Shadow Warrior, My Life In The Cia---Part Iv
By Phil Tufano
Chapter One
I felt nothing as we drove through the cold early morning, through the thick mist that was so prevalent in the mornings in the Kalahari Desert and Sub-Saharan Africa. This place (I thought to myself) this place I had come to know so well, that I had come to love; it was nothing like the commercialized society I was from; the place I started hating, nothing like the US. This was the dawn of that realization that became the dichotomy of my life. Still, I had no regrets about what I had just done; the operation that I just completed; no feelings of guilt or remorse, nothing at all. It had become familiar by then, the feeling of emptiness. I told myself it was my job, it was the right thing.
I did love my country even though I had problems with the way America sometimes was as a society; the way we forced our borrowed culture onto other countries. I still felt the need to protect the country I had loved so much just two years earlier. “They deserved what they got;” I thought, they would have done it to me if they had known the truth about me.
I watched the sun rising over the horizon as we drove much too fast in the beat up brown Land Rover Defender that had seen better days, skirting the fringe of the Kalahari Desert, just outside of Serowe, Botswana. “Must you drive so damn fast? No one is behind us, I assure you, we are alone, we are in the desert; we would see another vehicle behind us miles away.” The driver didn’t respond, but he slowed down. It was just after 5 am and the air was still very cold. The desert is cold at night; it’s hard to believe this with temperatures during the days reaching over 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The landscape was studded every now and then with patches of green, but mostly it was a dull brown and grey with a striking blue sky overhead, there was a contrasting emptiness and beauty to the desert, I thought.
“Do you want a cigarette boss?” The driver asked me. He was known to me only as Dieter, he was an Afrikaner. Dieter’s accent was very heavy, he was a rugged looking Afrikaner with a fine head of greasy thick black hair. He was a big man, typical for an Afrikaner, a ‘Dutch Man;’ what Afrikaners were called, in a negative connotative way by English South Africans. The man was unshaven, had yellow teeth and dirty finger nails and he chain smoked and smelled of cigarettes. Dieter also talked way too much for his profession.
“No thanks,” I responded. I was preoccupied reading the newspaper headline about Nelson Mandela’s trip to the US to request a future aid package in the month old Business Day I found lying on the floor of the Defender. “Yes, you see, these Kaffirs are destroying South Africa. If Mandela becomes president, well, I will surely leave South Africa then. After all I have done for this bloody South Africa; in Angola and in the townships, to see a Kaffir as president would surly kill me,” Dieter said. “Just drive, you talk too much,” I replied.
As we arrived at the drop I quickly grabbed my gear from the back seat. As I left the vehicle my driver muttered “good luck, stay safe and tootsies my friend.” I said nothing. I watched the Land Rover speed off into the early morning haze. I thought, this man would never be able to accept or live with the changes in the government and the white way of life in South Africa in the coming months. I wondered how the dismantling of apartheid would ultimately play out on a continent that was too ingrained and familiar with colonial rule and the inevitable bloody price that would need to be paid for democracy. “It’s not my problem,” I whispered to myself. I have my mission objectives, I thought; as much as I love South Africa, I must do what I am ordered to do by my country’s government. I sat on the cold sandy ground wet with the morning’s mist and lit a cigarette as I waited for the Cessna 182 to pick me up at the edge of a small runway that had been constructed by Afrikaner smugglers in the 1930s to smuggle blood diamonds out of the Botswana diamond mines. Very few people knew about the runways existence, but the CIA often used it in the 1970’s to deliver assets and weapons and military trainers into Botswana destined for Angola.
I still had the Remington .45 caliber M1911 pistol I was issued for protection and told to discard before I got on the plane, but I was feeling uneasy in the empathy desert and so I decided to hold on to it until the plane landed. Operation code named ‘ATM’ would not be over for me until I was back safely in my house in North Cliff, a suburb of Johannesburg. I could see the Cessna making its final approach off in the distance and so I got myself together, wiped down the weapon, removed the clip and the round in the chamber and buried the M1911 in the sand and then headed toward the end of the runway. The pilot was a true professional, he was an English South African who I had met eighteen months earlier through skydiving and I would use him on some missions to transport me to Botswana. Evan never asked any question and as long as I paid him in cash dollars, he was willing to take me just about anywhere, often flying beneath the antiquated radar systems of some of the smaller African countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Evan barley said two words to me the entire flight which was just fine with me. I slept almost the entire trip back to Wonderboom Airport in Pretoria and I then retrieved my car and drove the hour or so back to Johannesburg.
