A Spy's Journey

by Floyd Paseman

  To the horror of the German security people with us, the DCI said, “You see, I am the director of the CIA.” Our hosts were aghast.

  The woman, however, simply turned to him and said, “Oh sure, and I am the Queen of England.”

  And then there was the near-arrest of my driver/bodyguard. On a mission to a nearby country, and unknown to me, my driver decided to carry his weapon. He was properly licensed, of course, and as I discovered later, he had indeed properly notified the airport authorities he intended to have the weapon transported aboard the aircraft. He had not told me that he planned to do this, and we had never before traveled with weapons.

  He didn’t tell the airport authorities at the check-in desk that he was packing (carrying a gun). We separated for some reason, so I checked in and waited for him to come through the security checkpoint. All of a sudden, I heard alarms going off, and I stood up and saw my driver up against a wall, with two policemen pointing their weapons at him. The clerk at the desk activated the alarm when she saw the weapon in his briefcase. There was nothing I could do but watch. Finally, just before we were to board, they released my driver after numerous phone calls had verified his story about who he was and that he had secured advance permission from the airline to carry the weapon. Two German policemen escorted us personally onto the aircraft and to our seats. No one spoke to either of us during the entire flight.

  During one visit by a group of senior secretaries, I told my driver to use our official car to drive the women to the airport in comfort. It was a warm spring day, and the driver decided to have a little fun and turned on the car’s seat warmers. An hour later, they arrived at the airport all sweaty and ragged. No one had wanted to mention that they were getting hot flashes, and it wasn’t until they arrived that they noticed that the seat warmers were on.

  I had more than my share of hard times during my tenure as chief. Much of it could be attributed to the fact that the German equivalent of Time, Der Spiegel, ran an article that listed me as the chief of the CIA in Germany. The fact that they included the line “the mastermind of the CIA located on the Rhine” did little to help. Exposure like this did several things: First, it generated a whole series of calls from other German papers and media, as well as from the U.S. media. Der Spiegel in particular posed the question, “What are all these spies doing in Germany?”1 Secondly, it resulted in crank calls and threats as well.

  I simply turned over all calls to the embassy. I got great support from the embassy press officer, who answered all requests with: “It is U.S. policy not to comment on intelligence matters.” After a while, the calls stopped. This incident also resulted in the publication of my name as a CIA officer in a Russian-sponsored book, Headquarters Germany.2

  The exposé Headquarters Germany named a lot of officers and units correctly, but perhaps worse, listed hundreds of people who had no CIA affiliation whatsoever. In my own case, the information contained nothing new—in other words, it was a rerun of information that the Soviets had put together. One of the premises of the book was that “the CIA is still operating in [Germany] despite the dissolution of East Germany, the Soviet Union and Communist systems in Europe.”3 That resulted in a great deal of unwanted publicity about what the CIA was doing in Germany, and created demands for lists of names and other information from a number of sources, none of which the U.S. government provided. And once this started, it became a regular ordeal. Every several months, the local German media ran old articles again and again. I knew the Russians were behind this. We confirmed that, on several occasions, the author of a given article would be a known Russia agent of influence.

  Congressional delegations, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the vice president, and the president all came on official visits while I was chief in Germany. It took a great effort to accommodate this succession of VIPs, but the visits were very important. They demonstrated to the Germans that we were interested in them and helped keep the Atlantic Alliance strong after the confusion of the end of the Cold War.

  As our government wrestled with what U.S. Intelligence could and should do in the post–Cold War period, a commission was appointed to study the issue and prepare a report for the president and Congress. After a considerable amount of work had been done, the commission visited Germany to talk to our allies about their views.

  Most commission members were on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or PFIAB. The members of PFIAB are generally from the private sector—men and women who serve out of loyalty and have already earned their fortunes. We had dinner with the delegation at a local restaurant and drank several bottles of fine German wine, for which I was stuck with the tab. In the end, the Commission prepared its report—a full, thoughtful, well-presented analysis of the U.S. Intelligence needs in the twenty-first century.4

  There were difficult times in Washington and in Bonn. During my stay in Germany I worked for four different Directors of Central Intelligence (one was acting director for over six months). Additionally, I had three different ambassadors and one chargé d’affaires through this same period. So every time I turned around, I had to brief a new DCI—and his staff—on what was going on. This was terribly disruptive, and had its effect on the morale of the Agency in general. I was fortunate, however, that for approximately three years of my time, the deputy chief of mission of our embassy, J. D. Bindenagel, was an expert on Germany. I promised him early on he would not be surprised by anything the CIA or the intelligence community would do in Germany—subject of course to my not being surprised myself. We worked out a very good relationship. If he needed to see me, I would drop everything to be available, and should I call and ask to see him, he would do likewise. I didn’t schedule the normal weekly appointments, because I didn’t believe in wasting either his time or mine. I was sorry to see his tour end during my final year, and believe that in addition to a good professional relationship, we had a good friendship.

