A Guide for the Aspiring Spy (The Anonymous Spy Series) (4 page)

The role-playing done during training at the Farm is often conducted in a highly competitive environment where individual students or small groups of students are pitted against each other in training exercises such as interrogation practice, counter-surveillance exercises, agent debriefings, etc. This prepares the students well for the real world inside the CIA where one’s ability as an actor is an important element in agent handling as well as in interpersonal relationships with fellow CIA officers.

A crucial component of the training is personal security. Surveillance and counter-surveillance techniques are taught and practiced in practical field exercises over and over again. You are taught how to case and run a Surveillance Detection Route (SDR) and how to select the best Intrusion Points, and then you will be taken to a nearby city to practice these techniques. You will be taught how to case for, load, and unload dead drops, and then you will go to a nearby city to do what you have been taught. Other measures of personal security include weapons training, escape and evasion, compass navigation, terrorist and counter-terrorist tactics, and more.

Since the case officer is expected to train agents once in the field, a dose of special training in such areas as document photography, invisible writing, and agent communications is also provided. Some special training is quite detailed, while other training is cursory just to educate the case officer as to what can be made available to him or her in the field to enhance operations.

Reports writing is a vital component in the Basic Operations course. What use is the information you get from an agent if it is not communicated adequately and in a proper format to CIA headquarters? The information that the student obtains from debriefing sessions with the instructors role-playing as agents is written into intelligence reports, operational cables, and contact reports. This process is played over and over again in various agent-debriefing scenarios until the process becomes second nature to the student. There is no “objective” pass-fail for this training process. It is a subjective process based on the judgment of a staff of instructors.

The training at the Farm is for clandestine field operatives. There is a lot of pressure at the Farm, but the wash-out rate is not really that bad since the screening process to come on board is quite good and washes out those who are not likely to withstand the pressure and intense training process.

You’ve got to be able to adopt tunnel vision on the problems thrown at you at the Farm; focus is important. Don’t let issues that are not part of the immediate problem-solving training point get in your way.

During the Basic Operations Course at the Farm there is not much physical demand; it is mostly classroom with some on-the-street training. But there are ample out-of-class opportunities to get yourself physically fit: the gym, tennis, racket ball, basketball, obstacle course, etc. You will also have plenty of time to do so. If you are attending the paramilitary ops course, you need to be in fit condition. There is no specific martial arts training, but if some fellow trainees have martial arts backgrounds you may be able to learn from them.

Specialized Training

After completing Basic Operations training, many students are selected for intensive language training at the CIA’s language school in northern Virginia. A wide variety of priority languages are taught in courses lasting from six months to a year. Classes are small and intensive. There are usually four or five students per instructor, and classes last eight hours per day with an hour of homework and dialogue to memorize each night. Of course, you are paid during the training process and after language training, if you pass the final test at a sufficiently high level, you receive a language proficiency bonus. Then if you are placed in a language-use position, you receive “language pay” if the language you have learned is a priority language.

After completion of the language course, a few students are selected to go directly overseas as advanced language students for even more intensive studies. While studying abroad, these students do not have any official operational assignments but they are expected to keep their “eyes open” for people in whom the CIA may have an interest and to report these potential targets to their inside contact.

Upon successful completion of the Basic Operations course, some students can expect to be assigned to CIA headquarters where they may work on a country desk or a special staff. Other students may be assigned to one of the CIA’s thirty domestic Stations as a junior case officer for more on-the-job training. The student should expect one or two tours at a domestic Station or headquarters before being assigned to an overseas Station as a first tour operational case officer.

Other courses taught later in one’s career include the Advanced Operations Course and the Mid-Career Course. These courses are aimed toward CIA officers who have been with the Company many years and usually spend most of their careers dealing directly with the bureaucratic environment.

Special Operations Training

A portion of the CIA’s Special Operations Course for paramilitary officers or SOPO is taught at the Farm, as well. These officers receive training in paramilitary small unit tactics, ambush techniques, detailed weapons training, parachute training, survival training, escape and evasion training, and more. Isolated areas of the Farm may occasionally host specialized training courses for CIA officers or foreign agents who are secretly infiltrated into the facility for training and then dispatched overseas for operations. A Special Operations officer will almost always come to the CIA from a military background usually with a military intelligence specialty or from the Special Forces, Army Ranger, Marine Corp Recon, Navy Seals, etc. Some of the training takes place at the Farm and some at remote locations, especially for escape and evasion and survival training. Weapons training, for example, will involve use of perhaps twenty to thirty foreign weapons popularly used by terrorist and guerrilla operatives worldwide. You will be put through a course to fire each weapon and learn how best to employ the weapon. Weapons training takes place at the Farm. You will be taught at a remote location a bit of Bang and Burn operations—use of explosives. You will actually make several small explosive devices and learn how to employ such devices in operations. You will have small unit tactics training and will take turns with your team of trainees being team leader to set up ambush operations and other unit maneuvers. Survival and escape and evasion training is given in desert, tropical, and arctic theaters and usually lasts about one week in each zone. If you are lucky and train in the summer, your arctic survival training will not be too bad, but the flipside is that your desert training will be miserably hot.

