A Spy's Journey

by Floyd Paseman

  A third character of note during this tour was the Israeli ambassador to the country where I was stationed. He was a senior Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs official who was on his last assignment and had been rewarded with an ambassadorship for his long and dedicated service. He was also an avid tennis player, and quite good at that, as he had been at one time on the Israeli Davis Cup team. I was not quite up to his caliber, but I was good enough to make our matches challenging for him. The problem was that he cheated. He had, he believed, a responsibility to call all the lines on both sides of the court; these calls were, of course, always in his favor. If I successfully lobbed a ball over him, even if we could find the clay marks where the ball landed, he would inevitably call it out.

  After a few months in country, he was virtually isolated and no one wanted to play with him or against him. I also quit playing with him. The diplomatic community, however, arranged a doubles tournament during that spring.

  I was on the organizing committee, and we tried to pair up individuals who didn’t have a natural partner. More than half of the players were from communist bloc countries, allied with the Arab nations and with no diplomatic relations with Israel. Thus, despite several attempts to line the Israeli ambassador up with a partner, all the candidates refused to play either with him, or even against him. After I threatened to cancel the tournament and withdraw the American contingent from competition, the Soviet Bloc players grudgingly agreed to play against him with me as his partner. When I told the ambassador of this agreement, he was resistant at first. He insisted that he would rather play alone, and if the bloc players refused to play the matches, they would count as forfeits. I argued with the ambassador that this would probably mean he would be champion without a match being played. What meaning would such a championship really have? He finally agreed to the plan with me as his partner, and the tournament got under way.

  I still do not recall who won—heavy betting predicted that the ambassador and I would crush all opponents in a shoo-in. But only several games into the match, I ran to the side of the court to return a terrific shot that nose-dived in as it skipped past me. I signaled the ball in, and returned to the baseline for the next serve. The ambassador, however, walked to the net and explained to the opponents that, “Floyd was wrong, the ball was out.” An argument of three against one ensued. The ambassador held his ground, embarrassing me greatly. Our opponents offered to replay the point, but the ambassador refused. Our opponents gave in. On the next serve to my side, a looping, blooping easy-to-return ball, I simply stood there and watched it go by. The Israeli ambassador was stunned. We lost the match finally, and the ambassador and I never played together again on either side of the net. Later a representative from the Soviet embassy approached me and asked, “Floyd, are you Jewish?” I responded that I was not, but the Soviet said, “Why else would you play with that man?” I tried to explain that I felt everyone had a right to enter the tournament and was simply trying to expedite things. The Soviet walked away, shaking his head.

  It was also during this tour that I really got to know and love Australians. They had a relatively large embassy in country, with wonderful facilities to host community events, including a pool, tennis courts, and a bar. I played a good deal of tennis there, and was initiated into the Limp Fall Society. According to the rules of the Limp Fall Society, whenever someone walks into an Aussie bar and yells “Limp Fall,” everyone collapses to the deck. Those left standing then have to buy a round for everyone in the bar. This was explained to me after a round of tennis and an invitation to the Aussie bar to be initiated. Sure enough, we walked in and my partner yelled, “Limp Fall,” and all the patrons, about a dozen in total, went limp and hit the deck. “You buy,” he explained. I did so, and to this day have taken a couple of spills to the floor when Limp Fall is called out.

  I did do one good deed during this assignment. We were operating in a very repressive society. One day the ambassador called me and asked if I could talk to a young woman whom he had just seen and talk some sense into her. I agreed, and shortly thereafter met her in the receiving area. She was from Amnesty International (AI), and was insistent that she was going upcountry to visit some areas where AI suspected political prisoners were being held. The ambassador had told her that there were several small rebellions going on in the region where she wanted to travel and strongly suggested that she not go. She explained to me her doubts about what the ambassador had told her, that she thought he was trying to keep her from discovering the truth. I told her, “Miss, in all likelihood, your assumptions are probably correct. Without a doubt, there are probably some political prisoners in a number of camps upcountry. There are several small wars going on between different ethnic groups, and they do not treat prisoners well in general. However, unless you want to experience firsthand—as a prisoner yourself—the treatment they get, I advise you to cancel your plans and leave the country when your visa expires. Your chances of being captured—and they do ransom prisoners as well—are quite good.”

  The woman sat there stunned for a couple of moments and asked me directly, “Do you work for the CIA?” I told her that I did, and she remarked, “I trust that you would tell me the truth—I will forgo the experience.” She did in fact depart the next day. I felt I had saved her from probable capture and a potentially horrific experience.

  It was also in this country that I learned that the acquisition of important intelligence did not necessarily mean that this information would make it to either the analyst or the consumer. I was running an agent with terrific access to information regarding developments inside China. As a result, he was a key asset when Chairman Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China died just before I arrived at post. Everyone expected some sort of a power struggle to take place, and one of the key intelligence questions was: Who will replace Chairman Mao? Within days of my arrival, my agent signaled that he wanted an emergency meeting. We met late at night in a car pickup meeting, and he informed me that he had learned that Hua Guofeng would replace Chairman Mao as the most powerful man in China. I was a China hand, and I had no idea who Hua Guofeng was.

