Shadow Warrior, My Life in the CIA

Part Three of Four

The Boston Years Continued

Boston is a great place to be a graduate student and an intelligence agent. The city is very international, academia is the largest industry and the streets are a buzz with beautiful and intelligent young women.Euro trash types fill the club scene at night and no one seems to be over the age of thirty. I had several groups of different friends in Boston, my fellow journalism graduate students, some of my foreign students who were not CIA targets for recruitment and my non academic friends.

I started skydiving around the spring of 1992, it was something I always wanted to do and in April of that year I got the chance. One of my best friends back then was a Columbian undergraduate student who was studying business at Northeastern University. Juan was initially one of my foreign students in an ESL conversation class that I was teaching at Northeastern's English Language Center. Juan was an extremely intelligent guy; from a very wealthy family in Bogotá. Juan was interesting and we became instant friends when we met. We immediately started becoming regulars at the local clubs on Lansdowne Street and we began delving into extreme sports. Every weekend we would go either white water rafting, rock climbing, bungee jumping and finally, the most intense of extreme sports; skydiving.

Juan and I didn't just do one jump or even a tandem jump, which we thought was for women, we signed up for the Accelerated Free Fall course (AFF) at the drop zone at Pepperell, MA. Within two months we graduated the AFF class and had close to 100 jumps. My life back then was an adrenalin filled ride and the most interesting and exciting time of my life.

Since I was producing so many profiles on foreign graduate students who fit the criterion the agency had established for targeting this group, Martha and I had to come up with a covert action plan for having CIA personnel meet with these targets in the field without the targets knowing they were being ?sized up' by the Central Intelligence Agency for possible recruitment as ?witting' and ?unwitting agents.'

The way it worked was pretty simple, my CO would pick through the numerous profiles I had provided and was continuing to provide and would choose specific foreign students of interest. We would firm-up a day for the party (usually a Saturday night) and I would then invite the students to the party. The parties were always held at my apartment and the graduate students would always agree to come, mostly because of the promise of free food and booze. The opportunity to meet other Americans was a more interesting prospect to many of these students than another Saturday night alone studying super vocabulary or TOFEL preparation courses.

The plan worked like a well oiled machine. Several days before the parties, four or five CIA personnel would fly into Boston from HQ at Langley. Usually three women and two men were assigned to this operation. The women were always very attractive, young and well educated Americans. I always thought they looked as if they were from Texas because they were usually tall, blond with sizable breasts and very well built. The men were equally as handsome and seemed well suited to the task of socializing with foreigners and sizing them up as potential assets or agents to be run in the field. Most of these CIA employees spoke a second language (as I did) and usually, coincidentally, languages represented at the parties I would throw.

The process of preparing for a ?party' was tedious. We would spend days going over our cover and back stopped stories about how we knew each other where we met and the arduous task of making lies plausible. The tradecraft of deception is truly an art. The parties I would throw at my small one bedroom apartment in the Fenway section of Boston were pretty basic, lots of booze and food (courtesy of the US Government), interesting conversation with people from all over the globe and some music. The parties were a gold mine for the CIA to follow-up with the targets of interest, knowing enough about them through my indebt profiles to be able to determine after one of those parties if they were interested in moving ahead with targeting the student's further. These parties went on like that almost every month for close to two years. I often wonder how many of those foreign students are still working for the agency in some capacity back in their own countries, where many must now hold high level positions in government, industry and science.

One night during the summer of 1993 my Saudi student and I were socializing with a group of his friends; most of them were from the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and several were from Iran. We were at Avalon's; a club on Lansdowne Street in Boston and we were drinking heavily in the VIP section. My Saudi student was paying for everything. We were talking mostly about women and cars, but when the topic of politics came up I just listened and occasionally directed the conversation. That night would prove to evolve into a treasure chest full of useful intelligence.

As the topic of Mid East relations came up we discussed the situation between Israel and the Palestinians and with the Middle East and US relations. I could see that passions were beginning to flair. My mother always warned me against discussing politics and religion when alcohol was involved; was she ever right. It was obvious that the overwhelming sentiment among the group was that the US was a pawn of Israel and that the only interest the US had in the Middle East was oil. I agreed with them as I wanted them to continue spilling information. I began buying the drinks at that point, courtesy of the US Government. As the conversation progressed and the discussion of terrorism was brought up, sentiments toward terrorists among the group were mixed. The general feeling was that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

The most interesting and most useful information of the evening came from one of the Saudi's, who made a very clear statement about a secondary boarding school in the Middle East where many of the leaders of terrorist's organizations sent their kids to school. He said the name of the school almost by accident (so it seemed) as he was immediately and sternly reprimanded by one of the Iranians in Farsi or Arabic. I immediately kept repeating the name of the school to myself; not to forget. After several minutes I excused myself and went to the bathroom where I wrote the name of the school down on my leg. I did this in case a situation might arise that night where someone went through my pockets. I needed to be careful at that point. I knew that this information (about the school) would be deemed as very useful intelligence. As soon as I got home late that night I put in a call to my CO.

