Seraphim
11-14-2003, 05:15 AM
http://www.msnbc.com/news/993416.asp?vts=111420030204
Theres a short video on the link.
http://a799.g.akamai.net/3/799/388/c7f446b6b789ba/www.msnbc.com/news/2069299.jpg
Chris Eades, an undercover CIA official who has his cover rolled back, at home with his fiancee Michele Harris.
By Dana Priest
THE WASHINGTON POST
Nov. 14 — During the first month they dated, Chris Eades told Michele Harris that he was a U.S. government official based in Europe. During the second month they fell in love, and by then Eades was free, for the first time in 22 years, to say what he had really done for a living.
ON A RAINY AFTERNOON in March, as they were about to get in the car to visit the International Spy Museum downtown, Eades asked Harris to sit down for a minute. Downplay it, he told himself. Don’t be dramatic.
“I have to tell you, the explanation I gave you before about my work was not true,” he said. “I was under an obligation to lie. I worked for the CIA. I don’t anymore.”
Harris, a normally talkative person, did not speak. Her eyes widened as she leaned away from him and just stared.
They never made it to the spy museum that afternoon.
Eades was free to divulge his CIA work because the agency had agreed to “roll back” his cover when he resigned in March. His CIA colleague Valerie Plame had no such agreement in July, when a newspaper columnist with a well-placed administration source revealed that she works for the agency. Since then, Plame has declined to comment on the matter, but her case has lifted a curtain on living the covert life, which is at the heart of U.S. intelligence-gathering.
The CIA declined to comment for this article, but interviews with Eades, other former spies and intelligence experts provided a further glimpse into spy life — how spies gain cover, what they do to maintain it, and how hard it is to come out, even when their departure is planned and voluntary.
‘... LIKE YOU’RE NAKED’
Eades and other former CIA officers said there was no immediate psychological relief, but rather a pervasive anxiety over how to tell spouses, future spouses, family, friends and co-workers that they had lied to them.
Telling Harris and his own family the truth, Eades said, “felt like you dropped your pants, like you’re naked.” His younger sister had been so proud of his cover job that she had broadcast it to all her friends. When he told her it was a cover, he said, “she was stunned and confused.” He is now working as a lawyer.
Kathie Ksen, who worked undercover for 25 years as a support staff member for CIA stations around the world, retired in April 2001. She still has not told her mother she was a spy.
“She might say, how could you have lied to me all these years?” Ksen said. “There are people in your life who you really wish you could tell, but you won’t, because there’s an underlying fear they won’t understand. . . .
“You can leave the agency, but you can never quit,” she added. “You don’t know what that means when you’re 21,” which is how old Ksen was when she joined the CIA.
Hours before she agreed to be interviewed, Ksen and a friend were having a cup of coffee when he brought up the Plame case and the fact that Ksen had worked for the CIA. “He told me he found it difficult to be with me because I had been at the agency. . . . He told me it was unsettling” to know she had been trained to constantly assess people and to exploit them for information.
‘NON-OFFICIAL COVER’
About 20 percent of the CIA’s workforce is undercover and working for the agency’s Directorate of Operations, whose mission is to steal intelligence from foreign countries or individuals and to carry out covert actions to influence or overthrow foreign governments or organizations.
The vast majority of those operatives work under “official cover,” meaning they are given cover jobs as U.S. government officials, usually as State or Defense department employees. If caught or accused of spying by a foreign government, they would be accorded government status and protection.
A small but growing number of spies are trained to live under “non-official cover,” or NOC, status. NOCs, as they are called, typically work in businesses or nongovernmental organizations overseas or in U.S.-based front companies or legitimate private companies that require frequent travel abroad. If caught or accused of spying, they would not be accorded diplomatic status or rights.
In either case, an operative’s cover is created, and rolled back, by the CIA’s cover staff.
Most undercover operatives use their real names. The cover staff creates fictitious paychecks and bank accounts, driver’s licenses, parking permits, and building passes — “proof” that the person works somewhere other than the CIA.
For NOCs working in front companies, it creates fake payroll checks, tax forms, incorporation papers, business cards, suppliers, phone lines, employees and whatever else it takes to thwart discovery — including bankruptcy papers or closing notices when it is time to fold up an operation. “Unless someone deliberately burns them, you’ll never find them,” said Roy Krieger, a lawyer who represents CIA employees on work-related issues.
In recent years, the agency has rolled back most employees’ cover when they leave the agency. The number who join the overt world each year is unknown.