  “Who the heck is he?” I asked my agent.

  “Don’t know,” he replied.

  This was some state of affairs. I told my agent to try to find out who Hua was, and that I would do my homework too, but we clearly needed to get this information to Washington immediately. I researched all my reference material and found no listing of Hua anywhere. Nonetheless, I prepared the intelligence report for headquarters. My boss was very uncomfortable. “How can we send this in? How do we know it’s true? It doesn’t make sense.” While I agreed, I also argued that we had the responsibility to send it in, and also noted that my agent had an excellent reputation for providing accurate information. That carried the day, and we submitted the intelligence. It took less than 24 hours for us to receive a blistering admonition from headquarters, which refused to disseminate the intelligence in Washington due to, as they put it, “the extreme impossibility that an unknown by the name of Hua Guofeng would ascend to the leadership of China.” My chief sternly lectured me about the need for accurate intelligence from my sources, and I was downtrodden, to say the least.

  It didn’t help much when, two days later, an official announcement came from the People’s Republic of China that “Chairman Hua Guofeng has assumed the mantle of Chairman Mao.” So, we missed telling our policymakers in advance about this momentous event because we failed to think the unthinkable—a cardinal sin for any intelligence organization. Of course, we never got anything resembling an apology from headquarters.

  We as an organization were also going through some difficult times. We had a new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and it was clear early on that he had no particular fondness for the clandestine side of the house. The new DCI brought on a special assistant to take a fresh look at how we conducted our business. It wasn’t too long thereafter that all field elements—those located and operating outside Wash
ington, D.C.—received a cable noting that we were to pay particular attention to the moral aspects of our business. Specifically, we were to proceed with instructions that, “the recruitment of individuals for the purpose of espionage should be a morally uplifting experience.”Holy moley! It wasn’t that we disagreed with our agents acting morally, but we were also trying to persuade drug runners and terrorists to work as spies for the U.S. government. The cable drew widespread derision, and even more when we learned that this assistant would personally visit a number of field locations (including ours) to discuss their instructions and review our recruitment processes to ensure adherence. Fortunately for me, my chief decided to send me off on a trip elsewhere at the same time. No doubt my chief suspected, correctly, that I wouldn’t just sit and listen to the assistant lecture us on the morality of spying. Avoiding the special assistant’s visit probably saved both our careers.

  But this did come at a terrible price. It was well known early on that neither our new president nor his Director of Central Intelligence liked human spying—preferring what they saw as the antiseptic approach of intercepting conversations (signals intelligence) or studying satellite photos (imagery). Frankly, I never quite understood why one form of spying was OK but using humans for the same job was considered distasteful.

  The upshot of these developments was the “Great Massacre,” in which the director decided that it was time to eliminate the bloat left over from the Vietnam War. Overnight, he terminated the careers of over 800 Directorate of Operations case officers. You can imagine the effect on morale, and the director’s actions did long-lasting harm to our ability to collect human intelligence. Most of those fired were veterans of substantial fieldwork, most had at least one esoteric language, and many were over 40. Our collection capability was decimated. We regained some of our losses after President Reagan took office. But following the excesses in Nicaragua and the Iran/Contra affair, we reverted to about where we were at the end of the previous administration—with pretty poor human-collection capability left. (This came back to haunt us terribly in September 2001).

  During this, my third overseas tour, a vehicle I was driving almost floated out to sea. We were in a tropical rainforest that had frequent monsoons, and flash flooding could occur without warning. Late one evening, after the martial law curfew, I had a meeting with one of my agents just outside of town. I took a sterile vehicle and did my normal countersurveillance run to ensure that I was clean. I then drove without lights to the pickup point, and my agent jumped into the passenger seat. We began to drive around as I debriefed him. About ten minutes into the meeting, the monsoons hit. Still, I drove around trying to complete our meeting. But when I turned and drove down one road, heavy floodwater rushed in from nowhere. All of a sudden, our car started to float. We both remained relatively calm until the waters took us toward the local river that ran into the ocean. As our car floated toward the river, I told my agent to get his ass out of the car. He pushed his door open and abandoned the car. I stayed in the car as it started to enter the river. Fortunately for me, it caught on the edge of a bank, and I could then abandon it. I had to wade 50 yards to high ground, and I made my way on foot back home. All night long, I rehearsed the cable I was going to have to write about how the vehicle went down the river and into the ocean. Fortunately, the next morning I went back to the area, and someone had salvaged the car and had it sitting on high ground. I took my key, started the car, and drove it back. We had to refurbish the interior, but we didn’t have to send the humiliating cable telling headquarters that our car just happened to float away.

