Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  “We will protect your identity,” said one administrator. “We serve the government. This is our government.”

  Their teachers are in the dark. “The weird thing is that the Kennedy School provides faculty with limited information about the students in their classes,” says one professor. “We’re just told that they’re mid-career students. It would help me to teach them if I knew more about them.”

  Ironically, the State Department in recent years has preferred to send actual diplomats to the Kennedy School’s main competitor in the mid-career field: a one-year master’s program at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School (where University of South Florida professor Dajin Peng earned his doctorate). It’s a money-saving move: Princeton provides full scholarships to its fifteen to twenty students. The State Department’s Foreign Service Institute does sponsor mid-career training for two economic officers a year, and they occasionally choose the Kennedy School.

  Unlike the Kennedy School, the Wilson mid-career program does not accept CIA spies. “We never take operatives, we only take analysts,” John Templeton, the school’s director of graduate admission, told me. “We just basically feel that only the analysts should be part of our program. The operatives are not involved in setting policy.” The school has made its policy clear to intelligence agencies, and they abide by it, he said. Since the analysts acknowledge their CIA employment, Princeton avoids having to condone false credentials. Another person close to the Wilson program said it strongly prefers students who can candidly share their professional experiences, because such dialogue is vital to the educational process.

  I’m told that the Kennedy School’s policy of enrolling mid-career CIA officers undercover continues to the present day. In 2013, for example, a Latin American publication outed a CIA agent who went through the mid-career program as a foreign-service officer several years before. However, naming those who attended clandestinely in recent years might endanger their safety or U.S. interests, especially if they still spy. Thus in this chapter the only CIA officers whom I identify as mid-career graduates participated in the program more than twenty years ago and no longer work in the clandestine service.

  * * *

  ROBERT SIMMONS WENT to Harvard twice—and concealed his CIA background both times.

  Simmons and I met one morning in November 2015 in his Stonington, Connecticut, home, which overlooks a saltwater cove where Captain Kidd supposedly stashed some of his pirate treasure. The property has been in his family for more than a century. There’s an American flag on a flagpole in the front yard, and a blue Chevrolet TrailBlazer in the driveway with the license plate GUNGHO. A delicately carved, wood-paneled 1840 door from a Buddhist temple in Taiwan adorns the front hall. We talked in a basement study lined with books, including the Church Committee report on an upper shelf.

  A Haverford College graduate, Simmons earned two Bronze Stars in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He joined the CIA in 1969 because it “knew more about what was going on in Vietnam than the military did.” He ran a CIA interrogation center there, and then spent a year on leave as a special student in Asian studies at Harvard. He used a military cover, which didn’t endear him to a Chinese-language instructor from mainland China. “I remember her saying that she didn’t want to teach me Chinese because I might use it to kill Chinese.”

  His next CIA posting was Taiwan, where he gathered intelligence on its nuclear weapons program. After three years of quarreling with his station chief, he decided to pursue a master’s degree at the Kennedy School. When the chief tried to bury his application, Simmons appealed to the U.S. ambassador to Taiwan, who sent it to Harvard through his own channels. The application portrayed him as a State Department economic officer.

  The school not only accepted Simmons but gave him a scholarship, which made him uneasy. When he arrived at Harvard in 1978, he went to see then-dean Graham Allison; Zimmerman, who headed the mid-career program; and Albert Carnesale, his faculty adviser.

  “I don’t want to take your money if you don’t know who I work for,” Simmons recalls saying.

  They told him they did know; the ambassador had hinted there was “something unusual” about the application. They pledged to keep his secret. (Zimmerman confirmed the incident, Carnesale said he didn’t remember, and Allison declined to comment.) The program’s photo roster listed Simmons’s experience simply as “US Embassy, Republic of China, 1976–present.”

  I was startled to learn that the Kennedy School was already the CIA’s wingman in 1978, which was the year I graduated from Harvard. My mind drifted back to my college days, when my friends and I would have been oblivious to any spies in our vicinity. We were too busy studying, listening to Bob Dylan or James Taylor records, and playing pinball and foosball in the Dunster House basement.

  We wouldn’t have crossed paths with Simmons anyway, because he rarely socialized with other students. He was married and lived off campus, and he also worried that a few beers might loosen his tongue. “If I disclosed my identity so quickly after leaving Taiwan, it could jeopardize my replacement.”

  Had Simmons revealed his CIA past to classmates, one interrogation technique he employed with wounded prisoners in Vietnam might have sparked the kind of lively discussion that is supposed to enhance the program’s educational value.

  “When prisoners were wounded, we had a 50 percent better chance of getting them to cooperate with us than if they were not…,” he told an interviewer for a 1997 book. “I knew some American doctors who helped me out from time to time. I’d bring in an American doctor with a big bag full of pills and devices and everything, and he’d put his gear on and listen to a heartbeat and go through a fairly elaborate routine, which seemed quite sophisticated to a peasant. Then the doctor would look at the wound and say, ‘Oh, that looks very bad. It could get infected. You could lose that limb.’

  “The prisoner would ask, ‘What can you do?’

