Finally, the CIA turned to the Taliban’s chief opposition group in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, made up of rebels from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds with the common goal of toppling the regime. But since these groups had been at war with Al Qaeda and the Taliban for years, they were hardly in a position to provide useful intelligence on the long-range plans of the groups, especially as they related to future terrorist strikes against the United States.
The one group within the CIA’s Clandestine Service that is in the best position to penetrate organizations like Al Qaeda is the NOC program (recently renamed the “Non-Traditional Platform” program). It is wrapped in mystery, and little has ever been written about it; even within the CIA, few employees know anything but the barest details. It has also remained very small, selective, and remote; NOCs speak of agency personnel as “insiders,” while they speak of themselves as “outsiders.” At its height during the 1990s, there were only about 150 NOCs compared to about 2,500 DO case officers.
But throughout the 1990s, even within this select group, there was little innovation, growth, or redirection toward Middle East terrorism. Within the upper reaches of the agency and the DO, many officials looked at the program with a jaundiced eye, including James L. Pavitt, the chief of the Clandestine Service. He always seemed skeptical about the group and never expanded it beyond its traditional direction. Pavitt felt the NOCs were more expensive to maintain, and created more problems than the traditional DO case officers who worked out of embassies. Creating cover was more difficult for the NOCs, as was communication with them and establishing separate accounting procedures. Thus, the program basically languished when it might have been used to penetrate Al Qaeda, in the same way that the FBI was redirected to penetrate the Mafia.
One of those who spent the 1990s as a NOC said the often-heard complaints from the CIA’s senior management usually came from people who had little real understanding of the NOC organization. “We were always told,” he said, “from the inside perspective, that we were too expensive—we were more expensive to put into the field, to maintain, to care and feed. And from our own internal organization we were told we were no more expensive because the agency pays Department of State for cover slots [for undercover DO case officers], they pay for housing, and they pay for all these things. So if you subtracted all those costs, we were equivalent in what we cost.”
While recruits for the CIA’s Clandestine Service—the Directorate of Operations—usually came from applications submitted to the agency, recruiting for the NOC program was far more secret and selective. They were usually developed as a result of blind ads placed by agency cover companies masquerading as executive search firms looking for people with international business experience. According to the former NOC in a January 2004 interview, “The typical advertisement would request—it wouldn’t ask for anything about U.S. citizenship, but it would request experience on international projects, either residence abroad or birth abroad, education at foreign universities, native capabilities in certain languages, things like that. And there’s an amazing diversity of people highly qualified that are foreign born that are here in the U.S.”
It was by answering such an ad that the NOC himself, a person with an MBA and prior business experience in the Middle East, was recruited. “I had seen an ad from an ostensible headhunting firm advertising for international business positions,” he said. “It was in
The Wall Street Journal
or
Barron’s,
and I dashed off a résumé. At the time I came in, they had accumulated somewhere on the order of 18,000 résumés and responses for every class. And my class ended up being three people.” And out of the three, he was the only one to graduate.
While people with extroverted personalities often do well as case officers in the DO’s Clandestine Service, self-motivated introverts often do better in the NOC program. “You want to be under the radar, you don’t want to be recognized, and any recognition or awards were truly embarrassing to me, and I think that’s a very natural fit for that kind of career,” said the NOC. “You don’t want to have anyone single you out for any reason. And it allows you to operate very well without suspicion and move very seamlessly. The only time I’ve been up before a few people was at my wedding, and it scared me to death.”
For normal DO Clandestine Service case officers, the training lasted fifty-two weeks, with eighteen of those weeks spent undergoing operational training at The Farm. But the NOCs were often isolated from their counterparts, who would end up assigned to an embassy in an undercover position. “At the time you learned everything that an inside officer learned, much of which is not going to be useful to you once you actually finished,” said the NOC. “But it was all done in safe houses and unofficial facilities around the Northern Virginia area. It was for security, so people at The Farm wouldn’t know who we were.”
The process was very selective. “They started with 18,000 résumés collected,” he said. “They probably contacted 500, then brought in for polygraphs and psychological testing and everything else about 100, and made offers to a dozen or so, and got three of us in there, and one cranked out of the machine at the other end. A couple of dozen instructors, support people. It was a very expensive undertaking.”
Once the training was completed, the NOCs were placed within the CIA’s area divisions, such as East Asia (EA) or Near East (NE).“When I came in [in the early 1990s], the routine was for the NOC Operations Branch to go out into the divisions and try to sell you,” the NOC said. “Here I’ve got an MBA that speaks Japanese and has experience with international clients in the Middle East. And they’ll go to different divisions and try to put you with people—like an in-house search firm.” But because the NOC Operations Branch would occasionally be left with NOCs they were unable to “sell,” the policy has recently changed. “During the past three or four years,” said the NOC, “they started interviewing people and, before bringing them on, would take that résumé to the area divisions, so you didn’t come on unless you had a sponsor.”
After receiving an assignment to a location—for example, Singapore—the NOC would be embedded in a company, which could range from a large multinational business to a small few-person investment banking firm. In either case, the CIA would have to first get the approval of the company’s chief executive officer. “The cover provider is always witting,” said the NOC. “For example, IBM—I don’t know if IBM covers people or not, but at IBM it might be the CEO and the general counsel, and then the person you report to directly. So there may be three people. And they’ve generally kept the rule of maximum of five witting people in an organization.
