The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones
first month described spotting and locating the target, the next month, assessing his access and willingness to cooperate. Finally, a full paragraph announced that the target had agreed to provide secrets to the Agency. This was the classic recruitment cycle we’d all been taught in training. At each step of the cycle, HQs congratulated the chief on the progress he was making.
THE GODFATHER, the veteran spy and man of many wives, visited our office for a few weeks and used it as a base from which to run an operation. While waiting for his meetings to begin, he amused himself by pulling out a local telephone book and dialing up names he recognized as terrorist tribal names. He’d find a Fadlallah or a Mugniyah, pick up the phone and, without a script, give them a call.
“Hello, this is Hussayn,” he said in Arabic, “is this the number for Muhammad? I have not seen him in many years. I am visiting from Lebanon.” Whether there was a Muhammad there or not, the calls often developed into lengthy conversations. He was able to find someone in the world that they knew in common—and he might even stumble upon a traveling terrorist.
The Godfather didn’t obey many Agency rules, but his charisma and strength of personality kept the bureaucrats at bay. He was a bit like Sylvia in the sense that the bureaucracy didn’t smell fear in him and so didn’t know what to do with him. An uncommonly skilled linguist, he could go to a country and learn its language in a short time: “I went to Spain,” he once said. “I was there studying the language for three months. Then I went to meet a target. Talking to the target, it suddenly occurs to me I’m recruiting him in Spanish after only three months of studying the language.”
The Godfather was so effusively outgoing that he almost never had to wait for HQs to give him a go-ahead. He’d just put on a kaffiyeh , rent a limousine and driver, tell a target he worked for a Saudi prince, and hand him a fistful of money. Then he’d tell him to go home and think things over, and they’d meet again the next day.
At seminars and conventions, the Godfather sat in the front row and clapped loudly when his target gave a speech. The target would smile broadly at the Godfather. After the speech, the Godfather would approach the target to ask if he could help him with his particular problem. The target was always eager to converse.
Because of his gregariousness and high-octane activity, the Godfather had to be careful. His cover was utterly blown. Numerous foreign intelligence services knew he worked for the Agency. Most officers would be sent back to HQs when their covers were blown, but not the Godfather.
I spent a lot of time with Lebanese immigrants to target terrorists and counterfeiters. Lebanese targets are complex because their country contains so many different factions. The Godfather helped me to better understand this. A Lebanese Christian will be eager to assist against terrorism, but may have no ability to do so. A Lebanese Sunni may also lack access. Lebanese Shi’a have potential, but then their loyalties are so diffuse that they could be bitter enemies or close allies of any other Shi’a. During my OJT tour I spent many midnight dinners getting to know Lebanese contacts.
We had potential Indian chemical and nuclear targets in the area, but they were tough to evaluate because Agency experience showed that Indians rarely returned to their positions of access in India once they made it to the US. Some of our Agency offices in the US abandoned targeting Indians; one could waste a lot of time courting an Indian only to find he had no intention of returning home.
Dinners and lunches were an important feature of agent development. My Chinese targets couldn’t stand any kind of food except Chinese. They had a visceral hatred of sushi. I also had trouble moving Chinese targets forward because the OFTPOT in charge of Chinese targeting was a sort of James Jesus Angleton character, one who saw the world of espionage as a wilderness of mirrors. The OFTPOT figured that if I’d met a friendly Chinese citizen, he must surely be a Chinese spy trying to recruit me: Any Chinese student in the US had to have an income from the Chinese government.
Several retired case officers worked in the office as contractors. Agency people usually came back as contractors the day after retirement. Prior to 9/11, contractors were paid a reasonable hourly rate. One spent his day chatting and doing crossword puzzles. Another had once been held hostage by terrorists while serving in a foreign assignment. He carried a concealed pistol and swore he’d fill his captors full of lead the instant he saw them. One of the OFTPOT couples in the office sold products in some Amway-style pyramid scheme.
One day, a local FBI agent called. “Ishmael, what the hell are you guys doing over there?” he asked. “I just met the target we’re working jointly with your office, and he told me you guys are trying to sell him consumer goods.” I learned that the OFTPOTs had pitched their products to agents and prospective agents, as well as to US government contacts at the FBI and INS.
DURING MY DOMESTIC OJT assignment, I traveled back to HQs a few times to try to push forward the paperwork for my overseas assignment. The HQs offices were strewn with the carnage of the non-State Department training classes: officers in limbo, officers just back on a one-way ticket from some aborted foreign assignment.
While I’d been on my OJT tour, the recruiting trend at HQs had been to hire people reputed to be from wealthy families. The Agency seemed fascinated by wealth. A recent training class had been lousy with the spoiled progeny of nouveau riche families. Most of their fathers had connections to the Agency as contractors.
One of these trainees required that the Agency hire his wife, and the Agency complied. The couple confided that they were open to assignment in any foreign city, so long as that city had Concorde service. Once the kids found out that working for the Agency wasn’t as much fun as they’d expected, they quit the training course. The husband made it about halfway. His wife stuck it out a bit longer, but the instructors noted that she’d often leave unexpectedly to go fox hunting in Virginia. Nevertheless, come graduation day, both were awarded their certifications as case officers. Other trainees complained, but to no avail. The instructors advised that the trainees had rated certification for their valuable “life experience,” an explanation that satisfied no one. Soon after, the couple quit, making the complaint moot.
I studied the walking wounded hanging around the HQs office, listening to their stories. I wanted to learn from them and avoid the obstacles they’d faced. A Portuguese speaker had been locked into a triangle of Portuguese-language assignment possibilities: Brazil, Portugal, or Angola. He hadn’t gotten along with the people in Portugal so he requested he be sent to Angola, but as soon as he received that assignment, the people from Portugal were sent there, too. There was no escape.
Another officer’s station had given him a list of targets he was forbidden to contact—including every conceivable target in the region. He was on the first plane back to HQs to seek an overseas assignment somewhere else.
One poor fellow got back from an assignment in Southeast Asia. He was married, but he also had a lot of girlfriends. For counterintelligence purposes, the Agency requires officers to report the identities of their girlfriends, which he dutifully did, thereby developing a reputation around the Agency as a ladies’ man.
Time went by and he continued to report his girlfriends, until he was assigned to a chief who thought their quantity indicated a moral failing. In the officer’s annual evaluation, the boss indicated as much, buying the officer his one-way ticket back to HQs. The officer sought to have the dreaded “morals problem” removed from his file. Under pressure from HQs, the boss agreed to remove the comment—but he spitefully replaced it with “this officer cannot be trusted with government funds”—an even more serious charge.
It was around that time that I met Charlton for the first time. Charlton was a no-nonsense officer who didn’t have any complaints, and, if he did, he kept them to himself. He was a foreign national with passports from three countries and excellent native language skills. He was never frustrated, because the Agency bureaucracy wasn’t much worse than the ones he’d dealt with in his home-lands. At the same time, his overseas pay package made him rich by the standards of two of his three home countries, so he wasn’t as tempted as some were by opportunities in the business world.
★ 4 ★