Spycraft - Melton [35]
Russell, who lived for operations, was also one of a handful of senior case operations officers of his generation who understood the potential advantage technology could give to operations. “When you went to one of Russell’s stations overseas, you saw good technical skills meshing with ops. He really sucked the techs dry in terms of wanting to know what they could provide and how it was going to happen,” said one TSD veteran. “A lot of station chiefs literally didn’t want to know that ‘tech stuff,’ but Russell wanted to know it all.”
Over the next four years, the Russell-Gottlieb-Krueger team proved to be an inspired, if unlikely, trio. This combination of a case officer with no scientific experience, a scientist of limited operational experience, and an engineer steeped in Big Technology programs would transform TSD. Eventually, this new organization would play a major role in nearly every significant CIA operation for the remainder of the twentieth century.
Russell wasted no time in exerting his influence on TSD. He conveyed a sense of operational reality and urgency that made the case officer’s concerns for recruiting and handling spies a concern for his engineers, while daily advances in technology began to influence his vision of operations.
However, Russell and TSD faced a problem unrelated to technology, that of the tightly compartmented world of the Agency itself. Although TSD was a “global division,” its technical officers were rarely privy to the details or scope of the operations they supported. Compartmentation sealed off all but the basic facts of an operation to anyone who did not have an absolute need to know. This constraint was of little consequence if the requirement was to secretly photograph a document or prepare a dead drop container. However, with more sophisticated and flexible technology becoming available, the more the techs knew, the better they could match TSD expertise and technology to the operation.
“This was a place where compartmentation and need to know were at odds,” said one case officer. “To perform the task perfectly the tech should know everything. But in our world the techs weren’t allowed to know everything. Compartmentalization is a necessary fact of life.”
Along with this situation, which separated the tech and the case officer, there also existed a subtle cultural divide. In the DDP, the case officer was the star player. The culture of the DDP had evolved from the OSS. The “Ivy League” image that once prompted derision in the press and the “Oh So Social” sobriquet carried over with the former OSS officers who were among the founding members of the CIA. DCI Allen Dulles had an Ivy League background (Princeton, class of 1914) and an association with New York’s powerful white-shoe law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. Richard Helms, later a DCI himself, had attended boarding schools overseas, including the prestigious Swiss prep school Le Rosey, before attending Williams College. OSS head William Donovan, although not from a wealthy family, attended Columbia University (class of 1905) and its law school (class of 1907). DCI William Colby, the son of an army officer, graduated from Princeton and Columbia University Law School. DCI Bill Casey, who graduated from Fordham University, Catholic University School of Social Work, and Brooklyn Law School, represented the exception that proved the rule.
President Lyndon Johnson may have been thinking of the historical characterization of the so-called blue-blooded case officer when he said, “The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.”1
Conversely,