Spy vs. Spy. Ex-CIA spooks clash over Russiagate…
By: Nina Burleigh
Tags: Politics, CIA, Trump, Reasonable Doubt, Foreign Affairs

Santa Fe is one of those places — like the South of France and the city of San Miguel de Allende in Central Mexico — where American spies often go to retire. Today, the city, with its art galleries and turquoise jewelry, is best known as a moneyed playground for gentleman ranchers, heiresses, and horsey trophy wives. But that reputation belies a far more controversial backstory: the city’s vital place in the history of Cold War espionage. According to ex-CIA officer Bruce Held, author of A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque, the nearby Los Alamos laboratories, where scientists developed the atom bomb, attracted the KGB’s attention early on. For decades, Americans working in the service of the Soviet Union showed up in the area, using code names like Star and Bumblebee, looking for technical information on the nuclear weapons program and delivering it to their Russian handlers. KGB agents dead-dropped papers and notes in invisible ink all over town, exchanged intel at clandestine meetings at the Paseo de Peralta bridge, and executed expert brush-passes at the Greyhound station.

Plame and her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, settled here after Plame’s cover as a CIA agent was blown — not by Moscow or another foreign adversary but by senior members of the Bush administration. A week before her outing in 2003, Wilson had publicly disputed one of the Bush team’s main rationales for the invasion of Iraq. Outing Plame was an attempt to retaliate and discredit him. The so-called Plame affair led to the conviction of Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for several felonies (he was recently pardoned by Donald Trump) and became the subject of the movie, Fair Game.

Left to right: Bruce Held, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Glenn Carle, Larry Johnson, James C. Lawler, and Mary Beth Long. Photo: Dave Stabley, courtesy Spies, Lies & Nukes

Now the author of a memoir and a few novels, and a regular on the lecture circuit, Plame launched the conference, Spies, Lies & Nukes, last year, inviting eight retired CIA agents to reminisce about their adventures in Russia, Chad, Libya, Switzerland, and other countries they said they were forbidden from naming. At least one, Mowatt-Larssen, bore the honor of having been PNG’ed at Moscow; as spies put it — caught out, declared “persona non grata,” and sent packing.

Having been obligated to keep their work secret for years, it turns out that retired spies like to talk. Working in intelligence can be lonely and thankless. The best operatives are invisible, so bland and colorless that they are capable of hiding in plain sight. It is not a job for someone with a narcissistic bent or a need for public validation.

The CIA “wanted me to exploit, manipulate, persuade, and bribe people. And I found out that not only was I good at it, but I enjoyed it.”

As spy-turned-novelist John Le Carre knew, the life can be psychologically and emotionally challenging. “What the hell do you think spies are?” the jaded British spy Leamas snarls to his naive girlfriend in the 1963 adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. “They’re just a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me: little drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?”

The spies who came in from the cold for Plame’s warm Southwestern spy-hang were not seedy or squalid. They didn’t swagger or drink heavily. They wore business suits or the fleece vests preferred by west of the Rockies elites, and reminisced placidly about hiding their identities, bribing foreigners with suitcases full of cash, and sometimes, risking their lives.

Even so, in his talk “Soul Catcher — How the CIA Recruits Assets,” James C. Lawler, retired member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service who spent much of his career tracking and fighting WMD proliferation, described the sort of old-fashioned tradecraft Leamas would have recognized.

An elfin man with a white goatee, Lawler said he decided to join CIA in 1980 without giving the idea much thought. “I had no idea what they wanted me to do,” he said. “Then, I learned they wanted me to exploit, manipulate, persuade, and bribe people. And then, I found out that not only was I good at it, but I enjoyed it.”

He added: “There’s sociopathy involved.”

The first rule of recruiting an asset, he said, is identifying the target’s vulnerabilities. “You study the cracks. What are your stress points?” he explained. “And then, you let them know, ‘I can relieve your stress.’” Revenge was one motivation to commit treason. Money was another. People going through a divorce were “prime bait” — child support, health care, the cost of education. And then there were those with what he called, “a Walter Mitty fascination” — people who would betray their country because it fed their sense of self-importance.

Lawler recounted his first attempt to persuade one embassy deputy in an unnamed country to share information with the CIA. The deputy, who had until then thought of Lawler as just an American acquaintance, turned him down. After worrying that the target would turn him in to local authorities (and knowing the CIA would cut him loose if it happened), he decided to call a week later to see if they were still on good terms. To his surprise, the deputy not only affirmed the friendship, but asked if the offer was still on. His wife had announced she was divorcing him, and he needed money. Lawler signed him up.

“Recruitment is metaphysical,” he concluded. “It’s as if you have a mental link to the target.”

In the end, he justified such manipulation by convincing himself he was improving his targets’ lives. “Maybe that’s my coping mechanism,” he told the audience.