144 AMERICAN SPYus via secure radio and we’d abort the mission, getting out of the house
before the hostiles arrived.
We needed a trusted “inside” person to assist, since this was a highly
sensitive and risky operation, and we did not have enough cleared station
officers or headquarters TDYers to cover all of the roles. My COS decided
that my witting wife would do the job. I reminded him that Stacy was
working as the assistant commissary manager and she couldn’t just leave
her post on a moment’s notice. It would put her job in jeopardy and might
also raise suspicions, since many embassy employees knew or at least sus-
pected who my real employer was. My arguments fell on deaf ears, and he
ordered her to assist. Stacy complied, and the operation went off without
a hitch. It also earned me another What have you gotten me into this time? look.
It was then we both accepted the reality that the CIA got two employees
for the price of one. The wife—and in those days it was typically a wife
and not a husband—was an unpaid partner. The CIA expected the wife to
participate in training and operations, especially entertainment and devel-
opmental work in which the case officer husband attempted to cultivate
individual targets of operational interest. The practice was not necessarily
fair, but that’s just the way it was. I suspect it is less the case today, but it
certainly was common in the “old days,” including the late 1980s and into
the 1990s.
This “two-for-one” phenomenon became doubly apparent after my Latin
America tour, when we transferred back to DC for the grueling but phe-
nomenal Soviet–East European Internal Ops (SE/IO) course prior to our
upcoming series of long-term TDYs to Communist Yugoslavia. As my
former CE Division chief Milt Bearden and the national security journalist
James Risen revealed in their book, The Main Enemy, the SE/IO course was
the CIA’s equivalent of the US Navy’s Top Gun school for fighter pilots.^1
It was hands down the best, most challenging, and most valuable training I
ever received in my life. Although all CIA officers underwent solid surveil-
lance detection training during the operations course at the Farm, those
of us selected to operate in denied areas also had to successfully complete
the much more intensive SE/IO course. The CIA had to be 100 percent