Once I was back in Joburg I continued my life; my established routine of being an international business professor (my cover job) at the Technikon Witwatersrand in Auckland Park and running my operations in and around Joburg. My real job was as a Non Official Cover Agent for the CIA known as a NOC in the intelligence community. I had been in Africa several years by then and I was beginning to feel strongly that I belonged in South Africa, like I was more comfortable in a foreign society than with my own. Yet, part of me missed the United States after having been in South Africa for so long. I missed New England and even my home back in Brooklyn, NY. My thoughts often drifted back to those days in New England and Brooklyn during my years in South Africa---mostly because I felt more and more every day like I was losing my true identity, who I was as a person. I felt alone during the final months in South Africa as I sometimes had in New England as a graduate student in Boston during the long dark winters. But South Africa was my new world, it was beautiful and it was my departure from the place I sought to escape, my narrow minded Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY.
For me, growing up in Williamsburg Brooklyn, back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, in a tough Italian neighborhood was anything but beautiful. The one thing South Africa and my neighborhood in Brooklyn did have in common, though, was a hatred for blacks. I always wanted to escape from Brooklyn, I hated it. Even during college; I could never escape from my neighborhood of guys named Vinnie two chins, Frankie the WOP and Nino the killer, who was found at the ripe old age of twenty-four rolled up in a carpet near the East River in Greenpoint with a bullet hole in his head and over one-hundred cigarette burns to his body. This (according to word on the street) was payback for some of his business activities that may have crossed over into Mafia territory. This seemed almost normal to me; growing –up in a Mafia dominated neighborhood, but looking back, most of the guys I grew-up with were now gone---they were either dead or in prison. It was not all bad, though, I had a great family who pushed me to go to school and become something other than what I witnessed many of my friends becoming out on our street on a daily basis. So, South Africa, was a world away from where I grew-up, yet the similarities and the divisions between black and white and right and wrong were just as clear and just as distorted.
I missed my family and the familiar smell of my mother’s homemade pasta and of bread being baked in a brick oven at 4 a.m.; emanating from Rosalie’s Bakery down the street from our house. I tried very hard not to hold on to memories of people and places that were long gone and no longer relevant to my life, but still; they haunted my mind like a ghost.
Chapter Two
When I started working for the CIA in the early 1990’s the agency back then seemed to have no direction, no specific mission, except their omnipresent mandate to protect Americans and national security. The USSR and communism were finished, East Germany and the wall that divided the East and West Germans had fallen and terrorism was something that happened in Europe and in Israel. The CIA was in search of new enemies that were looming in the distance and South Africa fell into this category. I joined the CIA in 1990; I had training in counterintelligence from the US Army, spoke fluent Italian and had extensive international experience, so the agency was a good fit for a potential career. I applied through the Career Trainee (CT) program in 1989 and successfully passed their extensive battery of academic exams, psychological and medical screenings, drug tests and the polygraph and background check. I traveled back and forth several times to Tysons Corner, VA during the one year long screening process. I was flagged during my first polygraph on the personal lifestyle security portion of the screen for not being entirely honest about having experimented with drugs back in the 1970’s; but I was able to get passed that by confessing the truth to the agency security personnel. If you breeze through all the exams and background checks, attended the right schools but fail to pass the security or personal lifestyle portion of the notorious black box (polygraph machine) the agency will not proceed with hiring you. It is almost impossible to get into the Directorate of Operations (now called the National Clandestine Service) to become a Case Officer, the agency is extremely selective with their recruitment requirements.
Once I was cleared I wound-up working in the Clandestine Service as what is called a Non Official Cover agent (NOC). This is one of the most difficult and challenging assignments in the CIA because of the nature of not being protected by diplomatic immunity in overseas postings. But I am getting ahead of myself. After training at Camp Perry (The Farm) in Virginia my first assignment with the agency was in Boston and it coincided with what was a perfect cover, because it was my actual life.
I was a graduate student studying journalism at Northeastern University in the early 1990’s and working as an instructor at several different English as a Second Language (ESL) institutes connected to some of the top universities in Boston and Cambridge, MA. My cover job was teaching ESL, conversational English, mostly to foreign graduate students from all over the world. My real job, however, was "agent spotting" or an access agent for the CIA.
