170 AMERICAN SPYI quietly entered my house, locked the front door, and went directly
upstairs to our bedroom. Reeking of Belgrade, I stashed the gym bag
under our bed, hoping I wouldn’t wake Stacy in the process. My little girls
were fast asleep in their bedroom across the hall.
Early the next morning, I brought the bag to the office, hidden inside
a cardboard grocery box.
Mission accomplished.The day following a HITCH meeting always felt a lot like Christmas
morning. After my experienced Vietnam vet and former US Marine COS
shook my hand, as he’d also done prior to each HITCH meeting, we would
carefully remove the documents from the bag and briefly marvel at the
quantity and quality of the previous night’s take. Faced with a stack of
hundreds of top secret Serbian-language documents, all in Cyrillic, we
prioritized the reports and both got to work on translating and turning
the salient parts into finished intelligence reports. I also wrote up reports
based on what HITCH had told me orally, either on his own initiative or in
response to my specific requirements. Because of the threat of electronic
eavesdropping, all of our writing was done longhand, in pencil, on legal
pads and not on computers. Tracy Chapman and other songs of that era
blared nonstop over cheap CIA-issue stereo speakers in our tiny, window-
less office, to counter any possible audio surveillance. Once the reports
were in final draft form, we would hand them to our communications spe-
cialist, who would type them up inside a secure commo “closet” and send
the encrypted cable traffic via satellite to headquarters.
The entire process was slow and deliberate by design, to protect our
sources and methods. To protect HITCH. We intentionally traded speed
and efficiency for security, and the results were pretty damn good.
My primary mission during my two years of operating in Belgrade, Yugo-
slavia, was to securely handle HITCH and produce intelligence reports
based on oral debriefings and on the top secret documents he provided.