The Reluctant Spy Read online

  By the time I met him in the late 1990s, Gust was a so-called Greenbadger—a retired officer still working for the agency under contract. He worked with me in the Counterterrorist Center as I began reading the Greece files, to which he had made many contributions, and his detailed, intimate knowledge of the country’s terrorist groups helped inform my thinking. Once I was actually on assignment in Greece, we kept in regular touch; even years removed, Gust provided valuable insights, guidance, and even the names of people worth contacting. He was an abrasive guy, who could swear with the best of them and who had a difficult personal life. He had grown up in Aliquippa, a tough steel town only thirty miles from my home in New Castle, but our connection went beyond geography and a common Greek heritage. To me, Gust was a mentor—almost a second father—who helped explain a country to which I was tied by ancestry and emotion, and which had fascinated me since long before I had opened the first agency file.

  Growing up, how could I not be hooked on Greece? My immigrant grandfather and grandmother came to visit every Thursday, and our family would reciprocate at least once every weekend. My grandparents were rarely without small gifts or trinkets, sometimes books, almost always having some association with the land of their birth. I was nine or ten years old when my grandfather gave me a book on Alexander the Great—the greatest Greek of them all, the old man said. Of course, I read it from cover to cover.

  This was the time of the junta, and members of the Kiriakou extended family were all over the place politically. My grandmother, who read prolifically, was quite conservative, but other relatives were evenly split between conservatives and Socialists; there was even one Communist. Then, in mid-November 1973, when I was nine years old, a group of leftists protesting the junta took over the student center at the Athens Polytechnic Institute in the central part of the city. They were unarmed and demonstrating peacefully, but the colonels were having none of it; early on the morning of November 17, they sent tanks to the campus, where they opened fire on the student center, killing several dozen and wounding as many as five hundred students.

  The junta had come to power in reaction to leftist political agitation that included the Socialists, a real and active Communist movement, and a near-paralysis in government. The Greeks accepted the junta partly because the colonels had the guns and partly because the military promised, in effect, to make the trains run on time. But the heavy-handed, unnecessary use of force at the student center inspired a national outcry. By the summer of 1974, the junta had collapsed, giving way to a democracy under former premier Constantine Karamanlis, who had lived in exile in Paris for more than a decade.

  Democracy has prevailed ever since, but terrorism never went away. Across Europe, most of the radical groups of the sixties, seventies, and eighties—the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, Action Directe in France—had either disbanded or were brought to heel by law enforcement. The Irish Republican Army and ETA, in the Basque country between Spain and France, would survive into the nineties, only to diminish in influence at the dawn of a new millennium.

  Greece was different. Maybe it’s a part of ancestral DNA, something having to do with a rich heritage as the cradle of European civilization, but Greeks tend to hold grudges. Two groups, ELA (for Popular Revolutionary Struggle) and 17 November, named for the day of the 1973 assault on the student center, found fresh targets for their anger starting in the mid-1970s. Stocked with lefties who had fled or were exiled during the junta years, these violent fringe groups included among their imagined enemies the European Community (later to become the European Union), NATO, almost anything American, and almost everything capitalist. Bombs were set off, shots were fired, people were killed.

  For Americans and especially for Greek Americans, it became personal on December 23, 1975. Richard Welch, the CIA’s senior officer in Greece, had attended a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. He and his wife and driver had returned to his home in northern Athens. These were the days before electronic gates, so the driver pulled up and got out to open up. Four people—three men and a woman—were parked in a car directly across the street. Two masked men emerged from the backseat, and one of them shouted as they approached Welch’s vehicle: “Richard Welch, get out of the car.” Welch, who spoke excellent Greek, got out of the car with his wife. Their driver, meanwhile, had run for his life. One of the men said, “Richard Welch, you have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people and you have been sentenced to death.” With that, he shot Welch three times in the chest at point-blank range with a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun. As Welch’s wife screamed, the two men returned to their car, and their driver sped off.

  The CIA promised Welch’s widow it would do everything it could to find his killers. Meanwhile, more bombings, attacks, and other killings of Americans took place, among them navy captain George Tsantes, a U.S. defense attaché, in 1983; navy captain William Nordeen, another U.S. defense attaché, in 1988, and air force tech sergeant Ron Stewart in 1991. Everyone had a tough time tracking down the assassins, and there was widespread speculation that local law enforcement was complicit in the killings or at least tolerant of them. What’s more, the terrorists were using more than small weapons like the “Welch .45”—so memorialized because the gun that killed Welch in Athens had never been found and was used time and again in other assassinations.

