Anonymous asked about use of foreign NOC case officers in CIA recruitment

Q. In the Middle East and Eastern Europe, where the local citizenry who may be recruited to be agent of the Company, there seemed to be an expectation of the Company's representative to be "American (caucasian)". In your professional experience, if a NOC case officer is of Asian heritage with command of their native language operating in Asia, would the local citizenry potential agents expect the Company representative to be "American (caucasian)" in order to buy-in to the recruitment? Your thoughts are deeply appreciated.

A. Your observation is correct! Most people regardless of their country would probably expect a CIA case officer who might try to recruit them as an agent to be an “American” and this usually implies a Caucasian. This has been the historical view! Of course, the CIA understands this view and allocates its case officer resources accordingly. When I first entered the ranks of the Company, most case officers, both NOCs as well as “inside” case officers, were Caucasians. But over the years as the demographics of the US population changed, the Company deliberately attempted to adjust its personnel base to be more reflective of the national demographics as a whole. Thus the demographics of the Clandestine Service became more reflective of the national demographics.

At the same time, the Company began to recognize that the linguistic and cultural understanding of case officers of foreign ethnic origins played an important role in its pool of assets. For example, back in the 1950-1960’s the Company ran a program using native Chinese contract employees as debriefers/interrogators. They were so successful that the Company converted many of them to permanent status as case officers that opened the door for more officers of foreign origin to come into the ranks of the Clandestine Service as case officers. I had the honor to work with many of these officers. I had one as my supervisor as a young NOC and later supervised several of these officers when I gained seniority. I learned a great deal about how to recruit, train and handle Chinese agents because of the experienced I gained from them. For a period of several years while assigned to an Asian country, I was supervisor of a “cluster” of NOC case officers that included two ethnic Chinese, one ethnic Japanese, one Cuban, one Korean and two Caucasian American case officers. All were multilingual.

Getting back to your question of using an Asian, let’s just say Chinese, NOC case officer with language ability in a Middle Eastern or Eastern European country. It might be more appropriate to use the ethnic Chinese NOC case officer in a false flag recruitment. That would mean that the target would believe that the NOC officer was an agent for Chinese (either mainland China or Taiwanese) intelligence. For another view, it is far more possible that a NOC case officer would recruit targets as commercially recruited agents who are not witting of any CIA affiliation. So an Asian NOC case officer or an American Caucasian officer, for that matter, would face less security implications should the operation become exposed than an overtly CIA recruitment attempt in the event that the target refuse recruitment and inform his security service of the attempt. If the commercial recruitment is accepted by the target, it is always possible in the future to gradually move the operation into an official CIA relationship with fewer security implications.