Gathering this information and compiling reports was useful in two ways. First, it enabled me to move around and use my French, because official liaison contacts were part of the effort. Second, it was clearly a learning process. In my discussions with French contacts and by reading the French press I gained a better understanding of the country and its culture.
All of it established a direction for my future. I became interested in the craft of intelligence and in living abroad. Both would become integral parts of my 35-year career in the CIA.
Before I left for Washington my parents told me they felt uneasy about the choice I had made. Dad asked me if I really knew anything about the agency. I told him I had read a lot about it and learned a little more during my time in France. That didn’t seem to satisfy him, but he eventually dropped the subject and apparently accepted my decision.
In any event I was elated as I headed east in the TR3. I loved that little car, particularly then. It fit my mood. My prospects were looking good, I had been accepted into the program I wanted, and I eagerly anticipated training for the start of my professional life.
Back in D.C., I stopped by the JOT office. The receptionist gave me some leads on housing, and soon I settled into an old place along MacArthur Boulevard across from the reservoir in the western part of the city. I lived with five other men, three of whom were also JOTs. Of the two others, one served in the Air Force at the Pentagon and the other already worked as an analyst in the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence. That made many things easier. We often commuted together in town and subsequently to the Farm, the CIA’s training facility in southeast Virginia. With so many things in common we bonded easily, and our friendships have lasted through the decades.
We spent the first six weeks in one of the “temps,” rows of low office buildings that had been erected in haste during World War I to house the War Department—the Pentagon’s precursor—and weren’t removed until the 1970s. Located along Constitution Avenue near the Lincoln Memorial and its reflecting pool, the uniformly dingy buildings ruined the otherwise beautiful setting.
My fellow JOTs impressed me. Twenty-two young men and three young women—plus me—we represented the 10 percent of agency applicants who had achieved the highest standards. Almost all had served in the military, though at the time that distinction was fairly common because of the draft. Many had earned graduate degrees and the group had pursued a broad range of college majors.
Except for four of us from the Midwest and a couple from the West Coast, all were graduates of eastern schools. I felt lucky to be among them. My own service background, plus my bachelor’s degree from Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois, had landed me a spot I never could have imagined while in school.
Our instructors began by giving us the history of World War II intelligence. Then they moved on to the origins of the agency and its four directorates: Plans, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Administration. We all were destined for Plans, which eventually became Operations and then the National Clandestine Service.
Next they presented a detailed look at the intelligence community and how it served policymakers. A review of postwar events followed, including the beginnings of the Cold War, which would continue to dominate the world scene for three more decades. The confrontation between the Free World, led by the United States, and the communist-inspired totalitarianism practiced by the Soviet Union, China and their satellites, would drive all of our efforts.
This wasn’t the first time I had been presented with a clear picture of the communist world. Back in France at Bussac, I had met Tim Lawson, a civilian who periodically sold cars on the base. I bought the VW convertible from him.
Tim was the kind of guy you instinctively didn’t trust too much. At the time I had no doubt he was making money in other ways—some probably illegal. He had served in the Army and was stationed at Bussac from 1955 until 1957, the year before I arrived. He decided to stay in France after his discharge and found the car-sales job after bumming around a bit. He was living with a French woman, appeared to have lots of local friends, and knew quite a bit about happenings in the little towns around the base. I often had trouble sorting out his rumors from facts, but I joined Tim for a cup of coffee once in a while.
I can’t remember how we had raised the subject, but on one such occasion he suddenly launched into a long tirade about the 1956 Hungarian uprising. I was in college at the time, and though I had heard about it from news reports I was far from well-versed.
Tim told me that shortly after the uprising began, he and some of the other soldiers in the motor pool—where he was serving as a truck driver—heard via shortwave radio the Hungarian freedom fighters calling for help from the United States and Western Europe. Send them weapons and they would do the rest, they said. As the situation grew worse and Soviet intervention seemed imminent, the freedom fighters continued to plead for assistance from the West.
Tim said he became so agitated and frustrated that he actually had considered stealing a motor-pool truck and driving it to Hungary to fight at the side of the rebels. He insisted that others, including some young Frenchmen he knew, would have gone with him. But in the end no one went. The Russians invaded and crushed the uprising, and the freedom-fighter broadcasts stopped abruptly.
What struck me at the time was Tim’s outrage, which seemed entirely heartfelt. Although he had no understanding of the international politics involved—nor did I—he still felt angry, three years later, at the Western governments for not responding.
Tim’s anger had sprung from several questions—obvious ones:
Why would President Eisenhower, a military man, refuse to act?
Why would he allow the freedom fighters to be slaughtered, particularly because he knew the Europeans would follow his lead if he decided to counter the crackdown?
And how could the Russians be so brazen? How could they openly smash a rebellion in another country when the Hungarian people clearly opposed their government?
I was no expert, but given the Cold War and the geopolitical situation that prevailed, the answers seemed self-evident. The Reds had shown no restraint in brutalizing their own people, so they couldn’t be expected to do so in Hungary. And the West, still war-weary in the mid-1950s, had forsaken a military response, which might have escalated into another global conflict.
Tim would have none of that, which was why he said he still felt pained that the Free World had allowed Soviet tanks to shred the Hungarian revolt.
Listening to Tim’s rants forced me to think, more than I ever had before, about the Cold War, communism and the international situation in general. Sure, I had grown up with a sense of patriotism and a belief that the American position was right—whatever it was. Communism was bad, the Soviets were bad, and what happened in Hungary was just awful. It reinforced my negative feelings about communism and the efforts by its practitioners to spread their ideology so forcibly around the world.
Though I didn’t realize it then, that conversation laid the groundwork for my decision to spend a career in intelligence, working to counter the communist ideology. It had made me think differently about why I was in Europe and why a U.S. base like Bussac was essential. If the Russians ever did attack Western Europe we would need every military asset we had there.
We attended several weeks of classes on international communism, presented from scholarly and historical perspectives as well as from intelligence-gathering and operational viewpoints. I had studied communist and socialist economics in college but I knew little about the politics.
Learning about the organization and inner workings of a communist cell gave us much food for thought, and we discussed it at length during breaks. Communism was a lousy system that needed to be resisted. Despite our varied backgrounds we agreed that communism had no merits.
We also began learning how to write intelligence reports and how to master the prevailing style. It was a little like newspaper writing: