Free See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism by Robert Baer

into our heads, was that you had to be absolutely sure you knew your target’s vulnerabilities before pitching him. Waving a . hundred-dollar bill in front of someone who didn’t care about money just got you into trouble.
    A couple of classes after mine, the students at the Farm learned firsthand about the tragic consequences of a pitch gone bad. The story began in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a Soviet diplomat whom a case officer wanted to recruit. When it came time for the case officer to leave at the end of his tour, he still hadn’t pinpointed a vulnerability to hang his pitch on. Instead, he lobbed the diplomat a softball about the need for the Soviet Union and the US to get to know each other better. When the diplomat agreed, the case officer proposed introducing him to his replacement so they could ‘exchange views.’
    Too bad that wasn’t the way the case officer described it in his report. He claimed he had recruited the Soviet, and his replacement, Bob XXXXXXX, took him at his word. At his first solo meeting with the Soviet in a restaurant, Bob asked him for classified documents. The Soviet turned red, slammed his fist on the table, and started shouting. No one in the restaurant misunderstood what was going on. The incident turned into such a cause celebre in Kabul that Bob was sent home to the Farm to teach. Deciding his career was over, and no doubt suffering from other problems, Bob shot himself on Christmas morning on the front porch of his house with his wife and children inside.
    Another thing the DO pounded into our heads from day one: There’s nothing more important than your agent’s life. Just as a Secret Service officer is expected to take a bullet for the president, so case officers were to do anything to protect an agent’s life - lie, cheat, steal, or worse. Very few people outside the business understand the nature of the bonds between a case officer and an agent, but to look at the scenario in cold institutional terms, if the word got out that the DO didn’t protect its agents, no one would ever spy for the CIA again.
    Sometimes a mole would betray agents and blow entire networks, but more often, agents were lost when they were spotted meeting their case officers. Accordingly, the DO spent millions of dollars training its officers to spot and beat surveillance. During our stay at the Farm, we spent almost a third of our time running foot and vehicular surveillance runs, mostly in Richmond, Virginia. Sometimes we’d follow the instructors; sometimes they’d follow us; sometimes the students would follow one another. It was all an elaborate cat-and-mouse game, and it was only a warm-up for the main event - the internal operations course, held in Washington, DC.
    The course was designed for case officers going to places like Moscow and Peking. The idea was to fire them in the crucible, replicating as nearly as possible what it was like to work against a hostile, determined, two-to-three-hundred-man surveillance team. I’ll call the instructor Martha. She was a pert blonde, about thirty years old, who had just been thrown out of the Soviet Union after she was caught meeting an agent in Moscow as part of a KGB setup. Martha had been picked to instruct the internal ops course because she’d proven herself on the streets and held up to a nasty KGB interrogation. Beating surveillance wasn’t something you learned in a lecture or by reading a book.
    On the first day she dismissed us early. ‘Go home, pay your bills, and do anything else you need to clear up whatever it is you do in your life,’ she said ‘because the next six weeks, you’re mine. ‘Since I wasn’t married or otherwise attached it didn’t take me long.
    Martha meant it. During those six weeks, for sixteen hours a day, we were never off the streets of Washington. We put down dead drops (packages for agents), chalk marks on the walls (these were signals to agents), and took long counter surveillance routes - they turned into a