13 March 2006

Cover

In one of my last official missions for the government I was to lead a delegation to a prominent south Asian nation. I was not the best qualified person to do it, but the assignment had been a bit of a hot potato, and no one else wanted to do it.

I volunteered, and with relief, the office nominated me to go. I was sent over to the new tower of the Headquarters and presented with a black diplomatic passport. The picture of me inside the cover was a dead-ringer for Slobodan Milosevic, I asked about a cover story, since it was clear to me, anyway, that even a cursory check would reveal that I wasn't exactly what I purported to be.

This called for some rapid improvisation. The woman behind the counter told me to use my own name, and say that I worked for the State Department.

I thought that was a little thin for protection, but it was not the first time. On another outing to the eastern Mediterranean I was equipped with some business cards with my name on them that claimed I worked for a contracting firm in California.

That cover would not have survived an in-depth search of the Washington phone book.

Cover is essential at some Agencies. Where I worked, the credit union insisted on knowing if you were overt or covert when you opened an account, and everyone on the other side of the building had at least two names, and sometimes many more.

I suspected part of it was to avoid returning phone calls, but there were real issues of survival involved. I was in a coalition meeting in a suite at the Willard Hotel when someone disclosed the true name of an operative I was with. There was a third-party service in the room, and my friend's face went gray with dismay.

A good cover requires a lot of work to maintain.

I knew something about the tradecraft from a series of exchanges with a covert enterprise that was in search of funding. They came to my office to plead for additional resources, since it was important that their people be plausibly who they claimed to be.

With so many records in the public domain, even in-depth and expensive covers go up in flames rapidly. Think about buying a car. There are a lot of Company people who live around Big Pink, and driving the right car is important.

Mohammed, my previously-owned Mercedes specialist up the street, explained that it was difficult when a customer refused to divulge information for a credit report. It was a no-win situation for the buyer. There was no getting around the anti-money-laundering provisions of the law, which preclude cash purchases without identification. It was intended to get the drug smugglers, but it had an impact on us, too

Refusing the report meant essentially divulging covert status, or admitting you were a drug kingpin. What is a Spook to do? But if you can't trust the nice people at Mercedes, who can you trust?

The upshot of the briefing from the cover people was that they needed to manufacture a whole cohort of bogus names, and march them right through life, from fake birth certificates to school and military service and employers. Simulating a life in the digital age is a challenge.

I was thinking about it while standing on the balcony, basking in the first heat wave of the year, seeing the faint green corona the was beginning to envelope the bare branches of winter.  With this much energy in the air, the first thunderstorms of the year cannot be far behind.

The Chicago Tribune unleashed some thunder of its own over the weekend, and I was troubled by it.

Network theory and analysis has been prominently discussed in the media as a tool for combating terrorism, which is what the NSA eavesdropping controversy is really about.

What senior correspondent John Crewdson did was take available internet tools and see what information he could produce on the government itself. He used a commercial online data service to compile a list of more than 2,600 CIA employees, some of them in covert status, and identify more that a couple dozen operating locations.

The CIA was horrified, of course, and explained that they were taking dramatic steps to fix the problem. Regrettably, they could  not reveal what they were.

I don't know if “Crewdson” is the correspondent's real name. It sounds suspicious, like the whimsical names my old associates used.

I haven't had time this morning to check him out. It would not take long, just a couple mouse clicks. But if I was looking for information on Spooks around here, the first place I would go is the Mercedes dealership, and buy my friend Mohammed a cup of coffee.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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