Part 1: Inside The Company, CIA Diary...April 1956- June 1960

 Inside The Company, CIA Diary

By Philip Agee

South Bend, Indiana April 1956 

Hundreds of companies come to the university to interview students for possible employment. I hadn't signed up for any interviews but I've just had my first, and probably only, job interview. To my surprise a man from the CIA came out from Washington to see me about going into a secret junior executive training programme. Virginia Pilgrim must have recommended me. I'd forgotten she mentioned a programme like this when she stayed with us in Tampa last year— said she would dearly love to see the son of her oldest friends come into the CIA. Somehow I have the impression she is one of the highest-ranking women in the CIA—worked on the Clark Task Force that investigated the CIA under the Hoover Commission. 

I told Gus,  the recruiter, that I had already been accepted for law study. He was surprised. Virginia didn't know my plans. He said the JOT (Junior Officer Trainee) Program consists of six to nine months, in some cases even a year, of increasingly specialized training on the graduate school level. After the course you begin CIA work on analysis, research, special studies and reports writing, administration or secret operations. He said he couldn't say much about the course or the work because it is all classified. 

Gus asked me about my military service situation and when I told him I would have to do it sooner or later he mentioned a possible combination. For JOT'S who haven't done military service the CIA arranges for them to take a special course in the Army or the Air Force, which is really controlled by the CIA. It takes about a year to get an officer's commission and then you have to serve a year on a military assignment. Then it's back to Washington for the JOT training programme and finally assignment to a job at CIA headquarters in Washington. According to his calculations it would take five or six years to be assigned overseas if I wanted to go into secret operations. Too long to wait before getting to the good part, I thought. 

Gus knew a lot about me: student government, academic honours and the rest. I said that what I liked best was being Chairman of the Washington's Birthday Exercises in February when we gave the Patriotism Award to General Curtis Lemay. I told Gus that the Exercises are the most important expression of the 'country' part of the Notre Dame motto ('For God, Country, and Notre Dame '). He said I should keep the CIA in mind if I changed my plans. I would consider the CIA if the military combination worked but Gus emphasized that they only want people prepared for a career in the CIA. That leaves me out. 

I suppose the CIA works closely with General Lemay and his Strategic Air Command. This is the most important part of the speech he gave at the Exercises: 

Our patriotism must be intelligent patriotism. It has to go deeper than blind nationalism or shallow emotional patriotic fervour. We must continually study and understand the shifting tides of our world environment. Out of this understanding we must arrive at sound moral conclusions. And we must see to it that these conclusions are reflected in our public policies .... If we maintain our faith in God, our love of freedom, and superior global air power, I think we can look to the future with confidence. 

Tampa, Florida June 1956 

It's a strange feeling being back in Florida for the summer with no plans to return to the cold north in the fall. The miserable weather and the long distance from home and all the other negative aspects of studying at Notre Dame seemed to fade away during Commencement Week-end. 

No more bed check or lights out at midnight. No more compulsory mass attendance and evening curfew. No more Religious Bulletin to make you feel guilty if you didn't attend a novena, benediction or rosary service. And no more fear of expulsion for driving a car in South Bend. The end has come too, I hope, to the loneliness and frustration of living in an all-male institution isolated from female company. 

What will it be like to live without the religion and discipline of the university? It may have been hard but they were teaching us how to live the virtuous life of a good Catholic. Even so, I still have this constant fear that after all I might die by accident with a mortal sin on my soul. Eternity in hell is a worry I can't seem to shake off. But the main thing is to keep on trying—not to give up. After having to take all those courses on religion the only person to blame, if I really don't make it, will be me. It is the discipline and religion that makes Notre-Dame men different, and after four years of training I ought to be able to do better. 

Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, discussed this in his speech at the graduation ceremony. He really impressed me: 

"Notre-Dame symbolizes many virtues. It blends the virtues of religion and patriotism—service to God, service to country. Notre-Dame stands for faith— faith in self and faith in country .... Self discipline and determination and fighting spirit are an integral part of the curriculum ... We are living in a great country where there is equality of opportunity, where justice is a reality.... We are a generous nation.... We will never wage a war of aggression.... We are a strong nation.... We have strong allies.... But greater than all this strength is the strength of our moral principles.... Our nation is the symbol of freedom, of justice and opportunity, regardless of flag or political beliefs .... Communism has been, and still is, a prison for the millions who are denied the opportunity to learn responsibility—who are compelled to let the few do the thinking for the many who will do the labor .... Should we relax our efforts, either spiritual or physical, we would find our ship without a rudder; we would find our strength not sufficient to cope with the strong adverse winds which at some time will confront us. It takes a man with strength and a stout heart to steer in a gale." 

Admiral Burke writes a great speech—couldn't have been more accurate or more inspiring. At Notre Dame we learned how one's responsibilities extend beyond oneself to family, community and nation, and that respect for authority is the virtue of a respectable citizen. 

I will be driving a truck this summer to earn money for law school in the fall. 

Tampa, Florida December 1956 

Studying law at the University of Florida was a mistake. I didn't feel I belonged—I wasn't comfortable—in the fraternity whirl and the' hail fellow' routine. But I'm not an ascetic either. I suppose it was the lack of a sense of purpose or maybe I couldn't adjust to secular learning after four years of Jesuits and four at Notre Dame. At least I did realize it, and only stayed three months. 

I checked with the draft board and they said I have about six months before I'll be called up. It's a sad prospect, two years wasted as a private, washing dishes and peeling potatoes. For a few months anyway I'll live with my parents in Florida and try to save some money. A draftee only makes about eighty dollars a month and that's hardly enough for booze and cigarettes. 

The problem is what to do about the business. My father and grandfather are just starting a big expansion and they're counting on me to take my place with them. I know I'll make a lot of money but I can't get enthusiastic about it. Why the reluctance to go into a family business? When I switched to philosophy studies after a year of business administration at Notre Dame I thought I was doing it for the sake of a higher form of education. Like so many others I could learn to run a business once I got into it. Well now I'm in it and I feel the same as when I rejected business administration for philosophy. I wish I could speak to my father or grandfather about it but it would look as if I think I'm too good for something they've dedicated their lives to. 

No hasty decisions. I've got six months to work with them and then two years in the Army. 

Tampa, Florida February 1957 

There has got to be a way to avoid two lost years in the Army. I've written to the CIA, reminding them of my meeting with Gus, and asking to be reconsidered. I've received application forms, returned them, advised Virginia Pilgrim by telephone, and now have to wait. Virginia said her friends in the personnel department would process my application as fast as possible because of the problem of the draft but it looks as if I may be too late. She said the security clearance takes about six months so the draft will probably win. 

Gus said the JOT programme is strictly for people who want to make the CIA a career and I've been wondering about this. No way to know until I learn more about what CIA work is like, but I really am interested in politics and international relations. And the more I live here the less enthusiastic I get for a lifetime in the family business. 

We'll see what kind of alternative the CIA can provide. It will mean three years' military duty instead of two if they take me, but I'll be an officer—more pay, better work (especially at the CIA), and time to decide. 

Washington DC April 1957 

I've been called to Washington for an interview with the JOT office which is in Quarters Eye near the Potomac River. I waited in a reception room until a secretary came for me, filled out a visitor's pass form giving name, address and purpose of visit, and the receptionist added the hour and stamped in large letters MUST BE ACCOMPANIED. Then she gave me a plastic clip-on badge which I had to wear at all times. The secretary signed as responsible for me and I followed her to the JOT office. 

The man who interviewed me is named Jim Ferguson.  We spent about a half-hour discussing Notre Dame, the family business and my interest in a career in foreign affairs. I remembered the conversation with Gus and emphasized that while I am interested in a CIA career I know so little about the Agency that my reasons are necessarily restricted to an interest in foreign affairs. He said that they had arranged a series of tests and interviews with officers in charge of the JOT programme, including Dr Eccles,  the Program Director. If the testing and interviews go well a complete security background investigation will be made: which could take about six months. But in my case, with the problem of the draft, they could ask for priority action and hope for the best. 

The secretary gave me a piece of plain white paper with the building names, offices and times I was to report for the testing - it would take three days in all. She explained that at each building I would have to report to the receptionist, who would call the office where I had the appointment for someone to come and sign me in. She also reminded me to wear the visitor's badge at all times in the buildings and to return it with the pink visitor's pass on leaving. I would use the shuttle, an exclusive Agency bus, to get around the different buildings. 

During that first visit to the JOT office, I immediately sensed the fraternal identification among the CIA people. I suppose it was partly because they used a special 'inside' language. No one spoke of 'CIA', 'Central Intelligence Agency', or even 'The Agency'. Every reference to the Agency used the word 'company'. 

My first appointment was at the North Building with the Medical Staff and after that I alternated between those people and the office called ;Assessment and Evaluation' in the Recreation and Services Building on Ohio Drive. Although it seemed that the Medical Staff were looking for physical and mental health, and that 'A and E' were looking for the special qualities needed in an intelligence operative, there seemed to be little distinction between them. It was exhausting: endless hours filling in answer sheets to vocational, aptitude and personality tests. I've read of the elaborate testing procedures developed by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and now I see it's still going on. Stanford, Minnesota, Strong, Wechsler, Guilford, Kudor, Rorschach—some tests are administered and others just written. The worst was the interview with the psychiatrist at the Medical Staff—he really bugged me.

I finally finished about noon on the afternoon of the third day, and I had a couple of hours before I had to report back to the JOT office so I decided to do some sightseeing. I grabbed a sandwich at a blind stand and then took the shuttle to the Executive Office Building. (Those blind stands—sandwich bars operated by blind people—are in practically every building. I guess it's a good thing for the blind people to have that work, and the company can let them in the buildings because they can't read secret papers. Everybody wins.) 

Then out to the Washington Monument. Looking out from the top of the Monument at the buildings where our national life is guided, where our integrity in the face of grave external threat is defended, and where the plurality of conflicting domestic interests finds harmony, I admitted to myself that participation in government is my long-range goal. It won't matter if I live below my parents' material level or even without fixed roots in a community. Working in the Central Intelligence Agency, preferably overseas, with intimate knowledge of the functioning and decisions of friendly and hostile governments will provide a forever stimulating and exciting atmosphere as well as an intellectually challenging occupation. I'll be a warrior against communist subversive erosion of freedom and personal liberties around the world—a patriot dedicated to the preservation of my country and our way of life. 

I left the Monument through the circle of American flags and walked back to Quarters Eye feeling more confident and self-possessed than at any time since arriving. After the usual sign-in, pink slip, badge and escort procedure, I was received again by Ferguson  who told me the first reports on the testing looked pretty good. While waiting to see Dr Eccles, Ferguson said he would brief me on the military programme they had in mind. First, however, he warned me that the programme was classified and not to be discussed with anyone outside the Agency. At his request I signed a statement acknowledging that what I learned was information relating to national security and promising that I would not reveal it. 

Ferguson outlined the military programme. When the security clearance is completed I will be called back to Washington where I will enlist in the Air Force. After three months' basic training I will be assigned to the first available class at Officer Candidate School—all at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Following OCS I will be assigned to an Air Force base somewhere in the US, and, with luck, my duties will be in air intelligence. Ferguson explained that the company doesn't control assignments made by the Air Force after completion of OCS, but more and more of the company military trainees are getting intelligence assignments during the obligatory year of strictly military duties. After a year at the Air Force base I will be transferred to an Air Force unit in Washington that is actually a company cover unit, and my formal company training will begin. 

The secretary appeared and said Dr Eccles would see me. I still had to get past him and I had primed myself for this meeting. Virginia had told me that Dr Eccles's approval was necessary for acceptance. He turned out to be a bushybrowed, bespectacled man of about sixty with an unavoidable authoritative glare. He asked me why I wanted to be an intelligence officer and when I replied that foreign affairs is one of my main interests he tried to make me uncomfortable. He said that foreign policy is for diplomats; intelligence officers only collect information and pass it to others for policymaking. He added that maybe I should try the State Department. I said maybe I should but that I don't know enough about the Agency yet to decide, adding that I'd like to come into the programme to see. He then gave me a little lecture; they don't want men who will quit the CIA as soon as they finish military service. They want only men who will be career intelligence officers. After that he turned into a kind old grandfather and said we'd see how the security clearance turned out. He shook my hand and said they'd like to have me. Made it! I'm in—but it seems too easy. 

Back in Ferguson's office where he continued to describe the programme. At no time will I be connected openly with the company, and I am to tell no one that I am being considered by it for employment. Assuming the security investigation is favourable, they will arrange for me to be hired as a civilian by the Department of the Air Force, actually by an Air Force cover unit of the company, when I am called back to Washington. A few weeks later I will enlist in the Air Force and be sent to Lackland for basic training. While in the Air Force I will be treated just like any other enlistee and no one will know of my company connection. Keeping the secret will be part of my training—learning to live my cover. A violation of cover could lead to dismissal from the programme. My assignments afterwards will also be determined in part by how well I have concealed my company affiliation. Back in Florida I must keep the plan secret, but notify Ferguson if I receive any orders from the draft board. 

I'm beginning to feel a kind of satisfaction in having a secret and of being on the threshold of an exclusive club with a very select membership. I am going to be my own kind of snob. Inside the Agency I'll be a real and honest person. To everyone outside I'll have a secret lie about who and what I am. My secret life has begun. 

Washington DC July 1957 

Salvation! The security clearance ended before the call-up came, and I drove to Washington loaded with books, hi-fi, records and tennis gear. Georgetown is the 'in' area where a CIA officer trainee feels most comfortable, so I've moved in with some former Notre Dame classmates who are doing graduate study at Georgetown University. We're living in a restored Federalist house on Cherry Hill Lane, a narrow brick street between M Street and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. I have that feeling of being just the right person in just the right place. These friends don't know I'm going into the CIA so this will be my first real test of living a cover. 

At the JOT office Ferguson told me whom I am working for. My 'employer' is the Department of the Air Force, Headquarters Command, Research and Analysis Group, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington. He gave me the names of my commander, an Air Force colonel, and of my immediate supervisor, a major, both of whom are fictitious. I have to memorize all this so I can reel it off to people I meet. My Bolling Air Force Base telephone number rings in the Agency Central Cover Division where they have some male telephone operators who roll dice each morning to see who will play the colonel and who will play the major. 

I signed another secrecy agreement—the wording makes it permanent, eternal and universal about everything I learn in the company - and Ferguson sent me over to my first assignment at 1016 16th Street. I rushed over but discovered nobody was expecting me. Finally I was called up to the fourth floor and welcomed to the Personnel Pool. All we do is fold maps and have crossword puzzle competitions. 

The Personnel Pool is a holding area for all prospective employees who lack the final nihil obstat for the security clearance—we're all waiting for the same happy event: the polygraph or lie detector. We're about thirty people. Some of them have been in the pool for over a month and they're the rumour-mongers. It seems that the polygraph, or 'technical interview' as it's officially called, has been a real trauma for some. We have been warned that nobody talks about the 'poly' and that makes the rumours all the more mysterious. It seems that the main part of the apparatus crosses the breasts, which makes some of the girls nervous, and the main questioning is on homosexual experience, which makes some of the boys nervous. There are stories of nervous breakdowns, ambulances and even suicide. There's no doubt, however, what's going to happen when you get advised of an appointment at Building 13. 

Washington DC July 1957 

After two weeks of folding maps my turn finally came. How stupid to think I could beat the machine! Yesterday I was 'polyed' and now I'm back at the Personnel Pool but on a different floor and with people who've already taken the test. We're kept away from those who haven't taken it so they won't know much about it. The interrogators don't tell you right away about the results of the test— they make you wait. Nothing but gloom here. 

The shuttle doesn't stop at Building 13 so I had to ask the driver to leave me as near as possible. When he acknowledged Building 13 in a loud voice (on purpose, I'm sure) the cold, knowing eyes of the other passengers focused right on me and I felt like a leper. They knew I was about to make a secret, intimate confession. Bad joke. 

At 23rd Street and Constitution Avenue, the driver announced Building 13 and pointed me towards a complex of temporary buildings, barracks style, beyond a parking lot towards the Watergate. The buildings are surrounded by high chain-link fences topped by several strands of barbed-wire tilting towards the outside. All the windows. have the same type of chain-link mesh and every third or fourth window has an air-conditioner. None of them are open and the buildings look impenetrable. 

I made my way along the fence and the first building I noticed after getting to a gate was one with a discreet 13 near the entrance. After a short wait with the receptionist I was greeted by a man about thirty-five—clean-cut, clean-shaved and clear-eyed. He took me a short distance down a hallway, opened a door, and we passed into a small room with acoustical tile covering the walls and ceiling. There was a standard government leather easy chair that backed up to a desk-like construction with a built-in apparatus of dials, graph paper and odd, narrow, metal pens. In an effort to keep me from more than a swift glance at the machine, he conducted me immediately to a sitting position in the easy chair. From behind the desk he brought a straight chair and sat down in front of me. 

The interrogator announced that I had reached the final phase of the security clearance procedure necessary for access to Top Secret material and, of course, for employment with the company. He assured me that all employees of the company, even Mr. Dulles, submit to the polygraph—not just once when they're hired, but periodically throughout their careers. Then he asked me to sign a prepared statement acknowledging that I was submitting to the test of my own volition and that I would hold no claim against any person or the company afterwards no matter what the outcome. I eagerly signed this quit claim—in advance—and also another secrecy agreement, pledging myself to speak to no one of the questions or other details of the interview. 

