A Guide for the Aspiring Spy (The Anonymous Spy Series) (2 page)

Non-integrated cover is a much lighter level of cover, and the CIA officer so covered has the grade status of Foreign Service Reserve (FSR). He receives only light cover training and light to no cover duties. Most CIA officers under DOS cover are FSRs since the DOS closely and jealously guards FSO positions. All CIA officers under FSO and FSR cover work out of US diplomatic missions such as embassies and consulates. All such officers have diplomatic immunity. It is somewhat of an inside joke that if you are an FSR working in an embassy abroad, then you are CIA; especially if you are in the restricted area of the embassy.

Working in a US embassy is like working and living in a fish bowl. It is a small, closed community where everyone knows everyone else’s business, which makes it fairly easy to guess who is probably a part of the CIA. This makes it vitally important for CIA officers to employ discreet security measures and tradecraft to perform their CIA duties under the very noses of other US officials not to mention the host country security services responsible for exposing them.

Other CIA official covers employing Department of Defense (DOD) and military covers are light-level covers providing cover for status. CIA officers so covered are not truly integrated into the cover organization. The CIA basically “creates” a unit and provides the officer with appropriate identification documentation. The unit may be physically located on a US military base with the CIA officers so covered physically working from that facility. Some CIA officers under these covers may also work out of diplomatic missions.

Now, some CIA officers under official cover are “declared.” This means that the CIA has told the host country security services that they are CIA officers. Usually these CIA officers are working in liaison with the host country security services against hostile foreign countries, organizations, or terrorists. In rare cases, a Non-Official Cover officer may be “declared” to a host country security service as well.

Non-Official Cover Case Officer

Then there is Non-Official Cover, or NOC (pronounced “knock”). Since I was a NOC officer most of my career, I will spend more time covering this category. Non-Official Cover is provided by corporations or institutions at the request of the CIA. The most common type is corporate cover where the CIA officer is integrated into the staff of a US corporation with the full knowledge and consent of the company’s CEO and other select corporate officers. He is trained by the cover company and assigned overseas as a corporate representative. NOC officers have no diplomatic immunity; therefore, attention to cover maintenance and personal security must be exacting and detailed.

Until the early 1990s, the CIA maintained a stable of several hundred NOC officers, of which about one-half were assigned abroad under deep cover at any time. The rest were usually in the US in training or training other young NOC officers preparing for assignment abroad. Of NOC officers assigned abroad at any one time, less than two dozen may be considered senior NOC officers—those who have achieved a high level of intelligence production and agent recruitment. Because of the high cost and magnitude of support required by NOC officers, the CIA requires a minimum of a four-year assignment abroad and actually prefers that NOC officers remain in the field for their full twenty-plus-year careers.

Starting around 1993, the CIA began to expand the NOC program due in part to the perceived success of the earlier NOC program by Congress and by the ever changing nature of the targets of espionage in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR. The CIA began to experiment with “platforming” many NOCs together into a unit responsive to a geographical unit with several or even all the NOC case officers under the same commercial cover. The problem with this approach is that should one NOC officer become compromised, then all other NOC officers with the same cover are potentially exposed as well.

Prior to the NOC platform approach, many of the larger CIA Stations had already developed successful programs of NOC clusters. NOC clusters were teams of NOC officers working together under the supervision of a senior NOC officer but with each NOC officer having a separate commercial cover arrangement. They maintained separate commercial covers and worked together in secret, usually against some specific target within the CIA Station. For example, the China cluster would target Chinese targets such as the Chinese Embassy, Chinese organizations in the host country such as China Airlines, Chinese corporations abroad, and even Chinese students abroad. The Internal cluster would target the host country government organizations and host government political parties. The High-Tech cluster would target government and research institutions and foreign high-tech corporations.

The more traditional approach to NOC management in the field has been to have one NOC case officer in direct contact with one inside officer contact. This has been the traditional trend especially in Stations with fewer than five or six NOC case officers. This type of compartmentation more securely protects the other NOC officers in the event that one NOC officer and his inside contact should become exposed to a foreign security service. Clearly, the weakest link here is the inside contact who is more likely to be under hostile surveillance by the local security service.

With the growth in recent years of terrorism worldwide as a major collection target of the CIA, Special Operations and Programs Officers (SOPO) have joined the ranks of the NOC program for deployment in foreign theaters where they could not otherwise openly operate as Special Operations officers. The report card on the effectiveness of this approach is still out, but initial reports are encouraging.

Often within the CIA you will hear people talk about “cover for action,” “cover for access,” and “cover for status.” These refer to the particular utility that a cover provides. For example, a NOC officer under corporate cover as a salesman for semiconductor equipment will have access to corporate engineers and buyers of Japanese or South Korean semiconductor manufacturers. In such a position he will be able to assess and develop foreign engineers and administrators for potential motivation and vulnerabilities that may subject them to recruitment by the CIA as agents inside their companies. Semiconductor trade is a competitiveness issue between the US and these countries that requires frequent adjustment of trade agreements. Such a NOC cover position will provide the CIA officer with cover for access as well as cover for action.

Those who saw the first
Mission Impossible
movie with Tom Cruise know that the NOC list had been stolen and Tom and company were to retrieve it to keep it from being sold and exposing the identities of all the agency’s NOC officers. In actual fact, there is no place where the true identities of all the Company’s NOC officers are kept on such a list. NOC officers are never referred to in their true names inside the Company. They are given a pseudonym, as are all CIA officers, and their cover company is given a cryptonym to be used in all correspondence and communications.

