A Spy's Journey

by Floyd Paseman

  “Is your dad in?” he inquired.

  “Oh no, Dad’s out seeing a man about a horse,” my son replied, adding, “Dad goes out a lot to see that man about a horse but he hasn’t bought one yet.” We later laughed it off, but I did begin to explain my frequent absences a little more honestly.

  The second story illustrates the value of including your family in your activities whenever you can. On one occasion, headquarters had been interested in establishing contact with a senior intelligence officer from the Eastern Bloc for some time, but no one had yet been able to establish the contact. We finally learned that the target, as a relatively accomplished tennis player, was signed up to play in the International Open Tennis tournament of this country. This was a big event, and despite the odds against my meeting him this way, I, too, entered the tournament. The first problem came up early—the target and I were seeded in different brackets. Consequently, if we both won we wouldn’t meet until the championship round. We also discovered that the target, under strict rules from his host government, showed up just in time to play his matches and left immediately afterward.

  We both advanced several rounds until I came up against the top seed in the quarterfinal round. I knew I would not beat this excellent player, and I felt discouraged that after all this time we still hadn’t accomplished the one thing we wanted—to get an introduction to the target. My wife and son had attended the tournament to give me support, when we noticed that the target had stayed around to scout out his next opponent. But he had moved off all by himself, and an approach directly to him would have alerted him, and others, of our interest. As I mused about how to solve this dilemma, my wife and I noticed that our son was playing in the dirt, enthralled with a handful of old rusty screws he had dug up. Unbeknownst to us, my son had wandered off and had gone up to the target, handed the handful of rusty screws to him with the admonition “Don’t lose these,” and went off to dig elsewhere. The target was absolutely in stitches and later came up to us after our son had returned and introduced himself. Still laughing, he handed my son back the screws, saying, “You see, I did as you asked—I didn’t lose your screws.” This started a long and productive friendship between the target, his wife, and my family. It turns out the target and his wife could not have children, and the target loved spending time with my son. In spite of our best-laid plans sometimes things just work out on their own.

  This target and I ended up spending a lot of time together. He was disenchanted with his government’s repression, and we spent a lot of time talking about the internal affairs in his country. He had no doubt after a while about my true affiliation or the purpose of my in-depth questions. It was clear he was wrestling with the idea of accepting a formal recruitment to work for the United States, but we just couldn’t quite make the turn to formalize this. We arranged to meet at an island outside the host country to discuss things further. He wanted a vacation and time to consider what he was doing, and I agreed to meet with him. I took my family along so there would be a reason I was there. I saw him in passing the first day, and he told me he was staying at a beach on the other side of the island. He told me he would contact me when he was ready to get together, but after several days I still hadn’t heard from him. I fretted and finally decided to look for him. As I approached the beach, I noticed immediately that everyone was nude. The nude lifeguard came up and told me if I was going to wander on that beach, I would have to take off my suit. My God! I tried to explain to the lifeguard that I was only looking for a friend. “Sure, sure—the suit still has to come off,” he said. What to do? I removed the suit, and walked out to where the water was waist high. I walked maybe a half mile, and I heard someone yell, “Floyd, I’m up here.” It was the target, lying bare-ass naked next to a stunning big-breasted girl who was also naked. And it wasn’t his wife.

  I walked up said I was glad to see him. He was more than a little sheepish and said, “You know, I was going to call you but I got distracted,” which I understood. He introduced me to the woman, and I carried on a conversation as best as I could. As I backed out into the surf to return to my part of the island, he said he’d contact me that evening. He did, and he asked if I would keep our nude-beach encounter between the two of us. I assured him I would, and we began a formal relationship to everyone’s benefit. I reported my success back to headquarters omitting certain details, but I couldn’t help reporting that we got the bare facts out.

  But, as with all my tours, I continued to learn that spies are a different breed and can only be counted on to do the unexpected. Two examples from this tour illustrate my point.

  I had inherited an excellent denied-area agent from an officer who had in fact recruited the agent and turned him over to me to finalize the recruitment, and then to run him to produce intelligence. (A turnover is a change in the officer who deals with the agent.) As with many good agents, this one didn’t want to be turned over to another case officer. But the case also demonstrated the importance of listening to the original recruiting case officer’s opinions. We had reported the agent’s reluctance to headquarters regularly, and we had to finally argue that the recruiting case officer nonetheless believed the agent would take the turnover. “He’ll do it, he’ll do it,” the case officer insisted.

  The case officer believed that all we needed was a little drama, so he built the following scenario: he would tell the agent that I, the new case officer, was Mr. Big back in Washington and that I had been sent out especially to work with him. The case officer assured the agent that, although I had been reading the reporting, I had no idea of his identity.

  Further, the case officer managed to arrange for the agent to meet me accidentally on several occasions at large diplomatic receptions. So the stage was set: As far as the agent knew, I was there to work with him, but didn’t yet know who he actually was. The agent loved the drama even though he still maintained he would not work for another case officer.

  Finally one evening the original case officer picked the agent up and told him that tonight was the night he would meet Mr. Big. The agent protested mightily, but agreed, for the sake of the case officer, to meet me. Yet, the agent insisted he was going to tell me that he would not work for another case officer.

