A Guide for the Aspiring Spy (The Anonymous Spy Series) (8 page)

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The CIA does not like to disclose the technology it or our opposition uses or the effectiveness of such technical means, and I agree to limit my input on this matter. However, the high-technology operating environment does offer many challenges to the personal security of the case officer. Looking over your shoulders and running bottlenecks to identify the opposition is of no use against high-tech surveillance technology. Truly living your cover and perfecting your tradecraft are your only real protections. Training practices for the operational environment in a high-tech theater will only change as a result of flaps and near disasters in the field. Lessons learned is a concept that the bureaucracy does seem to understand, and it is unfortunate that quite often a case officer and an agent must get burned before we learn the right lessons and get the answers into the case officer classroom. This is not the case all the time, however. As a NOC in the field, I had an encrypted radio communication system to talk to the Station and we used it quite frequently. We knew that the opposition could not listen to our conversations. However, we learned from one of our agents that while we were talking, the “white noise” we were producing could be triangulated (direction finding) and tracked right back to me if we had stayed on for any length of time. Why our own tech people had not known this is mystifying. Perhaps they had and did not think the opposition was smart enough to figure it out. But learn it we did and it resulted in a change of practice that I cannot discuss.

I had pretty good luck with backstopped covers during my NOC career. I used quite a few devised commercial cover facilities (DFs), as they were called in my day. Some DFs were for long-term use, some for short-term use and then thrown away. DFs are usually fronted by a friendly lawyer or agency retiree. In pre-email days, they were backstopped with a telephone number, fax number, real address, and someone to answer the number and stick with the cover story. Before I actually used the DF—i.e., give it to an asset—I made sure I was actually registered there by calling it myself and asking for me. If I did not like the response, I would send a cable, wait for changes, and check it again. I would also make frequent follow-up calls to make sure there were no surprises. The mistake many officers make is to trust the bureaucracy to get it right the first time. The responsibility falls on the case officer to make sure all is in order before you use your cover facilities. Do not depend on the Station and certainly do not depend on the HQ bureaucracy to get it right. It’s your life and security, so it’s your responsibility. I had little patience with the young NOC officers I supervised when they complained about DFs and the failure of the bureaucracy. In my twenty-seven years in the business with the CIA and Army Intelligence, I can probably count on one hand the battles I have lost with the bureaucracy. Patience and persistence will overcome in the end.

Finally, I guess I am pretty much old school. There were some technologies I found useful in that they made me more productive as a case officer. But using technology as a shortcut to good tradecraft was never my way of working. It was all about personal and operational security and productivity.

Case Officer Productivity

Between the early 1970s and 1990s, the CIA witnessed a dramatic increase in the productivity of its case officers, especially its NOC case officers. This increase can be attributed primarily to advances in computer and information technology.

In bygone days—twenty to forty years ago—NOC case officers had a great disadvantage compared with their inside counterparts inside the CIA Station who had immediate access to files and to computers or typewriters when preparing their reports. NOC case officers were trained in More or Less Invisible (MLI) systems of reports writing, but some MLI processes took hours to complete a few pages of reports. Some Stations employed Special Processing Required (SPR) film for reporting and communications with NOC officers. This also took hours for the NOC officer to process the film, read the reports, and then destroy the film. When submitting reports to the Station using SPR film, the NOC officer had to type reports on water-soluble paper, photograph the reports using SPR film, destroy the reports by dissolving them in water, hide his typewritten ribbon in a concealment device, then brush pass or dead drop the SPR film for retrieval by his inside contact.

Other Stations employed various secret writing systems. Using an MLI carbon system, for example, a NOC officer would take the transfer paper—the paper upon which the invisible report will be written—and wipe the paper using a soft cloth in all four directions to prepare it to accept a smooth transfer of the written or typed report. Then the NOC officer would place the MLI carbon on top of the transfer paper, place water-soluble paper on top of the carbon, and begin to type or write the report. One MLI carbon could be used for about ten pages of reports. When the report was finished, the NOC officer would take the transfer paper, turn it over, and write a normal letter or some innocuous message, then prepare the report for submission to the Station by dead drop, brush pass, or some other pre-determined means. Next, the NOC officer temporarily placed the water-soluble paper upon which the report was written in his concealment device until the Station had confirmed receipt and successful development of the MLI report. Finally, the water-soluble draft would be destroyed.

Some stations used One Time Pads (OTPs) for NOC officers and agents to submit reports to the Station. Using OTPs is a lengthy but secure encryption system where the NOC officer or agent prints his report on a piece of paper, then takes out his OPT sheet—a code sheet containing a series of four-digit numbers used to encode the message using what is called false subtraction. The report submitted by dead drop or brush pass to the Station is a series of four-digit numbers, not an alphabetical report. The Station then takes its OTP decode sheet corresponding to the agent or case officer’s encode sheet and decodes the message. While secure, the process takes hours to encode and decode for a simple two- or three-page report.

All of these reports-writing systems were painstaking and time-consuming. Often the time-pressed NOC officer would abbreviate the reports in order to save time and this was often the cause of misunderstanding or misinterpretations at the Station when the reports were processed and prepared in intelligence or operational reports format.

After the NOC case officer’s reports were completed using any of these processes, he had to find a way to get the reports to the Station. This required either a personal meeting with an inside contact, a dead drop, live drop, or brush pass. All of these required more unproductive time running SDRs and increased the risk of exposure to hostile security services or perhaps just accidental exposure to casuals (regular people on the street who may accidentally see the case officer doing something suspicious).