  How the bad guys got their bigger guns amounts to a kind of comedy of terrors. Athens has a military museum right in the center of the city, an institution with a tank outside and a collection inside that would delight even the most knowledgeable armchair general. The collection includes swords and shields, battle-axes, longbows, catapults, and more. It also features an extensive array of sophisticated modern weapons—for example, rocket launchers and rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. Most of this stuff was displayed on the museum’s walls. There was only one problem: Apparently, it never occurred to anyone at the museum to deactivate these weapons.

  So there they hung, functional weapons just waiting for ammunition, until early one morning when members of 17 November descended on the museum just as it opened, tied up the security guards, and locked the door. Then they calmly and methodically removed all the live weapons from the walls, hustled them into a truck, and left without so much as a drachma for the contribution box. Next thing anybody knew, they had invaded a military depot in Larisa, a town about 150 miles north of Athens, tied up the privates and corporals on guard duty, and stolen all the rockets and grenades in sight. Later, they also attacked a police station, tied up the cops inside, and walked away with every gun and bullet in the place. When all this work was done, they were set for a couple of decades. Access to weapons would not be a problem for 17 November.

  All of this information was in the public record. The Greece files at the CIA contained much more detail, based on the work of clandestine operatives and agency analysts, including the use of Athens as a kind of branch office for certain Muslim and Arab terrorist groups. But those details cannot be revealed here. Bottom line: Greece was not a patty-cake assignment, not by a long shot.

  ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1998, I began the operations course at CIA training facilities in the mid-Atlantic states, including one facility widely known in press accounts as the Farm. Actually, I had been to this facility several times before for course work in writing analytical papers and learning leadership techniques. This time, I was there for weapons training, lessons in counterterrorist driving, a special operations course, and more, including instruction in a set of skills America’s enemies employed far too often—the fine art of acquiring and running foreign agents to work for your country or cause.

  The first day of weapons training was certainly an enlightening experience for me. I was in a group of twenty or twenty-five people, most of them ex-military, several from Special Forces units. Still, the head instructor was taking no chances. He asked two questions:

  “Anybody here not own a gun? Raise your hand.” My hand was the on
ly one airborne.

  “Anybody here not ever fire a weapon?” Again, one raised hand was conspicuously alone.

  “Oh, Jesus, okay, we’re going to start at the beginning.”

  Members in our group were trained in three weapons—two pistols and a shotgun. It turned out I tested at the top of the class with 100 percent on all three weapons. That was in marksmanship. But I also topped the class in the shooting gallery. This is the drill sometimes featured on television adventure shows and in the movies, where the shooter moves through a maze of fake buildings, and lifelike images of people pop up in a window or a doorway or around a corner—a woman holding a baby, for example—and the trainee has a split second to decide whether to fire.

  The special operations course taught skills that might have been second nature to guys who had hunted and fished and camped in their pre-CIA days. But I was a bookish type with a fondness for big cities, decent restaurants, and comfortable beds. I wasn’t accustomed to jumping out of a plane, parachuting to the ground, and living off the land for two or three days.

  My orders in one particular exercise were to catch, kill, and skin a rabbit, then manage on its cooked remains. Okay, I thought at the time, I can do this, but what’s the point? There can’t be a lot of demand for these talents in Athens or any of the other places in southern and eastern Europe where I was likely to work on special assignments. Similarly, the part about swimming through a snake-and leech-filled swamp: I wasn’t headed for the jungles of Southeast Asia, after all. I would emerge from a swamp, filthy and praying aloud for a hot shower, while most of my classmates seemed to enjoy this humbling experience. Still, I did well in this phase of training, just as I had with firearms.

  The world of weapons and special operations wasn’t something I had considered very seriously when I applied for transfer from the Directorate of Intelligence. No one deceived me or downplayed the abundant differences between a desk job at Langley as an analyst and fieldwork as a covert operator abroad. But the clandestine service was something of an abstract concept. I wanted this assignment because the political dynamics in the region seemed challenging. And, yes, I figured it was a way to satisfy my craving for adventure. That Greece, the land of my and my wife’s heritage, was included in the package made it especially appealing. Who knows, it might even strengthen my marriage. A couple of years of this special-assignment work would do nicely, I thought, and make me an even better analyst when I returned to headquarters.

  So I was taken by surprise when I not only excelled at the weaponry, the counterterrorist driving, and the other flashy stuff, but also kind of got into it, if not life in the swamps. The process of self-discovery never ceases to astonish.

  THE GUNS, hand-to-hand combat, and other physical and survival training tend to dominate depictions of this training program in press accounts, popular fiction, and even nonfiction books. By comparison, tradecraft—the techniques necessary to effectively serve as a clandestine operative—gets short shrift. But inadequate tradecraft skills can be every bit as costly in blood and treasure as the misuse or abuse of automatic weapons, which is why agency instructors forced me and other trainees to practice the best methods over and over and over again.

