Anonymous asked about effectiveness of NOC recruitment in open access society.

Q. The effectiveness of the NOC program in the past was based on a highly secretive selection process - personal referrals by academicians, military branch experience (i.e. combat veterans, special ops. delta force, Navy SEAL, etc.) with appropriate language abilities, and formal Company officers. With The Company's current open publicity advertisement for NOC and their various historical types of approved released documentations, how can this be an effective means when such openness of our country's national clandestine service can be researched and digest by enemy nations hostile to the USA ? Your professional insights and management experience are highly appreciated.

A. I struggle with this issue myself! The mandate from Congress to drastically increase the number of NOC case officers results in throwing numbers at the problem to resolve it. I hold the opinion that as you force an increase in numbers of this nature you reduce the quality of the end product. This reduction in quality in my opinion results from not only the recruitment process of taking younger candidates right out of college or with little real world business experience but also by short-cuts being taken in training these recruits in order to get them to the field ASAP. I would prefer that all NOC officers have some military experience since such experience tends to add a level of maturity and ability to deal with frustrations and stress. Also having military experience usually emplies that the candidate may have some experience in a foreign country which the NOC candidate recruited off the streets or out of college may not have. Since the NOC will spend some 90 percent of his career abroad the Company needs to know in advance whether or not the candidate is able to adopt and operate in a foreign country.

It should probably take a good five years to recruit, train, cover and dispatch a NOC to the field and once there, it should still take another year of on-the-job type training before the NOC becomes an effective producer. By trying to reduce this period at the mandate of Congress we are placing our foot right in front of the barrell waiting for someone to pull the trigger! Patience is no longer appreciated as it was in by-gone days. As a result many of these younger NOCs have not developed the skills to manouver in the system and thus easily become frustrated and resign from the program. Result is wasted taxpayer money. The Company's Office of External Development responsible for the NOC program realizes these problems and is caught between a rock and the hard place unable to deal effectively with it because of Congressional mandates. So they press on doing the best they can with the limitations they are given as any good bureaucrat does.

I must disagree with your contention that public openess leaves the clandestine service open to public exposure. We have always had an open and free press who love to nose around in Company business and our enemies have their methods, too, but the layers of secrecy make it impossible to expose large numbers of members of the intelligence service under well documented covers. NOCs are more thoroughly covered and protected than the average inside officer under government covers. So I do not see this as a big issue.

Anonymous asked about the role of the NOC's spouse!

Q. Often times, while overseas on tours of duties, a NOC's spouse may play in an important supporting role. However, since a NOC does not have any diplomatic immunity (i.e get out of jail free card) if caught at host country, assuming the spouse agrees and the NOC does not want to expose the family to his / her work resulting in their local recruits / agents finding out about the NOC's family or where they live (minimizing any danger and harm to the family), is that acceptable to The Company ? Would appreciate your thoughts on this issue.

A. The Company does not expect the NOC's spouse to become involved in any agent handling role with the NOC case officer. In fact, such participation is not desired but is not unheard of either as you will see below. Thus the agent would have no knowledge of the NOC's family situation at all. However, the Company does expect the spouse to be involved in a supporting role in the agent recruitment cycle, such as spotting, vetting, development, assessment but not directly in agent recruitment itself. In fact, in some cases the NOC's spouse may receive some training, both in the US and abroad, at Company expense. My own spouse received several years of foreign language training in three differenr languages at Company encouragement and expense. She was also trained by me in deaddrop loading and unloading. In one of my cases my wife and infant daughter acted as live-drops to receive film drops from one of my agents who refused to rushpass them directly to me. Refer to the Tales section of the blog to read details of this incident. My daughter was probably the youngest co-opted agent in the history of the Company! In this case, the agent knew me only in operational alias and did not know my wife or daughter by any name. He was a long-term valued asset in a country under martial law where foreigners were all suspect. My wife is Asian and fit well into the local society where I ovbiously stood out like a Christmas tree.