We then reviewed the questions, all of which were to be answered simply 'yes' or 'no'. Is my name Philip Burnett Franklin Agee? Was I born on 19 January 1935? Have I ever used any other name or identity? Have I filled out my job application form honestly? Have I ever been a member of any of the subversive organizations on the Attorney-General's list? Have I ever been a communist or belonged to any communist organization? Have I ever been in a foreign country? In a communist country? Have I known any officials of a foreign government? Of a communist government? Have I ever known an intelligence officer of a foreign country? Have I ever worked for a foreign government? For a foreign intelligence service? For a communist intelligence service? Have I been asked by anyone to obtain employment with the CIA? Have I told anyone outside the CIA of my attempt to obtain employment? Have I ever engaged in homosexual activities? Have I ever taken drugs? Have I taken tranquilisers today? 

The pre-test interview lasted over an hour as the interrogator explored each question in depth, noting all names, dates, places, and finally rephrasing the question to include an 'other than' or 'except for' clause that would qualify the question and still allow for a 'yes' or 'no' answer. During this discussion the interrogator explained to me that the lie detector is used exclusively in the company by the Office of Security which is responsible for protecting the company against employment of security risks or against penetration by hostile intelligence services. He also assured me that everything I said during the interview is strictly confidential and will be restricted to my Office of Security File which is available only to security officers of the same office. I didn't have the courage to ask how many security officers that meant, but as I wondered I felt a creeping discomfort that behind one of those thousands of holes in the acoustical tiles there was a microphone secretly recording our conversation. I also began to wonder if I was having incipient symptoms of the paranoia that some people say is the personality trait sine qua non of the effective intelligence officer. 

Now we were ready for the test. The polygraph consists of three apparatuses which are attached to the body of the person being interrogated and which connect by tubes or cords to the desk ensemble. Each apparatus measures physiological changes, marked on moving graph paper by three pens. There are, accordingly, a blood pressure cuff that can be attached either to the arm or leg, a corrugated rubber tube about two inches in diameter that is placed snugly around the chest and fastened in the back, and a hand-held device with electrodes that is secured against the palm by springs that stretch across the back of the hand. The cuff measures changes in pulse and blood pressure, the chest-tube measures changes in breathing rhythm, and the hand instrument measures changes in perspiration. I was hooked into the machine, told to look straight ahead at the wall, to be very still, and to answer only 'yes' or 'no' to each question. The interrogator was behind me at the desk ensemble facing the back of my head. He asked the questions to my back and I answered to the wall in front. 

During the pre-test interview I had given my interrogator several half-truths, partly because I simply resisted his invasion of my life, and partly because I was curious about the effectiveness of the machine. Foolish child! As the cuff inflated I was conscious of increased pulse and my hands began to sweat profusely. Anticipating the questions that I should react on, I started to count the holes in the tiles in order to distract myself from the test. The interrogator passed very slowly from one question to another, pausing between each question. I answered 'yes' or 'no' and at the end he slipped in an unannounced question: had I answered all the questions truthfully? Dirty trick. I said 'yes' and after a few seconds the cuff deflated. 

I heard a shuffling of paper and he reviewed the chart as I remained still. He told me I could move a little but that if I was not particularly uncomfortable he would like me to remain seated and hooked up. Fine. He stayed behind the desk behind my chair behind my back and started asking me what I was thinking about when I answered the question on whether anyone had asked me to obtain employment with the CIA. Nothing in particular. He insisted but I couldn't come up with an answer other than that I was thinking that indeed no one had asked me. Discussion. Then he asked me what I was thinking when I answered the question about telling anyone outside the CIA of my attempt to obtain employment. Nothing in particular. Discussion. Then the question on homosexual experience. Then drugs. As we passed from question to question he insisted with increasing intensity that I try to remember what I was thinking when I answered the question, emphasizing that my cooperation is essential for a successful testing. Successful? I wondered if successful for him is the same as successful for me. Obviously not. I would stick to my half-truths. They weren't lies anyway, and besides I have heard that you can beat the machine if you stay consistent. 

We started again. Up went the blood pressure cuff and out came the questions. In went the 'yes's' and 'no's' and up and down went the faintly scratching pens. I fiercely counted the holes in the tiles and was gaining in confidence. Down went the cuff followed by more post-test discussion. This time I was' having difficulty' on two more questions. I repeated and insisted that I was being truthful and that when answering each question I had been thinking only of the question and of its only possible truthful answer—which I gave. 

The interrogator said we would go through the questions again and that I hadn't done too well on the first two runs, adding that there is no way for me to be hired without successfully passing the test. Was there anything I wanted to say or clarify? No. I was being truthful and maybe something was wrong with the machine. That hurt. His tone cooled, the cuff inflated and we did another test. At the end he said I was obviously having trouble. With an air of finality he unhooked me from the machine. 

At that moment I got scared and feared I wouldn't be hired. As I was about to confess he said he would leave me alone to think things over for five or ten minutes. He closed a lid to the desk ensemble and left the room taking the charts with him. I stood up and looked at my watch which I had been asked to remove and place on the desk behind me. I had been at Building 13 for over two hours. The interrogator was gone for at least twenty minutes. During that time I decided to tell the full truth. Why risk losing the job out of silly pride or the illusion that I could beat the machine? But as the door opened and my interrogator rejoined me I suddenly became frightened of admitting deception. I decided not to change any answer. Besides, in the Personnel Pool I had heard that some people who have difficulty are called back for a second or third time for the polygraph. I would have another day if I really failed this time. 

We passed through the questions two more times. After both tests the interrogator insisted that I was having trouble on the same questions and I insisted that I was answering truthfully no matter what difficulty I was having. At 14 last he said that would be all. I asked if I had passed and he answered skeptically that he didn't know, that I would be advised after the Security Office had reviewed my case and the charts. He was very pessimistic, and as I was leaving I feared that they might not even call me back for another test. I was exhausted— went home, had a couple of drinks and slept for twelve hours. 

When I called Virginia in the morning and told her I thought I'd failed the test, she said not to worry, that they always make people think they've failed. She thinks it's to avoid disappointment and fewer problems with those who really aren't going to be hired. Virginia's news is temporary relief, but the wait is agonizing. No more arrogant jokes about the polygraph in the Pool now—and nobody's reckless enough to discuss his interrogation with anyone else. Everybody's just sitting. 

Washington DC July 1957 

I couldn't stand it any longer. After three days' waiting, I called Ferguson to admit I was lying and to volunteer to take the test again. Before I could say anything he said he had some good news and to come over to his office. The tone of his voice gave infinite relief—I knew I had passed. 

At the JOT office Ferguson told me he has started my processing for enlistment in the Air Force but it will take three or four weeks. Meanwhile he wants me to take a training course on international communism and, if there is time, a course on the bureaucratic organization of the company. These aren't the courses I'll be taking when I get back but they'll be useful, he thinks, even if they're pretty elementary. He also had the secretary arrange to get me a badge—I can come and go now without being signed in - and he made an appointment for me with Colonel Baird,  the Director of Training. 

I missed the meeting with Baird and after being chastised at the JOT office I finally saw him in his office at T-3 (another of the Potomac Park temporaries). I hadn't realized how important Colonel Baird is—he set up the JOT programme in 1950 under direct supervision of General Walter Bedell Smith who was then Agency Director. With Princeton, Oxford, and the headmastership of a boys' school behind him, Baird is considerably more formidable than his military rank. He oozes firm leadership, old hand super-confidence and a Dunhill special blend for special pipes. He's tall, greying, very tanned and very handsome—irresistible to the ladies, I'm sure. He didn't say much—just to work hard at OCS. 

Ferguson and everyone else, since the polygraph, have greeted me with' welcome aboard', as if these words are the official greeting for newcomers. Maybe there are a lot of ex-Navy men in the CIA—or maybe these people like to think they're on a ship because of the isolation imposed by cover and security. 

Baltimore, Maryland August 1957 

The two weeks studying communism and two weeks reading organizational charts of the headquarters' bureaucracy leave me happy to leave Washington. 

Yesterday morning Ferguson gave me my final briefing on joining the Air Force. Arrangements had been made, he said, at the main Air Force recruiting office in Washington for me to be taken into the Air Force on a normal five-year enlistment, which was the standard procedure for all Air Force enlistees. However, after basic training I will receive a special appointment by the Secretary of the Air Force to the first OCS class. I would have to be prepared to cover this appointment because we JOT'S are the only exceptions to the Air Force regulation that five years' service is needed before an enlisted man can even apply for OCS. Ferguson said I can refer to a little known (so little known, in fact, that it doesn't exist) Air Force programme for college graduates if I am pressed, but I can probably avoid giving explanations. He warned me, however, not to tell anyone that I am going to OCS until the assignment is actually announced to me at Lackland Air Force Base. 

I signed another secrecy agreement and Ferguson said I'll have to take the polygraph again when I get back in two years' time. Then I took the bus to the recruiting office carrying only an overnight bag with some toilet articles and a change of underwear and socks. 

I told the paunchy, weather-beaten recruiting sergeant my name as pleasantly as I could. He answered 'yeah' and when I noticed it was a question I wondered whether to say' here I am' or 'I want to enlist'. I decided to say both, trying to sound unrehearsed, and I added that I thought I was expected. The recruiting sergeant understandably looked back as if he thought I thought the Air Force was about to be saved. 

He gave me some forms to fill in and asked if I wanted to go in thirty, sixty or ninety days. I said cheerfully that I was ready to go right then, which made his eyes narrow and his mouth screw up into that' another case' expression. He motioned me over to a table across the room where I filled in the forms, wondering all the while whether the sergeant was really attached to the JOT office and was testing my ability to maintain the cover story. I returned the forms which he looked over and then he disappeared into a back office. 

After a few minutes he returned with another recruiting sergeant and both expressed considerable scepticism. We spent the next half-hour discussing why a philosophy graduate wanted to enlist for five years in the Air Force in order to learn to be a radar mechanic. Finally I admitted that it was indeed kind of strange and I accepted their invitation to think it over for a few days. I carried my little bag of essentials out of the recruiting office wishing I could find somewhere to hide. 

From a telephone booth I called Ferguson to advise that apparently the Air Force didn't want me—not that day anyway. He gulped and stammered for me to call him back in two hours. I wondered what clown had missed his cue while at the same time I dreaded facing the recruiting sergeant again. When I called back, Ferguson told me to go back to the recruiting office, that everything was all right now. When I pressed him for an explanation his voice turned cold and he warned me not to discuss classified matters over the telephone. Back in the recruiting office there was a new sergeant who' simply gave me a ticket for the bus to Baltimore for the medical examination and swearing in. 

At Fort Holabird they took me. Tonight I fly to San Antonio to begin two years away from CIA headquarters—Ferguson said I must consider this time as part of the JOT training, a time for 'maturing', I think he said. 

San Antonio, Texas Christmas 1957 

Tony and I had Christmas dinner at the dining-hall, the low point of a miserable day. Next week, New Year's Eve to be exact, we report to OCS. We're going to live it up meanwhile except neither of us has any money. 

There are only three of us going into this class; Tony, who's from Princeton; Bob, from Williams, and me. A couple of nights ago we met in a hotel downtown with the six JOT'S who started OCS in the last class. They are going to be upperclassmen now—the course is three months lower and three months upper class— which means they will be harassing us. That's normal and necessary for cover. 

For the meeting we took security precautions as Ferguson instructed when he came to see us in October. No one can take any chances by a show of prior knowledge or special camaraderie between the triple Xer's. Those three X's which are in brackets after our names on all our documents, are the Air Force's way of keeping track of CIA trainees. 

The guys from the upper class told us not to be surprised if they put the heat on us—they have to because of the resentment on the part of the others in the class who had to work years to get into OCS. It seems these non-corns aren't happy about our miniscule bunch (there are about 300 cadets altogether in OCS) being specially privileged by entering straight from basic training. I suppose we'll run into the same. 

San Antonio, Texas June 1958 

In a few days I'll be a Second Lieutenant unless the OCS Commandant decides my insult was too much to take. A couple of weeks ago he called me in to tell me I was going to be eligible for a regular commission instead of a reserve commission. Only the top six OCS graduates get regular commissions and for an aspiring career officer it's the end of the rainbow—you practically can't get discharged. The Commandant also said it looked as if I might graduate first in the class. I made a panic call to Ferguson and he told me to turn the regular commission down. I told the Commandant who said it might not help our cover situation (he's the only officer on the OCS staff who knows of our CIA sponsorship), if the top graduate refuses a regular commission. I got the hint and am holding back an academic paper which should drop me a notch or two. But the Commandant took my refusal of the regular commission like a slap in the face. Guess this hasn't come up before. 

My orders after commissioning are for transfer to the Tactical Air Command. It's too good to believe: assignment as intelligence officer to a fighter squadron at a base just outside Los Angeles. 

Victorville, California June 1959 

My orders finally came for transfer back to Washington—to the company bogus unit, I mean. It's been a marvellous year, driving up and down those motorways to Mexico, San Francisco, Yosemite, Monterey. I finally got busy training the pilots in targeting because we have the new F-104 and nuclear targets in China. I've also done some training in evasion and escape because some of the targets are one-way ditch missions. The only big mistake was volunteering for the Survival School at Reno, Nevada because they sent me to the January course and the week-long trek in the mountains was on snowshoes—pure misery. 

I've been seeing Janet, my girlfriend from college, almost every week-end since last summer. I've told her about my work in the company and about my hopes to be assigned abroad. We've talked a lot about marriage but we're not sure what to do. She would like to stay in California, and I wonder if I should wait until after the JOT course is over a year from now. I'll be leaving for Washington in a couple of weeks and we'll see how we endure the separation. 

Washington DC September 1959 

It didn't take a long time for us to decide. Less than a month after I left California we agreed we didn't want to wait any longer, so now we begin a life together. We were married at Notre Dame as a kind of compromise because Janet's family is Congregationalist and she felt a wedding in a Catholic Church in her home town might raise difficulties. We took a small apartment in the building complex where Vice-President Nixon and his wife first lived when they came to Washington after his election to the House. We have furniture to buy, but family and friends have been exceedingly generous and new gifts arrive every day. We can save some money by shopping at the military commissaries because I'm still on active duty. 

My military cover unit is an Air Intelligence Service Squadron at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. My cover telephone number has changed but the same two telephone operators are rolling the same dice to see who will be the colonel and who the major. 

Ferguson said I probably won't be discharged until June or July of next year, which will coincide with the end of the JOT training programme. 

All the JOT'S in the OCS class ahead of me, my class, and the one behind me are united in the JOT programme. Even so, we make up only about fifteen of the sixty-odd in the class - which includes only six women. The JOT classes, which have just started, are held in the Recreation and Services Building, the same one where I was tested by the Assessment and Evaluation staff two years ago. The 'A and E' routines are even longer now than before and I'm going through all of those monotonous tests again. The only thing we lack is a mammoth Potomac Park football stadium for Saturday afternoon frenzy—the rest is the old college routine once more. 

The opening sessions in the training course were welcoming speeches by Allen Dulles, Colonel Baird, and others who have been showering us with affection and praise for following them into this life of deliberate self-abnegation, unknown sacrifice and silent courage as secret warriors in the battles of our time. Very romantic. Each one of us in the class represents the one in a hundred, or one in a thousand, of the total number of applicants for the JOT programme who were finally accepted. The company leaders tell us we're entering the world's second oldest profession (maybe even the first, but that can't be proved) and if there are any uneasy consciences in the group they have been soothed by Biblical quotations showing that no less a figure than God himself instituted spying. So much for the moral question. 

But our country had forgotten the lesson of Jericho. In 1929 Secretary of State H. L. Stimson closed the code-breaking operation known as the Black Chamber with the scolding that 'gentlemen don't read other people's mail'. Until Pearl Harbor foreign intelligence in the United States was all but forgotten. Then there were the heroics of the OSS during the war followed by the decision of President and Congress alike not to risk another surprise attack by leaving early warning to peace-time military neglect once again. So the civilian CIA was established in 1947 to provide a centralized agency for processing all foreign intelligence and for producing a national intelligence product blessed by enlightenment from all possible sources. 

After two years away with the Air Force these first sessions have been stimulating and even exciting—almost like a raging thirst being finally quenched. The JOT office has arranged evening language courses for anyone interested, and Janet and I have a class in Spanish three nights a week. It's nice that the company includes the wives as much as possible. Otherwise they would really be at a distance, because everything we study and read, almost, is classified. We selected Spanish only because that was my language at school, but there is a monetary awards programme for maintenance and improvement of foreign languages and it might be a way to earn a little extra. Things are working out just right. 

Washington DC October 1959 

We've just finished a month studying communism and Soviet foreign policy, and soon we'll begin studying the government organization for national security, where the Agency fits in, and the bureaucratic organization of headquarters. Each of us has periodic sessions with one of the JOT counsellors to discuss possible future assignments and where to continue training after Christmas. Almost everyone seems to want to go into secret operations, which will mean six months' special training away from Washington at a place called 'the farm'. I told Ferguson I wanted to go to 'the farm', but he was non-committal. 

The lectures and readings in communism have been especially interesting. The Office of Training stays away from philosophy—dialectical materialism wasn't even mentioned—while concentrating on the Soviets. It's a practical approach, of sorts, because what the CIA is up against, one way or another, is Russian expansion directed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union— CPSU. The Leninist concept of the party, particularly its elitist and secretive nature, and the CPSU's difficulties in reconciling pragmatism with ideology (Russian domination of the minority nationalities, NEP, collectivization and elimination of the kulaks, united front doctrine, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) are seen as related to one goal: obtaining, retaining and expanding power. 

Subservience of foreign communist parties to the CPSU is another theme given considerable emphasis—it's hard to believe that the Soviets with a straight face preach that the first obligation of every communist, no matter what nationality, is to defend the Soviet Union. Institutions such as the Comintern and Cominform served that purpose in their time, but the KGB is the principal organ. Much importance, of course, is given to the Soviet security organizations, from the Cheka down. 

