Framed: America's Patsy Tradition  

Chapter 12

Personnel:   The Chameleon Game


      An Australian scientist waiting at the counter of the Military Air Transport Service passenger service desk at 3:00am felt ill at ease in these unfamiliar surroundings. He had been assured that his travel through to Washington had been arranged and that he would be met when his plane arrived from Manila at Travis Air Force Base in California. All he had in the way of instructions was a small note that said, "Major Adams will meet you upon arrival at Travis. If he should not be there, call him by base telephone, number 12-1234." The WAF on the other side of the counter could find no Major Adams listed anywhere in the Travis telephone book;   but she volunteered to ring that number anyhow. A sleepy voice answered, "Special Support Squadron, Airman Jones speaking." The contact was made. "Airman Jones" appeared shortly at the passenger service desk in civilian attire and announced himself as Major Adams. The Australian had met his contact and would soon be on his way to South San Francisco airport for his commercial flight connection to Washington.

      In Washington he was met again by another contact and spent two or three days at a hotel where from time to time he met various scientists and their companions. They discussed with him the meetings he would attend in Rotterdam, then later in Moscow, to join with the world's top radio astronomers in observing the latest massive antennas that were being used in Europe and in the Soviet Union. Nothing in the United States approached the sophistication of the Soviet equipment, and the Australians were far ahead with their own work. After a few days with his new friends in the scientific world, with whom he met on the basis that they were from the National Science Foundation, the Australian flew to Europe and thence to Moscow. In Europe he had more meetings with American scientists, and after the Moscow meetings he willingly discussed the advanced equipment and techniques he had seen and worked with there. He even talked about a totally new antenna concept of his own for which he hoped to get funds in Australia and which had been enthusiastically accepted by the scientists in Europe and Russia as a great advance over present fixed-parabola technology.

      In return for free air travel and other amenities, this Australian had been willing to spend time with American scientists whom he knew or knew of and with certain of their friends and fellow workers. He was unaware of the fact that among those "fellow workers" were CIA personnel eager to learn all they could about the technology of the Russians. Advanced radio antenna work used in astronomical observations could, with minor changes, also be used in radar antennas for an advanced air defense system.

      The recruitment of personnel for such special and fleeting requirements is one of the many skills of the Personnel Division of the CIA under the leadership of the DDIS. It is another of the logistics functions of that Directorate that performs major miracles for the CIA and even for the ST.

      In the beginning, when a new organization is formed in the Government, such as HEW (Health, Education and Welfare), HUD (Housing and Urban Development), and others, it is customary to flesh out the unit with staff and resources from other organizations assembled for that purpose. Since the CIA was a totally new organization, this normal process could not be relied upon to build a professional staff in the period of time required for the Agency to become effective. Former OSS alumni from World War II were pulled in from wherever they were at the time and they were augmented as rapidly as possible by personnel from other units within the Government who had the special training for intelligence type of work. This meant that the FBI was "raided" to the point that its director called upon the DCI to ask that such raids be halted. Many other early personnel came from World War II military resources of all kinds. The straight-line intelligence personnel went into DD/I and a large number of logistics specialists went directly into the DD/S.

      It was startling to see them take on new life as they began to realize that they no longer worked under the routinered tape and restraints of the military service in which they had been trained. Men who had fought to keep supply levels up to authorized quotas now found that they could exceed quotas with abandon. Men who had watched budget figures year after year to build little caches to take care of essential needs found that they could draw upon funds that never seemed to run out. The same was true for personnel needs, for transportation, and for communications. It was not long before the Agency was quite adequately manned, and wherever there were shortages, it was able quite easily to find military personnel who would voluntarily accept an assignment. As a result, thousands of military men served with the Agency from its inception.

      This turned out to be fortunate. No long range organization can prosper with most of its employees in the same general age bracket. The Agency, having been born in the immediate postwar era, inherited people who were generally in the same age group. The men at the top and the men in lesser jobs all were about the same age. This meant that as the years rolled on, the openings at the top would be few and the log jam of those in lower grades would be terrific, stifling career development. The overhead of "disposable" military personnel helped clear up this problem. Therefore as all personnel, military and civilian, rose to higher positions, there became fewer of these higher positions. The military could be returned to their services and the overhead easily weeded out, leaving room for the more senior careerists. This helped, but it was not a total solution.