“I worked for what was called a boutique investment banking firm,” he said, “and the firm was actually just one fellow who had managed to have done a great job of selling himself to the NOC cover branch and had negotiated a very big fee, and wanted representation in [a foreign city]. So I went over and opened an office and tried to drum up business. It’s a great cover, because if you’re in the business of moving money around you can ask any question you want, and if people are interested in having a piece of that money, they’re going to answer your questions. And it opens a lot of doors.
“I would be in an office from eight in the morning until six at night, and then work in operational activity at lunchtime or in evenings or weekends, and typically, forty to forty-five hours a week working for the company and then another twenty-five or thirty hours a week doing operational activities. Either handling recruited assets or out there developing sources that people had—the station said we need an asset in this area in which you have particular access through your job or your social standing. ‘Trolling’ is the word used a lot—targets of opportunity.”
Sometimes the NOC would “pitch” a possible asset himself and then run the person as a case officer would, and at other times he would simply find people for operations officers at the embassy to pitch.
“[I have to consider], can I bring this person to the point where they can give me information and I can get them bound to me without turning them over to someone else?” said the NOC. “And that’s a good way to do it, in which way you can continue on in your own persona—but you have to weigh that risk against the possibility that someday this guy’s not going to believe what I’m telling him. Or do you introduce them to a friend, or arrange a chance meeting, or make available information that allows someone else to approach them? And if you’ve spent six months, and you know that this guy is a dog breeder and he can be found at this place, and here are his interests and here’s his political leanings, and things like that—it could be easy to set up someone else to be there at the right place at the right time with the right interest to take that over, and not have any visible connection between us.”
Once the asset was recruited, a great deal of time and consideration was given to selecting meeting sites and locations for dead drops. The routes were designed to detect whether the NOC was being followed. “We used to have to put in plans for all of our surveillance-detection routes, where we were going to asset meetings,” said the NOC, “and the CI chief would review them, and the ops chief would review them, things like that. And one time I had inadvertently mixed up the names of two subway lines, and I got a note back from one of these guys saying we’re doing a thorough review of this because you purported to be at this station at this time and it’s not on the line you said it was on. And for me it was an innocent error. I took a two-hour route and I stopped here, and here, and here. If you’re familiar with the city and you’re familiar with patterns, it’s like an eight-hour route. They review them before the meetings. Some would want to see it and some wouldn’t—it depends on the station and how junior the person was.”
As the NOC quickly learned, even the best-planned surveillance-detection routes occasionally ran into problems. “I had a couple of hairy instances,” he said. “One of them, we were terminating a fellow in [a friendly Asian country]. Letting him go, he wasn’t useful anymore. Very nice guy. My cover there was as a visiting businessman from Hong Kong. So he had very graciously agreed to meet out near the airport.
“Because they had been having terrorist incidents, there were a lot of roadblocks and tightened security. I had run the route two or three times before meeting the fellow, and there were roadblocks at various places, but they seemed to be rather static and not changing daily or regularly. And I had also gone into the station and asked for an update on that, and everything seemed good. I had about 50,000 dollars . . . since I was paying out this fellow’s escrow account, and I had not much else in my bag. Often, the escrow account protects someone from trying to live outside their means; we hold it in an escrow account for them. So I was cashing him out. So it was a pretty sizable amount in cash, in big bundles.
“I had gone through three or four hours of surveillance detection to get there. And [then] I turned one of the final corners in the last ten or fifteen minutes before I was supposed to meet him and I came across a roadblock that would have meant a very thorough search of my bag. So I made some quick changes to the rest of the route to get to where I needed to go. But I was within twenty-five feet of going through that, and managed to avert that, but it was because of area knowledge and thorough preparation beforehand.”
Traveling with large amounts of money to pay assets was always a major difficulty for NOCs, who were not allowed to get money from the embassy or even go anywhere near it. Ironically, the more the international community tightened up on the movement of cash to fight terrorism, the harder it became for the NOCs. “We weren’t allowed to go into the station, we weren’t allowed to have personal meetings in country with anyone from the station,” said the NOC. “Money movement out to NOCs in the field is a huge problem. The sophistication with which banks and law-enforcement agencies try and track money movements, try to deter criminal activities, also keeps you from getting big sacks of cash. And there’s been a lot of attention paid to how you get big sacks of cash or their equivalent to people in the field. And that’s a very thorny issue.”
The biggest difference between DO case officers and the NOCs is their lack of diplomatic immunity. When case officers assigned to the DO’s Clandestine Service travel, they carry diplomatic passports, and if they get caught and arrested passing money or receiving documents from an asset, the worst that can happen is that they would be declared persona non grata and tossed out of the country. But the NOC is forbidden from revealing his relationship with the CIA, and the best he or she can hope for, especially in a hostile country, is to eventually be exchanged or “exfiltrated”—snatched—by the agency and brought to safety.
Despite the risks, actual arrests are fairly rare. A close call happened in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s. “The fellow was about to recruit someone, and it turned out that we had gotten other reporting that this guy was working for Saudi intelligence, and they were getting fairly close to arresting our fellow,” said the NOC. “We spirited him and his family away to a neighboring country in the dead of night, and they were airlifted from there. That was early nineties. But it is relatively rare for a lot of different reasons. Number one, you’re very well trained and very well prepared and you typically don’t come up on the radar. If you’ve got a hundred thousand expatriate businessmen in the country, like Japan or China, they can’t watch everybody no matter how hard they try. If you stay under the radar fairly well, and if you don’t screw up or someone else doesn’t screw up for you, you’re in pretty good shape.”