The writings of defectors from communism were the most interesting: Louis Budenz, Howard Fast, The God that Failed, Kravchenko, Gouzenko, Petrov. But the most devastating for the Soviets, because of his criticism of Leninist party doctrine, is Milovan Djilas. The other day we split into small groups and interviewed Peter Deriabin, he's the highest-ranked KGB defector yet. It was done through closed-circuit television so that he could not see us (to protect our security) and he was disguised and spoke through an interpreter (to protect his security because he is living in the Washington area). 

The central theory is that communist attempts to set up dictatorships around the world are really manifestations of Soviet expansion which in turn is determined by the need to maintain CPSU power at home. Our country is the real target, however, and the Soviets have said often enough that peace is impossible until the US is defeated. Now we're going to study how the government, and the CIA in particular, are set up to counter the Soviet threat. 

Washington DC November 1959 

A theme that is continually repeated during these sessions is that the CIA does not make policy. The Agency's job is to provide the intelligence or information that is used by the President and other policymakers. It only executes policy, and collects information to be used in policy decisions by people outside the Agency. It doesn't make policy. 

For several weeks we have been listening to lectures and reading documents on the government machinery for national security. The basic document is the National Security Act of 1947 which set up the National Security Council (NSC) as the highest body concerned with national security. Chaired by the President, the NSC is composed of the following statutory members: the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, and the Vice-President. Membership can be enlarged whenever the President desires by ad hoc appointments such as the Attorney-General or the Secretary of the Treasury. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) are NSC observers. [1] 

The NSC has its own staff and offices in the Executive Office Building next to the White House and, in addition, has three important subordinate groups reporting to it: the NSC Planning Board, the Operations Coordination Board (OCB), [2] and the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC). [3] The NSC Planning Board works mostly on preparing materials for NSC meetings and on following up the implementation of NSC decisions. The OCB is of very special interest to the Agency because its function is to review and approve CIA action operations (as opposed to collection of information) such as propaganda, paramilitary operations and political warfare. The OCB is composed of the DCI, the Under-Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defence and ad hoc members at the Under-Secretary level. 

The IAC is like a board of directors of the intelligence community, chaired by the DCI and having as members the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, the intelligence chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Intelligence and Research (I N R) of the Department of State and the Director of the National Security Agency. Intelligence chiefs of the FBI and the Atomic Energy Commission sit on the IAC when appropriate. The purpose of the I A C is to assign intelligence tasks among the different services according, at least in theory, to which service can best do the job. It is also designed to avoid both overlaps and gaps in the national intelligence effort, and it has several subordinate interdepartmental groups such as the Board of National Estimates, the National Intelligence Survey Committee and the Watch Committee, each of which is chaired by a CIA officer. 

As part of the NSC mechanism the National Security Act of . 1947 established the office of the DCI as the NSC's principal intelligence officer and the Central Intelligence Agency as the organization that would effect the centralizing of the national intelligence effort. The CIA has five statutory functions: 

1. To advise the NSC in matters concerning such intelligence activities of the government departments and agencies as relate to national security. 

2. To make recommendations to the NSC for the coordination of such intelligence activities. 

3. To correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security, and provide for the appropriate dissemination of such intelligence within the government. 

4. To perform, for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies, such additional services of common concern as the NSC determines can be more efficiently accomplished centrally. 

5. To perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC may from time to time direct. 

It is this fifth function which occupies most of the CIA's time and money. It's the dagger inside the cloak. Covert action, although it is not spelled out for us this way, is a form of intervention somewhere between correct, polite diplomacy and outright military invasion. Covert action is the real reason for the CIA's existence, and it was born out of political and economic necessity. 

The DCI is described as a man with two hats. First, he is the principal intelligence advisor "to the President and the NSC, and secondly, he is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Formal commands are given by the NSC to the DCI through Top Secret Documents called National Security Council Intelligence Directives (NSCID's—pronounced non-skids). The NSCID's are put into effect by documents issued by the DCI to the concerned member of the intelligence community, including the CIA, these documents being called Director of Central Intelligence Directives (DCID's). Within the CIA the DCID's are particularized in the thick and continually changing volumes of regulations and other instructions. We have been studying, then, the very broadly worded NSCID's, the more particularized DCID's, and the specific CIA regulations. These are the documents that govern everything from foreign intelligence collection operations through political, psychological and paramilitary operations to communications and electronic intelligence efforts. Clearly, the documentation and the bureaucratic structure demonstrate that what the Agency does is ordered by the President and the NSC. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President ... to use in any way he pleases.

⛇⛇⛇ 

We have also examined the question of Congressional monitoring of intelligence activities and of the Agency in particular. The problem resides in the National Security Act of 1947 and also in its amendment, the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949. These laws charged the DCI with protecting the 'sources and methods' of the US intelligence effort and also exempted the DCI and the Bureau of the Budget from reporting to Congress on the organization, function, personnel and expenditures of the CIA—whose budget is hidden in the budgets of other executive agencies. The DCI, in fact, can secretly spend whatever portion of the CIA budget he determines necessary, with no other accounting than his own signature. Such expenditures, free from review by Congress or the General Accounting Office or, in theory, by anyone outside the executive branch, are called 'unvouchered funds'. By passage of these laws Congress has sealed itself off from CIA activities, although four small sub-committees are informed periodically on important matters by the DCI. These are the Senate and House sub-committees of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, and the speeches of their principal spokesman, Senator Richard Russell, are required reading for the JOT's.

There have been several times when CIA autonomy was threatened. The Hoover Commission Task Force on Intelligence Activities headed by General  Mark Clark recommended in 1955 that a Congressional Watchdog Committee be established to oversee the CIA much as the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy watches over the AEC. The Clark Committee, in fact, did not believe the sub-committees of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees were able to exercise effectively the Congressional monitoring function. However, the problem was corrected, according to the Agency position, when President Eisenhower, early in 1956, established his own appointing committee to oversee the Agency. This is the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, [4] whose chairman is James R. Killian, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It can provide the kind of' private citizen' monitoring of the Agency that Congress didn't want. Moreover, our speakers have pointed out, the more Congress gets into the act the greater the danger of accidental revelation of secrets by indiscreet politicians. Established relationships with intelligence services of other countries, like Great Britain, might be complicated. The Congress was quite right at the beginning in giving up control—so much for them, their job is to appropriate the money. 

Washington DC December 1959 
Studying the Agency bureaucratic structure has been fascinating but at the same time exhausting—there's been no end to organizational charts and speeches by representatives from everyone of the divisions, sub-divisions, offices and sub offices. Each of the speakers has a story of how his office broke an important case by having just the right piece of information or person for the job. 

Woven into the training programme since the first days in September are constant reminders of the need for tight security. Capabilities and intentions 'of the enemy must be discovered, whether in the Kremlin, in a Soviet nuclear weapons factory, at a missile development site, or in the meeting-hall of an obscure communist party in Africa. But of utmost importance, since knowledge of the enemy is necessarily limited, is the protection of our intelligence. We don't want the enemy to know what we know about him, for then he could take measures to annul our advantage. So we have to protect our intelligence by building a curtain of secrecy called' security'. Receptionists, guards, badges, barred windows, combination safe-filing cabinets, polygraphs, background investigations, punishments for security violations, compartmentation and the 'need-to-know' principle.  

Compartmentation is the separation of activities whereby a person or group performing a particular task do not know what tasks other people are doing. The gap between people doing different jobs is bridged by the need to know. If a person working in intelligence has a definite need to know what others are doing on a specific job, he will be given access. If not, he is expected to subdue normal curiosity. The CIA is organized with built-in compartmentation designed to give maximum protection to the secret information collected for the policymakers. 

The CIA bureaucracy is fairly complicated. [5] At the top of the pyramid are the executive offices composed of the Offices of the Director, the Deputy Director, the Inspector-General, the General Counsel, the Comptroller and the Cable Secretariat. 

Below the executive offices are four deputy directorates, each responsible for distinct activities and each named after the title of the deputy director who heads it. They are the DDI, headed by the Deputy Director, Intelligence; the DDP, headed by the Deputy Director, Plans; the DDS, headed by the Deputy Director, Support; and the DDC, headed by the Deputy Director, Coordination. The DDC, we were told, is a small office dealing with management problems, and we have spent practically no time discussing it. The other three deputy directorates are the bone and muscle of the Agency. (See pp. 319-20 for organizational changes in the early 1960s.) 

The DDI is the component that sets requirements, engages in some collection, evaluates and collates intelligence, and produces the finished product. [6] It consists of several different offices, each of which provides a coordinating function for the entire intelligence community. They are the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), the Office of National Estimates (ONE), the Office of Basic Intelligence (OBI), the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), the Office of Research and Reports (ORR), the Office of Central Reference (OCR), the Office of Operations (OO), the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC). We have been asked to write examples of the different types of specialized report prepared by these offices, and we have visited several of them. It is interesting to note that over 80 per cent of the information that goes into finished intelligence reports is from overt sources such as scientific and technical journals, political speeches and other public documents. The rest is obtained from secret agents or techniques, and the difference, of course, is in the quality and sensitivity of the covertly collected intelligence. 

The clandestine collection part of the CIA is the DDP which is also known as the Clandestine Services (CS). It consists of a headquarters' organization with field stations and bases in almost all foreign countries. Although we reviewed the headquarters' organization of the DDP we were told that the details of how secret operations are run will be given only during the later instruction. Only the JOT'S who express a desire to serve in the DDP and who agree in writing to take an assignment to any country will be given the advanced operational training at 'the farm'. Those who want to work in some area of the Agency other than the DDP will go on to specialized training in headquarters. 

The bulk of the CS is divided into operating divisions and senior staffs. [7] the operating divisions are in charge of geographical areas and certain specialized services. The senior staffs are in charge of coordination and review of all operational activities within the functional category of each—which are reflections of basic CIA operational theory. There are three senior staffs: the Foreign Intelligence (FI) staff; the Psychological Warfare and Paramilitary (PP) staff; and the Counter-Intelligence (CI) staff. The FI staff is concerned with intelligence collection operations, the PP staff with action operations and the CI staff with protection of Fl and PP operations. The difference between collection and action operations is that collection should leave no sign, whereas action operations always have a visible effect. (See pp. 319-20 for organizational changes in 1960s.) 

A collection operation might be the running of an agent in the Soviet Ministry of Defence who is reporting on military planning. An action operation might be an anti-communist intellectual journal, supported by CIA money, passed through a Russian emigre organization with headquarters in Paris. Collection operations respond to the needs of the DDI, for producing finished intelligence— which in turn depends on the needs of the NSC and other consumers such as the military services and the Department of State. Action operations consist of the control, guidance and support of individuals and organizations engaged in the battle against communism throughout the world. They include labour unions, youth and student organizations, public information media, professional societies such as journalists and lawyers, businessmen's organizations, politicians and political parties and governments. Action operations also include the training and support of irregular military forces such as guerrillas in Tibet or montagnards in Vietnam or saboteurs in Communist China. Protection operations consists generally of CIA efforts to protect the Agency against hostile penetration and to penetrate intelligence services of other countries in order to discover what operations those services are running against us. 

The DDP area divisions are responsible for all activities of the CS within designated areas. These divisions are for Western Europe (WE) (which includes Canada), Eastern Europe (EE), Soviet Russia (SR), the Near East (NE), Africa (AF), the Far East (FE) and the Western Hemisphere (WH). Each area division is headed by a Division Chief and Deputy Chief whose offices include staffs responsible for review of FI, PP and CI operations within the geographical area. [8] 

Within each division the geographical area is divided into branches which may include one or more countries as well as functional specialities peculiar to the division. The branches in turn are divided into country desks when more than one country is included in the branch. Thus the Polish branch of EE Division deals exclusively with matters on Poland while the Central American branch of WH Division has separate desks for six different countries. 

A division and branch of the Clandestine Services in headquarters are responsible for supporting field stations and bases in the foreign countries within its area, as well as for keeping the senior staffs and the DDP advised on all matters related to those countries, informational as well as operational. A headquarters' division will provide personnel for the stations and bases, arrange training support by specialists and, most important, process the paper-work required for all field operations. Every operation; every agent and every report sent from the field to headquarters requires review and routing of documents. Area divisions are responsible for seeing that this enormous flow of paper is properly channelled to the appropriate offices of the CS for review, advice and approval or disapproval. Intelligence reports, as opposed to operational reports which deal with the mechanics of how information is obtained, also need processing for spelling, grammatical usage and routing to interested components of the CS, the DDI and the rest of the intelligence community. Processing of the operational and intelligence reports from the field is the job of desk officers in the area divisions. 

The CS includes four divisions that serve the rest. The International Organizations Division (IO) supervises CIA relations with labour, youth, student, professional and news media organizations throughout the world. Activities in these fields are coordinated by IO with the PP staff and with the area divisions and branches concerned. Contact between the CIA and officials of those organizations might be handled by an officer of IO or by a station officer where a particular operational activity takes place. 

The Technical Services Division (TSD) provides support to operations in all area divisions through experts in listening devices, photography, lock-picking, invisible writing, clandestine opening and closing of correspondence, disguise, containers with hidden compartments, handwriting analysis, identification of persons through saliva analysis from objects such as cigarette butts, and many other technical services. Specialists are available for training agents as well as to perform tasks themselves. Several TSD support bases exist in foreign countries for regional support. The TSD also has a continuing research programme for improving its capabilities and for developing protective measures against the devices of foreign services, especially the KGB. 

Division D is the CS unit that supports the National Security Agency in cracking the codes of foreign governments. When it is necessary to mount operations in the field against the communications of other countries, NSA turns to its sister intelligence services, such as the military services, all of which have sizable monitoring operations going against communist countries' military communications. Or NSA could turn to Division D which coordinates CIA collection support for NSA. Thus Division D provides expert knowledge for the planning of operations to recruit code clerks or to install technical devices to enable the decrypting of coded messages. Division D seems to be the most hushhush of the CS operating divisions, but, like 10 Division, its activities are always coordinated with the geographical area divisions and with station chiefs abroad. 

The Records Integration Division (RID) is to the Clandestine Services what OCR is to the DDI. It is somewhat different, however, because of the different needs of the DDP. Clearly the Agency has spared no expense with the best system for storage and retrieval that IBM can build. Numbering systems exist for topics and sub-topics for every country for storing intelligence reports. They also exist for all agents and the different phases of each operation. Millions of names are indexed for easy electronic processing and retrieval and microfilm is automated so that copies of documents can be obtained simply by pushing buttons according to coding classifications—practically instant retrieval of one document from among millions. As the central repository for all CS intelligence and operational reports, RID serves the entire headquarters DDP organization and the field stations as well.

The DDS [9] is the support structure of the Agency, much of which serves the DDP. This is the deputy directorate that we belong to as JOT'S. The most important offices of the DDS are Personnel, Security, Training, Finance, Communications and Logistics. Each of these offices has an important function, but most of us have been pushing hard for the special operations training and for assignment to the DDP. 

A few days ago a list was read of those who have been accepted for 'the farm'. I was on the list—practically everyone was—and we had a special briefing on what lies ahead. 'The farm' is officially known by the cryptonym ISOLATION (cryptonyms are always written in capitals), and is a covert training site run by the Office of Training under military cover. It is a few hours' drive from Washington, and we will spend most of the next six months there. On Friday evenings those who wish will be allowed to check out for the week-end. The briefing officer said that there is daily Agency air service (military cover) between Washington National' Airport and ISOLATION, but the flights are used mostly by Agency personnel not assigned for long periods to the base. At the briefer's suggestion we have divided into groups of four or five for car pools so that as many wives as possible will be able to get around Washington during the week. Apparently we won't need transportation at ISOLATION anyway. 

We have been given a Washington telephone number and told that it is a direct line to ISOLATION for families but only to be used for emergencies. The briefing officer finally told us the name and location of the base, the best route for driving and our instructions for reporting. He placed extreme emphasis on protecting the cover for the base and the sensitivity of its identification. He said that agents from all over the world are trained there and they are not supposed to know where they are. We probably won't even see them. The name of the base is so sensitive, in fact, that we were told not to tell any of the JOT classmates who weren't taking the operations training, nor any other Agency employees, nor even our wives. Nobody talks about ISOLATION, and in conversations and even formal briefing sessions it's just 'the farm'. 

We report to 'the farm' the first Monday after New Year's Day. I feel relaxed now - the customary over-eagerness has disappeared. I've been 'accepted into the work I want and only an utter catastrophe can wash me out. Six more months of training, study, learning a profession. Then an assignment to a DDP headquarters desk and in another year or two I'll be a secret overseas operative. 

Camp Peary, Virginia January 1960 
The entrance to Camp Peary is an ordinary looking gatehouse manned by military police about fifteen minutes out of Williamsburg on the road towards Richmond. We showed our company badges to a guard and he instructed our car pool driver which turns to take to get to the JOT area. Our first session was in an amphitheatre called the 'pit' where we were welcomed by the ISOLATION Base Chief—formerly a Chief of Station in Mexico City. Then we were briefed by the Base Security Officer on the do's and don'ts of ISOLATION. At anyone time there are a number of different training sessions being conducted here, some with foreigners who are not even supposed to know that they are in the US. These are called' black' trainees and are. restricted to areas away from the JOT site and other' normal' activities. From time to time we will hear weapons firing and explosions as well as aircraft movement. 

We are to stay in the general area of the JOT site except when coming or going from the base entrance, although we will have training sessions at sites all over the base where we will be taken by bus. Wherever we go on the base we are to take extreme caution with cigarette packages, beer cans or other objects that might reveal the location of the base to 'black' trainees. We are to wear Army fatigues at all times on the base. 

We are discouraged, although not forbidden, from leaving the base at night, but the Base Chief told us we will have night study and training sessions that will leave little time for visits to Williamsburg. Since all of us pertain to bogus Defense Department cover units in Washington, our cover story for ISOLATION is that we are Defense Department employees temporarily assigned to Camp Peary. The security officer gave us the name of an Army colonel and his Pentagon telephone extension in the unlikely event of verification of our status at Camp Peary becoming necessary. This Pentagon extension rings in the Camp Peary administration building where a CIA. officer plays the part of the colonel. 

The base is thickly wooded and surrounded by high, chain-link fences topped by barbed-wire with conveniently placed signs warning: 'US Government Reservation. No Trespassing.' The northern boundary of the base is the York River and the base itself is divided internally into different tightly-controlled areas including administration, which is towards the entrance, the JOT training site, the staff housing area, the landing field, and distinct sites for training in border crossing, sabotage, weapons, air and maritime operations, ambush, evasion and escape, and clandestine meetings. Deer are plentiful as the base was once a wildlife refuge, and there are several ranges for hunting as well as a couple of stocked lakes. 

After the fatigues were issued we checked into the old wooden-frame barracks that have double rooms rather than open bays. All the buildings, in fact, are World War II-style frame buildings except the new brick gymnasium. There are classroom buildings; the training office where instructors have their offices, mess hall, officers' club, movie theatre, football fields and a softball diamond. For leisure time we have the club and sports facilities and even a language lab where we can work with tapes. ISOLATION won't be bad at all, and on Friday nights we can drive back to Washington for the week-ends. 

Each of us has been assigned an advisor from the teaching staff with whom we will meet from time to time to discuss our strengths and weaknesses. Mine is John Allen,  an 'old NE hand' who served in Cairo. The training course will be divided along the usual lines of Foreign Intelligence (collection), CounterIntelligence (protection) and Paramilitary and Psychological (action). We will also spend considerable time, they said, studying the tools of the clandestine operator, otherwise known as 'tradecraft'. Finally there will be many practical exercises in and around ISOLATION as part of the war-games technique used to create the training scenario. 

As all clandestine operations take place within a political context, the first consideration is the set of objective factors that create the 'operational environment or climate'. These factors include the friendliness or hostility of the host government, the level of sophistication of the host internal security services and other intelligence services operating in the same area, the known and presumed aims of these services, the effectiveness and sophistication of the local communist and other revolutionary organizations, local language, dress and other customs, and the general political atmosphere of repression or liberalism. These are the objective conditions within which clandestine operations are undertaken, and they determine the manner in which these are executed. Running an agent penetration of the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad obviously differs from running the same type of penetration in Paris or Prague or Bogota. As the degree of clandestinity can vary according to the tools and techniques employed— operational security practices can be more extreme or less—the 'operational environment' determines whether goals are realistic and how they are to be achieved. It includes a continuing evaluation of enemy capabilities. 

Taking into account, then, the operational environment, each CIA station has a charter or general operational guide called the Related Missions Directive (RMD). This is the document that establishes priorities and objectives and is, in effect, the DCI'S instructions to the Chief of Station. In any country where there is an official Soviet presence, such as an embassy or trade mission, the first priority for the RMD is almost always the penetration of the Soviet mission through the recruitment of its personnel or by a technical device. Penetration operations against Chinese and other communist governments follow in priority as do intelligence collection efforts against indigenous revolutionary movements and local governments, whether friendly or hostile. CI and PP operations are also included in the RMD, and when a station requests headquarters' approval of new operations or continuation of existing operations, reference is made to the appropriate paragraphs of the RMD. 

I suppose my problem will eventually disappear, but I find it all rather complicated because in the CIA cryptonyms and pseudonyms are used in place of true names. There are many standard ones and, when reading, one has constantly to refer from the text with cryptonyms to the cryptonym lists which give a number, and then look up the same number on a separate true name list. The cryptonym and true name lists are never kept in the same safe. Cryptonyms consist of two letters that determine a general category or place, followed by letters that form a word with the first two, or by another word. 

Thus the United States government is ODYOKE. The Department of State is ODACID, the Department of Defense is ODEARL, the Navy is ODOATH, the FBI is ODENVY. All government agencies have a cryptonym beginning with OD. The CIA'S cryptonym is KUBAR K and all Agency components have cryptonyms beginning with KU. The Clandestine Services is KUDOVE, the FI staff (and FI operations generically) is KUTUBE, the CI staff (and CI operations) is KUDESK, the PP staff (and PP operations) is KUCAGE. Every foreign country and every agent and operation in that country has a cryptonym that begins with the same two letters—AE for the Soviet Union, BE for Poland, DI for Czechoslovakia, DM for Yugoslavia, SM for the United Kingdom, DN for South Korea, etc .. AELADLE, AEJAMMER and AEBROOM are cryptonyms for operations against the Soviets. 

Cryptonyms are used to substitute for true names in order to protect the true identities of persons and places mentioned in correspondence. They are only used in documents of the Clandestine Services. The Records Integration Division assigns new cryptonyms whenever a new operation or agent is proposed, using the first two letters that correspond to the particular country. In certain cases agents and operations are given cryptonyms of which the first two letters refer to operations that occur in several countries—particularly the international organizations involving labour and students. In operational correspondence when no cryptonym has yet been assigned for a particular person, the word IDENTITY is substituted in the text and the true name is sent in separate correspondence for reconciliation with the original document by the addressee. 

All KUDOVE officers who engage in operations .are assigned a pseudonym consisting of a first name, middle initial and last name which is used in the same fashion as cryptonyms—in order to preserve the officer's true identity should correspondence be lost or stolen. Pseudonyms are always written with the last name in capital letters, e.g. Rodney J. PRINGLE. 

All this seems confusing at first—it's really like learning a new language. But it adds a certain spice to the work, like a special taste that helps develop institutional identity—more and more of the inside group syndrome. 

Camp Peary, Virginia February 1960 
We still have plenty of snow on the ground and on Sunday nights when we return from Washington the deer are so thick along the base roads that we almost run into them. We've all gotten to know each other more since coming to ISOLATlON. Almost any type of person you want can be found in the class. We have a physical training programme three or four times a week at the gym— calisthenics, basketball, squash, volleyball, weights. We also have training at the gym in defence, disarming, maiming, and even killing with bare hands—just how and where to strike, as in karate and judo. Our instructor in these skills (at first nobody believed his real name was Burt Courage) was formerly on Saipan in the South Pacific, which is another secret base of the Office of Training. 

It's hard work. There is a physical-conditioning program, plenty of practice in the martial arts. How to disarm or cripple, if necessary kill an opponent. We have classes in propaganda, infiltration-exfiltration, youth and student operations, labor operations, targeting and penetration of enemy organizations. How to run liaison projects with friendly intelligence services so as to give as little and get as much information as possible. Anti-Soviet operations—that subject gets special attention. We have classes in framing Russian officials, trying to get them to  defect. The major subject, though, is how to run agents—single agents, networks of agents. 

In the classes we have been studying the different kinds of Foreign Intelligence—FI, or KUTUBE—operations conducted by the Clandestine Services. Although these operations are designed to discover the capabilities and intentions of foreign powers, particularly enemy or unfriendly governments, visa-vis the US, they are supposed to focus on secrets rather than on overt or public information. In addition to discovering ordinary state secrets, the CS is responsible for obtaining the most complete and accurate information possible on the global manifestations of Soviet imperialism, that is, on local communist parties and related political groups. The exceptions to the world-wide operating charter of the CS is the agreement among the US, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand whereby each has formally promised to abstain from secret operations of any kind within the territory of the others except with prior approval of the host government. The governments of all other nations, their internal political groups and their scientific, military and economic secrets are fair game. 

FI operations originate with the informational needs of US policymakers, specified in the voluminous requirements lists prepared by the various sections of the DDI that produce finished intelligence. These requirements are also reflected in the station RMD. The station, incidentally, is the CI A office in the capital city of a foreign country. Other major cities of the country may have CIA offices subordinate to the station and called bases. In most countries the stations and bases are in the political sections of the embassies or consulates, with some officers assigned for cover purposes to other sections such as economic or consular. In certain countries, however, such as Panama and Germany the CIA stations are on US military installations with only the chief and a minimum of other officers having diplomatic status. Most of the others are under cover as civilian employees of the Department of Defense with assignment to the military bases. 

The station's task is to determine the different ways desired information can be obtained and to propose to headquarters the method thought most appropriate. This task is called 'targeting', and for every operation targeting receives its written expression in a Field Project Outline which is prepared at the station and includes all the operational details such as the purpose or desired outcome, specific target, the agents to be involved, any technical devices needed, support needed from headquarters or other stations, security and cover considerations with an assessment of the 'flap potential' meaning the possible scandal if the operation is discovered, and costs. Most overseas CIA operations are described in Field Project Outlines, which are forwarded to headquarters for suggestions and approval or disapproval by all interested headquarters' sections of the CS.

Depending on the cost or sensitivity of an operation, the Project Outline is approved on a lower or higher level in headquarters, from Division Chief to Assistant DDP, to DDP, to DCI. Some operations require approval outside the CIA, but these are usually PP (action) projects that are submitted to the Operations Coordination Board of the National Security Council (the UnderSecretary level).

Projects for intelligence collection operations are generally approved for periods of one year and can be renewed. The request for Project Renewal is a document almost identical to the Field Project Outline and it includes details of the operation's progress over the past year such as productivity, costs, security problems, new agents and justification for continuation. Operations that have failed to meet expectations or that are compromised by a security flap or that have simply dried up are cancelled through a 'Request for Project Termination' forwarded from the station to headquarters. This document includes the details on reasons for termination, disposal of agents and property, alternative sources, security and cover considerations and support requirements from other stations or from headquarters.

Correspondence among CIA stations, bases and headquarters is the lifeline of Agency operations. There are two basic types: operational reporting and intelligence reporting. In operational correspondence. matters discussed include security problems, cover, finances, agent access to targets, levels of production (but not the facts themselves), proposals for new recruitments or termination, equipment requirements, agent motivation, and any other occurrences that affect the operation. On every operation an Operational Progress Report is required by headquarters every three months, but much more frequent correspondence is usually necessary.

Intelligence reporting from overseas operations comes in the form of a Field Information Report (FIR) which contains fads related usually to one subject but possibly from several sources. The FIR relates the facts as obtained from the sources although source or field comments may be added. FIR's are prepared in the stations on special mats for printing which are forwarded to headquarters for  reproduction and distribution. FIR's contain a heading that includes the name of the country or countries concerned, the subject-matter of the report, a description of the source (prepared to protect his identity), an evaluation of the source's reliability and an evaluation of the accuracy of the contents of the report. The body of the report follows with the clarifying comments or opinions of source, station or headquarters at the end. In headquarters the FIR's are given CS numbers for retrieval purposes, and copies are sent, for instance, to DDI sections, the Departments of State and Defense, the FBI or the White House.

Both operational reports and intelligence reports may be sent to headquarters or other stations and bases either via the diplomatic pouch or by cable or wireless. Practically all stations and bases have radio transmitting and receiving equipment although commercial telegraph service is frequently used. 

How do we get the information that goes into the intelligence reports of FI operations? Mostly through paid agents. On the highest level there is the politician, scientist, economist or military leader who is actually creating the events that the Agency would like to forecast. This kind of person, however, because of his position of leadership, is the least likely to tell the CIA or the US government his own country's official secrets. There are some, however, who can be convinced that the interests of the US and their own country are so close, even identical, that nothing is lost by providing the information wanted by the CIA. In other cases what the high level official says or plans may be placed on paper to which access may be obtained by a whole variety of secondary level officials, functionaries or colleagues. People of this level may betray their leader's confidence for a great variety of motives. Then there is the third level of prospective agents who simply have physical access to a target area but not to documents themselves. These people may be trained to place listening devices where sensitive conversations are held or to open secure document storage containers or to photograph documents. Finally there is a great variety of people who can assist in operations but who have no direct access to the sources themselves. These are the support agents who rent houses and apartments, buy vehicles, serve as couriers, and perform countless additional necessary tasks. 

There are, then, in addition to operations involving high-level, primary sources, a category of extremely important secondary operations called 'support operations'. Often targeting to primary sources is effected through support operations. These operations involve the use of surveillance teams to follow people in the streets, observations posts to watch the comings and goings from buildings, multiple forms of photography, interception of correspondence from the mails, access to important statistics and identification files of police and other security services, airline, rail and ship passenger and freight lists, devices for listening, telephone tapping and telegraph records. These operations may very well yield sensitive, high quality intelligence but more often they are used to identify the people we really need to get at, who may be recruited as intelligence collection agents. Support operations are also indispensable for knowledge of target personalities in order to discover motives that might make them accept or decline a recruitment approach: strengths, weaknesses, problems, ambitions, failures, enmities, vulnerabilities. 

Another type of FI operation that is very common throughout the free world results from the working relationships between the CIA and the intelligence and security services of foreign countries. Contacts with foreign services are known as liaison operations and their purpose is to exchange information, mount joint operations and penetrate foreign services. The general rule on exchange of information is to give nothing unless necessary. But since foreign services usually press for an exchange, and often in poor countries they collect very little useful information on their own, the second rule is to preserve a net gain, or favourable balance towards the CIA in the exchange. Regulations determine the types of information that can be exchanged and the record-keeping required. 

The 'third agency rule' is an important operating principle in liaison operations. Information passed from one agency to a second agency cannot be passed by the second agency to a third agency without prior approval of the first. The purpose of the rule, obviously, is to preserve the security of operations and. the secrecy of information as well as the secrecy of the existence of the liaison relationship between the first two services. If, for example, the British equivalent of the CIA, MI-6, passed to the CIA station in London a certain piece of information, the CIA in turn could not pass that information to the Dutch Intelligence Service even though the information might be of great interest to the Dutch. In such a case the London station would either suggest that MI-6 pass the information directly to the Dutch (which may already have happened) or permission might be requested for the CIA itself to pass on the MI-6 information. In the event of a first agency agreeing that a second agency may pass information to a third, the first agency may not wish to be revealed to the third agency as the source, so that adequate concealment of the true source will be arranged. Sometimes it can get complicated. 

The most important liaison operation of the CIA is with MI-6, whose cryptonym is SMOTH. It has been almost ten years since Burgess and Maclean disappeared, and SMOTH has apparently tightened its loose, 'old boy', clubby security practices. The inner club also includes the services of Canada, Australia and New Zealand although the CIA receives relatively little from these. Liaison with the Dutch is considered excellent because they facilitate support operations against targets of mutual interest, as do the Italians who tap telephones and intercept correspondence for the CIA station in Rome. The West German services are considered to be thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets while liaison with the French has become difficult and sensitive since the return of de Gaulle. 

In theory no operations should be undertaken by CIA stations with liaison services if the same operations can be mounted without the knowledge of the local service (excluding the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). Those operations undertaken without the knowledge or cooperation of a liaison service, are called 'unilateral', whereas bilateral operations are those mounted for the CIA with the knowledge and support of local services. As we examine various liaison relationships it becomes clear that the major FI results in Western Europe come from local services. particularly with support operations such as travel control, telephone tapping, physical surveillance, postal intercepts and communist party penetration operations. However, in underdeveloped, less sophisticated countries, local services usually lack the knowledge and technical capability to mount effective intelligence operations. Thus the station in many cases can choose whether to mount joint or bilateral operations, or to undertake the operations without the knowledge of the local service. The decision is often based on the local services' internal security but also on the CIA personnel available in a given country; when this is limited, it can balance the scales in favour of bilateral operations. 

Finally, there is the matter of penetration of local services by the CIA. For many reasons, not the least of which is protection of the CIA itself, operational doctrine demands the continued effort to recruit controlled agents within liaison services. These agents, or prospective agents, are usually spotted by CIA officers assigned to work with the local service to exchange information, to train the local service and to work on the operations mounted by the local service to support the CIA. Thus a CIA station may have an information-exchange programme going with a local service, a joint telephone-tapping operation with the local service and an officer or two of the local service on the payroll as a penetration of the  same service. Penetration of liaison services, however, is more properly a counter-intelligence function. 

FI operations, then, are those undertaken to obtain information on the capabilities and intentions of foreign governments, especially enemy and unfriendly governments. Ultimately the FI collection effort is aimed at recruiting or placing an agent in the Kremlin with access to the decision-making process of the Soviet Praesidium. From that dream situation, collection operations spread out and down to practically all other governments and their political, scientific and economic secrets, and from there to the most obscure communist or other revolutionary grouping of the extreme left. 

As we study the different types of FI operations we engage in practical exercises, both here at ISOLATION and in cities near by such as Hampton, Norfolk, Newport News and Richmond. My main FI case has been a series of meetings with a leader of an opposition, nationalistic political party. I play the role of the station case officer under diplomatic cover while one of my instructors plays the foreign political leader. This is a developmental case and I have to work carefully to convince him that the best interests of his country and of the United States are so closely aligned that by helping me he will be helping his own country and political party. One more meeting and I'm going to offer him money. 

Camp Peary, Virginia March 1960 
Counter-intelligence (CI or KUDESK) operations differ from foreign intelligence collection because by definition they are defensive in nature, designed to protect CIA operations from detection by the opposition. The opposition in this sense is every intelligence and security service in the world, from the KGB to the municipal police in Nairobi. Since many countries separate their foreign intelligence service from their internal security service, much as the FBI is separated from the CIA, CI operations are targeted against both the foreign and the internal services. 

