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The MASTER of DISGUISE My Secret Life in the CIA



Antonio J. Mendez with Malcolm McConnell



To all the Masters of the Game; some whom I met or engaged during the Cold War and others I came to learn about or know while writing this book. To all the members of our families who also served the cause.



Contents



Acknowledgments



v



Preface



ix



1



A Letter Slipped in the Door



2



Border Crossings



23



3



Onto the Shadowy Battlefield



51



4



Murky Waters, Southeast Asia



78



5



Kipling’s Beat



122



6



HONOR and GAMBIT



158



7



Pinball



176



8



Moscow Rules



196



9



RAPTOR in the Dark



256



Endgame



308



Epilogue



341



Glossary



344



10



About the Author Cover Copyright About the Publisher



1



Acknowledgments I UNDERTOOK THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK WITHOUT FULLY REALIZING the complexity of such a project. Although many



others have written books about their careers in intelligence over the years and several have done so since the end of the Cold War, none could have been so blessed with encouragement and help from colleagues, friends, and family. Also I received excellent assistance and advice from many highly qualified and understanding people as this project unfolded. My wife, Jonna, who was Chief of Disguise more recently and worked at the CIA for twenty-seven years, was fully engaged in this project. I penned the first lines in November 1997 and the last change to the manuscript was made on the fifth and final draft a year and a half later. Her writing and editorial advice greatly enhanced the process and final product and her creative judgment and political sense helped ease my way more than once. My collaborator, Malcolm McConnell, proved he has infinite patience. He first called me about Reader’s Digest’s interest in doing an article about my rescue of the six U.S. diplomats from Iran, and mentioned he had always wanted to write a book about CIA successes during the Cold War. “So do I,” I answered, and so we did. His wife and able partner, Carol, was also a joy to work with and proved a marvelous cook and hostess as well.



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My agent, Andrew Wylie, and his assistant, Jeffrey Posternak, have earned a well-deserved reputation as the top guns of the literary trade. It is no wonder their legions of wellknown clients trust them to run interference. My editor, Betty Kelly, and her assistant, Alice Lee, have made this project first among many at William Morrow. Their thoughtful review and deft editorial changes, line by line, have added infinite value, well beyond what one might expect in the hectic world of publishing. They also developed and spread an interest and excitement for the book throughout their organization that bodes well for the further success of the project. Thanks also to my friends and associates, formally or currently in the CIA, who read and made corrections on the various chapters. Everyone in this group was there in the midst of the Cold War with me. They each appear as one of the major players in their respective stories. All have been given pseudonyms as a matter of courtesy or good security practices. Some are still serving in harm’s way while others are in CIA’s most senior positions. They all took time away from busy operational schedules to help me write this book because they believe it is important. A special thanks to the reviewers of the final draft. Their comments and suggestions helped ensure an independent point of view, plus the historical accuracy and technical quality of the work. This group includes: H. Keith Melton, author of The Ultimate Spy Book, noted espionage expert, and military historian; A. Denis Clift, president of the Department of Defense, Joint Military Intelligence College, and a senior staff officer in the National Security Council in the White House during many years of the Cold War; John Hollister Hedley, retired chairman of the CIA’s Publication Review Staff and senior career intelligence officer;



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Gordon E. Smith, a scholar and professor of Russian studies who studied and did research in Moscow in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and Catherine Eberwein, a senior staffer on the U.S. House of Representative’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and an expert on counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Finally, my regards to the chairman of the CIA’s Publication Review Board, Scott Koch, and his staff, who led me through the wilderness of the review process. Also my regards to the members of the board who have a tough job and little time to do it. By federal statute they have only thirty days to complete their review of sensitive material. The month they reviewed my final manuscript, they completed their review on over four thousand pages of material. The board obliges me to include a disclaimer stating that “CIA’s Publication Review Board has reviewed the manuscript for this book to assist the author in eliminating classified information, and poses no security objection to its publication. This review, however, should not be construed as an official release of information, confirmation of its accuracy, or an endorsement of the author’s views.” The entire experience of preparing this collection of Cold War tales, while often harrowing, in the final analysis turned out to be as smooth as silk; not unlike my twenty-five-year career in the CIA. Antonio J. Mendez



Preface I DECIDED TO WRITE THIS MEMOIR IN SEPTEMBER 1997, WHEN THE



Central Intelligence Agency publicly celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. During three of the Agency’s five decades, which spanned the Cold War years, I served as a professional intelligence officer, creating and deploying many of the most innovative techniques of the espionage trade. My purpose in writing this book, however, is not to bring credit to myself. I have already received ample recognition in the intelligence community. Vanity is not at stake in this project. Rather, I want this book to describe as accurately as memory permits a few of the operations my colleagues and I conducted. The reader can judge for himself the quality of our service in the cause of freedom. Some of those we worked with are no longer alive. Others prefer to celebrate their achievements privately. Others are still actively engaged and must remain in the shadows. I have changed certain details of their identities so that they can remain anonymous. But, willing to err on the side of openness, I chose the potential risks of telling our story. I trust that doing so will also serve the cause of freedom. Almost since its inception, the American intelligence effort has been either vilified by the world’s news media—sometimes as part of Soviet disinformation operations—or romanticized by spy novelists with only vague notions of the nature of espionage operations. Yet for more than



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fifty years, Americans have been asked to support—both morally and financially—a large and active intelligence effort of which they have had little concrete knowledge. Several Directors of Central Intelligence and many of my colleagues have concluded that it is time to share more details of the earnest endeavor we made in the name of the American people. I agree. I realize that my decision alarms certain intelligence professionals who see no need to breach the principles of silent service that I and others instilled in them during their training. But those who know me best will realize that I would never knowingly betray a trust or reveal a secret that would jeopardize a comrade, a source, or my country’s interests. Secrecy, of course, is the lifeblood of espionage. I am not a reckless renegade intent on exploiting clandestine operational methods to promote a book, nor do I feel it necessary to apologize for the U.S. government or the CIA’s past errors or excesses. In telling my story, I intend to help redefine the CIA’s traditionally stringent disclosure position. Although I will reveal much of what I know to be the Agency’s ongoing contribution to preserving the world’s peace and democracy, I intend to be consistent with sound security practices. I must also adhere to the spirit of the law. Anything I write or say for public consumption is subject to scrutiny by the CIA’s Publications Review Board. Further, I must consider the needs of intelligence professionals who continue to uphold the integrity of the service. Publication review does not mean censorship. I have the same First Amendment right as any American citizen to express my opinion, positive or negative, about declassified details of our business. The review process is designed to determine whether any present or former Agency officers have violated the trust placed in them. We must all protect the



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appropriately classified aspects of the procedures and individuals used to collect intelligence vital to our country’s security. The secrecy agreement we signed represents this contract of trust. We all signed it willingly, fully realizing that we would never be able to divulge certain details of our profession. But attendant to this lofty obligation is a more practical concern, first expressed by veteran American intelligence officer Sherman Kent in 1955. He was proud of his leadership position but ambivalent as a scholar. Writing in the first issue of Studies in Intelligence, then a classified Agency in-house publication, Kent noted: Our profession, like older ones, has its own rigid entrance requirements and, like others, offers areas of general competence and areas of intense specialization. People work at it until they are numb because they love it, and because the rewards are the rewards of professional accomplishment. Intelligence today is not merely a profession, but like most professions it has taken on the aspects of a discipline: It has a recognized methodology; it has developed a vocabulary; it has developed a body of theory and doctrine; it has elaborate and refined techniques. It now has a large professional following. What it lacks is a literature. From my point of view this is a matter of greatest importance. And where is that literature? In 1998, forty years later, CIA director George J. Tenet announced that because of “current budgetary limitations,” plans to declassify records on significant Cold War covert actions conducted from the 1940s through the 1960s would have to be shelved indefinitely. His announcement caused both academics and the CIA’s history staff to express their deep disappointment. Tenet, however, conceded that the CIA still has “responsibility to the American people, and



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to history, to account for our actions and the quality of our work.” He added that the public needs the Agency’s histories “to judge for itself the contribution made by the Intelligence Community to the successful conduct of the Cold War.” This sentiment is central to my decision to write a memoir. Many intelligence officers did not live to see the end of the Cold War. The efforts of those who fought in the shadow world of the espionage wars, from the torrid backwaters of the Congo to the spy capitals of Vienna, Moscow, and Berlin, were never acknowledged in a parade or public memorial. There are a few dozen stars carved in the white marble wall in the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters that serve as mute tribute to staff officers who died in the line of duty. But like the countless documents awaiting declassification, this stone memorial gives the American public no opportunity to celebrate the sacrifice these men and women made for freedom. Perhaps this book will help honor the memory of their service.



