Part 5: The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence...The Clandestine Mentality

The CIA and the 
Cult of Intelligence
By Victor Marchetti 
and John D. Marks
EIGHT: 

The Clandestine Mentality 

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. 

—JUSTICE BRANDEIS, 1928 

The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we too are honorable men devoted to her service. 

—CIA DIRECTOR HELMS, 1971 

THE man who masterminded and oversaw the CIA's clandestine operations in Indochina during much of the 1960s was William Colby. He is a trim, wellgroomed Princeton and Columbia Law School graduate who, if he were taller, might be mistaken for a third Bundy brother. He started in the intelligence business during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services. His field assignments included parachuting into German-occupied France and Norway to work with the anti-Nazi underground movements, during which he showed a remarkable talent for clandestine work. After the war he joined the newly formed CIA and rose rapidly through its ranks, becoming an expert on the Far East. From 1959 until 1962 he served as the CIA's chief of station in Saigon. In 1962 he was named head of the Far East Division of the Clandestine Services. 

In this position Colby presided over the CIA's rapidly expanding programs in Southeast Asia. Under his leadership (but always with White House approval) the agency's "secret" war in Laos was launched, and more than 30,000 Meo and other tribal warriors were organized into the CIA's own L'Armee Clandestine. Colby's officers and agents directed—and on occasion participated in—the battles against the Pathet Lao, in bombing operations by the CIA's proprietary company Air America, and in commando-type raids into China and North Vietnam, well before Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. 

Colby seemed to keep the secret operation always under tight control. His colleagues in the CIA marveled at his ability to run all the agency's activities in Laos with no more than forty or fifty career CIA officers in the field. There were, to be sure, several thousand other Americans supporting the CIA effort, but these were soldiers of fortune or pilots under contract to the agency, not career men. From the CIA's point of view, the war in Laos was cheap (costing the agency only $20 to $30 million a year) and well managed.[1] The number of Americans involved was small enough that a relatively high degree of secrecy could be maintained. In contrast to the tens of thousands of Laotians who died in the war, few Americans were killed, and those who were casualties were not CIA career officers but rather mercenaries, contract officers, and personnel of the agency's air proprietaries. The agency considered Laos to be a very successful operation. And Colby received much of the credit for keeping things under control. 

The agency's clandestine activities in Vietnam were not so well organized, concealed, or successful as its Laotian operation. In the mid-1960s the CIA was swept along with the rest of the U.S. government into launching huge programs designed to support the war effort. The agency would have preferred to run relatively small, highly secret operations (or to have had complete control of covert action), but the stiffer and stiffer demands of the Johnson administration made this impossible. Thus, if the President wanted a larger contribution from the CIA, the CIA would contribute. In 1965 Colby, still stationed in Washington, oversaw the founding in Vietnam of the agency's Counter Terror (CT) program. In 1966 the agency became wary of adverse publicity surrounding the use of the word "terror" and changed the name of the CT teams to the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). 

Wayne Cooper, a former Foreign Service officer who spent almost eighteen months as an advisor to South Vietnamese internal-security programs, described the operation: "It was a unilateral American program, never recognized by the South Vietnamese government. CIA representatives recruited, organized, supplied, and directly paid CT teams, whose function was to use Viet Cong techniques of terror— assassination, abuses, kidnappings and intimidation— against the Viet Cong leadership." Colby also supervised the establishment of a network of Provincial Interrogation Centers. One of these centers was constructed, with agency funds, in each of South Vietnam's forty-four provinces. 

An agency operator or contract employee directed each center's operations, much of which consisted of torture tactics against suspected Vietcong, such torture usually carried out by Vietnamese nationals. In 1967 Colby's office devised another program, eventually called Phoenix, to coordinate an attack against the Vietcong infrastructure among all Vietnamese and American police, intelligence, and military units. Again CIA money was the catalyst. According to Colby's own testimony in 1971 before a congressional committee, 20,587 suspected Vietcong were killed under Phoenix in its first two and a half years.[2] Figures provided by the South Vietnamese government credit Phoenix with 40,994 VC kills. 

Also in 1967, President Johnson sent Robert Komer, a former agency employee who had joined the White House staff, to Vietnam to head up all the civilian and military pacification programs. In November of that year, while Komer was in Washington for consultation, the President asked him if there was anything he needed to carry out his assignment. Komer responded that he certainly could use the services of Bill Colby as his deputy. The President replied that Komer could draft anybody he chose. A year later Colby succeeded Komer as head of the pacification program, with the rank of ambassador. The longtime clandestine officer had ostensibly resigned from the CIA to become a State Department employee. 

One of Colby's principal functions was to strengthen the Vietnamese economy in order to improve the lot of the average Vietnamese peasant, and thereby make him less susceptible to Vietcong appeals and more loyal to the Thieu government. To win over the peasants, Colby insisted that corruption within the Saigon government had to be greatly reduced. At one point he even proposed a systematic campaign called the "Honor the Nation" program, which was to be an attack on illegal practices at all levels of Vietnamese society. At that time Colby was well aware that black-market trafficking in money was one of the biggest corruption problems in Vietnam. All U.S. personnel in Vietnam were under strict orders not to buy Vietnamese piasters on the black market, and a number of Americans had either been court martialed by the military or fired by their civilian agencies for violating these orders. 

But Colby also knew that for many years the CIA had been obtaining tens of millions of dollars in piasters on the black market, either in Hong Kong or in Saigon. In this way the agency could get two to three times as much buying power for its American dollars. Additionally, the Clandestine Services claimed, black-market plasters were untraceable and thus ideal for secret operations. [3] Although from a strict budgetary point of view the agency's currency purchases were sound fiscal policy, they directly violated both Vietnamese law and U.S. official policy. Moreover, the purchases helped to keep alive the black market which the U.S. government was professedly working to stamp out. 

During the mid-1960s while Colby was still in Washington, the Bureau of the Budget learned that the CIA budget for Vietnam provided for dollar expenditures figured at the legal exchange rate. Since in truth the agency was buying its piasters on the black market, it actually had two to three times more piasters to spend in Vietnam than its budget showed. The Bureau of the Budget then insisted that all figures be listed at the actual black-market rate, so at least examiners of the agency's budget in Washington would have a true idea of how much money the CIA was spending. The bureau then also tried to cut U.S. government costs by having the CIA buy piasters for other agencies on the black market. The agency was unenthusiastic about this idea and managed to avoid doing it, not because massive black-market purchases would have negated the government's avowed efforts to support the piaster, but because the agency did not want the secrecy of its money exchange operations disturbed. 

Compared to other aspects of the Vietnam War, the CIA's use of the black market is not a major issue. It simply points up the fact that the CIA is not bound by the same rules that apply to the rest of the government. The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 makes this clear: "The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditures of Government."[4] 

Thus, a William Colby can, with no legal or ethical conflict, propose programs to end corruption in Vietnam while at the same time condoning the CIA's dubious money practices. And extending the concept of the agency's immunity to law and morals, a Colby can devise and direct terror tactics, secret wars, and the like, all in the name of democracy. This is the clandestine mentality: a separation of personal morality and conduct from actions, no matter how debased, which are taken in the name of the United States government and, more specifically, the Central Intelligence Agency. When Colby left his post as deputy ambassador to Vietnam in 1971, the CIA immediately "rehired" him, and Director Helms appointed him Executive Director-Comptroller, the number-three position in the agency. When James Schlesinger took over the agency in early 1973, he made Colby chief of the Clandestine Services. In May 1973, at the height of the personnel shake-ups caused by the Watergate affair, President Nixon moved Schlesinger to the Defense Department and named Colby to head the CIA. Thus, after about four months under the directorship of the outsider Schlesinger, control of the agency was again in the hands of a clandestine operator. 

Senator Harold Hughes, for one, expressed grave reservations about Colby's appointment as CIA Director in a Senate speech on August 1, 1973: "I am fearful of a man whose experience has been so largely devoted to clandestine operations involving the use of force and manipulation of factions in foreign governments. Such a man may become so enamored with these techniques that he loses sight of the higher purposes and moral constraints which should guide our country's activities abroad." 

Deeply embedded within the clandestine mentality is the belief that human ethics and social laws have no bearing on covert operations or their practitioners. The intelligence profession, because of its lofty "natural security" goals, is free from all moral restrictions. There is no need to wrestle with technical legalisms or judgments as to whether something is right or wrong. The determining factors in secret operations are purely pragmatic: Does the job need to be done? Can it be done? And can secrecy (or plausible denial) be maintained? 

One of the lessons learned from the Watergate experience is the scope of this amorality and its influence on the clandestine mentality. E. Howard Hunt claimed that his participation in the Watergate break-in and the other operations of the plumbers group was in "what I believed to be the ... the best interest of my country." In this instance, at least, we can accept Hunt as speaking sincerely. He was merely reflecting an attitude that is shared by most CIA operators when carrying out the orders of their superiors. Hunt expanded on this point when interrogated before a federal grand jury in April 1973 by Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert. 

