Photograph by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
These articles about the CIA, while fascinating and
terrifying and thrilling, also feel somewhat incomplete: It’s tough to
read them without wondering about all the stories we’ll never know.
How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six
Americans out of revolutionary Iran. The declassified story that became
Ben Affleck's Argo.
“We have prepared for your escape,” [Tony] Mendez announced
during dinner. He then explained the cover story and presented Kirby’s
drawings, the script, the ad in Variety, and the telephone
number of the Studio Six office back on Sunset Boulevard. Mendez handed
out the business cards and passports. Cora Lijek would become Teresa
Harris, the writer. Mark was the transportation coordinator. Kathy
Stafford was the set designer. Joe Stafford was an associate producer.
Anders was the director.
Schatz, the party’s cameraman, received the scoping lens and detailed specs on how to operate a Panaflex camera. Mark Lijek noticed that Mendez wore a distinctively British Harris tweed sport coat, in keeping with his alias as an Irish film producer.
Schatz, the party’s cameraman, received the scoping lens and detailed specs on how to operate a Panaflex camera. Mark Lijek noticed that Mendez wore a distinctively British Harris tweed sport coat, in keeping with his alias as an Irish film producer.
The Americans were initially nervous about the plan. ‘Let me
just show you how this kind of operation works,’ Mendez said, picking
up two corks from the many opened wine bottles. He put the corks between
his thumbs and forefingers in two interlocking D shapes. “Here’s the
bad guys,” he said, showing that they couldn’t be separated, ‘and here’s
us.’ With a sudden sleight of hand, he pulled them apart.
It was parlor magic—but somehow extraordinarily comforting.
The six felt they had a competent leader. ‘It’s going to be that easy,’
Mendez said, sensing the group’s growing confidence. ‘We’ll be able to
fool them all.’ ”
Throughout the '50s and '60s, media outlets including the New York Times and CBS News provided the CIA with information and cover for agents. Then everyone decided to pretend it had never happened.
“In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and
handle foreigners as agents; to acquire and evaluate information, and to
plant false information with officials of foreign governments. Many
signed secrecy agreements, pledging never to divulge anything about
their dealings with the Agency; some signed employment contracts, some
were assigned case officers and treated with. unusual deference. Others
had less structured relationships with the Agency, even though they
performed similar tasks: they were briefed by CIA personnel before trips
abroad, debriefed afterward, and used as intermediaries with foreign
agents. Appropriately, the CIA uses the term ‘reporting’ to describe
much of what cooperating journalists did for the Agency. ‘We would ask
them, Will you do us a favor?’said a senior CIA official. ‘We
understand you’re going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved all the
streets? Where did you see planes? Were there any signs of military
presence? How many Soviets did you see? If you happen to meet a Soviet,
get his name and spell it right. ... Can you set up a meeting for us? Or
relay a message?’ Many CIA officials regarded these helpful
journalists as operatives; the journalists tended to see themselves as
trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors—usually
without pay—in the national interest.
‘I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done it,’ said
Joseph Alsop, who, like his late brother, columnist Stewart Alsop,
undertook clandestine tasks for the Agency. ‘The notion that a
newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.’ ”
Erik Prince, the boyish CEO of America's largest and most
controversial mercenary force, Blackwater, also happened to be a CIA
agent.
“In Hollywood, meanwhile, a town that loves nothing so much
as a good villain, Prince, with his blond crop and Daniel Craig mien,
has become the screenwriters’ darling. In the film State of Play, a Blackwater clone (PointCorp) uses its network of mercenaries for illegal surveillance and murder. On the Fox series 24,
Jon Voight has played Jonas Hodges, a thinly veiled version of Prince,
whose company (Starkwood) helps an African warlord procure nerve gas for
use against U.S. targets.
But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude
stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an
astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O.
and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s
bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from
inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has
trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members
and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his
activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy.
While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government
contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an
overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department
officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to
paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable
ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made
him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence. (Full
disclosure: In the 1990s, before becoming a journalist for CBS and then
NBC News, I was a C.I.A. attorney. My contract was not renewed, under
contentious circumstances.)”
The story of William Morgan: American, wanderer, Cuban revolutionary, possible spy.