To get back to your question, the spouse can handle many roles in the agent recruitment cycle, especially valued is the second set of ears. It is always of value to get a second opinion from the opposite sex on what the agent candidate may have meant by a certain phrase. It is also of value to have a second person vetting the agent candidate with questions that you may not have thought about. If you are so fortunate to have a couples gathering where the agent candidate and his/her spouse are together you and your spouse may split them off for separate conversations for insight into the motivations and vulnerabilities of both partners. Thus your spouse may play an equally important role with the NOC is assessment of the couple.

Something that you may not have considered is the fact that the NOC spouse can gain an appreciation of the NOC's role in the agenda of the Company which may strengthen the NOC-spouse martial relationship. Further, the NOC spouse may feel a genuine part of the Company team which may help insure more tolerance for the NOC's heavy workload that may keep him away from the family for long periods of time. On the whole, having a spouse who is a participant with the NOC is seen within the Company as a definite plus and to that end the Company will provide ample opportunity for training. I knew a NOC couple in the 1980's where the supporting wife was so active and valuable that she was eventually hired as a NOC.

Anonymous asked How to Elicit Information from Unwitting Contacts

Q. How do you get people to open up and divulge important information without their becoming suspicious that you are a CIA agent?

A. Roll playing is an important tool for the CIA Case Officer. Operating under cover and in alias, the CIA officer is given the freedom to completely change his persona, to alter his personality to fit the situation at hand. This is an arena where acting skills are so important. The Case Officer in alias can break away from the confines of his true character to become someone completely different. Operating in alias and perhaps light disguise the Case Officer might find himself/herself doing things that he would never do ordinarily. I am a fairly traditional person with fairly high moral standards, a sense of fair play and I like to think I am fairly intelligence with a quick grasp of any subject matter that comes up in discussion. I found roll playing to be fun.

On one occasion, however, while developing a contact in alias and a light disguise I found myself compelled to play the role of an idiot to feed the ego of a contact who felt that all Americans were dumb and that it was his job to educate us. In fact, he felt that everyone, even his own countrymen, were well beneath his intellectual level and he was probably right!

The agent was an expert in the field of sub-micron lithography, one of only a few such experts in his country at the time. It seemed the dumber I acted the more he would divulge information about his research. I managed to use this dumber than dumb technique over a period of almost a year to elicit information about his research in this high technology field. Clearly his vulnerability was his superiority complex and vast ego that was easily manipulated to obtain not only his verbal elicitation but also numerous documents on his research. Through this mechanism we were able to assess the level of this technology without recruiting the contact and at very little expense to the US taxpayers. All that was required was a bit of acting and a shift in personality on my part and a few meals a month with the contact.

Of course each situation varies but there are key ingredients common to all relationships where you are trying to elicit information on value. True rapport is necessary to place both parties at ease. Rapport implies a level of trust between the two parties. This rapport also implies some give and take by each party where both parties feel they are getting something from the relationship. What each party may be getting from the relationship does not have to be stated, implied or even understood by the other parties. The CIA case officer in the relationship must develop over a period of time an understanding of the motivations and vulnerabilities of the contact and to use these to encourage the contact to talk about the information that is desired. Of course, the contact knows that he is divulging information but he has no idea, if the CIA officer’s cover is good, that he is divulging information to US intelligence. This is what makes it elicitation information and thus why the contact is called an elicitation contact. Over the coming months I will recall more such incidents from my past work where I can offer them on the blog.

Anonymous asked about use of polygraphs on CIA officers!

Q. During the vetting process for a potential NOC officer, and for a NOC who has been in the field every few years a polygraph test is given by the CIA. In your professional experience, how effective is the polygraph -

(a) Can the test be ethnically biased for potential NOC officers born abroad with US citizenship?

(b) Can the test be an indicator whether the potential NOC can be an effective officer in the field?

(c) For what purpose to test current NOC officers every few years?


A. The Polygraph examination has several names used by CIA Case Officers. One name is classified. One is flutter. Another is simply “the box”. Box and flutter are used both as a verb and a noun such as “The agent was boxed (or fluttered) last week” or “He has to go on the box (or will be fluttered) next week”. Flutter is rarely used these days. It was common back in the 1950s to early 1970s.