In recent years, however, there have been advances in computers, information, and communications technology and the availability of cheap but secure encryption systems. This has allowed the CIA to develop secure systems for NOC officers to type reports on their home computers and save the information on encrypted disks for passage to the Station. Some systems even employ encrypted email systems so the NOC officer can email reports safely and securely to CIA headquarters and the Station. So the old time-consuming MLI and SPR film systems are now nearly a bygone technology for the NOC case officer. As a result, the NOC officer today has more free time to devote to operational activities such as agent spotting, vetting, and development, and, of course, agent handling.

These advances have enabled the NOC case officer to become more competitive with his inside counterparts who have always had the advantage in terms of access to information and technology. These new electronic communications and reporting systems have also been beneficial to the NOC case officer’s operational security since it reduces the frequency of contacts between the NOC officer and his inside contact. This lowers the case officer’s potential for exposure to a hostile security service.

These are just a few techniques now available to NOC case officers. There are numerous others that the Company has deleted from the original manuscript, so out of concern for my fellow officers I will not discuss these. The main point, however, is that of productivity. Having personally used both the old system and some of the newer technology based systems, I believe that NOC case officer productivity has increased threefold between the 1970s and 1990s. What this means in terms of manpower is that a contingent of one hundred NOC officers in 1970 would equal three hundred officers in 1990.

As for promotions, NOC officers (“outside” officers) and OC officers (“inside” officers) have completely different promotion systems within the CIA. NOC officers are only compared with other NOC officers of the same grade level for promotions. Separate promotion panels evaluate NOC officers and inside officers. A senior NOC officer is assigned to the promotion panel to evaluate other NOC officers.

Mixing Your Personal and Professional Life

Working Both Sides

The NOC officer is expected to perform cover duties for the cover company. In some cases, the NOC will be the only American employee for the cover company in the country, so he will be able to establish his own work schedule. His immediate supervisor would then be assigned back in the corporate or regional HQs and the immediate supervisor is always witting of the NOC’s true affiliations and very rarely will make time demands on the NOC. I found supervisors to be most supportive of the NOC’s true mission and would work with the NOC to ensure a smooth cooperative relationship.

In other cases, the NOC will have an American supervisor inside the country, but this supervisor will be witting of the NOC’s true affiliation and real duties. In such cases, the NOC is expected to work together with his supervisor to maintain cover duties while performing his true CIA duties. This is rarely a problem. In the old days, the Company and the cover company had a memorandum of understanding outlining precisely what duties the NOC was expected to perform for the cover company and outlining approximately how many hours per week the NOC was expected to put in for the cover company.

When I worked as a NOC, I averaged perhaps twenty to twenty-five hours a week for the cover company. There were times when I would travel regionally for the company and work forty to fifty hours a week for the cover company and there were times when I would work as little as five to ten hours a week. There were also times when my cover company and CIA duties would overlap and I would be performing a service for both at the same time. This may happen if you are so fortunate to work for a cover company that provides access to targets of interest to the CIA.

You will find that your cover supervisor may go all out to support you in your CIA duties and will even front for you and create excuses for you. He may do so to protect the interests of the cover company, but it’s more likely he loves feeling a part of something that is worthwhile.

Still, you are expected to work fifty to sixty hours a week. This is the case not only for NOC officers but also for your inside counterparts

The best cover is one that you live in a normal manner. “Live your cover” is what all deep cover operatives are taught, and if you do it well there is not much on the downside to worry about. Your personal security depends on how well you adopt your cover to your normal life. As a NOC case officer living under commercial cover as the foreign representative of a real commercial company, you have a responsibility to yourself, the CIA, and the company providing the cover to live your cover so well that even when you conduct intelligence operations they are not perceived as suspicious or out of the norm for your daily life. Falter, and you may raise suspicion of the local security services and wind up under surveillance or, worse yet, caught in the act of espionage and arrested without diplomatic immunity. The downside, obviously, is that you lose your freedom, your commercial employer is at least embarrassed and perhaps suffers financial or even worse loss because of your “inappropriate” spying activities, and the US Government disavows your actions.

On a less serious side, perhaps the downside of a life under cover is that you always have to keep up your guard to live your cover. Watch what you say and do and how you live your daily life. Cover maintenance is a subject all NOC officers are taught and refers to doing those things that real employees of your cover company actually do on a daily basis. Blend in to the background; do not stand out from the crowd. Furthermore, you must use appropriate techniques—called tradecraft—to always ensure your personal security and the security of the operations for which you are responsible. You can never let your guard down.

Your commercial cover as a NOC case officer is seldom actually used to perform agent handling operations. It is used to do such things as spotting, assessment, vetting, and development of potential agents but not for recruitment or handling. For agent recruitment and handling, you will be provided with a devised cover and an alias. Often, case officers have several active devised covers and aliases that they use for numerous operational activities. When going from your true name and NOC cover to conduct an intelligence activity under the devised cover and alias, you must ensure that you properly clean yourself—such as going through an SDR to make sure you are not being followed. The same applies when going from the devised cover back to your true name and NOC cover position. So again, part of the downside is having to endure several hours of trains, buses, subways, planes, walking, taxis, etc., for the SDR. You may use two or three hours of SDR just for a short agent meeting, brush pass, or dead drop.