Over the next few days, I’d grab an armful of files in the morning,
read them, take them back to the file cabinets, and get another batch
for the afternoon. I really could have just scanned them to get the information
I needed, but as I said, I liked reading them, and nobody
particularly cared, or even noticed, how much time I was taking with
the assignment.
Like all CIA employees in the Directorate of Operations (DO), I
had a Top Secret clearance, which meant that I was cleared to see almost
anything. Certain types of information required a special clearance — . But if you were working
on something where that clearance was required, your boss signed
a slip, you handed it in to Security, and a day later you had the clearance.
It wasn’t really a big deal.
There was the idea of "need to know," which meant that you
shouldn’t see, hear, or read about anything you didn’t need to know
about in order to do your job. But this was largely ignored. If you
were sitting with a friend from a different division at lunch, you’d tell
each other about the cases you were working on. You might not do it
at a table of five people, but if your boss knew you were talking to
other officers about your cases, he almost certainly wouldn’t care. He
did it, too. The environment was surprisingly open within the Directorate.
And in a sense, learning about a wide variety of cases would
help you understand your job better, so you could even make an argument
that you "sort of needed to know."
In any case, I had no real need to know about the details of these
cases I was reading. But I was cleared for them, and they were within
my division, and even my office, so I didn’t hide the fact that I was
reading them much more carefully than I needed to.
Each of the files contained the cable traffic . In a lot of the
cases, it was determined after a few encounters that the target wasn’t
susceptible to recruitment, or didn’t have access to useful, classified
information. These were the thin files. In other cases, there were multiple
meetings, and a relationship developed that often produced some
intelligence, but the case never turned into a full- blown recruitment.
These files were a little bit thicker. Finally, in some cases, an agent
was recruited and either run for a period of time or was still being
run. These files could be anywhere from to pages,
depending, presumably, on the Chief of Station (COS) and his attitude
about Headquarters. Some COSs saw Headquarters as troublesome,
bureaucratic, and meddlesome, and felt that only the broad
outlines of a case should be reported. Others obviously encouraged
their case officers (C/Os) to write in great detail about every aspect of
a case, either because it forced the C/Os to be clear and rigorous in
their thinking, or as a cover-your-ass maneuver in case something
went wrong.
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