SILBERT: Now while you worked at the White House, were you ever a participant or did you ever have knowledge of any other so-called "bag job" or entry operations? 

HUNT: No, sir. 

SILBERT: Were you aware of or did you participate in any other what might commonly be referred to as illegal activities? 

HUNT: Illegal? 

SILBERT: Yes, sir. 

HUNT: I have no recollection of any, no, sir. 

SILBERT: What about clandestine activities? 

HUNT: Yes, sir. 

SILBERT: All right. What about that?

HUNT: I'm not quibbling, but there's quite a difference between something that's illegal and something that's clandestine. 

SILBERT: Well, in your terminology, would the entry into Mr. Fielding's [Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist] office have been clandestine, illegal, neither or both? 

HUNT: I would simply call it an entry operation conducted under the auspices of competent authority. 

Within the CIA, similar activities are undertaken with the consent of "competent authority." The Watergate conspirators, assured that "national security" was at stake, did not question the legality or the morality of their methods; nor do most CIA operators. Hundreds if not thousands of CIA men have participated in similar operations, usually—but not always—in foreign countries; all such operations are executed in the name of "national security." The clandestine mentality not only allows it; it veritably wills it. In early October, 1969, the CIA learned through a secret agent that a group of radicals was about to hijack a plane in Brazil and escape to Cuba. This intelligence was forwarded to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and from there sent on an "eyes only" basis to Henry Kissinger at the White House and top officials of the State Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security Agency. Within a few days, on October 8, the same radicals identified in the CIA report commandeered at gunpoint a Brazilian commercial airliner with 49 people aboard, and after a refueling stop in Guyana, forced the pilot to fly to Havana. Neither the CIA nor the other agencies of the U.S. government which had advance warning of the radicals' plans moved to stop the crime from being committed, although at that time the official policy of the United States—as enunciated by the President— was to take all possible measures to stamp out aerial piracy. 

Afterwards, when officials of the State Department questioned their colleagues in the CIA on why preventive measures had not been taken to abort the hijacking, the agency's clandestine operators delayed more than a month before responding. During the interim, security forces in Brazil succeeded in breaking up that country's principal revolutionary group and killing its leader, Carlos Marighella. Shortly after the revolutionary leader's death on November 4, the CIA informally passed word back to the State Department noting that if any action had been taken to stop the October skyjacking, the agency's penetration of the radical movement might have been exposed and Marighella's organization could not have been destroyed. While it was never quite clear whether the agent who alerted the clandestine operators to the hijacking had also fingered Marighella, that was the impression the CIA tried to convey to the State Department. The agency implied it had not prevented the hijacking because to have done so would have lessened the chances of scoring the more important goal of "neutralizing" Marighella and his followers. To the CIA's clandestine operators, the end—wiping out the Brazilian radical movement—apparently had justified the means, thus permitting the hijacking to take place and needlessly endangering forty-nine innocent lives in the process. 

During the last twenty-five years American foreign policy has been dominated by the concept of containing communism; almost always the means employed in pursuit of "national security" have been justified by the end. Since the "free world" was deemed to be under attack by a determined enemy, sincere men in the highest government posts believed—and still do believe —that their country could not survive without resorting to the same distasteful methods employed by the other side. In recent years the intensity of the struggle has been reduced as monolithic communism has split among several centers of power; as a result, there have been tactical changes in America's conduct of foreign affairs. Yet the feeling remains strong among the nation's top officials, in the CIA and elsewhere, that America is responsible for what happens in other countries and that it has an inherent right—a sort of modern Manifest Destiny—to intervene in other countries' internal affairs. Changes may have occurred at the negotiating table, but not in the planning arena; intervention—either military or covert—is still the rule. 

To the clandestine operations of the CIA, nothing could be more normal than the use of "dirty tricks" to promote the U.S. national interest, as they and their agency determine it. In the words of former Clandestine Services chief Richard Bissell, CIA men "feel a higher loyalty and ... they are acting in obedience to that higher loyalty." They must be able to violate accepted standards of integrity and decency when the CIA's objectives so demand. Bissell admitted in a 1965 television interview that agency operators at times carried out actions which "were contrary to their moral precepts" but they believed "the morality of ... cold war is so infinitely easier than the morality of almost any kind of hot war that I never encountered this as a serious problem." 

Perhaps as a consequence of the confused morality that guides him, a clandestine operator is dedicated to the utmost secrecy. Convicted Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, who long worked with and for the agency, described these operators in a September 1972 New York Times interview: "They're anonymous men. They hate publicity; they get nervous with it. They don't want to be spoken of. They don't even want to be known or anything like that." And nearly always accompanying this passion for· secrecy comes an obsession with deception and manipulation. These traits, developed in the CIA's training programs, are essential elements for success in the operator's career. He learns that he must become expert at "living his cover," at pretending he is something he is not. Agency instructors grade the young operators on how well they can fool their colleagues. A standard exercise given to the student spies is for one to be assigned the task of finding out some piece of information about another. Since each trainee is expected to maintain a false identity and cover during the training period, a favorite way to coax out the desired information is to befriend the targeted trainee, to win his confidence and make him let down his guard. The trainee who gains the information receives a high mark; his exploited colleague fails the test. The "achievers" are those best suited, in the view of the agency, for convincing a foreign official he should become a traitor to his country; for manipulating that official, often against his will; and for "terminating" the agent when he has outlived his usefulness to the CIA. 

Operating with secrecy and deception gradually becomes second nature to the clandestine operator as his early training progresses and he moves into an actual field assignment. The same habits may at times carryover into his dealings with his colleagues and even his family. Most operators see no inconsistency between an upstanding private life and immoral or amoral work, and they would probably say that anyone who couldn't abide the dichotomy is "soft." The double moral standard has been so completely absorbed at the CIA that Allen Dulles once stated, "In my ten years with the Agency I only recall one case of many hundreds where a man who had joined the Agency felt some scruples about the activities he was asked to carry on." Even today Dulles' estimate would not be far off. 

As much as the operator believes in the rightness of his actions, he is forced to work in an atmosphere that is potentially demoralizing. He is quite often on the brink of the underworld, or even immersed in it, and he frequently turns to the least savory types to achieve his goals. Criminals are useful to him, and are often called upon by him, when he does not want to perform personally some particularly distasteful task or when he does not want to risk any direct agency involvement in his dirty work. And if the clandestine operator wants to use attractive young women to seduce foreign officials, he does not call on female CIA employees. Instead he hires local prostitutes, or induces foreign girls to assume the seductress's role, hoping to use his women to ferret information out of targeted opponents and to blackmail them into cooperating with the CIA. 

Other CIA men regularly deal with blackmarketeers to purchase "laundered" currency. The agency cannot very well subsidize a political party in South Vietnam or buy labor peace on the Marseilles docks with money that can be traced back to the CIA. Thus, CIA "finance officers" permanently assigned to Hong Kong, Beirut, and other international monetary centers frequently turn to the world's illegal money changers to support agency clandestine operations. "Sterile" weapons for CIA paramilitary activities are obtained in the same fashion from the munitions merchants who will provide arms to anyone able to pay the price. And when untraceable troops are needed to assist a CIA-sponsored revolution or counterrevolution, the agency will put out the word in such mercenary centers as Brussels, Kinshasa, and Saigon that it is hiring soldiers of fortune willing to support any cause for a price. Yet there are certain standards the CIA's clandestine operator must maintain in order to hold on to his job and the respect of his colleagues. By the agency's code, he is not supposed to profit personally from his activities. If he were involved in narcotics traffic for his own gain, he would probably be fired for having been "corrupted by the trade." But if the same CIA man were involved in narcotics traffic because he was using his narcotics connections to blackmail a Soviet official, he would be considered by his colleagues to be doing his work well. 

While the CIA has never trafficked in dope as a matter of official policy, its clandestine personnel have used this trade—as they have used almost every other criminal activity known to man—in the pursuit of their goals. In Laos the CIA hoped to defeat the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese (and, thus, "stop communism"); for that purpose, it was willing to supply guns, money, and training to the Meo tribe, the part of the Laotian population most eager to fight for the agency. The CIA was willing to overlook the fact that the Meos' primary cash crop was opium and that they continued to sell the drug during most of the years that they participated in the "secret" war as the "cutting edge" of the anticommunist force in Laos. While the planes of the CIA proprietary airline, Air America, were on occasion used to carry opium and while some of the highest military officers supported by the agency were also the kingpins of the drug trade, the agency could still claim that it did not officially sanction these activities. But not until the heroin traffic from Southeast Asia was perceived as a major American problem a few years ago did the CIA make any serious effort to curb the flow of the drug, for it mattered not what sort of people the Meo were—what mattered was what they were willing and able to do for the CIA. The agency would hire Satan himself as an agent if he could help guarantee the "national security." The key to a successful espionage operation is locating and using the right agent. There are seven basic areas of agent relations: spotting, evaluation, recruiting, testing, training, handling, and termination. Each deserves extended examination. 