An access agent is just what the name implies, an individual who works as an agent collecting information on foreign nationals. In my case it was foreign students in masters and PhD programs studying in the United States. I would spot foreign nationals of interest, get close to them and get them to trust me. I would then create profiles or ‘201 files’ on the targets. I would provide the information to my Case Officer (CO) or principal agent who then after approval from HQ in Langley would set up what are called ‘cutouts’ to attempt to recruit certain foreign nationals of interest to the CIA, at some point in time. In essence, provide access to foreign nationals of interest to the CIA for purposes of recruitment or as unwitting agents.
I loved my job, I was good at it and I felt I was doing something that was helping my country and Americans remain safe. I think, looking back, that self justification for actions that are often distasteful is necessary in that line of work. But at the time, I loved working for the CIA; they were good to me and provided me with opportunities I would never in my wildest dreams have conceived growing up in Brooklyn. But, like everything else in life; with the good there is always an element of bad, the darker side of what I was doing would eventually catch up with me.
I realized many years later that at the end of the day you can never outrun the past, no matter how hard you try or how fast you run, it eventually catches up to you. This is something they never tell you when you’re being recruited or in training with the CIA. My first Case Officer was this very attractive woman in her mid-forties. She had been with the agency for close to twenty-years and had been posted around the world. She looked more like a former model who now worked in the fashion industry out of Paris, than a CIA Case Officer. Africa though was her favorite place, as it would become mine as well, I just didn’t know it yet at that point in time. I was her agent and she was my boss. Case Officers generally train agents one at a time, in isolation, including only those elements of tradecraft needed for a specific operation or to penetrate the target at hand.
The business of spying has its rules and regulations just like any other job and there are skills called tradecraft that must be learned in order to be effective. The character of James Bond is so far removed from what an agent actually does, that the entire concept is comical. In fact, the job of a spy is often mundane and tedious---long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of excitement, danger and fear. Tradecraft must be learned to be effective in collecting intelligence from individuals, called HUMINT. Tradecraft is a general term that denotes a skill acquired through experience in a trade. The term is also used within the Intelligence Community as a collective word for the techniques used in modern espionage. It can be used to refer to general topics or techniques, such as a dead drop or the specific techniques of a nation or organization (the particular form of encryption used by the NSA, for example).
I was instructed to meet my Case Officer in Boston on a snowy day in November. I arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) on Huntington Avenue in Boston thirty minutes before I was scheduled to meet my CO at the Egyptian Collection, back then the collection was housed on the second floor of the MFA. I sat down on the hard marble bench near the door of the exhibit and gazed around pretending to act like a tourist. I don’t remember a thing about that exhibit; as my eyes were scanning the room for a woman with short brown hair wearing a blue suit and white shirt carrying a copy of the Boston Globe in her left hand. I was also instructed on what to wear and to carry a folded-up copy of the Boston Globe in my right hand. I noticed a tall attractive woman walk through the glass double doors of the exhibit.
The woman had short brown hair and was wearing a blue suit with white blouse and carrying a folded-up newspaper in her left hand. I felt my heart begin to beat faster and I remember questioning myself if this could be the woman? I waited for her to notice me. The woman didn’t make eye contact with me but rather she walked over to a sarcophagus that was displayed in the center of the room. The woman began reading the information about the piece contained on the plaque next to the sarcophagus. Finally, she glanced over at me.
Case officers will train agents how to develop cover for status, and cover for action, meaning how to establish credible pretexts for their presence and behavior while engaged in collection activities. A well-trained and competent agent can conduct his or her clandestine tasks while under close surveillance, and still evade detection. More advanced agent training can include resistance to interrogation and torture as well, at least for the first twenty-four hours of incarceration. Initially, I was contacted through a series of dead drops. A dead drop or dead letter box, is a location used to secretly pass items between two people, without requiring them to meet. This stands in contrast to the live drop, so called because two live persons meet to exchange items or information.
I walked over to the exhibit and stood next to the plaque housing the description of the display. She finally spoke, “Have you seen the King Tut collection?” I responded with the appropriate ‘code phrase’ as I was instructed to do. “Only in New York,” I said. She motioned toward the marble bench and said, “Let’s sit down.”For reasons pertaining to my confidentially agreement with the CIA and not to compromise anyone or potential similar operation, I will call the woman Martha. Though this was not in fact her real name; I am certain the name she provided me for three years while I was working for her on operations in Boston was a pseudonym. Pseudonyms are also used to hide an individual's real identity and are used in intelligence operations for the safety of the Case Officer and agent and to protect the individual and operation from being compromised, it is common intelligence tradecraft known as compartmentalization.
