Born To Spy

E Is For Espionage When we collect information on the plans and capabilities of other nations without their consent (or often even their knowledge) it’s called espionage. The activity is creative and often exciting. As a kid, I recall the secret pleasure of stealing a penny or two (never more) from the little drawer in the upper middle section of Mother’s desk, which had a key in place on the outside but was never locked. I came to suspect that Mother planted those pennies deliberately to test the honesty of her children. Once, in the course of examining the contents of the drawer I discovered a nickel. Now, really, how could my mother think I was stupid enough to incriminate myself by stealing a whole nickel? Hiding places were an important aspect of my childhood indoctrination in the fine arts of secret intelligence work for which my childhood prepared me and may have propelled me. The floor boards in the attic at 38 Elizabeth Street were perfectly suited to the secret storage of personal goods. When I first painstakingly sawed a board width of flooring to create a place to cache my booty, I failed to note that the work left a tell-tale scar. This had to be covered with a scrap of old carpeting cut from a remote corner of the attic rug. And I was made aware of a major pitfall in all clandestine activity: It is easy, in fact inevitable, to leave visible tracks of such action but difficult to cover them from unwanted observation. I found this out a few years later when I had to cover the marks left behind where I buried a secret radio set in the winter forests of Finland for use by stay-behind nets to be activated in the event of a Soviet occupation in World War III. But when the snow melted, the ground sank to reveal the outline of the cache, which had to be repaired when I fortunately returned to check out the site several months later. In preparing a stay-behind network for activation in WW III, my boss was Bill Colby, who had served with the OSS in the second world war, when he was parachuted into occupied France and Germany to work with resistance groups. This bona fide hero of mine, who served in our embassy in Stockholm directed me to recruit and train stay-behind agents to set up secret resistance groups and to plant secret caches of weapons and other materials This sounds like fun a lot of and games today, but it was serious business in the early days of CIA when covert operations were divided into two compartmented units–one for intelligence collection and one for propaganda and political action operations, including the creation of stay-behind nets to be activated in a third world war. Bill Colby encouraged me to diversify my cover activities to provide maximum flexibility to cover my absences from home on Agency assignments that had to be kept out of the public eye. I called this lateral diversification, and it worked like this: If I normally would have attended a press conference but had a meeting scheduled with a secret agent at the same time, I’d have to have a fall back excuse for my absence. Beyond illness or a normally confidential meeting with a member of the opposite sex, neither of which should be overused, I could explain that I had to meet a businessman who needed help in getting a speech translated into English, or I had to complete a rush translation of a sales presentation, or whatever. The main idea was to have at the ready an excuse to explain my location at any given time or place. This multi-faceted, flexible form of cover employment served me well for a score of years working as a deep-cover secret CIA agent overseas. Of course, as with every aspect of life in the world of secret operations, luck plays a huge role. One officer who came to Stockholm with a neatly designed and documented commercial cover was identified as a secret CIA agent by another American businessman in a whispered revelation to members of the local businessmen’s club. He had no evidence to support this disabling assertion, but none was needed. He simply used the medium of gossip to undermine the credentials of a business competitor. The damage was done to the viability of the agent’s cover and he returned to a Headquarters job in Washington after a brief tour of duty abroad. There were, of course, several secret assignments that needed to be carried out for which there could be no plausible cover story. One such job involved the transportation of a large briefcase of Polish currency to a member of the Polish resistance, who lived in a two-room hovel in the university town of Lund several hours train ride south of Stockholm. It was impossible for me to insult this lady and her lonely service to her homeland by simply shoving the currency under her doormat. First of all it would be rude. This nice old lady always insisted that I have a coup of coffee with her before our transaction. Apart from a few words of Swedish we had no common language, so after sharing our coffee mostly in smiling silence we got down to business. She counted the currency out loud in Polish, which made it sound like she was whistling a sprightly tune. Then she signed a receipt and I departed until my next delivery of funds for use by Polish patriots fighting against their Soviet oppressors in the Cold War. This activity and my secret work with Estonian and Latvian refugee students at the University of Stockholm where I had studied under the G.I. Bill in 1974-1948 constituted my Cold War baptism of fire. Bill Colby, who firmly believed in on-the-job training of deep-cover staff agents like me, saw to it that I was kept busy with a variety of assignments that would enhance my experience and keep me busy (and excited) with work on the street. He created one ad hoc assignment from a small item in the local press that reported how a visiting delegation from Red China had been evicted from their fleabag downtown hotel because they prepared Chinese stir fry cuisine in their room. Bill sent a message to me through his secretary (we met for these meetings in secluded out of the way locations) to visit the hotel, get the names of the Chinese Communist visitors and any details of their undiplomatic behavior. Then get it published. I did so and my story was picked up by several European newspapers to the embarrassment of Mao’s recently installed communist government in Peking. Mission accomplished. Before leaving the subject of non-official cover, I should mention that there are certain risks involved in the arrangement. One is the risk that the cover job might become more attractive both financially and in terms of job satisfaction than working secretly part-time (at all hours of the night and day) for the CIA. To reduce this problem, non-official (NOC) cover has been made a career service option, with special incentives to employees who are willing and able to make the commitment to this career path. Personally, I loved almost every minute of the special challenges and satisfactions offered by a NOC career in the CIA. At the same time, I understand and respect all the young men and women officers employed in the CIA who may be ill-suited to handle the special stress that goes with living under non-official cover.