Spotting: This is the process of identifying foreigners or other persons who might be willing to spy for the CIA. The agency operator mingles as much as possible with the native population in the country to which he is assigned, hoping to spot potential agents. He normally concentrates on officials in the local government, members of the military services, and representatives of the intelligence agencies of the host country. People in other professions, even if recruitable, usually do not have access to the kind of strategic or high-level information which the CIA is seeking. Most operators work out of the local U.S. embassy; their diplomatic cover allows a convenient approach to their target groups through the myriad of officials and social contacts that characterize the life of a diplomat, even a bogus one serving the CIA. Some agency officers pose as military men or other U.S. government representatives—officials of the AID, the USIA, and other agencies. In addition to official cover, the CIA sometimes puts officers under "deep cover" as businessmen, students, newsmen, or missionaries. 

The CIA operator is constantly looking for indications of vulnerability on the part of potential foreign agents. The indicators may come from a casual observation by the operator at a cocktail party, gossip picked up by his wife, suggestions from already recruited agents, or assistance furnished—wittingly or unwittingly—by a genuine American diplomat or businessman. The CIA operator receives instruction, based on studies made by agency specialists or American college professors under contract to the CIA, on what kinds of people are most susceptible to the intrigues and strategies of clandestine life. Obviously, the personality of the potential spy varies from country to country and case to case, but certain broad categories of preferable and susceptible agent types have been identified. The most sought-after informants are foreign officials who are dissatisfied with their country's policies and who look to the United States for guidance. 

People of this sort are much more likely to become loyal and dedicated agents than those whose primary motivation is monetary. Money certainly can go a long way in obtaining information, especially in the Third World, but the man who can be bought by the CIA is also a relatively easy mark for the opposition. On the other hand, the agent who genuinely believes that what he is doing has a higher purpose will probably not be vulnerable to approaches from the KGB or other opposition services, and he is less likely to be plagued by the guilt and the accompanying psychological deterioration which frequently hamper the work of spies. The ideological "defector in place" is the prize catch for CIA operators. Other likely candidates for spying are officials who have expensive tastes which they cannot satisfy from their normal incomes, or those with an obviously uncontrollable weakness for women, other men, alcohol, or drugs. 

The operator does not always search for potential agents among those who are already working in positions of importance. He may take someone who in a few years may move into an important assignment (with or without a little help from the CIA). Students are considered particularly valuable targets in this regard, especially in Third World countries where university graduates often rise to high-level governmental positions only a few years after graduation. In Latin American and African countries the agency puts special emphasis on seeking agents in the armed forces, since so many of these nations are ruled or controlled by the military. Hence, the "cleared" professors on the CIA's payroll at American universities with substantial foreign enrollments, and military training officers at such places as the field command school at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, are prime recruiters.

In the communist countries, as we have said, agency operators tend to focus on members of the opposition intelligence services in their search for secret agents. 

Evaluation: Once a potential spy has been spotted, the agency makes a thorough review of all information available on him to decide whether he is, or someday will be, in a position to provide useful intelligence. The first step in the evaluation process is to run a "namecheck," or trace, on the person, using the CIA's extensive computerized files located at headquarters in Langley. This data bank was developed by International Business Machines exclusively for the CIA and contains information on hundreds of thousands of persons. 

Any relevant biographical information on the potential agent found in the files is cabled back to the field operator, who meanwhile continues to observe the prospect and makes discreet inquiries about his background, personality, and chances for advancement. The prospect will probably be put under surveillance to learn more of his habits and views. Eventually a determination will be made as to the prospect's probable motivation (ideological, monetary, or psychological) for becoming a spy. If he hasn't any such motivation, the CIA searches for ways —blackmail and the like—of pressuring him. At the same time, the case officer must determine if the prospect is legitimate or if he is an enemy plant—a provocation or a double agent. Some member of the CIA team, perhaps the original spotter, will attempt to get to know the potential agent on a personal basis and win his confidence. 

Recruiting: At the conclusion of the evaluation period, which can last weeks or months, CIA headquarters, in consultation with the field component, decides whether or not the prospective agent should be approached to spy for the agency. Normally, if the decision is affirmative, a CIA outsider will approach the prospect. Neither the spotter nor the evaluator nor, for that matter, any member of the local agency team will generally be used to make the recruitment "pitch"; if something goes wrong, the individual being propositioned will therefore be unable to expose any of the CIA operators. As a rule, the CIA officer giving the pitch is furnished with a false identity and given an agency-produced fake American passport. The "pitchman" can quickly slip out of the country in case of trouble. 

Once the recruiter is on the scene, agency operators will concoct a meeting between him and the prospective agent. The pitchman will be introduced to the target under carefully prearranged—and controlled —circumstances, allowing the operator who made the introduction to withdraw discreetly, leaving the recruiter alone with the potential agent. Steps also will have been taken to provide the recruiter with an escape route in the event that the pitch should backfire. If he is clever in his approach, the recruiter makes his pitch subtly, without any overt statements to reveal his true purpose or affiliation with the agency. 

If the potential agent has previously voiced opposition to his government, the recruiter is likely to begin with an appeal to the man's patriotic obligations and higher ideological inclinations. Ways by which he could aid his country and its people through secret cooperation with a benevolent foreign power will be suggested. If, on the other hand, the prospect is deemed susceptible to money, the recruiter probably will play to this point, emphasizing that he knows of ways for the right individual to earn big money— quickly and easily. If the subject is interested in power, or merely has expensive habits to satisfy (sex, drugs, and so forth), if he wants to defect from his country, or simply wishes to get away from his family and social situation, the recruiter will attempt to concentrate his efforts on these human needs, all the time offering suggestions as to how they may be met through cooperation with "certain parties." People volunteer or agree to spy on their governments for many reasons. It is the task of the recruiter to determine what reason— if one exists—is most likely to motivate the potential agent. 

If the agency has concluded that the prospect is vulnerable to blackmail, thinly veiled threats of exposure will be employed during the pitch. In some cases, however, the recruiter may directly confront the potential agent with the evidence which could be used to expose him, in an effort to shock him into accepting the recruitment pitch. And in all cases the meeting between the recruiter and the prospect will be monitored either by audio surveillance (i.e., a tape recording) or some other method—photographs, fingerprints, or anything which will produce evidence that can later be used to incriminate the prospect. If not at first susceptible to blackmail, the prospect who wittingly or unwittingly entertains a recruitment pitch may afterward find himself entrapped by evidence which could be employed to ruin his career or land him in jail. 

After the prospect accepts the CIA's offer, or yields to blackmail, the recruiter will go into the details of the arrangement. He may offer an agent with high potential $500 to $1,000 a month, say, partly in cash but mostly by deposit in an escrow account at some American or Swiss bank. He will try to keep the direct non-escrow payments as low as possible: first, to prevent the man from going on a spending spree which could attract the unwanted attention of the local security service, and, second, to strengthen his hold over the spy. The latter reason is particularly important if the agent is not ideologically motivated. The recruiter may pledge that the CIA will guarantee the safety of the agent or his family, in case of difficulties with the local police, and he may promise a particularly valuable agent a lifelong pension and even American citizenship. The fulfillment of such pledges varies greatly, depending on the operational situation and the personality of the CIA case officer in charge. Some are cynical, brutal men whose word, in most instances, is absolutely worthless. Others, though, will go to extraordinary lengths to protect their agents. In the early 1960s in Syria, one CIA man endangered his life and that of a trusted colleague to exfiltrate an agent who had been "rolled up" (i.e., captured) by the local security service, tortured, and forced to confess his complicity in the CIA's operations there. Although the agent, rendered a physical and mental wreck, was no longer of any use to the CIA, the two operators put him in the trunk of a private automobile and drove him to a nearby country—and safety. 

The recruiter will try to get the new agent, upon agreeing to work for the CIA, to sign a piece of paper that formally and evidently connects him with the agency, a paper which can later be used to threaten a recalcitrant agent with exposure, should he balk at continuing to work for the CIA. 

The recruiter's last function is to set up a meeting between the new agent and the CIA operator stationed in that country who will serve as his case officer. This will often involve the use of prearranged recognition signals. One technique, for example, is to give the agent a set of unusual cufflinks and tell him that he will soon be approached by a man wearing an identical pair. Another is to set up an exchange of code words which the case officer can later use to identify himself to the agent. When all this is accomplished, the recruiter breaks off the meeting and as soon as possible thereafter leaves the country. 