      The Agency put into operation a Junior Officer Training program (JOT) something like an ROTC program. In fact, JOT drew many of its men from the college ROTC resources. As these men filtered into regular jobs they replaced military men who went back to their parent services. Meanwhile, the Agency pushed an "early-out" retirement program and other projects to clear up the age-bound overhead.

      This had an interesting and perhaps unintentional bonus effect. A large number of men who had served with the Agency as volunteers had rotated back to their own military services, and in some cases, back to other government departments to pursue other tasks. However, the lure of "fun and games" is great, and most of these men still retained much of the old desire to play the intelligence game. The Agency found itself with willing alumni in all parts of the Government, and they made use of these men in every way possible.

      This can be illustrated in the Pentagon Papers since that is an available source of names and other statistics. A quick survey of the Pentagon Papers as published by The New York Times reveals a random listing of military officers of general and admiral rank, all of whom in one way or other took part in the early activities in Vietnam. Some of them served with the Agency for a number of years and went back and forth from Agency assignments to military assignments. And in most cases the military assignment was simply an Agency cover assignment under which they served at the direction of CIA superiors. It is a most important fact that most of the political and military leaders of Asian countries from Korea to Pakistan could easily be sympathized with for not being able to discover whether the "military" officers with whom they were dealing were military or were CIA. Most of the generals mentioned in the Pentagon Papers were involved in CIA activities while they were in Southeast Asia and were not under the operational control and direction of the DOD.

      When Marshall Sarit of Thailand met with an American Army general to discuss the buildup of the Thailand border patrols on the Laos border, he may have believed that he was talking with a U.S. Military officer and that the results of their talks were going to be achieved with the direct assistance of the U.S. military. He had no way of knowing that the results of his talks were going to be carried out by "U.S. military" under cover who were working under the direction and operational control of the CIA. The same can be said for such talks with Somanna Phouma and Phoumi Nosavan in Laos and for Generals Thieu and Ky in Vietnam. The Diem regime, far back in those early and formative days of the Vietnam operations, never did know who they were talking with, and Ngo Dinh Diem had to rely upon the few real American friends he had, such as Ed Lansdale, a bona fide U.S. Air Force general, but also a man who worked solely for the CIA for more than a decade. Diem could unravel some of the deals he became involved in by calling his friend Lansdale in Washington;   but he could not get similar help from the contacts he had in Saigon. The string of generals who appeared in Saigon from 1954 through 1964 -- who were really not generals - would have been enough to confuse anyone. In fact, real generals stayed away from Saigon for fear of being labeled "CIA" by their contemporaries back in Honolulu or Washington.

      The other side of the coin was equally significant. Military men found the CIA an easy means to promotion. As a result, they longed to get more of that valuable duty. Men who would have retired as majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels found that the CIA was the easy road to generals' stars. There are a great number of generals, even up to the full four-star rank, who would never have made that grade, and who never would have made general at any level had it not been for their CIA assignments and the role they played in the development of the Vietnam operations. There were a great many of these men;   this force alone has had a considerable impact upon the nature of Vietnamese events and upon the escalation of activities in Vietnam back in the days when small but catalytic events propelled the early actions into a massive campaign.

      The same thing was happening in Washington. As men who served under Allen Dulles went out into other parts of the Government -- into the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Rand corporation, certain key university jobs, into select businesses and major foundations -- Dulles found that he had a massive instrument upon which he could orchestrate events as he wished. It was not his technique to lay deep plans and to use all of these resources in pursuit of these plans. Rather, it was his game to continually call upon the vast and continuing resource of secret intelligence to supply him with input data, with the raw events that he could then toss upon the keyboard to sound their own chords across the field of foreign relations.

      This may sound a bit weird at first telling;   but how else can anyone explain the random series of events that has happened in the names of foreign affairs and anti-Communism since 1955? All personnel who had trained with the Agency had learned enough about its ways, its freedoms, and its ability to circumvent normal bureaucratic red tape, and were somewhat spoiled. Later, when they had gone out into other departments and agencies of the federal government, they would find themselves, at times, frustrated in their everyday activities. They tended to return to their Agency affiliations and found that they could still get things done through Agency channels. They also served as Agency conduits for things which the Agency wanted done where they now worked. This developed a loose but effective network, with tentacles that reached out in all directions.

      There was a group that was utilized as airline operators. They went into various countries such as Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan, Laos, Vietnam, and many others and worked to establish airlines, many of which ostensibly were national air carriers. These airlines were put together by common interests, part civilian business and part clandestine operations. In such cases secrecy was not really very deep;   but it was used to shield the identity of the interests concerned from other parties in the U.S. The host government certainly knew who was behind the airlines, and they knew that there was more money being spent than was coming in through commercial revenues.

