See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (8 page)

‘Sami,’ I finally started, alarmed by the tremor in my own voice. I could feel myself starting to sweat even though the air-conditioning was blasting out a stream of arctic air. ‘I need to ask you something.’

Sami looked at me quizzically and sat down in a chair on the other side of the office. I was sitting behind my desk.

‘A couple weeks ago, we talked about the need for a dialogue between our two countries. Well, I was thinking that maybe you could help with something.’

Sami listened without saying a word as I fumbled through what was undoubtedly one of the most awkward pitches ever delivered by a CIA case officer. When I got to the part about having to keep this arrangement secret from his government, Sami shot out of his chair. He was trembling with anger.

‘Are you asking me to spy?’ he asked in a low, raspy voice.

When he hurled his cup on the floor, I knew ‘yes’ wasn’t going to put this toothpaste back in the tube.

I mumbled something about the understanding between countries being his idea. Sami cooled down a couple of degrees, but we didn’t go to lunch. I would see him again a few more times, but he always made sure someone else was present.

A day after I sent New Delhi a cable about the botched pitch, its chief, Bill XXXXXXX asked me to fly up to see him.

Wild Bill, as he was affectionately known, was a tough little fireplug of an Irishman and one of the best street officers, maybe ever. He’d recruited the first North Korean as well as dozens of other hard targets. He was also a wizard with gadgets and disguises. One story held that when he was assigned the task of bugging a conference room, Wild Bill fashioned an ice arrow to shoot a miniature microphone into the conference room’s acoustic tile ceiling - at night through an open window from the street. The arrow, in theory, would melt away, leaving the microphone embedded in the ceiling. I never learned whether it worked or not, but the story was Bill to a T. Another story went around that when he was in Tokyo, he tailored his own reversible jacket and hat. When the Japanese had him under surveillance, he’d follow a walking route until he was momentarily out of sight, then reverse his jacket and hat and move back through the surveillance team undetected.

The first time I walked into Bill’s office I was surprised to find the American ambassador to India, Robert Goheen, leaning over his shoulder, looking at something I couldn’t see at first. Bill was wearing jeweler’s goggles and had a pair of tweezers in one hand and a razor blade in the other. When I got closer, I could tell he was cutting under a period in a typed letter, making a pocket for a microdot - a photographic negative tiny enough to be hidden in such a minute space.

‘This new generation doesn’t even know what a microdot is,’ Bill mumbled to the ambassador, nodding in my direction.

When he finished, Bill changed places with Goheen and walked him through the procedure. Goheen’s resume included a tenure as president of Princeton University, as well as a stint as a classics instructor. I doubt he had had the slightest interest in spying before meeting Bill, but he clearly loved these microdots. Bill was that type of person; his enthusiasm was contagious.

Another thing about Wild Bill: He never flinched from risks. When the Pentagon needed to know the composition of the T-72 tank’s frontal armor, Bill found a sergeant at an Indian tank-repair depot who would give us access to aT-72 overnight. A tech team with a high-speed precision drill was brought in to take a core sample of the armor. Another time he had one of Delhi’s case officers recruit aT-72 driver to steer one of the tanks across the border into Pakistan. Both operations came up short - the CIA wouldn’t let me write about them here if they had succeeded - but the point is that Bill was prepared to do whatever was needed to get the job done.

I went directly to Bill’s office as soon as I got off the plane from Madras. When I walked in, he got up and closed the door.

Uh-oh, I thought, here it comes - he’s sending me home.

‘Well?’ Bill asked.

I was stammering something about having hustled Sami too fast when Bill cut me off. ‘Kiddo, I didn’t call you up here to flog you for pitching that joker. My only gripe is that you didn’t go up to his base and pitch him again.’

Before I could recover, he asked,’ How much does Uncle Sam pay you a year?’

‘About $26, 000.’

‘And how much did your training cost ?’

I didn’t know for sure, but I’d heard a figure of $250, 000 batted around.

‘Okay. Now let me add up the rest. There’s your car, your rent, your electricity, your airplane tickets, and all the money it costs to send your stuff to India. And then there are the salaries of all the people who support you back at headquarters. That brings us to a ballpark figure of 500K. Do you think you’ve earned it back so far?’

I’d never thought about spying in those terms, but $500, 000 definitely sounded like a lot of money. By the time we finished talking, we had agreed that I’d come up to New Delhi to start paying down my debt. Bill liked my initiative with Sami. Maybe with a little mentoring, he could turn me into a decent case officer.