The Box is only as effective as the qualifications of the examiner and the quality of questions being asked on it. I have been on the box about six times during my career but I have used it as an investigative tool in authenticating my agents about a hundred times. You might check the Facts section of the blog under the chapter on Agent Authentication for further details of use of the Box in agent handling.

Your question relates to boxing NOCs prior to and during employment. Generally speaking all CIA officers undergo a Box about once every five years but some are more frequent depending on the sensitivity of assignments, unresolved or questionable areas of previous Box exams, etc. In general the Box is used to determine possible lifestyle areas that may call into question a person’s loyalty, integrity, discretion, character and morals (LIDMC) pronounced Lid Mack, including financial improprieties, drug use, sexual sensibilities, and security issues such as the presence of hostile control, etc.

While the Box can be ethnically biased, in my opinion, that bias can be reduced by an experienced examiner who has experience with foreign assets. Most examiners do have such experience since most of the people whom they box are foreign agents. The selection and translation of questions is vital to a successful box if administered in a foreign language.

Since the Box only measures physiological responses to the questions measurable within the body, the Box examiner has to use his own best judgment to evaluate what these responses indicate. Do they indicate deception or is there some underlying issue involved? In the case of boxing foreigners, is there something in their value system that may make them respond to a question in a way as to indicate deception? Can a question be a “loaded question” to one person and be a normal question to another where each responds differently yet honestly to the question? A good Box examiner will recognize these areas and adjust his technique to the situation. The average examiner may miss the nuances and potentially fail a good NOC candidate.

Can the test be an indicator of whether the potential NOC can be an effective officer in the field? I doubt it. That is not the reason the box is administered. It is not a personality test. During the vetting process the CIA will administer to the employee candidate a number of assessment tests that are designed to determine whether or not they have the type of personality desired by for NOCs. NOCs must be self-starters able to work under extreme pressure with little or no supervision for long periods of time. They must be able to adjust and adapt in a foreign environment with little or no contact with other CIA personnel. They require a high tolerance for frustration, both from the operational environment and from the CIA bureaucracy that will always be second-guessing their field work. The Box cannot tell you about those qualities.

Anonymous asked about CIA "Black" Station Program!

Q. As the NOC program typically functions as an elite entity, made up of a small cadre of carefully selected case officers, some of whom would spend years in training and a decade or more overseas with only intermittent contact with headquarters.

According to a recent article, CIA has a new plan calling for the newly created front companies (and not the legitimate US corporation overseas subsidiary) to serve as way stations even for relatively inexperienced officers, who would be rotated in and out much the way they would in standard embassy assignments.

The idea was that these were going to be almost like black stations, to build something that had a life span, that had durability.

In the process, the agency hoped to break a logjam in getting post-Sept. 11 recruits overseas(as thousands of applicants had rushed to join the CIA after the attacks, and many were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq). But outside of those war zones, open slots were scarce.

In your opinion, would such a front company (black stations) be as effective (operationally and cost) as US State Dept cover ?


A. The program you describe is known as platforming. It first surfaced back in 1992 as an option the CIA considered to place a number of NOC officers under one single commercial cover facility devised, structured and established the CIA. The facility would be a super devised cover facility ostensibly doing some form of business but in fact no real business would actually be done. It basically would provide cover for status.

The predecessor to this was the NOC “cluster”. At large CIA stations there were often several NOC officers in the field. One of the methods to handle all these NOC case officers was to place them under the supervision of the senior grade NOC officer as cluster chief having primary responsibility for meeting with the inside contact within the Station. Each NOC had his own commercial cover company thus no link between the NOCs publically. So long as they employed good tradecraft, ostensibly there would be no way to connect them as having any sort of connection or relationship.