When the recruitment pitch doesn't work ... The recruitment pitch sometimes goes wrong. One such case occurred in ... when CIA covert operators ... spotted and evaluated ... official, ..., the ... back at headquarters in Langley, was so excited by the prospect of recruiting a ... official that he took personal control of the operation. He did not want to entrust responsibility to the field station ... When the time came to select a recruiter, ... chose himself and ordered ... to assist him. The station ... would have preferred someone from ... to make the recruitment pitch, since the operation already had had to be delayed for several precious days while ... made final arrangements to travel ... but ... he had the support of CIA Director Helms. Traveling ... arrived ... followed a day later declaring himself to be ... the two CIA men went ... to talk to ..., who had no idea the CIA was interested in him .... Highly embarrassed, they returned to CIA headquarters to make their report. Nor only had the operation been a complete failure, the two senior clandestine professionals had committed an even worse sin in the Agency's view ....[5] meeting with a potential agent/defector in a local "gasthaus" only to find that the occupants of the nearby tables were not Viennese but rather members of a KGB goon squad. In that instance, when fighting erupted, he managed to escape by fleeing to the men's room and ignominiously crawling to safety through the window above the toilet.[clearly we have some censoring in that mess DC] 

Testing: Once an agent has been recruited, his case officer immediately tests his loyalty and reliability. He will be given certain tasks to carry out which, if successfully performed, will establish his sincerity and access to secret information. The agent may be asked, for example, to collect information on a subject about which, unknown to him, the agency has already acquired a great deal of knowledge. If his reporting does not jibe with the previous intelligence, he is likely to be either a double agent attempting to mislead his case officer or a poor source of information clumsily trying to please his new employer. When feasible, the agent's performance will be carefully monitored during the testing period through discreet surveillance. 

In addition, the new agent will almost certainly be required to take a lie-detector test. CIA operators place heavy reliance on the findings of a polygraph machine—referred to as the "black box"—in their agent operations. Polygraph specialists are available from headquarters and several of the agency's regional support centers to administer the tests on special assignment. According to one such specialist, testing foreign agents calls for completely different skills than questioning Americans under consideration for career service with the CIA. He found Americans to be normally straightforward and relatively predictable in their responses to the testing, making it comparatively simple to isolate someone who is not up to the agency's standards. But testing foreign agents, he says, is much more difficult. Adjustments must be made to allow for cultural differences, and for the fact that the subject is engaging in clearly illegal and highly dangerous secret work. An ideologically motivated agent, furthermore, may be quite emotional and thus unusually difficult to "read," or evaluate, from the machine's measurements. One spying solely for monetary gain or to satisfy some private vice may be impossible to read because there is no way of gauging his moral limits. Congenital liars, psychopaths, and users of certain drugs can frequently "beat the black box." According to the polygraph expert, a decision on the agent's reliability and sincerity is, therefore, based as much on the intuition of the tester as on the measurements of the machine. The agent, however, is led to believe that the black box is infallible, so if he is neither a well-trained double agent nor clinically abnormal, he will more than likely tell the truth. 

Training: When the agent has completed the testing process, he is next given instruction in the special skills required for his new work as a spy. The extent, location, and specific nature of the training vary according to the circumstances of the operation. In some instances the secret instruction is quite thorough; in other cases the logistics of such training are nearly impossible to handle, and consequently there is virtually none. In such circumstances the agent must rely on his instinct and talents and the professionalism of his case officer, learning the ways of clandestine life as the operation develops. 

When training can be provided to an agent, he will be taught the use of any equipment he may need—a miniature camera for photographing documents, for example. He will be instructed in one of several methods of covert communications—secret writing, coded or encrypted radio transmissions, or the like. He will also learn the use of clandestine contacts. And he will be given training in security precautions, such as the detection and avoidance of surveillance. 

Depending upon the agent's availability, however, and his estimated worth in the eyes of the Clandestine Services, he may receive only a few short lessons from his case officer on how to use an audio device or how to communicate with the agency through a series of cut-outs. Or he may be asked to invent a cover story to give to his family and his employer that will allow him to spend several days or even a couple of weeks at an agency safe house, learning the art of espionage. He may even seek an excuse to leave the country so he can receive instruction at a CIA facility in another nation, where he is much less likely to be observed by his country's security service. Or he may even be brought to the United States for training, constantly monitored while here by the CIA Office of Security. Special training facilities for foreign recruits, isolated from all other activities, exist at Camp Peary —"The Farm"—in southern Virginia. 

While the tradecraft taught to the agent is unquestionably useful, the instruction period also serves as an opportunity for his case officer and the other instructors to motivate him and increase his commitment to the CIA's cause. The agent is introduced to the clandestine proficiency and power of the agency. He sees its tightly knit professional camaraderie. He learns that although he is abandoning his former way of life, he now has a chance for a better one. Good work on his part will be rewarded with political asylum; the government he is rejecting may even be replaced by a superior one. Thus his allegiance to his new employer is further forged. It is the task of the case officer to maintain this attitude in the mind of his agent. 

Handling: Successful handling of an agent hinges on the strength of the relationship that the case officer is able to establish with his agent. According to one former CIA operator, a good case officer must combine the qualities of a master spy, a psychiatrist, and a father confessor. 

There are two prevailing views within the CIA's Clandestine Services on the best way to handle, or run, an agent. One is the "buddy" technique, in which the case officer develops a close personal relationship with his agent and convinces him that they are working together to attain an important political goal. This approach can provide a powerful motivating force, encouraging the agent to take great risks for his friend. Most senior operators believe, however, that the "buddy" technique leads to the danger of the case officer forming an emotional attachment to his agent, sometimes causing the CIA man to lose his professional objectivity. At the other end of the agent handling spectrum is the "cynical" style, in which the operator, while feigning personal concern for the agent, actually deals with him in a completely callous manner —one that may border on ruthlessness. From the beginning, this case officer is interested only in results. He drives the agent to extremes in an attempt to achieve maximum operational performance. This method, too, has its drawbacks: once the agent senses he is merely being exploited by his case officer, his loyalty can quickly evaporate. 

Agents are intricate and, often, delicately balanced individuals. The factors which lead them into the clandestine game are many and highly complex. The stresses and pressures under which they must function tend to make such men volatile, often unpredictable. The case officer, therefore, must continually be alert for any sign that his agent is unusually disturbed, that he may not be carrying out his mission. The operator must always employ the right mixture of flattery and threats, ideology and money, emotional attachment and ruthlessness to keep his agent actively working for him. 

With the Soviet Oleg Penkovsky, his British and CIA handlers found that flattery was a particularly effective method of motivation. Although he preferred British manners, Penkovsky greatly admired American power. Accordingly, he was secretly granted U.S. citizenship and presented with his "secret" CIA medal. As a military man, he was quite conscious of rank; consequently, he was made a colonel in the U.S. Army to show him that he suffered no loss of status because of his shift in allegiance. On two occasions while Penkovsky was an active spy, he traveled outside the U.S.S.R. on official duty with high-level delegations attending Soviet-sponsored trade shows. Both times, first in London and then in Paris, he slipped away from his Soviet colleagues for debriefing and training sessions with British and American case officers. 

During one of the London meetings, he asked to see his U.S. Army uniform. None of the CIA men, nor any of the British operators, had anticipated such a request. One quick-thinking officer, however, announced that the uniform was at another safe house and that driving there and bringing it back for Penkovsky to see would take a while. The spy was temporarily placated, and a CIA case officer was immediately dispatched to find a colonel's uniform to show to the agent. After scurrying around London for a couple of hours in search of an American Army colonel with a build similar to Penkovsky's, the operator returned triumphantly to the debriefing session just as it was concluding—uniform in hand. Penkovsky was pleased. 

Months later, in Paris, the CIA operators were better prepared. A brand-new uniform tailored to Penkovsky's measurements was hung in a closet in a room adjacent to where he was being debriefed, and he inspected it happily when the meeting was concluded. In the 1950s the CIA recruited an Eastern European intelligence officer in Vienna whose motivation, like Penkovsky's, was essentially ideological. While he was promised a good salary (and a comfortable pension upon the completion of the operation, at which time he would formally defect to the United States), his case officer avoided making any direct payments to him in Vienna in order not to risk attracting the opposition's attention to him. The agent well understood the need for such precautions, yet after he had been spying for a while, he shocked his case officer one day by demanding a fairly substantial amount of cash. He refused to say why he wanted the money, but it was obvious to his case officer that theagent's continued good work for the agency was contingent on getting the money he had requested. After consultations with the local CIA station chief and with headquarters, it was finally decided that the risk must be taken and the agent was given the money, with the hope that he would not do something outlandish or risky with it. Agency operators then put him under surveillance to learn what he was up to. To their consternation, they discovered him the following weekend on the Danube River cruising back and forth in a motorboat which he had just bought. A few days afterward his case officer confronted him and demanded that he get rid of the boat, for it was not something a man of his ostensibly austere circumstances could possibly have purchased on his own salary. The agent agreed, casually explaining that ever since he was a small boy he had wanted to own a motorboat. Now that yearning was out of his system and he was quite willing to give up the boat.

Another Eastern European, who spied briefly for the CIA years later, refused all offers of pensions and political asylum in the West. He wanted only Benny Goodman records.