  “I’d usually let the doctor go, and then tell the prisoner, ‘We’d like to help, but it’s hard to get the medicine. I can’t do anything to help you without getting some sort of help in return.’ That tended to work well.”

  The Geneva Conventions state that wounded or sick combatants “shall not wilfully be left without medical assistance and care.” Prisoners of war may not be coerced or tortured physically or mentally to induce cooperation, or, if they refuse to answer, be “threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”

  Simmons told me he didn’t violate those rules because “they weren’t our prisoners.” They were the responsibility of South Vietnam, which referred them to the CIA for questioning. If they cooperated, they could eat and sleep at the interrogation center, and American doctors would treat them; if not, they were returned to the South Vietnamese for medical care. Their information, he added, saved American lives.

  After finishing the mid-career program, Simmons resigned from the CIA. It allowed him to list his agency employment on his resume as he sought work on Capitol Hill, where he quickly rose to be staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Later, he taught a Yale University seminar on Congress and the intelligence community. His students included Samantha Power, Obama’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. As a former CIA officer, he had to submit the syllabus to the agency for approval.

  Simmons was narrowly elected to Congress in 2000 and served three terms as a Republican in a Democratic-leaning district. Especially after September 11, 2001, his credentials as a soldier and spy impressed both voters and his colleagues in the House, where he sat on the Armed Services, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security committees and was considered an expert on terrorism. After being defeated for reelection in 2008 and the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2010, he made a modest political comeback in 2015 by being elected first selectman of Stonington.

  Simmons may be the only undercover spy in the mid-career program to be honored on the Kennedy School’s walls. Like other graduates who served in Congress,
he rates a plaque in the school’s Taubman wing.

  * * *

  THE CIA SENT Thomas Gordon to Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Berlin, Bosnia, Egypt, Kuwait, London, Oman, Somalia, Washington, D.C.—and Harvard Square.

  Agency recruiters first wooed Gordon when he was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. After stints as a Houston policeman and a Navy officer, he joined the CIA in 1987. He had a knack for languages. Part Native American, he was already fluent in Navaho and Hualapai, and soon gained a working knowledge of German and Arabic. Among his responsibilities: tracking a fledgling terrorist organization called Al Qaeda.

  He was between assignments when CIA higher-ups summoned him. They told him that a year of training would help him move up the ladder, and presented an array of options including the National War College, Princeton, and the Kennedy School. When he couldn’t decide, they chose for him. “They called me back the next day and said, ‘We’re going to send you to Harvard for a year.’ … I think it’s one or two or three a year that they’ll try to send there.”

  He was admitted to the mid-career program as a State Department foreign-service officer but sensed that the school was aware of his real job. “I think they had some kind of a wink and a nod. A couple people there at the Kennedy School talked to me like I wasn’t a foreign-service officer. I got the impression they were amenable to my coming there.”

  The CIA, which paid his way, cautioned him not to recruit anyone at Harvard. “We got the brief before I left—we were not to be doing our normal job when we get there. I said, ‘Sure.’

  “But of course, in that line of work, you keep your line open for future consideration. It’s like going into the NFL Draft. You meet people you might end up knowing later in your career. My associations that I made there came in handy later.… As corny as it is, there’s a camaraderie. I can pick up the phone and call anyone on the alumni list—I was there in 1992, can I get your thoughts on this?”

  Upon arrival, he checked in with the CIA office in Boston as a courtesy, and then devoted himself to academic life. Aside from the usual run of courses on foreign policy, he studied federal Indian law at Harvard Law School, and picked the brain of Kennedy School professor Joseph Kalt, an expert on Native American economic development.

  Maintaining his cover was no harder than it had been overseas, though at least one classmate was skeptical. “What he was saying about his background didn’t add up,” says Bryan Welch, then editor of the Taos, New Mexico, News. “I recall the vague feeling that there must be something else going on there.”

  Gordon also occasionally ran into CIA colleagues such as Ken Moskow, who had attended the mid-career program the year before. “I knew him in passing, and then back at the office. Sitting down with him a few times when he came back to Cambridge. And then overseas a couple times.”

  After Harvard, Gordon resumed pursuing Al Qaeda. He left the CIA’s employ in 1996 but continued working for U.S. intelligence as an independent contractor. “I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade.”

  In 1998, he was elected an Arizona state representative as the ultimate long shot, a Republican write-in candidate in a Democratic district. “I was out here, noticed nobody filed, threw my name in.” The next year he was embroiled in a bizarre scandal that led to media exposure of his CIA background.

  At the time, the province of Kosovo was fighting for independence from Serbia. A naval reservist, Gordon persuaded an Arizona congressman to give him a special permit to travel to the Balkans, on the grounds that he’d been ordered to deploy there. That explanation was bogus, as the congressman learned when an irate general contacted him, complaining that Gordon was causing trouble. Gordon issued a statement that he couldn’t discuss the details because he’d spent most of his career in “intelligence or special operations,” prompting the Arizona Republic to reveal that he had worked for the CIA. It also reported that the agency had fired him, which Gordon denies. He pleaded guilty in 2001 to entering a military installation for an illegal purpose, and paid a ten-dollar fine.

