A Day in the Shoes of a Non-Official Cover Case Officer

Well, you have completed your training but not at the Farm. The training of a NOC Case Officer is conducted in non-government facilities mostly in the area of northern Virginia that is easily accessible to the CIA personnel who will be doing the training.

After a year of training that is more detailed and specialized than that given at the Farm to Official Cover Officers, you are assigned to a CIA domestic field Station for further on-the-job training similar to that given to Official Cover Case Officers. Only your office and position are not declared as government affiliated.

You may work in alias rather than true name to further protect your identity and affiliation. In some cases, the CIA may train you in a foreign language in the US or perhaps send you abroad to study a foreign language before you become a first four-year tour as an operational NOC Case Officer.

Finally, you are integrated into a US company or institution to provide you with cover. You may work at the company or institution for a period of three to six months before being assigned overseas as its representative or employee. It has now been around five years since you entered employment with the CIA in the NOC program and you are ready to do this!

After six months at the Station you have become an integral part of the Station’s pool of NOC Case Officers but you have never been and will never be inside the physical boundaries of the Station. You have a through understanding of the Station’s Operating Directives and priorities the Station attaches to each of these. You are an “outside” Case Officer and you do not have diplomatic immunity. You have no protection other than the integrity of your cover arrangement with your employer. You are only as safe as the good tradecraft you practice protects you.

Much like the Official Cover Case Officer, you as a NOC also have a routine. You come to your cover office each morning but you do not have access to the same reading materials that your Official Cover counterparts have. If you are lucky enough to have access to an encrypted email system, you can sign on to your office computer and download the encrypted intelligence reports, operational cables and other cable traffic that the Station deems pertinent to you and the objectives the Station has assigned to you. You should not have access to too much information lest it may be compromised in the event you are exposed and rolled-up by the host country security service.

If you do not have access to encrypted email, perhaps the Station has brush passed to you an encrypted disk with the cables that morning or the previous evening. It is also possible the Station may brush pass to you a roll or two of SPR(Special Processing Required) film containing the cables and other information that you need to do your job. You then develop the film with special chemicals and equipment in your concealment device and read the negatives with a special reader. Worse case, the Station may brush pass to you instructions in More of Less Invisible (MLI) format, called secret writing by laypeople.

After reading the cable traffic, you may have some cover work to do. After all, the company providing your cover expects you to do some work for them and perhaps they have sent you some email or faxes to respond to their business requirements. Normally, the NOC Case Officer should have 10-20 hours per week of legitimate cover work to do for an effective cover arrangement. However, he is still expected to put in a full workweek for the CIA.

You finish your cover work by mid-morning and now you have one hour before you must make a brush pass at 11:30 AM with your “inside” contact. During that one hour you must run an SDR (Surveillance Detection Route) with three intrusion points in an effort to insure that you are not under hostile surveillance. You then must hit the brush pass point within seconds of the pass time to insure a secure and successful pass with your inside contact.

After the brush pass you must once again run an SDR with at least three intrusion points before you can return to your office and digest the material you have just received. If all goes well that will put you within two hours of an afternoon agent meeting.

By early afternoon you prepare for an agent meeting at a local hotel at 4:00 PM. You do not have the luxury of an immediate supervisor at hand to bounce around your ideas like your “inside” counterpart has. You prepare for the meeting in nearly the same was as your “inside” counterpart does. But in your case, you are using alias documents to check into the hotel for the meeting and using the same alias with the agent, who must never know your true identity.

The agent arrives, gets your room number and calls the room to make sure all is ok for him to come up. Two or three hours later and equally exhausted as your “inside” counterpart, the meeting is over. The agent leaves first and you leave 30 minutes later, again conducting an SDR to your home just in time for dinner.

After dinner, you go to your home office space, lock the door so the kids can’t see you and open your concealment device to retrieve an encryption disk so you can begin to prepare the operational and intelligence reports from the agent meeting. By 10:00 PM your reports are ready for transmission to the Station via CIA headquarters using an encrypted email system. Transmission done, you can finally retire for the evening.