My CIA career has come up several times lately, during new release promo events for BARRACUDA BAY, the latest Detective Emilia Cruz mystery.
House of Mystery podcast
When I was chatting with House of Mystery podcast co-hosts Alan Warren and Joe Goldberg, one of them asked that given my long CIA career, “Why don’t you write spy thrillers instead of police procedurals?”
It was a fair question. Many retired CIA officers go on to write spy thrillers, like Joe (DEVIL’S OWN DAY, etc) and Jason Matthews (RED SPARROW, etc). But I didn’t have anything clever or different to say that would make me stand out in that crowd.
I did, however, have something to say about how cartels and corruption are eroding Mexico’s rich culture and civil authority. The situation tugs at my heartstrings after years living in the region. Hence the Detective Emilia Cruz series set in Acapulco, otherwise known as Ground Zero for drug war violence.
In one of our first videos, I show off two CIA challenge coins.
Lived to tell the tale
Recently, I shared how my personal experiences have inspired more than one scene in the Detective Emilia Cruz books with fellow author Debra Goldstein. I know she can relate.
Debra is a former judge with meaningful professional experiences that lie behind her award-winning fiction. She left the bench to follow her passion for writing mysteries. Her novels and short stories have received Silver Falchion, IPPY, BWR, and AWC awards and been named as Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Claymore finalists.
Her most recent release is With Our Bellies Full and the Fire Dying, a collection of 18 award-winning short mysteries, from cozy to dark, centering around family and friends, their sins and sometimes redemption.
Here’s how my little “I lived to tell the tale” memoir for Debra began:
“If the police show up, make sure you’re holding the package.”
The fellow CIA officer prepping me to meet a deep cover agent wasn’t trying to scare me, although he sure succeeded.
No, he was simply being practical. I was expendable. The source wasn’t.
Meeting a CIA source in a foreign country involved a head-spinning number of variables, not least of which were avoiding local cops and hostile intelligence services like those from China and Russia.
As my heart hammered, I memorized the details of the upcoming rendezvous. I’d been a CIA officer for 12 years, but meeting agents was never my job.
In the language of modern espionage, the officer who was supposed to meet the agent had been “burned.” Basically, the bad guys knew who he was. With a hostile service on his tail, the compromised officer could not meet the agent, whose situation already simmered with danger.
Part of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, I wasn’t the kind of officer you read about in John Le Carré novels, furtively doing brush passes with agents or leaving coded messages in dead drops. I ran a technical collection platform which kept me behind a computer keyboard.
This meant that I was completely unknown to the opposition. Thus, the perfect candidate to replace the compromised officer.
I rarely discuss hot potato topics, but this week it became painfully clear that the CIA I joined in 1985 is not the CIA of today.
the nonpartisan rule
I entered on duty the day after Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration. At that time, it was made crystal clear to me that the CIA was staunchly apolitical and any deviation from that standard was an ethics violation. As far as I knew, this expectation covered all employees and was non-negotiable.
My mother once asked what people were saying at work about an upcoming US presidential election. I replied that no one ever talked about domestic politics. The CIA mission is external to the US and that’s where our attention was. We talked about elections around the world—Russia, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, anywhere voting takes place. But never the US.
I still remember the collective discomfort in 2008 when an officer came into a meeting with a big Hilary Clinton button pinned to her purse. How could this officer be so clueless? It didn’t matter who the officer supported. Overt displays of political support were persona non grata.
The lapse was especially concerning to me because I’d spent so much time in Mexico where the intel services legally sway with the wind. It’s normal for the country’s intel apparatus to be used to target domestic political figures and/or parties.
51 letter-signing rule breakers
So imagine my shock when on the eve of the 2020 US presidential election, 51 former senior intel officers, including some I knew and worked for, signed a public letter suggesting that a laptop reportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the then-candidate for president Joe Biden, was a Russian operation to discredit the Bidens.