One of the biggest problems in handling an agent is caused by the changeover of case officers. In keeping with the CIA's policy of employing diplomatic and other forms of official cover for most of its operators serving abroad, case officers masquerading as U.S. diplomats, AID officials, Department of Defense representatives, and the like, must be transferred every two to four years to another foreign country or to Washington for a headquarters assignment, as is customary with genuine American officials. A departing case officer introduces his replacement to all his agents before he leaves, but often the agents are initially reluctant to deal with a new man. Having developed an acceptable working relationship with one case officer, they usually are not eager to change to another. Their reluctance is often heightened by the agency's practice of assigning young case officers to handle already proven agents. In this way, junior operators can gain experience with agents who, as a rule, do not need as much professional guidance or sympathetic "hand-holding" as newly recruited ones. Most agents, however, feel that dealing with an inexperienced officer only increases the risks of compromise. All in all, making the changeover can be quite sticky, but it is almost always accomplished without permanent damage to the operation. If persuasion and promises are not adequate to retain the agent's loyalty, threats of blackmail usually are: The agency precaution of amassing incriminating evidence —secret contracts, signed payment receipts, tape recordings, and photographs—generally will convince even the most reluctant agent to see things the CIA's way.

In certain highly sensitive operations the problem of case officer changeover is avoided in deference to the wishes of a particularly highly placed agent. The potential damage to the operator's cover by his prolonged service in a given country is considered of less importance than the maintenance of the delicate relationship he has developed with the agent. Similarly, in those situations where a ( DELETED ) the agency officer may serve as many as six or eight years on the operation before being replaced. And when he is eventually transferred to another post, great care is taken to select a replacement who will be acceptable to the friendly chief of state.

Termination: All clandestine operations ultimately come to an end. Those dependent upon agent activities have a short life expectancy and often conclude suddenly. The agent may die of natural causes or by accident—or he may be arrested and imprisoned, even executed. In any such event, the sole consideration of the CIA operators on the scene is to protect the agency's interests, usually by covering up the fact that the individual was a secret agent of the U.S. government. Sometimes, however, the agency itself must terminate the operation and dispose of the agent. The decision to terminate is made by the CIA chief of station in the country where the operation is in progress, with the approval of agency headquarters. The reason for breaking with an agent may be simply his loss of access to the secrets that the CIA is interested in acquiring; more complicated is emotional instability, lack of personal trustworthiness endangering the operation, or threat of imminent exposure and arrest. Worst of all, there may be a question of political unreliability—it may be suspected that the man is, or has become, a double agent, provocation, or deception controlled by an opposition intelligence service. The useless or unstable agent can usually be bought off or, if necessary, successfully threatened. A reliable or useful agent in danger of compromise or exposure to the opposition, or an agent who has fulfilled his agreement as a spy and has performed well, can be resettled in another country, provided with the necessary funds, even assisted in finding employment or, at least, retraining for a new profession. In those cases where the agent has contributed an outstanding service to the CIA at great personal risk, particularly if he burned himself out in so doing, he will be brought to the United States for safe resettlement. The Director of Central Intelligence, under the CIA Act of 1949, can authorize the "entry of a particular alien into the United States for permanent residence ... in the interest of national security or the furtherance of the national intelligence mission." The agent and his family can be granted "permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws and regulations."

Resettlement, however, does not always go smoothly. And sometimes this is the fault of the CIA. In the late 1950s, when espionage was still a big business in Germany, former agents and defectors were routinely resettled in Canada and Latin America. The constant flow of anti-communist refugees to those areas was too much for the agency's Clandestine Services to resist. From time to time, an active agent would be inserted into the resettlement process. But the entire operation almost collapsed when, within a matter of months, both Canadian and Brazilian governments discovered that the CIA was using it as a means to plant operating agents in their societies.

Not all former agents are willing to be resettled in the United States, especially not on the CIA's terms. In the 1960s, a high-ranking Latin American official who had been an agent for years was forced for internal political reasons to flee his native country. He managed to reach Mexico City, where agency operators again made contact with him. In consideration of his past services, the agency was willing to arrange for his immigration to the U.S. under the 1949 CIA law if he would sign an agreement to remain quiet about his secret connection with the U.S. government and not become involved in exile political activities in this country. The Latin American, who had ambitions to return triumphantly to his native country one day, refused to forgo his right to plot against his enemies back home, and wanted residence in the United States without citizenship, thus presenting the CIA with a difficult dilemma. As long as the former agent remained unhappy and frustrated in Mexico City, he represented a threat that his relationship with the agency and those of the many other CIA penetrations of his government which he knew about might be exposed. As a result, CIA headquarters in Langley sent word to the station in Mexico City that the ex-agent could enter the country without the usual preconditions. The agency's top officials hoped that he could be kept under reasonable control and prevented from getting too deeply involved in political activities which would be particularly embarrassing to the U.S. government. It is only logical to believe that there are instances when termination requires drastic action on the part of the operators. Such cases are, of course, highly sensitive and quite uncommon in the CIA. But when it does become necessary to consider the permanent elimination of a particularly threatful agent, the final decision must be made at the highest level of authority, by the Director of Central Intelligence. With the exception of special or paramilitary operations, physical violence and homicide are not viewed as acceptable clandestine methods—unless they are acceptable to the Director himself.

Two aspects of clandestine tradecraft which have particular applicability to classical espionage, and to agent operations in general, are secret communications and contacts. The case officer must set up safe means of communicating with his agent; otherwise, there will be no way of receiving the information that the agent is stealing, or of providing him with instructions and guidance. In addition to a primary communication system, there will usually be an alternate method for use if the primary system fails. From time to time, different systems will be employed to reduce the chances of compromising the operation. As with most activities in the intelligence game, there are no hard and fast rules governing communication with secret agents. As long as the methods used are secure and workable, the case officer is free to devise any means of contact with his agent that is suitable to the operational situation.

Many agents want to pass on their information verbally to the case officer. From their point of view, it is both safer and easier than dealing with official papers or using spy equipment, either of which could clearly incriminate them if discovered by the local authorities. The CIA, however, prefers documents. Documents can be verified, thus establishing the agent's reliability. They can be studied and analyzed in greater detail and with more accuracy by the intelligence experts at headquarters. In the Penkovsky case, for example, the secret Soviet documents he provided were far more valuable than his personal interpretations of events then occurring in Moscow's military circles.

On the other hand, some agents want to have as little personal contact as possible with their case officers. Each clandestine meeting is viewed as an invitation to exposure and imprisonment, or worse. Such agents would prefer to communicate almost exclusively through indirect methods or even by mechanical means (encoded or encrypted radio messages, invisible ink, micro-dots, and so on). But the CIA insists on its case officers having personal contact with their agents, except in exceptionally risky cases. Periodically, the spy's sincerity and level of motivation must be evaluated in face-to-face meetings with the operator.

Each time the case officer has a personal contact with his agent, there is the danger that the two will be observed by the local security forces, or by a hostile service such as the KGB. To minimize the risk of compromise, indirect methods of contact are employed most of the time, especially for the passing of information from the agent to the operator. One standard technique is the use of a cut-out, an intermediary who serves as a go-between. The cut-out may be witting or unwitting; he may be another agent; he may even reside in another country. Regardless, his role is to receive material from either the agent or the case officer and then relay it to the other, without being aware of its substance. Another technique is the deaddrop, or dead-letter drop. This is a kind of secret postoffice box such as a hollow tree, the underside of a park bench, a crevice in an old stone wall—any natural and unlikely repository that can be utilized for transferring materials. (One of the dead-drops used in the Penkovsky operation was the space behind the steam-heat radiator in the entry of an apartment building in Moscow.) The agent simply deposits his material in the dead-drop at a prearranged time; later it is "serviced" by the case officer or a cut-out engaged for this purpose. Still another frequently used technique is that of the brush contact, in which the agent and his case officer or a cut-out meet in passing at some prearranged public place. The agent may encounter his contact, for example, on a crowded subway platform, in a theater lobby, or perhaps on a busy downtown street. Acting as if they are strangers, the two will manage to get close together for a moment, long enough for one to slip something into the other's hand or pocket. Or they may quickly exchange newspapers or briefcases. Such a contact is extremely brief as well as surreptitious, and usually it is quite secure if well executed.

Although the case officer makes frequent use of indirect contacts, he still must arrange personal meetings with his agent from time to time. Whenever there is a clandestine meeting—on a bus, in a park, at a restaurant—other CIA operators keep watch as a precaution against opposition monitoring or interference. This is known in the covert business as countersurveillance. The case officer works out safe and danger signals in advance of each rendezvous with both the agent and the countersurveillance team. In this way, the operator, the agent, or any member of the team can signal to the others to proceed with the meeting or to avoid or break off contact if something seems out of the ordinary. Safe houses (CIAmaintained residences) are also used for meetings with agents, especially if there is a lot to be discussed. A safe house has the advantage of providing an atmosphere where the agent and the case officer can relax and talk freely without fear of surveillance, but the more frequently one location is used, the more likely it is to be discovered by the opposition. The need for secrecy can keep the clandestine operator busy; but it is a need on which the clandestine operator thrives.