      These airlines and their supporting bases, which in many countries were relatively costly enterprises, became increasingly modern. They began with what were called World War II surplus aircraft, such as the old C-46 and the C-54. Then they began to get hand-me-down Constellations and DC-6 and DC-7 aircraft, which had been the backbone of the U.S. airline fleet before the advent of jet transports. Most of these countries did not have the pilots and other personnel essential to the operation of modern aircraft, so the Agency cover units filled these spaces. Soon, national pride dictated that these airlines have the finest modern equipment in order that their neighbors would not outshine them. It was not long before a number of these small and impecunious airlines began to flaunt their new jets before the public, from Manila to Tehran.

      These operations all began as modest havens for personnel who had been affiliated with the Agency or who were still with the Agency but gave the appearance of having left. By 1960 the CIA had grown very large in comparison with the figures that had been projected and with the figures that various controlling authorities thought the Agency had. By the time of the Congo problems and the uncertainties of other emerging African nations, the CIA had not less than forty stations scattered all through that continent, all of them very active and all of them manned with everything from U.S. military to non-attributable civilians of all kinds. The agency that Harry Truman thought would be his quiet intelligence arm had become a vast organization, which no one could control for the simple reason that the Agency was no longer the finite organization that had been created by law and then built with properly appropriated funds. It was now a tremendous force, using its own funds as an ante to open the big game, and then playing the big game with money belonging to most of the rest of the Government.

      In the Government, people (or as the bureaucratic euphemism goes, "bodies") are controlled by the appropriation and then authorization of funds. Thus, any Government organization is permitted to have precisely so many people;   and to exactly control that number of people, the Congress appropriates only enough money to pay that number and no more. This is usually an effective method of control, provided measures to evade them are not cloaked in security. When the Air Force had the problem of manning the vast space center at Cape Canaveral, it found that it did not have sufficient people for the task but that it could get funds for the maintenance of that huge and fast-growing complex. So the Air Force obtained enough funds to contract the operation and maintenance of that base. Thus several companies bid for the job of operating the big space center, and Pan American Airlines was awarded the contract. By this device the Air Force could man a huge complex, with money and not with people. There are many obvious advantages of this method of performing a housekeeping task.

      The Agency witnessed the simplicity and effectiveness of this action and began to use it for its own ends. It would transfer funds to another department of the Government, and in return it would get people. Thus the Army, for example, could truthfully say that it had perhaps forty-two people in the Military Advisory and Assistance Group (MAAG) in Athens, and yet any visitor to the MAAG offices in Athens could easily see that there were more than one hundred people working throughout that big building. As a matter of fact, some visiting Senators noticed this and commented on it. They were told, with a straight face by the local MAAG officials, that the Army did have only forty-two people there and that they would be glad to have the Department of the Army in Washington furnish the Senators with an exact accounting of those people. This satisfied the visitors, and upon their return to Washington they were given audited figures from the U.S. Army, certifying to the fact that the Army had spent no more than "X" dollars on personnel in Athens and therefore could not have had more than forty-two people there.

      This is an old story. There are military bases that have been closed by the services. The records, based upon money audits, show that the bases are in fact closed, yet the base had been reopened by the service concerned with CIA funds and for CIA support purposes. There is a small but uniquely self-contained Army base near Washington that was closed in such a manner years ago. It is still open, and it is so active that it has a very lively housekeeping function, including a PX and commissary that services not only the special CIA elements on the base but a select group of senior retired military and naval personnel who live in baronial luxury in the adjacent horse country.

      There is also a massive Army post that has been closed many times. No news is ever published to show that it has been opened;   but there is always a fanfare when it is closed. This huge, forested reservation is one of the best hunting preserves in the Washington vicinity, and it is frequented by noble parties of ranking military and other high government officials who travel to their shooting sites on an old Army railroad in quaint old cars -- in real luxury attained by few people short of Hugh Hefner and the Onassis set.

      There was a time when the late Senator Harry Byrd, father of the present Senator, used to have to intervene on behalf of a few of his select clientele, because he kept receiving letters and telephone calls about bombs and other explosives bursting at a "closed" U.S. Navy station. The Senator had these messages sent to the Honorable Secretary of the Navy, who in turn would pass them to the Chief of Naval Operations and thence on to the proper authorities in the Norfolk area. Time after time the Navy would reply to the good Senator that there were no explosives being detonated in the area and that the base in question was closed and secured by a proper guard force.