The CIA counter-intelligence function begins with the Office of Security of the DDS and its responsibility for physical and personnel security. By protecting buildings from entry by unauthorized persons and documents from perusal, the Office of Security serves to protect the overall CIA effort. Similarly, the lengthy and costly background investigations, together with the polygraph (cryptonym: LCFLUTTER) help to prevent the hiring of penetration agents. Continuing review of the security files of CIA personnel as well as periodic LCFLUTTER examinations are designed to reduce the risk of continued employment in the CIA of employees who might have been recruited by opposition services. 

The use of cover and compartmentation also serves to protect secret operations by concealing the true employer of Agency members so as to prevent discovery, The same is true of organizations, buildings, apartments, vehicles, aircraft, ships and financing methods. Cover protects operations by making them appear to be something legitimate that in reality they are not. Compartmentation reduces the chance that exposure of a single operation, for whatever reason, can lead to the exposure of additional operations. A CIA officer or agent could gain knowledge of what other officers or agents were doing only if it were necessary for him to do so for his own work. 

Whether to use or not to use a particular prospective agent is determined, from the CI viewpoint, by the 'operational approval' process. It is an integral part of every relationship between the CIA and foreign agents no matter what a given agent's tasks might be. The operational approval process begins with the initial spotting and assessment of a prospective agent and continues through field and headquarters' file checks and background investigation to the operational approval system established in the CI staff of the DDP. 

No person may be used in an operational capacity by a field station without prior approval by the Operational Approval Branch of the Counter-Intelligence Staff of the DDP in headquarters (CI/OA). Requests for approval start from the field stations and are outlined in a document known as 'the Personal Record Questionnaire (PRQ) which is divided into two parts. The PRQ Part I contains some seven pages of basic biographical data including full name, date and place of birth, names of parents, names of family members, schools attended, employment history, marital history, military service, present and past citizenship, membership in political organizations, hobbies, any special qualifications, and use of drugs or other vices. In itself the PRQ Part I reveals no operational interest or plans. The PRQ Part II, which never carries the prospective agent's true name or other identifying. data, is a document of similar length with all the details of operational plans for the agent. It is reconciled with the PRQ Part I by a numbering system and usually bears the cryptonym assigned to the prospective agent. In the PRQ Part II the proposed task for the agent is described, the means through which the information in PRQ Part I was obtained and verified is detailed, the cover used by the person who spotted and assessed the agent is given, and all the operational risks and advantages are discussed. 

The officers in CI/OA run a series of name checks in headquarters and, after studying the case, give final approval or disapproval for the proposed use of the prospective agent. Assuming no serious problems exist, CI/OA issues a Provisional Operational Approval (POA) on the agent, effective for six months, at the end of which an Operational Approval (OA) is issued, based on additional investigation by the station and the CI staff. 

Files are maintained on all agents and they always begin with the number 201—followed by a number of five to eight digits. The 201 file contains all the documents that pertain to a given agent and usually start with the PRQ and the request for POA. But the 201 file is divided into two parts which are stored separately for maximum security. One part contains true name documents while the other part contains cryptonym documents and operational information. Compromise of one part will not reveal both the true name and the operational use of the agent. 

In addition to the continuing station assessment and evaluation of agents from a C I point of view (which is to protect the Agency from hostile penetration) and continuing file review in headquarters, almost all agents are polygraphed from time to time. We call this' fluttering', from the polygraph cryptonym LCFLUTTER. Agents are' fluttered' by the same polygraph officers of the Office of Security in headquarters who interview prospective Agency employees in Building 13. They travel, usually, in teams of two on periodic visits to several countries in the same geographical area, although special trips on the spur of the moment can be arranged for serious cases. 

The polygraph is usually sent to field stations through the State Department diplomatic pouch, and is mounted snugly inside a suitcase, usually the two-suite size, caramel colour made by the Samsonite company. These suitcases look innocuous and facilitate carrying the polygraph in and out of embassies and the places where agents are tested. Arrangements are made for agents to be 'fluttered' in safe sites with interpreters as needed. The questions usually concentrate on whom the agent has told about his relationship with the CIA and any contacts he may have had with other intelligence services. The purpose of using the 'flutter' on agents is to root out double agents, although other matters inevitably arise such as honesty in reporting and in the use of money.

Communist Party (CP) 
Penetration Operations 
Communist party penetration operations are all those efforts made to penetrate the communist and extreme leftist revolutionary movements around the world. Their purpose is to collect information on the capabilities, plans, officers, members, weaknesses, strengths and international connections of every revolutionary organization outside the communist bloc. They are considered primarily of a counter-intelligence nature because of the conspiratorial nature of communism and the similarity between communists parties and hostile intelligence services. The focal point of headquarters for specialized skill and advice on CP operations is the International Communism Division of the Counter-Intelligence Staff (CI/ICD). Although intelligence operations involving officials of communist-bloc countries may be included in the general definition of CP operations, because most government officials of interest in communist countries are also party members, these are more properly considered Soviet or satellite operations rather than CP operations. 

A CIA station's approach to penetration of a communist party or of any revolutionary organization is determined by the operational environment and particularly on the measure of repression exerted against the revolutionary left. Another factor of major importance is the general economic and cultural level of a given country which will reflect markedly on the sophistication and vulnerability of the revolutionary groups. As a general rule, penetration of a communist party is more difficult in the degree that local security forces compel it to operate clandestinely. If a given party is completely forced underground, for example, there is no obvious way of penetrating it. Similarly, recruitment is easier to the degree that members of the party are forced to live in penury, and this generally corresponds to the overall level of a country's economic development. A communist in La Paz will be more likely to spy for money than a communist in Paris. 

A proper interpretation of the operational climate is therefore an essential first step in any station's CP programme. Next comes the matter of studying all the overt material available on the party. This can be very considerable in the case of a large and open party such as those of Italy, and France, or very limited in the case of a proscribed party that operates clandestinely, as in Paraguay. Such a study is based on the party press, speeches by its leaders, its propaganda notices, activities of front organizations and its degree of adherence to the party line that emanates from Moscow. 

Penetration of communist parties and other local revolutionary. organizations by agents are standard bread-and-butter operations of practically every CIA station. These agents are members of the revolutionary organizations on which they report through clandestine communications arrangements with the station. They are recruited in several ways. The first type is known as the 'walk-in'. The walk-in is a member of the party who, from need of money, ideological disillusionment or other motive decides to offer his services to the US government. He makes his initial contact either by walking into the US Embassy or Consulate or by a more discreet path designed to protect him from discovery and party wrath. 

It is the duty of every Chief of Station to make sure that the Embassy Security Officer (State Department) briefs the receptionists (usually local employees) and the Marine Guards about the possibility that nervous people who do not want to give their names may show up from time to time asking to speak to someone in the embassy about 'politics' or the like. In such cases, a legitimate State Department officer, usually in the political section, will be notified and will hold a private, non-committal interview letting the walk-in do most of the talking. In this way the station officers are protected. The interviewing officer will advise an officer in the station and a decision will be made about the walkin's bona fides and the advisability of direct contact by a station CP officer. A file check and background investigation is always made before risking an initial contact with the walk-in, since every precaution must be taken to avoid provocation. 

If the walk-in looks favourable and contact is established a series of long sessions follow in which the walk-in details his political activities and his reasons for having contacted the US government. His capabilities and willingness for future work as a spy against the party will be determined and sooner or later he will be 'fluttered'. The clearance process for POA will be initiated and if all goes well secret communications are established and a new CP penetration operation will be under way. 

Another way of penetrating the CP is through the non-communist who is recruited to join the party and work his way up from the bottom. This is a long haul approach and usually undertaken only as a last resort. 

Perhaps the most difficult is the recruitment of members of a revolutionary organization who are in good standing. This type of operation depends on reports from other CP penetration operations because extensive knowledge of the prospective recruit is needed to determine vulnerabilities and possibilities for success. CIA stations are continually engaged in trying to recruit in this manner and files grow thicker until a decision is made to recruit or not to recruit. 

The recruitment approach may be 'hot' or 'cold'. In the first case a station agent, usually not a CP penetration agent, who knows or can get to know the target, will make the proposition, sometimes after long periods of nurturing the relationship and sometimes rather quickly. The cold approach may be made by a CIA officer or agent, perhaps wearing a disguise or called in from a neighbouring country or from headquarters. He may accost the target in the street or at the target's home without prior personal acquaintance with him. This type of approach known as the' cold pitch' can backfire when knowledge of the target's vulnerabilities is defective, and a ready escape plan for the recruiting officer is advisable. 

In both the hot and the cold approaches, prior arrangements are made for immediate debriefing at a safe site, or for secure communications afterwards should the target decline at first but reconsider later. The cold approach may also be undertaken, on a small or large scale, by sending letters or notices to possible recruits advising them of interest in their political work and suggesting that they share it with others. A serviceable but non-compromising address such as a postbox in the US may be furnished as well as a separate identifying number for use by each prospective recruit. If the target answers by number he will be contacted by an officer under secure conditions. 

Finally, there is the bugging of the homes or meeting-places of party officers. Such operations can be mounted successfully only if considerable information is available on people, places and the importance of meetings. These are not always available, given the secrecy required of conspiratorial revolutionary activity. But bugging yields excellent intelligence because it lacks the human factor that may colour, exaggerate or otherwise distort the reports from agents. 

A station's support operations may be used to assist in the CP programme. Surveillance teams may discover secret meeting-places that may be bugged. Postal interception may provide interesting party correspondence, both from the national and the international mails. Observation posts may reveal participants in clandestine meetings or serve as listening posts for audio devices. Telephone tapping can reveal voluminous information on party functionaries and the routines of party leaders. Surreptitious entry may produce party records and membership lists. 

Aside from the penetration programme directed against revolutionary organizations, CIA stations also direct the offensive weapons of psychological and paramilitary operations against them. These include the placing of anticommunist propaganda in the public media, the frame-up of party officials for police arrest, the publishing of false propaganda attributed to the revolutionary group in such a way that it will be difficult to deny and damaging as well, the organizing of goon squads to beat up and intimidate party officials, using stink bombs and other harassment devices to break up meetings, and the calling on liaison services to take desired repressive action. But we shall study these types of operation later. Next we are concerned with the CI aspects of liaison operations. 

Liaison Operations 
From the standpoint of pure doctrine all liaison operations are considered compromised, since even the existence of a liaison relationship implies the giving of something by the CIA: at the very least the identity of a CIA officer. It is always hoped that the virtues of liaison operations with other intelligence services outweigh their defects, but the judgement is sometimes hard to make. The two most basic principles of liaison operations from the counter-intelligence point of view are: first, there is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service, and, second, all liaison services are penetrated by the Soviets or by local revolutionary groups. Thus any operations undertaken jointly by the CIA with a liaison service are by definition compromised from the start. It is for this reason that some CIA intelligence reports (FIR'S) include the NOFORN or NO FOREIGN DISSEM indicators which restrict reports to US officials only. The indicators are used so that foreign liaison services will not receive information from sensitive sources in the course of normal exchange programmes. 

Why get involved with other services? Basically, liaison operations are conducted because they are useful. They extend a station's limited manpower however shaky the extension may be. They give the CIA a foot in the door for penetration of the liaison service. And they may also result in a local service taking action, such as an arrest or raid, at station request. 

In non-communist countries it is the policy of the Agency to assist local security services to improve their capabilities if, of course, these services want the help and their government is not openly hostile to the US. By giving money, training and equipment to local services like the police, the CIA is able to receive information that might otherwise not be available because, for example, of the shortage of station officers. Travel control, for instance, involves obtaining airline and ship passenger lists from the companies or from local immigration services. Often it is easier to obtain them from a liaison service than from five or ten different companies. Telephone tapping is often possible only through a local service, especially when many lines are to be monitored. Mails can be opened much more easily by a local service than by the lengthy process of unilateral agent recruitment in post offices. Above all, if flaps (scandals) occur, the local service, not the CIA, will take the rap. 

Usually a Chief of Station will handle the contact with the chief of a local service. Some stations may have whole sections of liaison officers at the working level both in operational planning and in information exchange. The general rule, of course, is to expose the absolute minimum of station officers to a local service and, if possible, only those officers engaged in liaison operations. Officers engaged in unilateral operations, that is, operations undertaken without the knowledge of the local government, should be protected against compromise with the local service. 

Some local services are so pitifully backward that they need overt US government assistance. Thus the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) [10] technical assistance missions in many countries include Public Safety Missions made up of US technicians who work with police departments. They seek to improve the local service's capability in communications, investigations, administration and record keeping, public relations and crime prevention. The Public Safety Missions are valuable to the CIA because they provide cover for CIA officers who are sent to work full time with the intelligence services of the police and other civilian services. Station officers under other cover may work with military intelligence and, at times, officers undercover as businessmen, tourists or retired people may be assigned to work with local services. 

CIA assistance to local services through Public Safety Missions or other forms of cover are not only designed to help improve the professional capability of the local service. Operational targeting of the local service is guided by CIA liaison officers so that the local service performs tasks that are lacking in the overall station operational programme. In other words local services are to be used for the benefit of the CIA, and this includes keeping the local service away from station unilateral operations. 

The personal relations between CIA liaison officers and their colleagues in local services are very important, because the CIA liaison officers are expected to spot and assess officers in the local service for recruitment as penetration agents. Liaison officers make money available to officers of the local service and it is expected that the local colleague will pocket some of the money even though it is supposed to be strictly for operations. The technique is to get the local police or intelligence officer used to a little extra cash so that not only will he be dependent on the station for equipment and professional guidance but also for personal financing. 

Security officers such as police are often among the poorest paid public servants and they are rarely known to refuse a gift. Little by little an officer of a local service is called upon to perform tasks not known to anyone else in his service, particularly his superiors. Gradually he begins to report on his own service and on politics within his own government. Eventually his first loyalty is to the CIA. After all, that is where the money comes from. Penetration operations against local services are often of very considerable importance because of the place of security services in local political stability. Reporting from these agents is sometimes invaluable during situations of possible coup d'etat. 

Finally, CIA stations may undertake unilateral operations through officers of liaison services who have been recruited as penetration agents. That is the final goal. Recruited liaison officers may also report on efforts by their services to uncover unilateral station operations. This, too, is a happy situation. 

Soviet/Satellite Operations 
Operations against the Soviets and the satellite governments are designed to produce, in the long run, positive information as opposed to counter-intelligence. But both types of information, FI and CI, are so intertwined that they are practically inseparable in specific operations. The reason is that operations are extremely difficult to mount inside the target countries because of the effectiveness of the communist internal security services. Those that do originate within the Soviet Union or the satellites are usually surprise offers of services that have little to do with targeting, spotting, assessment and recruitment. Rather they are the result of inner processes hidden somewhere in the psyches of communist officials which surface at an unpredictable moment of strain. In effect, these people usually recruit themselves. 

On the other hand, access to Soviet and East European officials outside the communist bloc is relatively easy and an elaborate operational method for attacking them has developed in the CIA over the years. The operations that result from this are generally more of a CI than an FI type, that is, they reflect more of the protective function than the collection of intelligence information, although they are in no way lacking in aggressive character. 

The first rule is that all the bordering property around a Soviet embassy should be considered for purchase by station support agents. The most appropriate and the most promising of these properties will be purchased and kept available for use whenever needed. As Soviet embassies are often sizeable plots of land with large mansions and surrounded by high walls, there may be as many as seven or eight houses contiguous with the Soviet property. These houses may be used as visual observation posts and for the setting up of technical collection equipment. For example, when the Soviets are known or suspected to be using electronic encrypting machines, radiations emanating from them may be captured, enabling the message to be decrypted. Such an operation is undertaken in support of the National Security Agency. But observation posts are more routinely used for identifying, by associations, the KGB and GRU (military intelligence) residences within the Soviet mission as well as the general pecking order in the Soviet colony. 

Wherever possible all the entrances to the Soviet compound as well as the gardens within are placed under visual observation. Such coverage may necessitate as many as three or four observation posts. Each OP is manned by agents, often elderly couples, who maintain a log of the comings and goings of every Soviet employee as well as those taking part in, and characteristics of, the frequent garden conversations. Photography is frequently used to get up-to-date photos of Soviet personnel as well as for less successful purposes as close-up movies shot of garden conversations and passed to Russian lip-readers. The logs from the observation posts are studied with the transcripts of telephone tapping, which is standard operational practice against all Soviet and satellite missions outside the bloc together with the transcriptions of bugging operations against their installations, if bugging has been possible. From these studies the functional duties within the Soviet colony are revealed and the daily routines of everyone become fundamental operating knowledge of the CIA Soviet and satellite operations officers. 

Coverage of Soviet and satellite officers begins, however, long before they arrive in a foreign country. Almost always the first notice of a new arrival results from the visa request made by the Soviet Foreign Ministry to the embassy of the country concerned in Moscow. The visa may be granted by the embassy, which will advise its own Foreign Ministry, or the request will be transmitted to the Foreign Ministry for approval. These communications are often made in coded diplomatic messages. The CIA station in the capital city where the Soviet is to be posted receives the decrypted messages from the National Security Agency via headquarters where file checks immediately start on the Soviet official in question. Thus if the Soviet Foreign Ministry requests from the Indian Embassy in Moscow, a diplomatic visa for Ivan Ivanovitch the CIA station in New Delhi may receive its first indication of the assignment through the monitoring of Indian government communications. 

Before the Soviet arrives the station will have all the available information on him and his family together with photographs if possible. The information would have been collected and filed from coverage of the Soviet (or satellite) officer on previous tours of duty abroad, from defector debriefings, from communications intelligence and from other miscellaneous sources. When no traces exist a new file is opened and the target's history with the CIA begins. 

