See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (7 page)

‘Keep driving around until you’re clean,’ one of the students offered.

‘Maybe. But driving around aimlessly late at night is likely to tell surveillance you’re operational. Red meat to the jackals. They’d flood the streets with surveillance. Now is the time for our case officer to think out of the box - break the rules.’

‘I know what I’d do,’ I interrupted. ‘I’d put the agent on the floor of the car, drive home, let him out in the garage, and make a place for him to sleep for a couple of hours. The next morning I’d take him out the same way. It would look like a normal day. No surveillance, and I’d drop him off in some out-of-the-way place.’

Lynch reached across the table and shook my hand. ‘Good for you.

‘Or how about this,’ he went on. ‘What if you’d prepared yourself for this eventuality - like putting a suitcase in the trunk of your car the morning of the meeting. The million pairs of eyes would have jumped to the conclusion that you were going out of town on a trip. So rather than driving around in circles, you head out of town with the agent. Surveillance thinks you’re finally leaving on your trip and drops off. You leave the agent at the first town with a bus stop. The agent’s not happy, but at least he’s not in jail.’

Lynch was mentoring, talking from years of experience in the field, and he was dead right. As I’d find out in my career, spying wasn’t something you learned from a book, a training film, or a lecture. You learned it by doing it, with someone looking over your shoulder.

My Pan Am ticket pretty well told the story: seven hours to Frankfurt; another five to Tehran, where I overnighted; two more hours to New Delhi and another stayover; then a final two hours to Madras. I’d come to the other side of the world, but I didn’t realize how remote a place the CIA had sent me until I stepped out of the plane and slammed into the sweet stench of rotting vegetation and open sewers. In the pitch black, it took me a while to figure out that the tin shed on the other side of the runway was the Madras airport terminal.

Inside the terminal, the wobbly ceiling fans only managed to stir up the hot air. Sweat was dripping off my nose. Thanks to a broken luggage belt, bags from who knew how many flights formed a mountain in the middle of the concrete floor. Two porters fought each other climbing to the top to retrieve the same bag. Three other porters followed me around, pestering to carry mine. They wouldn’t listen when I told them I intended to carry my backpack myself. All the while a beggar with a withered arm and an amputated leg scooted behind me, pulling and pushing himself along the filthy floor with his good arm and leg. Every once in awhile he’d reach up and grab at my pant leg. It didn’t seem to matter how many rupees I dropped into the pouch around his neck or how fast I hopped from one side of the terminal to the other. He just kept following. I was the only white person in the place.

I finally surrendered and gave one of the porters a fistful of rupees to go find my backpack. It took him about two minutes to come back with it.

‘Madras isn’t Paris,’ the branch chief for India had told me before I left for Dulles. ‘Do your two years there, keep your nose clean, and you’ll be in line for a good assignment the next time around.’

In other words, I was on probation. Although I had graduated from the Farm, the Near East Division, which recruited me for Madras, had decided I needed a tour in one of its true shit holes to see if I could make it as a case officer. The practice back then was to send Arabic-speaking rookies to Sana, North Yemen, and the rest to the CIA’s small outposts in South Asia, which we called the night-soil circuit. (If you’ve ever seen South Asians walking into the fields as if picking their way through a minefield, you’ll understand where the term comes from.) In fact, it wasn’t such a bad system. The Madrases of the world really did determine who was cut out for the work and who wasn’t. Some got sick, hated living overseas, or couldn’t hack the work. Some were caught meeting an agent, and sent home in disgrace. One or two went crazy. And some of us just soldiered on, hoping to make a difference.

India was better than most places to get your feet wet in operations. For a start, you learned how to operate against real, live surveillance. India’s Intelligence Bureau, whose job it was to keep an eye on the CIA and India’s other enemies, had been created by the British, which meant it was focused, disciplined, and tough. The IB could field thousands and thousands of surveillants. The ones on foot were nearly impossible to spot because they wore the same white dhotis or loincloths as every other male loitering on the street. They could flood any Indian city and disappear in the knot of humanity. Four-wheeled surveillance wasn’t any easier: There were only two models of cars in India back then, and in the rearview mirror, one car looked like another. Short of Moscow or Peking, India was one of the toughest operating environments in the world.

