The Dangerous Life of Spies

The Reality of Espionage

The year is 1973. American disillusionment with the Vietnam War is spreading rapidly and consuming the general populace—a resounding refusal to believe the old model of military combat makes sense when the enemy is an ideology. Both sides seem to agree. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is in Paris, negotiating a U.S. withdrawal. But Kissinger and his staff aren’t the only government employees in Paris. The CIA is also there, in the shadows, eavesdropping on the North Vietnamese delegation. The mission: gather intelligence on the North Vietnamese’s position, hopefully providing the U.S. government with some diplomatic leverage. And similar to the Vietnam War, their enemy is hiding in plain sight, using the geography to their advantage, waiting to strike a crippling blow.

A German man, regularly hired by the CIA for such a job on European soil, is running the routine audio-surveillance operation from a hotel room across the street from the North Vietnamese delegation. Instead of listening to and recording the conversations, probing for information to bolster Kissinger’s negotiations, he removes all of the equipment, loads it into his car and drives to Germany. There he holds a press conference exposing the United States and its covert surveillance operation. Roll the credits sequence, and it would seem like a modern cable drama cold open.

This is the story according to Robert Baer, an ex-CIA case officer with direct knowledge of the operation. As detailed in his memoir, See No Evil, he spent two decades as a spy, with years of paramilitary training and routine activities designed to minimize risk in the field. His past assignments include Morocco; New Delhi, India; and Khartoum, Sudan. Today, Baer is a columnist, author and frequent guest on CNN. He is also a story consultant on EPIX’s new spy thriller Berlin Station, which follows a dramatic mole hunt for a whistleblower in Berlin.

C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D Baer’s story shows the humanity at the core of espionage—it’s not just scripted entertainment that has flawed heroes and conflicted plotlines. The life of a field agent is rife with deception, suspicion, a constant ache of insecurity, and the potentially fatal reality that your mission has been compromised. What must a spy do to succeed?

The Job of a Field Agent

When Baer arrived in India on his first mission, he was scared that he would screw up and lose an informant. Against CIA protocol, he also found himself romantically entangled with an Irish foreign national (Langley was “rightly pissed”).

Despite those early foibles, Baer established a routine—the cornerstone of gathering good intelligence. He adopted the spy’s mindset, creating a fiction during the day so that at night he could gather information from multiple assets. He kept a physical office where he took appointments during business hours. And when night covered the city, Baer, like any good spy, got down to the real business of espionage—gathering information from the dark edges of the city.

This is where the job (and the threats) of being an agent truly begins: in the field with informants.

How you gather information from an informant can be best achieved under the guise of a friendly drink, “trolling for people,” as Baer describes it—probing for ideologies or political affiliations under the illusion of socialization in bars and clubs. A useful asset can bring critical documents, information about the government, or individuals within it. CENSORED CEN SO RED CENSOR ED CE NSOR ED C ENSORED

A field agent’s modus operandi is skilled undercover work: collect intel without detection. The intelligence you collect is yours to debrief, translate into English, type up in a report, and send as an encrypted message back to CIA headquarters. The CIA and the folks in Washington decide the next order of business. Your duty is done.

“This is pretty much the way espionage works for everybody, whether you’re Russian or British,” Baer says. “You’re just out meeting assets.”

The Risks

But even the most familiar schemes cannot prevent an operation from going south. Information is a fickle mistress, easily wooed by the enemy. As the unveiling of the surveillance operation during the Paris Peace Accords illustrates, when things go bad with a CIA operation, they can go bad spectacularly.

Inasmuch as it is your job as a field agent to collect intelligence, it is also your job to protect it. In one precarious situation, Baer says, a CIA station chief working in an unnamed African country found himself stopped by police while driving a car. The officers ordered the CIA agent out of the vehicle, frisked him and took his address book. The book detailed more than a few relatives and friends. It contained information on every asset the agent had gathered during his post. In an instant, his entire operation was compromised.

“That is a lesson learned—it’s the type of thing that the CIA told you about,” he adds. “Don’t keep anything in your pockets that can identify anyone in an operation.”

The information you gather is dangerous in the wrong hands, but the spy himself is information—his existence alone betrays a government agenda. Identify a spy and you uncover a mission. The implications of this can be bleak. Baer recalls an instance where the CIA flew a case offer to Europe. It was a simple routine, but in this operation, the agent carried a briefcase containing a notable sum: one million dollars. When the CIA found out the officer had died mid-flight they could not and did not claim him. Disavowed, in the parlance of Mission Impossible.

CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSOR “There are so many operations that have gone bad, but they’re classified,” Baer says. “There are legions of things that go wrong for no good reason at all.” CENS O RED CENS ORED CENSOR ED CE NSORE D CENSO RED CEN SO RED CE NSO RED CEN

Things that “go right” don’t get the glory, or the press. Small (or large) victories in espionage—ones that might help stop a war or avert some diplomatic disaster—are really the sum of a few small and seemingly mundane interactions. You discuss some information over a drink with an informant, extract the important pieces of their story into a document, and deliver it to a superior. With a job well done, there are no car chases or action sequences, just a bunch of interviews conducted under the cover of darkness.

This darkness is not ubiquitous, however. The world is filled with a gradation of danger for a spy, increasing the threat to missions with an already increased sense of importance. Where is the spy least safe?

Police States

In the game of espionage, being uncovered as a spy is the next worst possible outcome after death. There are places in the world, both tangible and intangible, that present constant threats to agents in the field. Police states, cyberspace, even intimate relationships are considered unsafe “areas.” Your best defense as a spy maneuvering these territories is your own paranoia. Trust no one.

It’s true that James Bond could maneuver benign countries like France or Italy with relative ease. As a foreigner, you don’t necessarily stick out. Perhaps even a high-speed chase on the top of a moving train could go off with minimal detection (depending on the skill of said spy).

But then there are “denied areas,” police states like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran where CIA operations are likely being watched. CEN SORED CENSO RED CE NSORE D CEN SORED C ENSORED CENS ORED CENSOR ED CENSORED CENS ORE D CEN SO RED C EN SO RED These denied areas come with heightened stakes and breed a constant fear for those involved in or attempting to prevent information warfare.

According to retired CIA case officer Robert Baer, “These are police states that are paranoid about foreigners. They have police everywhere, surveillance everywhere and are tapping every phone.”

Baer adds that, “A dead drop would be impossible in North Korea because they’re xenophobic and you’re watched all the time, from the people in the hotel to the person in the kiosk. North Korea makes 1984 look like Sweden. You can't fart there without the secret police knowing. No dead drops, no nothing. Everyone is watching and reporting on foreigners: what they do, where they stop, what questions they ask. So there is just no anonymity.”

A CIA case officer in a police state would, of course, stick out (if they are not a native turned double agent). For field officers in these dangerous territories, it is critical to blend in by way of cover identity. As Baer demonstrated, a successful routine is keeping an office and pretending to work during the day and, only under the cover of night, trying to cultivate informants at bars or clubs. But this formula breeds risk.

In certain denied areas, even something routine for a spy like driving around the city to meet with an asset for debriefing becomes complicated. In Kabul or Baghdad, for instance, case officers are not allowed to drive at night to pick up their assets. In these kinds of high-conflict cities being out at night identifies you as a spy. Your death is almost imminent.

This is the importance of counter-surveillance and understanding a country’s culture. You need an acceptable reason to be where you are, when you are. “In Moscow, there was a time when they issued dogs to case officers, so it would explain why they were walking at 11 or 12 o’clock at night,” Baer says. “It would bore the Russians, who would think he couldn’t sleep or was in a bad marriage.”

As a spy you develop these habits, like attending the same street market every Saturday, to appear as banal as possible. “What you’ve got to do in a denied area is assume you’re under surveillance 24 hours a day,” Baer explains. C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D “It’s an art to detect surveillance.”

As Baer learned in his two years of apprentice work, intensive training is necessary to spot surveillance. Avoiding detection often comes down to skilled paranoia. As an agent, you might notice a man on the side of the road standing under a streetlight or a woman sitting in a parked car and you’ve got to maintain your routine. You must master a quotidian lifestyle that errs enough on the side of boring that surveillance teams lose their suspicion, but the constant threat is that potentially anyone could be watching you. Often a spy must take cinematic measures of deception.

“You can change your appearance,” Baer says. “You can do identity transfer like Mission Impossible, where you go to a party as one person and leave as another. You can put a whole mask of hair and face over your head.”

