Inside the CIA (30 page)

When the test began to show signs of deception, Scranage at first denied any wrongdoing. Eventually, she admitted she had given her boyfriend extensive secret information. If she did not go along, he made it clear he would break up with her. In fact, she handed Soussoudis virtually everything there was to know about the CIA’s activities in Ghana. She even gave him top-secret cables that she copied in shorthand, then recopied for her lover in longhand.

Her spying led to the compromise of eight CIA agents in Ghana, who were arrested and imprisoned. In addition, the pro-Marxist head of Ghanian intelligence is believed to have passed on information obtained through Scranage to the KGB and Cuban intelligence.

Scranage agreed to cooperate with the FBI and Jerry Brown of the Office of Security to catch Soussoudis, who was an agent of the Ghanian government. The FBI arrested him at a Holiday Inn in Springfield, Virginia.

After pleading guilty in 1985, Scranage was sentenced to five years in prison. Later, the sentence was reduced to two. Soussoudis was returned to Ghana in exchange for the release from prison of the CIA’s eight agents. The CIA has resettled in the U.S. nearly two dozen Ghanians, including families, who were compromised as a result of the fiasco. The agency has since tightened its regulations on reporting relationships with foreign nationals.

While the Office of Security had helped apprehend Scranage, its delay in polygraphing her after it became clear she had been dating a relative of the prime minister was inexcusable. Unlike a failure to forecast a political event, this was an avoidable mistake. Indeed, of the six Justice Department espionage prosecutions of CIA employees or employees of contractors to date, only one—that of Edwin G. Moore II, who threw a package of CIA documents over the fence at a Soviet apartment house in Washington—did not involve any mistakes by the Office of Security.
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More recently, the Office of Security botched one of the biggest spy cases in history by insisting on treating KGB spy Vitaly Yurchenko as a prisoner. This contributed to his decision
to redefect three months after he left the Soviet Union in 1985. As the most important KGB officer ever to defect to the U.S., Yurchenko had in his head information about dozens of cases of interest to the Office of Security and the FBI. While he gave away two major cases—that of Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA officer who defected to Moscow, and Ronald Pelton, the former NSA employee who spied for the Soviets—Yurchenko had clues to many more. The CIA and FBI had meant to debrief him for years. If they had, he would almost certainly have led them to a number of other spies.

When Webster became director of Central Intelligence in 1987, the lawyers that he brought with him from the FBI found that, of all the CIA offices that deal routinely with legal issues—the Office of General Counsel, the Counterintelligence Center, and the Office of Security—the Office of Security was most likely to flout legal procedures. One example was the great postage-stamp case, which involved nine workers in the Office of Security’s mailroom who noticed that $1 U.S. postage stamps had been misprinted. They sold eighty-five of the stamps—now valued at $28,000 each—to a New Jersey stamp dealer for an undisclosed sum. When the Office of Security learned about it, they interrogated the suspects without warning them of their right to have counsel present.

Eventually, four of the employees were fired because they had made statements during the investigation that were technically true but misleading, or because they had not returned the stamps they had taken, or both.
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If the cases had been criminally prosecuted, they would most likely have been thrown out because the employees had not been warned of their rights.

To improve the operations of the Office of Security, Webster appointed new directors who came from outside the office—one from the Directorate of Intelligence, another from administration. While they were not burdened by the Office of Security’s mind-set, they did not have the experience in law enforcement needed to give them the confidence to
make wholesale changes. For his part, Webster did not want to become heavily involved in the operations of the office, realizing that trying to micromanage its activities would only lead to more problems. In any case, much of what the office does would be done the same way regardless of who is in charge. Debugging is one example.

W
ITHIN THE
O
FFICE OF
S
ECURITY, NEARLY A HUNDRED
technicians engage in a never-ending battle to find wiretaps and other eavesdropping devices in the CIA’s offices at Langley and around the globe. Besides helping to investigate espionage and other crimes, polygraphing people, taking care of the buildings and grounds and locks, and guarding defectors, the Office of Security looks for eavesdropping devices. Given the threat, this is one of the most important jobs in the CIA. Besides finding bugs, the Technical Security Division within the Office of Security installs white-sound systems to mask voices, as well as state-of-the-art alarm systems, safes, locks, and other security systems. But the main job of the office is finding bugs by conducting periodic sweeps of the agency’s buildings in Washington and stations overseas. While usually based in Washington, the technicians spend most of their time traveling to CIA stations in their quest for elusive bugs.

A standard office can present dozens of possibilities for bugging, and CIA technicians have to check them all. Any speaker in a radio or television set can be turned into a bugging device that radiates signals to a remote listening post. An electrical outlet can be replaced with one that contains a bugging device that transmits signals through the air or over the power line. A microphone in a thermostat can transmit signals to the furnace, where a transmitter can beam the signals outside. Rewiring of a telephone can turn it into an open microphone, transmitting sound in the room down the telephone line even when the receiver is on the hook.

Typewriters are not immune. The power supply used by an IBM Selectric typewriter can be used to pick up what the typewriter is typing. Each time the typing element moves, the motor inside the machine runs. The amount of time the motor operates depends on how far the typing element moves. In turn, the amount of movement is based on which letter is being typed. By measuring the amount of current drawn, a snooper can determine how far the typing element has traveled and thus which letter it typed.

A computer screen also radiates signals that denote which letter is being typed. A microphone in a room can also be used to pick up sounds from the keyboard. Each key, when struck, makes a different sound. That sound can be used to determine which key was depressed. Likewise, a daisy-wheel computer printer emits sounds that can be translated into the text that it is printing out. If a computer has a modem, so long as the computer is turned on, a snooper can obtain the entire contents of the computer’s hard drive over the telephone line.

