Some of the nuances about writing, evaluating and disseminating reports we learned from someone who would later figure prominently in my life: Wallace R. Deuel. Wally had started his career in the late 1920s after graduating from the University of Illinois. He accepted a teaching post at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon. He met his wife Mary there as well.
Wally later joined the Chicago Daily News and worked as a foreign correspondent. The paper assigned him to Rome during the early and mid-1930s, and then to Berlin during the latter part of the decade. But he grew so intensely opposed to Hitler that he left Germany in 1939.
Based on his experiences Wally wrote a book titled People under Hitler, which he first published in 1942. He also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, our wartime intelligence agency and the CIA’s predecessor. He later helped to write a history of the organization. When the Cold War began he recognized the need to resist another totalitarian movement, so he joined the newly established CIA to help stop communism from taking over Europe.
Along with his impressive background Wally was an articulate and entertaining public speaker with a wry sense of humor. An expert on the subject—he had developed many of our rules for writing reports—he influenced some in the class to pursue careers as reports officers and analysts.
Wally’s son Mike was one of our classmates, so with his dad at the lectern we maintained our interest. I’m sure Mike was quite proud.
Wally also focused on what was called the requirements process and its impact on collecting information in the field, something we all would be doing someday.
Any part of the executive or legislative branch of the federal government may request information from the agency, and the agency is required to respond. Over the years the requirements process has been continually refined and restructured, but even back in the early 1960s many government entities were using it.
In theory, federal officials would pose their question in a neutral manner and the agency would respond objectively. In practice, some officials tended to structure their questions to elicit answers that supported their views.
On our end, the requirements staff passed along the requests to the appropriate people in the intelligence community and returned the answers to the requesters. Despite the obvious potential for politics it was a reasonable system that helped members of the federal government develop U.S. foreign policy.
On Sundays during those early weeks in Washington, groups of us, mostly the bachelors, would congregate on the National Mall or on the Ellipse, the large oval lawn just south of the White House grounds, to play touch football. Other young men would join us as well.
I mention this because I noticed a distinction in those games early on. Whenever we would choose sides, almost invariably the outcome would be an agency team versus a foreign-service team. Granted, we tended to choose our friends and fellow trainees, but there was more to it than that.
There seemed to be an intangible difference. We were all bright, well-educated, personable men, but our respective choices for career paths revealed contrasting viewpoints and approaches. Agency trainees, particularly those aiming for the Directorate of Plans, in general were more action oriented, while our foreign-service counterparts tended to be more reflective and analytical.
That distinction would mark all of us throughout our professional lives. In my experience, agency officers and foreign-service officers rarely saw eye to eye. Those differences spawned a mutual lack of trust and confidence that consistently marred our exchanges.
The conflict persisted all the way up the ladder. The two arms of the executive branch constantly competed for the president’s ear. Based on my encounters at those casual football games, each side suffered from a lack of real understanding of the other’s role. We were different kinds of people, something for which there is no easy solution.
Moreover, the problem wasn’t unique to us. Throughout my career, working with various allied services—particularly the French and the British—I noticed the same difficulty afflicting the bureaucracies.
In July 1961, we got to meet Allen Dulles, the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence. He enjoyed a solid reputation because of his war record with the OSS and his long history in the community. He had been DCI for eight years—longer than anyone else—and he was highly respected in Washington. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was President Eisenhower’s secretary of state. His welcoming remarks included telling us war stories and emphasizing the need for good intelligence during the Cold War.
Neither Dulles nor any of us mentioned the disaster the agency had suffered in the Bay of Pigs covert operation just three months earlier, back when I was savoring my acceptance as a JOT. The operation, conceived under the previous administration but approved by President John F. Kennedy, involved the invasion of southern Cuba at a location called Playa Girón, the Bay of Pigs. It failed and many men were killed, partly because Kennedy at the last minute had withheld air cover—another case of a U.S. president refusing to order the military to resist a communist takeover of a nation.
At the time our intelligence indicated a good chance of sparking a general uprising against Castro as soon as a beachhead was established. But the point was rendered moot by the unsuccessful invasion. To this day Kennedy’s hesitation remains a sore point among some agency veterans.
Speaking of whom, after about 20 minutes Dulles’s secretary entered the office and announced that the president wanted to see him at the White House. The message impressed us youngsters. That his secretary may have done the same thing each time a group of JOTs met him did not occur to us—and it probably wouldn’t have bothered us if true. I instantly liked Dulles and considered him sincere in his efforts to sustain a strong intelligence community and an active clandestine service.
I cannot say the same for some of my other twelve directors.
Six weeks later and the groundwork laid, the agency dispatched us to its training facility in southeast Virginia. The Farm, as it is known, is about a three-hour drive from Washington. The facility would become our home away from home until Christmas. Located on a former military base, the Farm boasted few amenities. We lived in Quonset huts, Spartan style, in rooms with shared lavatories and tabletop fans, but we stayed too busy to complain about accommodations that we used mostly for sleeping.
We dressed in military fatigues and combat boots and ate in a mess hall that served copious amounts of food. We had no complaints there, either. Each morning we walked a short distance from our quarters to a gym for physical training. Some took the PT in stride; others did not. I didn’t mind. Excluding my two years in France, I had always tried to stay in good physical condition. When time permitted some of us played basketball in the gym before dinner.
The PT and occasional basketball games constituted our only distractions. Security people patrolled the fenced perimeter, keeping unauthorized individuals away. We trained in isolation and purposefully so. The instructors expected us to concentrate on our training, which we did. As a result time passed swiftly. The range and depth of subjects we covered kept us busy up to 18 hours a day throughout our five-month stay.
We began learning the art of tradecraft, the methods employed to manage an intelligence operation. It is an art because of the nuances involved and it is not easy to learn. Some, lacking the required personality traits, can never master it. The rest of us, in our limited time at the Farm, received only an introduction. We needed actual experience to perfect the techniques needed to engage, say, a Swiss banker or a Jordanian camel driver, because in a given situation both can provide vital information.
Eventually the training, new and different from anything we had experienced, took on a life of its own. The people running the Farm allotted blocks of time to cover specific subjects, and we plowed through each one: agent recruiting, agent handling, clandestine communications, surveillance and countersurveillance, report writing (good writers, we continued to learn, enjoyed a distinct advantage), cover, security, liaison operations, covert operations, counterintelligence, debriefing and eliciting, and the art—it