1 A Letter Slipped in the Door Delicate indeed, truly delicate. There is no place where espionage is not used. —Sun Tzu The Blue Ridge Mountains, Maryland, August 21, 1997 • The anxious memories returned to haunt me that summer night, keeping me from sleep once more… It is past midnight near the time of the monsoon. I wait tensely on the concrete observation deck of the sweltering airport terminal, peering down at the tarmac through a thickening haze. The TWA flight from Bangkok is already two hours late. I have watched Swissair arrive from Riyadh, Lufthansa from Bangkok. An Aeroflot IL-62 arrives from Tashkent and lumbers up to the gate directly below. My pulse suddenly surges. The appearance of the Aeroflot is an ominous sign. The operations plan called for the subject and his CIA escort



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to have left on the continuation of the delayed TWA flight at least an hour ago, for a very good reason. We wanted them out of here before the Aeroflot landed, with its inevitable ground retinue of KGB gumshoes. The subject is a KGB defector who simply walked into our Station ten days earlier. Now, waiting down in the steamy, crowded departure hall, will he panic and run when he hears the Soviet flight announced? I glance over the mildewed cement barrier. All the gates are full, but there is no American plane. Then, out of the gloom, the TWA Boeing 707 materializes. It lands, taxis down the runway, and finally stops at the far end of the poorly lit parking apron. The haze thickens—“smit,” the old Asian hands call it, ground-hugging “smoke from shit” from the millions of cow dung cooking fires burning in villages across the subcontinent. I squint, but the TWA plane is hard to distinguish. I wait. The disembarking TWA passengers grope their way through the murk and stumble into the terminal, where the humidity and stench of clogged W.C.s will certainly overpower the smit. I cannot leave the platform. My task is to confirm that our subject and his escort officer “Jacob,” my partner in this operation, safely board the continuation of the TWA flight. But in this miasma, how can I see whether they reach the plane? If I don’t catch sight of them coming out of the terminal with the other passengers booked for the same flight, it could mean they have run into trouble at passport control. That is where the alias documents and disguise I’ve helped create will be tested. Passengers emerge from the terminal, headed for the TWA plane, but I still don’t see the subject and his escort. Is it possible that they have already bolted to the two getaway cars sitting at the dark end of the parking lot with their engines running?



THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 3



Whatever the outcome of the exfiltration operation, I have to pass a signal from the phone booth at the bottom of the stairway. Tonight, we will use an open code with an ostensible wrong number. Is Suzy there? (They made it.) May I speak to George? (Something went wrong.) The rest of the plan will unfold based on which of these two things happens… Finally, I sleep, but I have no rest. Even in my dream, my mind cannot let go of the scene at the airport. I find myself descending the stairs with their chipped paint and wedging myself into the oven of the phone booth. I lift the receiver of the clumsy red Bakelite phone, put a brown coin in the slot, strike the cradle bar and release it. No dial tone. No coin drop. Damned colonial phone, a legacy of British rule that probably hasn’t been maintained since the King folded the Union Jack. Again I jiggle the cradle. The fat copper disk drops into the coin return slot. I jam the coin back in. A hiss, a click, a weak dial tone. Receiver held between ear and shoulder, I dial quickly, scanning the number scrawled on the hotel matchbook in my other hand. Clicks and pops, finally a coherent double whir. The phone is ringing at the other end. I press the receiver tightly against my ear. Four rings…five…Pick it up, Raymond. I slam the phone down after ten rings. Why doesn’t he answer? I look at my watch: 3:07, an hour past my scheduled call time. I know he’s still at the safe house. They’re expecting me to pass the signal. I suck in a deep breath of humid air and release it slowly to ease the tight band across my shoulders and the drumming in my ears. I have to call. I insert another fat copper coin and dial. A pause. A click…the coin drops through again. The phone is dead. I open my eyes to the wispy dawn spreading over South Mountain. The August sun brushes the treetops behind our BLINKING AWAY SLEEP,



4 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL



garden teahouse. I blink again. Is that smit swirling among the azaleas? No, only mist. The intensity of the dream dissolves slowly. I’m not in South Asia on an operation twenty-seven years in the past, but in the master bedroom of our house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Still, as the cardinals start to sing, I am gripped by an anxious lethargy, the helplessness of the dream. Unable to return to sleep, I watch the colors in the garden change with the sunrise and quietly reflect on my life. I’ve considered myself an artist since childhood. For a long time, I also saw myself as a competent spy. Since 1990, when I retired after a twenty-five-year espionage career in the CIA, I have once again been painting full time. During these seven years of normal life, the recurrent dreams of the world I inhabited for so long have only slowly subsided. But one day, a totally unexpected event occurred that unleashed an avalanche of long-suppressed memories. I LIVE, WORK, and show my paintings on forty acres in the Blue



Ridge Mountains of western Maryland. Our post-and-beam house, and the surrounding studios on this lushly wooded property create a harmonious atmosphere similar to that found on a New England farm. A hundred feet down the grassy slope from the house stands a two-story studio, a red saltbox carriage house, and several sheds. Dominating the studio and stretching back toward the house is a large enclosed pavilion with a thirdstory tower perched in the center of the roof. The pavilion’s second floor is a main exhibit area above a large office at ground level. My writing studio is now in the tower. This complex of wooden buildings is my personal work in progress, built by the hands of family, friends, and myself over the years since 1974.



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Surrounding the studios and house are terraced gardens that my wife, Jonna, claimed as her personal domain when we married in 1991. Maple and oak trees cover most of our rolling property, on the base of a Blue Ridge summit west of South Mountain. Late on Thursday, August 21, 1997, Jonna and I drove up the winding gravel track with our four-year-old, Jesse, asleep in the backseat of the red Pathfinder. From the garage bay beneath the studio, we passed the door of the office. A white envelope had been slipped into the screen door. “What’s that?” Jonna asked. I got out and retrieved the envelope. “FedEx letter,” I replied. While Jonna tucked Jesse into bed, I examined the contents, a single-page letter on heavy bond stationery bearing an official letterhead: THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE WASHINGTON D.C. 20505



The letter was addressed to me and signed by George J. Tenet, the newly appointed and just confirmed Director of the CIA. Its purpose was to inform me that I had been selected by my peers as a “CIA Trailblazer.” The Agency had established the Trailblazer Award as part of its fiftieth anniversary celebration. Fifty Trailblazers or their survivors would receive commemorative medallions during a closed ceremony at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, scheduled for the anniversary date, September 18, 1997. I would be among the “CIA officers who by their actions, example or initiative helped shape the history of the first half century of this Agency.” Tenet noted that veterans of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),



6 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL



the Agency’s World War II predecessor, as well as former CIA employees, had nominated three hundred candidates to be honored. A select panel had “worked very hard” to narrow the list down to the present fifty. I read the letter again slowly, finding it hard to grasp that I was one of those selected. Jonna poured herself a glass of cold water. “Anything interesting?” She assumed the FedEx was related to our art business. I handed her Tenet’s letter. “Take a look at this.” “Amazing,” she whispered, shaking her head. Jonna herself had retired from the CIA in 1993 with twenty-seven years of service, so she recognized the significance of the award. Tens of thousands of people had worked for the CIA in the past fifty years, hundreds of them virtual legends in the intelligence community, but most unknown to the public. Jonna read aloud from the letter, noting that I had been one of the people chosen out of all those “of any grade, in any field, and at any point in the CIA’s history—who distinguished themselves as leaders, made a real difference in CIA’s pursuit of its mission, and who served as a standard of excellence for others to follow.” I couldn’t sleep that night, despite the cool breeze and the soothing chirp of crickets from the garden, so I got up and climbed the staircase to my small studio, to reread Tenet’s letter. On shelves around the desk were mementos of my CIA career. The dim light glinted off the tarnished silver of a Hmong necklace. I glanced at a framed picture of a boxy little Zhiguli sedan, driven along the Moscow embankment by a surveillance team from the KGB’s Seventh Chief Directorate and reflected in the slush-spattered side mirror of an Embassy Ford. But one object stood out from the others. I reached up for a small case and removed the bronze Intelligence Star I’d been awarded



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for “courageous action” during a highly sensitive mission to Tehran at the height of the hostage crisis. It was a journey made in alias, using false documents—a hazardous and difficult assignment successfully accomplished, but never described in any unclassified publication. Hefting the cool weight of the medal, I considered the closing comments of Director Tenet’s letter. “Your achievements and those of the other forty-nine CIA Trailblazers probably will never be known in their fullness by the American people.” As I replaced the Intelligence Star in its velvet-lined case, I pondered the improbable sequence of events that had led me to this time and place. In some ways, I realized, I had been destined from childhood for a career in the shadow world of espionage. in 1940 in Eureka, an old mining town snuggled into the Diamond Mountains in central Nevada. As Route 50—“the loneliest road in America”—entered Eureka, it passed through a gap in a black wall of slag, the detritus of the enormous tonnage of silver and lead ore smelted earlier this century. When the World War II boom hit Nevada, my dad, John G. Mendez, was hired at the nearby Kimberly copper mine. He was only twenty-three when he was crushed between two ore cars deep in a mine shaft. He lingered three days, then died on October 24, 1943, three weeks before my third birthday and the day after Mom’s twenty-fourth. He left behind a young widow, four children, and a token insurance settlement. After the accident, we moved in with Mom’s mother, Ina Bell, in Eureka. It was in Grandma’s old frame house that I learned of the family’s pioneering history. My great-grandfather, Cristoforo Giuseppe “J.C.” Tognoni, one of the legends of Nevada’s gold bonanza earlier this century, had been born into a big family in the mountain town of Villa di I WAS BORN



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Chiavenna in the northern Italian region of Lombardi. J.C.’s father died in 1872, and the boy struggled to help his family survive before immigrating to America at age fifteen. Somehow, he reached the United States and traveled west to Nevada to join two of his brothers. J.C. already possessed a skill highly prized in mining towns: In Italy he’d begun learning the secrets of the carbonari, who transformed wood into the high-grade charcoal needed to fire smelters. It was working in the mountains as a young charcoal burner for pennies a day that J.C. gained his intimate knowledge of the land forms and rock formations of Nevada. Still a teenager, J.C. headed off to seek his fortune prospecting in the Comstock Range. A year later, he married Jesse Myrtle, a twenty-seven-yearold widow who worked as a cook on the mule-train line between Eureka and Tonopah. For the next fifteen years, the couple struggled, with J.C. working a succession of hard-rock mining, ranching, and freight-hauling jobs to stake his next prospecting expedition. In May 1903, J.C. rode a horseback circuit to the top of a volcanic extrusion called Vindicator Mountain and studied the jumbled landscape below. After twenty-five years in Nevada, he could identify not only promising rock face, but also see from the narrowing of the washes where water might be found to work any claim. In quick succession, J.C. registered claims on a series of sites near a settlement known as Goldfield. These claims were among the richest gold strikes anywhere in the West. Within two years, J.C. became one of the wealthiest men in the state. In 1916, my grandparents, Joseph R. Tognoni and Ina Bell Cates, eloped in Goldfield when she was just a teenager and moved to the Tognoni family’s ranch. Although the cattle operation was making



