See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (5 page)

It was then that a Boston Whaler appeared out of the darkness. Alan was standing on the bow. It was lighter now, and we could be seen clearly from the shore. Automatic gunfire was everywhere, and because of the reeds, the boat could come only so close to shore. The agent was starting to go under, pulling Peter and me down with him, when Alan stuck out a gaff for us to grab on to.

‘The agent in first! ‘he yelled. The crew and Alan hauled him up while Peter and I pulled ourselves over the side. Eric and Curt were nowhere to be seen, but the pilot turned the boat around and got the hell out of there. He’d gotten what he came for - the agent, not us.

We had started in May at the Farm, the CIA’s main training base, field stripping every assault rifle, machine gun, pistol, and rifle known to man. As soon as we knew our way around an M-16 or an AK-47 or a suppressed Sterling submachine gun, we took it out to the range for target practice. But that wasn’t the end of it. We then field stripped and cleaned the same gun blindfolded. And to make sure we felt comfortable with it, we then fired it from a moving car, on a pop-up range, and at night. We even practiced on several weapons after forty minutes of physical training, to simulate the heart-thumping excitement of firing a weapon in a real combat situation.

Next came two weeks running compass courses. Everyone would line up on a numbered stick and start off across a wood, navigating only by compass. The idea was to emerge on the other side at the same numbered stick. When we’d mastered the day runs, we started walking them at night, and then through swamps, and finally through swamps at night. That was the pattern: first in the light, then in the dark.

Following three weeks of jump training, we moved south to North Carolina for two weeks of nonstop demolitions training. We spent two days crimping blasting caps to make sure we understood that if you crimped them too high, they’d explode and take your hand off. After we’d mastered that, we crimped them in the dark, by feel. Then we started blowing up things: cars, buses, diesel generators, fences, bunkers. We made a school bus disappear with about twenty pounds of US -made C-4. For comparison’s sake, we tried Czech Semtex and a few other foreign plastic explosives.

Not that you really need anything fancy. We blew up one bus using three sacks of fertilizer and fuel oil, a mixture called ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil), that did more damage than the C-4 had. The biggest piece left was a part of the chassis, which flew in an arc, hundreds of yards away. We learned to mix up a potent cocktail called methyl nitrate. If you hit a small drop of it with a hammer, it split the hammer. Honest. We were also taught some of the really esoteric stuff like E-cell timers, improvising pressurized airplane bombs using a condom and aluminum foil, and smuggling a pistol on an airplane concealed in a mixture of epoxy and graphite. By the end of the training, we could have taught an advanced terrorism course.

In Arizona we did desert and mountain training. It was more of the same thing - compass courses, wandering around all night, improvising weapons. The only variation was that we got to catch a rattlesnake with a forked stick, cook it, and eat it. Two weeks later we were back at the Farm learning how to navigate helicopters and guide a short-takeoff-and-landing airplane onto a patch of field no larger than my backyard in Aspen. Landmarks on a map never look the same as they do on the ground, and it’s a lot worse in bad weather. Afterward we spent two weeks in the Atlantic on small boats, learning some of life’s useful little skills - like locating a submerged submarine off the Atlantic coast in the middle of the night.

For a little sun-and-fun time, we spent a week in Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands, a miserable patch of swamp and mangrove forest. Four days sloshing around in moccasin-infested swamp and the chlorophyll in the water turned our skin lettuce green. Another four days living on mangrove roots, and our clothes started to rot. Our final exercise there was to find and dig up a weapons cache on a deserted island about a mile out in the Gulf of Mexico. By then we looked like extras from Night of the Living Dead. Just as we were wiping the protective grease off the cache’s unloaded M-16s, we spotted a fast boat approaching the island. It wasn’t until the pilot was about to run his boat up on the sand that he caught sight of us. He spun the boat around so fast it almost flipped. I would never dig up a weapons cache in a real operation, but at least I’d done my part in America’s war on drugs.

Even as I was going through the paramilitary course, I knew that a case officer’s job wasn’t about digging up weapons caches. The course was a relic left over from the OSS, which really did fight in World War II, but the DO existed to run agents, not defend battle lines. As far as I could figure out, the only reason the DO kept the course going was to engender an esprit de corps in its new officers - a reminder that we didn’t work for the pinstriped crowd down at the State Department.

