The Intelligence Business
The Many Things I am Not
There are multiple disciplines in intelligence collection. The most productive is open-source reporting. That is, just reading newspapers, magazines, blogs, internet fora. There are many others, such as direction finding (that is, determining the origin point of a transmission) and tactical monitoring of actions (this at least used to consist of Unattended Ground Sensors, which will report on the presence of a large moving object, and Ground Surveillance Radars, an obsolete Navy radar system adapted to ground use). Together they were known as UGS as GSRs, or Thugs and Greasers).
I have lost count of the number of strategic and tactical imaging systems that exist. Ditto the number and capabilities of Electronic Intelligence, which collects information on the electrical transmissions of objects. Ditto (or maybe Tritto?) the number of communications interception technologies and programs. I’ve been a consumer of all of those disciplines’ products. I don’t care how they work, not my wheelhouse. I do have a wheelhouse in Human Intelligence.
A Few of the Things I Am Not Within my Wheelhouse
At the lowest level this is simply monitoring behavior and talking to people who seem off. Israeli airline El Al has the highest threat profile in the world and yet has suffered no high jackings or bombings. They monitor people’s behavior – that’s called profiling, something all of us do - and ask questions. In three concentric rings before being admitted to an airport. It works. They maintain terrorist watch lists which go to every security point.
These watchlists use SOUNDEX codes, which usually accounts for someone being denied boarding in the U.S. Even though your name is Edward V. Courtney IV, in soundex it is can be returned as Osama bin Laden.
We do this in the United States as well, but must be careful to subdivide the population into 197 genders, 42 sexual orientations, 1,181 races and follow whatever the latest woke rules are. This gets us to 97-year-old grandmothers being frisked, infants being x-rayed, and the list goes on. And yet the number of attempts to smuggle weapons onboard aircraft sets new records year after year. Despite efforts to make TSA workers subject to Excepted Service Personnel rules, in which they agree to remain ununionized and accept firing at will – commonly used in sensitive positions – they were all unionized at the insistence of Congress. Government unions. Whose political contributions go to a single party.
There are also border screenings set up at many international borders. Schenegen Europe does not allow this, so once someone arrives in a member country, she or he is free to wander at will. I found it convenient when traveling by train in Europe. Even so, because of my appearance I am the least likely passenger after the train crew to be questioned. The US military for years had a program of questioning those traveling between Warsaw Pact countries and NATO countries. I never did that.
What I did in my Wheelhouse
I worked in counterintelligence, interrogation, Attché operations, intelligence Echelons Above Corps (strategic) planning, and sub-rosa recruitment of foreigners to support U.S. security interests. I taught interrogation, interviewing and elicitation to multiple organizations. Elicitation can be easy. I once told a co-worker, who was my work wife, I could get an accurate fix on her age in less than five minutes just through normal conversation. We talked about job training, then college, and in just over 60 seconds I had her age. I refuse to use that on the people around me. I don’t enjoy manipulating people.
In The Beginning
The chances for things to go wrong in human intelligence are always 100%. There is no perfect operation. My first task ever assigned was to watch the sole entrance/exit to a subway station in West Berlin. Piece of cake. I positioned myself at a food and beverage stand, and just watched. After the third beer I had to find a bathroom or embarrass myself. My next task was to talk to walk-in informants in a counterintelligence organization. The first step in the protocol was to determine the individual’s language. I tried German (we were in Germany), no luck. I tried French, futile. Spanish, silence. I tried Italian, got a whiff of something, but he shook his head. I ran through my entire Romanian vocabulary, my entire Dutch vocabulary and half a dozen other languages. Finally, I shrugged my shoulders. “Yugoslavian, but I do speak English.”
The easiest thing to exploit is people’s need to share information. I’ve talked hundreds of interviewers through use of alternating praise and questions to get the subject to spill the beans. It’s always a matter of re-framing the situation until the person has no choice but to talk. I don’t do that anymore.
Latin America
At an Embassy in South America, I doused a host-country Brigadier General in whiskey in a misplaced attempt to salute. I kidnapped the Canadian Armed Forces Chief of Staff by accident in that same country. I did give him back. My wife helped in the follies. I was late one night, and my wife had custody of our kindergartener and her younger sister. The next-door neighbors were noisy, and she finally had enough. She knocked loudly on their door and shouted, “Limpie el baño, por favor,” the only Spanish phrase she had memorized. They got very quiet after that. By the way, the phrase means “Clean the bathroom, please.”
When Space Lab was hurtling toward earth on a trajectory that took it over the country where I was working, I was tasked to call the head of the country’s NASA equivalent and keep him apprised of progress during the final thirty minutes. We chatted pleasantly in Spanish for half an hour, until I could tell him it had landed in the Pacific Ocean, safely. He then asked me to let him talk to my secretary, because he had some questions in Spanish to ask. As gently as I could, I reminded him of the fact that we had been speaking Spanish for the past half hour.
While there, more than half of the city’s Ambassadors were taken hostage by terrorists. I was closest to the scene and driving an armored panel truck, so I went there immediately. I had the wrong street address, an odd number; the proper address was an even number. I found a large tree to shield me, and only when a policeman next to me was shot and fell backwards did I realize I was on the wrong side of the tree. I could see the Ambassador’s driver frozen in place in the driveway once I switched sides of the tree. I crawled out to get him and put him in my van, and raced back to the US Embassy. There were a few bullet holes in the back of the van, but the local police were lousy shots. I radioed the Embassy and asked to be transferred to the physician. I told him to meet me in the courtyard to take custody of the driver, who was clearly so upset he couldn’t think. The doc took charge of him and refused anyone else permission to question him until he could examine him. A shot of a mild tranquilizer, and he was ready to answer questions. I made no friends in the intelligence organizations that day.