The final purpose of the operations is to recruit Soviet and satellite officials as agents for spying and this can be done only by getting to know them. In this work the 'access agent' is the station's most sensitive and effective means of obtaining data on target officials. Access agents are people who, for a great variety of reasons, can establish a personal relationship with a Soviet or satellite officer and through whom the CIA can observe the officer as closely as possible. The access agent can also guide conversations very carefully to selected topics so as to discover weakening beliefs, character defects, personal problems and basic likes and dislikes. Sometimes an access agent's role may change to that of double agent if the Soviet attempts to recruit him, but double-agent operations are discouraged except in special circumstances because there are too many problems in the continual need to be certain that the agent has not been doubled back against the CIA. An access agent may be anyone so long as the target official can be kept interested: a host country Foreign Ministry official, a third country diplomat, someone who shares the same hobby, a man with an attractive wife. 

In most countries the foreign diplomats have a club with monthly luncheons, dinners and excursions. State Department and CIA officers under State cover are members of these clubs and can thereby develop personal relationships with Soviet officials. The Ambassador's permission is necessary for a station to guide a State Department officer in a personal relationship with a communist diplomat, who is almost always an intelligence officer, and at times CIA officers themselves develop personal relationships with communist officials. But such relationships are usually not as productive as the personal relations developed by access agents, with whom the target official may relax and let down his guard. 

Soviet and satellite embassies usually employ a small number of local people as gardeners, cleaners and occasionally as chauffeurs. These people are always screened by the embassy for loyalty to communism, but sometimes they too can be recruited by the CIA. They have very little physical access to embassy offices so they usually cannot plant listening devices, but they can report interesting information on superior-inferior relationships, gossip and back-biting, wives and children and visitors to the embassies. 

The bugging of Soviet and satellite official installations abroad is a very high priority but possible only in rare circumstances such as when a defector can plant a device after contact with the CIA but before disappearing. However, as the Soviets, satellites and Chinese expand their diplomatic and commercial relations around the world, they always need buildings. From the moment a preliminary mission by a communist country is planned, the CIA station brings everything to bear in order to discover the buildings selected and, during the period before occupancy, every effort is made to install listening devices. Soviet and satellite officials usually live in embassies, consulates or other official buildings with their families or alone, but a few live in apartment buildings. Their apartments are also bugged whenever there is reason to believe intelligence of value can be obtained. 

Almost all CIA stations have surveillance teams equipped with cameras, vehicles and radio communications. Their primary targets are known Soviet and satellite intelligence officers and efforts are made to discover through the surveillance teams the operational habits, and, with luck, the clandestine contacts of the communist officer. 

Soviet operations are closely controlled by the Soviet Russia (SR) Division of the DDP in headquarters. They are the specialists and much operational correspondence on Soviet operations bears the cryptonym REDWOOD, indicating SR Division action and control. In certain cases, however, the indicator may be REDCOAT which means action and control by the area division concerned. SR Division also coordinates a number of other operations that have world-wide significance. 

The REDSOX programme of illegal infiltration of agents into the Soviet Union and satellite countries had started during the early 1950s but failed miserably. It is still conducted, however, when the need is great and when a Russian emigre with suicidal tendencies can be found. The REDSKIN programme of legal travellers, on the other hand, has been highly successful even though several agents have been lost. This programme includes tourists, businessmen, scientists, journalists and practically anyone who can obtain legal entry into the Soviet Union or the satellites and who is willing to perform operational tasks. 

Then there is the REDCAP programme which is a machine-listing system of all Soviet nationals who travel abroad: scientists, technicians, military advisors and commercial officers as well as diplomats. Intelligence officers, of course, use all of these types of cover. The ZOMBIE listings are also machine runs, listing all non- Soviet/satellite nationals who travel to the bloc, and the ZODIAC machine programme lists travel of citizens of satellite countries to the West. SR Division activities are particularly intense at international scientific and technical congresses, and prior notices are sent to stations around the world describing the meetings and requesting station nominees to attend the meetings and establish contact with Soviet or satellite colleagues. 

Our instructors here, and the visiting lecturers from SR and EE Divisions, freely admit that the communist intelligence services have discovered numerous examples of all categories of operation against them. Thus they are aware of our methods. Nevertheless; the leaders of the Soviet Russia Division keep driving home the theme that the Soviets are the only nation on earth with the capability and the avowed intention of destroying the United States of America. This alone requires every possible effort to carry the attack to the enemy. 

Practical exercises continue. We've been spending about one afternoon per week in near-by towns practising surveillance and having 'agent meetings' with instructors. My liaison case was to convince the officer of the sister service to accept money for personal expenses and to begin performing tasks for me without the knowledge of his superiors. The communist party penetration exercise was focused on building up the 'agent's morale' and encouraging him to take a more active role in the party work he despises. The Soviet operation was a series of developmental meetings with a 'third country' diplomat (in my case an Indian) leading to his recruitment as an access agent to a KGB officer. I also had a legal travel case in which I recruited a reluctant American scientist who was to attend a scientific conference. Then we had a series of briefing and debriefing sessions before and after his trip. His main task was to befriend a Soviet colleague who we know has access to sensitive military information. Hopefully they will meet at future conferences and eventually my agent will recruit the Soviet scientist.

Camp Peary, Virginia April 1960 
Psychological and paramilitary, known as PP or KUCAGE, operations differ from those of FI or CI because they are action rather than collection activities. Collection operations should be invisible so that the target will be unaware of them. Action operations, on the other hand, always produce a visible effect. This, however, should never be attributable to the CIA or to the US government, but rather to some other person or organization. These operations, which received their Congressional charter in the National Security Act of 1947 under 'additional services of common concern', are in some ways more sensitive than collection operations. They are usually approved by the PP staff of the DDP, but when very large amounts of money are required or especially sensitive methods are used approval may be required of the OCB (Under- Secretary level), the NSC or the President himself. 

PP operations are, of course, risky because they nearly always mean intervention in the affairs of another country with whom the US enjoys normal diplomatic relations. If their true sponsorship were found out the diplomatic consequences could be serious. This is in contrast to collection operations, for if these are discovered foreign politicians are often prepared to turn a blind eye— they are a traditional part of every nation's intelligence activity. 

Thus the cardinal rule in planning all PP operations is 'plausible denial', only possible if care has been taken in the first place to ensure that someone other than the US government can be made to take the blame. 

PP programmes are to be found in almost every CIA station and emphasis on the kinds of PP operations will depend very much on local conditions. Psychological warfare includes propaganda (also known simply as 'media '), work in youth and student organizations, work in labour organizations (trade unions, etc.), work in professional and cultural groups and in political parties. Paramilitary operations include infiltration into denied areas, sabotage, economic warfare, personal harassment, air and maritime support, weaponry, training and support for small armies. 

Media Operations 
The CIA'S role in the US propaganda programme is determined by the official division of propaganda into three general categories: white, grey and black. White propaganda is that which is openly acknowledged as coming from the US government, e.g. from the US Information Agency (USIA); grey propaganda is ostensibly attributed to people or organizations who do not acknowledge the US government as the source of their material and who produce the material as if it were their own; black propaganda is unattributed material, or it is attributed to a non-existent source, or it is false material attributed to a real source. The CIA is the only US government agency authorized to engage in black propaganda operations, but it shares the responsibility for grey propaganda with other agencies such as USIA. However, according to the 'Grey Law' of the National Security Council contained in one of the NSCID'S, other agencies must obtain prior CIA approval before engaging in grey propaganda. 

The vehicles for grey and black propaganda may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of exposing true sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who their masters in the case are. Some among them obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a distinction between 'witting' and 'unwitting' agents. 

In propaganda operations, as in all other PP activities, standard agency security procedure forbids payment for services rendered to be made by a CIA officer working under official cover (one posing as an official of the Department of State, for instance). This is in order to maintain 'plausible denial' and to minimize the danger of embarrassment to the local embassy if anything is discovered by the local government. However, payment is made by CIA officers under non-official cover, e.g. posing as businessmen, students or as retired people; such officers are said to be working under non-official cover. 

Officers working under non-official cover may also handle most of the contacts with the recruited agents in order to keep the officer under official cover as protected as possible. Equally, meetings between the two kinds of officer will be as secret as may be. The object of all this is to protect the embassy and sometimes to make the propaganda agents believe that they are being paid by private businesses. Headquarters' propaganda experts have visited us in ISOLATION and have displayed the mass of paper they issue as material for the guidance of propaganda throughout the world. Some of it is concerned only with local issues, the rest often has world-wide application. The result of the talks was to persuade most of us that propaganda is not for us—there is simply too much paperwork. But despite that, the most interesting part of propaganda was obviously the business of orchestrating the treatment of events of importance among several countries. Thus problems of communist influence in one country can be made to appear of international concern in others under the rubric of 'a threat to one is a threat to all'. For example, the CIA station in Caracas can cable information on a secret communist plot in Venezuela to the Bogota station which can 'surface' through a local propaganda agent with attribution to an unidentified Venezuelan government official. The information can then be picked up from the Colombian press and relayed to CIA stations in Quito, Lima, La Paz, Santiago and, perhaps, Brazil. A few days later editorials begin to appear in the newspapers of these places and pressure mounts on the Venezuelan government to take repressive action against its communists. 

There are obviously hosts of other uses to which propaganda, both black and grey, can be put, using books, magazines, radio, television, wall-painting, handbills, decals, religious sermons and political speeches as well as the daily press. In countries where handbills or wall-painting are important media, stations are expected to maintain clandestine printing and distribution facilities as well as teams of agents who paint slogans on walls. Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty  are the best known grey-propaganda operations conducted by the CIA against the Soviet bloc. 

Youth and Student Operations 
At the close of World War II, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union began a major propaganda and agitation programme through the formation of the International Union of Students (IUS) and the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), both of which brought together national affiliates within their respective fields in as many countries as possible. These organizations promoted CPSU objectives and policy under the guise of unified campaigns (anticolonialism, anti-nuclear weapons, pro-peace groups, etc.), in which they enlisted the support of their local affiliates in capitalist countries as well as within the communist bloc. During the late 1940s the US government, using the Agency for its purpose, began to brand these fronts as stooges of the CPSU with the object of discouraging non-communist participation. In addition to this the Agency engaged in operations in many places designed to stop local groups affiliating with the international bodies. By recruiting leaders of the local groups and by infiltrating agents, the Agency tried to gain control of as many of them as possible, so that even if such a group had already affiliated itself to either the IUS or the WFDY, it could be persuaded or compelled to withdraw. 

The Agency also began to form alternative youth and student organizations at local and international level. The two international bodies constructed to rival those sponsored by the Soviet Union were the Coordinating Secretariat of National Unions of Students (COSEC) [11] with headquarters in Leyden, and the World Assembly of Youth  (WAY) situated in Brussels. Headquarters' planning, guidance and operational functions in the CIA youth and student operations are centralized in the International Organizations Division of the DDP. 

Both COSEC and WAY, like the IUS and WFDY, promote travel, cultural activities and welfare, but both also work as propaganda agencies for the CIA— particularly in underdeveloped countries. They also have consultative status as non-governmental institutions with United Nations agencies such as UNESCO and they participate in the UN special agencies' programmes. 

One very important function of the CIA youth and student operations is the spotting, assessing and recruiting of student and youth leaders as long-term agents, both in the FI and PP fields. The organizations sponsored or affected by the Agency are obvious recruiting grounds for these and, indeed, for other CIA operations. It is particularly the case in the underdeveloped world that both COSEC and WAY programmes lead to the recruitment of young agents who can be relied on to continue CIA policies and remain under CIA control long after they have moved up their political or professional ladders. 

Apart from working through COSEC and WAY the Agency is also able to mount specific operations through Catholic national and international student and youth bodies (Pax Romana and the International Catholic Youth Federation) and through the Christian democratic and non-communist socialist organizations as well. In some countries, particularly those in which there are groups with strong communist or radical leaderships, the Catholic or Christian Democratic student and youth organizations are the main forces guided by the Agency. 

Agents controlled through youth and student operations by a station in any given country, including those in the US National Students Association  (NSA) international programme run by headquarters, can also be used to influence decisions at the international level, while agents at the international level can be used for promoting other agents or policies within a national affiliate. Control, then, is like an alternating current between the national and international levels. 

Largely as a result of Agency operations, the WFDY headquarters was expelled from France in 1951, moving to Budapest. The IUS headquarters, on the other hand, was never allowed to move to the free world after its founding at Prague in 1946. Moreover, the WFDY and IUS have been clearly identified with the communist bloc, and their efforts to conduct conferences and seminars outside the bloc have been attacked and weakened by WAY and COSEC. The WFDY, for example, has been able to hold only one World Youth Festival outside the bloc, in Vienna in 1959, and then it was effectively disrupted by CIA controlled youth and student organizations. The IUS has never held a congress in the free world. More important still, both WAY and COSEC have developed overwhelming leads in affiliate members outside the communist bloc. 

Labour Operations 
Agency labour operations came into being, like student and youth operations, as a reaction against the continuation of pre-World War II CPSU policy and expansion through the international united fronts. In 1945 with the support and participation of the British Trade Unions Congress (TUC), the American Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the Soviet Trade Unions Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was formed in Paris. Differences within the WFTU between communist trade-union leaders, who were anxious to use the WFT U for anti-capitalist propaganda,. and free-world leaders who insisted on keeping the WFTU focused on economic issues, finally came to a head in 1949 over whether the WFTU should support the Marshall Plan. When the communists, who included French, Italian and Latin American leaders as well as the Soviets, refused to allow the WFTU to endorse the Marshall Plan, the TUC and CIO withdrew, and later the same· year the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU ‡) was founded as a noncommunist alternative to the WFTU, with participation by the TUC, CIO, American Federation of Labor (AFL) and other national centres. Agency operations were responsible in part for the expulsion of the WFTU headquarters from Paris in 1951 when it moved to the Soviet sector of Vienna. Later, in 1956, it was forced to move from Vienna to Prague. 

The ICFTU established regional organizations for Europe, the Far East, Africa and the Western Hemisphere, which brought together the non-communist national trade-union centres. Support and guidance by the Agency was, and still is, exercised on the three levels: ICFTU, regional and national centres. At the highest level, labor operations congenial to the Agency are supported through George Meany,  President of the AFL, Jay Lovestone,  Foreign Affairs Chief of the AFL and Irving Brown,  AFL representative in Europe—all of whom were described to us as effective spokesmen for positions in accordance with the Agency's needs. Direct Agency control is also exercised on the regional level. Serafino Romualdi,  AFL Latin American representative for example, directs the Inter-American Regional Labor Organization (ORIT)  located in Mexico City. On the national level, particularly in underdeveloped countries, CIA field stations engage in operations to support and guide national labour centres. In headquarters, support, guidance and control of all labour operations is centralized in the labour branch of the International Organizations Division. 

General policy on labour operations is similar to youth and student operations. First, the WFTU and its regional and national affiliates are labelled as stooges of Moscow. Second, local station operations are designed to weaken and defeat communist or extreme-leftist dominated union structures and to establish and support a non-communist structure. Third, the ICFTU and its regional organizations are promoted, both from the top and from the bottom, by having Agency-influenced or controlled unions and national centres affiliate. 

A fourth CIA approach to labour operations is through the International Trade Secretariats  (ITS), which represent the interests of workers in a particular industry as opposed to the national centres that unite workers of different industries. Because the ITS system is more specialized, and often more effective, it is at times more appropriate for Agency purposes than the ICFTU with its regional and national structure. Control and guidance is exercised through officers of a particular ITS who are called upon to assist labour operations directed against the workers of a particular industry. Very often the CIA agents in an ITS are the American labour leaders who represent the US affiliate of the ITS, since the ITS would usually receive its principal support from the pertinent US industrial union. 

Thus the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees  serves as a channel for CIA operations in the Public Service International,  which is the ITS for government employees headquartered in London. And the Retail Clerks International Association,  which is the US union of white-collar employees, gives access to the International Federation of Clerical and Technical Employees,  which is the white-collar ITS. Similarly, the Communications Workers of America  is used to control the Post, Telegraph and Telephone Workers International  (PTTI) which is the ITS for communications workers. In the case of the petroleum industry the Agency actually set up the ITS, the International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers  (IFPCW) through the US union of petroleum workers, the Oil Workers International Union. Particularly in underdeveloped countries, station labour operations may be given cover as a local programme of an ITS. Within the Catholic trade-union movement similar activity is possible, usually channelled through the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions  (IFCTU). [12] And for specialized training within the social-democratic movement, the Israeli Histadrut  is used. 

Labour operations are the source of considerable friction between the DDP area divisions and the stations, on the one hand, and the International Organizations Division (IOD) on the other. The problem is mainly jurisdiction and coordination. The labour operations agents on the international and regional level (ICFTU, ORlT, ITS, for example) are directed by officers of IOD either in Washington or from a field station such as Paris, Brussels or Mexico City. If their activities in a particular country, Colombia, for example, are not closely coordinated with the Bogota station, they may oppose or otherwise interfere with specific aims of the Bogota station's labour operations or other programmes. Whenever IOD labour assets visit a given country, the Chief of Station who is responsible for all CIA activities in his country, must be advised. Otherwise the IOD agent, lacking the guidance and control that would ensure that his activities harmonize with the entire station operational programme, not just in the labour field, may jeopardize other station goals. Continuing efforts are made to ensure coordination between IOD activities in labour and the field stations concerned, but this is also hampered at times by the narrow view and headstrong attitudes of the agents themselves. 