NOC Officer Training

If you intend to become a NOC case officer you will miss the entire experience at the Farm. NOC officers no longer receive training there. Since NOCcase officers are the deepest of all the CIA cover positions, they are highly compartmented and isolated from anything that hints at being connected to the CIA or US government. They do receive the same Basic Operations training as the other CIA officers and even more.

NOC training in surveillance and counter-surveillance and personal security is even more intense than their fellow case officers who work on the “inside.” NOC officers also receive training in secret writing techniques, code encryption for reports writing, document photography, and much more. Because the personal security of the NOC case officer is only as good as the cover provided to him, there is a big dose of training in cover care and maintenance. Part of this process includes integrating the NOC officer into the commercial cover company or institution that is providing a cover position for the NOC officer overseas.

Training for NOC officers is mainly held in the northern Virginia area near Washington, DC. It is usually done with one to five NOC officers at a time, each using an operational alias so they do not get to “know” each other on a personal level. This alias ID is only a fig leaf, however, since the NOCs generally violate this compartmentation and become good personal friends. There are some areas of training where a singleton NOC is trained without any interface with other NOCs.

Training in surveillance detection—how to case and run an SDR is done in downtown DC. The training staff has a professional surveillance team, sometimes using old ladies or old men to throw the NOC trainee off guard. The trainee will usually run the SDR many times, in all types of weather and different times of day and night, trying to detect the hostile surveillance. Part of the SDR training includes loading and unloading dead drops and making brush passes while under surveillance. It is not easy to do. These are professionals. After each SDR run, there is a meeting where the trainee is critiqued and told what he did that was right and wrong and how to improve and spot the hostile surveillance.

Training in agent debriefings and asset elicitations is done on a one-on-one basis with the agent doing operational cables and intelligence reports writing after each meeting. Members of the training staff acts as agents or assets and work from a training script often raising challenges to the NOC trainee in the debriefings and elicitations that he may expect to meet in the field. Some debriefings are easy while others are quite difficult. The NOC trainee is critiqued by the training staff after each session. There may be fifteen to twenty such training debriefings to help the NOC trainee perfect his skills.

The NOC trainee is trained on several encrypted communications and secret writing systems, some quite traditional and some highly technical. A number of different systems are included because different overseas Stations use different systems depending on the operational environment there. After the NOC arrives at his Station, the training on the systems employed there will be more focused.

NOC officers have ample training opportunities while overseas. Often this may include foreign language training while posted to a country where the NOC expects to stay for one or more tours. Usually, they will receive initial language training while in the US prior to assignment, and then advanced language training once they are in country. NOCs will also received specialized training once they go operational abroad. This will usually be designated by the Station’s needs and may include communications training, computer training, etc. Also based on the primary targets assigned to the NOC, the Station may require further training, for example, in nuclear proliferation issues, high-tech targets of interest, etc. NOCs may often feel they are over-trained, in fact.

Agent Recruitment Cycle

Now that you have gotten on board and completed your training, you are ready to go overseas for your first operational assignment. Remember your primary job is to spot, assess, and recruit agents of interest who can provide intelligence of interest to US policy makers.

Intelligence agencies operate about the same in the acquisition of their pool of agents. They use a process known as the Agent Recruitment Cycle. The recruitment cycle includes spotting, assessment, vetting, development, and finally recruitment of targets of interest into the pool of agents that provides intelligence and/or operational information. Each of these elements in the recruitment cycle is important for the case officer to master to become a good agent recruiter. Let’s face it: All case officers are expected to recruit and handle agents. That’s why they are hired by the CIA. That’s how they justify their promotions.

Now what does each of these elements entail?

Spotting

Spotting is the art of finding potential agents and gaining access to them for at least some very initial assessment or to determine basic biographic information to enable the CIA to run a name trace. Spotting may be done in many venues such as diplomatic functions, social settings, professional conferences, or the normal working environment.

If it is determined that the person has access to information of interest to US policy makers, the cycle will continue.

Assessment

Assessment is the process of evaluating the intelligence value of a potential target once he has been spotted. Assessment is the continually ongoing process of studying a target to determine his access to information of interest to the CIA and understanding the motivation and vulnerabilities that can be used to gain and maintain his cooperation. Assessment is an art, not an exact science. Assessment takes some length of time—months or even years—to determine precisely the motivations that drive a person and the vulnerabilities that can be used to control, influence, or guide a person to cooperate. The CIA employs many assessment tools to assist the case officer to better understand his target. For example, psychological tests may be directly or indirectly administered to a target as an assessment tool. Most often, however, it is the case officer’s personal evaluation from recurring contact with the target that provides the most useful assessment.