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money, old J.C. was typically restless—“stubborn as hell,” as Grandma always told us. When he had sold some of his Goldfield claims in 1904, he had turned his prospector’s eye to a likely spot at Black Rock Summit in the Pancake Range. Almost sixty, he pulled a horse trailer behind his Dodge Brothers truck until the dirt track petered out, then rode higher into the mountains. Beneath an eroded volcanic lip, he found a rich vein of reddish “ruby” ore and promptly named the claim Silverton. J.C. was convinced that he could make this remote mine pay because the silver vein appeared to run thick and deep through the volcanic ridge. So he began investing. But Silverton became the opposite of a mother lode: J.C. put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the claim, but did not take out a penny. The banks eventually gave him an ultimatum: He could choose between foreclosure on the ranch or on the mine. J.C. chose to save the mine. He died at sixty-seven on August 9, 1932. No one ever did figure out how to make Silverton pay off. The old man was buried beneath that stark desert ridge, in a private cemetery where many of his descendants also now lie. Eventually, my grandfather, J.R., took his family north to live in the old home in Eureka, but the stress of their financial collapse was too much for his heart, already weakened by childhood rheumatic fever. He died in February 1936, leaving Grandma with four children. There wasn’t much welfare in those days, and county assistance was especially slim in Nevada mining towns. So she and her kids learned to live by their wits and hard work in order to survive. Grandma had never driven her husband’s ’28 Dodge stakebody truck when he was alive, but that tough old vehicle soon became the family’s principal source of



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money. Grandma bid on a “Lone Star” route, delivering mail to outlying mines and ranches, over washboard roads that switchbacked up stony mountainsides and crossed wide alkali flats. Her route led through some of the loneliest terrain in the state, and she drove through some of the most severe weather in North America. I grew up with eyewitness accounts of Ina Bell burrowing under her truck stuck in a snowdrift and cinching on her wheel chains before a sheepherder or passing busload of miners could stop and lend a hand. My mother relied on Grandma’s example to help her through the shock, grief, and fear that followed my father’s sudden death. Mom went to work as the editor of the county newspaper, the Eureka Sentinel. She and Grandma pooled their money so that Mom could save enough for a down payment on our own small house. Then she met Arch Richey, who was twentyseven years older than she was. They married in 1945. Richey had worked in mines all over the West and lived by a simple rule: Give the boss an honest day’s work and have a good time at night. His idea of a good time was drinking boilermakers, swapping yarns, and gambling. Then the war ended, and the bottom fell out of copper and zinc. We left Eureka in 1947, the entire family jammed into the family car, a 1930 Model A Ford pickup piled high with bedding and suitcases. My half-sister, Maureen, was a baby, and Mom was expecting her second daughter, and final child, with Arch. The only work Richey could find was cutting rock at a quarry outside of Sparks, a suburb of Reno. He planned to build a house on the side of a desert mountain and had made a fair start on the foundation. But we were forced to spend several months in a sun-faded old Army surplus pyramid tent, sleeping on canvas cots, before moving into the shell of the house. We had no toilet and used a boulder slide down from the building site as the latrine. Our only run-



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ning water was the cold Truckee River, where we washed our clothes and took baths, and where I learned to swim in the fast currents. Twenty-some years later, these tough conditions helped me adjust to even more austere living when I’d visit the CIA’s Lima Site strongholds on sheer limestone monoliths above the rain forest north of Vientiane and on the Bolovens Plateau in southern Laos. Night and day, heavily armed Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army troops moved in the nearby lowlands along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hidden beneath the forest canopy. The sites could be supplied only by helicopter or rugged little short takeoff and landing planes, so amenities like water were precious. Still, taking a sponge bath from a five-gallon Jerry can that had warmed all day in the tropical sun was a lot better than bathing in the Truckee River in the winter. It was in the half-finished house in Sparks that I started to draw. Using a brown paper bag and a carpenter’s pencil, I created a primitive cartoon strip of my family’s trek from Eureka and the progress of the new home. One Saturday after payday, Mom came back from town with small presents for the kids. “This is for you, Tony,” she said, handing over a sketch pad and box of watercolors. “You have the qualities of an artist.” AFTER LIVING ON that mountainside in Sparks, the drafty house



above the tracks in Caliente did not seem like much of a hardship when we moved there in 1948. But there were plenty of nights between paydays when the single pot of beans Mom always kept on the stove and a few slices of Wonder bread had to stretch to feed us all. On summer mornings, my brother John and I often headed up the canyons, lugging a black cast-iron frying pan, a potato, and an onion, sometimes an end of bacon if we were lucky. I knew where the rabbits



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watered, so we usually shot one and had it sizzling in the frying pan by noon. Then we’d doze under the scrub cedars through the hot afternoon before climbing the steep pink rhyolite cliffs to chisel out a gunnysack of rock-hard bat guano—which, strangely, was always laced with cactus needles—from caves I’d found my second summer in Caliente. High-quality bat droppings made excellent fertilizer, and we could usually peddle a gunny sack for a dollar to the better-off Mormon ladies across the tracks. Word got out that we knew of secret caves, and some of the kids tried to tail us. I learned my first lessons in surveillance evasion by leading them into dead-end box canyons well away from our precious bat caves, then climbing out unseen through hidden, narrow chimneys. John and I shared a Las Vegas Sun paper route and always asked our manager for extra copies when we filled our sacks each morning. Every afternoon we’d peddle these papers in bars along Main Street. We turned over our regular pay to Mom; anything we made selling the extras was movie money for all the kids in the family. Watching the Bob Steele and Superman serials at the Rex, I felt an early fascination with the magic of deception: The kids around me in the splintered old movie-house seats actually believed the characters were real. I knew they were actors, and I wanted desperately to discover what makeup techniques, props, and camera work had transformed them into celluloid heroes and villains. Sometimes when we had extra papers, we’d hike out to Cherry Hill and sell them to the girls, who often had curlers in their hair and were just finishing their late-afternoon breakfast before a long night’s work. I don’t think John knew what a whorehouse was, but I was fascinated by the tangible sense of the clandestine that we would encounter by stalking over the ridges and surprising the married ranchers and store



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owners. Startled, they would jump back in their trucks and get away, terrified of being recognized by two scrawny little kids from town. Their embarrassed expressions stayed with me for decades. I saw this again in Vientiane on the faces of government officials and diplomats leaving the White Rose or stumbling down the steps of Lulu’s Rendezvous des Amis on the Mekong embankment. I would also encounter this caught-in-the-act resignation among Soviet bloc diplomats in Bangkok. When I was a kid, the knowledge that a “proper” merchant indulged in occasional pleasure with the girls on Cherry Hill was merely amusing. In Southeast Asia, spotting the second secretary of a Soviet embassy or an Indian military attaché at a whorehouse was potentially valuable information, so CIA stations organized regular “pole patrols” to conduct this unsavory but necessary form of surveillance. The paper route provided another crucial skill that served me well in my later profession: the ability to deceive with plausible denial. When John and I were stuck with unsold papers from the previous day, we met the Union Pacific streamliner from Salt Lake to Las Vegas that stopped in Caliente for just nine minutes each morning. John would take the Pullmans, and I’d hit the restaurant car, calling out “Papers…get your morning paper!” The passengers were usually so sleepy that they handed over their dime without checking the paper’s date. The fact that they’d just paid for yesterday’s news wouldn’t hit them until the train was well south of town. And it was unlikely we’d ever see them again. But before beginning this little operation, we worked out a contingency plan. Growing up in remote mining towns without television, I’d spent hours studying magic tricks in my uncles’ battered old copy of The Boy Mechanic, a book published in 1905 that taught everything from building gliders to making bicycle-powered washing machines and had



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several chapters devoted to sleight-of-hand and parlor-game illusions. I realized that tucking a couple of the correct morning’s papers behind the stacks under our arms was just a variant of the old transfer-the-sugar-cube trick. One day I sold a paper to a stocky professional gambler in a herringbone suit who was too busy chomping down ham and eggs to even look up as I took his dime. But as I turned away, he reached out and grabbed my shirt. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, waving the Sun in my face. I looked into his hard eyes, then noticed the ruptured duck pin in his lapel. He was a veteran, probably a former officer from the look of him, a guy who’d seen every yardbird swindle and heard every stockade lawyer’s alibi in the army. I knew he’d have a sharp eye for sleight-of-hand if he’d spent much time at the gaming tables of Las Vegas and Reno. “Oh, sorry, sir,” I said, blinking at the paper’s date. “They must have been upside down in my bag. I have to take the old ones back to the station.” I turned over the stack, slipped him that morning’s edition and retrieved the offending copy. Even though there were several potential customers seated at tables down the line, I opted for a tactical withdrawal. Chalk up another lesson that later served me well: Keep your options open; always have a fallback when you’re working in hostile territory. WE MOVED TO Denver in 1954, the year I finished eighth grade.



