244 SEPTEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
Up Front Spy Games
They break character only to share these gems with us a few
hours each night in the sanctity of our SCIF, small room–size safes
where five of us work on our cables and intelligence reports,
under the watchful eye of our advisers. The rest of the time, they
stay in character, talking about the impact of upcoming fake
elections on the value of the country’s fake currency, speculating
about weapons proliferation across the fake border with the DPRV
and worrying about threats from fake terror groups. We go to
embassy parties, bump into our targets, recruit our assets. We drive
off-base in cars tricked out with concealment compartments for
our notes and dread unannounced searches at the roadside, our
knees in the gravel and our graduation dependent on our not having
anything incriminating lying about in the cup holders. The crises
ramp up quickly. Soon our every night’s sleep is interrupted by
urgent walk-ins reporting imminent threats and
simulated terror attacks. We’re under constant
surveillance, pitted against one another, tested
well beyond our limits. A multilayered game
takes hold. On one level, we recruit the fictional
characters played by instructors. On a second,
we recruit the real-life instructors we know
decide who graduates. All the while continuing
to play a third, long-distance level, recruiting
chiefs back at headquarters to ensure the
best real-world assignment. All without ever
breaking character. It’s exhausting. And like the
running millipede, we learn to avoid thinking
about how we do it all for fear of tripping up.
Every so often, we are given a free weekend,
but I don’t tell Andrew that. Instead, I meet up with classmates
at random Holiday Inns. We revel in the anonymity of American
suburbia. We see movies in cineplexes. We eat pancakes at Cracker
Barrel. And sometimes, most times, we have sex.A
s the Farm weeks wear on, we take our human targets
through the entire recruitment cycle—spot, assess,
develop, recruit, run, terminate. Spotting is spy speak for
noticing people with interesting access at the embassy
parties or events around “town”—access that could prevent an
attack or give insight into an adversary’s plans. Assessment is the
dance we go through with headquarters to confirm that access,
determine whether the target might be sympathetic to approach and
if so, what kind. Development is where the time and talent comes
in. Building a relationship with the target over weeks, months,
years. Finding genuine commonality. Those are the relationships
that last decades, that end wars, that prevent attacks. Those are the
relationships that change history.
Students who lose an asset also likely lose their place at the Farm.
For the rest of us, the recruitment cycle continues. Next comes
running—the long sweeping arc of a source’s working relationship
with the Agency. All our meetings at this post-recruitment
stage are clandestine. Arranged via predetermined signals, which
are themselves documented for headquarters, to be sure a new field
officer could take over an asset in case we disappear or worse. We
learn these signaling and meeting techniques as we go, with new
ones added in each exercise. There are the traditional chalk marks
and lowered window blinds, shifts in the physical world made by one
of us in a place the other can see during their daily commute. Thenthere are the newer, more creative ideas. One instructor prefers using
Starbucks gift cards. Each has a balance he can check by typing the
card number into the Starbucks website online. He gives one to each
of his assets and tells them, “If you need to see me, buy a coffee.”
Then he checks the card numbers on a cybercafé computer each day,
and if the balance on one is depleted, he knows he’s got a meeting.
When an asset signals for a meeting, we head to a predetermined
spot—an operational site we’ve cased and scouted, checking to be
sure it fulfills the slew of attributes our instructors have drilled into
us with endless lists of acronyms. Something as simple as a car-
pickup site—the spot an asset knows to stand so we can swoop in
and scoop them—must be shielded from passersby, have a different
entrance and exit, be free of cameras and security, sit sufficiently
far from hot spots like police stations or schools, remain accessible
24 hours a day, and offer some plausible
explanation for why somebody of the asset’s
position or stature would be hanging around by
themselves, often in the wee hours of morning.
Given all the care that’s gone into selecting
the pickup spot, it wouldn’t do to take a
tail to the meeting, so we can’t drive straight
there. Instead, we embark on long, circuitous
surveillance detection routes, known as SDRs.
The aim is to identify cars or people who
keep popping up over time and distance. If we
see the same granny with a yoga mat twice on
the same street, she could just be walking in the
same direction we are. But see her twice on two
different streets, miles and hours apart, and we
might have just nailed our surveillant. To spice things up, they work
in teams of seven or eight, switching off with one another each time
we turn left or right, so no single surveillant exposes themselves more
than a handful of times over the entire route. It’s a cat-and-mouse
labyrinth chase through city streets, and the only way to win is to
design a route with enough changes of direction to force surveillance
to stick close. All that need for pickup spots and surveillance
detection routes means every unoccupied minute of time at the Farm
is spent casing the surrounding area for operational sites.
“When I retire,” my friend jokes, “I’m coming back down here
to open a restaurant that just happens to have perfect cover and flow.
Guaranteed business from every class of students.”
When a source loses their access or just gets to a point where
they prefer to retire, the recruitment cycle reaches its last stop—
terminate. This isn’t the termination you hear about in the movies—
the kind with blood splatter on the walls. These are dignified,
intensely emotional conversations about the end of an era, about
gratitude and honor and legacy. Sometimes the source knows
they’re finished even when the case officer wishes they’d continue.
Sometimes it’s the other way round. But more often than not, it’s
a decision they make together, two long-bound dogs of war who
know when the battle is through.
After each exercise, we retreat to our SCIF and write a fake
cable to headquarters describing the interaction. This is the part of
the training—the part of the job—that doesn’t make the spy novels.
The paperwork kingdom. We type them up in all caps, according
to the old-school, midcentury style the Agency still uses. At the top
we add the distro—lists of stations in relevant cities that have a
stake in the asset or the topic at hand. We add slugs,The pace of our training
ops ramps up. We add
land navigation, trekking
for days to meet our assets,
armed with nothing
more than a ziplock-
covered map, a compass,
and a rainproof notebook