COLD-WAR CHANGES
During the Cold War, the CIA kept most retired employees undercover out of fear they would be prey for Soviet and East Bloc counterintelligence services. It was an expensive practice. Maintaining a cover means the false phone line has to work and someone has to be there to answer it. If the cover involved a front company, business records and even fake employees might have to be kept on board to thwart detection.
Even after the Cold War ended, some retired NOCs were required to live undercover until they died. At the same time, during the 1990s, the budget for the Directorate of Operations shrank by 20 percent, according to officials familiar with the CIA’s classified budget. Partly with the budget in mind, and partly because many former “target” countries were no longer hostile to the United States, CIA officials decided to roll back nearly all retiring operatives’ cover. Even some NOCs have their cover rolled back these days.
Ksen remembers the change. “Some people feared the change in policy because, my God, how do you live if your whole life has been a lie?” she said. “Some people I know have had an extremely difficult time readjusting to the overt world.”
The first day Ksen’s cover was rolled back, someone asked her where she worked, “and it just wouldn’t come out,” she said. “I couldn’t say it, and when I did I was looking over my shoulder.” Still, there were immediate advantages: She could finally give her agency phone number to her home repairman. Before, she always had to say she would call him.
THE PLAME CASE
Richard Brennan, who worked undercover for 25 years and now teaches high school history in the Washington area, had a hard time writing it down on his mortgage application. “I found it hard to put anything down on paper,” he said.
Telling his children took his emotional vulnerability to a whole different level. His oldest, then 16, said “she didn’t think I was that kind of person.” Now, with the CIA’s higher public standing after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, “they are more intrigued with me.”
Plame’s case is different in that she was burned — not once, but twice. The first time was by Aldrich H. Ames, the CIA turncoat who is believed to have given the Russians the name of every covert operative in the Soviet/East European Division over 10 years beginning around 1985. Not knowing exactly whom he had outed, the CIA recalled hundreds of operatives, including Plame, for their safety. Still, her undercover status remained intact until July, when syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak identified her by name as a CIA “operative” in a column about her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whom the CIA had sent to Niger to check on allegations that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium oxide there.
It is difficult to assess the damage to national security from the Plame case without knowing her specific assignments. Between July and October, when the story of Plame’s outing took on a much higher profile, the CIA was not officially assessing the damage from Novak’s column. Nor was the agency taking, or recommending that Plame take, any particular security precautions.
The CIA has still not launched a damage assessment, but in matters that involve law enforcement, such as the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into who leaked Plame’s name and occupation to Novak, the CIA typically waits until the case is wrapped up so that nothing it unearths is subject to discovery in court.
COCKTAIL-PARTY COMRADES
For officers posted in the Washington area, “cover becomes quite fragile,” one retired senior CIA officer said. There are social circles — neighborhoods, soccer leagues, cocktail parties — filled with overt and covert CIA employees and Defense and State department officials.
Some former spies spoke of how they tried to halt lines of questioning about their work. “I tried to be as boring as possible,” Brennan said. Others complained that their diplomatic colleagues too often engaged in games of “spot the spook,” and even playfully outed them at cocktail parties. The spies considered it dangerous and irresponsible; the trick, former operatives said, was never to shirk from questions, but to turn them back on the questioner.
“A lot of people handle cover better than others,” the retired senior CIA official said. “A few people I replaced walked around blabbing it. I had a hard time revealing my cover even afterwards, when I was allowed to.”
‘DO YOU TRUST ME?’
So it was with Eades when he told his girlfriend the truth about his past. After staring at him for several awkward seconds, Harris nodded and said, “Oh. Okay.”
To herself, she said: Is he nuts? Or just even more intriguing than I thought?
They spent a quiet day at Eades’s apartment. She asked him no questions, she said, and just took time to absorb what she had heard. He waited anxiously to see whether their relationship would survive the revelation.
Several days later, Eades brought the subject up again. “Is everything okay?” he asked. “Everything all right?” He offered a little more, just the bare bones, which is all the CIA authorizes its former spies to divulge.
He had spent more than a decade traveling around the world with military intelligence. His subsequent CIA assignments were in Europe. He also worked at the agency’s Counterterrorist Center.
“She was still very cool about it,” Eades said. Later came questions about trust and lying.
“One of the things he asked me was, do you trust me?” recalled Harris. “My gut feeling was yes, I trusted him.”
“It took me a while to get used to the idea, though,” she said. But she did.
