Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  “CIA is by no means a rogue elephant,” Whipple, a former CIA officer who is executive director of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, said. “There isn’t anything independent about the CIA. We are asked to do these things under legal authority. Everything we do is under strict controls. Everything we spend has closer controls on it than in any other element of the government.”

  Occasionally, an officer claims he has obtained information from agents who do not exist. Often, this is uncovered when the officer is sent to another station. His replacement expects to be introduced to the agent and finds he has vanished. Or if he meets with him, the agent appears to know nothing about any secret arrangement with the CIA.

  “It’s a problem in rare cases,” a former operations officer said. “You replace somebody, he says, ‘Here are my agents,’ and the guy says, ‘What do you mean? I never agreed to do that. What do you mean you want me to be a spy?’”

  Eventually, deceptions like these catch up with officers, and they are fired.

  “There’s a perception from the outside that CIA case officers, or operations officers, are loose cannons, free to operate with little or no supervision,” former CIA officer Saunders said. “In reality, there are a multitude of checks and balances. If nobody’s heard from you for eight hours, you’d better have an explanation when you surface. ‘This is where I’ve been, and this is what I’ve been doing.’”

  “When you undertake a covert or political action, you never do it without authority from Washington,” former CIA officer Whipple said. “I don’t know of any case where any of us undertook a covert action we were not ordered to do.”

  As a rule, there is a degree of friction between State Department and CIA officers assigned to a post. The CIA officers look at State Department officers as softheaded errand boys. The State Department looks at CIA officers as bumbling troublemakers.

  “You need intellectuals on the DI [Directorate of Intelligence] side You need scientists. But the agency is not about intellectuals. The agency is about hard-nosed covert operators,” a former operations officer said. “That’s why the State Department doesn’t get along very well with the agency. They think the CIA is full of uncultured thugs. The CIA thinks the State Department is all pussies. And they are, most of them. They’ll never be able to work in great harmony.”

  In part, the frictions stem from the fact that the two agencies have different roles.

  “The State Department guys are expected to talk to people at their level in the host government. They take at face value what they are told,” a former operations officer said. The CIA, on the other hand, recruits agents who will obtain classified information or reveal confidential conversations. They are quizzed over and over again to make sure they are telling the truth.

  “The name of the game is getting agents who tell you what people are doing,” he said. “The State Department is paid to hang out at receptions and ask diplomats, ‘What are you doing these days?’ A covert agent is a backup. The diplomat says one thing and the covert agent says, ‘Bullshit.’ They’re doing the opposite.”

  For their part, diplomats insist the information they pick up is often more valuable than what the CIA learns because it is attributable to responsible government officials. They often look down their noses at CIA officers.

  “They [CIA officers] were not of the same caliber as we were,” a former U.S. consul general in Leningrad said. “To be a Foreign Service officer, you practically have to be a Ph.D., and the exams were rigorous. The same was not true of other agencies. Frequently people who couldn’t get into Foreign Service went into the others. I was offered a job by the CIA at twenty-five percent more salary. But I wasn’t interested.”

  Problems develop when the CIA and the State Department both wind up dealing with the same individual, or when an ambassador wants to know everything the CIA is doing. Some ambassadors think they have a right to know who the CIA’s agents are in his country. They do not, and often they have to be told that by State.

  “Once in a while, you recruit somebody who may be a contact of someone in the embassy. That’s when you run into trouble,” a former CIA officer said. “There’s no reason ever to tell anyone, except maybe the ambassador or deputy chief of mission, this is our agent.

  “There are always some jealousies because of the usually incorrect assumption that because you are CIA, you have extra privileges [such as better housing],” the former CIA officer said. “That somehow you get more than they do, which isn’t the case at all. This is usually based on the belief that the CIA doesn’t pay for what it gets and is thus a drain on the embassy’s budget. In fact, the CIA provides State with more than enough money to pay for each of its officers overseas. State comes out ahead, but it remains a source of friction.”

  As in any organization, there is always some friction between headquarters and the field.

  “In every government agency, and especially in the CIA, there is continuing competition, and perhaps a touch of resentment, between headquarters and field personnel,” Saunders said. “The field officer thinks that headquarters is staffed by idiots who do nothing but attend meetings and don’t understand squat. The headquarters guy thinks the field person is narrow. The ironic thing is that when they switch places, as inevitably they will, they will both conclude that they have now entered the big time, where they have all the action and all the answers.”

  “It [the Directorate of Operations] is a fraternity,” William Colby said. “People who work closely together with a sense of discipline. There are mutual loyalties. When you live in a station overseas, there is a tendency for the families to stay together.”

  While the CIA moved under William Webster to hire and promote more women and minorities, the Directorate of Operations remains a backwater. Many older operations officers think women cannot relate properly to males in Latin America or the Middle East—a similar prejudice that existed, until recently, about female police officers. There has never been a female division chief and only a few female station chiefs in the CIA.

