Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  All this flashed through my mind when we lost one of the people we were supposed to have under surveillance, on the outskirts of town minutes before our insertion team went in. Up until then, the team had largely been directing the operation, because of its expertise and preparation, and seemed to want to call the shots. This now changed on a dime. No one wanted to sit in the middle of the room and take responsibility for what needed to be done next.

  “Over to you, Chief. Now what do we do?”

  They recognized that the risk had escalated substantially. They understood that I needed to make the call and take full responsibility for the operation. All the air was sucked out of the room, and all the risk was on me. Within seconds, I had to assess the options and outcome—where did we lose him? what was the likelihood of his returning to the building? could we pick him up in enough time to still vacate?—and then decide. And it all needed to be done in a matter of seconds. I couldn’t say, “I want to go think about it, and we’ll reconvene in an hour.” Truth be told, I didn’t need an hour. I had the facts. I knew that nothing new was going to develop over the next hour. I calculated that, given where we had last seen the target, we should be able to get in and out before he returned. I also doubted that on that particular day, at that hour, he would be headed back to the office. But it wasn’t a certainty. I took a calculated risk.

  “Okay, we’re going,” I said.

  You could say it was foolhardy, or you could say it was a prudent risk-management decision. It all came down to whether we pulled it off. And this time it did indeed go off like clockwork. The team got around the alarms and the security cameras, broke the locks, found the documents we wanted, and got them out in minutes. We had to quickly copy them and put them back exactly where we’d found them. But then we hit a major snag no one had anticipated: the documents were sealed with an acrylic paint that, if they were opened, would show telltale indications of tampering. Since they had to be returned in pristine condition, we couldn’t break the seal until we solved the paint problem. Fortunately, my wife, Pat, was out on one of the surveillance teams, method acting. She is an artist, and she was on the street posing as one, with all her paints. She came in, looked at the envelope, and worked up an identical paint. We broke the seal, and Pat restored it to normal without a trace. The team redeposited the documents. Mission accomplished.

  * * *

  If anything, the pressure, the risk, and the intensity only escalated all these years later as I was put through my paces on the seventh floor. Days often began before dawn and ended well after dark, with me lugging a large Samsonite suitcase loaded with an evening’s reading, which was retained in an Office of Security safe within my residence. When I first got there, I wondered if I was the only one doing this, until one night I saw DDCI Studeman leaving with two suitcases! After dinner at home, I would spend hours plowing through documents, only to start again the next morning. Dottie Hanson, who was my wise and multitalented administrative assistant, recalls that I would arrive in the morning with a pile of little notes I had written overnight, which she would quickly review so we could plan our day from there.

  Despite the intensity of the work environment, Hanson maintained her sense of humor. Most memorably, one day I accidentally shut a car door on her foot rushing to go downtown. Although she wasn’t hurt, she decided to play a prank and immediately headed to the nurses’ office and had them wrap her foot in a huge bandage. I was mortified when I returned to the office and saw her foot, but she could not keep a straight face and quickly broke out laughing, to my relief. The ability to laugh was an important quality for everyone working in such a fast-paced and high-stakes environment.

  Another important trait in this type of environment is the ability to think strategically. I learned a lesson about effective leadership from an unlikely source when I was young. The lesson was to carve out time in my day, every day, just to think. I learned it when I was listening as a teenager to an unusually frank conversation between my father and his longtime friend Jim O’Neil, the head of Plumbers Union Local 690 in Philadelphia and the leader of all the building trades in the city. In terms of power, he was second only to the mayor, who many thought had been elected by the powerful union bosses in the early 1960s. I was fascinated to see these very strong men talking about life and leadership. They exuded strength and decisiveness. O’Neil noticed me, turned, and apropos of nothing said, “Always have a firm handshake and never have your photo taken with a drink in your hand. But most important, take the first half hour of each day to reflect and game the day.” These were simple thoughts, but they stuck with me. I have a reliable alarm in my head and almost never use an alarm clock. When I was on the seventh floor at the CIA, that internal alarm always woke me up—as it does today—half an hour early so that I could reflect on the day ahead.

  To help in the decision-making process, the Directorate of Operations through the years had set up mechanisms to get necessary information in front of the DDO and ADDO and to reduce the amount of time needed for them to be awake at night. The front line for headquarters was our twenty-four-hour watch center, which monitored all the worldwide cable traffic and fast-breaking developments and crises. Most issues were handled at the branch or division level, but the duty officers would reach out via a secure phone to the DDO and DCI if people had been injured or if there had been an operational flap that would vibrate around Washington or a foreign government, which happened with some frequency.

  What kept me awake at night when I was responsible for overseeing spy operations all over the world? Interestingly enough, it was rarely the operations alone. It was much more likely to be an operation complicated by a serious personnel problem for which there was not a Solomonic solution. While operations could be extraordinarily complex, both from a tradecraft and a political point of view, they tended to be relatively easy to deal with when all the data were in front of you. Adding personnel problems to the mix always created untold complexity.