Couched in the careful language of an intel report, the letter noted that the laptop “has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and that “We do not know if the emails . . . are genuine or not.”
According to the Politico story below, Former DCIA John Brennan’s aide carried the doubtful letter to the news outlet.
Almost 4 years later, Hunter Biden is on trial in Delaware for falsifying information on an application to purchase a handgun. His much ballyhooed laptop is Exhibit No. 16.
FBI agent Erika Jensen testified under oath that “the laptop was obtained by the FBI in 2019 with a subpoena from The Mac Shop in Wilmington.”
From the dates, this was obviously known well before the letter was signed by the 51 former intel officers.
Did any of them know? Doesn’t say much for their intel skills if they didn’t and says everything about their intentions if they did.
Verifying the laptop’s content as authored by owner Hunter Biden and not introduced into the machine by Russian spies, is egg on the face of all 51 signatories. But their letter did its job as intended. They have nothing to gain by refuting it now.
my take
Morrell and the other former intel officials who signed that letter crossed a longstanding ethics line. They had not examined the laptop nor had any way to assess its provenance.
What they did know was that their reputations would carry weight. They knew their words and the timing would aid a US presidential candidate facing fallout from the salacious content on his son’s computer.
They also knew they were still influential within the CIA and would embolden those who might use an Agency position for political purposes.
Sure, you can argue that they were “former” officials. But being a CIA officer, especially for those who rise to high position, is a lifetime commitment.
Such retirees are forever associated with the Agency. They often get contracts to do work for the CIA. They have security clearances because of their association with the CIA.
By publicly flouting the CIA’s ethical standards and in such a high profile way, the signers of the October 2020 letter opened a Pandora’s Box in the form of political partisanship and activism within the intelligence community.
You’ve been granted a tour of the original Central Intelligence Agency headquarters building outside Washington, DC.
Pass the statue of Nathan Hale as you walk through the big glass doors of the front entrance. Try not to gawk.
Once inside, the Great Seal stretches across the floor in varied shades of gray granite. A quote from the Bible is chiseled on the wall to your left. To the right, you see the Wall of Honor. Each star on the wall represents an Agency officer who died in the line of duty.
At CIA Headquarters, Nov 2016, the same day I was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal.
Walk straight ahead to the bronze bust of William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the forerunner of the CIA. Proceed past walls lined with portraits of US presidents and former Directors of National Intelligence. Pause by Leon Panetta’s portrait. His dog Bravo, who often came to the office, is in the picture with him.
Through a bank of tall windows, you’ll glimpse a big courtyard. Keep going.
You’re almost at the most highly anticipated stop on your tour.
The store
Imagine the Disney Store if it was full of items bearing the CIA seal. Everything from cuff links to glassware, cigarette lighters to tee shirts. Even a cookbook written by intelligence officers called Spies, Black Ties and Mango Pies. Hidden in the back are necessary items for busy office workers: aspirin, mouthwash, extra ties and pantyhose.
Wade into the clothing section. Ignore the ubiquitous hoodies and polos. You’re looking for treasure.
There it is.
One tee to rule them all
The tee shirt bears 3 simple sentences, the unofficial ethos of those engaged in clandestine activities. These 3 simple sentences are key to understanding how lying and deception gain traction.
Admit nothing.
Deny everything.
Make counter accusations.
Whether bold-faced lies or subtle marketing falsehoods, successful lies are grounded in at least one of these concepts.
Admit Nothing
The easiest thing to do when confronted by a lie is to not admit it. Politicians and their spokespeople do it all the time. “No comment.”
A lie of omission is when you admit nothing AND create a believably false narrative. For example, by not reporting a hot news item that might damage a political or economic ally, a media outlet implies that the story is just not that important. Not worth wasting time on it.
The best thing about lies of omission is that they’re just so durn hard to prove.
Deny Everything
Denial is most effective with creative, slippery and/or vague language. “There’s no there, there.”
WTF?
