Official Cover and Non-Official Cover

Throughout your career with the CIA you will be told to “live your cover”. Your cover becomes an integral part of your daily life. Live your cover and you are secure. Break cover and you jeopardize yourself, your family and the agents and assets entrusted to you. A successful cover is one that is so integrally woven into the fabric your daily life that you do not need to give it a second thought, just routine maintenance. It becomes natural.

There are two categories of cover used by the agency for field operatives. One is Official Cover and the other Non-Official Cover. Official Cover simply implies placing a Case Officer into a position overseas under the guise of an officer for another agency of the US government. The Case Officer may be given “light” cover duties to perform for two or three hours per day to establish his cover credentials. Often, however, this is not the case and the officer will devote full-time to his agency duties.

Usually, Official Cover implies some degree of diplomatic immunity that protects the CIA officer in the event he is caught in the act of espionage. About 95% of CIA officers assigned abroad have some form of Official Cover. The normal assignment abroad for an Official Cover Officer is two years, four at the most since the CIA prefers to rotate officers from headquarters to the field or to another Station on a fairly frequent basis.

Then there is Non-Official Cover (called NOC – pronounced “knock”). Non-Official Cover is provided by corporations or institutions at the request of the CIA. The most common type is corporate cover where the CIA officer is integrated into the staff of a US corporation with the full knowledge and consent of the company’s CEO and other select corporate officers. He is trained by the cover company and assigned overseas as a corporate representative. CIA officers under Non-Official Cover have no diplomatic immunity; therefore, attention to cover maintenance and personal security must be exacting and detailed.

Until the early 1990’s the CIA maintained a stable of several hundred NOC officers of which about one-half were assigned abroad under deep cover at any time. The rest were usually in the US in training or training other young NOC officers preparing for assignment abroad. Of NOC officers assigned abroad at any one time, less than two dozen may be considered Senior NOC officers who have achieved a high level of intelligence production and agent recruitment. Because of the high cost and magnitude of support required by NOC officers the CIA requires a minimum of a four year assignment abroad and actually prefers that NOC officers remain in the field for their full twenty plus year careers.

Starting around 1993 the CIA began to expand the NOC program due in part by the perceived success of the earlier NOC program by Congress and by the ever changing nature of the targets of espionage in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR. The CIA began to experiment with “plat-forming” many NOC’s together into a unit responsive to a geographical unit with several or even all the NOC Case Officers under the same commercial cover. The problem with this approach is that should one NOC officer become compromised, then all other NOC officers with the same cover are potentially exposed as well.

Prior to the NOC platform approach, many of the larger CIA stations had already developed successful programs of NOC clusters. NOC clusters were teams of NOC officers working together under the supervision of a senior NOC officer but with each NOC officer having a separate commercial cover arrangement. They maintained separate commercial covers and worked together in secret usually targeted against some specific target within the CIA Station. For example, the China Cluster would target Chinese targets such as the Chinese Embassy, Chinese organizations in the host country such as China Airlines, Chinese corporations abroad and even Chinese students abroad. The Internal Cluster would target the host country government organizations and host government political parties. The High Tech cluster would target government and research institutions and foreign high-tech corporations.

The more traditional approach to NOC management in the field has been to have one NOC Case Officer in direct contact with one inside contact. This has been the traditional trend especially in Stations with fewer than five or six NOC Case Officers. This type of compartmentation more securely protects the other NOC officers in the event that one NOC officer and his inside contact should become exposed to a foreign security service. Clearly the weakest link here is the inside contact who is the more likely to be under hostile surveillance by the local security service.

With the growth in recent years of terrorism worldwide as a major collection target of the CIA, Special Operations and Programs Officers (SOPO) have joined the ranks of the NOC program for deployment in foreign theaters where they could not otherwise openly operate as Special Operations officers. The report card on the effectiveness of this approach is still out but initial reports are encouraging.

Often within the CIA you will hear people talk about “cover for action”, “cover for access”, and “cover for status”. These refer to the particular utility that a cover provides. For example, a NOC officer under corporate cover as a salesman for semiconductor equipment will have access to corporate engineers and buyers of Japanese or South Korean semiconductor manufacturers. In such a position he will be able to assess and develop foreign engineers and administrators for potential motivation and vulnerabilities that may subject them to recruitment by the CIA as agents inside their companies. Semiconductor trade is a competitiveness issue between the US and these countries that requires frequent adjustment of trade agreements. Such a NOC cover position will provide the CIA officer with cover for access as well as cover for action.