At Englewood High School, I fell in with a group of boys who shared my interest in art. This “greaser” crowd liked to draw, but we were also fascinated with anything mechanical. We worshiped Marlon Brando and his gang in The Wild One and, of course, James Dean in Rebel With-



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out a Cause. We drank beer, organized illegal drag races, harassed the local cops and our high school teachers, and had the occasional rumble with kids from outside neighborhoods. While doing all right academically, I couldn’t accept the smug conventions of Englewood High’s reigning clique, the “sosh.” During my junior year, 1957, the student government arbitrarily decided the Christmas dance would be couples only. This meant that guys like my buddy Doug and myself, who liked to go to dances to meet girls, would be excluded. “Looks like we’re out of luck,” Doug said, applying a coat of wax to his 1932 V-8 Ford deuce streetrod in the old garage behind his mother’s place. “The hell we are,” I said. Ever since the announcement that morning in home room, a plan had been forming. “We can go as a couple and tear the place up.” Doug grinned, but then looked worried. “Who’s going to be the girl?” I tossed a coin…and lost. I had two weeks to become “Denise,” Doug’s date from out of town. I suppose the Christmas dance caper was my first covert operation, because it involved analyzing hostile security, planning an elaborate “cover legend,” inventing a persona, and developing a disguise that would pass the closest scrutiny. Once Doug registered Denise as his official date from another school, we got down to the details of building a foolproof disguise. It had been announced that the regular school teacher chaperons would be supported that year by city police under strict instructions to maintain order and admit only couples with tickets. Their vigilance would discourage the leather jacket crowd from crashing the party. I approached with dead seriousness the challenge of becoming a



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convincing teenage girl. Enlisting Mom’s support was not hard; she relished the idea of putting something over on the “popular” kids. Mom borrowed a dress from a friend who was about my size, constructed a padded bra, and even plucked my eyebrows the afternoon of the dance. Doug and I had already picked out a long brunette wig from a costume shop in Denver. That evening, I shaved my legs and practiced my backward dance step, wearing the borrowed pumps for the first time and coached by my four giggling sisters. As we moved down the line of couples toward the door of the school cafeteria, I could feel Doug’s arm tighten inside his powder-blue sportscoat. There was a big, serious-looking police sergeant standing beside the ticket taker. It was not too late to back out, but I struck out my chest and strutted ahead. “This is going to be so much fun,” I murmured in falsetto. “Shut up!” Doug moved ahead. Out on the crowded dance floor, my anxiety dissolved and I began to enjoy the power of our deception. This was fun. Dancing nearby was one of the worst of the stuffed shirts, a senior named Dave, who’d been voted the school’s “most studious.” With me maneuvering backward, we slid in beside Dave and his date and I began to wink at him. Dave was so flustered that he stepped on his girl’s white pumps. After two more dances, Doug and I pulled up alongside Dave again and unleashed the surprise we had been saving up for him. “Bastard!” I shrieked, startling the entire dance floor. “Bitch!” Doug snarled back. He threw a solid punch into my ample right breast. Girls around us screamed. I snatched off the brunette wig and threw it at Doug’s face. He ducked and a girl behind him was hit by the flying tresses. For a couple of minutes we traded movie punches and wrestled, my crinoline skirts whirling. The desired effect was



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achieved. The dance’s Goody Two-shoes snobbery had splintered into chaos. As the cops and chaperons shouldered their way onto the dance floor, I snatched up the wig, and Doug and I sprinted for the emergency exit. Although we expected to be called into the principal’s office, we actually escaped punishment. Everybody in authority, including the cops, had found our little act outrageously funny. For me, the most amazing aspect of the episode was that a good cover story, supported by a clever disguise, actually could transform one person into another. But, as I would later teach hundreds of CIA case officers, disguise was more than a matter of putting on a dress and renting a wig. You had to live the deception. Every aspect of the altered persona—the walk, the voice, the posture, and the mannerisms—was essential. They all combined to make a convincing whole. year at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I spent the summer working fifty-four hours a week as a plumber’s helper, digging ditches and chopping through concrete with a jackhammer. There was a building boom under way in Denver. The Cold War was heating up again after the cease-fire in Korea. Martin Marietta’s aerospace division had just landed air force contracts to build Titan I and II intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Engineers and skilled craftsmen were pouring into Denver from around the country. One night in June at a swimming pool, I met a pretty girl with auburn hair named Karen Smith. A junior at Englewood High, she was about to turn sixteen. We dated all summer, and when I went back to Boulder that fall, I was sure I’d met my future wife. But college wasn’t the same. Even though I’d earned $1.85 an hour AFTER A PLEASANT



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with plenty of overtime all summer, Mom had borrowed most of my savings because Arch was unemployed and still running up hefty bar tabs. The news from home that winter got worse. Money was so tight that there were times the utilities were shut off and the kids had to stay in bed, bundled under blankets, instead of going to school. I decided to take a semester off to help them out. This time I wasn’t as willing to overlook Arch Richey’s problems as I had once been. We had some serious fights, and I was soon living in my own apartment and working again as a plumber. This gave me more time alone with Karen. We planned to get married when she graduated from high school. But, hormones and emotions being what they are at that age, a year’s wait seemed impossibly long. In 1960, unmarried couples didn’t just move in together, so we did the only thing we could: We eloped that May, on Friday the thirteenth. Karen and I had three children, Amanda, Toby, and Ian. I’d gone from plumber’s helper to a partnership in an art and design fabrication business, then landed a job on the night shift at Martin Marietta as an artist/illustrator in the proposal department. The work at the Martin Marietta plant was neither exciting nor challenging. An engineering team would cobble together a proposal on a subcomponent for a military satellite, missile, or perhaps even a NASA spacecraft, and we’d have to transform their drawings into finished schematics and charts and provide an eye-catching brochure cover, often working all night. Defense work was a roller coaster. I got advance word of my layoff a month before the hammer fell in 1963. Still on the Martin payroll, I qualified for a mortgage. Karen and I bought a house in the suburb of FIVE YEARS LATER,



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Littleton that had enough room for a studio, shop, and gallery. I planned to make my way in the world as a painter and run the art and design business as sole owner. But I soon found out that trying to live on a fifty-dollar-aweek unemployment check while hoping to sell landscapes to other unemployed aerospace workers was not a winning proposition. We had a couple of rough years during which I hustled for any kind of fabrication or store-decoration job, and even worked as a process-server for my lawyer uncle, Robert Tognoni. For a while, it looked as if my own kids were destined to live through the financial instability that had plagued my own childhood. Then I got called back to Martin, this time as a tool designer working with electronic engineers on the huge new Titan IIIC booster. We were designing the missile’s electronic control modules, which had to withstand the stress of launch and the hostile environment of space. My job took me into vast sheds where prototypes of the missile lay in cradles wider and longer than the huge Ute dump trucks in the Nevada mines or the gondola cars that used to rattle through Caliente. I had to crawl around the “bird,” making exact measurements for my lifesize drawings of the wiring harnesses and junction boxes. The first time I actually touched the smooth titanium skin of the massive rocket, I felt a twinge of excitement mixed with dread. This missile might actually be fired in wartime, and I knew the possibility was not so remote. The Cold War was no longer a nagging geopolitical dispute; it was a smoldering potential holocaust that could easily destroy human civilization, not simply individual nations. The wars in Korea and French Indochina had ended in bloody stalemates; Europe was divided by the



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Iron Curtain. None of us would ever forget the tense October days of the 1962 Cuban missile standoff. Now an arms race of unprecedented magnitude had begun. In the years since I’d witnessed my first atomic bomb tests in Nevada, both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed hydrogen bombs. Here in the plant, the blunt gray nose cones were mock-ups, but we all realized the Titan IIIC was meant to deliver halfway around the world a thermonuclear warhead yielding the equivalent of millions of tons of TNT. Just as the atomic bomb had made World War II blockbusters seem like firecrackers, the H-bomb, driven by the fusion process that fueled the sun, had turned fission weapons into toys. IN FEBRUARY 1965, George Adams, a friend from my first job at



Martin, dropped by my studio. He was still out of work and had answered a want ad in the Denver Post asking for “Artists to Work Overseas—U.S. Navy Civilians.” George’s résumé had been rejected. “I had some juvenile police trouble,” he explained. I studied the ad. Working for the Navy “overseas” would probably be more exciting than drawing plans for wiring harnesses on the Titan missile. I sent in my résumé to the Salt Lake postal box listed in the ad. Ten days later, a man called and asked that I appear for an interview at a motel on West Colfax Avenue in Lakewood. “Funny,” I told Karen, “I wonder why somebody from the Navy didn’t want to meet downtown at the federal building.” Richard Ryman offered me a chair at the faux-wood-laminated motel table. A shaded bulb hung low above us, illuminating my chair, while Ryman remained in the shadows. The scene reminded me of a Sam Spade movie. Ryman was in his forties, tall and rangy with blond hair going to gray. He wore a snap-brim hat and no suit coat. His dark tie



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was loosened to expose a prominent Adam’s apple at his unbuttoned shirt collar. Ryman placed an open bottle of Jim Beam and two motel glasses on the table. “Care for a drink?” His tone was casual. This was unusual behavior for someone recruiting a civilian Navy artist. But I tried to be friendly. “Sure,” I said, holding out a glass. As we sipped our bourbon straight, he slid a thick black ring binder into the light. “What kind of art work do you do?” “I’ve got some samples with me.” I bent to open my two old leather portfolios. For the next twenty minutes, Ryman sat silently, nursing nips of bourbon as I rattled on, showing prints of portraits, landscapes, specialty design projects, draftsman and architectural drawings, and the covers of Martin proposal brochures. Finally, I ran out of samples and sat down. Ryman knocked back the last of his drink and opened the ring binder to a page he had marked. “I really don’t know what kind of artist they’re looking for,” he said, gazing at me reflectively from beneath the brim of his hat. “I sent in several applications, but none of them seemed to be right. Here, you read this.” He swiveled the binder across the table. The bold red typeface leaped out at me from the top and bottom of the page: TOP SECRET—NO FORN DISSEM. The only classified documents I’d ever seen had been at Martin, and I knew they weren’t supposed to leave a secure facility. Then my eye moved down the page. I was staring at a recruitment guide prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, Technical Services Division. Half an hour later, I left the meeting with Ryman, a sixteenpage application form tucked inside my portfolio. At the door, Ryman touched my arm. “If you do apply, you will be polygraphed and sub-



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jected to a thorough background check to make certain you’re trustworthy and not an agent of a hostile organization.” His tone softened slightly. “But remember, Tony, we’re not looking for paragons. We don’t give a shit if you patted someone on the ass once or twice. You just have to level with us.” Loading my portfolios into the car, I looked back at the motel room. The curtain was firmly closed, betraying no hint of the person inside.