Agency Culture 
A few years ago Newsweek magazine described the CIA as the most secretive and tightly knit organization (with the possible exception of the Mafia) in American society. The characterization is something of an overstatement, but it contains more than a kernel of truth. In its golden era, during the height of the Cold War, the agency did possess a rare élan; it had a staff of imaginative and daring officers at all levels and in all directorates. But over the years the CIA has grown old, fat, and bureaucratic. The esprit de corps and devotion to duty its staff once had, setting the agency apart from other government departments, has faded, and to a great degree it has been replaced by an outmoded, doctrinaire approach to its missions and functions. The true purpose of secrecy—to keep the opposition in the dark about agency policies and operations—has been lost sight of. Today the CIA often practices secrecy for secrecy's sake—and to prevent the American public from learning of its activities. And the true purpose of intelligence collection—to monitor efficiently the threatening moves of international adversaries—has been distorted by the need to nourish a collective clandestine ego.

After the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, a few hundred CIA employees (mostly younger officers from the Intelligence and Science and Technology directorates, not the Clandestine Services) signed a petition objecting to American policies in Indochina. Director Richard Helms was so concerned about the prospect of widespread unrest in the agency's ranks and the chance that word of it might leak out to the public that he summoned all the protesters to the main auditorium and lectured them on the need to separate their personal views from their professional duties. At the same time, similar demonstrations on the Cambodian issue were mounted at the State Department and other government agencies. Nearly every newspaper in the country carried articles .about the incipient rebellion brewing in the ranks of the federal bureaucracy. The happenings at the CIA, which were potentially the most newsworthy of all, were, however, never discovered by the press. In keeping with the agency's clandestine traditions, CIA employees had conducted a secret protest.

To agency personnel who had had the need for secrecy drilled into them from their moment of recruitment, there was nothing strange about keeping their demonstration hidden from public view. Secrecy is an absolute way of life at the agency, and while outsiders might consider some of the resulting practices comical in the extreme, the subject is treated with great seriousness in the CIA. Training officers lecture new personnel for hours on end about "security consciousness," and these sessions are augmented during an employee's entire career by refresher courses, warning posters, and even the semi-annual requirement for each employee to review the agency's security rules and to sign a copy, as an indication it has been read. As a matter of course, outsiders should be told absolutely nothing about the CIA and fellow employees should be given only that information for which they have an actual "need to know."

CIA personnel become so accustomed to the rigorous security precautions (some of which are indeed justified) that they easily accept them all, and seldom are caught in violations. Nothing could be more natural than to work with a telephone book marked SECRET, an intentionally incomplete telephone book which lists no one working in the Clandestine Services and which in each semiannually revised edition leaves out the names of many of the people employed by the overt directorates, so if the book ever falls into unauthorized hands, no enterprising foreign agent or reporter will be able to figure out how many people work at CIA headquarters, or even how many work in non-clandestine jobs. Those temporarily omitted can look forward to having their names appear in the next edition of the directory, at which time others are selected for telephonic limbo. Added to this confusion is the fact that most agency phone numbers are regularly changed for security reasons. Most employees manage to keep track of commonly called numbers by listing them in their own personal desk directories, although they have to be careful to lock these in their safes at night—or else risk being charged with a security violation. For a first violation the employee is given a reprimand and usually assigned to several weeks of security inspection in his or her office. Successive violations lead to forced vacation without pay for periods up to several weeks, or to outright dismissal. Along with the phone books, all other classified material (including typewriter ribbons and scrap paper) is placed in these safes whenever an office is unoccupied. Security guards patrol every part of the agency at roughly half-hour intervals in the evening and on weekends to see that no secret documents have been left out, that no safes have been left unlocked, and that no spies are lurking in the halls. If a guard finds any classified material unsecured, both the person who failed to put it away and the person within the office who was assigned to double-check the premises have security violations entered in their personnel files. These security precautions all take place inside a headquarters building that is surrounded by a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire, patrolled by armed guards and police dogs, and sealed off by a security check system that guarantees that no one can enter either the outer perimeter or the building itself without showing proper identification. Each CIA employee is issued a laminated plastic badge with his picture on it, and these must not only be presented to the guards on entry, but be kept constantly in view within the building. Around the edges of the badge are twenty or so little boxes which may or may not be filled with red letters. Each letter signifies a special security clearance held by the owner. Certain offices at the CIA are designated as restricted, and only persons holding the proper clearance, as marked on their badges, can gain entry. These areas are usually guarded by an agency policeman sitting inside a glass cage, from which he controls a turnstile that forbids passage to unauthorized personnel. Particularly sensitive offices are protected, in addition to the guarded turnstile, by a combination or cipher lock which must be opened by the individual after the badge is inspected.

Even a charwoman at the CIA must gain security clearance in order to qualify for the badge that she, too, must wear at all times; then she must be accompanied by an armed guard while she cleans offices (where all classified material has presumably already been locked up). Some rooms at the agency are considered so secret that the charwoman and her guard must also be watched by someone who works in the office.

The pervasive secrecy extends everywhere. Cards placed on agency bulletin boards offering items for sale conclude: "Call Bill, extension 6464." Neither clandestine nor overt CIA employees are permitted to have their last names exposed to the scrutiny of their colleagues, and it was only in 1973 that employees were allowed to answer their phones with any words other than those signifying the four-digit extension number.

Also until recent years all CIA personnel were required to identify themselves to non-agency people as employees of the State or Defense Department or some other outside organization. Now the analysts and technicians are permitted to say they work for the agency, although they cannot reveal their particular office. Clandestine Service employees are easily spotted around Washington because they almost always claim to be employed by Defense or State, but usually are extremely vague on the details and unable to furnish an office address. They do sometimes give out a phone number which corresponds to the correct exchange for their cover organization, but these extensions, through some deft wiring, ring in Langley.

The headquarters building, located on a partially wooded 125-acre tract eight miles from downtown Washington, is a modernistic fortress-like structure. Until the spring of 1973 one of the two roads leading into the secluded compound was totally unmarked, and the other featured a sign identifying the installation as the Bureau of Public Roads, which maintains the Fairbanks Highway Research Station adjacent to the agency. Until 1961 the CIA had been located in a score of buildings scattered all over Washington. One of the principal justifications for the $46 million headquarters in the suburbs was that considerable expense would be saved by moving all employees under one roof. But in keeping with the best-laid bureaucratic plans, the headquarters building, from the day it was completed, proved too small for all the CIA's Washington activities. The agency never vacated some of its old headquarters buildings hidden behind a naval medical facility on 23rd Street Northwest in Washington, and its National Photo Interpretation Center shares part of the Navy's facilities in Southeast Washington. Other large CIA offices located downtown include the Domestic Operations Division, on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House.

And in Washington's Virginia suburbs there are even more CIA buildings outside the headquarters complex. An agency training facility is located in the Broyhill Building in Arlington, and the CIA occupies considerable other office space in that county's Rosslyn section. Also at least half a dozen CIA components are located in the Tyson's Corner area of northern Virginia, which has become something of a mini-intelligence community for technical work due to the presence there of numerous electronics and research companies that do work for the agency and the Pentagon. The rapid expansion of CIA office space in the last ten years did not happen as a result of any appreciable increase in personnel. Rather, the technological explosion, coupled with inevitable bureaucratic lust for new frontiers, has been the cause. As Director, Richard Helms paid little attention to the diffusion of his agency until one day in 1968 when a CIA official mentioned to him that still one more technical component was moving to Tyson's Comer. For some reason this aroused Helms' ire, and he ordered a study prepared to find out just how much of the agency was located outside of headquarters. The completed report told him what most Washington area real-estate agents already knew, that a substantial percentage of CIA employees had vacated the building originally justified to Congress as necessary to put all personnel under one roof. Helms decreed that all future moves would require his personal approval, but his action slowed the exodus only temporarily.

When the CIA headquarters building was being constructed during the late 1950s, the subcontractor responsible for putting in the heating and airconditioning system asked the agency how many people the structure was intended to accommodate. For security reasons, the agency refused to tell him, and he was forced to make his own estimate based on the building's size. The resulting heating system worked reasonably well, while the air-conditioning was quite uneven. After initial complaints in 1961, the contractor installed an individual thermostat in each office, but so many agency employees were continually readjusting their thermostats that the system got worse. The M&S Directorate then decreed that the thermostats could no longer be used, and each one was sealed up. However, the M&S experts had not considered that the CIA was a clandestine agency, and that many of its personnel had taken a "locks and picks" course while in training. Most of the thermostats were soon unlocked and back in operation. At this point the CIA took the subcontractor to court to force him to make improvements. His defense was that he had installed the best system he could without a clear indication of how many people would occupy the building. The CIA could not counter this reasoning and lost the decision.

Another unusual feature of the CIA headquarters is the cafeteria. It is partitioned into a secret and an open section, the larger part being only for agency employees, who must show their badges to the armed guards before entering, and the smaller being for visitors as well as people who work at the CIA. Although the only outsiders ever to enter the small, dismal section are employees of other U.S. government agencies, representatives of a few friendly governments, and CIA families, the partition ensures that no visitor will see the face of any clandestine operator eating lunch.