Do you recall President Bill Clinton’s 1998 denial in regard to his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky? “I did not have sex with that woman.”
Given the accusations, the word “sex” became a distracting sideshow. What does the word REALLY mean? And can we talk about it out loud?
Result? Denial AND a shiny object for detractors to chase.
Make Counter Accusations
Send the blame elsewhere. So-and-so did it, not me.
Go a step further and accuse So-and-so of having a nefarious reason for doing the bad thing. Claim to know their innermost thoughts.
Bonus points 1: make the counter accusation before the original accusation gets out there. Get ahead of the problem.
Bonus points 2: make the counter accusation into a shiny object for the audience to chase. Look! It’s Elvis!
Now as a mystery and thriller author, that education helps me create crime fiction loaded with danger and deception.
Related: The Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series
As the Information Age picks up speed, we encounter more and more instances of creative falsehoods and hidden information.
We are fooled by clever lies of omission, slippery denials, and fingers that point in the wrong direction. And then there’s marketing . . . Basically we are living in a stew of deception.
In short, I find the mechanics of lying and deception quite fascinating and will be discussing it in the months ahead.
Ready?
Tour over. Grab your tee shirt and that engraved CIA beer stein. We’ve got work to do.
On his radio show National Security This Week, thriller author and former US military intel officer Jon Olson asked me why I’d specialized in Western Hemisphere issues as an intelligence officer.
As I told one senior manager during a career development talk, I like to build things and I like to fix things. That was sort of the theme of my career, especially in the last half.
The Western Hemisphere appealed. I grew up Italian and Catholic and easily embraced local traditions of family, church, and holidays in Mexico and Central America.
So the Western Hemisphere gave me the opportunity to combine problem solving with a cultural fit.
I can tell you the exact minute my fate was sealed.
I was sitting at my desk in the office eating lunch and surfing around online. Came across a video posted by the Blog del Narco website.(I tried to link but my anti-virus software advised against it.)
For those who aren’t familiar, this uncensored site posts graphic content of narco activities in Mexico, much of which is created by the cartels and gangs themselves. It’s a “look what we’re up against” kind of site that has ebbed and flowed over the years. As you can imagine, staff is continually targeted by cartels.
So this particular video shows a clearing in the woods. There’s a dead man in the foreground, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. The video is kind of grainy, but he’s definitely dead.
There’s another guy, fully dressed, and he’s got an axe and he’s trying to chop off the dead guy’s arm at the bicep.
But either the axe is dull or the dead guy has bones like concrete because our woodsman is chopping and chopping and getting nowhere.
Meanwhile, off camera, male voices are hooting and hollering at the guy with the axe, yelling advice, questioning his strength and technique.
My bite of sandwich literally fell out of my mouth. It was such a visceral lesson in what was happening in Mexico.
You know, I remember that video in black and white. But I am not sure that it wasn’t in color.
The moment lasted
The Agency is a fairly flexible organization that wants well-rounded officers. If you have transferable skills, an understanding of how the intelligence community works, and how the different intelligence mission areas support each other, you can move across the organization.
It’s not common. Most folks, stay in a single mission area for their entire career. I was very lucky to have been able to work across all 3 major mission area: analysis, operations, and S&T, largely because I had transferable skills that could be applied to a variety of positions that focused on or were in the Western Hemisphere.
I had a retirement photo opportunity with then-CIA Director John Brennan. He greeted me with a CIA keepsake coin and a firm handshake. We posed for the photographer and chatted for a minute about favorite assignments over my 30 year career.
Front and back of Director Brennan’s keepsake challenge coin
Mystery and thriller author. Retired Central Intelligence Agency intel officer. Dog mom to Hazel and Dutch. Recovering Italian handbag addict.
A 30-year veteran of the CIA, Carmen Amato is the award-winning author of the Detective Emilia Cruz police series, the Galliano Club historical fiction thrillers and standalone suspense. Her bi-monthly Mystery Ahead newsletter is for mystery lovers like you.