“U.S. and Cuban intelligence agents also began picking up
chatter about a Yankee commando. In the summer of 1958, the C.I.A.
reported whispers of a rebel, ‘identified only as El Americano,’
who had played a critical role in ‘planning and carrying out guerrilla
activities,’ and who had virtually wiped out a Batista unit while
leading his men in an ambush. An informant from a Cuban revolutionary
group told the F.B.I. that El Americano was Morgan. Another
said that Morgan had ‘risked his life many times’ to save the rebels,
and was considered ‘quite a hero among these forces for bravery and
daring.’ The reports eventually set off a scramble among U.S. government
agencies—including the C.I.A., the Secret Service, the State
Department, Army intelligence, and the F.B.I.—to determine who William
Alexander Morgan was, and whom he was working for.”
When a CIA operation in Pakistan went bad, leaving three men
dead, the episode offered a rare glimpse inside a shadowy world of
espionage. It also jeopardized America’s most critical outpost in the
war against terrorism.
“Some particulars of the 36-year-old’s work remain cloaked
in classification, but a search for answers in Pakistan and the U.S.—and
eventually, a brief interview with Davis himself—give a good sense of
who he is and what happened to him. He likely worked alongside the CIA’s
Special Activities Division, the agency’s paramilitary wing. The SAD
works in hostile environments—the ones where running agents is risky, if
not impossible—gleaning intelligence through covert means. That can
include anything from tapping wires to snatching suspects to influencing
politicians through propaganda. Davis’s particular role focused on
operational security. Whether it was a clandestine meeting between a
case officer and a source or an eavesdropping or other black op, his job
would be to work closely—but not too closely—with the case officer, in
case the scene shifted in some perilous way. During a meeting in a hotel
lobby, for instance, an operator like Davis would try to remain far
enough away from the exchange to not draw attention, but near enough to
watch for hostile movement. If someone were to attack, protocol calls
for two essential actions: Shoot any attackers until they’re down for
good, and clear out immediately, along with any other Americans and
agents.
In Pakistan, Davis’s near-translucent official cover was as a
‘technical consultant’ to the American consul general. But in reality
he and his CIA team sought to do something difficult and dangerous: to
surveil and report on the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.”
On the CIA’s early operations.
“I don’t recall just when in the 1950s I began to suspect
that the CIA together with the State Department, the Ford Foundation,
and similar institutions had turned anti-Stalinism into a flourishing
sub-profession for a number of former radicals and other left-wing
intellectuals who were then and are still my friends in New York. No
doubt the evidence was all around me well before I began to piece it
together or before it popped into my head, as such discoveries do, that
organized anti-Communism had become as much an industry within New
York’s intellectual life as Communism itself had been a decade or so
earlier, and that it involved many of the same personnel. An important
difference, however, was that the new enterprise was far more
luxuriously financed than its predecessor had been, involving branch
operations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, together with
subsidized publications in all these places, to say nothing of
conferences and seminars on such a scale and in so many countries and
with so much air travel to and fro that even the Ford Foundation, which
was ostensibly paying for much of this activity, could hardly be assumed
to be paying for it all.”
A spy takes on his own agency.
“Groat was arrested and held in the room for five hours.
Flynn and two other agents remained with him, he says. His car keys were
taken away. ‘One of the FBI agents said, ‘It probably wouldn’t do much
good to ask you questions, would it?’ And I said, ‘No, it wouldn’t.’
After being strip-searched, fingerprinted and handcuffed, he says, he
was driven to the Federal District Court building and locked in a cell.
Held there for two days, he was strip-searched again in front of eight
people, including a female officer, shackled and outfitted with a stun
belt. ‘My eyes were covered with a pair of goggles, the lenses masked
over with duct tape,’ he says. He was moved by van, with a police
escort, to a waiting helicopter.
After a short ride, he was taken to a windowless room that
would be his home for the next six months. He was never told where he
was, but he was told he was being treated as an ‘extreme risk’ prisoner.
The lights in his cell were kept on 24/7, and a ceiling-mounted camera
monitored him all the time.”
A three-part series on the U.S. intelligence system post-9/11.
“It is also a system in which contractors are playing an
ever more important role. The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people
with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. There is no better
example of the government's dependency on them than at the CIA, the one
place in government that exists to do things overseas that no other U.S.
agency is allowed to do.
Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies
in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA
directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a
suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees
once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up
in the Washington suburbs. At Langley headquarters, they analyze
terrorist networks. At the agency's training facility in Virginia, they
are helping mold a new generation of American spies.”
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