The Reluctant Spy (8 page)

The special operations course taught skills that might have been second nature to guys who had hunted and fished and camped in their pre-CIA days. But I was a bookish type with a fondness for big cities, decent restaurants, and comfortable beds. I wasn't accustomed to jumping out of a plane, parachuting to the ground, and living off the land for two or three days.

My orders in one particular exercise were to catch, kill, and skin a rabbit, then manage on its cooked remains. Okay, I thought at the time, I can do this, but what's the point? There can't be a lot of demand for these talents in Athens or any of the other places in southern and eastern Europe where I was likely to work on special assignments. Similarly, the part about swimming through a snake-and leech-filled swamp: I wasn't headed for the jungles of Southeast Asia, after all. I would emerge from a swamp, filthy and praying aloud for a hot shower, while most of my classmates seemed to enjoy this humbling experience. Still, I did well in this phase of training, just as I had with firearms.

The world of weapons and special operations wasn't something I had considered very seriously when I applied for transfer from the Directorate of Intelligence. No one deceived me or downplayed the abundant differences between a desk job at Langley as an analyst and fieldwork as a covert operator abroad. But the clandestine service was something of an abstract concept. I wanted this assignment because the political dynamics in the region seemed challenging. And, yes, I figured it was a way to satisfy my craving for adventure. That Greece, the land of my and my wife's heritage, was included in the package made it especially appealing. Who knows, it might even strengthen my marriage. A couple of years of this special-assignment work would do nicely, I thought, and make me an even better analyst when I returned to headquarters.

So I was taken by surprise when I not only excelled at the weaponry, the counterterrorist driving, and the other flashy stuff, but also kind of got into it, if not life in the swamps. The process of self-discovery never ceases to astonish.

THE GUNS
, hand-to-hand combat, and other physical and survival training tend to dominate depictions of this training program in press accounts, popular fiction, and even nonfiction books. By comparison, tradecraft—the techniques necessary to effectively serve as a clandestine operative—gets short shrift. But inadequate tradecraft skills can be every bit as costly in blood and treasure as the misuse or abuse of automatic weapons, which is why agency instructors forced me and other trainees to practice the best methods over and over and over again.

A case officer's success abroad depends upon his or her talent for recruiting agents. Officers must improvise, but they do so at their peril if they ignore the fundamental lessons taught at the so-called Farm. Chief among them is an asset-recruitment cycle of four steps: spot, assess, develop, and recruit. The best officers are always looking for someone who has access to information of interest and
use to the U.S. government. Once the officer spots such a person, whether it's at a cocktail party or a conference or a local gym, an assessment begins. What vulnerabilities does this person have? Does the person seem well disposed toward the United States? Does the person seem reliable? If the assessment suggests further movement, the officer initiates the development phase, establishing direct contact with the target and the start of a personal relationship. In the best of worlds, the relationship becomes a real, if not completely genuine, friendship. The case officer's spouse may even become friendly with the target's spouse as development unfolds. Finally, the case officer makes the pitch—the offer to work on behalf of the United States. If accepted, the target is recruited and enters the equivalent of a formal agreement, sometimes even including paperwork, with the U.S. government.

As a general rule, it is probably unwise for a case officer to pitch a target if he or she isn't nearly 100 percent certain the target will accept the offer. The chances of blowback if a target declines an offer are considerable. If the target is a citizen of the host government, for example, he or she could report the contact and the case officer could be expelled or even hurt or killed.

After a few months of practice, we could almost do these drills in our sleep. We also spent many hours on agent-pickup routines. Among the most common: The agent waits in a doorway, between buildings or near but not on a corner; the case officer drives up, pauses only as long as it takes for the agent to get in the car, then drives off.

Then there were the hundreds of hours spent practicing surveillance detection routes (SDRs), the elaborate driving routines before and after any operational act to determine whether a case officer was “red” or “black”—that is, under surveillance or free of it. The more sophisticated the trainees' SDRs were, the more their instructors liked what they saw. It wasn't a flair for intricacy or the dramatic that appealed to these experts; it was a demonstrated
seriousness of purpose. On final-exam day in SDR training, one of the guys in my group never saw the five different surveillance cars on him. He had excelled at every other part of tradecraft training, but dragging surveillance to his final meeting with an agent was a sin cardinal enough to wash him out. By then, everyone knew that an error like that could cause the arrest or even the execution of an agent—someone who was already risking his life for the United States.

THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
Agency prides itself on training its people and preparing them for all sorts of contingencies, whether an employee works at headquarters as an analyst or works abroad as an undercover operative. In some situations I can discuss and others I cannot, that training and preparation paid off handsomely, but not without exacting a certain price.

On January 6, 1999, almost nine years to the day after setting foot in CIA headquarters as an employee, I arrived in Athens with JoAnne and our two young sons, Chris and Constantine—Costa for short. Even though I was on a temporary assignment, I'd been told I could send the family along and even rent a house on a month-to-month basis, providing I could find one. I did.

Athens was special: It was an ancestral magnet, tugging at my heart and soul, sometimes in ways that were barely comprehensible to me. It was a city of splendor and intrigue. And no small thing in my pantheon of interests, it had one of the greatest boneyards in the world.