For Halloween, she taped a small ghost — a “spook” — on the front door as an inside joke. And later this year, Eades and Harris are going to get married.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Theres a short video on the link.
http://a799.g.akamai.net/3/799/388/c7f446b6b789ba/www.msnbc.com/news/2069299.jpg
Chris Eades, an undercover CIA official who has his cover rolled back, at home with his fiancee Michele Harris.
By Dana Priest
THE WASHINGTON POST
Nov. 14 — During the first month they dated, Chris Eades told Michele Harris that he was a U.S. government official based in Europe. During the second month they fell in love, and by then Eades was free, for the first time in 22 years, to say what he had really done for a living.
ON A RAINY AFTERNOON in March, as they were about to get in the car to visit the International Spy Museum downtown, Eades asked Harris to sit down for a minute. Downplay it, he told himself. Don’t be dramatic.
“I have to tell you, the explanation I gave you before about my work was not true,” he said. “I was under an obligation to lie. I worked for the CIA. I don’t anymore.”
Harris, a normally talkative person, did not speak. Her eyes widened as she leaned away from him and just stared.
They never made it to the spy museum that afternoon.
Eades was free to divulge his CIA work because the agency had agreed to “roll back” his cover when he resigned in March. His CIA colleague Valerie Plame had no such agreement in July, when a newspaper columnist with a well-placed administration source revealed that she works for the agency. Since then, Plame has declined to comment on the matter, but her case has lifted a curtain on living the covert life, which is at the heart of U.S. intelligence-gathering.
The CIA declined to comment for this article, but interviews with Eades, other former spies and intelligence experts provided a further glimpse into spy life — how spies gain cover, what they do to maintain it, and how hard it is to come out, even when their departure is planned and voluntary.
‘... LIKE YOU’RE NAKED’
Eades and other former CIA officers said there was no immediate psychological relief, but rather a pervasive anxiety over how to tell spouses, future spouses, family, friends and co-workers that they had lied to them.
Telling Harris and his own family the truth, Eades said, “felt like you dropped your pants, like you’re naked.” His younger sister had been so proud of his cover job that she had broadcast it to all her friends. When he told her it was a cover, he said, “she was stunned and confused.” He is now working as a lawyer.
Kathie Ksen, who worked undercover for 25 years as a support staff member for CIA stations around the world, retired in April 2001. She still has not told her mother she was a spy.
“She might say, how could you have lied to me all these years?” Ksen said. “There are people in your life who you really wish you could tell, but you won’t, because there’s an underlying fear they won’t understand. . . .
“You can leave the agency, but you can never quit,” she added. “You don’t know what that means when you’re 21,” which is how old Ksen was when she joined the CIA.
Hours before she agreed to be interviewed, Ksen and a friend were having a cup of coffee when he brought up the Plame case and the fact that Ksen had worked for the CIA. “He told me he found it difficult to be with me because I had been at the agency. . . . He told me it was unsettling” to know she had been trained to constantly assess people and to exploit them for information.
‘NON-OFFICIAL COVER’
About 20 percent of the CIA’s workforce is undercover and working for the agency’s Directorate of Operations, whose mission is to steal intelligence from foreign countries or individuals and to carry out covert actions to influence or overthrow foreign governments or organizations.
The vast majority of those operatives work under “official cover,” meaning they are given cover jobs as U.S. government officials, usually as State or Defense department employees. If caught or accused of spying by a foreign government, they would be accorded government status and protection.
A small but growing number of spies are trained to live under “non-official cover,” or NOC, status. NOCs, as they are called, typically work in businesses or nongovernmental organizations overseas or in U.S.-based front companies or legitimate private companies that require frequent travel abroad. If caught or accused of spying, they would not be accorded diplomatic status or rights.
In either case, an operative’s cover is created, and rolled back, by the CIA’s cover staff.
Most undercover operatives use their real names. The cover staff creates fictitious paychecks and bank accounts, driver’s licenses, parking permits, and building passes — “proof” that the person works somewhere other than the CIA.
For NOCs working in front companies, it creates fake payroll checks, tax forms, incorporation papers, business cards, suppliers, phone lines, employees and whatever else it takes to thwart discovery — including bankruptcy papers or closing notices when it is time to fold up an operation. “Unless someone deliberately burns them, you’ll never find them,” said Roy Krieger, a lawyer who represents CIA employees on work-related issues.
In recent years, the agency has rolled back most employees’ cover when they leave the agency. The number who join the overt world each year is unknown.