  So we set up the scenario on the evening in question. I was to open the door to my hotel room, see the agent, and feign absolute astonishment that this man was our agent in place. The knock came, I opened the door, feigned stunned surprise, and yelled, “It’s you? It can’t be!” The agent loved it. He left the other case officer standing outside, took some sheets of paper out of his coat pocket, and proceeded to give me an important top secret report he had just taken out of his embassy. I had to remind him that we needed to bring the other officer in from the hallway.

  In short, the turnover went exceptionally well, just as the recruiting officer had promised. I never forgot the importance of having the original case officer design his agent’s turnover—or the importance of adding a touch of drama to keep the agent engaged. Most agents thrive on the thrill of espionage and will agree to be turned over to keep that thrill alive.

  This particular agent was outstanding. He was loyal to the United States, and we became very close. As his assignment to this host country wound down, headquarters and I agonized over our ultimate goal—to have the agent back in his home country equipped with communications equipment. We wanted him to report secret information from inside the very government to which our access was denied.

  We decided this agent was indeed inside material and began the laborious project: training him to operate the equipment; dead drops, in which an agent drops materials in a predetermined spot for later retrieval by a case officer so the two parties won’t be spotted together; and other procedures. We were down to the last stages, and I was ready to pick up a practice dead drop from the agent. All was going well, the “cache is ready” sign was out, and no one was in sight. But just after I retrieved the material, my agent popped out of some bushes and shouted, “
You were right, we could do this. You found it and got it.” I had to report this, and headquarters was aghast. No amount of explaining by the agent—that he just wanted to watch the pickup in person—would make any difference. Despite his promise that he would never do that kind of thing again, wiser heads prevailed, and we decided we couldn’t risk running him inside. (To run an agent is to work with him clandestinely—that is, to meet him and obtain the secrets he has access to—all out of public view.)

  I also learned that a good agent, like a good case officer, must be where he is supposed to be. In this case, I had been running an agent for nearly a year, and the two of us had to conduct our meetings very discreetly. I had acquired a safehouse for this operation by getting a local citizen to provide me with a key to his apartment, and then leave the apartment at predetermined times. The safehouse was in a large, tall building in a residential neighborhood. The agent had a key to the apartment, as I did, and we met regularly and successfully in this venue. The outside air was cold and snow was on the ground when one of the largest earthquakes to ever hit the area—over 8 on the Richter scale—hit us. It destroyed many houses, split the major hotel in town up to the sixth floor, and damaged nearly every building in town. Now I had a problem: Our safehouse was on the 33rd floor, we had a regularly scheduled meeting the morning immediately after the quake, and aftershocks were still occurring. My boss argued that we abort the meeting, saying the agent wouldn’t show up, but I convinced him that I should go. Something in my gut told me this guy was different.

  I went through my normal countersurveillance procedures and left our facility by taxi to go to a busy downtown location. I went shopping for several hours, using the store windows to check for surveillance and looking outside while inside the stores to identify anyone as a possible hostile surveillant. I made a few purchases to appear normal to anyone who might be following me. I next took a subway back to the outskirts of town where I had lunch. From there I took another taxi back to the vicinity of the safehouse and walked the rest of the way.

  When I arrived in the courtyard outside the apartment building, the entire neighborhood was milling around. The earthquake had forced them out of their homes. It was bitter cold, and some of them were burning pieces of furniture in the yard just to stay warm. I began to think my boss was right.

  Only minutes away from our appointed meeting time, I looked up across the courtyard just in time to see the agent go into the building and start up the stairs. I waited a few minutes and followed him into the building. The elevator was out of service, so I walked up 33 flights of stairs in nearly total darkness because there was no electricity. Wet with sweat, I made the entry and greeted the agent. We congratulated each other on taking our responsibility seriously enough to make the meeting. We then started the debriefing process.

  Suddenly the earth began to shake—an aftershock! We lost our footing and both of us fell to the floor. But we kept our wits about us. Without a word, we got up, moved expeditiously—ran!—down the 33 flights of stairs. At the bottom we made arrangements to meet elsewhere, and I stayed in the building for another 15 minutes after his departure for security reasons. We both received commendations from headquarters for our dedication. Like any good agents and case officers, we were where we were supposed to be when we were supposed to be there—earthquake be damned!

  Never forget that the vast majority of CIA spies are loyal and dedicated, and believe in the ultimate good of our work. In one case, one of my agents gave his all and died on the job. He wasn’t one of our top agents, but he was the kind of steady reporter our business is built on. He came from a region where we had little coverage so his opinions and comments were of some interest. He was a scholarly fellow who was well known in literary circles. I took him over from another officer, and we developed a good bond. As with many good agents, he continually looked for an opportunity to do more. Almost every meeting with him ended with the comment, “We gotta keep the communist bastards at bay, don’t we?” Since I often had to travel to meet him, we had several designated sites where we would both show up if either instituted the emergency-meeting signal. Late in my tour I got an urgent signal that he desired a meeting. I made my normal trip to the site, taking a considerable amount of time to ensure I was clean before making the meeting.