  Over the years, I’ve dealt with a fair number of unsavory agents, and I’ve recruited a couple myself. One of them was a narcotics asset. He was as tough a person as I ever dealt with, and had been imprisoned and tortured by the police of two different countries. He earned his living as a smuggler of jade—and heroin. He had pockmarks from smallpox and scars on his face and shoulders from war and fights for survival. He spoke excellent Chinese, and I met him through an introduction from another asset reporting on narcotics for us. I didn’t control this agent; he agreed to work for us for the money. He did like me, and he always promised me that he would never betray me to others in the narcotics business. And he lived up to his promise. But he had a habit of showing up unannounced, late at night, at my home. Several times he scared the hell out of my family. Even when I wasn’t home, he would simply walk into the house (heavily armed), go over to the bar, pull out a bottle of his favorite (Johnnie Walker Red), and finish off the bottle. If I were home, he still would come in, go over to the bar, pull out the Johnnie Walker Red, and proceed to finish off the bottle as we conducted our business. Strangely, I never feared him. We had an excellent relationship, and he respected my ability to deal with him in his native Chinese tongue. He produced a tremendous amount of good, verifiable intelligence that helped us bust a number of drug operations. Unfortunately, on one of his smuggling trips he got into a gunfight with his traveling companions and was killed.

  One of my favorite tales concerns the ingenuity of case officers. One of my friends was running a denied-area asset. As a result, we seldom had the opportunity to meet with him face-to-face, and used a courier system to both give the agent our requirements and to get reporting back from him. The problem was how to pay the agent. He wanted a hedge against inflation and asked to be paid in gold rings. That in itself was not a problem. The question was concealing the rings so the courier could take them across borders safely. Finally, the officer decided to bake the rings into a pie and have them carried across that way. (We amused ourselves by singing “Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie” to his great displeasure.) As we brainstormed the idea, we realized that someone at the border crossings might want to taste the merchandise, and that appeared to be a real problem. Finally, I suggested we simply make the pie taste so awful that, if offered a sample, no one would want seconds. The pies were baked with the greenest, sourest apples we could find. It worked. The pie reached its destination intact.

  But, with the arrival of a new chief, the tour wasn’t all a bed of roses. A pleasant enough man, and a man of courage who had been in service in the war zones of Asia, he nevertheless was a breed of chief that believed things were owed to him because of his position. Over several months what I was seeing started to bother me. I noted shortly that after we purchased watches as gifts for our local government official friends, my chief and his wife began sporting new watches remarkably similar to the gifts. Ditto when we passed out new tennis rackets to our contacts—suddenly new ones showed up in the hands of our chief and his wife. When new tires showed up for official vehicles, the chief’s personal car appeared with new tires.

  During this time, I was fortunate to receive perhaps the finest fitness report in my career, which made a decision I needed to make even more difficult. Things came to a head for me when, during a visit to my chief’s home, I saw official serial numbers on a number of items in his home, indicating equipment that had been taken from official installations elsewhere.

  I knew what I had to do. We were scheduled to have an inspector general (IG) visit in the next few weeks. According to regulations, any officer can request to see an IG, with no questions asked. However, when I signed up for an appointment, the chief came to me and asked, “What are you going to see him about?” I told him that I just wanted to see the IG, and he finally left grumbling. Sure enough, the IG arrived, and during my session with him, I reported my suspicions that our chief was misappropriating U.S. government property for his personal use.

  The IG clucked and took everything down, and I thought that would be the end of that. However, minutes after the IG had his farewell session with our chief, and for the first time during the IG’s visit, I was called to the front office. The chief told me very sternly that, “I have been watching you for some time now, and it is clear to me that you don’t have what it takes to be a supervisor in this organization.” I was stunned tremendously, as this was t
he same officer who had endorsed my previous fitness report. It was not until later that I learned that the IG was a close personal friend of the chief from a previous assignment. What was clear was that nothing was ever done about the chief’s allegedly dipping into official property. This experience taught me a lesson about the Agency IG system. IGs, hoping for plum assignments, have a personal stake in not rocking the boat. I never again trusted an IG investigation until the inspector general position became presidentially appointed and congressionally approved, which came much later in my career.

  In one humorous episode from an inspector general’s visit, a large amount of explosives and thermite grenades from a neighboring country’s facility wound up at our facility when a communist takeover closed down their operations. No one knew how the explosives got to our country, but the IG ordered us to dispose of the unauthorized materials. Fine, well, and good. I wrote a cable back to headquarters and asked them how to mail or pouch these materials back to where they came from. A long silence ensued. Finally I received a cable that assured me that we couldn’t possibly have these materials on hand, since there was no record of them ever having been sent to us. “OK,” I wrote back, “what do you want us to do with them?” I got a one-line response: “Be inventive.”

  Inventive I was. I lined up one of our communicators, and we decided that we could burn the thermite grenades in a 50-gallon drum that we kept on the roof for emergency destruction purposes. So late one evening, after dark, we took the grenades up to the roof and set the first one off in the drum. Wow! Smoke, fire, and enormous heat encircled us. We put a lid on the drum, but we couldn’t put out the grenade. Worse still, we saw parts of the roof begin to smolder and melt. Fortunately, as we began to move the drum toward the edge of the roof (using asbestos gloves) with the intent of pushing it off the roof, it finally burned out. Sweat-soaked and all, we made the obvious decision not to discharge the remaining grenades.