PLAY BACKS

The assistant to the manager of the firm making custom chips for computers under contract to your Air Force may find that her new boyfriend is less interested in her personally than in her ability to work late at night next to the vault where your Air Force’s technical specifications are kept. When he asks her to find out the combination of the vault, she may tumble to the fact that she has been tumbling with a spy.

What the assistant does next depends partly on how well the nearest security officer has done his job and partly on how well you, as a counterintelligence officer, have done yours. Does the assistant know where to go for help? Does she trust the secu- rity officers whom she will encounter to respect her privacy, to understand her personality, to protect her job and her personal safety? Does she think of security people as dumb flatfeet or as nice guys?

Nor should this example imply that women are more vul- nerable than men. They aren’t, by any means, and I could cite a

few examples involving men of all ages that would weight the judgment the other way. I cite the hypothetical case of a female assistant because so often they have such fine access to sensitive information yet are ignored and set socially off to the fringes of their group by the management.

For your part, have you got a defined and mutually understood set of procedures with the security people to whom the woman (or man) will initially go? Do you and the security officers know each other personally and like each other? Is there resentment on either side over jurisdiction? Fights over turf are common in all bureaucracies, and this is a bureaucratic situation. The best ar- rangement is one in which it is taken for granted that the security officer is a Cl officer who happens to be doing security, while the CI officer is a security officer who happens to be doing CI. This assumption is very near the truth of any CI or security situation, and indeed sometimes the same person wears both hats.

Work it out between you and get on with the operation: Recruit the assistant to be your double, investigate the hell out of her boyfriend, and handle her skillfully.

This is only a hypothetical (though not totally fictitious) example. The principles apply to all playback operations that start with a volunteer. To get the volunteer, you have to be set up for him—or her.

Security and Morale

Sometimes security and morale are in conflict. Nobody likes to think that some secret office with a lot of secret files and a lot of secretive people is secretly watching what you do. To be effec- tive, a security organization has to have more than “good public relations.” It has to be depended on for advice and comfort and help in all the problems that members of an organization have. Let me tell you a true story:

There was once in a sensitive agency of the U.S. government a competent and efficient secretary named Sue who was mar-

ried to a chap named Fred outside the agency whose hobby was motorcycle racing. One weekend, at a big race at a big track in another state to which Sue had gone to watch her husband com- pete, Fred blew a rear tire while moving at about 110 miles an hour and smashed himself up—broken bones galore, including some vertebrae. Sue, who was distraught, telephoned her boss and told him what had happened, asking for emergency leave to get a motel room for herself and her two small children while she arranged Fred’s surgery, hospitalization, and visits to him for sev- eral weeks. The boss, who was upset, called his agency’s security office, said that the secretary held very high clearances and asked that she be looked after. This was a pretext, of course, because Sue with all her clearances was in no danger of leaking information from her motel room or from the hospital, or of being forced to do so by anybody nearby, and the security office understood this. Nevertheless, the security office sent a team to the city where Sue, Fred, and the two kids were stranded; arranged a loan from the credit union to cover emergency expenses; made contact with the local police; arranged for periodic look-ins on Fred in the hos- pital and Sue in the motel; set up a connection between Sue and the local pastor of her church; and notified Sue’s boss the next day that all was as well as could be expected.

Was this a waste of the security office’s funds and the tax- payers’ money? No. It was a sound investment in morale and in confidence. It was not big brother watching, but little brother caring.

Manager Alertness

The security office played the role of little brother caring, but another key element in this true story was the boss caring. Call it “manager alertness.” Here is a law of CI: The first, last, and essential security officer in any situation is the supervisor. As either a professional security officer or a CI officer, you must enforce this law.

The manager of the computer plant, mentioned above, whose secretary was asked by her boyfriend to be a spy, had not been doing his job if the girl did not come to him first with her problem. It was the manager who should have had her first confidence and should have worked with her and with the se- curity officer. This is not the place for a lecture on personnel management, but it is a fact that many supervisors are afraid of their employees, especially women; hate to get involved with personnel problems (what do we have a personnel officer for?); and shy away from what might be viewed as meddling in other people’s private lives. This diffidence or sloth may be acceptable in a brokerage firm or a Ministry of Mines and Milling, but in offices, agencies, or firms where enemy spy services are after your people, it won’t do.

CI Informant Nets

The old-fashioned way of spreading a net for playback doubles was to set up a group of formally recruited secret informants. In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo found this system useful for all sorts of mind control, thought control, and population control that we rightly see as odious. Schoolchildren finked on their teachers for making jokes about Hitler, or they invented al- legations to get rid of teachers who were too strict in marking homework. During the Cold war, the State Security Services of the Soviet Bloc (KGB et al.) used the same system, with a proportion of workers in a factory, say one in ten, coerced to report on the private acts of their comrades. This is a dirty busi- ness, and it misses the point of real CI.

The job of a CI officer is not to expose political beliefs but to engage alien intelligence organizations in clandestine combat. Your target is not agitators or polemicists but spies. During the Cold War, you would have found, when you got to know them, that professional Soviet Bloc intelligence officers were bored with ideology and found dealing with enthusiastic communists

tedious. Their function, as they saw it, was to penetrate your government, and they interested themselves in peace marchers, antinuclear demonstrators, anti-interventionists, anti-whatever, or even in your indigenous Communist Party, only when those outfits provided a means of recruitment of individuals who could steal secrets from your government. To the degree that such outfits may constitute a recruitment pool for the enemy, they may be worth your time to penetrate with informants. But be warned that what your informants will give you will be mostly political persiflage. You may be using a vacuum cleaner where you need a pair of tweezers. On the whole, use tweezers.

Dangles

If you wait for the enemy to come to you, you may not know when he does. However trusted and admired your security orga- nization may be generally in your bailiwick, its reception service may not be adequate to give you the contact with the enemy that you need. If the fish do not swim into your net, you have to give them a lure, a provocation, something that looks like a juicy worm but that has a hook in it.

How you bait the hook depends on where you are and when. You have to assess your opponent, as sketched earlier in this chap- ter, and tailor your operation to fit what you know or guess about that opponent’s operations. You must select provocation agents with apparent or potential access to what the enemy wants, yet be careful always to be able to restrict that access plausibly if your dangle is recruited. You must make your dangle appear vulnerable to recruitment—drinking problem? money problem? family problem? shaky ideology?—but actually be invulnerable. Your dangle must have acting ability, nerve, and stamina. And he or she must have—what do you call that further essential quality?—integrity.

Setting up a dangle program is not made difficult by your enemy but by the crankiness of human nature, of the nature of Playbacks

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the people you have to select, train, and manage. It is a frus- trating activity, for both the agents and for you, because only a fraction of the people whom you have laboriously co-opted, coached, protected, and mothered will actually connect with the enemy.

When the operation finally closes out, be sure your double is properly rewarded. Security may preclude public recognition, but a commendation quietly conferred, a note of appreciation from the director or general or commanding officer, may help compensate for the troubles you have caused.

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DOUBLE AGENTS: