A Day in the Shoes of an Official Cover Case Officer

OK! You have completed your training at the Farm, deployed to either CIA Headquarters or a CIA domestic Station for a two year tour of on-the-job training as a junior Case Officer and have completed a one-year course in a foreign language. Finally, you have been assigned to an overseas Station under diplomatic cover as a first tour Case Officer. It has been five years since you came on board with the CIA and you are ready for this!

After six months at the Station you have become an integral part of the Station’s stable of Case Officers. You have a thorough understanding of the Station’s Operating Directives and the priorities the Station attaches to each. Most days are about the same and this one is no exception. You get to the office around 8:00 AM, get your cup of coffee and start reading the cable traffic from Headquarters and other Stations that came in overnight. This cable traffic includes Field Information Reports (intelligence disseminations), operational cables, administration cables and more. You will also find copies of all the cables that your Station sent to Headquarters and other Stations, as well. The daily reading is an important part of your education and preparation to work with your own agents and developmental contacts.

Next you begin to write operational and intelligence cables from your meeting with one of your agents the previous evening. This will include the contact report that must be written after each agent meeting. The contact report documents the history of the operation and details the intelligence production, tasking and instructions given the agent, administrative matters such as payments made to the agent, agent training, communication arrangements and more.

Intelligence disseminations are prepared for each major topic on which there is sufficient information to warrant a full dissemination. If there is not sufficiently detailed information available, you may prepare the intelligence information in the form of an operational cable called an ops intel cable.

Finally, you prepare another operational cable summarizing aspects of the agent contact report that you want to emphasize to your Headquarter's country desk. This is often done because the contact reports are cabled in a separate format for file in the agent’s 201 file and sometimes are not read at the country desk. This process may take you several hours.

Next, your plans to meet with a developmental contact for lunch are discussed with your immediate supervisor – the Chief of Station at smaller Stations, the Chief of Operations or your Branch Chief at larger Stations. They may have some suggestions or instructions for developing the target.

Then off you go to meet with the target. Depending on the nature of the relationship and the host country security service, you may have to conduct a Surveillance Detection Route (SDR) to ensure you are not under hostile surveillance just prior to meeting with the target. In this case the target knows that you are a US government official at the diplomatic mission but he does not know of your intelligence affiliation.

Your task is to elicit information from the target to determine whether the target has access to any information that may be of interest to CIA analysts and US policymakers. To do this you need to put the target at ease and willing to talk about his work. This process may take many meetings but each meeting should have a goal and you need to plan a method of questioning to get the target to respond. It is a trial and error process. After the meeting you return to the Station, discuss the results with your supervisor and draft another operational cable to document the developmental process.

Tonight you have another meeting with a recruited agent who is aware he is cooperating with US intelligence. This is a major case given to you for handling. In the afternoon you prepare for this meeting. You develop questions to task the agent to respond to intelligence requirements, you review the communications plan for the operation, you arrange the agent’s pay and a receipt for him to sign, you prepare additional operating funds to dispense to the agent for use during the next several weeks or months. If the agent has recent intelligence production you review the comments of headquarters analysts and if further follow up is needed, prepare to levy additional requirements. You again review the contact reports and operational cables from recent meetings with the agent to make sure you have covered all areas of concern to both the agent, the Station and Headquarters. After preparing for the meeting you finally go home for dinner.

After dinner you embark to meet the agent at a safehouse used exclusively for this operation. It is necessary to conduct an SDR with at least three intrusion points to detect any possible hostile surveillance. This can be done on your own but is often best done with the help of another Case Officer or even your spouse to check for hostile surveillance at each intrusion point. If any is detected, they send you a prearranged abort meeting signal before the meeting. In this case, you are clean and go on to the safehouse at least 30 minutes prior to the arrival of the agent. The safehouse is an apartment rented by a local US resident of the country that is paid in full or in part by the CIA. The safehouse keeper is usually not in the apartment during the meeting. You signal to the agent a “safety signal” to indicate that it is OK to come on to the safehouse. Your agent meeting will last one to three hours and you should feel mentally exhausted at the end. As the meeting ends you go over requirements for the agent to respond to for the next scheduled meeting.

After the meeting you once again conduct an SDR back to your apartment, making sure you are clean before going home. Once home, you place your notes from the meeting in a small concealment device till you go back to work the next morning where you will once again draft your operational cables, intelligence reports and contact report from the meeting. This is a never-ending cycle for the Case Officer, a matter of routine that hardly changes from week to week, month to month, year to year. Funny though, the routine never becomes boring simply because of the nature of the business of espionage. Sometimes it is hard to believe that you actually get paid to do this job.