The purehearts in Washington blanch at the description, but case officers are in fact second-story men, thieves who steal other countries’ secrets. The DO is the only arm of the federal government dedicated to breaking the law - foreign law, but still the law. The last thing the DO wants is for its officers to run around setting off explosions and shooting it out with the bad guys in some Eastern European capital. Even back then, before political correctness had taken deep root at Langley and all around Washington, management was painfully aware that whenever the guns came out, the CIA got itself into trouble: Iran, Chile, and the Congo, countries where the CIA was accused of overthrowing governments. Better to operate in the shadows and leave the bang-bang to others. No news was good news.

Another thing I learned about the DO was that, like any other professional criminal organization, it lived according to a strict code of secrecy. Every document generated in the DO was classified, from a requisition order for toilet paper to invitations to office holiday parties. All communications were encrypted and super encrypted. Case officers used pseudonyms in place of their true names. Cryptonyms replaced the names of agents. Even geographical places were renamed. I was stunned when I found out the CIA created its own map of the Farm, with fake place names, including those of rivers and lakes - just like a real Geographical Survey map. It was as if the CIA lived in a parallel universe.

When computers were introduced, the CIA immediately understood the danger of digitized information storage. It continued to type sensitive information on manual typewriters with cloth ribbons, sometimes even recording it by hand. The DO’s famous ‘blue-striper’ intelligence reports (they were so named because of the faint blue stripe that ran diagonally across the paper) were disseminated around Washington by couriers who would stand by while the official read the report and then take it back as soon as he had finished.

My initiation into the cult of secrecy started even before I arrived in Washington to begin my training. Just as I was getting ready to leave San Francisco, Jim Scott telephoned to say that no one would be at the airport to meet me. ‘It’s too insecure,’ he said. ‘You’ll be staying in a safe house for the first two weeks of orientation.’

‘Why not a hotel?’

‘It’s too insecure.’

I shrugged it off. I was too excited about starting my first serious job to think about why I needed to be sequestered in a safe house in my own country.

I took a taxi from Washington’s National Airport to the address in Bailey’s Crossroads that Scott had given me, a new apartment building in one of those sterile complexes that were popping up like mushrooms all over northern Virginia. Another recruit, a lanky blond guy who was about thirty-five, had already moved in. He introduced himself only as Hank. I asked him for his last name. ‘Sorry. Can’t tell you. Scott asked me not to.’

The next morning, right at eight AM. , a pleasant man and a grandmotherly woman showed up from Central Cover, the DO component that fakes IDs, arranges bogus telephone lines, and works with other government agencies and businesses to hide the true affiliation of CIA officers around the world.

The woman asked Hank and me for our IDs. Everything: driver’s licenses, credit cards, club memberships, and anything else with a name on it.

‘You won’t be needing these,’ she said as she dropped them into individual envelopes, wrote our first names on the outside, and sealed them.

Just as I started to consider life without any proof of identity, the man handed Hank and me laminated cards with our pictures already affixed. They identified us as civilian military employees. I took a closer look at mine. It was definitely my picture - it was the one I’d submitted with my application - but the name on it was Robert Endacott.

‘Someone made a mistake’ I said, handing the man back the ID.

The man looked at me, surprised. ‘Didn’t they tell you you’d be in alias?’

No. No one had.

He then explained that from that day on, Hank and I would live under new identities, at least until we went overseas. Only a handful of people in the CIA would know our true names.

‘What do I tell my family?’ I asked.

He smiled and handed me a Washington, DC. , post-office-box number typed on a yellow three-by-five card. ‘We’ll service it once a week. You can write all the letters you want, but you can’t call them, from either the safe house or any other CIA facility. And, of course, they can’t call you.’

I had already figured out the no-call rule. I’d checked the phone in the safe-house apartment. The line was dead.

