The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones
you’re a secret agent? That’s really something.”
“You got that right.”
THE INSTRUCTORS, all of whom were retired, had had solid careers. Some of them had been high-ranking managers. Our active duty HQs managers, though, were more of a mixed bag. Some of them were officers who’d gotten in trouble overseas and, after receiving their one-way tickets home, had been assigned to managerial positions at HQs.
One morning, a chief from HQs came to speak to us—a chief whom a previous class had nicknamed “the Worst Spy in the World.”
The Worst Spy in the World had been assigned to a US ally. After meeting with an agent, he sat in his hotel room typing up the results on a computer. He heard a knock on the door of his hotel room, so he shut down his computer and got up to answer. A cleaning lady had come to deliver clean towels to the room. He took the stack of towels, thanked the cleaning lady, and went back to work.
A few minutes later there was another knock at the door. Figuring it was the cleaning lady again, he left his computer on with his notes visible on the screen, and went to answer the door. This time a squad of policemen surged in, pinned him down, took his computer and notes, and hauled him down to the police station for questioning. The country, though a US ally, was not an ally of Israel. The Worst Spy had used an Israeli-sounding alias, so the police thought he might be a Mossad spy. They spoke to him in harsh tones. After a few minutes he responded by breaking down and confessing to his CIA affiliation.
“Well, why didn’t you just say so!” the police said, relieved.
Everyone was all smiles, and the police gave him a ride to the American embassy. The embassy gave him his one-way ticket back to the US.
The Worst Spy, true to his moniker, was a whiner: “After all I’d been through, as soon as I got back to HQs, the first people who came to see me were from Accounting. They demanded that I account for the missing $100,000 in cash I’d been given for my revolving fund!” The Worst Spy’s personal finances and Agency accountings were in disarray when he returned to the US, so he picked up a paper route to help make ends meet. He arose early each morning to deliver newspapers before reporting to his job at HQs.
We later learned that the Worst Spy had first come to the attention of the police because, while riding a bus to a meeting, he’d discussed his religion with his fellow passengers. They were drug smugglers. Feigning interest in his nattering, they distracted him while filling his suitcase with cocaine. This would make their border crossing less risky. Since the police at the border knew that his traveling companions were drug smugglers, they followed him to his hotel.
As the Worst Spy finished his sorry tale, another manager came by to tell his story. He’d been on a foreign assignment for a few months when he began to suspect that he was under surveillance. He hadn’t been able to confirm it, but he’d spotted furtive movements by people on the street. He begged HQs for help and advice.
HQs thought he was seeing “ghosts”—incidents that look like surveillance but aren’t. But his persistence convinced them, and they spirited him back to the US. Later, the Agency learned that he had indeed been under surveillance and that his host country had been on the verge of arresting him for espionage.
“Bet you don’t have any plans to go back to that country on vacation,” Max said. “Probably don’t want to get on any airplanes that plan to make a fuel stop there, either.”
MY TRAINING CLASS enjoyed hearing that we were the best and most qualified they’d ever had, but there was a definite edge to the praise, a hint that there was more to the story. We eventually learned why.
The Agency had been promising to separate itself from the Department of State for years. Today, intelligence targets, human sources in WMD programs, or members of terrorist groups are all inaccessible to American diplomats. Everyone admitted that our Department of State diplomats weren’t getting the job done and that the Agency needed to find new ways of doing business. But it was hard for a bureaucracy to change.
During the early 1980s, Director William Casey ordered the Agency to increase its non-State Department capabilities. In response to his orders, the Agency hired and trained large classes during the mid- and late-1980s. My class entered shortly after this, and we had front-row seats for the aftermath.
The individuals in these classes encountered strong bureaucratic resistance, with a failure rate of nearly 100 percent. Within a few years, only a few of these non-State Department officers were operating successfully overseas, and most had left the Agency. A few continued to work at HQs in other jobs, and a few switched over to become diplomats with the State Department. The official explanation within the Agency was that Casey had pushed the Agency too hard and too fast, so that it had had insufficient time to properly evaluate the new people before hiring them.
We saw these forlorn individuals wandering our safe-house apartments, and we listened to their sad tales. They looked like they’d been through a rough time physically: out of shape, unsmiling, bags under their eyes. Andy, a member of a class of about twenty recruits during the mid 1980s, said that most of his fellow trainees were qualified but a few were indeed a bit strange. Several of them barely spoke English. One man made loud snorting noises and occasionally grabbed his crotch.
Another had an odd habit of repeating the last few words he heard spoken in a sentence. If the instructor said, “Today we will talk about surveillance,” this fellow would mutter, “About surveillance.” During a break, the man went outside, lit a cigarette, and then put the entire cigarette in his mouth and chewed. Then he pulled his trousers down to his knees and fell to the ground in a trance. When he awoke a few moments later, he didn’t remember anything about what he’d done. It turned out that he had a medical condition which had led to a fit and seizure. The instructors transferred him into an HQs job.
Andy said a fellow classmate had approached him and said that she planned to have a little plastic surgery done, and would he be so kind as to pick her up at the doctor’s office afterward, as she might be feeling a bit woozy. When Andy arrived at the hospital, the minor work turned out to have been a major facial reconstruction. The woman was bloody and semi-conscious. The doctor said, “So, you’re the boyfriend,” and showed him how to insert the anal suppositories that she would need to control her pain. She was bedridden for a week, and he nursed her back to health.
Bad luck haunted this class. Once, while filing out of a safe-house training site, the class was photographed as a group by a man who passed by in a car. The class noted the car’s license number and traced it. The plate had been stolen from an elderly woman in Iowa. A few days later it happened again, with a different car, and this time traces revealed that that license number did not even exist.
A rumor circulated at HQs that some of these trainees’ IQ scores were quite low. Another had it that one of them was an ex-convict.
Day after day in the airless and artificially-lit classrooms, tension mounted between the mid-1980s classes and their instructors. The trainees spiked their instructors’ coffee with Ex-Lax and let air out of their tires. The instructors fought back by flunking several trainees. A lawyer in an office below the safe-house apartment noticed the odd comings and goings and began telling clients that the CIA lived upstairs. When the office’s location became widely known in the neighborhood, the Agency closed the office and moved the training class to a different location.
Two decades later, the Agency was still pointing to the debacle of these training classes as a reason not to push the Agency to separate from the State Department. Officers who’d entered before or after this period were careful to point out that they weren’t part of that big hiring wave.
I’d met a lot of the people from the mid-1980s classes, and thought that most of them could have been successful if properly led. None of them had joined thinking, “I’d like to be a failure.” Bureaucracy thrives in office environments, and Casey had pushed upon the bureaucracy a whole bunch of case officers who would be operating in a freewheeling way. I figured the mid-1980’s classes had been eviscerated by the bureaucracy because they presented a threat to them.
The way these people