A Spy's Journey Read online

  I had to avoid crossing paths with another agent since that would have dangerously exposed them. Fortunately, we had planned for all contingencies. Following standard procedure, other officers picked up every one of my agents successfully. A postscript: My wife and I had packed our bags for our final departure and were waiting for transportation to the airport, when a driver and car showed up with the message, “The chief wants to see you immediately.” Here we go, I thought—I almost made it out of this intact. My wife anxiously awaited my return, as time was getting short to make it to the airport. I got to the facility and was immediately escorted into the chief’s office. He got right to the point. “I know time is short,” he commented. “Have you seen your performance report?” I responded that I had. Despite the fact that my immediate supervisor was still smarting over recent developments, he was smart enough to have written me a fabulous fitness report. “I am exercising my prerogatives as chief, so I am rewriting it.” With that he handed me a memo that informed the promotion panels that, “This is the finest officer I have seen in 30 years of business. It is incumbent upon the organization to advance officers of this caliber ahead of their peers.” I was speechless. He asked if this met with my approval, and, if so, told me to get out of his office and make my flight. I beat a retreat, and we made the flight on time. I was promoted shortly thereafter.

  All operations have their lighter moments, as the following four incidents reveal. One evening I was meeting a terrorist suspect in an out-of-the-way hotel. Due to suspicions about the possible terrorist, I was operating in disguise to prevent him from identifying and perhaps targeting me later. As the evening wore on, we had several beers while talking. All of a sudden, as I was putting down my glass of beer to ask some more questions, I noticed that the terrorist suspect had a startled look on his face. When I looked down at my beer, I saw why—my mustache was floating on top of my beer. I paused for a moment, then reached into the beer, picked up my mustache, excused myself, went to the bathroom, glued it back on, and resumed the session. I had not been warned that alcohol would dissolve the mustache glue. For his part, the terrorist suspect never said a word about it.

  Dissolvable paper is another trick of the trade—it even comes in flavors so you can enjoy it while eating the evidence. One evening as I went to call an agent, I took along a small pad of the paper, which I normally used to take notes. In an emergency, I knew that I could flush it down a toilet or throw it into a washbasin to destroy evidence of my espionage activity. That night, as rain slashed in sheets from the sky, I went to a public phone booth, made the call, and set up a meeting with my agent later that night. I took numerous notes on the pad, and as I started to leave the phone booth, I decided to call home to let my wife know I’d be late. As I finished the call, I looked down, and there was my entire water-soluble pad with all my notes floating on top of a puddle. With great care, I was able to pick up the pad, which was floating, fortunately, on its thick binding and saved all my notes.

  In another incident, I took my wife to the largest sports facility in the country to watch a martial arts demonstration during a rare moment of leisure during this tour. The place was packed, but fortunately we had good seats. During the halftime break, I told my wife I was going to step out for refreshments. As I stood up, however, I noticed across the stadium a young woman—one of my agents—waving to me, indicating that she wanted to see me. I whispered to my wife that, if the woman were to come over, she knew me by an alias. So things were OK, but when I turned to go up the stairs, I saw a second agent making his way toward us. And he knew me by yet another name. As I was deciding my next move, I heard someone call out one of my aliases. It was yet a third agent, and—yes—he knew me by still a third name. I quickly told my wife, “Meet me at the car and don’t ask any questions,” and left her there while I made for the exits. I did successfully avoid all three agents. Fortunately, my wife was most understanding.

  The fourth humorous episode was also a learning experience. I was out on my business, and taking great care to do a good surveillance detection run. I had a small suitcase with me, and I took a taxi to a small subway station on the outskirts of town. I took the subway, and changed trains at three separate stations. By this time, two or three hours had passed. Finally, I went on a walking route and went through a department store. Coming out the other side, I got in line at the taxi stand and got into the same taxi I had taken in the first place. I could barely tell him where to take me. It was all innocent enough, I guess, but I aborted the meeting just in case. Too much coincidence, and I have always been a believer in the line Goldfinger used with James Bond: “Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.” So I missed the meeting, just in case.

  Sometimes the demands of espionage intrude into your personal life. Once while on this tour I needed some minor surgery, and I selected a U.S. military facility to have it done. Two aspects of this were unfortunate: first, the facility was a five-hour train ride away. Second, the procedure was done on an outpatient basis, meaning I had to return home afterward. Predictably, the train ride home after the surgery was not a pleasant experience. But once I got home, everything was fine until I received an emergency meeting request from one of my agents late in the evening. You do what you have to do in this business, so I loaded up with painkillers and plenty of admonitions from my loving spouse and went out to make the meeting. This was an important debriefing, and we completed it without the agent noticing that I was sweat-soaked from pain throughout.