On the other hand, IOD agents can be enormously valuable in assisting a local station's labour programme. Usually the agent has considerable prestige as a result of his position on the international or regional level, and his favour is often sought by indigenous labour leaders because of the travel and training grants and invitations to conferences that the agent dispenses. He accordingly has ready access to leaders in the local non-communist labour movement and he can establish contact between the station and those local labour leaders of interest. Such contact can be established through third parties, gradually, so that the IOD agent is protected when a new operational relationship is eventually established. Field stations may call on IOD support in order to obtain the adoption of a particular policy or programme in a given country through the influence that an IOD agent can bring to bear on a local situation, again without the local labour leader, even if he is a station agent, knowing that the international or regional official is responding to CIA guidance. 

Measuring the effectiveness of labour operations against their multi-million dollar cost is difficult and controversial, and includes the denial-to-the communists factor as well as the value of indoctrination in pro-Western ideals through seminars, conferences and educational programmes. In any case, freeworld affiliation with the WFTU has been considerably reduced, even though several leading national confederations in non-communist countries still belong. 

Operations against the 
World Peace Council
Agency operations against the World Peace Council (founded in Paris in 1949) are undertaken to neutralize the Council's propaganda campaigns against the US and its allies, particularly with regard to military pacts. Although no rival organization has been established, media operations are directed against WPC activities in order to expose its true sponsorship as a propaganda front of the CPSU. Some success can be claimed in the expulsion of WPC headquarters from Paris to Prague in 1951 although it moved to Vienna in 1954. Efforts are also made to prevent the WPC from holding congresses and other meetings outside the communist bloc through operations involving media, students, youth, labour and especially political-action agents for denial of permissions and other harassment.

Journalists
Founded in Copenhagen in 1946, the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ) brought together writers from both communist and noncommunist countries. Although the original headquarters of the IOJ was in London, the Second Congress was held in Prague in 1947 where it was decided to move the IOJ headquarters. Following the leadership of the national journalists' organizations of the United States, Great Britain and Belgium, most non-communist membership had been withdrawn by 1950, and its activities were generally confined to Iron Curtain countries. 

In addition to propaganda against the IOJ and operations to deny Western capitals for IOJ meetings, the Agency promoted the founding of an alternative international society of journalists for the free world. In 1952 the World Congress of Journalists reestablished the International Federation of Journalists  (IFJ) which had been founded originally in 1926, but had been disbanded in 1946 when the IOJ was formed. 

Benefits to the Agency from the IFJ operation include the spotting and operational development of potential propaganda agents. Moreover, local station support to IFJ member organizations can be used to combat the local communist and pro communist press and the efforts at penetration by the IOJ. especially in underdeveloped countries. 

Lawyers 
In 1946 the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) was founded in Paris with the participation of lawyers from some twenty-five countries. Dominated from the beginning by pro-communist forces, especially the French participants, the IADL soon lost most of its non-communist members and in 1950 was expelled from France, moving its headquarters to Brussels where it has remained. The IADL'S main function has been to serve as a propaganda mechanism for the CPSU post-war themes of peace and anticolonialism. 

In 1952, an international legal conference was held in West Berlin from which a permanent committee emerged to carryon the work of exposing communist injustice in East Germany. In 1955 this committee became the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) with headquarters in The Hague, moving to Geneva in 1959. The ICJ is composed of twenty-five prominent lawyers from countries around the world, and its main work consists of investigating and reporting on abuses of the 'rule of law', wherever they occur.

The Agency saw the ICJ as an organization which it hoped would produce prestigious propaganda of the kind wanted on such issues as violations of human rights in the communist bloc. Reports on other areas like South Africa would, so far as the CIA was concerned, merely lend respectability to this object. 

Political-Action Operations 
Communist expansion brought forth still another type of PP operation: political action. Operations designed to promote the adoption by a foreign government of a particular policy vis-a-vis communism are termed political action operations. While the context of these operations is the assessment of the danger of communist or other leftist influence in a given country, the operations undertaken to suppress the danger are pegged to specific circumstances. These operations often involve promotion through funding and guidance of the careers of foreign politicians through whom desired government policy and action can be obtained. Conversely, these operations often include actions designed to neutralize the politicians who promote undesirable local government policy regarding communism.

Although political-action operations after World War II began with electoral funding of anti-communist political parties in France and Italy in the late 1940s, they are now prevalent in the underdeveloped countries where economic and social conditions create a favourable climate for communist advance. The obvious human elements in political-action operations are political parties, politicians and military leaders, although agents in other PP operations including labour, student and youth, and' media are often brought to bear on specific political-action targets.

In order to obtain political intelligence as well as to develop relationships with potential political-action agents, most stations have continuing programmes for cultivating local politicians from opposition as well as from government parties. Making acquaintances in local politics is not usually difficult because CIA officers under diplomatic cover in embassies have natural access to their targets through cocktail parties, receptions, clubs and other mechanisms that bring them together with people of interest. Regular State Department Foreign Service Officers and Ambassadors as well may also facilitate the expansion of station political contacts through arranging introductions. When a local political contact is assessed favourably for station' goals, security clearance and operational approval is obtained from headquarters, and the station officer in contact with the target begins to provide financial support for political campaigns or for the promotion of the target's political group or party. Hopefully, almost surely, the target will use some of the money for personal expenses thereby developing a dependency on the station as a source of income. Eventually, if all goes well, the local politician will report confidential information on his own party and on his government, if he has a government post, and he will respond to reasonable station direction regarding the communist question. 

A station's liaison operations with local security services are also a valuable source of political-action assets. Because of frequent political instability in underdeveloped countries, the politicians in charge of the civilian and military security forces are in key positions for action as well as for information, and they are often drawn into an operational relationship with the station when they enter office merely by allowing ongoing liaison operations to continue. They are subjected to constant assessment by the station for use in political action and when deemed appropriate they may be called upon for specific tasks. Financial support is also available for furthering their political careers and for a continuing relationship once they leave the ministry. 

As final arbiters of political conflicts in so many countries, military leaders are major targets for recruitment. They are contacted by station officers in a variety of ways, sometimes simply through straightforward introduction by US military attaches or the personnel of US Military Assistance Missions. Sometimes the liaison developed between the Agency and local intelligence services can be used for making these contacts. Again CIA officers can make contact with those military officers of other countries who come to the US for training. As in the case of politicians, most Agency stations have a continual programme for the development of local military leaders, both for the collection of intelligence and for possible use in political action. 

The political actions actually undertaken by the Agency are almost as varied as politics itself. High on the list of priorities is the framing of Soviet officials in diplomatic or commercial missions in order to provoke their expulsion. Politicians working for the Agency are expected to take an active part in working for expulsion of 'undesirables'. Similarly, where the Soviet Union tries to extend its diplomatic or commercial activities, our politicians are expected to use their influence to oppose such moves. They are also expected to take a hard line against their own nationals engaged in left-wing or communist activities. In the last of these instances success means the proscription of the parties, the arrest or exile of their leaders, the closure of their offices, publications and bookstores, the prohibition of their demonstrations, etc. Such large-scale programmes call for action both by anticommunist movements and by national governments—where possible the Agency likes to use the same political-action agents for both purposes. 

But it is not just a matter of financing and guiding local politicians. In situations regarded as dangerous to the US, the Agency will conduct national election operations through the medium of an entire political party. It will finance candidates who are both 'witting' and 'unwitting'. Such multi-million-dollar operations may begin a year or more before an election is due and will include massive propaganda and public-relations campaigns, the building of numerous front organizations and funding mechanisms (often resident US businessmen), regular polls of voters, the formation of' goon-squads' to intimidate the opposition, and the staging of provocations and the circulation of rumours designed to discredit undesirable candidates. Funds are also available for buying votes and vote counters as well. 

If a situation can be more effectively retrieved for US interests by unconstitutional methods or by coup d'etat, that too may be attempted. Although the Agency usually plays the anti-communist card in order to foster a coup, gold bars and sacks of currency are often equally effective. In some cases a timely bombing by a station agent, followed by mass demonstrations and finally by intervention by military leaders in the name of the restoration of order and national unity, is a useful course. Agency political operations were largely responsible for coups after this pattern in Iran in 1953 and in the Sudan in 1958. 

Paramilitary Operations 
At times the political situation in a given country cannot be retrieved fast or effectively enough through other types of PP operations such as political action. In these cases the Agency engages in operations on a higher level of conflict which may include military operations—although these should not be seen as US-sponsored. These unconventional warfare operations are called paramilitary operations. The Agency has the charter from the National Security Council for US government unconventional warfare although the military services also sustain a paramilitary capability in case of general war. These operations seem to hold a special fascination, calling to mind as heroism, resistance, guerrilla warfare, secret parachute jumps behind the lines. Camp Peary is a major Agency training base for paramilitary operations. 

The need for getting agents into denied areas like certain parts of the Soviet Union, China and other communist countries, is satisfied in part by illegal infiltration by land, sea or air. The agents, usually natives of the denied area, are given proper clothing, documentation and cover stories and, if infiltrating by land, may be required to pass secretly through heavily guarded borders. Training in border crossing is given in a restricted area of Camp Peary where a mile or so of simulated communist borders is operated with fences, watch-towers, dogs, alarms and patrols. Maritime infiltration involves the use of a mother ship, usually a freighter operated by an Agency cover shipping company which approaches to within a few miles of the shore landing-site. An intermediate craft, often a souped-up outboard, leaves the mother ship and approaches to perhaps a mile off the shore where a rubber boat with a small silent outboard is inflated to carry the infiltration team to the beach. The rubber boat and auxiliary equipment is buried near the beach for use later in escape while the intermediate craft returns to the mother ship. Infiltration by air requires black overflights for which the Agency has unmarked long- and short-range aircraft including the versatile Helio Courier that can be used in infil-exfil operations with landings as well as parachute drops. Restricted areas of Camp Peary along the York River are used for maritime training and other parts of the base serve as landing-sites and drop zones. 

Once safely infiltrated to a denied area, a lone agent or a team may be required to perform a variety of jobs. Frequently an infiltration team's mission is the caching of weapons, communications equipment or sabotage materials for later retrieval by a different team which will use them. Or, an infiltration team may perform sabotage through the placing of incendiary devices or explosives at a target-site timed to go off days, weeks or even months later. Sabotage weapons include oil and gasoline contaminates for stopping vehicles, contaminates for jamming printing- presses, limpets for sinking ships, explosive and incendiary compounds that can be moulded and painted to look like bread, lamps, dolls or stones. The sabotage instructors, or 'burn and blow boys', have staged impressive demonstrations of their capabilities, some of which are ingeniously designed so as to leave little trace of a cause. Aside from sabotage, an infiltration team may be assigned targets to photograph or the loading or unloading of dead drops (concealed places for hiding film, documents or small containers). Escape may be by the same route as entry or by an entirely different method. 

The Economic Warfare Section of the PP staff is a sub-section under Paramilitary Operations because its mission includes the sabotage of key economic activities in a target country and the denial of critical imports, e.g. petroleum. Contamination of an export agricultural product or associated material (such as sacks destined for the export of Cuban sugar), or fouling the bearings of tractors, trucks or buses destined for a target country may be undertaken if other efforts to impede undesired trade fail. As Economic Warfare is undertaken in order to aggravate economic conditions in a target country, these operations include in addition to sabotage, the use of propaganda, labour, youth, student and other mass organizations under CIA control to restrict trade by a friendly country of items needed in the target economy. US companies can also be called upon to restrict supply of selected products voluntarily, but local station political-action assets are usually more effective for this purpose. 

Also coordinated in the Paramilitary section of the PP staff is the effort to maintain Agency supplies of weapons used in support of irregular military forces. Although the Air and Maritime Support section of the staff supervises standing Agency operations to supply insurgents (Air America and Civil Air Transport in the Far East, for example) additional resources such as aircraft can be obtained from the Defense Department. These operations included the Guatemalan invasion in 1954 (aptly given the cryptonym LCSUCCESS); Tibetan resistance against the Chinese in 1958-9 and the rebellion against the Sukarno government in Indonesia in 1957-8; current training and support of irregular forces in South Vietnam and Laos; and increasing sabotage and paramilitary operations against the Castro government in Cuba. Leaflet drops as part of the propaganda aspect of paramilitary operations are also arranged through the Air and Maritime Support section. 

Closely related to paramilitary operations are the disruptive activities known as militant action. Through organization and support of 'goon squads' sometimes composed of off-duty policemen, for example, or the militant sections of friendly political parties, stations attempt to intimidate communists and other extreme leftists by breaking up their meetings and demonstrations. The Technical Services staff of the DDP makes a variety of weapons and devices for these purposes. Horrible smelling liquids in small glass vials can be hurled into meeting halls. A fine clear powder can be sprinkled in a meeting-place becoming invisible after settling but having the effect of tear-gas when stirred up by the later movement of people. An incendiary powder can be moulded around prepared tablets and when ignited the combination produces ample quantities of smoke that attacks the eyes and respiratory system much more strongly than ordinary tear-gas. A tasteless substance can be introduced to food that causes exaggerated body colour. And a few small drops of a clear liquid stimulates the target to relaxed, uninhibited talk. Invisible itching powder can be placed on steering wheels or toilet seats, and a slight smear of invisible ointment causes a serious burn to skin on contact. Chemically processed tobacco can be added to cigarettes and cigars to produce respiratory ailments. 

Our training in PP operations includes constant emphasis on the desirability of obtaining reportable intelligence information from agents engaged in what are essentially action (as opposed to collection) operations. A well-run action operation, in fact, can produce intelligence of extremely good quality whether the agents are student, labour or political leaders. Justification for continuing PP operations in Project Renewals includes references to the operation's value in strictly collection activities as well as effectiveness in achieving action goals. No action agent, therefore, can be allowed to neglect the intelligence by-product of his operation, although the action agent may have to be eased into the intelligence reporting function because of the collaborative nature of his early relationship with the Agency. Nevertheless with a little skill even leaders of some rank can be manipulated into collecting information by letting them know indirectly that financial support for them is based partly on satisfaction of intelligence reporting requirements. 

The funding of psychological and paramilitary projects is a complex business. Project Outlines (see p. 50) are prepared either in the station or at headquarters, depending on which of these is proposing or running the operation. Included in this, apart from those elements already mentioned for FI projects, will be a statement on the need for coordination with other US government agencies such as the State Department or the Department of Defense. Where appropriate further reports are attached giving greater detail on finances, personnel, training, supply and cover mechanisms. 

Operational progress reports are required each trimester in the case of routine operations, but such reports may be more frequent in special cases. Intelligence received as a result of p p operations is processed in the same way as that which comes from FI operations. 

Funding action operations, especially those involving labour, student, youth or other organizations is a perpetual problem. Under certain circumstances it can be done through foundations of one sort or another which have been created as fronts for the Agency, but before this, or any other, method can be employed there first has to be a decision about the level at which the funds should be passed. If money is to be put into an international organization like WAY, for example, then it might be possible to do this through an American organization affiliated to it. The money can then be disguised as a donation from that organization. In other circumstances it might be possible to supply the money through a 'cutout', that is, through a person who can claim that the money is either a donation on his own account or from his business. If this system is used the money is sometimes paid by the 'cutout' to a US organization affiliated to the international group for whom the money is finally intended. 

If it is paid direct then it is usual for the secretary-general or the finance committee chairman of the organization in question to be a 'witting' agent. The decision about the method to be used is subject to several considerations. First the matter of security and cover is considered; second comes the question of which method would best ensure that the recipient or recipients will then do what they have been paid for. Thus funds become a very effective method of guiding an action agent. When cover foundations or companies are used for funding they may be chartered in the US or in countries such as Lichtenstein, the Bahamas and Panama, where commercial secrecy is protected and governmental controls are minimal. 

Camp Peary, Virginia May 1960 
The practical exercises are more pleasant now that spring has arrived. Except that we pick up hordes of ticks during the paramilitary training. We have had training in evasion and escape and border crossing—also night exercises in maritime infiltrations and air drops. At the ranges we have firing sessions with a variety of pistols, rifles and sub-machine-guns. In July, after the regular JOT training course ends, there will be a three-month specialized course in paramilitary operations. Ten or fifteen of the class have volunteered for the course and afterwards they'll be assigned to operations already underway against Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. 

The instructor who was my nationalistic political leader in the FI exercise became a wild man in the political-action case. He went around without my knowledge trying to recruit colleagues to overthrow the government and telling them he was working for me in the US Embassy. The word got back to the Ambassador (another instructor) and I had to convince him not to send me home. Then I paid the agent a generous termination bonus and picked up with one of his party subordinates. 

Still, we have had a serious upheaval in the JOT class. None of us is quite sure whether this is a training exercise or real or partly both. The training staff has been ranting and raving, both in individual sessions with advisors and in the classroom and pit sessions, that we aren't taking the work seriously enough. They cancelled a couple of week-ends off and we all had to stay here and practice report writing. Morale among the JOT'S is down and resentment against the staff gets higher every day. Four of the outstanding trainees have quit—two of them in order to take appointments as Foreign Service Officers with the State Department. 

The problem grew out of the way most of us handled the practical exercises with the political-action agent—practically all of us were crucified in the criticism sessions for not having developed proper control over the agent before moving into sensitive assignments. The instructors accused us of adopting whimsical attitudes—what they call derisively the 'cowboy approach'. Besides agent-control failure, the staff is down on us for not taking pains with tradecraft in the practical exercises. A couple of weeks ago several teams got arrested while photographing a huge chemical plant about twenty miles from here—they were caught by security patrols, turned over to the police, and then had to be bailed out through the base administration office. It was supposed to be a clandestine photography assignment in a denied area and those guys climbed over the fence and started snapping like they were at the beach in August. 

The extra night sessions in tradecraft are supposed to emphasize the dangers in taking shortcuts on how clandestine operations are performed—as opposed to what is done (FI, CI and PP operations). Tradecraft is all the techniques and tools of the trade used to keep a secret operation secret. The tradecraft one selects depends on a correct analysis of the operational environment—the set of conditions that determine the degree of clandestinity needed, including the capabilities of local services, and the strength of the local target organizations against which our operations are directed. The more relaxed the operational environment, the more simple and uncomplicated the tradecraft and the more mileage obtained from each CIA officer. 

