killed, and the event had the effect of rallying the country around Allende, who was inaugurated two days later. At that point, all coup plotting ended. In fact, Nixon drastically altered his policy. The new goal was to avoid giving Allende any excuse to use the United States as a target to rally domestic loyalty and international support.8 Nixon appointed an ambassador, Nathaniel Davis, who liked Allende personally and who had an intellectual curiosity to see whether the transformation from a capitalist to a Marxist economy could be accomplished peacefully—what Allende called “the Chilean path to socialism.”

  There are many reasons that CIA officers have rocky relationships with ambassadors. Most have to do with the conflicting cultures and power struggles between the CIA and the State Department. This is a tension that dates back to the creation of the Agency, and became so bad by the mid-1970s in many stations (including Chile) that the two sides agreed to formal ground rules establishing the ambassador as the head of the country team at any foreign post, though the CIA worked some strong footnotes into the rules about protecting methods and sources.

  On the ground, relations between ambassadors and station chiefs often became strained over the high level of political access a chief can enjoy as a result of our covert actions and the substantial support the host country’s intelligence service received. Being plugged into a host nation’s intelligence service gave us special access to the country’s governmental system, access the State Department did not always have. In politically turbulent countries, the embassy could deal only with the party in power or else risk the wrath of the government, whereas the CIA could operate below the radar across the entire political spectrum. We could support an array of political, media, military, police, and intelligence leaders, some of whom would eventually become heads of state or cabinet-level officials. This gave the CIA a significant leg up when the opposition returned to power. People don’t forget the support they got on their way up.

  Our ability to pay sources for information and access was also always a bone of contention with State, which thought it gave us an unfair advantage in gaining political access and influence. CIA recruitment is based largely on the American capitalist system: namely, buying sources’ cooperation. It has been my experience that the taking of money, often because of an urgent financial need, makes sources more reliable and responsive. Once on the payroll, they are compromised and cannot divulge the relationship without hurting themselves. This is a very important factor in controlling an asset’s potential negative behavior. Still, money doesn’t guarantee reliability, and all information has to be vetted independently. Wherever possible, the Agency tries to get confirmatory sources and independent data, and it tracks agents over a long period of time to determine their reliability, accuracy, and consistency. (To the CIA, “agents” are not employees but individuals—typically foreigners—who are paid to steal secrets, provide intelligence, and broker access. The CIA equivalent of an FBI agent is called a “case officer.”)

  I do not believe that paying agents and other sources of information corrupts the intelligence-gathering process. As a general operating principle, we select targets who have known access to information we want. Hence, we start from a very strong position, because the source does not have to invent information to get paid. He or she already has the access. Furthermore, a high percentage of our recruitments begin with ideological identification with the United States. Many of them either don’t identify with the political systems in their countries or have been harmed by them. The money is a reinforcing inducement, not the be-all and end-all in a source’s productivity. Plus, there is a work ethic among most agents. They respond to financial incentives and try to collect good information to continue earning them.

  The issue of false or corrupted information comes into play when you have a walk-in (someone who appears at an embassy and volunteers his services) or a double agent. Nearly as troubling is the fabricator who tends to be creative and substantively smart, albeit without real access. Guarding against these impostors is where tradecraft kicks in. Beyond polygraphs, background checks, and surveillance, the most effective way to evaluate sources’ reliability is to vet their information. Even with very good fabricators, their information doesn’t hold up under routine professional questioning in a debriefing, which is what most asset meetings are. Over time, a phony source will show himself to be inconsistent when his or her information is compared to that from other, reliable reporting.

  During my first tour, the CIA resumed its strategy of opposing Allende by supporting his political opponents in Chile and making sure he did not dismantle the institutions of democracy—the media, political parties, and labor organizations—that kept the opposition robust. We were under strict orders that all military contacts we made should be for the purposes of gathering intelligence, not fomenting coups. But we also understood that Allende did not represent the majority of Chileans. Under the terms of the Chilean constitution, his Unity Party had been elected with just over 36 percent of the vote. The opposition was, in fact, the majority.

  At this point, readers who are wondering why the CIA continued to act against Allende at all are surely too young to remember the proxy war between the democratic West and the Communist Eastern Bloc waged by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. We believed that the fate of the democratic world was at stake. When a country went Communist, it was a victory for the Soviet Union. Dictatorship inevitably replaced democracy, and U.S. interests were defeated. That’s what had happened in Cuba, and the United States was bound and determined to keep communism from spreading in our own hemisphere, even as the Soviets were working hard to promote it in the region. To the United States, Allende represented a dangerous new front for the Soviets in the Cold War. In his 1977 interview with David Frost, Richard Nixon recalled being warned that, with Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile, Latin America was a “red sandwich” that would eventually be all red in between.9 We were no longer under orders to topple Allende, but we certainly wanted, and were willing to assist in, his political defeat.