“The CIA also has a thing called a Jack in the Box,” he adds. “Let’s say two of you are driving in a car and you take a double left, so anyone behind you is out of sight. The person in the passenger seat jumps out of the car, and the driver then pushes a button on a briefcase, which pops up your form in the passenger seat. The driver continues on and the people behind still think you’ve got two people in the car. There’s no way to see. These methods are pretty effective in denied areas.”

Cyberspace

But police states are not the only areas that are exceedingly dangerous for American spies. Cyberspace, the Internet—the entire ether—is a territory gamed to blow an agent’s cover. While you can’t hide in a digital landscape, you can simply be someone else. C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D

In the decoy day job or at home, the spy imagines a surveillance team is parked outside. The agent tries to imagine what this team might be thinking about his or her actions. Any time they pick up the phone, whether to make a call or send a text, they assume the conversation is being recorded and the data stored, not just for information on them but to learn about the person with whom they are speaking.

The conversations they have with friends in the city or with relatives far away are totally mundane if not completely fictional. The dullness of small talk is meant to throw off anyone who might be tapped in.

“You can’t use a cell phone, put anything on Facebook, Twitter,” Baer explains. “Burner phones don't work, and neither does Internet encryption. If you're one to live life on the Internet, you can't be a spy.”

Relationships

A case officer’s paranoia is not just confined within the borders of a particularly hostile country or in the borderless shadows of the Internet. An agent has to be suspicious in the one place where trust is considered essential: their relationships. An informant is not a friend.

Baer says that an officer will look at any asset as possibly duplicitous until that asset gives them a piece of information that “utterly and irretrievably hurts the other side.” Until then, Baer says, you can’t really trust anyone.

As unnatural as it may feel, this skepticism must extend to intimate relationships. A CIA case officer who easily falls into romance could be led into a “honey trap” enacted by the denied area’s intelligence agency. In a “honey trap,” a secret agent woos the CIA case officer, maintains a relationship with them, and feeds information back to their handlers.

Love, already a dangerous game, can be lethal when your career is based on deception.

The true objective of the game is to be boring. To be ordinary. To have nothing remarkable about you or your daily routine. Of course, this takes remarkable skill, patience, and intelligence. If you’re losing this game, you might find death gaining the upper hand.

“In one case we thought we were going to get kidnapped, so I had a tech carrying a grenade with the pin pulled out,” Baer recalls. “It’s hard to grab somebody that way because everybody dies.” This is the dark side of espionage.

The Unceremonious Deaths

Death is never easy to deal with, but in the world of espionage, there’s an entirely different playbook.

“There was a country—we don’t need to name it because it’s not very important—where the senior public official worked for us,” says former CIA case officer Robert Baer. “He was an older guy, run by one of our case officers. It doesn’t matter what year. The guy died of a heart attack in a car. So what do you do?” C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D

“You can’t take him to the morgue and say, ‘Oh, well, I’m so and so and this guy is my agent’—you’d be in an enormous amount of trouble,” Baer adds. “The guy had to think on his feet, so he took him to the guy’s house, dragged him out of the car, pulled him out onto the lawn, rang the doorbell, and ran.”

While their whole career is pretending to live normal lives, spies never do. In the inverse, spies also do not die like the rest of us. “There is always something like that where you can’t really act like a normal person, where if you’re friend died in a car you’d dial 911 and everyone would go to the hospital. But can’t just do that in the CIA. It’s not immoral: nobody killed the guy, you’re just living in a parallel universe.”

This parallel universe, with all of its unheralded, classified triumphs and operational catastrophes, has its varied shades of darkness. While Baer never lost an asset in the field in the Middle East—something he considers a great success—losing an asset was his greatest fear when he began his career in India.

“If you contribute to the asset or agent’s death it’s a guilt that you carry on your shoulders forever, unless you’re a sociopath,” Baer explains. “If you’re sitting in Washington as an analyst, you don’t lose assets, but if you’re in the field for your entire career you lose assets. If you don’t lose any, that’s big, and for me it was. I may have not made the United States a better or safer place, but not losing assets was an achievement for me.”

Detaching from Humanity

By the time Baer had moved on from India to the Middle East, where he worked war zones like Beirut and Northern Iraq’s Kurdish region during the Iraq-Kurdish Civil War, shades of psychological darkness began to emerge. Doing this sort of high-risk CIA work, Baer claims, a case officer has to become extremely detached from their own humanity to keep his or her wits about them.