Ay, Que Linda su Amatrelladora
At one point I was driving through a rural area and was stopped by at a roadblock run by one of the many terrorist organizations. They took me hostage, but only for a short period. I chatted amiably with them, agreed with most of their ideology and eventually convinced them we weren’t so different. And it’s true. Usually, differences in a relationship come down to focus. You can focus on the one percent where you disagree, or the 99% on which you agree.
Back in the USA
The next job was as a primary staff officer for a strategic counterintelligence group. I was the S-2, intelligence and security. I decided to introduce myself, and wrote an introductory message to all offices. I listed the distribution on the address side of the paper, and added “See other side” for the text.
You guessed it. The first communication from me was only “See Other Side.” Things improved from there. Later I developed a national refresher training course for counterintelligence organizations. My two favorite parts were tasking a group to follow me around for an hour, then turn their backs to me and describe my appearance. The results were always a tragicomedy. My other favorite part was leading a threat assessment workshop where we looked at the intelligence threat to the training. I always let them convince me that the threat was too high, and would conclude that the exercise should be halted. That invariably led to a lot of back-tracking. The whole point was to show the students that when they recommended some security precautions to a tactical organization and thought they were being ignored, they needed to allow for the commander to have other priorities.
That brought me into contact with the Army’s then-Training and Doctrine Command, where I learned just how decisions were made. I overheard two senior officials debating how much time an interrogator needed to spend on language learning and refresher training. Each had solid opinions. Neither ever cited any empirical data.
It’s Easy to Give Up a Chance at Something You’ll Never Have.
That assignment brought me to the attention of an organization I didn’t know existed. It ran the careers of people assigned to secret intelligence operatives. One had to agree to never becoming a flag officer - admiral or general – in order to join. Since my prospects were somewhere between none and uproarious laughter anyway, I signed up. My first assignment was as a strategic planner working for John Poindexter, the National Security Advisor. A co-worker, Oliver North, was a braggart and full of hot air. He once took me to meet someone he thought I would like, working at the National Military Command Center. There I encountered my brother-in-law and best friend.
David was talking to a colleague, so I let North dominate the white space, bloviating about his many accomplishments. The colleague turned out to be an FBI Agent, who eventually forced North’s retirement.
If I tell you, I’ll Have to Kill You
Some of the strange goings-on are still classified. I can tell you the unclassified parts, which are actually most interesting. I found myself on a one-mile-long island in an atoll, with two villages, one at each end. They had been rivals for as long as anyone could remember. I was chased up a palm tree by a feral pig. I outlasted the pig’s interest, which was fortunate. That middle spot was never seen by either village, because if it was, they ran the risk of encountering the other village.
One might think that camels are a romantic species, selflessly serving mankind. B.S. They are ill-tempered beasts who would just as gladly kick you to death as to let you mount them. I found that out the hard way. To this day I shiver every time I see one of the species.
On a memorable trip to the Pacific Islands, I was shoved off the roadway into a swamp by a monitor lizard. He didn’t try to eat me. Later, on that same trip I came into my second-floor room at a hotel and found a five-foot lizard in my bed. Without thinking I grabbed his tail and threw him out the window. All in a day’s work.
Even after retirement I still wasn’t done. I got an e-mail from a former boss, Condoleezza Rice, asking me to drop in. She wanted me to use friendships I had developed with a couple of very influential people in the richest per capita country on earth (not Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Liechtenstein) to recruit people. I declined. There was nothing I could do that would benefit me, and that was my focus du jour.
So, Sue Me
I lied at least once in the above. Since retirement I told a former client how to recruit an inside source, a worker who had been badly treated by the company he exploited. She was a gold mine. Her recruitment bonus was a cruise to the Bahamas for the single mom and her kids. He made millions, she had the time of her life.
As one who did technical intelligence for some 30 years, I always admired those who did human intel. My closest connection to that real world was being asked to volunteer to enter a nation with a blue passport without any military clothing. We were to setup equipment, get it operational with an unknown transfer condition. Since I had a family to worry over, I declined. The more normal condition was a red passport, civilian clothes generally but no scrubbing of military identity. But there were places that we went into knowing that officially we were "never there". I am told the only way to prove that fact lies within travel payment records but it has never been that important to get around events that "never happened".
It's refreshing that some stories of the past do get told some 50 years later, but few involved in those adventures will ever put them to paper or go though the hoops to publish. Even trying to spring loose documents long since declassified is an arduous process left to professionals at FOIA requests.
Thanks for the anecdotes, they do bring up old memories. Sad that many stories to be told will never see the light of day.
Bravura piece. I am abashed; I cannot equal it. Lots of decades of work here.
I will instead, cheaply, throw out (what I hope is) an amusing anecdote; a CIA case officer of my acquaintance mistakenly put his issue handgun and two full magazines through carry-on baggage on a commercial airline. He also provided me with one of the finest aphorisms I have ever heard in my life: "First I was in the Marine Corps, where you were expected to tell the truth. Then I was in private business, where you are expected to lie. Now I'm here and I don't know what the fuck this is."