  When I arrived at the site, an elderly distinguished-looking woman was waiting. It was our agent’s wife. She emotionally thanked me for coming, and told me that our agent, her husband, was dead. He had suffered a heart attack several days before and died on the street. She was aware of his work on our behalf, and of the emergency meeting arrangements. I spent a long time with this elegant and graceful woman. I asked her what we could do to help, and she replied, “Nothing, I just wanted you to know that he’s dead—and that he was proud of what you were all doing together.” It choked me up, and I managed to make arrangements to see her in several weeks after the funeral. With the concurrence of headquarters, I saw her one more time and read to her a letter from the director thanking her husband for his service. I did explain to her that she would be unable to keep the letter for security reasons, and she understood. I was also able to get her to accept, reluctantly, a small stipend as a gesture of our appreciation.

  In another case, a good case officer’s judgment came to naught. Elections were coming up in our host country, and it appeared to most of us that the vote would go against the government that had been friendly to U.S. policy for over a decade. Our agents were reporting that a revolution was in the air, which would likely result in a decidedly anti-American administration. Unfortunately, both our ambassador and our chief failed to see the writing on the wall, and they were adamant that the current administration would be victorious. We held several meetings on the subject, and our chief would finish each meeting by arguing, “You people don’t really see the bigger picture. You don’t have the contacts that the ambassador and I do.” True, we didn’t have the contacts the chief and the ambassador had—contacts with a huge vested interest in the status quo. Finally, we received a request from our headquarters to predict the election results as best we could so they could send a report to policymakers in Washington.

  So we made one last check two days before the election by dividing up areas of the city and suburbs and visiting political rallies of both the incumbent and the leftist parties. I went to a suburb that typically voted for the incumbent party, and I was stunned to find that the incumbent rally was sparsely attended and without enthusiasm. Conversely, the leftist party rally was crammed with emotionally charged people from the neighborhood who were enthusiastically chanting slogans.

  We held a big meeting the next morning and asked for everyone’s thoughts. Those who had gone to the rallies found the same thing I found. The chief was getting aggravated, so he called for a show of hands to predict who would win the election, and this would determine the report we would send to headquarters. The vote was unanimous that we were going to see a change of government. That did it for the chief. After a severe tongue lashing, he again told us that we didn’t see the big picture. With that, he drafted our “official” position—that the election might be close, but that the incumbent party would win.

  On election day, the incumbent party took their worst beating ever, and a government hostile to the United States took power. Headquarters chastised us several days later for missing the call so badly. I vowed that if I were ever in a senior management position, I would listen to the officers who make their living on the streets.

  After the election, everything changed for the worse. The new leftist government immediately pulled police support from our building, and this was during a large anti-American demonstration. A number of us were inside our building on Friday night when the protests began. Thousands of people marched and demonstrated right outside, throwing bottles and eggs, and blaring hate propaganda from megaphones. It was scary: we were really trapped inside. Given the way things were going, we were preparing to burn and destroy our documents. While
we had started planning for trouble after the election, we now found ourselves stuffing documents into bags, into shredders, and generally hunkering down. Meanwhile, the new prime minister and his wife led the march and taunted us by megaphone. Both, by the way, had been educated in the United States, and both of their children had recently been to the U.S. Embassy to have their U.S. passports renewed. We made it through the night, but this marked the beginning of many difficult years with the new regime, a time when the specter of terrorism was raised throughout the region. Over the next six months, our cars were firebombed, two policemen guarding our building were shot, and several U.S. military personnel were killed in a bombing. And, shortly after my departure, our defense attaché at the embassy was assassinated.

  Shortly after the election, my wife experienced a terrible incident. Our car had diplomatic license plates that easily identified us as Americans. One evening as we entertained guests, my wife decided to drive up the hill to buy some things for dinner. It was dusk, and visibility was poor. As she returned home, a motorcyclist tried to pass her on the right, and he hit her a glancing blow. What should have been a minor incident escalated. Fortunately, my wife called to tell me she was in trouble. By now a crowd surrounded the car and was rocking it back and forth. I called the police station nearby, and they promised to send a car out immediately. A friend then drove me to my wife—and of course, the police never showed up. After we skidded right up to the car, I got out, pushed my wife to the passenger side, and accelerated into the crowd, scattering them out of the way. We made it out, but we avoided that area afterward. If you’ve ever been surrounded by an angry crowd that was trying to overturn your car, you’ll know the terror my wife and I felt. Unfortunately, things would only get worse.

  I was assisting an agent working inside the communist bloc who had escaped hot pursuit by his own intelligence service. The agent came out several times to meet a headquarters officer, and I was the support officer on the ground. Part of my duty was to help plan an escape route if the agent ever had to flee his own country. In this assignment, I traveled to the agent’s country, learned the trains and roads, and devised an escape plan. I opted for a route with several checkpoints that would allow us to intercept the agent at a specific point, whisk him out of the country, and get him to safety in the United States. I didn’t think we’d actually use this particular route, but I devised the best plan I could.