The pair from Central Cover made it all seem cut-and-dried, but a CIA cover wasn’t always airtight. During the Gulf War, one case officer was back in Washington minding a group of Arab trainees who had been put up at the West Park Hotel in Rosslyn. About midnight on their first night in town, one of the Arabs decided he was lonely. Never having been to the US before and not knowing much English, he opened up the telephone book to emergencies, dialed 911, and told the dispatcher in his broken English that he needed a woman. The quick-thinking dispatcher instructed him to wait in front of the hotel until his date showed up. As promised, when he stepped out of the hotel lobby, there was a woman in the park - as well as five surly Arlington policemen hiding in the bushes.

The Arab, now handcuffed, convinced the policemen to take him back to the hotel to talk to his case officer, who would confirm he was in Washington on a US government training program. The case officer backed up the Arab’s story. It was a language misunderstanding, he explained, and he hoped the police would be able to overlook the incident. They asked to see the case officer’s own identification, a Central Cover-issued government ID that apparently looked suspicious enough for one of the policemen to check it out. True to the agency’s code of silence, the CIA night operator at the agency denied ever having heard of the case officer.

As the policeman pulled out another set of handcuffs, the case officer decided if there was any time to break cover, this was it. The policeman allowed him one call to the CIA.

‘We cannot confirm the employment of CIA officers,’ the CIA security duty officer dutifully told the policeman. At that point the case officer, an ex-marine, took back the phone and screamed into it,’ You S. O. B. , if you don’t look up my name on your goddamned computer and confirm I work there, I’m going to break your neck as soon as I get out of jail.’

A few more phone calls cleared up the problem, but most case officers spent their careers in perpetual fear that their cover wouldn’t hold up at a crucial moment. In the US , a blown cover might mean a night in jail. Overseas, it could be a lot worse.

After the Central Cover people left Hank and me, two men in black showed up from the Office of Security, a component of the CIA that I would come to know very well over the next twenty-one years. Security took care of everything from the polygraph and security clearances to monitoring internal telephones and making sure safes were closed at night at Langley. Security even had a specialist whose only duty was to fire people: the hatchet man. While he delivered the bad news, a couple of security goons would rifle through the safe of the fallen employee, examine his computer’s hard drive, and check any belongings he had in or on his desk, even such seemingly innocuous items as family photos. After that, a security team would escort him to the door.

The security officers pulled a foot-high stack of forms from their briefcases for Hank and me to read and sign. The first was a secrecy agreement stipulating that in return for a paycheck every two weeks, we agreed not to write a book, magazine article, movie script, or to go on television without clearance from the CIA. True, it covered only subjects related to the CIA and intelligence, but if you spent your life in the agency, that pretty much included anything you might consider writing or saying.

Another agreement we signed was never to admit to anyone we worked for the CIA, including mothers, spouses, and even the cop who might stop you for running a red light out of CIA headquarters. It didn’t matter if he had seen you with his own eyes passing through the gates, you still had to deny any connection to the CIA. When DO officers threw around the cliché ‘Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations,’ they meant it. Although some case officers actually attempted to hide from their spouses where they worked, I found out later that most didn’t. It was too hard to cover for all those late nights meeting other agents.

We also signed an agreement not to disclose anything related to ‘code-word’ intelligence - like intercepts, satellite photography, or nuclear bombs. Access to code-word intelligence requires a top-secret security clearance, which has its own stringent criteria.

I was reading some of the fine print about top-secret clearances when I came across the word ‘satyriasis’ It was one of the things you couldn’t engage in and at the same time keep a top-secret security clearance. I had no idea what it meant. ‘Satyriasis?’ I asked.

One of the security officers dropped his voice conspiratorially. ‘A satyrist is someone who likes to have a lot of women. And regulations say if we catch you screwing a lot of women, we gotta lift your TS clearance.’ It all seems comical now, but sex was one of management’s biggest headaches. It boiled down to the fact that the CIA did not want its employees indiscriminately cavorting with the enemy. Because all foreigners were considered enemies of the state until proven otherwise, security strictly enforced a rule that employees must report any ‘close and continuing contact’ with a foreign national. The problem was, no one was sure what ‘close and continuing’ meant. A one-night stand? Writing sonnets to a platonic lover? Security wouldn’t say. Eight years later, my boss in Khartoum, Milt Bearden, came up with the most sensible definition: If you keep a pair of slippers under your friend’s bed, it’s close and continuing.