The CIA's "supergrades" (civilian equivalents of generals) have their own private dining room in the executive suite, however. There they are provided higher-quality food at lower prices than in the cafeteria, served on fine china with fresh linens by black waiters in immaculate white coats. These waiters and the executive cooks are regular CIA employees, in contrast to the cafeteria personnel, who work for a contractor. On several occasions the Office of Management and Budget has questioned the high cost of this private dining room, but the agency has always been able to fend off the attacks, as it fends off almost all attacks on its activities, by citing "national security" reasons as the major justification.

Questions of social class and snobbery have always been very important in the CIA. With its roots in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (the letters OSS were said, only half-jokingly, to stand for "Oh So Social"), the agency has long been known for its concentration of Eastern Establishment, Ivy League types. Allen Dulles, a former American diplomat and Wall Street lawyer with impeccable connections and credentials, set the tone for an agency full of Roosevelts, Bundys, Cleveland Amory's brother Robert, and other scions of America's leading families. There have been exceptions, to be sure, but most of the CIA's top leaders have been white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and graduates of the right Eastern schools. While changing times and ideas have diffused the influence of the Eastern elite throughout the government as a whole, the CIA remains perhaps the last bastion in official Washington of WASP power, or at least the slowest to adopt the principle of equal opportunity.

It was no accident that former Clandestine Services chief Richard Bissell (Groton, Yale, A.B., Ph.D., London School of Economics, A.B.) was talking to a Council on Foreign Relations discussion group in 1968 when he made his "confidential" speech on covert action. For the influential but private Council, composed of several hundred of the country's top political, military, business, and academic leaders, has long been the CIA's principal "constituency" in the American public. When the agency has needed prominent citizens to front for its proprietary companies or for other special assistance, it has often turned to Council members. Bissell knew that night in 1968 that he could talk freely and openly about extremely sensitive subjects because he was among "friends." His words leaked out not because of the indiscretion of any of the participants, but because of student upheavals at Harvard in 1971.

It may well have been the sons of CFR members or CIA officials who ransacked the office housing the minutes of Bissell's speech, and therein lies the changing nature of the CIA (and the Eastern Establishment, for that matter). Over the last decade the attitudes of the young people, who in earlier times would have followed their fathers or their fathers' college roommates into the CIA, have changed drastically. With the Vietnam War as a catalyst, the agency has become, to a large extent, discredited in the traditional Eastern schools and colleges. And consequently the CIA has been forced to alter its recruiting base. No longer do Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a few other Eastern schools provide the bulk of the agency's professional recruits, or even a substantial number. For the most part, Ivy Leaguers do not want to join the agency, and the CIA now does its most fruitful recruiting at the universities of middle America and in the armed forces. While the shift unquestionably reflects increasing democratization in American government, the CIA made the change not so much voluntarily as because it had no other choice if it wished to fill its ranks. If the "old boy" network cannot be replenished, some officials believe, it will be much more difficult to enlist the aid of American corporations and generally to make use of influential "friends" in the private and public sectors.

Despite the comparatively recent broadening of the CIA's recruiting base, the agency is not now and has never been an equal-opportunity employer. The agency has one of the smallest percentages—if not the smallest—of blacks of any federal department. The CIA's top management had this forcefully called to their attention in 1967 when a local civil-rights activist wrote to the agency to complain about minority hiring practices. A study was ordered at that time, and the CIA's highest-ranking black was found to be a GS-13 (the rough equivalent of an Army major). Altogether, there were fewer than twenty blacks among the CIA's approximately 12,000 non-clerical employees, and even the proportion of black secretaries, clerks, and other non-professionals was considerably below that of most Washington area government agencies. One might attribute this latter fact to the agency's suburban location, but blacks were notably well represented in the guard and char forces.

Top officials seemed surprised by the results of the 1967 study because they did not consider themselves prejudiced men. They ordered increased efforts to hire more blacks, but these were not particularly successful. Young black college graduates in recent years have shied away from joining the agency, some on political grounds and others because of the more promising opportunities available in the private sector. Furthermore, the CIA recruiting system could not easily be changed to bring in minorities. Most of the "spotting" of potential employees is done by individual college professors who are either friends or consultants of the agency, and they are located on predominantly white campuses where each year they hand-pick a few carefully selected students for the CIA. The paucity of minority groups in the CIA goes well beyond blacks, however. In 1964 the agency's Inspector General did a routine study of the Office of National Estimates (ONE). The Inspector found no black, Jewish, or women professionals, and only a few Catholics. ONE immediately took steps to bring in minorities. One woman professional was hired on a probationary basis, and one black secretary was brought in. When the professional had finished her probation, she was encouraged to find work elsewhere, and the black secretary was given duties away from the main ONE offices—out of sight in the reproduction center. ONE did bend somewhat by hiring a few Jews and some additional Catholics. There are extremely few women in high-ranking positions in the CIA, but, of course, the agency does employ women as secretaries and for other non-professional duties. As is true with all large organizations, there is a high turnover in these jobs, and the agency each year hires a thousand or more new applicants. In a search for suitable candidates, CIA recruiters concentrate on recent high school graduates from the mostly white small towns and cities of Virginia and the neighboring states, Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Washington, with its overwhelming black majority, supplies comparatively few of the CIA's secretaries. Over the years the recruiters have established good contacts with high-school guidance counselors and principals in the nearby states, and when they make their annual tour in search of candidates, interested girls are steered their way, with several from the same class often being hired at the same time. When the new secretaries come to CIA headquarters outside of Washington, they are encouraged to live in agency selected apartments in the Virginia suburbs, buildings in which virtually all the tenants are CIA employees.

Security considerations play a large part in the agency's lack of attention to urban areas in its secretarial recruiting. All agency employees must receive full security clearances before they start work. This is a very expensive process, and women from small towns are easier and cheaper to investigate. Moreover, the CIA seems actually to prefer secretaries with the All-American image who are less likely to have been "corrupted" or "politicized" than their urbanized sisters.

Agency secretaries, as well as all other personnel, must pass lie-detector tests as a condition of employment. Then they periodically—usually at fiveyear intervals or when they return from overseas assignments—must submit themselves again to the "black box." The CIA, unlike most employers, finds out nearly everything imaginable about the private lives of its personnel through these polygraph tests. Questions about sex, drugs, and personal honesty are routinely asked along with security-related matters such as possible contacts with foreign agents. The younger secretaries invariably register a negative reading on the machine when asked the standard: "Have you ever stolen government property?" The polygraph experts usually have to add the qualifying clause, "not including pens, pencils, or minor clerical items."

Once CIA recruits have passed their security investigations and lie-detector tests, they are given training by the agency. Most of the secretaries receive instruction in the Washington area, such instruction focusing on the need for secrecy in all aspects of the work. Women going overseas to type and file for their CIA bosses are given short courses in espionage tradecraft. A former secretary reported that the most notable part of her field training in the late 1960s was to trail an instructor in and out of Washington department stores.

The agency's professionals, most of them (until the 1967 NSA disclosures) recruited through "friendly" college professors, receive much more extensive instruction when they enter the CIA as career trainees (CTs). For two years they are on a probationary status, the first year in formal training programs and the second with on-the-job instruction. The CTs take introductory courses at a CIA facility, known as the Broyhill Building, in Arlington, Virginia, in subjects such as security, the organization of the agency and the rest of the intelligence community, and the nature of international communism. Allen Dulles, in his days as Director, liked to talk to these classes and tell them how, as an American diplomat in Switzerland during World War I, he received a telephone call from a Russian late on a Saturday morning. The Russian wanted to talk to a U.S. government representative immediately, but Dulles had a date with a young lady, so he declined the offer. The Russian turned out to be Nikolai Lenin, and Dulles used the incident to urge the young CTs always to be alert to the possible importance of people they meet in their work.

Afterward, CTs go to "The Farm," the establishment near Williamsburg that is disguised as a Pentagon research-and-testing facility and indeed resembles a large military reservation. Barracks, offices, classrooms, and an officers' club are grouped around a central point. Scattered over its 480 mostly wooded acres are weapons ranges, jump towers, and a simulated closed border of a mythical communist country. Away from these facilities are heavily guarded and off-limits sites, locations used for super-secret projects such as debriefing a recent defector, planning a special operation, or training an important foreign agent who will be returning to his native country to spy for the CIA.

