The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones

“You two, Max and Ishmael, get into the conference room.” There, we found a panel of instructors.

      “What the hell were you guys thinking at the party last night?” Harry demanded. The others scowled and grumbled. They were genuinely upset.

      “Well, I thought the exercise went well,” I said. “We found our targets, struck up good conversations, and then prepared to set follow-up meetings. I thought everything went fine.”

      The instructors’ grumbling increased. When Harry saw that Max and I had no idea what we’d done wrong, he patiently explained that diplomats never drink directly from beer bottles at diplomatic cocktail parties. “I tried to help you out,” said Harry. “Don’t you remember me asking if you’d like a glass?” I did remember: I’d thought Harry was just trying to be nice. Max and I acknowledged our mistake, but the instructors never let us live down our faux pas.

      THE INSTRUCTORS LED US in classroom work and exercises on tradecraft and agent recruitment. The classroom portion was most difficult for me, because it meant long hours sitting in a closed, curtained, airless room, listening to Agency veterans drone on. At least they were paid a reasonable hourly rate, nothing like the free-for-all that erupted years later, after 9/11. They were restricted to a thirty-nine-hour work week, without overtime. This meant our training day was usually held between 8 and 5, and night work was rare. Of course, if an instructor hadn’t booked his 39 hours in a given week, he could extend Friday evening by speaking on any topic that tickled his fancy until he hit the mark. As is true of many older men, the instructors loved to talk and to be listened to. It was a blowhard’s dream.

      The classroom was a hard slog, and after many months of it I built up an aversion to long talks. To this day, I have trouble accepting dinner invitations for fear of being trapped with a bore.

      The instructors had videotaped themselves talking during previous training courses, so if they had an appointment and couldn’t deliver the lecture in person, they’d pop in a video of themselves and torment us from the VCR. We watched Roger present a three-hour lecture on “international finance,” much of which consisted of him holding up foreign currency and saying, “This is a German mark. This is a British pound....”

      I considered the training a necessary evil, an obstacle that had to be overcome to get out to an overseas field assignment and protect our nation—anything to make me feel like a genuine case officer. Jonah did a better job of handling the frustration, keeping a look of engagement on his face and asking questions designed to show interest and enthusiasm. Yet every day that I sat in that classroom, I felt weaker. Every day Charlie spent conducting espionage, he got stronger. Time is all we have on this earth, and I knew that I wanted to spend my time battling America’s enemies. I also knew that my instructors were sensitive to “attitude,” so what I needed to do first and foremost was wipe that bored scowl off my face.

      I came up with a solution. My foreign language skills were lacking, so each day before work, during breaks and lunchtime, and after work, I drew up lists of foreign words and phrases to memorize. While seated in the classroom, I kept the list in my lap so I could glance down at it surreptitiously. While the instructors prattled on, I memorized. Listening to the lectures and memorizing at the same time, I felt challenged and productive. The bored scowl gradually disappeared.

      I also rose early each day to exercise, running in parks near my home or working out on a weight set I kept in the basement. I saw the poor physical condition in the faces and bodies of colleagues, especially graduates of mid- and late-1980s training classes, and I wanted to keep myself in top shape. I did exercises I could measure, like distance running, pull-ups, and resistance training, to keep track. If the numbers stayed the same or increased, at least I knew that I wasn’t falling apart.

      Training outside the classroom involved meetings with instructors role-playing as agents or potential agents. We’d perform surveillance detection by car, public transportation, walking, or some combination, until we arrived at the meeting, usually held in safe houses, hotel rooms, our houses, instructors’ houses, restaurants, or parks. Afterwards we’d write it all up in proper Agency format. The Agency had strict writing standards. Spelling and grammar were always to be flawless.

      On exercise days, when there was less classroom work, I often wound up with free time to study languages and to be with my family. I did my best to complete exercises in three hours. Some of my classmates, particularly Jonah, claimed to be putting in twenty-hour days. Concerned that I was missing something, I studied their written after-action reports and was relieved to see that they were the same quality and length as mine.

      The instructors urged us to create highly detailed written reports about our meetings. After a role-playing rendezvous with an instructor at the instructor’s house, Max described the interior: The instructor was “a pack rat”; his house was “filthy, with stacks of papers and piles of refuse all over the place. A real pigsty. Can we rely on an agent who keeps his house in such a mess?” The instructors read Max’s write-up, passed it around, enjoyed it immensely, and teased the messy instructor mercilessly. They’d all been to the house at one time or another and agreed with the “pigsty” verdict. When the pig’s wife found out about the incident, she made him throw out all his hoarded piles of stuff, then made him pay for expensive remodeling.

      OUR INSTRUCTORS LED US in candid discussions of the harsh realities of human source operations. Ever since “the Lord commanded Moses to send spies to report on the land of Canaan,”³ good leaders have recognized the value of human intelligence. My experience in the CIA was limited to human intelligence collection within the clandestine service, or Directorate of Operations.

      The skeleton in the clandestine service’s closet was that the CIAʹs primary mission since its founding had been to recruit Soviet spies—and that the Agency had never succeeded. The methods used during our recruitment exercises seemed valid, the instructors dedicated and intelligent, but Soviets were immensely difficult, even impossible, to recruit. Our instructors admitted this. They told us that the only Soviet spies with whom the CIA had worked were volunteers.⁴

      Our case officers had encountered Soviets at social and diplomatic functions and had documented those meetings in writing. “After each social contact with a Soviet,” a veteran instructor said, “we just kept making those files thicker and thicker.” Knowing that our instructors had never really mastered the skills they taught added a slight but inescapable friction to the classes in which we studied our new trade.

      The act of volunteering was a challenge. “In two of the most important Cold War cases involving Soviet volunteers, Popov and Penkovsky, these two Russian GRU officers literally had to throw themselves at Western officials before their offers to spy were taken up.”⁵

      Information provided to the KGB by CIA case officers Edward Howard, Aldrich Ames, Harold Nicholson, and by FBI agent Robert Hanssen later led to the execution or imprisonment of most of the later volunteers. In April and June 1985, Ames gave the KGB information on all Soviet cases run by the Agency.⁶ (The KGB morphed into the SVR and the FSB during the 1990s, but for simplicity’s sake I continue to call it the KGB. The GRU is the Soviet military intelligence service, a counterpart to the KGB.)

      In the 1950s, the Agency sought intelligence about the Soviet Union by digging a tunnel from Berlin into East Germany, and by tapping into Soviet communications cables. Harry was proud of the work he had done on the Berlin Tunnel.

      “I cut my teeth—” He paused, relishing his audience’s rapt attention, “—on the Berlin Tunnel.”

      Max asked, “Wasn’t the Berlin Tunnel a failure?”

      Harry explained that although the Soviets had learned of the tunnel from George Blake, their own human source within the British SIS, well before the tunnel was even built, the Soviets chose to let us continue the project in order to protect Blake’s identity. Some information gained from the tunnel operation had been useful, but it had also been given up willingly. (Several CIA memoirs, including those by Hitz and Helms, rate the operation as a strong success. I would rate it more soberly as an expensive, low-risk, and people-intensive operation.)

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