On the negative side, young NOC officers who have never had the opportunity of serving inside the CIA at the headquarters level do not have the advantage of first-hand knowledge and exposure to the peculiarities of office politics. This lack of exposure can be a disadvantage since the NOC officer has little understanding of nor patience with the bureaucratic process inside the CIA, particularly at the headquarters level. I have seen many young NOC officers quit the program in their first overseas tour simply because of frustration with the bureaucracy or inability to adapt to living in a foreign environment. I was very fortunate to have served a year as a bureaucrat at CIA headquarters between my assignment as a paramilitary case officer and my first NOC assignment, since this provided me an intimate knowledge of how the bureaucracy worked.
By their nature and training, NOC officers are very proactive, no-holds-barred, can-do people. They follow the path of least resistance to get the job done and done well. With little appreciation and understanding of the bureaucratic process at CIA headquarters, the NOC officer must have a high tolerance for frustration and the ability to work around obstacles to keep his operations on course.
Perhaps part and partial to trainability is the ability to learn one or more foreign languages and to learn it sufficiently well as to be able to handle non-English-speaking agents in their native language. If you have not already mastered a foreign language, do not worry. The CIA will test your linguistic capabilities, select the language best suited to your abilities and the needs of the CIA, and then send you to its own language school in Alexandria, Virginia.
Another important quality for the intelligence operative is to have the same high frustration tolerance level mentioned previously for NOC officers. If you expect to receive immediate personal reward from your career as a case officer, then you will be disappointed. If you expect a high degree of excitement in your career, you might get more excitement as a security guard at a monastery. During your Company training, you will be subjected to many very frustrating training situations and your responses will be judged.
When you finally make it overseas, you will find pressure and frustration on a daily basis, and much of the frustration is actually generated by the CIA bureaucracy that theoretically is there to help you. The view of the bureaucrat sitting at a headquarters desk is most often quite different from the view of the case officer in the field who has his finger on the pulse of his or her operations. Interoffice politics and field operations often butt heads. The field case officer must have the ability to manipulate the bureaucratic process to keep the operation from suffering.
The case officer will also have a better feel and concern for his own and his agents’ personal security than the bureaucrat at headquarters, who frequently second-guesses every operational decision made in the field. This often heavy-handed bureaucracy is a constant source of frustration for the field case officer and it is vital to one’s career to learn how to deal with this particular type of frustration in a manner that is perceived as constructive, even though it actually may not be.
The case officer’s own agents often cause frustration when they fail to follow instructions and thus create more work. More frustration is caused by the average man on the street, or casual, in his daily activities, whom, on occasion, the case officer may suspect to be hostile surveillance following his activities, thereby causing him to curtail his clandestine work only to have to do it again the next day. There is still more frustration with long hours of waiting for a target or agent who may never show for a meeting.
The reporting process may bring more frustration when the Station or CIA headquarters wants clarification on your reports. This causes the case officer to have to initiate more unscheduled meetings with agents. Then there is family frustration when you have to rearrange personal plans with your family to conduct unscheduled meetings and activities for the Company. The job of a case officer has much more than any normal amount of occupational frustration. Because of the nature of the job, you must hide this frustration from those who have no knowledge of your true CIA affiliation. Sometimes you must also hide this frustration from your immediate family. So I emphasize if you want the job of a case officer, make sure your frustration tolerance level is high.
Also highly desired is the ability to communicate effectively through the written word. The agency is not looking for prolific authors. Instead, the CIA wants people who can cut to the chase and communicate the who, what, when, where, why, and how from an agent debriefing session in as few words as possible without losing significant content.
Verbal communication skills are equally valued. You must be able to use persuasive skills to convince your assets and agents to often do things that are not in their best interest. Further, you must be able to convince your superiors to accept your divergent points of views on how your operations should be handled.
As a NOC case officer, you must have a high degree of self-confidence and trust in your own ability to make good decisions and to make them quickly without the immediate input of your supervisors. You must be a highly motivated self-starter because you will be working alone most of the time, with minimal direct supervision and infrequent personal contact with other CIA officers. Normally a NOC case officer may meet with an inside supervisor for detailed discussions only about once a month, usually for only two or three hours. So you can see why it is important for the NOC case officer to have good operational judgment and to trust his own operational instincts.
A NOC case officer goes about the majority of his working day in silence. He works alone. Thus, it is important that the NOC officer have the personality traits that enable him to thrive in such isolation. He is alone with his own thoughts as he runs his SDRs to and from his secret agent meetings. He is alone as he reads the many operational cables and intelligence reports sent to him by CIA headquarters to use to prepare for debriefing of his agents. He is alone as he waits, often for hours, for his agents to show up for debriefing, and when debriefing his agents he lets them do most of the talking while he listens and asks a few questions and gives some direction. Next, he is alone as he writes the many operational cables, intelligence reports, and contact reports for CIA headquarters. It is a solitary existence on a daily basis with no one around to talk with or confide in. So the NOC case officer does a lot of thinking and little talking.