Several years before I got to India, the IB caught a Delhi officer dropping off an agent after a meeting. The case officer had kept a pretty steady eye on the rearview mirror, looking for the giveaway of car lights hanging back. When he was ready to let off the agent, the case officer cut down a small street, stopped, and took off as soon as the agent was out. Problem was, an IB surveillance car had been hiding behind some foliage at an intersection the case officer had just passed. The IB team caught up with the case officer’s car just in time to see the passenger door open and the agent climb out. Disaster followed: The agent and a dozen sub-sources were arrested. The case officer and Delhi’s chief were sent horne. Indian operations were shut down for almost two years.

On the bright side, India was the perfect place to collect first-rate intelligence. The CIA’s interests there narrowed down to SOVMAT and India’s nuclear program, both subjects of intense study in Washington. SOVMAT was CIA-speak for Soviet military manuals. By the 1970s India had become one of the world’s biggest buyers of Soviet weapons, from tanks to airplanes and submarines. Since the Soviets typically would sell India their most advanced weapons, it had also become the most important country in the world for vacuuming up information on the Soviet military. Thanks largely to its offices in India, the CIA was in a position to tell the Pentagon what was going to come through the Fulda Gap if World War III were to break out. On the potential global-cataclysm front, India had tested a nuclear bomb in 1974. The White House wanted a heads-up on when the next one might go off - especially if it were in Pakistan.

India also was the perfect preserve for a young officer to bag his first agent. As one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, it hosted missions from just about every country in the world. You could go to a cocktail party and meet a Mongolian diplomat or the ambassador to the African National Congress. But the real attraction was the thousands of Soviet diplomats, military officers, and technicians. About all you had to do to find one was step out your front door. If you were ever lucky enough to actually recruit one, you were a made man.

Finally, India was a place you could polish up on your social skills - cope with servants, make a dry martini, properly clip a cigar, keep up with the mindless chatter at the cricket club. You could hire a tennis pro for pennies. Some case officers even learned to play polo. Even in Madras, the living conditions weren’t too shabby.

After the squalor of the airport, my mood definitely brightened as the driver drove through the gates of the estate that would be mine for the next two years. It was a white, two-story stone and stucco house with a huge banyan tree and a pergola of jasmine that arched over the entire length of the driveway. Lined up under the veranda were my servants - all seven of them. A cook, a bearer, a maid, an inside sweeper, an outside sweeper, and two gardeners. Although they were barefoot, the men were dressed in white starched uniforms and the women in brightly colored saris. They bowed as I got out of the car. When the bearer brought me a glass of cool, fresh mango juice on a silver tray, I decided India wasn’t going to be half bad after all.

Madras turned out to be the ideal place for me to start out as a spy. I inherited only two agents, and they weren’t stars, either. I had plenty of time to prepare for meetings, take long counter surveillance routes, and polish my cables back to headquarters. A rookie case officer thousands of miles from Washington either rose or fell on his cable prose.

Madras also was a great place to make the inevitable first mistakes. One night after a particularly hard monsoon rain, I took a wrong turn and ended up on a beach road with one of my agents in the car. I stalled in about two feet of water. Afraid the police might come along at any moment, I shooed the agent out of the car and watched as he disappeared into the darkness, shoes in his hand and pant legs rolled up above his knees. Another time my second agent didn’t show up for a meeting. He didn’t come to the alternate meetings, either. My choices were to sit on my hands and hope he’d turn up one day or to go look for him. Breaking the rules for the first time, I went to his house and knocked on the front door. If the IB teams in Madras had been as good as the ones in New Delhi, both of us would have been cooked, but Madras was a backwater posting for both sides.

The chief there, Chris XXXXXX, was old-school CIA. The son of an ambassador, Chris had joined the agency right after graduating from Harvard and had worked in Africa before landing in India. Prior to each agent meeting, Chris and I would sit down to talk about it. He wanted to know what counter surveillance route I planned, what papers I would carry with me, when the alternate meeting was scheduled if the agent didn’t show up, what questions I intended to ask, and so on. After the agent meeting, Chris and I discussed every detail of what had happened and what was said. Then he would go through my cable drafts with a thick red pencil.

Happily, Madras wasn’t all work. I rented a beach house south of the city. Built on stilts and surrounded by palm trees, it wasn’t more than fifty feet from the water. I spent most weekends there, reading and swimming, sweet relief from the boredom of South Asia. Madras also had good clay tennis courts, and I took up tennis seriously. It wasn’t skiing, but I was learning to make do.