2 Border Crossings Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail. —Attributed to Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, c. 1929 Washington, D. C, April 1965 • The bus from Baltimore Friendship Airport dropped me at the airline terminal on the corner of 12th and K streets on this bright spring afternoon. I paused for a moment on the curb, a pilgrim in his mid-twenties, trying to absorb what had been a memorable day. Not only had the American DC-8 flight from Denver been my first ride in a jet, it had also been the first time I’d flown. Now I was standing at the taxi rank, only blocks from the White House, my mother’s worn leather valise at my feet, about to head across the Potomac to the CIA’s Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The sun was warm and trees were budding. How nice it would be to stroll toward the mon-



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uments on the Mall, I thought. Until that moment, they had only existed in my mind as images from magazines and television. But I felt a sense of duty. The letter I’d received inviting me to an interview had been clear: I was to report to CIA Headquarters at nine A.M. on Tuesday, April 20. Now I wanted to find a room in Langley and try to get a good night’s sleep, if my excitement permitted. “Langley, Virginia,” I told the black cab driver, who wore a colorful, geometrically patterned shirt with billowing sleeves. It was the first time I had ever encountered an African. “Where in Langley, mister?” He removed his toothpick and gave me a dubious glance in the rearview mirror. “Any motel near the Central Intelligence Agency,” I said. “You say the CIA, mister?” The driver shook his head in mild amusement. We cut onto Constitution Avenue and rolled along the Mall with the rush hour commuters streaming toward the Virginia suburbs. I couldn’t help rubbernecking as we passed the Washington Monument, then the Lincoln Memorial, rising through the blossoming trees ahead. To me, this was infinitely more exciting than diagramming circuits at the Martin plant in Denver. I felt as if I was finally being lifted from the isolation I’d known as a kid, and the tough times I’d endured as a young artist, into an exotic world of adventure. But as the taxi weaved among the commuters crawling on the George Washington Parkway on the other side of the Potomac, the mundane returned to quash my sense of adventure. “You got a name for that particular motel, mister?” the driver asked with a wry grin. “Anywhere near the CIA,” I replied, trying not to sound like a naive tourist. He cut up the steep road beside Chain Bridge and turned onto



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Route 123. I assumed we were in Langley, but there was nothing but miles of newly budded oaks, maples, and sycamores. “Down there is the CIA,” the driver said, proud of his knowledge. I could barely make out what appeared to be a high security gate and a white concrete-block guardhouse, half-hidden by tree trunks, about three hundred yards down a curving, two-lane road. A small sign at the shoulder read simply: VIRGINIA HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT. I was suddenly shaken by uncertainty. Had all this business—the mysterious ad, the bizarre interview with Ryman, and now this taxi ride to nowhere—been a hoax? “Where’s Langley?” I looked around anxiously. “Where’s the town?” “Don’t know that there is one,” the driver said, his smile widening with the knowledge that he, an immigrant, knew more than a native son. “We will have to have a look up here by McLean.” An hour later, we were still searching for a motel, but the driver, who revealed he was a “very good Ghanaian Christian man,” had assured me I wouldn’t be charged more than the standard fare from the District to McLean. Finally, in Falls Church, we spotted an old Victorian house with a white gingerbread porch and a small blue sign that read ROOMS FOR RENT. We were a good five miles from the entrance of CIA Headquarters. Could I get a cab in the morning, or would I have to hitchhike? “The city bus to the CIA stops right here at the corner,” the landlord said. I paid my Ghanaian driver a generous ten dollars for his trouble and unpacked the suitcase in my temporary base of operations, a second-floor bedroom shielded from the street in a quiet neighborhood—my gullible idea of the operational security this first visit to Agency Headquarters required. But the next morning, I was again dragged back to the commonplace that lies beneath so much of the cloak-anddagger sensationalism



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of the intelligence profession. The municipal bus was crowded with commuters. At the CIA stop, I got off with about a dozen people, some carrying brown-paper lunch bags, and trudged along toward the security hut. I noticed that nobody looked like James Bond. The shapely Miss Moneypenny was also nowhere to be found. As we rounded the curve, however, I got my first look at the immense white limestone monolith of the Agency’s new Headquarters, reputed to be the second-largest office building in the world after the Pentagon. I had no reason to doubt that this massive, seven-floor structure dominating a green campus, although invisible from the surrounding roads, was in fact 1,400,000 square feet. The clean sweep of the roof was broken by clumps of antennae. An enormous fiberglass igloo, which I guessed must have sheltered satellite dishes, stood to the right of the building. Suddenly, I forgot about the brownbaggers and thought about the cryptic messages streaming to and from this building. As I waited in line at the uniformedsecurity guard station, my sense of awe and excitement returned. The people in line flashed blue laminated badges, and the guards waved them through. I had my interview letter open like an eager scholarship boy on the first day of school. “I have a nine o’clock appointment with personnel,” I told the guard, handing over the page embossed with the CIA seal. He glanced at the letter, then directed me to the swooping glass-and-marble front portico. Walking past the mysterious igloo, which I soon discovered was actually the auditorium, I imagined agents punching digits into tiny burst transmitters, just as I’d read in Len Deighton novels. This mental Ping-Pong match between the exotic and the workaday existence of bureaucracy had only just begun. Standing on the polished gray granite floor of the vaulted marble lobby, I gazed at the imposing seal, thirty feet in diameter. The words



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CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA were inlaid in multicolored granite characters, sur-



rounding a shield topped by the profile of a fierce eagle. The center of the shield was emblazoned with a sixteen-point compass rose, symbolizing the far corners of the world where the Agency operated. High on the marble lobby wall was the passage from John 8:32,…AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YE FREE…If the architect intended to impress people with this lobby, he had succeeded in my case. “Your first appointment is at the West Out Building,” the personnel officer told me, consulting a neatly typed schedule. He wore glasses with heavy black frames and kept a water glass filled with at least a dozen precisely sharpened pencils on his spotless desk blotter. Slender and balding, the man did not fit my image of a spymaster. “You’ll have to catch the Bluebird at the stop out front,” he said. The Bluebird was an unmarked bus that swung by the Pentagon before crossing Memorial Bridge, making a couple of intermediate stops at anonymous buildings, then depositing me at 15th and Independence on the Mall. It was another bright spring day, and I was once more torn between my sense of obligation and my desire to soak up the sights. But I wasn’t prepared for the ranks of dingy prefab “temporary” buildings dating from World War II that sprawled across this slope of the Mall and certainly never made it onto tourist postcards. The West Out Building was standard red brick government from the nineteenth century, a gritty facade broken by rows of windows too narrow to have offered much relief to the bachelor clerks in celluloid collars sweating at their desks in the decades before air conditioning. From the sidewalk, there was no way to discern the building’s current tenants; it could easily have been a branch of the nearby Bureau of Engraving and Printing. But in fact, it was the front office of the CIA’s



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Technical Services Division (TSD). Here I would have to pass my initial screening before being led across borders of secrecy into the concentric circles of security guarding the Agency’s clandestine heart. That morning’s interview was with two gentlemen I will call “Phil” and “Franco.” Phil was the chief of the Graphic Arts Reproduction Branch of TSD, and Franco headed the Art Department. These two men had the power to determine my future. Phil held up the art samples I had sent him with my initial application, including some rather elegant oriental calligraphy. “Why were you interested in this type of thing?” Franco asked, keeping his voice neutral. It was obvious they were intrigued with my samples, and I certainly didn’t want to be deceptive. “I saw the recruitment guidelines during my Denver interview,” I admitted. “So, I figured part of this job might involve, well, reproducing foreign writing.” Both men offered cautious smiles. Was I being resourceful or too clever? Maybe both were attributes the Agency desired, I silently hoped. “That explains it,” Franco said, stacking the pages neatly in a folder. “Not many artists send in Chinese grass writing or a watercolor of a Bulgarian postage stamp. We wondered if you were particularly insightful or some kind of a con man.” Franco was a large, jolly man with a few surviving wisps of hair. Now his smile was genuine. “It appears you’re aware of what we do here.” “I read that you call it authentication and validation,” I offered, referring to a book I’d borrowed from the Denver library about the CIA and the Technical Services Division. Phil, a dour no-nonsense type, nodded, impatient to cut through the pleasantries. “You understand that you will be reproducing documents,



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then?” His cool eyes locked on mine. “That doesn’t leave much creative latitude. Your lettering and line weight will be critiqued with a microscope.” In other words, a major part of my job would be duplicating official documents of foreign governments, ranging from ration books to letterheads to military identity cards. If I did that type of work on American soil with U.S. documents, I’d be in line for a ten-or twenty-year vacation in Leavenworth. I sensed that Phil was probing to see if I had the stomach for intelligence work in general; he was also testing my ability to surrender artistic freedom and succumb to the drudgery of providing the forged documents needed to sustain the Agency’s clandestine operations. I remembered the oft-quoted phrase of former Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, who was reputed to have said, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” when he effectively shut down American intelligence operations in 1929. Things had changed. The Cold War was entering its twentieth year. Not only was I willing to read the mail of any Soviet gentleman I might encounter, I was eager to take a crack at forging some, if it furthered my country’s interest. “I understand creative problem solving, which is what I think you’re doing here,” I told Phil. “The mechanical processes involved are incidental. The real creativity is in the planning and management.” That particular kernel of wisdom had come from one of the bullpen artists back at Martin Marietta, who had been studying for a management degree. “Well, all right, then,” Phil said, nodding to indicate he’d made his point. “I just don’t want us to have any misunderstanding.” I knew I had passed the first hurdle. The next appointment on my sheet was with a fellow named Glenn



