The Guardian, December 1987
Outside the night school in the centre of Washington DC, the sign on the wall advertised the evening’s classes: in one room, Arts and Crafts; in the other, Covert Operations. Seven dollars for either course. I paid my money and took my first step towards joining the Central Intelligence Agency.
Inside the classroom I entered a world which Peter Wright can only dream of. There at the front of the class without the aid of lawyers or the liberal press sat a former intelligence officer with 25 years of clandestine work behind him, calmly disclosing the internal workings of the secret services and fielding questions from all-comers.
Our tutor, David Atlee Phillips, was an undercover agent for the CIA in Chile in the 1950s before joining the agency full-time in 1954 in time to help engineer a coup in Guatemala. He went on to work as a CIA case officer in Cuba, Beirut, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Then he took charge of all CIA operations in Latin America including the destabilisation of the Allende government in Chile. He retired in 1975.
‘I am a sort of Cold War relic,’ he confided to us. His particular aim this evening was to help us decide whether we really wanted to work as spies by telling everything we wanted to know about the CIA but had been afraid to ask. He posed and answered a list of common questions.
‘Supposing you’re gay,’ he said. ‘Will that matter?’ It does. ‘If you’re gay, you’re not going to be hired by the CIA or the FBI.’ He told us he knew of two men who had been fired by the CIA when it was discovered that they were gay and, even though they had later successfully sued for compensation, they had not been reinstated. However, he had a tip for us, the NSA – the most secret agency of all which handles satellite intercepts – had recently allowed a gay man to keep his job.
‘Does it matter if you say you have been into drugs? Depends on the frequency and the circumstances – but you could be alright. Are women ever ordered to use sex in intelligence work? During all my time in the CIA, I never knew it to happen to a regular woman officer, but in deep cover, as a spy, it could happen.
‘If you work undercover, does that damage your chances of being promoted to ambassador? Well, it certainly does. But Nixon kicked Dick Helms upstairs and made him an ambassador when he was head of the CIA. That was because Nixon wasn’t happy that the CIA had been helping the Watergate investigation.’
After a while our teacher invited questions, at which point it became clear that my classmates were not there out of idle curiosity. They were an homogenous group – young, white, middle class, evenly divided between the sexes – and all deadly earnest about becoming covert operatives.
A woman who had just graduated from Yale confessed she had applied already but had failed to return the forms after more than six months, because they were so demanding. ‘Try again,’ he told her. They would still have her on record and it would prove she was persistent.
Another was worried that her work in disarmament would spoil her chances. ‘If it’s mainstream,OK,’ he said. ‘Intelligence officers very quickly learn the difference between a pinko and a Commie and a liberal.’
Wasn’t it dangerous being a spy? He frankly conceded that people did get killed, furthermore, that on one of the few occasions that he had been issued with a gun for his protection, he had had it stolen.
A law graduate wanted to know if the CIA was the best intelligence service in the world. ‘The British used to be the best,’ he said. ‘But then they had real counter-intelligence problems beginning with Philby. They are still the best in some areas, such as economic intelligence. The CIA are as good as the Brits. But next come the Cubans. They make great spies. They come in all different shapes and sizes. You can send them anywhere. They make friends with everyone. But if I was in a dark ally in a foreign country and I needed help I’d call on the Israelis to come and help me. They’re the very best.’
What did the CIA think of his night classes? ‘I expect some of them think I’m mad. And I expect I have had someone sitting in on one of these classes to see if I’m spilling too many beans.’
He said he had written eight books about intelligence,all of which had been protected by his consitutional right to free speech and cleared by the CIA. So what did he think of the British Government’s approach to Peter Wright’s book? He shook his head. ‘I reall find that very difficult to understand,’ he said.