      This exchange of correspondence went on for about three unpleasant cycles, until the Senator felt that he should bring it to the attention of the Secretary of Defense. Thus started an investigation that finally brought a harried naval officer to the Office of Special Operations at the Secretary of Defense level to ask if by some chance there might be some highly classified activity going on at that "closed" Navy base that the Navy did not know about. It was found that the Agency was in fact doing some demolitions and explosives training with a special group of foreign agents whom they did not want to expose at the Special Forces training site at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Agency was taking these men, from time to time, from Fort Bragg to this abandoned Navy base where it had set up some special training for them. Then the Office of Special Operations asked the Agency to move its training to another site, the Navy was given a polite but obtuse answer, from this the Navy wrote apologies to the Senator, and eventually things were settled graciously with the Senator's constituents.

      These things, of course, are not earthshaking and are not too different from similar uncoordinated activities that can happen in any large operation. But the Agency had acquired the power to carry out such activities in spite of restrictions and in spite of other plans and policy. It was not just the one MAAG in Athens in which Agency people were hidden, but it was almost every MAAC all over the world. In fact, wherever the military might have some small out-of-the-way outpost in a foreign country where the Agency might wish to install one of its people, it would not take long before the position would be assigned to the Agency so that it could have its own man there. In many countries, the vast Military Air Transport Service network (now military Airlift Command, or MAC) would have only two or three men to handle landing and take-off requirements for a few planes a week. Such small pockets of men in remote places and with little apparent activity became havens for CIA personnel. And when activity grew in such locations, as it inevitably did, the Agency would make funds available to the parent service for more bodies, and the manning would be increased to provide for an invisible military expansion. Later auditing of the strength of the service involved would never show the increase. The Agency would never have to show the increase either, because all it had done was expend dollars and this would not be questioned.

      One of the things Allen Dulles achieved shortly after the submission of this report to President Truman was the approval of an amendment of the National Security Act of 1947. The amendment was passed in 1949. Among other things, it gave the CIA much more latitude in the expenditure of and accounting for its authorized funds. As a result, all the DCI had to do was to personally certify that the money had been spent properly, and there would be no further review. It was not thought at the time that money such as this would be used to make major changes in the personnel strengths of supporting Government departments. This device was used, however, and it permitted vast expansion of CIA manning-strength in the guise of other Government department jobs. All of this went without review and audit.

      By the time the Agency was ready to participate in an operation as large as the Indonesian campaign of 1958, it had the resources to open foreign bases, to create an entire supporting Tactical and Transport Air Force, and to demand the services of naval supporting forces. A former World War II air base on a remote Pacific island was reopened and put into commission, and a whole fleet of aircraft was put into major overhaul bases in the States to create an attack force of substantial capability. A rather considerable Air Transport force was able to deliver deep into Indonesia tens of thousands of weapons and the ammunition and other equipment necessary to support such a force, all by airdrop. The CIA had become a major power by 1958 and was ready to enter the world arena as the core of the greatest peacetime operational force ever assembled.

      By this time the Agency was not working alone. It was getting the willing and most active support of other elements of the Department of Defense and from the White House and parts of the Government. It was becoming a broad-gauge ST. The CIA was being diverted from its original role by the actions of men who took their motivation from the substance of secret intelligence inputs and turned them into response activities as large as many overt military campaigns. Yet, for all of this, they covered their work in deep security, which of course was a false security, and veiled their true intentions and actions from the rest of the Government, and especially from those whose normal task and responsibility it would have been to carry out such actions had they been so directed by proper policy and authority.

      In 1949 the Congress enacted what is called The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, which restated the powers and duties of the CIA as they had been in the National Security Act of 1947, and added some interesting paragraphs concerned primarily with money and personnel. By 1949 it had become apparent that a great number of the personnel assigned to the CIA would be military personnel and that this situation would continue. Thus the new Act spelled out the terms and conditions of such assignments and did this in a manner that would not appear to expose or compromise the system;   yet the whole procedure appears in clear text within the law. The clear text is written as though it were a description of the duties of the DCI or of the DDCI only;   however, it is actually applicable to all military personnel on duty with the Agency:

      (2) . . . the appointment to the office of Director, or Deputy Director, of a commissioned officer of the armed services, and his acceptance of and service in such office, shall in no way affect any status, office, rank, or grade he may occupy or hold in the armed services, or any emolument, perquisite, right, privilege, or benefit incident to or arising out of any such status, office, rank, or grade. Any such commissioned officer shall, while serving in the office of DCI, or DDCI, continue to hold rank and grade not lower than that in which serving at the time of his appointment and to receive the military pay and allowances (active or retired) as the case may be, including personal money allowance payable to a commissioned officer of his grade and length of service for which the appropriate department shall be reimbursed from any funds available to defray the expenses of the CIA. He also shall be paid by the CIA from such funds an annual compensation at the rate equal to the amount by which the compensation established for such position exceeds the amount of his annual military pay and allowances.