My first meeting with Martha lasted about three hours. We remained sitting on the hard marble bench in the room housing the Egyptian collection for about an hour and then we moved to the Museum Café on the first floor of the MFA for the remainder of our meeting. During that time; I was instructed on tradecraft to use to communicate with her (i.e. dead drops, pager, phone messages, etc), what operations we would be conducting, how I would be paid, my back stopped cover story; and I was provided with a laundry list of information the CIA wanted me to work on collecting. “You need to follow the routine of your life ninety-percent of the time; we don’t expect you to develop assets right away, it takes time to develop your cover to produce good intelligence,” cautioned Martha. Most of my instructions had to do with the type of foreign graduate student I was to focus on, the area of specialization they were studying, the specific countries they should be from, the selection of targets, how I should proceed, what specific information to initially obtain and I was tasked to scout additional places around Boston where we could meet for future meetings. I was also instructed to scout potential safe houses for future use by our team, of whom at that point I had only met my boss Martha. A safe house is a secure location, a rented house usually in a very typical neighborhood rented for a short period of time suitable for debriefing assets or foreign agents, a place to hold meetings or for other potential use to an intelligence service.
After my meeting I left the MFA first. I walked through the heavy falling snow down along the back side of the museum through the park along Park Drive back to my apartment on Queensberry Street in the Fenway section of Boston. Once home, I memorized the laundry list of information I was tasked with collecting, I took the paper the instructions were written on and threw it in the toilet bowl. I didn’t even have to flush.
The paper used for the laundry list was written on ‘spy paper’ an extraordinary type of paper created by the CIA that, when placed in or flushed with water or steam completely dissolves, along with anything printed or written on it. It is actually quite amazing and rather a true tool often seen used in spy movies. I flushed the toilet anyway and grabbed my books for my evening graduate classes in journalism and headed off to Northeastern.
Chapter Three
I waited for my contact to arrive as I sat with my back to the wall in an outdoor café in Gaborone, Botswana on a hot Friday night in the summer of 1995. This was the second time I was meeting Adel, a twenty-nine year-old Iranian who called himself a currency trader, but who was actually a suspected member of Iran’s intelligence service selling counterfeit dollars on the black market in Sub-Saharan Africa. Adel knew me as Mario, an Italian Mafia middleman purchasing counterfeit dollars on the black market. I spoke fluent Neapolitan ( a southern Italian dialect common within the Italian Mafia) and knew enough about Italy from having lived there and knew more than enough about the Mafia from growing up in my Italian neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My cover was backstopped with a perfect phony Italian passport and enough documentation to substantiate my role. Adel and I also had another thing in common besides our lies, we were both educated in the United States. Adel’s English was excellent and, although, he never told me exactly where he attended college in the US, I got the feeling from the places he spoke about that it must have been in the Boston area.
“Hello my friend,” he greeted me as he shook my hand upon arriving at the café. “I am sorry I am late, I had business near Bokaa Dam and there was traffic on the A1,” he claimed. “Not a problem Adel, I was just enjoying the evening with a Castle Beer and people watching,” I said. I believe he was watching me from another location to make certain I was alone before he approached me, this was standard tradecraft and I am certain he was just as well versed in security procedures as I was. Back in the mid 1990’s there was a large scale counterfeiting operation taking place in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The operation was believed to be run by the Iranian Intelligence service known as SAVAMA (azman-e Ettela'at va Amniat-e Melli-e Iran, also known as the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of Iran) which replaced the SAVAK in 1979 after the Shah was overthrown. The US currency (mostly twenty, fifty and one-hundred dollar bills) that was being counterfeited was a professional operation, more so an operation that was being run by a government, because the money was so good. The counterfeit dollars were high grade quality and the paper they were using was the same seventy-five percent cotton and twenty-five percent linen paper that the US Bureau of Engraving uses. This was confusing and the agency was not sure how this was possible. Typically, this would have been a Secret Service operation, but being that the CIA had assets throughout Africa, it must have been passed off to them, since it was more of an intelligence gathering operation than it was a law enforcement operation.