Two months later I moved to New Delhi and was assigned an apartment in one of the newer suburbs - a big four-bedroom place, but definitely not my Madras mansion. I had only two servants now and no beach house, but none of that mattered. I was in the big leagues now.

The first week Wild Bill handed me an agent file. ‘Here,’ he said,’ go cut your teeth on this one.’

The agent was among Delhi’s best counterintelligence sources. He was supposed to be working for the KGB but had volunteered to be doubled back against it. Over the years bed provided spectacular information on the KGB in India - names of its case officers, its American targets, even the names of some Indian agents. But we still weren’t absolutely sure he was doubled. There was always the possibility that the KGB ran him in to collect information on us. Or maybe the double himself didn’t know whom he really worked for - one day for us, one day for the KGB. Counterintelligence was like playing chess blindfolded.

In fact, the KGB aggressively targeted the CIA. India was a training ground for them just as it was for us. The Soviets fielded a lot of hungry, young officers who would do just about anything to recruit one of us. They bugged our houses, put surveillance on us, and from time to time pitched us.

The KGB had its successes, too, as I found out, including one of our communicators, the people who handled our cables between the boonies and Washington. Arresting the communicator would have compromised our source of information - a Soviet ‘mole,’ or double agent - so the CIA left him in place and monitored him day and night, no easy task. The officer running the case communicated with headquarters using a onetime encryption pad. He had to encrypt and decrypt each and every message manually - hideously time-consuming but the only way to keep the surveillance secret from the communicator. In a separate case, a surveillance team had caught a KGB officer dropping off a State Department communicator a little after four in the morning. The only possible explanation was another KGB recruitment.

Paul XXXXXXX the double’s current case officer, was a Soviet targets officer and Delhi’s walking reference on the KGB. He could rattle off such things as the name of the deputy chief of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate in 1958 and a lot of other spy arcana without missing a beat.

When I asked Paul to introduce the double to me, he pulled out of his safe a half-dozen thick volumes, nearly two feet of background on the double.

‘Go read these and come back in two weeks,’ Paul said.

It was some of the most tedious prose I would ever have to suffer through - hundreds of long contact reports mixed with near-verbatim accounts of meetings with the double. Bach report started with a review of the previous meeting, then went on in excruciating detail about whom the double had met since then, what his KGB case officer had told him, how he’d responded, and so on. By going over and over the same ground, the hope was to either catch the double in a lie or establish his bona fides, but the density of detail was overwhelming. I started skimming.

Paul eyed me warily when I came back a week later carrying the files in my arms. ‘Did you notice how the double only mentioned Oleg Ivanovich’s name once?’ he asked before I could sit down. ‘We know Oleg is a prodigy, the rezident’s wonder boy. But why doesn’t our double know that?’

I didn’t even remember reading Oleg’s name. Paul pointed at the door, and I left the same way I came in - with the files stacked in my arms.

This time I devoured them. A month later I knew the first name, patronymic, and family name of every damn Russian in the KGB rezidentura. I’d even memorized their dates and places of birth and their wives’ names. I knew everything about their careers. I studied their pictures. I could have picked them out in a lineup. Paul gave me another quiz. I passed and now was ready to take over the double. As for Paul, he enjoyed looking over my shoulder, offering help when I needed it.

I met him twice a month, usually after midnight in old Delhi. At that time of night, when the streets were deserted, you could spot an IB watcher, whether he was wearing a dhoti or a three-piece suit. Nor was there any place for IB surveillance cars to hide. I’d drive around for a couple of hours debriefing the double. Every once in a while I would stop to take notes. After the meeting I’d go home to catch a few hours of sleep.

The next morning I’d be at my typewriter, banging out a contact report as detailed and tedious as the rest. I probably added two volumes to the double’s file.

But writing the contact report didn’t mean the job was over. Just as important, I had to cross-check the double’s information. Once, I asked him to look into Oleg Ivanovich, and he came back with Oleg’s home address and license-plate number. The following morning, very early, I drove by the address. A car with the right license plate was parked in the driveway. I drove by four or five more times to make sure it wasn’t a coincidence. Another time, when the double told me Oleg had left on a trip to Moscow, I had an agent at the airport check Aeroflot’s passenger manifest for that day. Oleg’s name wasn’t on it. I had the agent go back and check Air India’s Moscow flight for that day. His name wasn’t on that one, either. At that point it was one of two possibilities: Either Oleg had traveled on an alias passport or the double had lied to me. Running a double agent is a very long walk in the wilderness of mirrors. In the end, we finally found out he was really working for the KGB, which ran him into us to collect information on our officers.