“In my opinion, you have to be a bit of a sociopath to fight in war zones and not let it bother you,” he says. “But that’s me, I can’t speak for anybody else. I’ve had people go on these assignments where I was and just turn around and leave. They couldn’t take it.”

Navy SEALs who have spoken to Baer tell him that they have a way of conditioning their amygdala, a region of the brain that plays a vital role in processing emotions and decision-making, to keep them cool in harrowing situations.

“I don’t know if my amygdala was [conditioned], but I’m certainly not shocked by seeing dead bodies that had died violently.” C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D

For some who cannot condition themselves against the violence and death that can occur in CIA field work, who cannot become a “semi-sociopathic,” their instinct may be to leave the conflict zone and reestablish civilian life with their family. Baer admits that he was in a bad marriage during his time in the CIA, a misfortune that kept him from this instinct.

The lifestyle of espionage can be treacherous for a spy who does bring a family along. It is the job of a CIA case officer to be in constant proximity of alcohol and promiscuity to chase interactions with potential assets at bars, clubs, or private parties. This leads to a variety of temptations to abuse the agent’s anonymity and resources for pleasure. Some use safe houses as casual hook-up pads, others simply drink to excess every night under the guise of fieldwork. Significant others who accompany an agent to their assignment abroad rarely accompany them at night to probe for sources.

“With families, whether you are a man or woman, there is a feeling of abandonment if you’re out at night,” Baer says. “It builds hour by hour, and if it’s in the family’s mind it’s abandonment related to work.”

A Beleaguered Mind

But the underbelly of CIA work is not limited to a single agent’s machinations for self-destruction. It manifests politically with the U.S. government’s international policy. Even if the intelligence in a problem region is brilliant, as Baer says, if it’s s not politically expedient with the public or Congress it’s not used.

The international and domestic repercussions weigh on a case officer’s mind, both during and after CIA service, as they have with Baer. If diplomacy, covert or otherwise, doesn’t work, the intelligence may lead to the most undesirable outcome of all: open conflict between two nations.

“What about the Iraq War?” Baer says. “We’re talking about [thousands of] people who died there for no good reason. Look at Afghanistan. CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED I’m in touch with veterans and they ask me, “What did we do this for?”

“It affects me, it affects me more than ever now [and] it’s not the morality of war,” he continues. “With Iraq, this misuse of intelligence is going to get us into a Hundred Years’ war, and if you go back to 1998 we’re almost going on 20 years. And there is no reason it won’t go another 80.”

While paranoia defines a spy’s effectiveness, the broader implication of it haunts an officer for a lifetime. This paranoia, while an asset in the field, never truly leaves and has a crippling effect on the agent’s ability to exist in normal society after their service.

“Paranoia can work on your psyche to a debilitating degree,” Baer says. “I’m sure psychiatrists would say something about it. I think it’s more damaging that you can possibly describe. I deal with it every day.”

While Baer otherwise got out of the spy game with his wits and identity intact, he suspects that espionage in high-risk areas probably messes with a person’s neural networks in other ways.

Being evasive with friends or assuming a home is bugged is second nature to a spy in the field. C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D As Baer tells it, many spies cannot drop these habits when re-entering civilian life. Spies are also trained not to talk to people, including family, about what they do, which is another survival mechanism that doesn’t easily disappear upon integrating into normal society.

“You answer questions more slowly than you normally would because you’re thinking of the angles,” Baer says. “Who am I talking to and what do they want to know?” These routines and the conditioning that keep an agent alive in the field also keep them from truly living a peaceful life after service.

In most ways the learned lifestyle of a spy is incredibly and detrimentally unnatural. And yet, despite the risks, many have served with the intention of avoiding international disaster and serving their country.

“The system was totally oppressive, but I never doubted the reasons for it,” Baer says. “There is always the promise of a new adventure, and then there is the promise of public service. Believe it or not, it really comes down to that because it’s not commerce—the CIA is not a place to make money. It’s the idea that there is not a commercial motive here, which I always found very interesting.”

If Baer is to be believed, people should take comfort in their regularity, safe with the knowledge that a stranger most likely will not buy them a drink in the hopes of neutralizing international conflict with anecdotes and emails, or worse, using them to fan the flames of war.