Deadly Deceits (8 page)

Although CIA-approved books by William Colby (
Honorable Men
) and John Marks and Victor Marchetti (
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
) discussed clearances and traces, the Agency felt my treatment of the subject was too explicit and therefore deleted it as classified information. To give readers an idea of the clearance process, I include this passage from former CIA case officer Philip Agee's book,
Inside the Company:
¹

Whether to use or not to use a particular prospective agent is determined, from the CI [counterintelligence] viewpoint, by the ‘operational approval' process. It is an integral part of every relationship between the CIA and foreign agents no matter what a given agent's task might be. The operational approval process begins with the initial spotting and assessment of a prospective agent and continues through field and headquarters' file checks and background investigation to the operational approval system established in the CI staff of the DDP.

No person may be used in an operational capacity by a field station without prior approval by the Operational Approval Branch of the Counter-intelligence Staff of the DDP in headquarters (CI/OA). Requests for approval start from the field stations and are outlined in a document known as the Personal Record Questionnaire (PRQ) which is divided into two parts. The PRQ Part I contains some seven pages of basic biographical data including full name, date and place of birth, names of parents, names of family members, schools attended, employment history, marital history, military service, present and past citizenship, membership in political organizations, hobbies, any special qualifications, and use of drugs or other vices. In itself the PRQ Part I reveals no operational interest or plans. The PRQ Part II, which never carries the prospective agent's true name or other identifying data, is a document of similar length with all the details of operational plans for the agent. It is reconciled with the PRQ Part I by a numbering system and usually bears the cryptonym assigned to the prospective agent. In the PRQ Part II the proposed task for the agent is described, the means through which the information in PRQ Part I was obtained and verified is detailed, the cover used by the person who spotted and assessed the agent is given, and all the operational risks and advantages are discussed.

The officers in CI/OA run a series of name checks in headquarters and, after studying the case, give final approval or disapproval for the proposed use of the prospective agent. Assuming no serious
problems exist, CI/OA issues a Provisional Operational Approval (POA) on the agent, effective for six months, at the end of which an Operational Approval (OA) is issued, based on additional investigations by the station and the CIA staff.

Files are maintained on all agents and they always begin with the number 201 – followed by a number of five to eight digits. The 201 file contains all the documents that pertain to a given agent and usually starts with the PRQ and the request for POA. But the 201 file is divided into two parts which are stored separately for maximum security. One part contains true name documents while the other part contains cryptonym documents and operational information. Compromise of one part will not reveal both the true name and the operational use of the agent.

To protect the identity of Agency employees, pseudonyms were used. Pseudonyms consist of a first name, middle initial, and a last name. Discussions within the Agency took on an unreal character because they were often conducted only in cryptonyms and pseudonyms. For example: “Bertan F. Finley said RSROCK who is working in RSBOATLOAD [a project cryptonym] is acting suspicious. He failed to load the dead drop last week, so we may have to flutter him [LCFLUTTER was the cryptonym for the lie detector test].” This special language was undecipherable to all but the
entre nous
. It added an aura of mystery and reinforced the tendency to clannishness within the clandestine services.
[Two sentences deleted.]

Our file-tracing task wasn't easy. The Agency, because it was young and learning, had adopted recordkeeping procedures appropriate for a small organization. The Directorate for Intelligence remained rather small and its recordkeeping unit, Central Reference Service, seemed able to handle its requirements. But the Directorate for Plans had grown rapidly in the early 1950s and its records integration division had been unable to cope. Whereas the most mechanized and best of systems would have trouble establishing a world index of names, the records division used archaic methods and it slowly began to sink under the weight of the mass of work.

It continued to make a record of almost every name, American or foreign, that was mentioned in a document. Each card usually included the permanent file location of the document from which the name had been carded plus a short excerpt of the information in it. These cards then were used
as the information base for field file-trace requests. The absurd theory behind this antiquated method was that one obscure item of information might be
the
key to unlocking the great secret. Thus, carders of documents would use no discretion and would make a new record of virtually everything—even when only a first or last name was mentioned. Thousands of “Dwight (last name unknown)” and “Truman (first name unknown)” index cards flooded the system. Several field stations sent in telephone books, and the records division dutifully went about carding them. An entire huge room was stacked high with documents awaiting carding. To try to keep up with the crush, the records division operated in shifts around the clock.

The huge index room, commonly referred to as “the snake pit,” was surreal. The small window air conditioners would break down under the strain of the masses of sweating humanity trying to squeeze into the narrow aisles between six-foot-high wooden file cabinets. Earthy aromas greeted those who entered from the relatively fresh air of the corridor. There was a noisy din of shouted instructions, disgruntled conversations, and flirtations. To check a name in the index, you had to use fancy footwork to dance around the opened drawers and mobs of humanity. Inevitably you were shoved, elbowed, kicked, and jostled.

We in the China records unit had our own private hell as romanized Chinese names created a special form of file-tracing torture. The Chinese language had no alphabet. It was composed of about 10,000 commonly used ideographs or symbols representing ideas or words. This posed an extremely difficult problem for the records division and the file tracers, none of whom knew how to read or write Chinese. The most common Chinese surname is Ch'en, but there were more than a dozen ideographs that romanized out as Ch'en. The same with given names such as Cheng. A request for a trace on a Ch'en Cheng presented a near impossible task of sorting through the hundreds or thousands of index cards on that name. How to discriminate between them?

