Spycraft - Melton [36]
Typically, these technical recruits had shown a childhood penchant for tinkering that eventually turned into engineering and hard-science degrees. They were often the first or only member of their family to attend college and many came from rural communities in the Midwest and Southwest. They arrived at the CIA seeking technical opportunities and adventure.
It did not take long before these newly minted engineers began delighting in calling operations officers “liberal arts majors.” For engineers, this less than flattering term summed up both a case officer’s educational background and the imprecise, unscientific nature of agent recruiting and handling.
Case officers, for their part, had their own traditions. In theory, spies are acquired through a methodical process of spotting, assessing, developing, recruiting, and handling. All of it was usually done person to person. While living in Switzerland during World War II, Allen Dulles met with agents in his well-appointed study.3 Penkovsky was met and debriefed in hotel rooms. Face-to-face meetings between the agent and case officer were common practice. Agents were briefed, debriefed, and tasked in safe houses and out-of-the-way restaurants over leisurely dinners.
These meetings built rapport, mutual trust, and personal relationships that often approached friendship. Despite the inherent manipulation, deception, and potential for fatal consequences, the handler and spy worked as a team, with the best case officers also playing the role of a psychologist, cheerleader, banker, confidant, or best friend, depending on the needs of the agent.
Given the limited capabilities of most counterintelligence services after World War II, this process worked well until the 1960s. Highly valued spies such as Pyotr Popov and Penkovsky could use commercial cameras, pass film to their handlers via dead drops, receive messages in the form of strings of random numbers over a standard shortwave radio, and decrypt those numbers with OTPs like those used by the French or Polish underground in Occupied Europe.
As a result, case officers were generally passive toward technology’s potential in operations. “We didn’t comprehend what was there [technically], and either took a defensive position of operational arrogance or retreated into a shell of saying, ‘Look, there’s no way I will ever understand what you tech types are doing and if the success of this operation depends on me understanding, then we’re just not going to make it,’” remembers one case officer.
For case officers, lacking a clear understanding of technology meant not grasping its potential, while techs ran the danger of either misapplying technology or failing to capitalize on some special advantage. This attitude was especially frustrating for the eager engineers of TSS seeking insight into what was really needed in the field. Highlighting the separateness between operations and technology was the fact that TSD did not receive space in the new Langley CIA Headquarters building where the DDP operational components resided. Six miles separated TSD’s downtown Washington location from Langley, a distance that precluded the professional lubrication of drop-in meetings, cafeteria luncheon conversations, or office gossip.
Russell and Gottlieb, both with operational experience, understood this divide and undertook the task of bridging it. “Clearly there was a cultural