The next morning I met Martha and I gave her the information I'd obtained the night before. She didn't seem that excited about this bit of intelligence then, but within a month this small piece of information would be hailed as a great piece of the intelligence puzzle and I would receive accolades about my work from senior level management at Langley. The work I was doing was also being recognized as extremely useful and I was told I was being considered for an assignment in South Africa and to become a South Africa expert "as soon as possible." So my concentration then turned to South Africa, which was in the final throws of Apartheid and it was for the most part a country at war with itself.

I continued my journalism studies at Northeastern and continued teaching ESL at the schools where I had been working for close to two years and I continued my operations with foreign graduate students. What was now added to the list of things I had to accomplish in a day was becoming a South African expert. I started very simply with news reports, there was tons of coverage about South Africa back then because they were moving towards free all race elections for the first time in their history. CNN became the number one program on constantly in my apartment. I also read any news or feature article I could find about South Africa and began reading South African history and biographies about current and former leaders. I learned a lot in a short period of time.

One beautiful spring day I was sitting outside on the stoop of my apartment building in Boston after riding my mountain bike for most of the day. This very pretty young woman came bouncing up the stairs; looked into my eyes smiling and said to me: "howz-it, " in what sounded like an English accent. I stopped her and politely asked where she was from? I'd had a hunch she was from South Africa. "Johannesburg, South Africa, " she said rather proud of it. She became my new best friend. Over the course of the month that followed I learned a great deal from Jenny about the culture, politics, mores, customs, people and beliefs of South Africa. I even went on my first trip to South Africa that winter (which was summer in South Africa and the Southern Hemisphere) and spent Christmas and New Year's at Jenny's parent's home (more of a mansion) in a place called Ferndale in Randburg; an affluent suburb outside of Johannesburg. Jenny was a graduate student at Harvard, from a wealthy English South African family. She was studying geology and was born and had lived her entire life there.

My first time in South Africa was amazing. South Africa is the most beautiful country I have ever visited. The colors of the country mix together to form an overwhelming array of green and light browns and clay colored reds. Plush green landscapes with purple Jacaranda trees bloom all over Johannesburg in the spring and summer months and the sky above is a brilliant dark blue color. The city had the feel of a colonial town. The people of South Africa (both the Africans and whites) were extremely friendly and the place had a vibe like no other place I had ever been. South Africa in the summer of 1993 was at war with itself. Apartheid was reaching its end and some political groups within South Africa like the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging which translated means the Afrikaner Resistance Movement or AWB was blowing up buildings and attacking ANC members all over the country.

The AWB was formed on 7 July 1973 out of Afrikaaner nationalism in a garage in Heidelberg, Transvaal (now Gauteng), a town southeast of Johannesburg. Eugene Terre' Blanche, a former police officer, became disillusioned by then-Prime Minister B.J. Vorster's "liberal views, " as well as what he viewed as Communist influences in South African society. Terre'Blanche decided to form the AWB with six other like-minded persons, and was elected leader of the organisation, a position he holds to this day. During the negotiations that led to South Africa's first multiracial elections, the AWB threatened all-out war.

During the Battle of Ventersdorp in August 1991, the AWB confronted police in front of the town hall where President F W de Klerk was speaking, and "a number of people were killed or injured" in the conflict. Later in 1994 during the negotiations, the AWB stormed the Kempton Park World Trade Center where the negotiations were taking place, breaking through the glass front of the building with an armoured car. The police guarding the centre failed to prevent the invasion. It was during this period of time in the history of South Africa that I became an expert on the country and where I would wind-up less than a year later in a foreign deep cover posting. The two weeks I intially spent in South Africa with Jenny being introduced to the elite of South Africa would help establish my cover for my future posting. I took every opportunity I could to secure that cover early on, with Jenny's unwitting help.

Once back in Boston I started working hard toward finishing up my master's degree. I was six months away from graduation and during this time I would have to start preparing for my move to South Africa. Jenny introduced me to a group of South African exiles living and attending universities in Boston. The group was connected to the Fund for a Free South Africa (FreeSA).

I attended many FreeSA fund raisers and began to know many of the exiles in the group who would be returning to South Africa (some in government level positions) once the country were released from the grip of Apartheid. I began wrapping-up my operations against my foreign graduate students and started moving more and more in South African circles in and around Boston in order to prepare for my posting in December of 1994, several months away.

* The names of certain individuals have been intentionally omitted from this piece in order to protect individuals who may still work in the field and to abide by my non-disclosure agreement with the CIA