Tradecraft is used to keep an operation secure and free from discovery because, among many reasons, people's lives are often at stake. The instructors keep driving home the importance of care to protect the agent, and they toss out example after example of fatal and near-fatal consequences of poor tradecraft. The techniques include how to select a meeting-site, counter-surveillance before and after clandestine meetings, the use of disguise, safety and danger signals before meetings, concealment devices, precautions in the use of telephones, ways to counter possible audio penetration of meeting-sites, the use of cutouts or go betweens to avoid frequent direct contact between agents and CIA officers, and communication techniques. 

Cover is closely related to operational security because it is the lie established to make a secret operation appear to have a legitimate purpose. A foundation may serve as a cover funding mechanism. A shipping company may serve as cover for maritime operations. An airline may serve as cover for air support to paramilitary operations. A legitimate business activity may serve as ostensible employment for a CIA officer in a foreign country. The State Department, Defense Department and the International Cooperation Administration may also serve as cover employment for CIA officers. 

Communications with agents is perhaps the most crucial element of tradecraft and operational security. Personal meetings between CIA officers and their agents are often the most efficient type of communication but they are also the most dangerous and require elaborate security precautions and cover. Meetings can take place in hotels or apartments obtained for this purpose (safe houses), vehicles, subways, parks, isolated woods, tourist attractions. Normal communications may also be through cutouts and dead drops (hiding-places like the hollows of trees where messages can be placed). Brush contacts, such as the momentary contact for passage of a report, can be used in public lavatories or pedestrian tunnels where motion is uninterrupted and hostile surveillance difficult. 

Communications with agents in denied areas (Iron Curtain countries) where counter-intelligence forces are most effective, is often through encoded radio transmissions to the agent, which can be heard on ordinary home radios—while the agents' reports are made in invisible writing and sent to a drop address in a non communist country through the international mails. In such cases personal meetings would be restricted to emergencies or when the agent is able to travel to a non-communist country. Elaborate signal systems can be established to indicate safety, danger, discovery, loading or unloading a dead drop, request for meeting, postponement of meeting. 

In every clandestine operation some form of training is usually involved, from simple reminders on security precautions to highly specialized instructions in the use of complicated technical equipment. In FI operations, continuous training is needed for refinement of the agent's reporting in such areas as separation of fact from rumour and opinion, specification of sources, correct dates, places and names, and spelling and format in written reports. The Office of Training has a staff of multilingual training officers in its Covert Training Branch who travel the world giving specialized operational training to agents on station request. The Technical Services Division personnel are also heavily engaged in agent training as is the Office of Communications which is in charge of training agents in the use of radio equipment and cryptographic materials. 

Shortcuts in tradecraft on the practical exercises is not the main reason for the training staff's toughening up. The real reason is attitudes—they want us to get as serious about all this as they are, and they are focusing on agent-control factors in order to drive this home. Maybe we'll all have to become heavies in order to pass the course. 

The importance of agent control is paramount because agent control means the ways an agent is made to do what the CIA wants him to do. Each agent is different and not everyone is always willing to do exactly what we want him to do—sometimes he has to be coaxed, sometimes cajoled, sometimes threatened. 

'Agent' is a word that is used to signify the people who work at the end of the line. Usually they are foreigners and the instruments through which operations are executed. The word 'agent' is never used to describe the CIA career employee who functions in a station as an operations officer—more commonly known as a case officer. We are all being trained to be case officers, not agents. 

There are different types of agents in CIA parlance. Many operations are structured under the leadership of a single agent to whom other agents respond either as a group working together or in separate, compartmented activities. The single agent who runs an operation under station direction is known as the principal agent and the others as secondary or sub-agents. The chief of a fiveman surveillance team is a principal agent while the foot-men and drivers are sub-agents. An action agent is a person who actually provides secret information, e.g. a spy in a communist party, whereas a support agent performs tasks related to an operation but is not the source of intelligence, e.g. the person who rents an apartment for meetings between an action agent and the station case officer. 

Case officers must constantly be searching for new agents to improve ongoing operations and to mount new, better operations. Agent spotting, therefore, is the activity whereby potential new agents are brought under consideration. Agent development is the manner in which a potential agent is cultivated and tested while agent assessment is the evaluation of whether and how the potential agent can be used effectively. If, after weighing all available data, a positive decision is reached for recruitment, the formal clearance procedure is completed through the Headquarters Operational Approval system. Agent recruitment can take many forms, often determined by the type of operation for which the agent is needed and by the history of agent development. 

If your objective is to penetrate a leftist political party, the first thing to do is to probe for a weak spot in the organization. You might bug the phone of a leading party member and find out he's playing around with the party's funds. In that case, perhaps he can be blackmailed. Or perhaps one of your agents plays on the same soccer team as a party member, or goes out with his sister. The agent might learn something about the party member that seems to make him a good prospect. Then you move in and make an offer. 

On certain occasions recruitments are made in the name of the CIA, especially when involving US citizens and high-level targets for PP operations. But often recruitment can be effected without explicit sponsorship with the target simply expected to assume that the CIA is the sponsor. Thousands of policemen all over the world, for instance, are shadowing people for the CIA without knowing it. They think they're working for their own police departments, when, in fact, their chief may be a CIA agent who's sending them out on CIA jobs and turning their information over to his CIA control. On other occasions false flag recruitments are more appropriate so that the target believes a service or organization other than the CIA is the sponsor, perhaps his own government, or even Peking or Havana. You don't let the recruit know he'll be working for the United States, because if he knew that, he might not consent to do it. Coercive recruitment of a communist party member in an underdeveloped country (under a threat made to appear to come from a local security service) may be more effective to start with than revealing CIA sponsorship. Later, when financial and other means of control have been established, the recruited agent may be brought gradually to the knowledge of true sponsorship. 

In nearly all cases involving agents aware of their CIA sponsorship, a direct, personal relationship is established between the agent and the case officer. Since control of agents is so much more effective by persuasion than by threat, the development of personal rapport by the case officer with the agent receives constant emphasis from our instructors. On the other hand, agent-handling officers are expected always to maintain the upper hand and to avoid dangers that can give an agent a handle against him, or any of the different varieties of' falling in love with your agent'. 

However, as almost all operations depend upon money, delicate treatment of financial matters can be used as a constant control factor without insulting the agent by treating him as a mercenary. In rich countries a man might become an agent for ideological reasons, but in poor countries it's usually because he's short of cash. A man with a hungry family to support will do almost anything for money. The amounts paid to agents depends on local conditions. In a poor country $100 a month could get you an ordinary agent. In many countries $700 a month could get you a cabinet minister. Payment is made in cash—you can't pay spies by check. At the end of every month officers deliver pay envelopes to their agents around town; they meet in cars or safe houses. Agents should be made to count the cash in front of the officer so that any mistakes can be corrected immediately. 

Firm guidance of agents, especially those involved in PP operations, where a wide variety of alternatives is usually presented, depends largely on the personalities of the agent and the case officer, and the twin requirements of control and rapport present continuing problems. Capability for detached manipulation of human beings is a cardinal virtue of the CIA case officer and nobody makes any bones about it. 

Agent termination and disposal is the way an agent is unloaded when he's no longer needed or wanted. It can be touchy and complicated. Much depends on whether the termination is friendly or hostile and the reasons for it. Once the principle of terminating an operational relationship is established with an agent, the procedure usually becomes one of negotiating a financial settlement and quitclaim. The financial settlement may depend ostensibly on past services rendered by the agent, but under the surface both sides often negotiate on the basis of the damage a dissatisfied agent could cause if termination were not to his liking. Again the control exercised by case officers over the agent during the entire period of employment will reflect on termination negotiations. Efforts by terminated agents to get back on the payroll after having spent their termination bonus are not uncommon. When asked just how drastic agent termination and disposal might become in difficult circumstances, the instructor declined comment without disallowing 'final solutions'. 

Camp Peary, Virginia June 1960 
This month the emphasis has been on technical operations and we have had to incorporate these skills in the practical exercises, including the training of our 'agents'. The heat from the training staff over tradecraft and agent control is still on, but we're getting used to it now. It looks as if they're trying to build up to a peak of tension for the final week of practical exercises—five or six days of intense operations in the same war-games scenario either in Baltimore or New York. But the past weeks have mostly been dedicated to long hours in laboratories learning basic skills in the four main technical functions: audio, photography, flaps and seals, and secret writing. 

Audio operations include telephone tapping and all the different techniques of bugging. The most common and secure way to tap telephones is through connections made in the telephone exchange—sometimes by a unilateral agent but usually through a request to the local liaison service. But in certain circumstances telephone intercepts 'off the line' (meaning connections made somewhere between the target telephone and the exchange) are more advisable. There are also small transmitters that can be placed inside a telephone and TSD  has developed a pencil-sized transmitter that can be attached to telephone wires outdoors for reception in a listening post (LP) not far away. 

Telephones and telephone lines can also be valuable for full audio penetration of the rooms where the telephones are located. This technique calls for the activation of the telephone mouthpiece so that it will pick up all conversations in the room, even when the telephone is cradled, and transmit these conversations down the telephone lines. This technique is called the 'hot mike'. 

The simplest and most dependable audio operation is the 'mike and wire' job, consisting of a concealed microphone with a wire leading to a listening-post where an amplifier and recorder are located. But this technique is also insecure because the wire can be followed and unpleasant surprises given to the LP keepers. So the mike and wire can be connected to a hidden low-powered radio transmitter for reception in an LP protected by being separated from the bugging equipment. Transmitters can be connected to house current or operated with batteries. 

Switches on transmitters are often desirable especially in audio operations against the Soviets, Chinese and satellite governments because of their regular counter-audio sweeps in which wide-range receivers are used to detect radio transmissions. Visiting sweep teams pose as diplomatic couriers sometimes, and transmitters have to be shut down when they are in town. This necessitates constant reporting from station to station on the movements of diplomatic couriers and suspected sweep officers. 

The carrier-current technique is similar to the regular transmitter installation except that the transmission is made through electric power lines instead of through the air. This technique is convenient for easy switching and has an unlimited power supply, but LP location is complicated because the transmissions will not jump electric power transformers. 

Installation of audio devices often requires drilling through walls, floors or ceilings, for which TSD has demonstrated a large variety of drills, some with diamond bits, but drilling isn't recommended for the inexperienced. Even TSD technicians have been known to make the irreparable mistake of drilling large holes all the way through the wall or ceiling of a target room. Reducing the size of drilling equipment in order to reach the final pinhole takes fine calculation and infinite patience. Audio installations often require concealment afterwards, for which TSD has their Plaster Patching and Paint Matching Kit. This consists of super-quick-drying plaster, some fifty colour chips with mixing formulas for colour approximation, plus odourless super-quick-drying paint. 

Listening-post equipment for telephone taps usually consists of a Revere (ape-recorder and an actuator/dial recorder that starts the recorder when a telephone rings or when it is uncradled. Numbers called from the target telephone are also recorded on a paper tape. LP equipment for other audio operations may include FM radio receivers such as the military-supplied SRR-4 with a 50-200 megacycle range, headphones and a variety of tape-recorders. When switches are used the LP has a suitcase-package radio transmitter that transmits one frequency to turn a switch on, and another frequency to turn a switch off. But switches haven't been perfected yet and they cause problems by jamming in the on or the off positions. 

The research and development programmes of the TSD Audio Branch are dedicated to improving equipment like the switch systems and to development of sub-miniature microphones and transmitters for casting into innocuous objects like light-switches and electrical outlets—also to the development of new techniques. One new technique is the activation of cradled telephones (the 'hot mike') by sending a current down the line to the telephone without the need to make a complicated installation in the telephone itself. Another fascinating technique under development is the use of infra-red beams that can be bounced off windows and that carry back to the receiving equipment the conversations being held in the room where the target window is located. This technique captures the conversations from the vibrations of voices against the windowpanes. 

Still another new technique involves the use of cavity microphones like the one discovered in the eagle's beak of the Great Seal given by the Soviets to the American Ambassador in Moscow and which he placed in his office. The cavity microphone is a simple plastic spoon-shaped object that can be activated by a radio wave of a certain frequency. The spoon reacts by transmitting another radio signal that carries the voice vibrations from the room to an appropriate receiver. That Soviet-made Great Seal was included in a display of audio equipment with the admission that the Soviets are far ahead in this particular field. 

In photography we have learned to use a variety of cameras for general purpose and documents. 35-mm cameras like the Exacta, Leica and Pentax are the favourites of the instructors, although the tiny Minox is more secure for agents. We've been practising also with clandestine photography using cameras that can be concealed in a briefcase or innocuous package—even underneath a shirt with the lens opening disguised as a tie clasp. Darkroom training-sessions have concentrated on selection of films, paper and developing chemicals. In the practical exercises each of us incorporated both document and outdoor photography with developing and printing in the dark-rooms. 

The really boring technical skill is Flaps and Seals (F & S). This is the surreptitious opening and closing of letters and other containers such as diplomatic pouches. For a week we practised with hot plate, tea kettle and the variously shaped ivory tools fashioned· from piano keys and used for gently prying open envelope flaps. But the most effective technique for letters is the flat-bed steam table (about the size of a briefcase) that contains a heating element encased in foam rubber. Steam is created by placing a damp blotter on the top of the heated table, and most letters open in a matter of seconds after being placed on the blotter. Careful resealing with cotton swab and clear glue completes the process. 

Secret writing (SW) is the communications system used for concealing or making invisible a secret message on an otherwise innocent letter or other cover document. SW systems are categorized as wet systems, carbons and microdot. The wet systems use chemicals, usually disguised as pills, which dissolve in water to form a clear 'ink'. The secret message is written on a sheet of paper, preferably high-quality bond, using the end of a wooden swab stick that has been tapered with a razor-blade and soaked in the 'ink' to reach the proper tip flexibility. Before and after writing the message the paper must be rubbed with a soft cloth on both sides in all four directions to help conceal the writing within the texture of the paper. The paper with the secret message is then steamed and pressed in a thick book and after drying, if no trace of the message can be seen under ultra-violet and glancing light, a cover letter or innocuous message is written. 

Carbon systems consist of ordinary bond paper that has been impregnated with chemicals. The carbon is placed on top of the message sheet and the secret message is written on a sheet placed on top of the carbon. Applying the proper pressure when writing the secret message with a pencil on the top sheet transfers the invisible chemical from the carbon to the message sheet on the bottom. The cover letter is then written on the opposite side of the message sheet from the secret message.

On receipt of an SW letter, an agent applies a corresponding chemical developer, rolling the developer with a cotton swab on to the page, and soon the secret message appears. 

The microdot system involves a small camera kit with which a letter-sized page can be photographed on an area of film no larger than the dot of an 'i'. The microdot is glued over the dot of the 'i' or a period of a cover letter. Although the equipment for microdots is incriminating, the microdots themselves are very secure and practically impossible to discover. On the other hand they require very tedious processing and can only be read with a microscope. 

Secret messages can be written either in clear text or encoded for greater security. The SW branch of TSD has a continuous intelligence collection programme on the postal censorship procedures in most foreign countries for protective procedures in SW operations. The operational environment in which the agent works determines the other details of SW correspondence: whether the SW cover letter will be posted nationally or internationally, to a post-box or a support agent serving as an accommodation address, with false or true return addresses or none at all, the content of the cover letters, signals to indicate safety or the absence of which could indicate that the writing is being done under control of a hostile service. 

The SW branch also has a technique for' lifting's  from suspect correspondence. The process involves placing a suspect letter in a letter press with steamed sheets on either side. By cranking down pressure enough of the chemicals will come off on the steamed sheets to allow for testing with other chemicals for development. The suspect correspondence can be returned to the mails with no traces of tampering. 

The TSD instructors have also demonstrated some of their techniques in safecracking, surreptitious entry and lock-picking. But these are such highly specialized activities that TSD technicians almost always travel to countries when these talents are needed. As ordinary case officers we will need only the basic skills and enough knowledge of the really special techniques to know how to plan and when to ask for TSD technicians. 

A few weeks ago I was discharged from the Air Force. Now I'm a civilian employee of the Department of the Air Force, as I was when I came to Washington three years ago. The cover unit is another bogus Pentagon office with the major, the colonel and all that routine. But I'm keeping my commission (I'm a First Lieutenant now) by joining an Agency Air Force reserve unit. This is a cover unit too. 

Last week Ferguson came down from headquarters and he opened his session with me with a speech on the increasing demand in the Western Hemisphere Division for new case officers—apparently Castro and the Cuban Revolution are causing more and more problems all over Latin America. My reaction is disappointment, what with all my old fantasies of being a cloak-and-dagger operative in Vienna or Hong Kong. But Ferguson said I could ask for a transfer if after six months I still don't like it. It looks like ten or fifteen of us are destined for the Western Hemisphere Division so maybe it won't be so bad. Besides, all those hours in the language lab may at last be useful.

next Part 2....89s
Washington DC July 1960



Notes: 
1. See Chart 1, p. 630. 
2. Later known as the 54-12 Group, the Special Group, the 303 Group, the Forty Committee. 
3. Later renamed the United States Intelligence Board. 
4. Renamed in 1961 the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. 
5. See Chart 2. 
6. See Chart 3. 
7. See Chart 4. 
8. See pp. 319-20. 
9. See Chart 5. 
10. Predecessor of the Agency for International Development (AID). 
11. Later known as the International Student Conference (ISC). 
12. Later renamed the World Confederation of Labor.

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