THE
CRAFT
WE
CHOSE
My Life
in the CIA
Richard L. Holm
Mountain Lake Press
Mountain Lake Park, Maryland
The Craft We Chose: My Life in the CIA
Copyright © 2011 Richard L. Holm
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by
Mountain Lake Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-9814-773-8-1
Cover design by Michael Hentges
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
To Judy, my inspiration
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In this text I have identified some people only by their first names or sometimes with just an initial for their surnames. For others I’ve changed their true names. In these cases I did so to preserve their privacy or security.
I submitted the draft manuscript of this book to the agency’s Publications Review Board. I freely accept this requirement, including the disclaimer displayed below. The board functions solely to identify any information that might remain classified. Otherwise it cannot censor or alter the text in any way.
This is my story—my life in the CIA.
Richard L. Holm
Virginia, May 2011
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the CIA or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or Agency endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
FOREWORD
April 20, 2011
You can learn a lot about a person when you become the instrument of their pain. That’s how it began with me and Richard L. Holm.
I met Dick when I was a U.S. Army physician at the Burn Center of Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. He had just been brought there in an aircraft showing not a single marking of any kind. My superiors informed me that he was a “missionary” who had suffered extensive burns in Africa.
His first words to me were, “I got out of there,” spoken in a very weak voice. And then, “I have a briefcase, please take custody of it.”
Custody? What the hell could be in it?
“Someone will ask you for it,” he said next. “Give it to them if they show you proper identification.”
I wondered what kind of church asks for identification. But the answer would have to wait; I had a job to do.
I spent that night and at least another day with Dick—I really don’t recall how long. I reversed his dehydration and administered nutrition intravenously, and I balanced the two. I also began cleaning his wounds and talked with him during the brief periods when he was awake. Our friendship started then. We discovered our mutual passion for sports, particularly basketball. We found we had similar senses of humor and likeminded political views.
But no matter how friendly you become with a patient, no matter how compassionate a physician you may be, you cannot avoid hurting a burn victim on a daily basis. Most often it’s when you’re cutting away the dead skin and cleaning the wounds in “the tub”—as we refer to it. Most patients regard it, despite having substantial sedation, by various names that could be summarized as a brand of torture chamber.
Not so with Dick Holm. He was remarkably tough and used humor to cope. He dealt with pain by making jokes. And though he sometimes said things that hinted at who he really was, he never revealed then what he did for a living. But early on I had figured it out—and now, with this book, you can read about it.
Dick’s autobiography describes a man who served his country almost entirely in secret in many places in the world we will never go and perhaps we never heard of. It is Dick’s inside view of that life, that craft.
Though Dick keeps to himself much of what he accomplished—and much of it for security reasons we may never know—his story is filled with unexpected information. He helps you begin to understand the time and attention to detail required to train an agent in another country and be sure the information supplied by that agent is meaningful and reliable.
He shows you how, in the spy business, people are the currency; you must know and understand people because your job and your life depend on that judgment. He describes the deceptions and intrigue involved in uncovering a double agent as well as the cumbersome roadblocks of agency bureaucracy. He challenges today’s difficult political environment, which raises the possibility that if you’re wrong, or even perceived to be wrong, you can face prosecution.
This is not just a window into a life of secrets but a wide-open door. Employing the frankly spoken opinions that are his style, Dick reveals himself to be a dedicated, straightforward and ultimately honest man. That disarming honesty gives a unique but not always favorable view of the personalities he encountered over the years, from colleagues to guerrilla fighters and from politicians to diplomats—and even CIA directors.
But that’s only part of it. Dick had to deal with something even worse than his burns—his blindness. In the process of sustaining his injuries, Dick’s eyelids were singed shut and his eyes were so swollen we couldn’t open them. When we did we discovered that his left eye was damaged beyond repair. We had to remove it to prevent the damage from spreading to his right eye. We salvaged it, but it was injured as well, to the point that during his months in the Burn Center he never saw me.
A year later, Dick received a corneal transplant at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington. I had flown to D.C. around that time to visit a friend and attend a party. He was there, and for the first time we saw each other.
Now, after 45 years, the friendship remains. It expanded to his late wife Judy, one of the most amazing people I have ever known, and to his wonderful daughters.
Over the years I’ve read and heard a great deal of criticism of the CIA. If you agree with that criticism, perhaps Dick Holm’s disarmingly blunt description of his career, which spanned over three decades, will motivate you to reexamine your position. You might find reassurance that there are others like Dick Holm serving this country, people who are dedicated to protecting the United States and willing to face danger routinely as part of their job. We all owe a great debt to him, and to these men and women.
Dick writes convincingly about a host of other subjects, such as geopolitics, the Vietnam War, Bill Clinton’s shameful treatment of the clandestine service, the aftermath of 9/11, the operational compromise in Paris, and the distressing incompetence of a few of the CIA directors he served. But I’ll leave them for him to reveal and you to discover. Just be assured that within these pages there’s a comprehensive narrative about how the craft of intelligence has evolved over the past 50 years.
Oh, and that briefcase? Soon after Dick arrived at Brooke, a nice-looking