The operation for counterfeiting US currency in Sub-Saharan Africa was twofold, one because it was difficult to detect counterfeit US currency in Africa and so it was easy to pass the dollars. But this group was selling large amounts of counterfeit money for twenty-five cents on the counterfeit dollar to other groups. The profit from the sale of the counterfeit money sold were being used to purchase arms to supply to various terrorist organizations and to the armies of war lords that were anti-American in the region and in Northern Africa. Since this would be a covert operation my Case Officer had to draw up a Covert Action Plan and get permission from Langley before the operation could be undertaken.
“I have ten thousand American dollars,” I said to Adel. “I want to buy forty-thousand in paper from you tonight.” He looked at me for a while and then said “I have someone I want you to meet first, here in Gaborone, we can take my car and go there now,” Adel said. At this point I was not sure if he knew who I actually was or he was just testing me or still didn’t feel comfortable enough to do business with me yet. “That’s just crazy Adel. Why would I go with you to some place unknown, so you could rip me off? I don’t feel comfortable with that. Who do you want me to meet?” I asked. “My boss,” he said. “Understand this Mario, if I rip you off, then what? I make then thousand dollars?
Or even worse, I rip you off then kill you, then what? I will tell you, your Italian friends find me, or even worse my family and that’s something I do not want. I do business the right way, we don’t know each other, so we need to establish a level of comfort. Do you understand this?” he asked me. “I do,” I said. “Have your boss meet us here; where I feel safe, then we can go from there. Fair enough?” Adel paused for a moment and said, “I need to make a call, I will be right back.” I was unarmed and I was not carrying the ten-thousand dollars with me. The café was in a public place and so I felt safe enough, given the circumstances of the situation.
Adel returned twenty minutes later with a smile on his face. “OK Mario, my boss will come to you, but not here, we will meet him at this club in downtown Gaborone. Is that OK with you,” he asked. “I said that works, I will follow you in my car.” I followed him to a club called the Kasbah, about a ten minute drive from where we were. The place was packed and there was a line stretching outside the place with a mix of white, black and Middle Easterners waiting to get in. I followed Adel to the front of the line and we were escorted directly inside without paying the one-hundred pula cover charge. The pula is the currency of Botswana and one-hundred pula’s is roughly sixteen dollars. I followed Adel to the VIP section where we were seated and immediately brought over a bottle of French champagne. Adel’s boss was not there yet so he and I polished off the first bottle of champagne and we were well into the second bottle when three of his Iranian colleagues arrived and sat down.
I was surprised to see three men arrive instead of just Adel’s boss, but it was now clear to me that this was a large operation. The men did not acknowledge me but rather started speaking directly to Adel in Farsi, occasionally looking over at me. The reality of what I was doing at that moment hit me like a ton of bricks and I knew remaining calm was the only way I would survive, but I was scared. I stopped drinking. Adel was light skinned, he was tall, about six foot two and he had dark wavy hair and dark eyes. He was handsome and his style was more European than Persian. He was soft spoken and polite and he liked to party, this was obvious by the brief conversations I had with him.
I was introduced to Adel through a CIA informant who was providing information about the group. This was how I initially met Adel. It became clear that this group was more than just a criminal element because they were so carful and well versed in security protocol. Finally Adel turned to me and said, “Mario, I want to introduce you to three of my friends, this is Hassan, this is Farzeen and Asad,” he said. Each man shook my hand as I was introduced. Asad turned to me and asked me in half way decent Italian, “Where are you from in Italy?” This stunned me, but I calmly responded in Italian to his question. He then asked me again in Italian, “Why do you speak English so well and why do you appear to be American?” “I studied in the US, have family there and have business interests there. The people I am connected with are very well engrained into American culture, it is where most of our business revenue stream is generated,” I said in Italian. He seemed to be placated by my response and I could tell at that point that he was in charge of this operation, at least in charge of this group. He then asked me to speak English so the others could understand and he then began pouring drinks from the two additional bottles of champagne that had been brought over to the table without anyone even ordering them. I knew that this was their place, where they were known and where they operated from. I would now have to gain their trust.
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© Copyright 2010 Philip Tufano All rights reserved
About the Author
Phil Tufano worked for seven years for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the Directorate of Operations in the Clandestine Service, both in the United States and in South Africa; during and after the fall of apartheid.
Tufano is the Executive Director of Global Training and Technical Communications for InterActive Training, Inc. Phil was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where he attended the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College of the City University of New York (CUNY), obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree in International Business and Management in 1990. Phil obtained an MA degree in International Journalism & Corporate Communications in 1994 from Northeastern University in Boston, MA.
Special Needs Offenders: Reducing Risk (Part 1)