The last, but by no means the least, important quality, which is directly connected to decision-making, is a good dose of common sense. Perhaps this is why the agency does not try to recruit highly intellectual people as case officers. I say this not to degrade the intellectuals by any means. But there are times when over-thinking (intellectualizing) a problem only leads to more problems. What is needed is the ability to quickly pull together the essence of a problem, assess the alternatives, and quickly decide on the best avenue to resolve it, all without thinking about it too much. The case officer in the field often does not have the luxury of time to go into a matter in detail. He must make quick on-the-spot decisions alone based on experience. The many personality tests you will take during the pre-employment process will look for all of these qualities.
Also part of staying on board is being re-tested by the Company. Part of this process is the re-investigation and polygraph examination every few years. I have been on the Box about six times during my career, but I have used it as an investigative tool in authenticating my agents about a hundred times.
Generally speaking, all CIA officers undergo the Box about once every five years, but some do so more frequently depending on the sensitivity of assignments, unresolved or questionable areas of previous Box exams, etc. The Box is used to determine possible lifestyle areas that may call into question a person’s loyalty, integrity, discretion, character, and morals (LIDMC), including financial improprieties, drug use, sexual sensibilities, and security issues, such as the presence of hostile control, etc.
While the Box can be ethnically biased, in my opinion, that bias can be reduced by an veteran examiner w
ho has experience with foreign assets. Most examiners do have such experience since most of the people whom they examine are foreign agents. The selection and translation of questions is vital to a successful examination if administered in a foreign language.
Since the Box only measures physiological responses to the questions, the Box examiner has to use his own best judgment to evaluate what these responses indicate. Do they indicate deception or is there some underlying issue involved? In the case of examining foreigners, is there something in their value system that may make them respond to a question in a way as to indicate deception? Can a question be a “loaded question” to one person and be a normal question to another where each responds differently yet honestly to the question? A good Box examiner will recognize these areas and adjust his technique to the situation. The average examiner may miss the nuances and potentially fail a good NOC candidate.
Moral Dilemmas
It might seem that there would be a dilemma for someone who presumably is of high moral character but wants to help their country and would need to engage in immoral activities to achieve his objective. Just how does the CIA know its employees are moral, yet not too moral?
To start with, the Company takes some of the dilemma out of the equation from the start with the screening process. As mentioned earlier, the acronym LIDMC stands for Loyalty, Integrity, Discretion, Morals, and Character. These are the traits that the Company seeks to establish in prospective officer candidates for the Clandestine Service, both NOC officers andOC officers. During the vetting process, all candidates are put through a thorough background investigation that focuses on turning up things that reflect both positively and negatively on the LIDMC areas.
After the candidate comes on board as a trainee, he goes through an intensive high-pressure training process that gives him the case officer tradecraft skills to operate in the field. The training process itself is also designed to weed out those who may have been missed in the vetting process. In my class of some twenty-five trainees when I came on board, six were washed out before the training was complete. If there are any lingering doubts about your LIDMC at the end of the training cycle, you will probably be placed in a desk job at headquarters for some time while you are further observed by superiors to determine your fitness in becoming a field operative.
Once you have been in the field for several years, you may be subject to reinvestigation or to periodic polygraph examinations to make sure you are staying on the straight and narrow. I underwent a total of three periodic polygraph examinations and I have heard of others undergoing even more in a twenty-year career. If this is not enough to firm up your moral fiber and instill loyalty and dedication, you may be beyond hope. But still, there have been some who have slipped through the system for many years before being caught.
Another level of built-in safeguards is the Company’s bureaucracy. How the NOC officer deals with the bureaucracy was covered earlier. With bureaucrats both at headquarters and at the CIA Station closely monitoring how the case officer deals with his pool of assets, it is difficult to deviate from the direction the moral compass points, so to speak.
By and large, however, the dilemma is not a personal one; it is a systemic one, and the safeguards in place to check on operatives, both NOC and OC officers, are pretty good, though they are good enough by any means. There is always room for improvement.
But how does the NOC officer justify to his own moral conscience the lying, deception, trickery, etc., that is a part of the deep-cover lifestyle? Let’s just say you get used to it. It is a necessary part of the lifestyle and you had better learn to do it well, otherwise, you may blow your cover and end up not only compromising yourself but also compromising your agents. If it’s a choice between a little moral dilemma and twenty years in a foreign prison, well morals be damned. But the trickery, lying, and deception side is directed at protecting yourself, your family, the interests of your cover company, your agents, etc. It is not a part of your relationship with the Company.