      (3) The rank and grade of any such commissioned officer shall, during the period in which such commissioned officer occupies the office of DCI or DDCI, be in addition to the numbers and percentages otherwise authorized and appropriated for the armed services of which he is a member.

      This is a most important feature of CIA personnel policy. Note that the law states that "the appropriate department shall be reimbursed from any funds available to defray the expenses of the CIA." The CIA is authorized to use money to buy people, and as long as they have the money, they can add people. This is one reason why few people really know how many personnel the Agency has;   and why even these few may not know exactly, because so many of the cover people have been lost within the labyrinth of the total Government.

      Another key phrase is that in Paragraph 3, wherein it states, "The rank or grade of any such of commissioned officer shall . . . be in addition to the numbers and percentages otherwise authorized . . . for the armed service . . . " The military services, as other departments and agencies of the Government, are bound precisely to certain total personnel strengths and to the percentage of rank and grade throughout those totals. This is an exact amount, and one that must be maintained and accounted for at all times. However, the CIA is not so bound. Thus the services are permitted to provide as many personnel as the CIA requests and can pay for, to the extent that the services simply deduct those totals by rank and grade from their own strict manpower ceilings. As a result, the services encourage certain personnel to join the CIA, and certainly do not discourage them from leaving the roles of the services for that purpose. In a sense, the more the better. Some five thousand or ten thousand military personnel in the CIA are just that many less for the military budget to account for and just that much more strength for the CIA, which it accounts for by "reimbursement". The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 further underscores this bookkeeping device in favor of the CIA in the following manner:

      Par 403j. CIA:   appropriations;   expenditures.

      (a) Notwithstanding any other provisions of law, sums made available to the Agency by appropriation or otherwise may be expended for purposes necessary to carry out its functions, including (1) personal services, including personal services without regard to limitations on types of persons to be employed . . . (2) supplies, equipment, and personnel and contractual services otherwise authorized by law and regulations, when approved by the Director.

      (b) The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of Government funds;   and for objects of a confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature, such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the Director . . .

      Not only, then, is the CIA not required to account for the number and grade of all of its people by virtue of the fact that it is authorized to use money to buy people, without regard to other law;   but as we see in these latter phrases, the CIA is not required to account for the money it spends either. In 1949 this was a reasonable piece of legislation. The reader may judge for himself whether this same reasonableness applies today and tomorrow.

      There is another portion of this Act that touches upon another special facet of the personnel policies of the CIA. It states that "Whenever the Director, the Attorney General and the commissioner of Immigration shall determine that the entry of a particular alien into the United States for permanent residence is in the interest of the national intelligence mission, such alien and his immediate family shall be given entry into the United States for permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws and regulations or to the failure to comply with such laws and regulations pertaining to admissibility:   provided, that the number of aliens and members of their immediate families entering the United States under authority of this section shall in no case exceed one hundred persons in any one fiscal year." The common basis of understanding of the provisions of this paragraph is usually given as an allowance made for a valuable defector or official who might not otherwise be able to come into the country for such illegal reasons as that he was patently a Communist or at least a native and citizen of a Communist country. Certainly, in arranging for such defections the DCI and his agents must be able to guarantee to the defector that he and his family will be accepted permanently into the United States.

      This is the surface reason for this portion of the law. However, we discuss it here in this chapter on personnel because there are many more "illegal" aliens brought into the country who have been recruited as agents than there are defectors. In one sense of the words, "illegal alien" and "defector" may be about the same thing. However, there cannot be much confusing the roles of defector and agent. Most defectors would not submit to becoming active agents and to going back into the world of clandestine intrigue. However, many men serve the United States who are, in a sense, totally citizens of the world. These men are technically United States citizens by virtue of the application of the above cited law, but they also have been given "citizenship" in other countries as cover. These are extremely intricate ploys that require considerable time, money, and effort to maintain, as well as the dedicated daring of the men so occupied. Some of these men are pilots, navigators, and members of other highly specialized professions, and the least of them would titillate a true-life James Bond on most scores.