In 1992 ad 1993 the idea of the NOC platform gained popularity within the CIA and some test runs were made to see the problems that may surface in the concept. Several surfaced immediately. Since all NOCs were under the same over, if one NOC gets his cover blown, then all NOCs are contaminated. Thus to lower this risk, certain limiting parameters were employed. One was that the devised cover facility would be based stateside, with NOCs deployed on temporary duty assignment (TDY) to the field, sometimes employing operational aliases under another devised cover facility that, if blown, would not expose the other NOCs under the original devised cover facility. Well, as you can see if begins to get complicated already. A number of other problems were also involved that I will not go into at this time. Turf wars - where the CIA Station abroad and the NOC platofrm station based stateside had conflicts of interests - were common.

Now let us look back at the original purpose of NOCs from the 1950s and 1960s. NOCs were originally intended only to be agent handlers in alias identities as CIA case officers. They were supposed to handle only the most sensitive and productive agents within a Station’s stable of agents. This was supposed to add a layer of security since foreign security services were known to conduct surveillance against suspected CIA officers from within the local CIA Station. A NOC, having no ties to either the US government nor the local American Embassy or other suspected CIA station facilities, would have no reason to be under surveillance. Like just any other American businessperson the NOC should expect to go about his business with a low risk of hostile surveillance. So to enhance security of the Stations most sensitive agents, they were turned over to NOCs for handling.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s this view began to change. NOCs were now expected to use their commercial cover company to spot and develop targets of interest to the CIA and to “spin” them off to other inside officers for recruitment so as not to expose the NOC as having any CIA connection. Easier said than done! In the late 1970’s some CIA Stations began expanding the scope of NOC responsibilities still further. NOCs were now expected to also employ documented aliases under devised commercial cover facilities to spot, develop and even “commercially” recruit agents and handle them as commercial consultants to produce intelligence. The agent would not know that he was reporting to the CIA. Once these gates were opened and produced positive results a flood of other tasks were opened to NOCs to perform.

Now let’s get back to more recent developments. The aftermath of 911 produced a flurry of scrutiny from the US Congress on the NOC program. As mentioned in the previous posting, Congress wanted to vastly increase manpower in the program but this required time and money and congress was not very understanding about either. Here again the platform concept was revisited and given new life.

Your question: Do I think it would be effective both operationally and cost-wise? It depends on the tasking! While as an old hand I have reservations about tasking NOCs to do a job that inside case officers can well do, I know that NOCs can do most all tasks as well or better than the average inside case officer. Mind you, I have been on the inside at a CIA station, on the outside as a paramilitary case officer and also as a NOC officer for most of my career. I have also sat on a headquarters country desk as a desk officer responsible for administration and support of a Stations NOC contingent. So I have pretty much seen it all. NOCs have more risk exposure than the average case officer since we have no diplomatic immunity and the American corporation doing the CIA a legitimate service by providing the cover overseas for a NOC officer has great financial exposure should the NOC’s cover be blown. So I believe that NOCs, assigned to the platform concept where the cover facility is a CIA devised cover with no overseas risks, should be called upon to conduct tasks with more risks than the NOC officer under legitimate commercial cover. Personally, I would prefer to retreat to the concept of NOCs under legitimate commercial covers doing agent handling of the Station’s most sensitive assets and perhaps some spotting and developing work.

The platform concept I believe can be operationally effective. The CIA has for years had clandestine domestic Stations in key large US cities that target foreign visitors, foreign students and foreign officials, both civilian and military, who are inside the US on assignment, training or for education. The CIA officers staffing these facilities are both NOCs as well as regular inside case officers on rotational assignments. These officers work out of these domestic Stations under devised cover facilities and in alias. These domestic Stations produce some quality recruitments who return to their native countries as fully recruited CIA assets in place. The NOC platform concept as envisioned today could provide a valuable contribution to overseas targeting and recruitment similar to the CIA domestic Stations.

But will it be cost effective. This is also possible if it, in fact, replaces manpower that would otherwise be assigned overseas at a Station. It will cost considerably less to post a NOC and his family in the US than to post them abroad. Housing costs less, school tuition is nil in US public schools where abroad the cost of tuition at international (English) educational facilities is often more than college in the US. Would savings here be able to offset the cost of frequent international travel and living expenses? These are just a few cost considerations. There are many, many more.