A system of numbering every major Chinese ideograph was devised and was slowly being incorporated into the indexing system. Under this system each ideograph was assigned a four-digit number, which was included on the index card; i.e.,
Ch'en Cheng (7115/2638). In this way the tracer could look only for those Ch'en Chengs writing their names with the 7115 Ch'en ideograph and the 2638 Cheng ideograph—a vast improvement. But the system was new and it required a staff of Chinese to process the numbers.

Perhaps the most difficult of all problems was the records division's habit of lending out its record copies of documents. Someone conducting a trace on Ch'en Cheng would attempt to gather all documents mentioning that name. If there were 1,000 references to documents, then the tracer theoretically would attempt to gather every one of those documents. But as frequently was the case, other people outside of the records division had some of them. To do a thorough job, the name tracer would have to go to the office of each person and ask to see the document. The main corridor in the I-L complex was almost a half-mile long, and it was not infrequently that one traveled from one end of the building to the other and back again. In many cases the person who had borrowed the document had been transferred, and the document was lost forever.

The rules for processing the operational clearances, in light of the various deficiencies in the records systems, made it impossible to do a thorough job. We in the records unit had to compromise the rules severely or China activities would have come to a standstill.

When I assumed command of the unit, it had a horrendous backlog of clearance and name-trace requests. By refining some of the processes, gradually I was able to whittle away at the large stack of requested actions. Some unprocessed requests were several years old, and I sent frequent dispatches to see if the station was still interested. The replies fed my growing concern that the Agency was not as efficient as it ought to be: in many cases, it turned out, the station had hired the agent without waiting for clearance.

My first doubts about the quality of information kept in the CIA's highly touted files stemmed from an incident during this period involving an agent in Saigon who claimed to have a series of intelligence nets with radio operators in
mainland China. The agent, LFBOOKLET, said his people were not pro-Nationalist but were definitely anti-Communist. Claiming that he had been an important politician and his men were all personally loyal to him, he offered to share his intelligence with the Agency in exchange for financial support. China at the time was a denied area, and the Agency had no sources on the mainland.

After questioning him for a few weeks, the Agency case officer was convinced of the validity of his story and recruited him to work with the CIA. The agent began reporting on events on the mainland and activated more and more of his intelligence nets. The reports started pouring in, and the operations expanded over the next two years. The case officer increased LFBOOKLET's funding to millions of dollars a year. But slowly doubts about the agent began to surface. An allied intelligence agency alerted us to a newspaper clipping service located in Saigon; this turned out to be LFBOOKLET's home address. One of the radio intercept facilities tried to monitor LFBOOKLET's radio contacts and heard nothing. When confronted with this information, LFBOOKLET said he had to alter the frequency of the transmitters because the Chinese Communists had begun to employ radio direction-finder detecting systems. To resolve its doubts, the Agency asked LFBOOKLET to move to Subic Bay, where CIA radio operators could “help” maintain contact with his teams. His constant refusals to move even for a few weeks and a careful counterespionage review of his case led to the conclusion that he had been fabricating the information all along. When confronted with evidence of his duplicity, he confessed, at least in part. He had operated a clipping bureau. He would gather mainland newspapers that found their way into Saigon and clip items concerning minor events in scattered locations in China. He would rewrite details of those incidents, blowing them up into great significance, and pass the report to us as if it had come directly from his team in the area. Since each item had a germ of truth behind it, his reports seemed plausible.

After the operation was exposed as a fabrication, I was given the job of figuring out some way to remove from the record system all of LFBOOKLET's three years of intelligence reports and the thousands of index cards based on them. Unfortunately no one had a record of the identification numbers
assigned to LFBOOKLET's reports. I could devise no other solution than a month's shutdown of the work of the records unit for full concentration on digging out those cards and reports. This was deemed unworkable, and we decided to be on the alert for his reports and pull them out as we encountered them. We would pass such reports to the records division with instructions to remove from the files all index cards that had been based on the report. This process may still be going on today.

The mess in the records division was growing out of control. A priority name trace from another government agency would take a minimum of three months to complete. The documents in the carding room piled higher and higher. Early attempts to computerize the records with the then unsophisticated state of the art seemed merely to exacerbate the problem. It was obvious that something would have to be done or the entire system would collapse. Allen Dulles appointed a former Rhodes scholar I shall call Charles Thompson, who had worked in both the Directorate for Plans and the Directorate for Intelligence, as head of a task force to delve into the problem and find solutions.

Thompson was the ideal man for the job. A bespectacled Irishman with the gift of gab, he was brilliant, pragmatic, and thoroughly versed in the needs of the operating and intelligence sides of the Agency. He was a dynamo and soon after being appointed could be found getting his own hands dirty in the file and index rooms.

Thompson held a series of meetings to ask workers about their problems and to hear their recommendations. I served as the Far East division's representative at these sessions. After cataloging the problems, Thompson suggested a complete revision of records division procedures. He recommended greatly restricting the criteria for carding new names into the index and hiring competent carders who would be given some leeway in determining what to card. If a document mentioned Joseph Stalin 10 times, it would not be necessary to make 10 cards on Joseph Stalin; only one card would be prepared and then only if the writer added a special section to his
correspondence asking that Stalin be carded. He suggested that no more first-name-unknown or last-name-unknown names be indexed and that the present collections of those be destroyed. He recommended a cleaning out of the files to begin with a review of all intelligence reporting. The reviewers would mark for destruction all documents deemed of no value. Once a document was designated for destruction, it would be sent to the index card room, where all cards based on that document would be removed and destroyed. When a file trace was completed on a particular individual, a detailed form would be filled out so that no one would have to repeat the process for a later request.