  My executive officer, Rollie Flynn, recalled the kinds of thorny issues we regularly faced: “By Friday afternoon, my in-box was a foot and a half high. It was filled with quarter-inch-thick packages of decision memos with relevant attached documents. They were just god-awful things that would require the ADDO or the DDO’s decision. You could not make these things up. You might have a flap with an agent: perhaps the mother-in-law of a good case officer abroad is suspected of working with the Russians. Do you bring the valuable officer home from wherever he or she is in the world, pulling the kids out of school and disrupting the whole family on the suspicion that the mother-in-law might be out of line? The list of issues like this seemed endless. Every Friday night I’d have eight or ten of these binders that I would try to read over the weekend and highlight so I could put together recommendations for Jack by Monday. But there was never time to read it all.”2

  * * *

  The unique mission of the Clandestine Service made running the DO a challenge unlike others. My job was to make decisions, and the consequences were always significant, so the pressure was high. As an officer working on the floor at the time described it, the days were made up of a constant series of risk/reward calculations, and there was no such thing as a risk-free option.

  We also held a weekly DDO staff meeting, which was attended by all the directorate’s senior officers. It took place in a plush, secure interior conference room, where the walls were adorned with the photos of all the previous DDOs and ADDOs. The ghosts of the past seemed to haunt the room to ensure that tradition prevailed.

  I carried out a quirky operation for one of those legends, Ted Shackley. The “Blond Ghost,” as he was known, for his aversion to being photographed, served as station chief in Saigon during the Vietnam War, having run America’s secret war in Laos before that, and the CIA’s Miami station in the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Dressed in his black suits, white shirts, and black ties, he had always seemed to turn up where important activities were happening. I say this
to keep my brief encounter with him in perspective. It barely rates as a footnote in his long and controversial career, but it left an impression on me.

  It was 1976, and I was back at headquarters working for the Latin America Division after returning from a trip to Mexico, when I was summoned to his office on the seventh floor with a colleague. Shackley, the associate deputy director of operations at the time, was cut from the same cloth as Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary: enthralled by data, analytics, and the latest technology. Some found him intimidating and very demanding. But there was no denying he brought a certain energy to the table as he sat us down and told us that he wanted us to go to New York City and tell U.S. congressman Edward Koch, the New York Democrat who later became mayor of New York City, that a group of right-wing Uruguayan military officers had hatched a drunken plot to have him killed.

  The CIA had learned more broadly of Operation Condor from its reporting on various Latin American intelligence services—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay—as part of a global effort to eliminate those whom they deemed to be dangerous leftists. In their eyes, this was often anyone left of center, including the Chilean politician Orlando Letelier, who was tragically assassinated on the streets of Washington that same year. It would take years to determine that he had been killed by Chilean intelligence operatives. The plot against Koch wasn’t nearly as serious. A couple of Uruguayan officers had told their CIA counterparts that they were going to assassinate the congressman for sponsoring legislation that cut off military assistance to Uruguay because of human rights violations. When we obtained this kind of threat information, our policy was to brief anyone who might be targeted. Shackley wanted to make sure we gave Koch the facts without histrionics. After describing our assignment, Shackley wanted to know exactly what we were going to say. The meeting soon became a dress rehearsal of our session with Koch. As a case officer with two tours under my belt, I felt a little insulted by Shackley’s micromanagement. But Koch was an important figure, our intelligence was explosive, and Shackley wanted to get everything just right. In hindsight, I would have done exactly the same thing.

  We met Koch in his New York office. He was friendly, and I could tell that he was taking seriously what we were telling him. “Even though we have doubts about the source,” I said to him, “we wanted to make sure you were informed about it.” Nothing more came of it. After we briefed him, I learned that he formally asked for FBI and police protection, which means he took the threat very seriously.

  The CIA was definitely not involved in this operation against Koch. At the time, we took it upon ourselves to voice to our counterparts in the Latin American intelligence services our objections to assassination plots and human rights abuses whenever we learned about them. We were prohibited from even uttering the word assassination after the Church Committee, a select U.S. Senate panel chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), began to investigate intelligence abuses. The agency had released to the committee a series of fourteen reports in 1975 and 1976 on CIA assassination attempts, coup plotting, and domestic spying. This fundamentally put an end to the Agency’s dabbling in assassination at the behest of the executive branch.

  * * *

  During my tenure as associate deputy director of operations, one of the issues that occupied a great deal of our time and attention in meetings was dealing with the aftermath of the Ames affair. Ames’s arrest had dealt the Agency a devastating blow. There was instant and extensive disbelief, self-doubt, and demoralization, especially within the Directorate of Operations. The criticism we faced produced anger and frustration among the workforce. From the beginning, however, the blow was internalized, manifest only in a flurry of activity to prevent such a betrayal in the future. A palpable drumbeat was sounded that someone had to pay for the pain we were undergoing. At the same time, a steady stream of rockets was being fired at the Agency from the media, Congress, and other agencies in the intelligence community, including, at times, our allies at the FBI—who, it would soon become apparent, should probably have been spending more time scrutinizing their own counterintelligence apparatus than critiquing ours.