So yes, the CIA is going forward with platforming NOCs under such “black” stations. Let’s just hope that the concept does not get bastardized and turn into something that it should not be.

Anonymous asked about NOC ethnicity!

1. After 9/11 the CIA began actively recruiting NOC officers (those who are US citizens with native foreign language ability and authenticity). According to one report, there are currently 7 to 8 such NOC officers of Middle Eastern heritage and Arabic fluency out in the field. Yet, I have difficulty researching information as to how many such NOC officers with Asian heritage of Chinese or Korean abilities. Any thoughts you may share on this topic is appreciated (unless it is classified).

Yes, the total number of NOC officers and their ethnic mix is classified! Shortly after 911 the US Congress mandated the CIA to vastly increase the pool of NOCs, but mandating an increase is easy while making it happen is a difficult, expensive and a lengthy process. From the time of recruiting a NOC candidate, vetting, clearing, training, finding cover and placing the NOC if the field is a five year task. It is also a very expensive task! Doing the same for an inside case officer takes less than half the time and one-fourth the expense.

When I became a NOC in the early 1970’s the program inside the CIA was a disjointed endeavor that was run mainly by each area division and the country desks therein. They would put out their NOC needs to the Central Cover Staff, who, in turn, would try to find a NOC, mainly from inside the agency itself. To encourage inside case officers to become NOC officers, they were offered financial incentives, mainly a 10% increase in their pay grade salary. Sometimes the country Station may find a candidate in the field, perhaps retired military personnel or American business people, and vet them for recruitment as NOCs but this was in no way a centralized process and treatment of NOCs was different from that of inside officers. For example, most NOCs were “contract officers”, that is they were placed on two or four year contracts but the CIA could terminate the contract with any cause. However, inside officers who converted to NOC were reclassified as Staff Agents with more rights and protections than a contract employee NOC. Today, all NOC’s are afforded the same rights as their inside counterparts.

In the mid-1980’s, however, the CIA got serious about the NOC program when forces both within the CIA and outside, mainly Congress, saw the true potential of NOC case officers as the early templates of the program began to show that NOC officers could go places and obtain information impossible for an inside case officers tainted with the stigma of being a US government official. At this time the program was centralized and funded as it should be and the number of NOCs vastly increased. Today the program is unrecognizable from those early days. Still, however, the ratio of NOCs to inside case officers is around fifteen to one and only about half the pool of NOC officers is actually assigned overseas at any one time. The others are either in the US in training or on rotational assignment as some of the CIA’s domestic offices.

Now, you asked about Asian NOC officers. I knew about eight such NOC officers in the 1980’s to early 1990’s and supervised and trained several of them, all were born abroad and were naturalized US citizens with English as their second language. All had good natural instincts for this game and were quality officers with the only shortcoming being their reports writing skills in English. If you are convinced this is what you want to do, I suggest you prepare your resume with a covering letter that you want to become a NOC and submit it to the Company via the Website. Good luck.

Anonymous asked about Case Officer Comparisons between NOC and Inside Officers

1. How do NOC officers and Official Cover Officers compare in terms of effectiveness and productivity? How do they compare in terms of promotions?

Between the early 1970’s and 1990’s while I was a NOC Case Officer the CIA witnessed a dramatic increase in the productivity of its Case Officers, especially its Non-Official Cover Case Officers. This increase can be attributed primarily to advances in computer and information technology.

In by-gone days – 20 to 40 years ago, NOC Case Officers had a great disadvantage compared with their inside counterparts inside the CIA Station who had immediate access to files, to computers or typewriters when preparing their reports. NOC Case Officers were trained in More or Less Invisible (MLI) systems of reports writing but some MLI processes took hours to complete a few pages of reports. Some Stations employed Special Processing Required (SPR) film for reporting and communications with NOC officers. This also took hours for the NOC officer to process the film, read the reports then destroy the film. When submitting reports to the Station using SPR film, the NOC officer had to type reports on water-soluble paper, photograph the reports using SPR film, destroy the reports by dissolving in water, hide his typewritten ribbon in a concealment device, then brush pass or dead drop the SPR film for retrieval by his inside contact.

