An Army Intelligence Warrant Officer Volume Two

One Foot in the Gravy

An Army Intelligence Warrant Officer Volume Two

When I arrived in Berlin, I wasn’t actually surprised to learn it was a counterintelligence unit, where it was discovered that this clerk-typist had some unusual skills. One was identifying processes. A process consists of three elements: Input ---- Transformation ------Output. One particular thorn in our side was the Berlin Democratic Club. It was ostensibly a group of Democrats residing in Berlin who disliked the US military. It was also funded by and reporting to East German intelligence (Stasi). Every week they ran a promotional contest for “Pig of the Week” nominations, which were intended to be US servicemembers. At the time, in Germany, one could simply crudely draw a notice that the postage will be paid by the addressee, and the German Postal Service would take it from there.

I asked how much the postage cost: 30 Pfennig. Price of a Xerox? 7 Pfennig. The solution was simple. We bankrupted them week after week, and East German Intelligence could only supply so much money without making mistakes and getting caught. That happened, too.

I began participating in surveillance operations, easy enough since if someone spoke to me in German or English I replied in Spanish. My first surveillance was of a subway station’s sole entry. No problem but standing around staring at a subway entrance tends to draw attention. I sat at a kiosk and ordered a beer, half a liter. Then I had a second one. My shift was two hours long, and by the end of the first hour I had already started beer number three. Mid-way into hour two I realized I had a problem. There are no public restrooms at the subway entry. The final thirty minutes were excruciating.

Then I started asking questions about following the money and looking at where else it went. We followed a bunch of money to the U.S., where it was used to fund political campaigns of minority candidates. One of them wound up Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. What happened with that was above my paygrade.

More patterns. I soon learned that, as with music, most intelligence folks couldn’t care less about rank and other useless stuff. Despite his request I do so, I just couldn’t bring myself to call my commander by his first name, although that did come later.

I was fascinated by the Warrant Officers in the organization. They were, by and large, the happiest group of people. They got along with everyone, and enjoyed their work, taking shit from no one. I asked what differentiated a Warrant Officer from a Commissioned Officer. The answer turned out to be very little, especially once Warrant Officers were awarded commissions. Finally, it was sorted out by the pay grades. Warrant and Commissioned Officers had initially been joined at the hip on pay. When that went by the book, it was possible to refer to a Warrant Officer as W01 and an ensign or junior lieutenant as an O1.

The Difference

The theoretical difference is that Commissioned Officers were “branch qualified,” and Warrant Officers were “specialty qualified.” Thus, a commissioned officer could hold any job in the branch, while a Warrant Officer repeatedly served in a single specialty in the branch. All of that is good and well, except that I eventually became a branch-qualified Warrant Officer. Those weren’t supposed to exist.

The other difference is that Warrant Officers had far more control over their careers than did Commissioned Officers. There was no need to get one’s “ticket punched” for a one-to-three-year assignment somewhere, to advance. I was sold.

Step one was to get officially into intelligence. That was easy. Over the years I was offered commissions in other areas some three or four times. No, thanks. I knew what I wanted. I went through a mandatory “applicant interview,” and at the end of my assignment went to Arizona to train in counterintelligence. I was able to remember things quite well, and soon picked up on patterns enough that I could predict results. I was particularly good at interviewing/interrogation/elicitation. It’s all just memory and pattern recognition. On graduation I was assigned to the new Defense Investigative Service in Washington, D.C.

Subject Interviews

I eventually got myself assigned to the Special Investigations section and things took off. The subject of every special investigation is always offered a chance to tell his side of the story, and I excelled at those. At the time I had a tape recorder running in my head and could recall the interviews verbatim. Several were memorable. I often was told to take somebody with me to observe and learn. I had comparatively little time in the field, and several mistakenly assumed they knew more than I did. In one case, around 1975, I was interviewing a Vietnamese immigrant, a former Colonel, who was offered a job at a contractor. We established immediately that he spoke Vietnamese, French and English.

I asked him about his escape from South Viet Nam at the end of the war. He gave me the details. I told him he hadn’t mentioned extra fuel tanks, and that model aircraft couldn’t make that trip without refueling or extra fuel tanks, and he had been adamant about not making any stops. Suddenly, his English was no good. I told him that was OK and switched to French. He left immediately.

In another case I took a more experienced fellow in with me. The subject was a youngish man who had a record for drug dealing. I told the more experienced fellow not to interrupt. The subject and I established a rhythm of talk, silence, talk, silence. During one of the silent periods, the veteran asked the man, “How much does a dime bag cost?” The subject laughed, stood up and told us to get our act together and let him know when we had.

In yet another case I was assigned a very delicate mission. One of the President’s physicians was playing footsie with a Warsaw Pact intelligence officer. He was quite resistant to accepting instruction from a youngster. I finally read him his rights and arrested him. “I’m taking to you to the White House to explain yourself to the Secret Service.” He cut off contact with the footsie guy.

Then there was the youngish WASP fellow with an intricate Arabic name who had been arrested for murder once. He claimed innocence. He and a buddy were drinking on a construction site and fell into a hole. Buddy grabbed the subject’s gun and shot himself in the back of the head. It gets worse. Buddy shot himself again in the back of the head. We’re not quite done here.

Subject pulled himself out of the hole, found a payphone, and called a lawyer. The lawyer was a patent attorney. The theater of the absurd isn’t quite finished. The patent attorney took the case.

In one case I was talking to a fellow who did a lot of bowling. A technique I had developed was to describe an action far more flagrant than the subject could have performed, after which I was always told, no, I only XYZ. I asked him if he had ever stripped naked and assaulted the bowling pins. He looked at me amazed. “How did you know?”

I had come to know the Chief of Naval Intelligence. I solved an embarrassing problem for him quietly, by digging until I discovered the problem had falsified movement orders to get out of a lease. It was sufficient for the Admiral to order his General Discharge. He called the Air Force Brigadier who commanded the Service and requested I be made available to him if needed for sensitive matters. We were soon on a first-name basis.

First Hostage Experience

Then I went to the local Federal Courthouse to interview a Federal Parole Officer about a parolee. After about five minutes I figured out what was going on. The parole officer was allowing his parolees to travel to Mexico, procure drugs, and bring them back into the U.S. This was a case of patterns, connecting the dots and being shocked. The latter got me in serious trouble.

The parole officer took me hostage with his gun drawn. Typical Thursday afternoon, you know. We wound up in the hallway, I didn’t pee myself, I got him distracted long enough for The Hulk’s twin brother to come up behind us and beat the man to a pulp. I didn’t cry, either. At least not much. The Chief Judge thanked me and said he owed me one.

I cashed in that chip before the end of the month. I was catching walk-in cases one day when a man sweating like mad showed up with his lawyer. The lawyer looked familiar. He was Nicholas deB Katzenbach, former Attorney General. He told me his client had smoking gun proof of a scheme to defraud the Department of Defense on multi-hundred-million-dollar meat contracts, and he was pretty sure assassins were waiting outside. I didn’t bother with the chain of command; I called the judge. He and Katzenbach exchanged pleasantries for a minute. I asked him if we showed up in twenty minutes, could he have a small army of US Marshalls on site. He assured me his next phone call would have the army moving at top speed.

Out through the garage with a decoy car going first. I had no idea what I was doing, of course, but I had the wheel. Of an eight--cylinder piece of Detroit Iron. I didn’t hit anything, and we entered the D.C. Beltway at 90 miles an hour. Got to the courthouse and the Marshals were waiting. The gunmen never had a chance.