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who headed a new TSD program bearing the acronym TOPS (Technical Operations Officer Generalist). He explained that the Agency’s technical operations had always been a vital part of our espionage efforts, dating to the CIA’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). But, at its inception in 1942, the “Oh, So Social” had in fact drawn a lot of its officers from the prep school-Ivy League network, while their sergeant radio operators, interpreters, and demolition men had often been patriotic blue-collar draftees. Since the Agency had originated in 1947 at the start of the Cold War, Glenn assured me, any sense of class difference between case officers and the TSD had disappeared. I would soon learn more about the TOPS program, which assigned certain qualified TSD officers overseas to work sideby-side with their case officer colleagues. For example, a case officer might be skilled or lucky enough to recruit an agent willing to plant a listening device in the desk drawer of a sensitive department of a foreign government. Building the device and training the agent in its use were the TSD officer’s jobs. TOPS officers could handle most urgent jobs, but they knew when to ask for help. “I see you’re working on spacecraft electronics, have practical experience in construction, and have even run your own fabrication and design business,” he said, checking off items on my sixteen-page application. “There might be a TOPS assignment for you in a few years.” I later realized that Glenn was assessing my potential for what was known as a more exciting “singleton” assignment overseas—the forward deployment of tech ops (technical operations) officers as TSD firemen. They were expected to fly in on short notice and provide the technical support that case officers might need in a fast-breaking operation, perhaps in a remote area. That was good news because I didn’t relish the idea of spending my



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entire career hunched over a drafting board, forging military train passes for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. I also wanted to see such documents actually being used. After lunch I met with Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, the Deputy Chief of TSD. As I entered his high-ceilinged office, I couldn’t help thinking of the apochryphal Q in the James Bond sagas. A huge framed replica of Goya’s The Nude Maja hung on the wall behind him; on his desk was a tiny plaque reading THINK BIG. Gottlieb looked more like a tanned, athletic college professor than someone who worked in a basement laboratory, dreaming up smoke-screen dispensers for gleaming sports cars, or cunning devices used to eavesdrop on telephone lines without leaving a physical trace. Little did I know… Hardly stuffy, he sat with me in front of his desk with his shirt sleeves rolled up. I was conscious of his careful grooming and deliberately casual manner. “I like to meet with everyone who’s being considered for employment with TSD,” he said. After asking about my family, he looked at me thoughtfully and paused for a moment. “How would you feel about telling a lie for the good of your country?” he asked. There was a probing intensity to his question. I resisted the urge, natural in a young man with his foot in the professional world for the first time, to give a glib answer. “A lie can be a deceitful way to hurt people,” I finally said. “Or it can be a necessary form of deception in time of war. I think we’re engaged in a war, and both sides are using deception.” I sensed that my answer met his demanding criteria. At the end of my interviews in the West Out Building, Manny Fontana, TSD’s chief of personnel, wrote out a brief note on an Agency form. “Report back to Headquarters tomorrow morning for a polygraph and a full physical,” he said. I suppressed the urge to grin, having survived the first row of hurdles. Manny added that if I successfully passed the



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physical and polygraph, I’d be offered a position in the TSD Art Department at the level of GS-9/1 for the princely salary of $8,672 per annum. But, he cautioned, the offer was contingent on a background investigation, which would take a few more months to complete. It was mid-afternoon when I walked out of the old brick building and onto the sunny grass of the Mall. Now I could smile and hoot in delight—I was elated. The wider world of daring exploits that I had dreamed of as a kid those nights in Caliente, listening to the scratchy voices of London and Cape Town on my beat-up old radio, seemed to lie open at my feet. I spent the rest of the afternoon at the National Gallery of Art, awed to be in the presence of Rembrandt, Titian, and Picasso. small, quiet, and softly lit. I could have been in the empty waiting room of a heart specialist. Instead, I was sitting in a comfortable blue recliner in one of the Agency’s polygraph suites on the second floor of Headquarters. I tried to relax and breathe normally, but I was conscious of the elastic respiration band across my chest and the wired pads clipped to my fingertips. Worst of all, the inflated blood pressure cuff clamping my left biceps was so painfully tight that my arm was going numb down to my fingertips. “Is your name Antonio Joseph Mendez?” The middle-aged man sat at the small table close to the left arm of my chair, concentrating on the machine before him. A paper scrolled from a spool in the polygraph, its surface a network of smooth wave lines from the sensor scribes. The man’s voice was soft and kind but carried a sense of purpose. “Yes,” I answered, thinking, What a bizarre question. Then I realized I could have been there under false pretense. What better way for a foreign intelligence service to penetrate the CIA than to have one of its THE ROOM WAS



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own people assume the identity of an American who contrived to have himself hired? In addition, answering such a straightforward question was probably designed to establish a baseline of truthfulness, a hunch that was confirmed when the polygraph operator asked me to verify my address in Colorado and my place of employment. In the same cordial tone, he shifted his approach. “Are you working for any organization hostile to the United States?” “No.” “Have you ever told a lie?” His voice was completely devoid of confrontation. Obviously I had. “Yes.” The man didn’t even look up from his chart. “Have you ever divulged a confidence?” Yes, who hasn’t? But I answered, “No.” After a moment’s reflection, I changed my mind. “Yes.” “Have you ever divulged a confidence?” he repeated, ticking a corner of the scroll with a colored pencil. “Yes.” These last two questions, I saw, were also probably intended to assess how a lie might register. Only a saint could answer “no” with a straight face, and the way I replied probably gave him a good indication of how one of my true, positive responses registered on the sensors that day. Over the next twenty years, I would be regularly “boxed,” as were all employees of the CIA, and I would come to learn why polygraph evidence is not admissible in a court of law. The “box,” in the hands of a skilled polygrapher, could at best detect patterns of deception, not consistently distinguish individual lies from truthful statements. But as a screening device for recruits, both American officers and foreign agents, a wellrun polygraph exam probably remains the best technique available to unearth deceit, some notable failures notwithstanding.



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“…and what were you thinking when I asked if there was anything else you wanted to tell me?” I chuckled, in spite of the painful grip of the blood pressure cuff. “I was thinking about the TV show The Fugitive. I’m not sure why, it just popped into my head.” Five minutes earlier, he had asked me if I’d ever stolen anything, and I’d admitted stealing a bale of hay from a barn when I’d been a kid. This, he proclaimed, was “of no consequence.” Now he switched to another tack. “Have you ever used any illegal or controlled substance?” In 1965, where I came from, this could mean only one thing—marijuana. “No.” “Have you ever been involved in sexual activity that might be used against you for blackmail or coercion?” “No.” The chart purred softly off the machine. “Criminal activity?” “No.” I thought of my minor scrapes with the law as a kid in Denver. I even remembered peddling day-old newspapers on the Union Pacific. But apparently, my answer had been satisfactory. He bent over to remove the cuff and the galvanic skin-response pads from my fingertips. “Now,” he said, with a kind smile, “is there anything you’d like to ask me?” “Yes,” I answered, rubbing my numb arm. “I’ve heard that if someone takes certain drugs they can beat your machine. Is there any truth to that?” The polygrapher pursed his lips, then smiled, probably trying to decide if I was just a youthful go-getter or someone salting away potentially valuable information for the future. “No,” he said emphatically.



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“That’s simply not true. If you take drugs before the test, the machine will register abnormal bodily responses rendering the test invalid.” I found myself irresistibly drawn to spy lore, which was infinitely more satisfying than the James Bond concoctions then available to the public. “And what about a report I read that said the Communists have a special school in Czechoslovakia for their agents on how to beat the polygraph?” I persisted. In retrospect, it was incredibly presumptuous for a twentyfive-year-old TSD recruit to ask these questions. I hadn’t even signed my secrecy agreement yet. Still, the polygrapher was friendly and professional. “They might have,” he allowed. “But we’re fairly confident of our ability to detect any attempt at deception. It really is a matter of the examiner’s skill, not just the technology of the machine.” Leaving the polygraph suite that morning, I had the feeling that this particular examiner would have been hard to deceive, and after a rigorous physical exam, I concluded that everybody I dealt with at the Agency had been thoughtful and professional. Before heading home to Denver, I met with a CIA security officer, who briefed me on final procedures. “What have you told your family and friends about your interviews here?” he asked. “I told them I was going to interview with the CIA,” I answered. He briefly considered this information. So far, there was no security problem: Thousands of people, including many of the brown-baggers on the commuter buses, openly worked for the CIA, assigned to logistics or administrative jobs, or to the Directorate of Intelligence, which analyzed the daily avalanche of information arriving from open and clandestine sources worldwide. The Technical Services Division of that time



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was part of the thinly disguised Directorate of Plans (later named the Directorate of Operations) and generally called the Clandestine Service. People working for this Directorate did not acknowledge their affiliation, but I was not yet sworn in. “It’s fine for your immediate family to know you’ve had these interviews,” the security officer said. “But you should tell anybody else that you didn’t take the job offer from the CIA. Explain that you interviewed with other U.S. government departments while you were here and will probably accept a job offer with one of them if it comes through. We’ll let you know which department.” ran seven miles from Chain Bridge near CIA Headquarters at Langley, through the limestone palisades separating Georgetown from Arlington, and under the bridge named for Teddy Roosevelt. Near the base of the bridge on the District side, the bluff rose again to encompass a small campus of unremarkable neoclassic limestone and brick buildings set in a quadrangle, the east side of which was the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine compound on 23rd Street NW, fronting the State Department. In October 1965, the west side of this complex hung over a sheer drop down to an enormous, teeming construction site spanning a thousand yards along the Potomac, the future John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. When I arrived in the quadrangle on a crisp fall morning, I stood for a moment quietly taking in the buildings. They had been the Headquarters of the OSS during World War II, taken over from the National Institutes of Health. To a fledgling spy, the OSS was legendary. The service combined both intelligencegathering functions with covert action teams operating behind German and Japanese lines. The term “cloak and dagger” originated in nineteenth century Europe. It came THE POTOMAC RIVER