  All the changes going on caused great anxiety in the Agency. Senior leadership changes were everywhere. John Deutch had just been appointed and confirmed as the new Director of Central Intelligence by President Clinton. I had met Deutch before, when he was deputy secretary of defense and I had accompanied a senior delegation to meet with him.

  On his first day at the CIA, I was headed for a visit at headquarters. As I prepared to turn into the parking lot, I noticed a big, black armored Cadillac on my tail. It followed me into the guest parking lot, and out of the car stepped John Deutch. He was walking into CIA headquarters for the first time as the new Director of Central Intelligence. I parked my car, got out, and walked over to him and reintroduced myself. I congratulated him on his confirmation as DCI. He remembered me, and asked that I walk with him so we could talk.

  “What would you say if I told you I wanted to close all of our operations in Europe?” he said. I told him I would suggest that we should re-examine where and how we were doing our business first, and then make decisions regarding closing or reductions. He mulled this over as we approached the southwest entrance together at 8:20 a.m., the peak time when employees came into the building. Dozens of people I knew were gawking at me as I walked in with the new DCI. I turned to leave when he took me by the arm and asked me to ride up with him in the DCI elevator to his office to finish our discussion.

  I did, and we had a good chat. Afterward, I went to the office set aside for me and made a number of appointments. The chief of the German area ran up and said, “The DDO wants to see you right away. What were you doing with the new DCI?” I went up to the DDO office and told him that I had simply walked in with the director. The DDO was all a fuss but accepted my explanation. For the next month, including after I had returned to Germany, rumors were all over the place that Deutch had selected me to be the next DDO—a subject that never came up in our conversation. It illustrates how much anxiety his appointment caused in the Agency.

  I got along well with Deutch—he asked me if there was anything he could do for me, and
I told him an early visit to Germany to demonstrate the importance of our relationship would be very helpful. His first foreign visit as director was to Germany.

  We entered what I called the silly season in a big way. It began innocently enough, but soon turned into a personnel management nightmare. Those on top and new to the business decided that what was wrong in the Directorate of Operations—as demonstrated by the Aldrich Ames case—was the DO culture. They were alarmed by what they saw as a sharp division of the DO into layers—with the case officer cadre considered the pointed end of the spear. They believed that case officers looked down on other skilled officers in the Directorate, such as reports officers, support personnel, and the like. Further, they believed that this had to be changed and replaced with a culture where everyone was valued for what they did. By extension, they established functional groups of officers who were all promoted and paid at the same rates. This was designed to break down what they called case-officer mentality, in which those who did the real spying, the case officers, allegedly saw themselves as the fighter pilots of espionage. The culture-killing measures reached their peak, and we were left with a totally unworkable personnel system. Everyone was allowed to bid for any job they wanted, without any restricting qualifications, such as the need to speak a native language or have area knowledge.

  The result was a flood of people applying for positions well out of their experience or qualification range. They all had to be interviewed, which required careful notes including justifications for why they were not selected. If it were a highly desired country, say Australia or France, 50 people would apply for every position in hopes of getting one. This inundated the personnel assignment process to the point where it could barely function—and it placed a huge number of people into positions for which they were eminently unqualified.

  After several years, there was an alarming drop in the number of good recruited spies coming into the fold. As stated in recent remarks from Congress following the tragedy of 9/11, this led to the realization that the DO is broken and must be fixed. We have come full circle, and it appears that the DO is struggling but back on its way to full staffing. But these were lean years, and the damage will take more years to be fully repaired.

  These events affected us in Germany in a big way. First, I had precious few good linguists, as many of my language positions were filled with people with no languages other than English. And this wasn’t just true in Germany—it was the case throughout the entire organization. Unfortunately, I had to send more than a few people who weren’t getting their jobs done home. It wasn’t that they weren’t trying—they simply didn’t have the expertise to do the job that they were sent out to do. And it was impossible to tell this to headquarters, since they were the ones who killed the culture and made the assignments.

  It was not only the DO that suffered. I sent home a number of people in support positions, because they just couldn’t do their jobs. During one trip back home, a senior administrative official told me, “You know, there is a cloud hanging over you for sending so many people home.” I was aggravated, and pointed out several cases in which the individual I had sent home had arrived in country without the necessary professional knowledge to do their job. I didn’t enjoy sending anyone home, but the work had to be done. We had security specialists overseeing finance officers; information management specialists overseeing communicators; and many non–case officers occupying case-officer positions. The Agency was becoming dysfunctional from its attempts to give everyone the opportunity to do just about any job.

  And this was true at top levels of management as well. Many in the upper echelons were non-intelligence careerists, who proceeded from the assumption that, since the Agency was in trouble, it must be because those who formerly held high office didn’t do things right. No attempt was made to find out why things were done the way they were. We got again another DDO who was not from the clandestine service. Using four-letter words frequently, he would make calls issuing instructions that no one would carry out. I knew within a few months of his appointment I was going to make plans to retire.

