Free Inside the CIA by Ronald Kessler

employees—in such cities as Tokyo and Rome. About 15 percent of the CIA’s employees are stationed overseas.
    Depending on their size, CIA stations may have a chief of support, a finance officer, a communications officer, a logistics officer, and a personnel officer. Large stations may have branches that focus on internal political affairs, Soviet matters, terrorism, narcotics, nuclear weapons, and liaison with local intelligence and internal-security services.
    Through liaison, the CIA obtains information on people of interest to the agency. In exchange, the CIA usually gives the host country information it wants—perhaps the location of a fugitive. Besides providing useful intelligence, the CIA may supply the host intelligence service with funds to help it combat a local communist or terrorist problem. But the CIA playsit both ways. The agency recruits members of the local intelligence service to find out what that country is trying to do to penetrate or thwart the CIA, and to obtain other information the local security services do not want to share with the CIA. Often, the CIA’s liaison with local services is a pretext to enable CIA officers to get close to individuals in the local services and recruit them. In a reversal of that, Ghana recruited Sharon M. Scranage, a CIA support employee, to find out what the agency was doing in that country.
    The primary role of the stations is to recruit agents to tell the CIA what the host government is doing and to report on the activities of diplomats from other countries—such as the Soviet Union or Communist China—that are of interest to the CIA. Depending on how sensitive he or she is, a CIA officer may choose to receive information from an agent over lunch or in microfilm left in dead drops in tree stumps or holes in telephone poles. To further protect the agent, a seemingly chance encounter known as a brush pass may be arranged. The agent passes documents or film to a CIA officer inside a briefcase or some other article as they pass each other. Coded transmissions by radio or by satellite are commonly used. Laser beams aimed at office buildings are used to carry messages as well. The only way a laser communication can be intercepted is if a receiver is placed in the path of the laser beam.
    Since most have official cover, CIA officers must perform their normal State Department or military duties on weekdays and then carry out CIA operations evenings and weekends.
    “If you wanted to know who was CIA, look at the embassy sign-in log on Sunday. With the possible exception of the ambassador, only CIA people showed up on Sunday,” Herbert F. Saunders, a former CIA officer, said.
    The CIA officers are paid through the State Department or military, with funds secretly provided by the CIA. If a letter is sent to an undercover officer at Langley, it is returned. Likewise, the CIA switchboard operator, if asked, would say there is no listing for the employee.
    A CIA officer may fill any State Department position overseas except that of ambassador or deputy chief of mission,the second-in-command at an embassy. Thus when former CIA director Richard Helms became ambassador to Iran, he could not serve as a CIA officer. In practice, the rank of counselor—used for higher-ranking diplomats who are often in charge of a section—is never used either.
    CIA officers recruit agents the same way salesmen or lawyers go looking for business or journalists go looking for sources. If an officer in Mexico City, for example, is interested in recruiting a military officer, he might ask for recommendations from the U.S. military attachés stationed at the embassy, attend functions and conferences where military personnel show up, go to bars where they might hang out, and take advantage of other opportunities to meet the sort of person he is after. If an officer is interested in recruiting diplomats, he might attend diplomatic functions or go to diplomatic clubs, many of which were started by the