  A case officer’s success abroad depends upon his or her talent for recruiting agents. Officers must improvise, but they do so at their peril if they ignore the fundamental lessons taught at the so-called Farm. Chief among them is an asset-recruitment cycle of four steps: spot, assess, develop, and recruit. The best officers are always looking for someone who has access to information of interest and use to the U.S. government. Once the officer spots such a person, whether it’s at a cocktail party or a conference or a local gym, an assessment begins. What vulnerabilities does this person have? Does the person seem well disposed toward the United States? Does the person seem reliable? If the assessment suggests further movement, the officer initiates the development phase, establishing direct contact with the target and the start of a personal relationship. In the best of worlds, the relationship becomes a real, if not completely genuine, friendship. The case officer’s spouse may even become friendly with the target’s spouse as development unfolds. Finally, the case officer makes the pitch—the offer to work on behalf of the United States. If accepted, the target is recruited and enters the equivalent of a formal agreement, sometimes even including paperwork, with the U.S. government.

  As a general rule, it is probably unwise for a case officer to pitch a target if he or she isn’t nearly 100 percent certain the target will accept the offer. The chances of blowback if a target declines an offer are considerable. If the target is a citizen of the host government, for example, he or she could report the contact and the case officer could be expelled or even hurt or killed.

  After a few months of practice, we could almost do these drills in our sleep. We also spent many hours on agent-pickup routines. Among the most common: The agent waits in a doorway, between buildings or near but not on a corner; the case officer drives up, pauses only as long as it takes for the agent to get in the car, then drives off.

  Then there were the hundreds of hours spent practicing surveillance detection routes (SDRs), the elaborate driving routines before and after any operational act to determine whether a case officer was “red” or “black”—that is, under surveillance or free of it. The more sophisticated the trainees’ SDRs were, the more their instructors liked what they saw. It wasn’t a flair for intricacy or the dramatic that appealed to these experts; it was a demonstrated seriousness of purpose. On final-exam day in SDR training, one of the guys in my group never saw the five different surveillance cars on him. He had excelled at every other part of tradecraft training, but dragging surveillance to his final meeting with an agent was a sin cardinal enough to wash him out. By then, everyone knew that an error like that could cause the arrest or even the execution of an agent—someone who was already risking his life for the United States.

  5

  THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE Agency prides itself on training its people and preparing them for all sorts of contingencies, whether an employee works at headquarters as an analyst or works abroad as an undercover operative. In some situations I can discuss and others I cannot, that training and preparation paid off handsomely, but not without exacting a certain price.

  On January 6, 1999, almost nine years to the day after setting foot in CIA headquarters as an employee, I arrived in Athens with JoAnne and our two young sons, Chris and Constantine—Costa for short. Even though I was on a temporary assignment, I’d been told I could send the family along and even rent a house on a month-to-month basis, providing I could find one. I did.

  Athens was special: It was an ancestral magnet, tugging at my heart and soul, sometimes in ways that were barely comprehensible to me. It was a city of splendor and intrigue. And no small thing in my pantheon of interests, it had one of the greatest boneyards in the world.

  Let me explain. When I was ten years old, I read an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that said a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates 1927 team was buried in New Castle, my hometown. As any baseball junkie knows, 1927 was a memorable year. The Pirates won the National League pennant, only to lose four straight to the larger-than-life New York Yankees in the World Series. It was also the year Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs during the regular season, a record that stood for thirty-four years. The cemetery was only a half mile from our house. The idea of fame in this forbidding place grabbed my attention; I had to see exactly where this guy was buried. His grave, it turned out, was unremarkable—a normal headstone with a typical inscription. But the cemetery! The cemetery was like nothing I had ever seen. New Castle in the early twentieth century was a major tin-and steel-manufacturing town, and the barons and their families had built magnificent mausoleums to house their remains in this peaceful precinct of a bustling community. The stained glass, the architecture, all of it was pure beauty to my untutored eyes. I had discovered the man-made grandeur of death, yoked to the history of our co
untry, and I was enthralled. I needed to know and see more.

  My meanderings through cemeteries over the years turned obsessive, or certainly seemed so to my friends. In college, I spent hours and hours at Arlington National Cemetery, where military men and women, presidents and paupers, are buried. Abner Doubleday, the widely acknowledged inventor of baseball, is at Arlington. So is former heavyweight champ Joe Louis, but not without the intervention of President Ronald Reagan, who waived eligibility rules prohibiting the champ’s burial. I twice traveled to Richmond, Virginia, during college to visit the Hollywood Cemetery there. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and Jeb Stuart, one of his generals. U.S. presidents James Monroe and John Tyler. Founding Father John Randolph. They all came alive, in a sense, when I came face-to-face with their mortality.