How to Have a Long Career with the CIA
This is not at all meant in a disrespectful way, but, in a nutshell, you will have a successful career with the CIA’s Clandestine Service if and only if you are able to make yourself and your supervisors look good. This may sound somewhat cynical, but it is a fact of life inside the Company. What you do as a case officer must reflect positively on your supervisors in order to make them look like good administrators and bureaucrats.
A common saying among young case officers is “recruit your boss.” What this means is to get the boss on your side by giving him positive operational and intelligence input that he can take to his own supervisors to make himself and them look good. Everyone has a supervisor up the chain of command. Everyone has someone else to answer to and to please. It is essentially a perpetual mutual admiration society. Of course, the best way to get your supervisor on your side is to run good, clean agent operations and produce good-quality intelligence. Do so while occasionally blowing your own horn and your supervisor can then blow his own horn, too. All benefit and all get promoted.
Another factor that adds positively to your career is to remember that the CIA bureaucracy is always right, so reflect this back to headquarters in your cables. Remember what was said earlier about the bureaucracy? Even though there may be a pompous ass sitting on your country desk spurting meaningless cables to the field that only make more unnecessary work in your already overloaded schedule, you should respond as if these cables have the wisdom of King Solomon and have added inspiration to the handling of your agents. Just remember: that pompous ass of a desk officer may someday be your supervisor. He is, after all, sitting on the desk with every intention of showing his supervisor that he deserves to have another field assignment, so just remember that you have to make him look good, too.
Some case officers are good recruiters and some are good agent handlers. Few are good at both. However, the system expects all case officers to spot, assess, vet, develop, and recruit agents and to exploit their agent resources to collect and write intelligence and operational reports. Your proficiency report, that report of your achievements as a case officer that goes before promotion panels to rank you for promotion, will assess you in all these areas.
You are expected to excel as both an agent recruiter and agent handler in order to excel in your career and to climb the promotion ladder. If you are better at one than the other, then accentuate your strong point while exhibiting a no-quitter attitude for your weaker point. You will be surprised how an experienced, sympathetic supervisor who admires your positive attitude toward your weaker point can make it look strong on your annual proficiency report.
It is also quite helpful to one’s career to latch onto the coattails of a rising star within the Company and make his or her success reflect on you. When the rising star gets promoted, then you get promoted; if the rising star gets plush assignments, you ride along on the coattails. Rising stars are those CIA staff personnel purposely chosen by the leading bureaucracy to be future leaders of the Company. They are placed on the fast track, so to speak, for rapid promotions and higher responsibilities. These are the few people within the agency who are, indeed, chosen for their intellectual prowess. They are trained to think on a different level than the normal field case officer. They are trained to consider regulatory, foreign policy, and political consequences of the CIA’s activities abroad. This is often where the heavy-handed complacent headquarters bureaucracy interfaces with the highly motivated interactive field operations personnel and erupts into internal conflict. At times like these, you will find it advantageous to be on the coattails of one of these rising stars who can go to bat for you and your operations at headquarters while you are isolated in the field.
We have all heard the expression “patience is a virtue.” Well, inside the Company your best virtue can be your patience. For the sake of your career, it is best not to push the envelope of controversy against the bureaucracy even if you are convinced tha
t you are right. However, the bureaucratic memory is often short or even nonexistent. The priorities of the bureaucracy often change and sometimes come full circle to positively consider and adopt an option or plan that was once perceived as completely incomprehensible. So when one of your ideas is turned down as ridiculous by the bureaucracy, just have patience. Your time may come after all and when it does and your idea is accepted and is successful, your career opportunities will soar accordingly. Who knows? You might be one of those rising stars yourself and others will want to hop on your coattails. So for the sake of your career, develop patience and learn how to use it.
Also, you should not be too forthcoming about yourself to your supervisors. There should be some vagueness about you. Leave some mystique about yourself that your supervisors cannot quite put their fingers on. After all, your supervisors are or were once themselves case officers who have instilled within their psyche the case officer mentality. They automatically look at younger case officers in terms of motivations and vulnerabilities, just as they do their agents. Remember, this is what they have been trained to do. They are looking for ways to push your buttons, to get you to respond in predictable and desirable ways to test their own skills as case officers or to achieve their own agenda. If they can push your buttons too easily to get the responses they desire, they will actually lose respect for you. You are too easy, no challenge. If you are too predictable, they view you as intellectually shallow. This is an interesting contradiction. Become a challenge to them by always holding back something about yourself that when revealed continually surprises them. Develop the mystique of a head of lettuce gradually peeling off one leaf at a time to reveal something new about yourself with every layer. This makes you interesting and challenging and reinforces their confidence in themselves as case officers.
A Guide for the Aspiring Spy (The Anonymous Spy Series) Page 8