NOC officers receive the same basic employment benefits as other CIA personnel in their grade level. They receive the same annual leave and sick benefits, the same medical and hospitalization insurance, and the same retirement benefits. Where the policy of a NOC officer’s cover company differs with that of the CIA, then overtly the NOC officer must follow the policy of his cover company. Covertly, the CIA will make appropriate adjustments to ensure that the NOC is neither compensated too much nor deprived of his due allowances and benefits. NOC officers, however, do receive 20 percent premium pay over inside officers because of the extra demands and risks of the position.

Some thirty to forty years ago, Stations were allowed to recruit and train NOC officers from among the local US student and US expatriate communities. Such early NOC officers were hired as contract employees rather than staff officers. A staff officer in those days who volunteered for the NOC program was classified as a staff agent. In those early days the NOC program was essentially run between the Station and the corresponding Headquarters desk, and the treatment, training, and benefits of NOCs varied greatly. There was no centralized handling of NOC officers. Finding corporate cover was also sometimes a problem. This was the responsibility of the CIA’s Central Cover staff but it was a difficult process especially where the Stations made certain demands of the cover that was often hard to fulfill.

This all changed with the creation of the OED in the early 1980s. All recruiting and training of NOC officers as well as the development of commercial cover was centralized in the OED. As a result, while the bureaucracy and budget of the program grew, so did its effectiveness. Standards for NOC recruitment were established, as was the vetting process for NOC applicants. The CIA stopped the transfer of inside staff officers into the NOC program and all new NOCs were recruited clean without any hint of CIA or government affiliation. New standards resulted in recruitment of NOCs with real-world business experience, but at the same time it led to an elite group that was results-oriented with a disdain for bureaucracy.

The program grew rapidly, doubling the deployment of NOC officers worldwide between 1975 and 1986. By 1993, NOC overseas deployment grew another 50 percent, with the US Congress still pressing for an increase in the program. After the September 11th terrorist attacks, the US Congress provided additional funding and mandates for the CIA to continue expansion of the NOC program. Clearly, the strain on the CIA’s resources for recruitment, training, and management of such a significant increase and the lack of available commercial covers for these positions has reached a saturation point.

Actually, by the mid-1990s the NOC case officer pool awaiting cover arrangements for deployment overseas had exhausted available covers. Many US corporations had become reluctant to provide positions to the CIA; thus, the agency began to look toward smaller US businesses for cover. Often, however, these smaller businesses lacked the resources to serve the needs of the NOC officers in the field. Many lacked the financial foundation in terms of overall cash flow or profitability to truly justify the expense of placing an employee overseas. Such institutional problems create internal problems in smaller businesses where unwitting employees do not realize that the CIA is actually footing the bill to cover the NOC case officer’s expenses. Usually, in a business, large or small, only a handful of people, perhaps two or three people, are actually witting of the clandestine relationship with the CIA.

With changing priorities following the fall of the Soviet Union, the CIA began to seek covers to provide a higher degree of access by the NOC case officer to new targets of interest. As the CIA’s priorities changed as a result of new directions from US government policy makers, the CIA began to seek covers with access to terrorist targets, drug-related targets, money laundering, high-technology, and commercial competitiveness issues. The CIA has found it to be a significant challenge to obtain and to maintain commercial cover arrangements that provides such access.

Paramilitary Case Officer

The CIA maintains a cadre of very specialized personnel called Special Operations and Programs Officers (SOPO), or paramilitary case officers as we were called during the Vietnam War era. Fondly called “knuckle draggers” by insiders, the SOPO are largely recruited among the ranks of present and former US military personnel, mainly personnel with prior combat experience and military intelligence experience such as the Army Special Forces or Navy Seals.

The SOPO receive the same Basic Operations training at the Farm as other OC case officers. In addition, they receive six to eight months of specialized paramilitary operations training, such as small unit tactics and ambush operations, weapons training, parachute training, explosives training, desert, arctic, and tropical jungle escape, evasion, and survival training. While most SOPO have previously received such training as part of their military training, the CIA introduces its particular twist to this training based on the peculiar needs of the CIA.

The history of paramilitary operations in the CIA goes back to its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), during World War II. With the creation and growth of the CIA in the 1950s, little emphasis was given to such operations, and the cadre of paramilitary personnel from the OSS days were integrated into other CIA operations or released from service. It was not until the early 1960s and the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion that the CIA again placed an emphasis on paramilitary operations.

Then along came the Vietnam War. Its counterpart, known as the CIA’s private little war in Laos, resulted in CIA recruiting paramilitary personnel in large numbers. The special operations group within the CIA that was responsible was made a full-fledged Special Ops Division and given major funding to recruit, train, and deploy paramilitary case officers abroad to confront communist inspired insurgencies worldwide.

It is the SOPO who are intimately involved in the worldwide war on terror. SOPO are mainly deployed in hostile military theaters such as Iraq and Afghanistan. While they are not supposed to be directly involved in hostile military operations, they often find themselves drawn into such hostile zones by virtue of their work to collect intelligence. Often SOPO are involved in liaison operations with host country intelligence, security, and paramilitary forces. They may be “advisors” to local level host country security offices responsible for penetrating local terrorist cells. They may work with local paramilitary forces to fund, plan, and deploy teams to pursue terrorists. They also serve as liaison with US military forces in their theater of operations to collect and disseminate intelligence on the local terrorist target.