The technical term for what I was doing was ‘building matrices’ - a fancy name for basic detective work. The idea was to sift out suppositions, assumptions, hearsay, poorly sourced information, and wishful thinking, leaving the facts to stand on their own. No matter how thin they might be, they were the only conclusions you could trust. It was indispensable training for anything you wanted to do in the CIA.

I had the KGB double and a handful of other agents, but I still wanted to recruit an agent of my own - to start paying down my 500K debt.

I decided to go after an Indian military officer. It had been just eight years since the last Indo-Pak war, and there was always the possibility that another would break out at any time. The next might go nuclear. An Indian military officer in our pocket could give us forewarning.

The problem was getting close enough to the flock to separate a lamb. Indian military officers were a segregated class, forbidden to go to cocktail parties that foreigners attended or to join the same clubs foreigners did. When they did meet a foreigner, they were supposed to report it immediately. While most things in India were inefficient, the government’s effort to isolate its military officers from foreign contact wasn’t.

I soon discovered that a back window had been accidentally left open. Indian military officers loved to hunt. On weekends and on vacation, they would go up to the Punjab to shoot partridge and sometimes a large Indian deer called a Blue Bull. I figured by simply reinventing myself into an avid hunter, I could run into some of them.

On my first vacation back to the US , I bought a Browning double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun and a crate of shells. To be as unobtrusive as possible, I picked up a surplus Indian-made military jeep on my return, one modeled on the original 1942 World War II Willy’s. It was in fantastic condition, including its original camouflage paint. The owner told me it had been decommissioned after the 1971 Pakistan war, but it looked newer than that to me. Sorting out the registration took forever, but I went ahead and slapped some civilian plates on it, thinking no one would notice, and then I finagled a weekend invitation to a partridge hunt.

We started about nine in the morning, when the sun was up and the grass dry. To flush the partridge from the high corn where they fed, we mustered field hands to walk through and beat the stalks with sticks, yelling, ‘Titah, titah,’ Punjabi for ‘partridge.’ By mid afternoon we had bagged a good hundred of them. At night, while we sat around a bonfire in the courtyard, the cook roasted a dozen for dinner.

On my fourth trip to the Punjab, I met a Sikh who looked to be about thirty-five. He introduced himself as Major Singh and said he was the cousin of the landlord who owned the farm we were hunting on. I kept away from any sensitive subjects - hunting would do. Nor did I try to set up a follow-on meeting. I knew if I came back to his cousin’s farm, I would run into him again.

The next Saturday I hunted with Major Singh. Like most Indian military officers, he was a magnificent shot. I never saw him miss a bird. At the end of the day, when we were low on ammunition, he’d shoot only if he had a chance of taking down two partridges as they crisscrossed. Even then he rarely wasted a shot. That night around the bonfire we talked for several hours about India and the US He loved America. He thought it was a mistake for India to ally with the Soviet Union, both for ideological reasons and because Soviet military equipment was vastly inferior to America’s. His secret desire, he told me, was to attend staff college in the US We turned in about midnight.

That fall Singh and I spent almost every weekend together. We became friends. I eventually offered to buy an Italian shotgun for him, a magnificent weapon not for sale in India. When I presented it to him several weeks later, he hugged me. At our next meeting Singh brought some money to pay me back. I refused, telling him it was a gift and it would be an insult to accept money for it. He hemmed and hawed before accepting. The hook was set.

Worried that people would notice how much time we were spending together, I started taking Singh out to hunt during the week. There wasn’t time to go deep into the Punjab, but good partridge could be found closer to Delhi.

We were driving back into town one evening along a side road, to avoid the traffic on the Grand Trunk Road, the main highway that links Calcutta in the east to Kabul, Afghanistan, in the west (it runs 1, 600 miles diagonally across India) when Singh suddenly shouted,’ Stop!’ At first I thought there was something in the road, but as soon as I stopped the car, Singh jumped out, clutching his new shotgun, ran across the road, and hopped over a low stone wall. About two minutes later I heard a shot. The next thing I saw was Singh throwing a dead peacock over the wall. He was about to follow it when a half-dozen men wearing side arms and carrying automatic weapons came running up from all directions.