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into common usage in wartime propaganda films and press accounts describing OSS exploits. Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the OSS commander, was one such heroic figure. Awarded the Medal of Honor for World War I valor, Donovan built his wartime service into a global network, operating from bases in Britain, the Mediterranean, and South and Southeast Asia. He’d been a man of remarkable energy and innovation, attracting thousands of brave young Americans to his exotic unit. Beyond the Ivy Leaguers, there had been young infantry officers such as Bill Colby, who led a JEDBURGH team into Nazi-occupied France to rally resistance units after the Normandy invasion, and who later became Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in 1973. Hollywood actor Sterling Hayden had run his own small squadron of armed fishing boats across the Adriatic to support Yugoslav irregulars pinning down several German divisions. Julia Child, who later taught America how to master the art of French cooking, served in the OSS in China. Popular lore also suggested that the OSS talent pool had included professional counterfeiters, con men, and safecrackers. For me, the OSS represented initiative and bravery. Its operatives had engaged in daring acts of sabotage, subversion, and tactical deception against the Axis powers. Some had survived months behind Nazi lines, tracked by the Gestapo, living on their wits, audacity, and meticulous sets of personal effects and false documents contrived by the OSS predecessor-components of the TSD. Indeed, much of the structure, operational methods, and procedures of the CIA, created in September 1947, had evolved directly from the OSS. It was a proud heritage. Years later, I discovered a photo of General Donovan in elaborate disguise, wearing a cleric’s black cape and a prim-



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itive version of one of our more sophisticated devices, and I recognized that I had become part of an honorable legacy. Even on this fall morning, at the beginning of my new career, I felt a definite sense of professional kinship to my OSS predecessors. As I was entering on duty (EOD’ing, in Agency parlance), I sensed that I was taking up the baton passed to me by a team of older warriors in the long battle against totalitarianism. World War II had been the greatest calamity in human history. The battered survivors on all sides had welcomed the end of the bloodbath. But perceptive leaders in the West, influenced by Winston Churchill, were forced to admit that a system of tyranny equaling Nazi Germany in its dehumanizing strength existed beyond the Iron Curtain. The KGB’s predecessors, such as the notorious NKVD, did not herd people into gas chambers and kill them with Zyclon B; they packed them into cattle cars and sent them across Siberia by the millions to the frozen hell of the Kolyma mines, then worked them to death on starvation rations. Although both Hitler and Stalin were dead by 1965, world Communism had established a terrifying record of conquest and enslavement. In the 1950s, when people in East Germany and Hungary had revolted against the puppet rulers whom the Soviets had installed following “liberation” by the Red Army, Russian troops and tanks massacred them. The Korean War had been a naked act of aggression launched at the behest of the Kremlin. Communist China, although moving away from its earlier alliance with the Soviet Union, was itself a vast, soul-crushing tyranny. East Germany was a police state that would have made SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler proud. In fact, the Soviet overlords of “Democratic” Germany had been compelled to build the Berlin Wall in 1961—a glaring symbol of their



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failed system—to prevent a refugee exodus that would have depleted much of East Europe’s most promising youth. That primitive, concrete-and-barbed-wire barrier, more than any other tangible entity, came to symbolize the geopolitical fault lines of the Cold War. As long as the Wall stood, the world was divided. This struggle was not merely an economic dispute; it was a war. As the ten terrifying days of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 had shown, the Cold War could easily have flared into an exchange of thermonuclear weapons capable of incinerating cities across the world and poisoning the biosphere for millennia. There was also clear evidence that the Soviet Union and its surrogates, including the Cubans, were intent on spreading their form of liberation throughout the vulnerable wreckage of Europe’s empires in the Third World. My generation of young adults, who came of age in the 1960s, were acutely aware of our tenuous world situation. Was I proud to be enlisting, albeit in a seemingly minor capacity, on our side in the Cold War? You bet. Would I have preferred being a world-class painter living in New York or Paris, watching my kids grow up in a safe and peaceful world? Of course. But if I was going to become a cold warrior, I intended to be the best one I could. The Technical Services Division front office had moved into the South Building from its site on the Mall since my initial interviews in April. Making my introductions among TSD offices that morning, I kept my eye out for any of the more exotic World War II OSS vets, but no one seemed to fulfill the swashbuckling image I had in mind. What I did find was a group of highly competent language specialists, artists, engineers, technicians, and versatile craftspeople capable of responding to bizarre requests from the field on a tight deadline. TSD also had its share of physics and chemistry Ph.D.s, as well as professional psychol-



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ogists who could have thrived on any major American campus. The whole place seemed to resonate with competence and esprit de corps. My orientation now complemented the brief introduction to this branch I’d received during my initial interviews. Many clandestine operations, I learned, drew heavily on authentication and validation capabilities, an elaborate way of describing the creation of alias identities and forged documents. TSD also “maintained” these identities through regular updates and renewals of documents, an unglamorous but vital facet of espionage. But creating human identities was only part of TSD’s responsibility. The Division also developed several types of seagoing vessels, large and small, a diverse array of aircraft, and a few basic spy cars, equipped with secret compartments for hiding officers or agents. Some of TSD’s most innovative mechanical inventions were probably the shipping containers equipped with automatic cameras dispatched from Hamburg to Hong Kong, via the Trans-Siberian Railway. When the thousands of clandestine photographs were developed, they revealed crucial details of the logistics system supporting Soviet nuclear weapons facilities in areas closed to foreigners. TSD prepared other necessary spy gear, such as remote listening devices, the “bugs” of popular novels, and more sophisticated forms of “audio.” TSD specialists traveled to aid clandestine officers on agent recruiting and rescue operations by crawling into attics to install audio devices, and meeting with agents to instruct them in the use of miniature spy cameras and invisible writing techniques. TSD later assumed responsibility for making compact radio transmitters that sent encrypted messages in almost untraceable bursts. As former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms noted in his speech at the Agency’s fiftieth anniversary ceremonies, at which I re-



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ceived my Trailblazer Award, there is no doubt that TSD work overseas can be hazardous. Helms cited three of the Division’s officers, who were released in 1963 from Cuba’s Isle of Pines Prison, where they had been held for two years and seven months. They had suffered repeated interrogation under torture, and survived only because the U.S. government managed to negotiate a prisoners-for-tractors exchange following the failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. One of the reasons they had lived through their ordeal was the quality of their alias documents and their ability to sustain their cover story during prolonged interrogation. These officers had been captured in Havana in 1960 while engaged in an audio penetration operation; soon after their arrest, it became clear that the new Castro government was a Communist-led Moscow proxy. Even in that notorious prison, however, the three managed to run a successful intelligence collection operation, working with the grim knowledge that they might be tortured to death (the fate of many of Castro’s prisoners) had this brazen effort been discovered. During its first fifty years, the Agency awarded only fifteen Intelligence Crosses, its highest decoration for valor. Three went to these brave TSD officers. Former DCI Richard Helms asked one of the surviving members of this team to lay the memorial wreath for all the CIA officers lost in action over the first five decades. Three of the fifty Trailblazers honored at this ceremony were former TSD officers. I am the only Trailblazer who holds the Intelligence Star for Valor, but several of my TSD colleagues have also earned this coveted medal. When I came on board in 1965, TSD was organized under a Chief of Operations and a Chief of Development and Engineering. Since we were the technical arm of the Agency’s Clandestine Service, we focused on assisting clandestine (that is, secret) information collection—mate-



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rial of interest provided by agents. CIA case officers assigned abroad work under official or nonofficial cover, as do the intelligence officers of many countries. A case officer might recruit an agent who operates alone against his government or goes on to become a principal agent, running a compartmentalized network of subagents. These agents might need technical support in the form of clandestine communications gear, spy cameras, and other specialized equipment. Covert action propaganda printing, ranging in level of “plausible denial” by the U.S. government—from white to gray to black—was also a TSD responsibility. A white propaganda operation in the 1960s was merely promoting and packaging Western policy and culture, as with Voice of America programming. Gray propaganda might have involved writing and printing election campaign materials for a foreign political party friendly to the United States, or could have included planted news stories or editorial columns written for foreign press assets cooperating with the CIA. Former veteran case officer Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge has written about a black propaganda operation he conducted from his base in Madras, India. Clarridge used a non-Indian agent borrowed from another Asian country to convince the publisher of a local pro-Chinese Communist newspaper to run a series of increasingly virulent editorials, which eventually discredited the entire Indian Communist movement, both proMoscow and pro-Peking. Black propaganda had been in use for decades by the time I joined the CIA. Soviet overseas intelligence officers, dating back to the KGB’s predecessors, were experts at this nasty business. During the social and economic turmoil of the 1930s, the NKVD ruthlessly spread rumors of government corruption, backed up by forged documents, designed to inflame class divisions in Western Europe. Throughout the Cold War,