  Gordon told me that his commanding officer in the reserves had unofficially blessed his trip. He went to the Balkans to avenge an old friend from CIA training who had been killed in Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Osama bin Laden was backing the Muslim rebels, so Gordon was on Serbia’s side. “I was there with special ops—we helped some Iranians and Al Qaeda guys to leave the country.” Unfortunately, the Serbs didn’t realize it, and imprisoned him. “They just knew I was an American wandering around.”

  In 2010, Gordon flirted with a run for governor of Arizona, but withdrew. Today, as the head of a community development group on a Native American reservation, he puts the lessons of his Harvard education on Indian law and economic development to good use. “My time at Harvard has enabled me to do good things for tribes here. I went there fully thinking, I’ll be chief of station somewhere and retire in obscurity. I end up being more reservation related.”

  Kiowa Gordon, one of his eight children, is an actor best known for playing a Native American werewolf in the Twilight Saga. On his Twitter page, Kiowa describes his parentage this way: “Born in Berlin, Germany, to a spy and a Hualapai.”

  * * *

  TWO OF TOM Gordon’s mid-career classmates in 1991–92 wore their cover so well that they fooled even him into believing they were U.S. diplomats. Actually, Eric and Gayle von Eckartsberg were spies like him.

  Their entries in the photo roster portrayed both husband and wife as State Department officers in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. Eric specialized in international environmental policy and nuclear nonproliferation, and “researched and wrote on U.S.-Japan bilateral science issues and Japanese technology policy.” Gayle, in the embassy’s political section, had a background in “international political assessment and analysis” and “experience in research and reporting on Japanese political scene.”

  Eric told me in a January 2016 email that “my employment cover was later rolled back and I am able to publicly acknowledge that I worked for CIA from 1983–1994.” At Harvard, he said, he was “exclusively engaged as a full-time student under a professional development program.” He and Gordon “probably shared a beer or two at some point” but “never discussed work since neither of us were working while at school.”

  Gayle “was at the K school purely as a student as well, and can’t comment on anything related to her previous government service,” Eric said. However, one of her Harvard professors told me that he later learned she worked for the CIA.

  Gordon found out about the von Eckartsbergs when he returned to the agency from Harvard. “Somebody dropped their name,” he said.

  The von Eckartsbergs impressed their classmates. “They were very cordial and extremely interesting people,” Bryan Welch said. “They shared interesting insights from—I thought—the foreign service.”

  Upon earning their master’s degrees, they moved to New York, where Gayle was assigned to the United Nations. Returning to Japan for a visit, they lunched with former Kennedy School classmates there, including Eiichi Funada, who later became commander of Japan’s Self-Defense Force fleet.

  Eric’s memory of the lunch is hazy, but it would have been a “purely personal” event, not a recruiting trip, he told me. “I’ve visited Japan many, many times since the K-school and none of it was for that kind of work.”

  Both von Eckartsbergs soon left the clandestine service. Gayle, who had taken Professor Joseph Nye’s course at the Kennedy School, served as his special assistant when he became National Intelligence Council chairman in 1993 and assistant secretary of defense the following year. Later, she worked as an executive for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, identifying commercial technologies that could help with intelligence collection and analysis. She’s currently director of plans, policy, and operations for the Pacific Division of the U.S. Marine Corps.

  Eric is a senior vice president for an information technol
ogy company; his LinkedIn page touts him as an “experienced sales, business development, and strategy executive with record of delivering solid revenue growth to early and mid-stage start-ups” and “deep knowledge of Federal national security and defense markets.”

  In a tenth-reunion report to classmates, Gayle sustained her former cover, describing the United Nations as her “last bona-fide tour as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer.” The Kennedy School, she told them, “changed my life. You know what I mean—insight, context, contacts, retooling, focus, new opportunity, you name it. The promise of the Kennedy School experience was and is very real to me. Thanks to my classmates and teachers for this experience, and here’s to continuing the tradition.”

  * * *

  DONALD HEATHFIELD HAD impeccable credentials. He had earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at York University in Toronto and a master’s in business administration at a Parisian school, where he stayed on as international director of development.

  As a mid-career applicant, “I went through a detailed screening procedure that included tests, motivation letters and recommendations,” he later told a Russian magazine. “By that time, I already had an MBA diploma and a specialist in world economy diploma as well as experience in creating and managing businesses. So I didn’t differ from other candidates in terms of training level.”

  Heathfield did differ from most of them in another respect: both his name and nationality were false. In 2010, a decade after graduating from the program, he was unmasked as one of the ten Russian spies who had slinked into American society as “illegals,” gathering intelligence on their own without the diplomatic immunity enjoyed by embassy personnel. (Others included Lydia Guryeva, who under the alias Cynthia Murphy scouted Columbia Business School classmates and professors.) His real name was Andrey Bezrukov: “Heathfield” was borrowed from a dead Canadian. A backstory as a Canadian diplomat’s son who went to an international school in the Czech Republic was concocted to explain his Eastern European accent.