COLD-WAR CHANGES
During the Cold War, the CIA kept most retired employees undercover out of fear they would be prey for Soviet and East Bloc counterintelligence services. It was an expensive practice. Maintaining a cover means the false phone line has to work and someone has to be there to answer it. If the cover involved a front company, business records and even fake employees might have to be kept on board to thwart detection.
Even after the Cold War ended, some retired NOCs were required to live undercover until they died. At the same time, during the 1990s, the budget for the Directorate of Operations shrank by 20 percent, according to officials familiar with the CIA’s classified budget. Partly with the budget in mind, and partly because many former “target” countries were no longer hostile to the United States, CIA officials decided to roll back nearly all retiring operatives’ cover. Even some NOCs have their cover rolled back these days.
Ksen remembers the change. “Some people feared the change in policy because, my God, how do you live if your whole life has been a lie?” she said. “Some people I know have had an extremely difficult time readjusting to the overt world.”
The first day Ksen’s cover was rolled back, someone asked her where she worked, “and it just wouldn’t come out,” she said. “I couldn’t say it, and when I did I was looking over my shoulder.” Still, there were immediate advantages: She could finally give her agency phone number to her home repairman. Before, she always had to say she would call him.
THE PLAME CASE
Richard Brennan, who worked undercover for 25 years and now teaches high school history in the Washington area, had a hard time writing it down on his mortgage application. “I found it hard to put anything down on paper,” he said.
Telling his children took his emotional vulnerability to a whole different level. His oldest, then 16, said “she didn’t think I was that kind of person.” Now, with the CIA’s higher public standing after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, “they are more intrigued with me.”
Plame’s case is different in that she was burned — not once, but twice. The first time was by Aldrich H. Ames, the CIA turncoat who is believed to have given the Russians the name of every covert operative in the Soviet/East European Division over 10 years beginning around 1985. Not knowing exactly whom he had outed, the CIA recalled hundreds of operatives, including Plame, for their safety. Still, her undercover status remained intact until July, when syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak identified her by name as a CIA “operative” in a column about her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whom the CIA had sent to Niger to check on allegations that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium oxide there.
It is difficult to assess the damage to national security from the Plame case without knowing her specific assignments. Between July and October, when the story of Plame’s outing took on a much higher profile, the CIA was not officially assessing the damage from Novak’s column. Nor was the agency taking, or recommending that Plame take, any particular security precautions.
The CIA has still not launched a damage assessment, but in matters that involve law enforcement, such as the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into who leaked Plame’s name and occupation to Novak, the CIA typically waits until the case is wrapped up so that nothing it unearths is subject to discovery in court.
COCKTAIL-PARTY COMRADES
For officers posted in the Washington area, “cover becomes quite fragile,” one retired senior CIA officer said. There are social circles — neighborhoods, soccer leagues, cocktail parties — filled with overt and covert CIA employees and Defense and State department officials.
Some former spies spoke of how they tried to halt lines of questioning about their work. “I tried to be as boring as possible,” Brennan said. Others complained that their diplomatic colleagues too often engaged in games of “spot the spook,” and even playfully outed them at cocktail parties. The spies considered it dangerous and irresponsible; the trick, former operatives said, was never to shirk from questions, but to turn them back on the questioner.
“A lot of people handle cover better than others,” the retired senior CIA official said. “A few people I replaced walked around blabbing it. I had a hard time revealing my cover even afterwards, when I was allowed to.”
‘DO YOU TRUST ME?’
So it was with Eades when he told his girlfriend the truth about his past. After staring at him for several awkward seconds, Harris nodded and said, “Oh. Okay.”
To herself, she said: Is he nuts? Or just even more intriguing than I thought?
They spent a quiet day at Eades’s apartment. She asked him no questions, she said, and just took time to absorb what she had heard. He waited anxiously to see whether their relationship would survive the revelation.
Several days later, Eades brought the subject up again. “Is everything okay?” he asked. “Everything all right?” He offered a little more, just the bare bones, which is all the CIA authorizes its former spies to divulge.
He had spent more than a decade traveling around the world with military intelligence. His subsequent CIA assignments were in Europe. He also worked at the agency’s Counterterrorist Center.
“She was still very cool about it,” Eades said. Later came questions about trust and lying.
“One of the things he asked me was, do you trust me?” recalled Harris. “My gut feeling was yes, I trusted him.”
“It took me a while to get used to the idea, though,” she said. But she did.
For Halloween, she taped a small ghost — a “spook” — on the front door as an inside joke. And later this year, Eades and Harris are going to get married.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company