  It was into this atmosphere that I arrived in Santiago in August of 1971, with my wife and five children between the ages of two and seven. There were no direct flights, so we had flown first to Buenos Aires—after an emergency layover in Paraguay for a repair—and then to Santiago, an eighteen-hour trip that frazzled all of us. We got to our temporary quarters—a rather drab three-bedroom apartment—around dinnertime and discovered that the only thing available to eat was a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. Our six-year-old son burst into tears. Perhaps I should have been overwhelmed at that moment—at the audacity of our mission, the odds against success, and the sheer culture shock I was putting my family through—but I was not. Quite the opposite. I was supremely confident in the correctness of our cause, the power of our tools, and the resilience of my family. I was also elated at my good fortune: a junior officer on his first foreign assignment landing in Chile, the focal point, at that moment, of the Agency’s Western Hemisphere Division. I was exactly where I wanted to be.

  Recruiting—asking a foreign national to betray his country and work for Uncle Sam—is one of the most difficult tasks for a spy to pull off. There are many people who are very good at developing relationships, but few who have the instinct to close a deal. Timing is crucial. If you wait too long to make your pitch to an asset, when your relationship has become too close, you end up seeming manipulative and to be betraying a friendship. If you pop the question too soon, you run the risk of rejection and of causing a political flap if the potential asset reports the recruitment attempt to the authorities. Some people come by recruitment naturally, others need to be prodded, and everyone gets better with experien
ce. Nailing down your first recruitment is a milestone in any case officer’s career.

  Truth be told, recruiting did not come naturally to me. As a young officer, I was by nature reserved, if not socially awkward, and (I came to realize) rather intimidating-looking. I’m six foot five and tend not to smile in business settings, so my natural demeanor appears stern. I wasn’t aware of the impression I was giving until my boss told the ambassador he wanted me in on a sensitive meeting, and the ambassador replied, “You mean the big, sinister-looking guy?” Up until then, I had never quite looked at myself that way. Years later, a foreign intelligence service gave me the nickname Easter Island Man because of my supposed resemblance to the famous statues there. I actually was grateful for this rather gentle description, especially since one of my predecessors abroad had been called the Poison Dwarf! I got off lightly. Still, it did reinforce a growing perception that I hadn’t fully appreciated: to recruit, I would need a whole new skill set.

  Once more, and not for the last time, the highly social Pat became my most valuable asset. She is as diminutive as I am tall and as outgoing as I was seemingly introverted back then. She would literally lead the way, walking in front of me at parties, engaging the guests, and asking them, “You know Jack, don’t you?” In time, her sociability rubbed off on me, and eventually I moved rather easily through the social banter at cocktail parties and the disco parties we threw at our home, hoping to recruit Soviet agents. A dance called the Hustle was all the rage at that time, and I couldn’t help but think how appropriate it was when our house was packed with prospective foreign targets dancing the night away.

  * * *

  As I settled into my assignment in Santiago, I was mixing it up well with many of the locals, but I was having difficulty positioning myself for a recruitment. Fred Latrash, the deputy station chief, sensed my hesitation and he appropriately leaned on me. The spy business is a trade, and the process of spying is often referred to by insiders as tradecraft. In its ideal form, tradecraft is learned at the knee of a master journeyman. While much can be taught in the classroom and in training exercises, there is no substitute for working in the field under the leadership of an experienced professional. I was most fortunate in my early career to work for such a master journeyman. Fred was a flamboyant, experienced operations officer with extensive experience in covert operations in the Middle East and Africa. The word was that he had been sent to Chile to take more aggressive action than the more cerebral chief Ray Warren, whom I looked up to and tried to emulate in managerial and operational style. They made a good team. It was better that Ray was calling the political shots, but I also valued what Fred taught me about recruitment. He suggested that I recruit a senior Communist Party official whom the station had had periodic contact with for a number of years but had not put on the payroll. Our “cutout,” or go-between, with this official was a local businessman, who agreed to set up a lunch at his home for me and the official so I could make the pitch.

  I was apprehensive, but our host tried to put me at ease. He graciously served us a local delicacy, a deep dish of erizos, raw sea urchins. I can handle just about any exotic dish, but this was tough to get down. Fortunately, he accompanied the erizos with an excellent bottle of Santa Rita 120 white wine. After every spoonful of erizos, I had a big gulp of wine. Before too long the erizos started to taste better and the target seemed more amenable to cooperation. Nevertheless, I was taking too long to get to the point for our host, who finally blurted out, in so many words, “How much money are you going to give this Communist for his cooperation.” I immediately suggested a thousand dollars per month, he accepted, and my first recruitment was behind me. In retrospect, I’m convinced that it was somewhat of a setup by Fred to get me over the hump of making a recruitment pitch. It is much easier to make the second pitch, even if the first one is a cakewalk. This is a classic example of the journeyman-apprentice relationship when it works well.