  In intelligence operations you seldom know anyone by their real name. Your fellow officers have aliases and pseudonyms galore. Your agents get cryptonyms to protect their identities. The upshot of this is that soon your circle of friends and acquaintances get nicknames to make things easier. Also, most of the nicknames have something generally to do with either physical features or personality. Some more memorable nicknames are:

  • Nickel Nose: an agent with a nose that’s unusually large for an Asian. Given by an officer who noted, “You could put a roll of nickels in each nostril.”

  • Dumbo: an agent with large ears highlighted by her insistence on wearing a hat for disguises, which pushed them out even further.

  • Sir Oval: a case officer with a significant paunch.

  • Honda Bob: a manager who checked up on his officers by motorcycle.

  • Lightbulb: a chief with no hair.

  • Motor-Mouth: a very senior officer who simply couldn’t let anyone else have a say about anything.

  • Hair-on-Fire: another very senior officer, most noticeable by the fact that he was always in motion with some new proposal or scheme—running around as if his hair were on fire.

  • Broadway: another senior officer known for having a slick answer to any problem and whose current job was always the best he ever had.

  • Dufus: the officer who spotted the U.S. government pen and aborted our technical operation.

  • Moneypenny: one of the heroines of my career, nicknamed after James Bond’s Miss Moneypenny. She was a financial genius who taught me how to get money for operations (see chapter 12).

  • FNU/LNU [fahnu lahnu]: probably the most famous person in the intelligence world. It stands for first name unknown/last name unknown. Intelligence officers often request traces, or record checks, from headquarters to see if someone we have recently met has anything in their file. Frequently we would get back a response of either first name unknown or last name unknown. So we’d often ask, “Has anyone found FNU/LNU yet?”

  SIX

  JOURNEYMAN SPY

  1977–1979

  As I embarked on my third straight overseas assignment I was really on a roll from the previous tour. During a short TDY at headquarters, I was briefed on the state of affairs in my new country. Excited to arrive in country, I was ready to go to work upon arrival. On my first day, the chief called me in and asked me to immediately go to an adjoining country and attempt to recruit a denied-area official who was in touc
h with one of our officers in that country. I eagerly agreed and flew out that same day.

  When I arrived and was briefed by the officer working the case, I discovered that it was not much of a case at all. It was in fact what we call a gangplank recruitment attempt, or simply asking a departing official to work for us without laying any advance groundwork. But I made the attempt and walked up to the official and asked if I could speak to him for a moment. He was naturally wary, but agreed to listen to me. I had a proposal—cash for espionage. He was incredulous and refused outright. I went back and reported this to the officer in country, who said he was not surprised but that it was worth the try. I grumbled that this was a poor way to do business, and headed back to the airport.

  After arriving back in country, the chief immediately called me into the office and asked for a report. As I began to explain that the recruitment attempt hadn’t worked, he exploded, “What the hell kind of officer have they sent me anyway?”

  “One that knows better than to try that half-assed approach and one who doesn’t ever let anyone yell at him,” I responded. I then turned and walked out the door, slamming it for emphasis. Shortly thereafter, the deputy came to my office and told me it would be best if I apologized to the chief. I told him that it would be a cold day in Asia before I apologized, and called my wife to tell her not to start unpacking too soon, since we might be leaving shortly. I told her I would explain things later. Meanwhile, the chief’s secretary called and said he wanted to see me. I told her to relay the message that I would be glad to stop in if he could assure me there would be no more yelling. She called back, telling me that it would be a good idea if I came in. Fearing the worst, I reluctantly went back in and walked into his room, with the secretary closing the door behind us. The chief turned around and said to me, “You know, given your expertise in China, I thought maybe we could sit down and get your input into our programs here to see what we can do better.”

  That was that. He never raised his voice to me again during the tour. In fact, after our pleasant meeting he invited my wife and me to his home for dinner that evening. When I returned home after the meeting with the chief, my wife was clearly worried.

  “You’ll never believe this,” and I told her what happened as we dressed and went off for a perfectly enjoyable evening with the chief, who was a most gracious host.

  I had no idea about the shock that was to come next. A couple of days after arriving in the country, I went to get my mail and returned to my office. For some reason, the door was locked. I beat on the door for minutes, then decided it had been locked accidentally, so I went to the support area to see if there was a spare key. The secretary said to me, “Well, it’s just Dufus using your office.” I couldn’t believe it—he had been transferred here from my previous post. Was I distressed now.

  “Why has he locked me out of my own office?” I asked.

  “Well,” the secretary replied with a grin, “he requires anyone entering the office when he is there to use the secret knock, and then he’ll open the door.”

  “Secret knock? Tell him to open the damned door to my office and let me in or I’ll kick it in and him with it,” I responded. She dutifully made the telephone call to my office to ask Dufus to let me in as I went back down the hall.

  The door was open this time, and Dufus explained to me, “You see, the secret knock is just in case someone who doesn’t know I’m an intelligence officer tries to get in, then they won’t blow my cover.”