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the Soviets considered “disinformation” one of their important strategic weapons. Equally cunning, American intelligence during the Cold War found it useful to encourage similar unrest among the workers at an arms plant in a Soviet-occupied country by circulating well-forged, ostensibly confidential official documents calling for an increase in labor quotas and a decrease in food rations. TSD/Graphics was especially adept at black propaganda operational support that made good use of our forgery capabilities. Was this an “honorable” undertaking? In my opinion, it was justified. Our opposition practically owned the extreme left labor movement in a number of NATO countries and resorted to the same techniques. The KGB and its controlled intelligence services at the time were also actively engaged in “wet” operations—the assassination of political opponents in Eastern Europe and defectors who had sought asylum abroad. I joined the ranks of TSD in an atmosphere of continual crisis. The watchwords were “Operations first,” and “Can-do,” meaning that the small TSD staff often had to respond with intense urgency to address breaking situations in the field. When an IMMEDIATE NIACT (“Night Action”) cable requesting alias documentation for a fast-breaking operation hit DIRTECH (TSD) from an overseas station or base, people from Authentication and Graphics were often called in to work all night. In addition, we had to maintain over fifteen thousand alias identities at any one time. That first day on duty, I was taken to the Art Department in a second-floor corner suite overlooking the courtyard and the Kennedy Center construction site below. There were about a dozen artists with various specialties crowded into a single bullpen. Franco, the Art Chief, and his



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deputy, “Rick,” had small offices off the bullpen. We were located in only one section of the Graphics Branch, which occupied two of the Central Building’s three floors. Franco completed my introductions around the Branch. The offices on the first floor once housed the Institutes of Health’s research animals and were known as the Zoo because some of the rooms still had cage doors. These rooms now held printing presses of all descriptions, a bindery, storage with climate controls for specialized paper, and alcoves for offset and letterpress platemaking. The process photo darkrooms, ink and textile labs, and the remainder of the World War II steel-plate engraving and die-sinking operations were spread haphazardly around the second floor. During that war, printing near-perfect replicas of foreign documents—and enemy currency—had been a major part of the OSS graphics operation. Of the talented people who worked here, OSS legend Allen Dulles would later declare proudly, “Any intelligence service worth its salt should be able to make the other fellow’s currency.” That attitude was certainly a big stretch from Secretary Stimson’s disgust at the idea of reading another gentleman’s mail. By the end of World War II, the OSS banknote engravers had completed the reichsmark and were almost finished with the Japanese imperial yen, which would have been used to debase the Japanese currency prior to the scheduled invasion in November 1945, had the atomic bomb not ended the war. But we could not counterfeit Soviet currency: Counterfeiting another country’s money was officially an act of war, and the Cold War was not a declared conflict. In any event, by 1965, most of the world’s currencies, including those of the Soviet bloc, were based on dollar reserves, so undercutting their value made no sense. Consequently, the two engravers remaining from those wartime days worked



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on specialized foreign identity documents, and occasionally designed and engraved the CIA’s special citations and certificates for both officers and valorous foreign agents. In contrast to the artists, they had a huge workshop dominated by a massive, unused transfer press rivaling a steam locomotive in size, which had been used in making currency. Because so many of the people in Graphics had been around since the war, they had seen thousands of interesting jobs flow through the shop. They had helped document hundreds of Allied agents and even anti-Nazi turnaround German POW agents, whom the OSS had parachuted behind enemy lines to locate buzz bomb and V-2 missile launch sites. During the Korean War, the Graphics shop had produced reams of bogus Red Chinese Army field orders in a covert action printing operation. Courageous agents working under American control managed to insert these documents into the Communist command system. Each person in Graphics was expected to be a master artist in some specialty. In fact, many were bona fide eccentrics. Several had served overseas, and there was always a lot of talk on the floor about life abroad. Banter about traveling on the SS United States to Naples or attending Oktoberfest in Munich made the atmosphere in the bullpen very heady. The old hands would draw us new recruits aside and whisper, “The inequities of the job are more than made up for by the boat trips.” As I dived into my work, I became keenly interested in the operational purpose and goals of each project. I quickly discovered that this kind of curiosity was unusual among some of my colleagues, who were accustomed to producing a “job” skillfully on a very tight deadline and had little interest in precisely how the documents they were so artfully replicating would ultimately be used. Such details might have been too disquieting to hear.



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Certain Graphics people did not always mesh with their TSD colleagues. Although I had been hired as a GS-9, others in the Art Department worked on “wage board” standards and had their pay raised when the unions at the Government Printing Office got theirs. This gave some of the employees a slight blue-collar attitude. In fact, my being hired on the professional GS scale was an attempt by TSD managers to undercut the union mentality among the photographers and pressmen of the Central Building. Certainly Ian Fleming never wrote about such pedestrian concerns, and neither did the more sophisticated John Le Carré. However, this was the gritty reality of American intelligence. As it turned out, there was no way management was going to convert the pressroom workers to the Civil Service scale. Working under wage-board guidelines, some members of the Graphics Branch already made more than the Chief of TSD, who was a supergrade GS-18. This was because the wage-board system paid generous overtime, including double-time for weekend jobs. Civil Service employees had much more stringent overtime provisions. After the standard orientation courses for new employees, I volunteered for area studies classes and strategic seminars in order to widen my perspective. In these courses, I became acquainted with people throughout the Agency, including the CI (Counterintelligence) staff, headed by James Jesus Angleton, the legendary “Gray Ghost.” Angleton had been badly burned by the treachery of the Soviet’s British agent Kim Philby and was obsessed with the idea that the CIA had been penetrated by a highly placed Soviet “mole.” Unfortunately, his theories were so convoluted, and his methods so Byzantine, that he was forced to resign in 1974. Besides the occasional oddball, however, I found members of the CI staff relatively free from paranoia. The nuts and bolts of CI training was fascinating. We were shown



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photographs and diagrams of captured Soviet bloc listening devices embedded in a diplomat’s shoe, in the spine of a book presented to an American officer overseas, and even in the Great Seal of the United States, which the Soviets had offered as a “good will” gesture to our ambassador in Moscow. I came away from these classes with the knowledge that the shadow battles on the Cold War’s espionage front would be fought relentlessly, with great cunning, for years to come. With this in mind, I tried to absorb as much as possible about the actual impact of the Graphics operation. I learned that our products had to withstand the severe scrutiny of hostile services that had been at this business longer than we had. Much of what we produced was agent and officer documentation, which went beyond simple identity cards to include entire families of documents—birth certificates, school records, military service dossiers, the full gamut of paper needed to authenticate an alias identity, or “legend.” Early in my Graphics assignment, I discovered that the paramount challenge facing us with respect to documentation was embodied in the question: “How good is good enough?” The best way to answer that question was with another: “Would I use it myself in hostile territory?” By the 1960s, the Agency had learned the painful lesson that running agents behind the Iron Curtain was a lot more difficult than working with resistance groups in the Nazis’ Fortress Europe in World War II. Unlike the OSS, we could not parachute an agent into Hungary, Poland, or Rumania to be supported by a sympathetic and effective underground. That sad lesson was again learned with the Bay of Pigs disaster. An armed and organized resistance simply didn’t exist in Soviet bloc democratic republics as it had in countries under Nazi occupation. On many early cross-border operations into the Soviet bloc, agents were “rolled up”—seized and perhaps never heard from again—or “dou-



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bled back”—taken under Soviet control—or simply disappeared, never having intended to spy for the West in the first place. The extreme security systems of the Communist governments (the East German Stasi being the most notorious example), coupled with decades of indoctrination, made entire populations suspicious and willing to spy on neighbors or coworkers for the collective good. Although the fascist governments had never been able to penetrate the fabric of the societies they occupied, the Soviets, working with security services such as the Stasi, virtually controlled the societies of their satellite empire for decades. This made running intelligence operations in those countries extremely difficult and hazardous. We now know, for example, that the Stasi operated vast networks of informants, many of them reporting on one another, often family members, even husbands and wives. Under Soviet guidance, the Stasi trained “fraternal” intelligence organizations, such as Cuba’s DGI. During my career, the Stasi and the DGI were responsible for some of the most successful double-agent operations run against Western intelligence. We learned a lot more about those relationships after the fall of Communism. The first decades of the Cold War taught the Agency in general, and TSD in particular, some harsh lessons about crossborder operations. We had been able to reproduce sophisticated and complex materials such as international travel documents and internal identity papers. Only rarely, however, could we “backstop” them by having trustworthy agents in place in the issuing offices to plant the file supporting the false items. This meant that if one of our agents was apprehended because of his flawed demeanor—or Murphy’s Law—his or her false documents could be exposed within hours. Therefore, we had to find out much more about the minute practical details that legal travelers to those countries



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faced in order to move freely without undue suspicion. For example, did a Latvian soldier in the Soviet Army need special military and civilian papers to ride a train to visit his “aunt” in the Russian Republic? Our tradecraft was slowly evolving to become more adept at building neutral, “third-country” cover legends and aliases that were more innocuous and difficult to detect, even without backstopping. This level of spycraft requires years of patient preparation and had long been used by sophisticated services such as the KGB in their “illegals” (spies with nonofficial cover) program, which infiltrated hundreds of bogus “refugees” from Europe and South Africa after World War II. But the Agency was still mastering the “neutral” alias approach when I came on board. I absorbed much of this lore from both training courses and colleagues. What I found especially fascinating was the combination of intricate sophistication and massive deployment of manpower that the KGB expended on the espionage front. Beginning with the Cheka in the early days of the Revolution, and which was well established in Britain by the 1920s, the Soviets steadily deployed spy networks throughout the West. Their recruits had penetrated the British intelligence services before World War II, had several key agents recruited in the OSS hierarchy and, as we now know, had crucial spies in the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the atom bomb. Their networks were run by known KGB officers operating out of their residenturas under diplomatic cover, and by an unknown number of illegals, such as Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, who operated under deep cover without diplomatic immunity. In 1946, Abel had made his way to Canada, documented as a German refugee, then simply slipped across the border into the United States. Living in New York under the alias Emil R. Goldfus, he controlled a large KGB agent network that stretched from Canada to Pan-



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ama. He was discovered only when a drunken subordinate defected to the West and he was tr