As part of their formal clandestine training at "The Farm," the CTs are regularly shown Hollywood spy movies, and after the performance they collectively criticize the techniques used in the films. Other movies are also used, as explained by the former clandestine operator who wrote about his experience in the April 1967 Ramparts:

We were shown Agency-produced films depicting the CIA in action, films which displayed a kind of Hollywood flair for the dramatic that is not uncommon inside the Agency. A colleague who went through a 1963 training class told of a film on the U-2 episode. In his comments prefatory to the film, his instructor intimated that President Eisenhower "blew his cool" when he did not continue to deny that the U-2 was a CIA aircraft. But no matter, said the instructor, the U-2 was in sum an Agency triumph, for the planes had been overflying Soviet territory for at least five years. During this time the Soviet leaders had fumed in frustration, unable to bring down a U2 on the one hand, and reluctant to let the world know of their inability on the other. The photography contained in the film confirmed that the "flying cameras" had accomplished a remarkable job of reconnaissance. When the film ended and the lights came on, the instructor gestured toward the back of the room and announced: "Gentlemen, the hero of our film." There stood Francis Gary Powers. The trainees rose and applauded.

All the CTs receive some light-weapons training, and those destined for paramilitary duties receive a full course which includes instruction in explosives and demolition, parachute jumps, air and sea operations, and artillery training. This paramilitary training is also taken by the contract soldiers (who greatly resent being called "mercenaries") who have been separately recruited for special operations. They join the CTs for some of the other courses, but generally tend to avoid the younger and less experienced recent college graduates who make up the bulk of the CT ranks. Many of these mercenaries and a few of the CTs continue on for an advanced course in explosives and heavy weapons given at a CIA training facility in North Carolina. Postgraduate training in paramilitary operations is conducted at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone.

Fringe Benefits 
Although agency personnel hold the same ratings and receive the same salaries as other government employees, they do not fall under Civil Service jurisdiction. The Director has the authority to hire or fire an employee without any regard to normal governmental regulations, and there is no legal appeal to his decisions. In general, however, it is the CIA's practice to take extremely good care of the people who remain loyal to the organization. There is a strong feeling among agency management officials that they must concern themselves with the welfare of all personnel, and this feeling goes well beyond the normal employer-employee relationship in the government or in private industry. To a certain extent, security considerations dictate this attitude on the part of management, since an unhappy or financially insecure employee can become a potential target for a foreign espionage agent. But there is more to it than that. Nearly everyone seems to believe: We're all in this together and anyone who's on the team should be taken care of decently. The employees probably feel a higher loyalty to the CIA than members of almost any other agency feel for their organization. Again, this is good for security, but that makes the sentiments no less real.

Some of the benefits for agency personnel are unique in the federal bureaucracy. For example, the CIA operates a summer intern program for college students. Unlike other government agencies which have tried to hire disadvantaged and minority youngsters, the CIA's program is only for the sons and daughters of agency employees. Again the justification is security and the expense of clearing outsiders, but it is a somewhat dubious claim since the State Department manages to clear all its interns for "top secret" without significant expense or danger to security. If a CIA employee dies, an agency security officer immediately goes to his or her house to see that everything is in order for the survivors (and, not incidentally, to make sure no CIA documents have been taken home from the office). If the individual has been living under a cover identity, the security officer ensures that the cover does not fall apart with the death. Often the security man will even help with the funeral and burial arrangements.

For banking activities, CIA employees are encouraged to use the agency's own credit union, which is located in the headquarters building. The union is expert in giving loans to clandestine operators under cover, whose personal-background statements are by definition false. In the rare instance when an employee forfeits on a loan, the credit union seldom prosecutes to get back the money: that could be a breach of security. There is also a special fund, supported by annual contributions from agency officers, to help fellow employees who accidentally get into financial trouble. The credit union also makes various kinds of insurance available to CIA employees. Since the agency does not wish to give outsiders any biographical information on its personnel, the CIA provides the insurer with none of that data that insurance companies normally demand, except age and size of policy. The agency certifies that all facts are true—even that a particular employee has died— without offering any proof. Blue Cross, which originally had the agency's health-insurance policy, demanded too much information for the agency's liking, and in the late 1950s the CIA switched its account to the more tolerant Mutual of Omaha. Agency employees are even instructed not to use the airplane crash insurance machines available at airports, but to purchase such insurance from the credit union.

Attempts are made even to regulate the extracurricular activities of agency employees—to reinforce their attachment to the organization and, of course, for security reasons. An employee activity association (incorporated for legal purposes) sponsors programs in everything from sports and art to slimnastics and karate. The association also runs a recreational travel service, a sports and theater ticket service, and a discount sales store. The CIA runs its own training programs for reserve military officers, too. And it has arranged with local universities to have its own officers teach college level and graduate courses for credit to its employees in the security of its headquarters building.

The CIA can be engagingly paternal in other ways, too. On the whole, it is quite tolerant of sexual dalliance among its employees, as long as the relationships are heterosexual and not with enemy spies. In fact, the CIA's medical office in Saigon was known during the late 1960s for its no-questions-asked cures of venereal disease, while State Department officers in that city avoided the embassy clinic for the same malady because they feared the consequences to their careers of having VD listed on their personnel records.

In many other ways the CIA keeps close watch over its employees' health. If a CIA officer gets sick, he can go to an agency doctor or a "cleared" outside physician. If he undergoes surgery, he frequently is accompanied into the operating room by a CIA security man who makes sure that no secrets are revealed under sodium pentothal anesthesia. If he has a mental breakdown, he is required to be treated by an agency psychiatrist (or a cleared contact on the outside) or, in an extreme case, to be admitted to a CIA-sanctioned sanitarium. Although no statistics are available, mental breakdowns seem more common in the agency's tension-laden atmosphere than in the population as a whole, and the CIA tends to have a more tolerant attitude toward mental-health problems and psychiatric therapy than the general public. In the Clandestine Services, breakdowns are considered virtually normal work hazards, and employees are encouraged to return to work after they have completed treatment. Usually no stigma is attached to illness of this type; in fact, a number of senior officers suffered breakdowns while they were in the Clandestine Services and it clearly did not hurt their careers. Ex-Clandestine Services chief Frank Wisner had such an illness, and he later returned to work as the CIA station chief in London.

Many agency officials are known for their heavy drinking which also seems to be looked upon as an occupational hazard. Again, the CIA is more sympathetic to drinking problems than outside organizations. Drug use, however, remains absolutely taboo.

While the personnel policies and benefits extended by the CIA to its employees can be justified on the grounds of national security and the need to develop organizational loyalty, these tend to have something of a personal debilitating effect on the career officers. The agency is unconsciously viewed as an omniscient, omnipotent institution—one that can even be considered infallible. Devotion to duty grows to fanaticism; questioning the decisions of the authorities is tantamount to religious blasphemy. Such circumstances encourage bureaucratic insulation and introversion (especially under strong pressures from the outside), and they even promote a perverse, defensive attitude which restricts the individual from keeping pace with significant social events occurring in one's own nation, to say nothing of those evolving abroad. Instead of continuing to develop vision and sensitivity with regard to their professional activities, the career officers become unthinking bureaucrats concerned only with their own comfort and security, which they achieve by catering to the demands of the existing political and institutional leaderships—those groups which can provide the means for such personal ends.

Secret Writings 
A number of years ago the CIA established a secret historical library, later a secret internal professional journal, and ultimately began the preparation of the exhaustive secret history of the agency, being written by retired senior officers.

The Historical Intelligence Collection, as the special library is officially known in the CIA, is a fascinating library of spy literature, containing thousands of volumes, fiction and non-fiction, in many languages. The curator, a senior career officer by trade but by avocation a bibliophile of some note, is annually allocated a handsome budget to travel around the world in search of rare books and documents on espionage. Through his efforts, the CIA today possesses probably the most complete compilation of such publications in the world. In recent years the collection has been expanded to include intelligence memorabilia, featuring exhibits of invisible inks, bugs, cameras, and other equipment actually used in certain operations by spies or their handlers.

The CIA's own quarterly trade journal is called Studies in Intelligence. Articles in recent years have dealt with subjects ranging from the practical to the theoretical: there have been articles on how to react when undergoing enemy interrogation; how the National Estimate process works; how to covertly infiltrate and exfiltrate heavily guarded enemy borders. After the Cuban missile crisis the journal ran a debate on whether the CIA had failed to detect the Soviet missiles early enough or had succeeded in time to allow the government to take remedial action.

Some articles are of pure historical interest. In 1970 there was a fascinating account of the successful efforts at the end of World War II of the couturier Count Emilio Pucci, then in the Italian army, to keep out of German hands the diary of Mussolini's Foreign Minister (and son-in-law) Count Ciano, who had earlier been executed by the Duce. Presumably stories of this kind would be of interest to ordinary citizens but Studies in Intelligence, while bearing a physical resemblance to many regularly published magazines, is different in one important respect. It is stamped SECRET and is therefore available only to CIA employees and a few selected readers elsewhere in the intelligence community. Even its regular reviews of current spy novels are withheld from the American public.

The most important of the CIA's private literary projects is the massive secret history of the agency that has been in preparation since 1967. Recognizing the irresistible tendency of former intelligence officers to write their memoirs and, thereby, often to embarrass their organizations and their government with their revelations, Director Helms prudently agreed to permit the preparation of an official secret history of the CIA and its clandestine activities.

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