  “You jackass,” I replied. “We’re in a secure area.” With that, I forbade him from ever entering my office again and he left.

  But that wasn’t the end of my encounters with Dufus. Late one evening, I was entertaining some local officials at my house. It was a critical evening, because local regulations forbade local officials from being in the homes of U.S. government officials. The people in my home that night were younger local officials, and they had taken a risk just to show up. Things were going quite well, and darkness had just fallen. Suddenly, I looked up and saw Dufus looking in my living-room window. I excused myself, went outside, and asked him what the hell he was doing. I also noticed he had a tennis racket in his hand. He explained to me that he was doing his surveillance detection run (SDR) before he went to meet an agent and noticed I had some local officials in my home.

  “Yes,” I noted.

  “I recognize one of them and would be glad to come in and introduce you to him,” he explained.

  “You moron,” I fairly shouted, “I’ve already met him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be in my house.”

  Additionally, I pointed out to him that since he didn’t play tennis, any enemy agent performing a good surveillance of him over a period of time would find his carrying a tennis racket strange and unusual. Also, since there were no lighted courts, playing tennis at night would have been impossible. Dufus finally left. He returned to assignment in Washington, and was put into non-operational jobs for the remainder of his career.

  This tour was to a smaller facility, and to a country with definite Third-World credentials. We joked that it was a country in the fourteenth century moving rapidly to the twelfth. As with many assignments to such countries, you run across some real characters along the way.

  Representatives from almost all of the communist countries were posted here. Generally, the poorer the country, the more representatives from denied-area countries that can be found. (A denied area is a country that’s hostile toward the United States and closely monitors the activities of official Americans during their stay.) The senior diplomat in country was an old East German diplomat who had been there for nearly 11 years. He hadn’t returned to East Germany for several reasons. If he returned, he was afraid he would be unable to leave again, plus his government didn’t want to pay the expense of relocating him. Also, his government benefited from having the senior diplomat in country—an important diplomatic point in the social game.

  Along the way, this senior diplomat had acquired quite a taste for distilled barley. He was a drunken sot who typically got blind drunk at diplomatic receptions. One of our senior officers had been assessing him for recruitment as a spy, but headquarters had no interest in him because of his drinking. And, with 11 years away from his own country, headquarters considered him unlikely to have access to any useful information. When we decided to take a fresh look at him, we were introduced at an evening outdoor reception. The diplomat was already looking tipsy, and as we talked he kept spilling brandy down the front of his suit. We were standing just next to a hedge on a small hillside, and I excused myself to get another beer and some napkins to dry him off. “Hurry back,” he said, “I won’t go away.”

  When I returned, he was nowhere in sight. Then I heard a yell. “Help me up!” he screamed. He had fallen over the hedge and rolled to the bottom of the hill, a glass of brandy still in his hand. I helped him up, and we finished our conversation. I later reported to headquarters that I didn’t think this fellow was good agent material.

  It was at this same party that I discovered a KGB agent attempting to target me. A young Russian couple had shown up on the scene during my second year in country. We had done background checks on them and confirmed that both were KGB officers. He was a nice chap, interested in chess and reading while she, quite simply, was a knockout. We knew she was a senior officer due to political connections from her father. My wife and I did enjoy their company during our limited time together. Then, one evening at a social event where there was dancing, the fellow engaged my spouse in a conversation on the other side of the room. The KGB woman asked me to dance and I accepted. She adroitly maneuvered me to a dark corner on the other side of the room, and I looked down and there were only three legs on the dance floor—two of which were mine. She had curled one leg up around my thigh as she tried to whisper in my ear, “Let’s go back to my place.”

  I stopped dancing, looked her in the eye, and said, “I’m gonna do you a big favor.”

  “What’s that?” she responde
d.

  “I’m gonna stop this before my wife sees you and kills you.” Stunned, she desisted and never made another move in my direction the rest of the tour. It does illustrate, however, that the KGB often employed sex as an operational tool.

  The KGB would also do anything to maintain superior standing. After I had been in country for a while, I was regarded as one of the best tennis-playing foreigners there. I had played in [the country’s] Open Tennis Tournament, and had won a number of matches throughout the area. It aggravated the KGB, which was no longer targeting me, that I had not taken their earlier bait. So I wasn’t surprised when one of Russia’s top female tennis players appeared at the Soviet embassy ostensibly as a cultural officer. Nor was I surprised that she sought me out immediately and challenged me to a game of tennis. I accepted, and of course, when I showed up, half of the Russian embassy was on hand to cheer her on. She was a terrific player, and bigger than me. However, I managed to eke out a victory, and did so the next three or four times she challenged me. Interestingly enough, after she lost to me the fourth time, her assignment was cancelled and she returned to Moscow.