Because the careers of Official Cover officers and NOC officers are so different, they do not compete against each other for promotions. Official Cover officers only compete against other Official Cover officers of the same grade for promotions and the same applies for NOC officers. Other aspects of the careers of Official Cover and NOC officers is so different that even that division of the CIA which administers the NOC program is located separate from the CIA compound. Called the Office of External Development by some and the Organization External Division by others, the name that everyone agrees on is just simply O-E-D. OED is located in the northern Virginia area in a private office building and gives the appearance of being a legitimate company. Personnel from CIA headquarters are not allowed to visit the OED office. They must meet NOC and OED personnel at safehouses scattered around the northern Virginia area.

Those who saw the first Tom Cruise movie Mission Impossible know that the NOC list had been stolen and Tom and company were to retrieve it to keep it from being sold and expose the identities of all the agency’s NOC officers. In actual fact, there is no place where the true identities of all The Company’s NOC officers are kept on such a list! NOC officers are never referred to in their true names inside The Company. They are given a pseudonym, as are all CIA officers, and their cover company is given a cryptonym to be used in all correspondence and communications.

NOC officers receive the same basic employment benefits as other CIA personnel in their grade level. They receive the same annual leave and sick benefits, the same medical and hospitalization insurance and the same retirement benefits. Where the policy of a NOC officer’s cover company differs with that of the CIA, then overtly the NOC officer must follow the policy of his cover company. Covertly, the CIA will make appropriate adjustments to insure that the NOC is neither compensated too much nor deprived of his due allowances and benefits. NOC officers, however, do receive 20% premium pay over inside officers because of the extra demands and risks of the position.

Some 30-40 years ago Stations were allowed to recruit and train NOC officers from among the local US student and US expatriate communities. Such early NOCs were hired as contract employees rather than staff officers. A staff officer in those days who volunteered for the NOC program was classified as a Staff Agent. In those early days the NOC program was essentially run between the Station and the corresponding Headquarters desk and the treatment, training and benefits of NOCs varied greatly. There was no centralized handling of NOCs. Finding corporate cover was also sometimes a problem. This was the responsibility of the CIA’s Central Cover Staff but it was a difficult process especially where the Stations made certain demands of the cover that was often hard to fulfill.

This all changed with the creation of OED in the early 1980’s. All recruiting and training of NOCs as well as the development of commercial cover was centralized in OED. As a result while the bureaucracy and budget of the program grew, so did its effectiveness. Standards for NOC recruitment were established, as was the vetting process for NOC applicants. The CIA stopped the transfer of staff officers into the NOC program and all new NOC’s were recruited clean without any hint of CIA or government affiliation. New standards resulted in recruitment of NOC’s with real world business experience but at the same time it led to an elite group that was results oriented with a disdain for bureaucracy.

The program grew rapidly doubling the deployment of NOCs worldwide between 1975 and 1986. By 1993 NOC overseas deployment grew another 50% with the US Congress still pressing for an increase in the program. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the US Congress provided additional funding and mandates for the CIA to continue expansion of the NOC program. Clearly, the strain on the CIA’s resources for recruitment, training and management of such a significant increase and the lack of available commercial covers for these positions has reached a saturation point.

Actually, by the mid-1990s the NOC Case Officer pool awaiting cover arrangements for deployment overseas had exhausted available covers. Many US corporations had become reluctant to provide positions to the CIA; thus the agency began to look toward smaller US businesses for cover. Often, however, these smaller businesses lacked the resources to serve the needs of the NOC officers in the field. Many lacked the financial foundation in terms of overall cash flow or profitability to truly justify the expense of placing an employee overseas. Such institutional problems create internal problems in smaller businesses where unwitting employees do not realize that the CIA is actually footing the bill to cover the NOC Case Officer’s expenses. Usually, in a business, large or small, only a handful of people, perhaps two or three people, are actually witting of the clandestine relationship with the CIA.

With changing priorities following the fall of the Soviet Union, the CIA began to seek covers to provide a higher degree of access by the NOC Case Officer to new targets of interest. As the CIA’s priorities changed as a result of new directions from US government policymakers, the CIA began to seek covers with access to terrorist targets, drug-related targets, money laundering high technology and commercial competitiveness issues. The CIA has found it to be a significant challenge to obtain and to maintain commercial cover arrangements that provides such access.