The lectures covered the philosophical, ethical, psychological and academic aspects of every subject. But training was always hands-on. Practical exercises followed the lectures. They required us to perform, at least several times, everything they had taught us. To each class member they assigned a mentor, an experienced operations officer who monitored his or her charge’s progress, observing strengths and promptly addressing any weakness that surfaced. If a trainee’s skills fell short in any area, the mentor arranged remedial exercises.
The program’s standards were preset and high, and every trainee had to meet or exceed them. We regarded even the training sessions with utmost seriousness. We had to. Agents’ lives and diplomatic incidents detrimental to our country’s best interests were at stake.
This isn’t to say that our time at the Farm was devoid of lighter moments, at least for the single guys. On weekends the husbands usually returned home to D.C., but the rest of us sometimes sought companionship.
Once, four of us drove to the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, where we entered a girls’ dormitory and tried to ingratiate ourselves with the housemother. It wasn’t exactly our Bay of Pigs, but our invasion failed. She ejected us, and as we were leaving we heard one of the male students ask, “Who the hell were those guys?”
While we labored through the fall trying to master the principles of tradecraft, the agency changed leadership. A respectful seven months after the Cuban invasion disaster, Allen Dulles resigned. He had dutifully taken the rap. Following an intensive search to find “the right man,” President Kennedy named John McCone, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to succeed Dulles as DCI.
It was said that Kennedy had chosen McCone, a staunch Republican, to emphasize his conviction that CIA director was not a political position. Like Kennedy, McCone was a Roman Catholic and an intense cold warrior who regarded communism as evil.
When we heard about the switch, some lamented Dulles’s role as scapegoat, but the event minimally impacted our busy lives. Like frogs looking up from the bottom of a well, we had a limited view.
Our trainers staged the final three-day exercise in Baltimore. There we attempted to employ the full range of clandestine techniques we had learned. Acting as intelligence collectors we were pitted against FBI trainees in counterintelligence mode.
Stressful at times it was also fun and challenging, because it involved trying to evade and outwit our FBI counterparts. They were supposed to keep us under surveillance while we tried to meet with a designated contact.
Our collective inexperience showed. In my case, working with one colleague, we couldn’t quite shake the FBI guys entirely, and they couldn’t be discreet enough to avoid our detection. The exercise ended in a stalemate.
With one exception the entire class completed the course, our individual strengths and weaknesses duly recorded in our files. The exception was a trainee who dropped out shortly after we started. We learned that he had departed the agency to become an Episcopalian minister, a decision that puzzled the rest of us because of the vast differences between the two career paths.
Our joint training with the FBI had helped to underscore how important it would be for us to acquire sound tradecraft—something most of us would pursue in much greater detail in the field.
2. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
Southeastern Virginia 1962
My JOT training marked the first of two stints at the Farm. Before they sent us back to headquarters they also gave us a glimpse of covert and paramilitary operations and how those activities fit into the range of options the agency could provide the president.
The field intrigued me, especially the paramilitary aspects. Young and single, I thought it would be exciting. So when we received the opportunity to take an intensive, four-month course, including parachute training, I volunteered, as did eight others in my class.
The agency also offered us the chance, following our training, to volunteer for a six-month temporary duty—called a TDY—serving as paramilitary advisers in Laos. Four of us—André Le Gallo, Mike Deuel, Ralph McLean and I—accepted.
After a week’s leave over Christmas to visit my family, and several weeks at headquarters beginning to familiarize myself with our Laos efforts, I reported back to the Farm to begin paramilitary instruction in early February 1962.
The group included two of my MacArthur Boulevard housemates, and in preparation the three of us had been running each morning before work. It wasn’t much fun, but part of the incentive was the opportunity to visit a group of young women in a neighboring house. We had struck up a friendly relationship with them, something destined to go nowhere because of our impending departure. But no matter; for young men interest in a member of the opposite sex dies hard.
Each morning the women would invite us in for coffee after our run. We liked them, particularly the two who were really attractive, and they were a welcome sight, even at “oh dark hundred” on those January mornings.
The exchanges over coffee also served a purpose. They gave us an opportunity to live our cover assignments as Department of the Army civilians. It wasn’t easy, and we could tell they weren’t really buying our story.
The daily runs paid off in another way. They gave us a leg up in the PT we would be taking for the duration of the paramilitary course. Our instructor, Burt Courage, also lectured on other subjects.
A big, strong guy, Burt impressed us with his one-arm pull-ups and push-ups. We may have been in good shape, but he outclassed us. We liked and respected his quiet and unassuming manner. It helped get us through the strenuous calisthenics that always ended with a several-mile run.
Like Burt, all of our instructors were highly skilled. Each man had accumulated several years of military experience, and many had served the agency in the field. Each taught a specialty, the collective goal of which was to familiarize us with a wide range of military abilities we could use later in our careers.
Military officers controlled governments in many parts of the world. Or, they were deeply involved in politics. So learning military terms and concepts could be vital in helping to recruit these men as intelligence assets.
The training also helped prepare us for the paramilitary programs the agency was running in several countries, such as Laos, where qualified officers were needed. But the sessions were blunter than tradecraft; paramilitary operations are not an art.
Another important training component covered the use of weapons. Over the course of four months we used a wide range of firearms manufactured in the United States. We tried out rifles, pistols, machine guns, rocket launchers and mortars. We also examined and fired weapons made in Russia, China and Czechoslovakia.
I had won a Marksman medal in the Army with my Ml rifle. Even so, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with this block of instruction, because I never liked guns. But I tolerated it, because learning how to hold a weapon and fire it in training surely beats having to learn about it in the midst of a life-or-death situation—something I would discover later in Laos and the Congo.
We spent a lot of time studying small-unit tactics. Our instructors presented theory and described the actions of guerrilla fighters and revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung—as it was spelled using the Wade-Giles method at the time, instead of Mao Zedong, under the pinyin system followed today. We used standard U.S. tactics as our guide and spent many days in the woods and swamps on the base practicing what we had learned.
One simple but standard exercise involved following compass courses. The trainers would give us a list of moves—150 yards northwest, 60 yards south-southwest, 200 yards west, and so on—with the objective of reaching a designated target. To this day I question the value of what we derived, not from the efforts but from the idea of wading waist-deep through cold, muddy water in February and March.
When we inevitably complained the instructors’