      They are, of course, but a nucleus of a greater segment of the Agency. There are a great number of non-U.S. citizens who work for the Agency in many capacities. Filipinos, for example, appear in the wake of so many CIA operations, including the Bay of Pigs and many Indochina projects, because there are a large number of skilled Philippines citizens in the regular or contract employ of the Agency.

      With such a variegated personnel congregation, the CIA has been given very special authority with respect to retirement. This, too, is spelled out in plain language in the CIA Act of 1949, some of which has the same double meaning as the bits which we have dissected above. Retirement is a special thing for the "deep" Agency employee. If by circumstance any such employee must retire for reasons of health or other infirmity, the Agency is burdened to assure that whatever attention and treatment he may get will at no time result in disclosures that might occur during anesthesia, treatment by drugs, or during other periods when the principal might not be in full control of his mental processes. Furthermore, the CIA must remain concerned about the locale in which such people choose to retire, to assure that they are not unduly exposed to dangerous influences. The not-too-infrequent problems with alcohol and even hard drugs place a special burden upon the Agency. All of these men have been involved in many highly classified matters. All of them have at one time or another been "on the black box(polygraph)", and all of them have been debriefed;   but these are no more than the routine precautions that a large government agency can take. Much more remains that must be done. A thorough debriefing may underscore the zones of deep security;   but it cannot erase memories, the activity of the brain, and the area of human weaknesses. As more and more men reach retirement age, these problems are increasing. One solution for a great percentage of this problem lies in the area of rapid, effective, and continuing declassification of those numberless episodes that certainly have no reason to be classified. As with so many other things, unnecessary security measures crop up as an artificial generator of problems, whereas many of the problems would go away if unnecessary classification could be ended.

      The remaining special characteristic of CIA personnel activity is that which is known in the trade as "cover". Except for the true and overt intelligence employee and other strictly administrative and service types, all Agency employees live under some form of cover. The great majority live out their days with the Agency as Department of Defense employees. Many others have other common cover, that cover which is essential for no more than their credit cards, driver's licenses, and other public documents, just so they will not have to say that they are employed by the CIA.

      From this base, the vast intricacies of cover become manifold as the nature of the individual's work increases in areas of high specialization and security. Sometimes, cover is changed, and the man must go through a transition period and develop a whole new character, as when he may have served as a Navy man at one station and then must become an Army man at another. Such situations are rare, because of the ease with which such cover is blown with the passage of time.

      Some of the deepest and most total cover exists right inside the U.S. Government itself. Some of the most buried of CIA men have been employed by other departments and agencies for years, and only a few know any longer that they are really CIA. This is a special use of cover, but the CIA gets more per capita benefit from these men than from any others of the profession.

      There are other deep cover personnel all over the world;   but their existence and occupation is not the subject of this book. That they are there is enough. Some of them exist to assure that others in precarious positions can exist, and the rupture of the thin thread that supports them all is fraught with personal danger to them and their networks. These men are a part of the trade, and all countries know about the profession.

      Many people have tried to estimate the total personnel strength of the CIA. This is categorically a useless objective pursued by amateurs. First, there are the open, professional intelligence people. Next there is the vast army of support personnel, many of whom are buried as deeply as the "fun and games" types;   upon them depends the success of the clandestine side of the house absolutely. This is a very large group, and it is certainly not all within the structure of the Agency. Then there is the DD/P (the Directorate of Plans) and all that it encompasses. In most respects, this operation is the largest by far, and in certain aspects the border between where DD/P begins and DD/S ends is seldom clear.

      Add to all of this the great supporting structure behind both DD/P and DD/S, such as that which exists in Air America and other corporate subsidiaries of the worldwide Agency, and this will include tens of thousands of non-U.S. personnel. For example, Air America alone has no less than four thousand employees in Thailand and not less than four thousand more in Taiwan as of 1972.

      Beyond these fringes, there are additional thousands of CIA camp followers. There are members of the business world who enroll themselves or who have become enrolled for various reasons in the lure of "fun and games";   there are people from the academic world, the publications field, and so on. And since the limits of the CIA personnel rosters are really only the limits of how much money that Agency can put its hands on, even the groupings herein set forth simply serve to give evidence of what surrounds us. Would anyone wish to conjecture whether the CIA has been on the moon?