In checking for electronic eavesdropping devices, CIA technicians try to pick up any signals that might be transmitting sound from a room. This is not as easy as it sounds. In debugging the American embassy in Moscow, State Department technicians did not find the bugs implanted in the embassy’s IBM Selectric typewriters in part because of the clever way the Soviets masked the signals. The bugs stored data and transmitted it only intermittently. The Soviets controlled when the bugs dumped information and could turn them off
when a sweep might be in progress. Moreover, the coded signals used the same frequency as a Moscow television station. When the bugs transmitted, viewers heard momentary static. Since the signals were on the same wavelength as the television station, sweeps of the embassy detected nothing.

In debugging overseas stations, one of the biggest problems CIA technicians face is not bugs but insistent requests from ambassadors to sweep their offices.

“It’s a status symbol,” a former technician said. “If the chief of station gets his done, the ambassador wants his done, too.”

The State Department sweeps its own offices, including those of ambassadors, but when CIA technicians visit stations overseas, many ambassadors insist their offices need a check as well. When that happens, CIA officers assigned to the stations often apply pressure to go along with the request. But according to a former technician, “We’ve been told we’ll be canned if we do it. The State Department doesn’t want to send men and equipment there if we have just been there.”

Depending on the size of the station, two or three technicians take one to two weeks to perform their sweeps. Depending on their sensitivity and the degree of the threat, the stations are checked every six months to once a year. The director’s office has devices that constantly detect any stray emanations that might come from bugs. In addition, the office is swept along with the office of the deputy director of Central Intelligence every six months.

To keep in top form, the technicians look for bugs that are placed by the CIA’s buggers—the Office of Technical Service within the Directorate of Science and Technology. The bugs are placed in homes and apartments previously used as safe houses. There is rivalry between the two offices, and the positive buggers often do not want to share their latest techniques and devices with the debuggers.

The technicians find bugs at overseas stations only occasionally. In one case, while checking the airwaves at a station overseas, they heard the voice of the chief of the British intelligence station there. It turned out the British had given the local security service some outdated bugging devices. The
first thing the local security service did was to install one of the devices in the office of the British officer who had supplied them.

The Office of Security performs sweeps of the office of the director of Central Intelligence, his car, and his home every three to six months. They also sweep the rest of headquarters. CIA technicians have never found a bug in Langley. Sometimes, they think they have found one in the director’s office when they find a strange new wire. But in every case, it leads to a buzzer installed to signal a request for coffee and tea, or to some other newly installed gadget.

“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” a former technician said. “It could be anywhere in a building. You can bust your chops looking, never find anything, and never be sure if it was behind the next wall. You are never sure.”

To find technicians who can debug offices, as well as the dizzying array of other specialists needed by the CIA, the CIA has an agency-wide office of personnel that looks for practically every area of expertise listed in college and technical-school catalogues. But finding people who will become spies takes a special approach, which is the primary purpose of the CIA’s Career Training Program.

“W
E NEED PEOPLE WHO ARE DRIVEN, PEOPLE WHO ARE AGGRESSIVE
, manipulative—people who can manipulate people to get them to do what they want them to do.”

It is nine
A.M
. on a Friday. Bob, as distinguished looking as Walter Cronkite, is telling a group of eager and very respectful applicants what the CIA looks for in a spy. The applicants are being considered for the CIA’s Career Training Program, the training program for the agency’s elite. Most of the applicants will go into the CIA’s Directorate of Operations—the side of the agency that engages in human spying. Some will obtain management positions in the agency’s three other directorates.

This has to be the strangest show in Washington—a place where the CIA uses a classroom setting to recruit people to become professional impostors.

Competition to work at the agency is keen. Each year, the CIA receives 150,000 to 200,000 résumés for only 2,000 full-time,
part-time, and contract job openings. In all, the agency has 22,000 full-time employees and 4,000 part-time and contract employees.

About 12,000 applicants complete all the requirements, including taking polygraph tests. Many drop out along the way when they learn they will have to reveal prior drug usage, when they find out more about the job, or when they simply get tired of waiting. The CIA does not tell applicants why they were rejected. One common reason for rejection is evidence of psychological problems revealed in psychological tests. Psychiatric treatment is also frowned on. Occasionally, in the course of trying desperately to pass the polygraph test, applicants reveal they have committed rapes or other crimes—information that is passed along to the FBI and of course, disqualifies them for the job. So long as it is disclosed, homosexuality is no longer grounds for rejection.

The CIA advertises in local media in all fifty states and has twelve recruitment centers throughout the country. Each year CIA recruiters visit 450 college campuses. There, they play a videotape put together by an advertising agency.

In the video, William Webster, wearing a button-down blue shirt and a blue-and-rust-striped tie, looks earnestly into the camera. “There’s hardly any more diverse, complex, and truly worldwide organization than the CIA,” he tells potential applicants. “As our name indicates, our primary concern is intelligence, that is, information, information that helps protect the security interests of the United States. The scope of this intelligence includes virtually every kind of information from all parts of the world—economic, political, military, scientific information about people, places, and events. Events that have happened and might happen. Wars, coups, terrorist acts, crop failures, elections, famine, drug trafficking, and natural disasters. All of these events and many more worldwide are the concern of the CIA.”

Based on the résumés, the CIA narrows the list of applicants to five thousand and invites them to a three-hour introduction to the Career Training Program. Nearly all of the agency’s spies in the Directorate of Operations come through this program, and more than half of those who join the program
become spies. Only a few hundred a year are finally hired as operations officers. Specialists such as biologists, physicists, engineers, and demolitions experts, along with clerks and secretaries, are hired directly.