  I wish I could say the road was smooth from there on out, but the learning curve was steep. During one of my very first meetings with an asset, I climbed into his car and we drove slowly around a small city park. Unexpectedly, the asset handed me a sheaf of documents. I had to decide whether to take them, knowing that my cover could be blown if I were caught with them on the street. But this was a onetime offer, and my car was parked nearby, so I grabbed the papers and cut through the park on foot—only to find myself chased by five wild dogs. Imagine the scene: a very tall CIA spy, secret documents in hand, running from a pack of snarling canines. As I turned a corner, I remembered that one of my colleagues lived nearby, and I headed straight for his front door. By then the dogs had decided to rest, but when my colleague and I drove back to my car, there they were, waiting like sentries. They looked incredibly ferocious, but when my colleague approached one of the four-legged assailants and held out his hand, the dog started licking it. “I bet you have cats,” he said to me. It took me a while to live that one down.

  Several weeks later, I handed over a substantial amount of cash to another asset—this time a man from a Chilean newspaper opposed to Allende. Since the CIA is, first and foremost, a large bureaucracy, I needed a receipt to send back to Langley at the end of the month. And since I was just out of spy school and wanted to try some of the high-tech gear I had been exposed to in training, I wrote out the receipt and had the asset sign it in invisible ink, which had been touted in training as a means to protect an agent’s identity if a document fell into unfriendly hands. The asset was, needless to say, impressed by such tradecraft. I then went back to the station and applied the magic chemical meant to expose the ink. Everything worked perfectly. There was only one problem: when I went to file the asset’s expense account several weeks later, I discovered that the invisible ink had eaten through the paper. I had to go back to my source and beg for a new receipt, this time signed with a Bic pen.

  Still, I would become a fervent believer in putting gadgets to work in the field. One of my favorite devices was SRAC, or short-range agent communications. I installed in my personal vehicle, and in the vehicle of one of my top assets, a very low-powered SRAC device that allowed us to communicate while driving around town in relatively close proximity. There were no visible signs of connectivity between us—the perfect cover.

  Fred Latrash was even more enthusiastic about technology. He was continually sending messages to the tech staff at headquarters, pointing out some device he had seen in Popular Mechanics that could be deployed operationally or was less costly than a similar device in our inventory.

  For a time, if we wanted to talk to Fred in his office, we had to use one of his pet gadgets, a Hush-a-Phone. This was basically an upscale variation on the old Boy Scout soup-can-and-string device that kids used to use to talk to each other over a very short distance. The device had a miniature microphone attached to a headset, which in turn was attached to a similar set that Fred wore. Users had to sit ten feet apart and speak to each other in hushed voices, a guaranteed impediment to the free flow of discussion. This was Fred’s solution to the security implications of office conversations, which were indeed vulnerable to audio eavesdropping. The Soviets were always finding creative ways to plant bugs, and we did our share of bugging them as well.

  National security officials attempted to solve the bug problem by placing a soundproof plastic room, called a bubble, in virtually every U.S. facility around the world. These were generally located in an inconvenient spot. There simply wasn’t enough time in the day for officers to check into the bubble every time they needed to talk about an operations matter. Fred’s solution, though, turned out to be just as impractical. For weeks on end, we all vigorously avoided conversations with him in his office so we wouldn’t have to use the ludicrous-looking Hush-a-Phone. Eventually, Fred gave up and hung the Hush-a-Phone on his wall—a symbol, he said, of case officer obstinacy in the face of advances in technology.

  The truth is that, at least during my tenure, relatively few case officers liked new technolo
gy, even though it played an important role in Agency history and is part of the romance of the job—the hidden microphone, the spring-loaded secret compartment, the camera camouflaged in a commonplace object. The very popular spy museum in Washington, D.C., was founded on the public’s enduring fascination with such things. But they truly are just adjuncts to our trade.

  The most powerful tools I used in Chile remain the most powerful the CIA has: money and relationships. They were at the heart of my most important responsibility, which was the media account. El Mercurio was one of the oldest newspapers in Chile, serving, with the other publications in its chain, more than half the country’s reading public. As a profitable enterprise dedicated to free expression, it was a natural ally in our quest to keep the Allende government from establishing a Marxist regime. The owner legitimately feared that such a government might expropriate its papers and put the media under government control. Our chief of station, Ray Warren, brought me to meetings with his key contacts, and I gradually took over more of the account. It was a first-rate learning experience on how to manage top-level covert action assets.

  I hasten to clarify that the CIA had no role in what was printed in El Mercurio. The notion persists that the paper was an organ of the Agency. I can state categorically that this is not true. In fact, the editor did not take kindly to outside influence on the paper editorially. We did give them money that enabled them to continue publishing, but we met only with folks on the business side of the paper. Fred Latrash was always harping on the contention that El Mercurio needed to be more strident in its attacks on Allende, but Ray and I disagreed; I thought its stance was just right. The paper never used propaganda to deliberately mislead readers about the Allende government’s economic policies, but it did emphasize such issues as the seizure of private property, the illegal and violent actions of certain segments of the ruling coalition, and the specter of economic disaster. It managed to keep its credibility even as it became increasingly antigovernment.