See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism Read Online Free PDF Page B

long shot. Without a Ph.D. or even a master’s degree, I’m pretty certain the DI can’t use you right now. After Berkeley, maybe. But in any case I’ll pass on your application.’
    Oooof. The wind came out of my sails in a rush.
    ‘But let’s go back to the DO,’ he went on, almost without missing a beat. ‘It’s a different kettle of fish entirely’ I detected a change in his voice, an enthusiasm that hadn’t been there before.
    ‘Case officers run the DO,’ Scott said. ‘They’re CIA staff employees who run agents. Agents are almost always foreigners. Being foreigners, they go places where Americans, our case officers, can’t go, like inside their governments or their countries’ secret scientific establishments. At the case officer’s direction, the agents steal secrets, plans, documents, computer tapes, or whatever. In other words - let me be blunt - agents are traitors.’
    Scott had dropped his voice so that I had to strain to hear him - as if he were afraid someone was eavesdropping on us.
    ‘And what do I mean, exactly, by spying and secrets? Let’s take a hypothetical: Pearl Harbor. It’s 1941. Assume there was a CIA back then, and you were in it. You’re assigned to Tokyo. One night in late November you’re working late. You’re about ready to go home, dead tired from a long day at work. The telephone rings. The caller apologizes for dialing the wrong number. But you know it’s not a wrong number. You recognize the voice. It’s one of your agents, an ensign in the Japanese navy who works in naval headquarters. He’s just signaled that he wants a meeting.’
    ‘At first you have a hard time following the agent as he rambles on in Japanese. He’s excited. Then, all of a sudden, you realize what he’s telling you: Japan is preparing to attack Pearl Harbor. He hands you a top-secret document. It’s the plan for the attack, he says.’
    ‘You rush back to the office, wondering if your agent has lost his mind. You get down to translating the document. It’s all there, just as he described it. You fire off an encoded message to Washington. The US Navy disperses the fleet, and you’ve just altered the course of history.’
    ‘Knowing about the Japanese attack is information that cannot be obtained anywhere other than from a human being, an agent. There’s no way we could have known with this precision about the emperor’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor as early as November 1941, except from the ensign or another agent like him. Satellites and intercepts can’t see inside someone’s head. You need a person to do that. Agents and the secrets they steal are the crown jewel of American intelligence. It is what the intelligence business is really about.’
    Scott got up and went to the minibar and got us two Cokes.
    ‘You’ve got to admit, that’s a goddamn exciting job,’ he said when he sat down. ‘But I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t have its downsides. In fact, there are very few jobs in the world tougher than a case officer’s. First of all, almost every case officer has two jobs. There’s his daytime job, his cover job, what he does between eight and five. More than likely it’ll be a boring, routine, meaningless job. You might very well be sent overseas as a shipping clerk working for an import-export company; let’s say in Penang, Malaysia. You’ll have some dreary office in the port. All day long you’ll fill in import applications. Occasionally, you call the home office, let’s say in Passaic, New Jersey. The person who answers the phone will have only the vaguest idea where Penang is, or even care. Everyone will take you for a ne’er-do-well. You can never tell anyone what you really do for a living. It’s a thankless, anonymous job.’
    ‘And there’s another downside, a lot worse than the hardship of living your cover - getting caught committing espionage. Espionage is illegal in every country in the world and, in all but a few, a capital crime. Let’s