The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones
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Cuban programs were among the most important that the Agency ran during the Cold War. Many case officers earned promotions and awards based on their handling of Cuban agents. As time went on, many of these officers became Agency mandarins. No promotion or award was ever rescinded, no accountability ever enforced.
Vast amounts of false intelligence were fed into the system by the Cubans. Although a scrub of the system should have erased a lot of it, our instructors felt that because there had been so many Cuban doubles and such a large volume of production over a long period, a great deal of the false intelligence remained in our databases. All of the Cuban double agents had passed polygraph examinations.
Criticism of the operations was open and refreshing. Our instructors didn’t pull any punches on the Cuban program and felt it was important to analyze the past to learn how to avoid repeating mistakes.
In this analysis, HQs looked back on the cases and tried to find clues that could have shown these agents were bad. If an agent took a long time to respond to instructions, or was late for a meeting, it might mean that he had to check in first with his real handlers. In meetings, agents were scrutinized with an eye toward whether they were trying to control or manipulate the proceedings. Some speculated that the Cuban government prohibited its double agents from reporting to the Agency on certain restricted areas of information, even if the information they intended to report was false.
FOR TRAINING IN RECRUITMENTS, we studied the motivations of a human source and the rewards necessary to gain his cooperation. Usually the motivator was money, but it could also be the desire for praise, or the dictates of personal ideology. Playing to the natural human weakness for praise and attention, the KGB was reputed to take its agents, dress them in Soviet military uniform, promote them to general, and pin medals on them. Then, for “security purposes,” the uniform and medals would be taken away for safekeeping. Kim Philby, an infamous British spy for the KGB, was told that he was an official KGB officer. When he fled to Moscow, however, his uniform and full access to KGB headquarters were denied.8
A parade of speakers visited our safe house throughout the course to give valuable tips picked up during their careers. Later, we had the opportunity to meet informally with them. I enjoyed meeting one veteran officer in particular—a gregarious and charismatic man with the personality of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul. The Godfather was one of the Agency’s best recruiters.
“Aim at getting overseas,” the Godfather said. “Take any assignment you can get, just get overseas. Don’t be picky about location. Don’t be picky about the mission you’re assigned, either. Once you’re overseas, you’ll be able to figure out ways to work on the important targets, regardless of the initial intent of the assignment.”
That evening, following his visit to our safe house, the Godfather gave me some tips privately, over drinks, on working the system. The Godfather, for example, often married and divorced women who were not US citizens. Marrying a foreigner could get an officer sent to a cubicle at HQs for five years or more, while the Agency pondered what to do or just waited until the wife could get US citizenship. The Godfather’s solution was simple: Just don’t tell anyone. He’d never told his wives or ex-wives about his Agency job, and he’d never told the Agency about his wives and ex-wives. As a result he’d been able to remain overseas for many years.
A retired officer named Two Dog Dave dropped by our class periodically, always to give us the same disturbing prescription for life in a foreign country: Get two dogs. “This way,” he explained, “if a burglar tries to feed poisoned meat to your dog, one dog will eat the poison, but the other will still be ready to bark and bite.”
A visiting speaker described a recent breakdown in an overseas station. The station chief accused the deputy chief of being a wife-beater. The deputy in turn accused the chief, a woman, of sexual harassment and sexual misbehavior. The Agency charged the chief with sexual misbehavior, removed her from her position, and sent her back to HQs to an unimportant job. She sued the Agency, which settled out of court and paid her $410,000. She later became a lawyer specializing in litigation against government agencies.9
In the past, most of the Agency’s employees had been men. The case officers had all been men, and the wife’s role had been to support her husband and the family. Our instructors’ wives had never worked for the Agency. But by the early 1990s the Agency was about 40 percent female and by 2007 the gender ratio was about one to one. An increasing number of HQs employees were married to each other and were called “tandem couples.”
Jonah envied these tandem couples and called them One For the Price of Twos or OFTPOTs. He wanted to put his wife on the payroll, too, but she’d refused. Equality of men and women in the workplace became a tool used by many Agency employees to double their household income. In most American workplaces, it’s an enormous challenge for both parents to work full-time jobs while raising their children. In the government, with a relaxed eight-hour day of chatting and coffee, it’s not a problem. OFTPOTs could use “flex” time, in which one of them might work from 0700 to 1500 and the other from 0900 to 1700, so that one of them could be there to see the kids off to school and the other could be home when the kids returned. Both would have plenty of energy left over to play with the kids and help with their homework.
In theory, there were rules meant to prevent conflicts of interest—that is, rules prohibiting wives and husbands from working in the same office. But the OFTPOTs were often the same age, grade, and specialty, and given the Agency’s love of bureaucracy, it wasn’t unusual for a husband and wife to end up as two distinct layers of management within a single office.
DURING THE TRAINING COURSE, one of our children was born. Babies have a way of arriving at inconvenient hours, and this one came at about 0300. Later, at about 0800, I made a series of phone calls to family members to give them the happy news, and to my instructors to say that I wouldn’t be in that day. At noon I got a call from Harry.
“Where the hell are you?”
“My wife had a baby early this morning,” I said. “I called and left a message.”
“You get in here now,” he said. He was not impressed. “This is a demanding course and we can’t afford to be falling behind like this.”
The baby and my wife were resting and I wasn’t needed at the hospital, so I obeyed the order. Harry was waiting for me with a document.
“Sign the document,” he said.
“What’s it about?”
“By signing this document, you acknowledge your failure to report for training this morning. We’ll keep this document in your training file.”
I signed the document. Harry filed it in his briefcase, then assigned me an exercise that took a couple of hours to finish. I shrugged it off. It would have been nice to be with my family, but a couple of hours of training exercises before returning to the hospital wasn’t so terrible.
THE NEXT WEEK, Max had a car pickup meeting with a role-playing instructor. He picked up the instructor and they drove around, talking. Max noticed the instructor looked a little gray, and as the meeting wore on the instructor started to make choking, gurgling sounds. Max stopped the car and the instructor opened the door and made more gasping noises, then vomited a bit, mostly spitting and noise. The instructor said he’d been out too late the night before.
After Max’s exercise, we all met up in a local bar, and his instructor, feeling better, told stories about his past operations. The stories were windy and incoherent. I signaled the others to join me in another bar, the Vienna Inn, a place in Northern Virginia popular with Agency employees. The instructor didn’t seem to notice us slip away, one by one, until only Jonah remained, listening attentively to his stories.
At the Vienna Inn, a friend of Max’s joined our group. Max had known the man in the Agency’s paramilitary program. The man assumed Max had left the Agency and that none of us worked for it. After downing half a dozen glasses of beer, the man whispered that he had something to show me. He pulled out his wallet and showed me his CIA identification card.
“That’s