  “They say there are certain countries where you can’t operate. For example, how can a woman operate in the Middle East?” Robert R. Simmons, a former CIA officer, said. “Sometimes, some of the best officers there have been women. In some cases, it may make it easier to go against what people expect in an area. A female officer may have a reason for being there. You can hold hands. He [an agent] can give you flowers. Inside is a secret message. You can kiss him on the cheek and put something in his pocket. You can go together and not draw attention.”

  Because of the stress of working under cover, marriages between CIA operations officers are common.

  “You can tell your wife that you work for the CIA,” Saunders said. “You can say that you’re going to Singapore on a delicate operational assignment, but you don’t add that you’re going to tap so-and-so’s telephone. The security constraints sometimes have the effect of encouraging marriage among CIA people; there are many husband and wife teams in the CIA. A spouse who works, or formerly worked, for the agency is more likely to be sensitive to the security requirements and the stress associated with the work. He or she won’t ask what you’re doing and won’t be offended if you don’t offer the information.”

  If both spouses are CIA officers, things are a little easier. While in theory they should not talk about sensitive operational matters unless they are both assigned to the same operation, in practice they usually wind up freely talking about their daily activities.

  For the most part, the job of a CIA operations officer is not as dangerous as that of a police officer. Most CIA officers operate under diplomatic immunity, and most governments do not want to risk retaliation against their own intelligence officers by harming a CIA officer. Yet a number of CIA officers have been killed in the line of duty—fifty-three at last count.

  Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was one of the more well-known casualties. On November 25, 1975, the English-language Ath
ens News published his name and home address. His name had first appeared in 1967 in the East German publication Who’s Who in the CIA. Other publications, such as CounterSpy, later listed him as well. The Athens publication urged action against Welch and other CIA officers. On December 23, 1975, Welch was shot to death on his doorstep in Athens.

  Because the more recent listing had been in CounterSpy, many CIA officers blamed the publication for Welch’s death. However, some of the CIA officers assigned to Athens at the time said Welch’s identity and his home address were well known before they were published.

  “He was living in a house that had been occupied by his predecessor,” one of the officers assigned to Athens said. “It was careless. You get comfortable. The climate is benign. It was convenient. He didn’t have to go looking for a house. Everybody knows the chief of station. You can’t do your job as chief of station if they don’t know.”

  On March 16,1984, William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, was kidnapped. On June 3,1985, he died in captivity after being brutally tortured.

  Despite claims that morale has suffered since the Church Committee hearings, most operations officers say their mood depends more on what they are doing than who heads the agency or what investigations are going on.

  “Morale is about the same,” said a recently retired operations officer who was with the agency for several decades. “Everything depends on who you work for. Maybe you’re working for a gem, but the one above him is a son of a bitch. Any station overseas is happy if it’s successful and knows it’s successful. Any organization becomes more bureaucratic. Now they standardize the car for each defector. They’re not taking into account the fact one is more valuable to you. That’s bureaucracy at work.”

  For officers who perform well, the CIA provides monetary awards and intelligence medals, along with promotions. The most prized officers are those who can recruit almost anyone, yet they are not necessarily good managers. Many of the best spies do not want to work in headquarters.

  “If a CIA officer recruits a lot, it doesn’t mean he is a leader,” a former CIA officer said. “You have very good case officers who can recruit a tree. But they may not be chief-of-station material. Sometimes you find people who say they only want to be case officers. But most want more power. You often don’t know if he can recruit.

  “Somebody who can be recruited by one person can’t be by another,” the former officer said. “Some people can be recruited by anybody. That person may see CIA and begin imagining money. Others are not interested in money but feel they can’t do much in their own system and so they try the CIA as a way of trying to change their own government.”

  Usually, CIA officers woo potential agents for several weeks or months before they make a pitch. The KGB, on the other hand, tends to be more patient and sometimes works on developing a relationship for years before making a move. The KGB also tends to focus more on people who can reveal specific secrets, rather than recruiting anyone with access to sensitive information.,

  “The major difference is the KGB, by nature of the control it exerts, is very persistent,” a former CIA officer said. “They will say, ‘That’s the target, penetrate it.’ They won’t let go. Quite often, you look at something and say, ‘There’s no way I’m going to get anything on this, I’m going to do something else.’ In that sense, they are probably better organized. They tell them step by step what to do.”

  The KGB also does its homework better.

  “Americans,” the former officer said, “will go to a cocktail party and start something. The Soviets will say, ‘That guy is of interest, find out everything you can, and approach him.’ They go about it differently. They do their homework before meeting him. When they decide to go after him, they know he’s of interest.