  Headquarters mandated change, mostly without consultation, and certainly without much thought in advance, which reached incredible levels. A few examples will suffice:

  I received a call telling me a new officer was being assigned to my area. I learned that she was being assigned to protect her from her husband, who was due to get out of jail and had sworn to take revenge on her. I almost exploded when the caller continued, “This way, if he comes out to pester or harm her, you can have the local German authorities arrest him.” I told the caller that Germans had no such authority until someone broke German law, in which case it would be too late to protect the woman. I told him that, for her own safety, she should stay home, and I suggested a headquarters assignment. I won the battle by pointing out that sending someone overseas for protection was insane.

  An officer was sent out who had requested an overseas assignment in the belief that it would make her current boyfriend miss her, realize that he loved her, and then propose to her. Shortly after her arrival, the boyfriend found another girlfriend, and our employee requested reassignment back home.

  One of our officers had arrived from a denied-area posting with his family in tow. It was his second marriage, and he had a stepson with him. The family was dysfunctional, and we wound up refereeing several fabulous family fights, including one in which the son was choking his mother. In another episode, the father had gotten into a fistfight with his son, and wound up with broken eyeglasses and cuts on his face. As this agent approached the end of his tour, I suggested none too politely to headquarters that an assignment back home was in order. There this family could get the counseling and help they desperately needed. The results? The family was assigned to another overseas posting.

  A senior support officer arrived. He was indeed an expert in his field, but he was unilateral—that is, he had never had opportunity to expand and learn the full side of the support craft. I wrestled with this case as morale in his section reached rock bottom. Finally, headquarters reassigned the officer back into his field, where he once again excelled.

  One of my managers/case officers had carried out an extremely complex technical operation that was well conceived, difficult, time-consuming, and against a priority target. She, and I, were very proud of it, and she received accolades by the dozen from those who benefitted from the operation. Incredibly, division management seemed perplexed by the operation. In fact, as I discovered during a trip to try to explain it, they actually thought the operation was done by someone else and ignored the officer involved. I attempted to get an award for this officer, and had all the technical support experts lined up. She never received any recognition for her efforts. Again, it was typical of the difficult time we were going through.

  And there were other cases. The Washington Post reported on March 10, 2000, that a retired CIA officer was being given an award after being “the highest ranking CIA official fired in a scandal.”5 I need to fill in the disturbing circumstances of the firing.

  While the DCI was on an official visit to Germany, he instructed me to contact the officer via secure phone and ask that he come to our locale to meet. I am sure that the officer expected some sort of reprimand. The scandal in the press had described a series of activities in Latin America that had taken place nearly a decade before and involved some questionable support to local insurgents who had been working against the elected government with alleged CIA backing. As a good officer, he took the call and made immediate arrangements to fly down for the personal meeting with the DCI. He was serving at the time, in the summer of 1995, as the chief in another European country. He was an outstanding officer, and a former division chief. I was, as were many others, exceptionally fond of him. He was senior to me in the SIS ranks, and had been one of the people who had quietly offered me advice and counsel as I took on increasing responsibilities in the organization. I always found his advice sound, and he was
exceptionally conscious of the feelings of others.

  He arrived and was told to wait at the hotel where the DCI was residing, as the DCI and I were out with some local officials. I knew the meeting was set for 9:00 p.m. and that it was about a 15-minute drive from the restaurant to the hotel. At 8:30, I suggested that we needed to tie things up for the DCI to make his next appointment. The DCI was in no hurry, and even had more desserts sent in.

  At 8:45, I wrote a note to the DCI, “The officer is waiting at your hotel per your instructions.” The DCI turned to me and said, “Let him wait.” I was upset, and went to the DCI’s aide and said that we needed to be moving and that it was inappropriate to keep this senior officer waiting.

  The aide commented, “Let him sit—he isn’t going to like what he is told anyway.” That was my first indication that he was going to be fired. Despite my protests, the dessert lingered on. We finally left after keeping the officer waiting over an hour. In the end, some justice was done when the officer was presented after retirement with a medal for his service to the CIA and the U.S. government.

  There were more cases like this. The point is, the personnel system, which the CIA had willingly torn down, was replaced using concepts that simply didn’t work well in the occupation of spying. The term BOHICA (bend over, here it comes again) was used with each new absurdity.

  I forwarded some information we had acquired from the Germans alleging that a U.S. company was breaking sanctions against a Mideast country. The information alleged that one or more U.S. government officials knowingly turned a blind eye to the events. I knew that this was explosive, but I doubted the legitimacy of the information and noted that when I sent it in. Within two days, I received a heads-up from a colleague at headquarters: “You need to know that the director and the White House are planning to send a special envoy out secretly without your knowledge to deal with the Germans on the information.”