  Part of my job was to see that we made the necessary changes without going too far and hampering operations. The Ames affair forced us to become more vigilant about making hard personnel decisions when red flags arose and when it became clear that people were not performing. At the same time, as one of my colleagues recalled, we did not want to create a frenzied atmosphere in which everyone was looking over his shoulder, feeling that people were questioning how he could afford his shoes or his tie, and we did not want to destroy the élan or the esprit de corps of the organization.3

  Not surprisingly, countless initiatives were undertaken to tighten up our counterintelligence program, including additional training courses and extensive new rules and regulations. Some of these were important tools to allow us to highlight potential problems early on. One such highly worthwhile reform gave the security office access to selected employees’ financial records, which had not been permissible before Ames’s arrest. This would have been most useful for spotting Ames’s treachery earlier—for example, when he carelessly paid cash for his new home in Virginia. This would have raised a red flag during his routine security evaluation, even allowing for his credible but untrue cover story to explain his excess funds: that his Colombian wife came from a wealthy family. Regrettably, when the mole hunters were closing in on Ames, the information coming back from Colombia wrongly validated this story.

  Another outgrowth of the Ames scandal was a renewed focus on the compartmentation element of counterintelligence: making sure that, even in an atmosphere where everyone has security clearance, access to sensitive information remains restricted to those who truly need to know. In the Monday morning quarterbacking that followed the scandal, the Agency was lambasted for poor compartmentation. Many wondered why Ames had such broad access to information. Some within the organization believe that much of his access was actually informal “hallway intel” he was able to gather through friends, but the fact remains that our compartmentation systems and practices needed tightening up.

  The challenge with compartmentation, of course, is striking the right balance between protecting your secrets on the one hand and, on the other, making sure the people analyzing information have access to what they need. In government, the pendulum tends to swing back and forth as a reaction to the events of the day, which sometimes leads to overcorrection. Many within the Agency felt that there was an overreaction post-Ames, albeit in response to real mistakes that had been made. This overcorrection and hesitancy to share and disseminate information was a major criticism leveled at the Agency post-9/11. At the same time, much of the credit for successes such as the absence to date of CIA documents in WikiLeaks can be attributed to good compartmentation practices. The key bureaucratic and procedural question becomes: What is the right balance?4

  At the end of the day, though, while most of the post-Ames internal control reforms were well-intentioned, the majority of the professional counterintelligence people knew these endeavors could be helpful only around the edges. When you scrape away all the bureaucratic security measures, you are left with the realization that the best and most effective defense by far is having a penetration agent in your enemy’s camp who can tell you where their penetration agents are in yours. Good security and counterintelligence can help prevent penetrations, but you usually need a mole to catch a mole. The Russian recruitment of Ames illustrates this truism loud and clear.

  Being in the business ourselves, we understood its nature and knew that our Soviet Bloc opponents had been working just as hard to penetrate our system as we had theirs. Nonetheless, it still hurt to have our dirty laundry aired in public. One of my colleagues from the time notes that, before Ames, we had been able to point at other agencies—the army, the NSA, etc.—and say that we were special and had not been infected by this problem. But even though we had helped build an image
of invulnerability, it was always overstated. Ames forced us to admit that we were not invulnerable, which was humiliating. It was not so much that the Ames scandal set us back irreversibly on our mission or undid important things we had to do, but it did take some of the gloss off the organization for a few years.5

  In my mind, we hit a low point in our response to the scandal when it became fashionable among some of the workforce to wear buttons pronouncing “Never Again.” I refused to participate, because by that time I knew a terrible dark secret: the Ames damage assessment could not explain all our losses of top-notch Russian sources. The mole hunters had come to realize that the Soviets had executed agents whom Ames could not possibly have known about, leading them to an unmistakable conclusion: there had to be another mole in the woodwork somewhere. It was a professional nightmare.

  The hunt was on, and we were piecing together tidbits of information that came to us in dribs and drabs from our penetrations of Russian intelligence. Much of the information was titillating, but it consistently led us down blind alleys. At this time, we had a contingent of more than twenty FBI agents at Langley headquarters rooting through our files, trying to develop counterintelligence leads. I asked to speak to the CIA analytical team that was putting together the mosaic of our penetration. It was bizarrely fascinating to observe their dealings with me. Since “no one could be trusted,” they passively ignored several of my requests for a briefing on the possible CIA suspects. In desperation, I finally called them to my office and reminded them that they worked under my chain of command, they had an obligation to brief me, and if they could not find a way to do it, I would find a team that would. It felt rather heavy-handed to treat them this strongly, especially since I had some sympathy for their old-school views of counterespionage. But it had to be done. I had a management obligation to make sure everything was being done that could reasonably be expected. They acquiesced, but they probably secretly added me to the “suspect list” immediately afterward.