  “I think by nature, we are more impatient than other people,” the former officer said. “The recruitment process, if done classically and well, should take a long time. If it’s done in three sessions, he may not be worth a lot and he’s probably not yours anyway. It should take a long time for assessment and vetting.”

  On the other hand, the CIA has the natural advantage of representing America. KGB officers are far more likely to want to work for the U.S. than the other way around. In the area of human spying, both the CIA and KGB have scored tremendous coups against each other.

  “A lot of people recruit themselves,” a former officer said. “A lot of people walk in.”

  “One of the problems you run into throughout the agency is quantity versus quality. Everyone preaches quality, but most of the time you get quantity,” a former operations officer said. “Numbers have always been important. It’s competition. They keep track, they count. ‘What happened? You only got forty-six reports [from officers in one station] this month.’”

  “That was how careers were measured and made—by the numbers,” Tom Gilligan, another former CIA operations officer, said in his book CIA Life.15

  To expand their own empires, some officers at headquarters constantly ask for more information about trivial subjects. The more information they obtain, the more they can justify requests for larger budgets.

  “A lot of it is information for information’s sake,” a former officer said. “There are all sorts of little men sitting around, and their job is to keep track of iron ore production in Brazil.”

  In September, station chiefs write progress reports about the previous fiscal year and outline their budget needs for the next fiscal year. A shorter interim report is also prepared in March. The reports include a listing of each asset or agent by cryptonym. As the report is forwarded up the chain of command, the cryptonyms are deleted and are replaced by aggregate numbers to further conceal identities.

  “What you want to do basically is to show that you did better in the last six months than the previous six,” a former operations officer said. “If you are a new station chief or section chief, you want to show you did better than the last one. So you show you recruited x number of agents and got rid of x number of bad ones.

  “In the end,” he said, “quality is not taken into account as much as it should be. One good agent is not necessarily given more weight than a mediocre one.”

  One of the gravest problems confronting the CIA is the possibility that agents may in fact be double agents, meaning they work for the other side. This happened in Cuba, where nearly all the agents recruited by the CIA back to the early 1960s were found to be plants taking instructions from Cuban premier Fidel Castro. It was not until Juan Antonio Menier Rodriguez, who had worked for both Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence, defected in 1987 that the CIA began to learn of the deception. The real shock came a year later, when Maj. Florentino Aspillaga Lombard, who also had worked in Cuban intelligence, defected. He had far more detail than Rodriguez and identified as doubles thirty-eight Cuban agents working for the CIA—practically all of the agency’s complement at the time. Nearly all of the agents had taken polygraph tests, and most had passed. The test results of many of the other agents were deemed inconclusive, meaning there was not sufficient evidence to show they were lying.

  The revelation sent shock waves through the CIA and particularly the Latin American Division, which handles Cuba. Some could point to warnings they had previously made. For example, as early as 1976, the CIA’s counterintelligence staff expressed concern that some Cubans on the CIA’s payroll might be double agents. Their information was superficial and generally unhelpful. They also seemed to know too much about the operations of the CIA’s Madrid station, the hub for operations against Cuba over the years. This was an indication that at least some operations had been compromised or were under Cuban control. The warnings were not heeded.

  According to Rodriguez, the Cuban agents had all received extensive training in beating the polygraph. They were told that polygraph tests do not work and that if the agents failed the tests, they could always convince CIA operations officers that there was something wrong with the machine. As a result, most did
not show any signs of increased tension—interpreted as deception—when they lied.

  Rodriguez said the problem was that the American CIA officers who debriefed the Cubans were not themselves Cubans and did not understand their culture enough to interrogate them effectively.

  “The polygraph is a big mistake,” Rodriguez said. “We [in Cuban intelligence] get Chinese to recruit Chinese. We are not arrogant. They [the CIA] should use Cubans. If not, you will not detect [double agents].”16

  Rodriguez compared the CIA’s mistakes to its decision to mount the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  “They didn’t understand Cubans. Only a crazy would have thought in 1961 that the people would have gone against Fidel,” Rodriguez said.

  A former CIA operations officer familiar with what happened agreed.

  “The relationship develops between the source and case officer,” he explained. “There’s a tendency to try to work out problems with the source. The Cubans knew this and told the agents that if they have a problem with a polygraph, appeal to the case agent. ‘Don’t get upset over this thing. Say you were harassed. After all, you gave them good information. There’s something wrong with the polygraph.’”

  The CIA’s emphasis on quantity over quality also played a role.

  “You want your agent to get through the polygraph successfully because you don’t want the hassle of trying to establish by other means he is okay,” a former operations officer said.

  In general, “it’s not uncommon for a case officer to fall in love with an agent,” former CIA officer Saunders said. “Whenever a special bond develops, as it must between case officer and agent, there is some unique chemistry.”