I’d just settled into a comfortable routine when Chris was seen meeting an agent. Rather than wait for the Indian government to lodge a complaint, the office in New Delhi sent him home. I wasn’t happy to lose his company or mentoring, but now that I was on my own, I intended to show headquarters and New Delhi just how good I was. The rule was never to leave a rookie untended, because he’ll eventually screw up. I intended to prove myself the exception.

Shortly after Chris left, a recently recruited spotter - or ‘access agent,’ as the DO called them - introduced me to an Arab military officer on assignment to the Indian military. Sami, as I will call him, was assigned to a base about a ten-hour drive from Madras. He was an attractive target because relations between his country and the US were going from cold to frigid. Diplomatic channels were about to close down, which meant that very soon only the CIA would have eyes and ears on the ground in Sami’s country. Also, his government bought a lot of Soviet weapons, and the manuals that came with them were never far from our minds.

Ever since my first unhappy reception at the Farm when I tried to pass myself off as an oil man, I knew the first contact was tricky. As soon as I shook Sami’s hand, I plunged into an aw-shucks routine, rambling on about how dull India was, how difficult it was to make friends, how awful the weather was. It was a relentless torrent. Sami didn’t have a chance to say anything or walk away. Just around the time I needed to take a breath, I set the hook. I mentioned the beach house, how refreshing the breeze was, how nice it was to spend a day away from the bustle. ‘When you get to Madras, give me a call. You’ll love it,’ I said. Sami looked at me for a second or two before deciding the invitation was innocent. ‘Sure,’ he answered,’ I’d be happy to.’

When Sami accepted my card and gave me his in return, I had to bite my lip to hold back a smile. It worked! And this guy was a bona fide hard target definitely worth recruiting, my first developmental. I was as excited as I was the first time I asked a girl out on a date.

When I called Sami at his base two weeks later, he sounded genuinely happy to hear from me. He apologized for not calling. We were about to hang up when he let it slip that he would be passing through Madras the following week. I again mentioned the beach house. He hesitated for a beat and then accepted, adding he would bring his wife. Bingo. Now it was just a question of reeling him in.

I spent a week preparing the beach house for Sami and his wife. I stocked it with a couple of bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch, a case of good California white wine, and American food you couldn’t find in India. I brought over my stereo so there would be music, and I dispatched the cook the day before to have everything ready.

On the big day there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A steady breeze blew off the Bay of Bengal. You could barely feel the humidity. In the morning we swam and spent an hour sitting on the beach talking. We moved back to the house for lunch, and afterward we sat on the balcony drinking wine. Sami and his wife were completely relaxed. They talked about Islam, about Sami’s childhood growing up as a Bedouin, about his blind father.

The day was going fine until about four o’clock, when the ayah, my maid, went into labor. With her loosely wrapped sari, I had no idea she was even pregnant. I don’t think her husband knew, either. We quickly closed up the house and packed everything into the car. Sami and his wife insisted on going to the hospital with the ayah and me.

While Sami’s wife stayed with the ayah, he and I sat on a bench under a tree outside the hospital and talked. He slipped easily into telling me about his country’s military. He was on duty during the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, he said, assigned to a listening site monitoring Israeli communications when Israel attacked the US S. Liberty, killing thirty-four American sailors. Until that day he believed the Arab propaganda that Israel was America’s pawn, but listening to the Israeli pilots talk to one another as they strafed the ship, he understood how far he had been misled. The East and the West needed to keep open their channels of communication, he added. Otherwise there never would be peace in the Middle East.

All I could think of as he talked was how he was playing my song. Not only had I corralled a hard target, I had pinpointed an actual vulnerability: Sami’s concern about the need for a dialogue between Arabs and Americans. He had opened a door that I intended to walk right through.

Two weeks later Sami was back in Madras and called me. I had already received from headquarters what is called a provisional operational approval, or POA. A POA meant headquarters had done a background check on Sami and nothing derogatory had come up. He wasn’t a known fabricator or a double sent by his country to stir up problems with the CIA. Headquarters didn’t decide whether Sami was recruitable or not - that was up to me. But now I had the nod to take down my prey. Sami offered to take me out to lunch. I agreed but suggested that he first pass by my office to pick me up. The Farm had been explicit: I needed to control the venue of the pitch. As Sami walked around my office, drinking coffee and looking at my meager brag wall, he seemed less talkative than he had been at the hospital. I didn’t pay attention, though. I was silently rehearsing the pitch I’d prepared the night before, including the part where he said yes.