Let me explain. When I was ten years old, I read an article in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
that said a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates 1927 team was buried in New Castle, my hometown. As any baseball junkie knows, 1927 was a memorable year. The Pirates won the National League pennant, only to lose four straight to the larger-than-life New York Yankees in the World Series. It was also the year Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs during the regular season, a record that stood for thirty-four years. The cemetery was only a half mile from our house. The idea of fame in this forbidding place grabbed
my attention; I had to see exactly where this guy was buried. His grave, it turned out, was unremarkable—a normal headstone with a typical inscription. But the cemetery! The cemetery was like nothing I had ever seen. New Castle in the early twentieth century was a major tin-and steel-manufacturing town, and the barons and their families had built magnificent mausoleums to house their remains in this peaceful precinct of a bustling community. The stained glass, the architecture, all of it was pure beauty to my untutored eyes. I had discovered the man-made grandeur of death, yoked to the history of our country, and I was enthralled. I needed to know and see more.

My meanderings through cemeteries over the years turned obsessive, or certainly seemed so to my friends. In college, I spent hours and hours at Arlington National Cemetery, where military men and women, presidents and paupers, are buried. Abner Doubleday, the widely acknowledged inventor of baseball, is at Arlington. So is former heavyweight champ Joe Louis, but not without the intervention of President Ronald Reagan, who waived eligibility rules prohibiting the champ's burial. I twice traveled to Richmond, Virginia, during college to visit the Hollywood Cemetery there. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and Jeb Stuart, one of his generals. U.S. presidents James Monroe and John Tyler. Founding Father John Randolph. They all came alive, in a sense, when I came face-to-face with their mortality.

After college and graduate school, it wasn't as easy to steal away for an afternoon or a day at the cemetery. But I managed, inconveniencing myself and those close to me along the way. In South America for our honeymoon, I dragged my second wife to Eva Perón's grave in Buenos Aires, where we spent the better part of the day. Katherine has a huge heart, big enough to smile indulgently when I once drove two hours out of our way on a California trip to find an isolated village about fifty miles from Santa Barbara, where Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy Warhol's hangers-on during the 1960s, was buried after a fatal drug overdose.

CIA assignments overseas allowed me to satisfy my own peculiar addiction in more exotic locales—and none was as heady as the First Cemetery of Athens. It's a fantastical place, an urban island of life and death encircled by twelve-foot walls that embrace the late greats of Greek politics, society, science, and culture. The well-tended grounds and gardens of the Athens First offered moments of solace and respite amid all the chaos.

I was particularly interested in the grave of Alekos Panagoulis, who, as a college student, tried to assassinate one of the colonels while the junta was still in power in the early seventies. He was arrested, tortured, tried, and sentenced to death. But the junta collapsed before the sentence was carried out, and Panagoulis was released to become an instant national hero. He was elected to Parliament as a member of the PASOK, the Socialist party, and wound up in Athens's cemetery of the stars after he died in 1976 in a traffic accident. But here's the thing: Even though he hit an oil slick and collided with a taxi, resulting in his fatal injuries, the rumor was that the CIA had somehow assassinated him. How? No one could quite figure that out. But to this day, there are people on the left in Greece who believe the agency killed him.

MY BOSS IN
Athens, Burt Hopper, was a terrific guy who would wind up bailing me out of major-league trouble during my final days in the Greek capital. When I got to the office that first day in town, wearing my best suit, I introduced myself around, expecting to have at least a few hours to settle in and learn where the coffeepot and men's room were. It wasn't to be. “Don't get too comfortable,” Burt said. “We got a guy downstairs you need to see. He only speaks Arabic. No English, no Greek.”

I was in Athens on special assignment principally to work against Greek terrorists who continued to harass and target U.S. interests. But beyond the Greek terrorists, the city also seemed populated
by all sorts of groups and people who didn't exactly hold the United States, NATO, or Greece, for that matter, in very high regard. All of America's antagonists from the Middle East and North Africa were amply represented, as were most of the terrorist groups these states supported either directly or indirectly. Making matters worse, there was a widespread sense that local law enforcement turned a blind eye to the activities of foreign-born terrorists or at least put up with them so long as they didn't kill Greeks. That single proscription wasn't much of an impediment, since the Arab and Muslim terrorists were in Greece mainly because of its friendly relations with the United States and other members of the Western alliance. Greece was an American ally and a member of NATO. For the bad guys, it was a target-rich environment.

The guy downstairs underscored the point. He was a volunteer, who represented himself as an agent of a big-time terrorist group sent to Athens to do harm to the United States and its friends. His story was that he'd had a change of heart, that he had become something of a believer in truth, justice, and the American way, and that he now wanted to tell the Americans all about it. As I learned later, this wasn't all that uncommon, either in Athens or elsewhere around the world. The bad guys would send someone to a U.S. government office as a probe, hoping the Americans would bring him in for interviews and interrogation. That way, he could try to puzzle out where the office's security and defenses were positioned. That was information that might prove useful at a later date, if his masters decided to launch an attack.

I wasn't about to play it that way; instead, I told the volunteer to walk out and that he'd be picked up on a certain street corner at a specified time—in this case, at 5 a.m., before first light. If he wasn't there, I added, he needn't show up the next morning because the Americans wouldn't. But he did show at five o'clock sharp. I was in the backseat, joined by two others up front—a driver and a more
senior officer—and we drove around for ten minutes, just to see if the volunteer would stick it out. This guy hung in there, which told us that his eagerness to talk was either a ruse or shoddy tradecraft.