Other stations employed various secret writing systems. Using an MLI carbon system, for example, a NOC officer would take the transfer paper – the paper upon which the invisible report will be written – and wipe the paper using a soft cloth in all four directions to prepare it to accept a smooth transfer of the written or typed report. Then the NOC would place the MLI carbon on top of the transfer paper, place water-soluble paper on top of the carbon and begin to type or write the report. One MLI carbon could be used for around 10 pages of reports. When the report was finished, the NOC would take the transfer paper, turn it over and write a normal letter or some innocuous message, then prepare the report for submission to the Station by dead drop, brush pass or some other pre-determined means. Next the NOC officer temporarily placed the water-soluble paper upon which the report was written in his concealment device until the Station had confirmed receipt and successful development of the MLI report. Finally the water-soluble draft would be destroyed.

Some stations used One Time Pads (OTPs) for NOC officers and agents to submit reports to the Station. Using OTPs is a lengthy but secure encryption system where the NOC officer or agent prints his report on a piece of paper, then takes out his OPT sheet – a code sheet containing a series of four digit numbers used to encode the message using what is called false subtraction. The report submitted by dead drop or brush pass to the Station is a series of four digit numbers, not an alphabetical report. The Station then takes it’s OPT decode sheet corresponding to the agent or Case Officers encode sheet and decodes the message. While secure, the process takes hours to encode and decode for a simple two or three page report.

All of these reports writing systems were painstaking and time-consuming. Often the time-pressed NOC officer would abbreviate the reports in order to save time and this was often the cause of misunderstanding or misinterpretations at the Station when the reports were processed and prepared in intelligence or operational reports format.

After the NOC Case Officers’ reports were completed using any of these processes, he had to find a way to get the reports to the Station. This required either a personal meeting with an inside contact, a dead drop, live- drop or brush pass. All of these required more non-productive time running Surveillance Detection Routes (SDRs) and increased the risk of exposure to hostile security services or perhaps just accidental exposure to casuals (just regular people on the street who may accidentally see the Case Officer doing something suspicious).

In recent years, however, there have been advances in computers, information technology and the availability of cheap but secure encryption systems. This has allowed the CIA to develop secure systems for NOC officers to type reports on their home computers and save the information on encrypted disks for passage to the Station. Some systems even employ encrypted email systems so the NOC can email reports safely and securely to CIA Headquarters and the Station. So the old time-consuming MLI and SPR film systems are now nearly a by-gone technology for the NOC Case Officer. As a result, the NOC officer today now has more free time to devote to operational activities such as agent spotting, vetting and development, and, of course, agent handling.

These advances have enabled the NOC Case Officer to become more competitive with his inside counterparts who have always had the advantage in terms of access to information and technology. These new electronic communications and reporting systems have also been beneficial to the NOC Case Officer’s operational security since it reduces the frequency of contacts between the NOC officer and his inside contact. This lowers the Case Officers potential for exposure to a hostile security service.

These are just a few techniques now available to NOC Case Officers. There are numerous others that the Company has deleted from the original manuscript so out of concern for my fellow officers I will not discuss these. The main point, here, however, is that of productivity. Having personally used both the old system and some of the newer technology based systems I believe that NOC Case Officer productivity has increased twofold between the 1970’s and 1990’s. What this means in terms of manpower is that a contingent of 100 NOC officers in 1970 would by 1990 equal 200 officers.

As for promotions, NOC officers (outside officers) and “inside” officers have completely different promotion systems within the CIA. NOC’s are only compared with other NOC’s of the same grade level for promotions. Separate promotion panels evaluate NOC officers and inside officers. A senior NOC officer is assigned to the promotion panel to evaluate other NOC officers.