In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

[136] IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES
questions," she said, "just give me fifteen zaires. "*
Meanwhile, I had lunched with Larry Devlin, my former patron
and the famous eminence grise of the Congo program of the early
sixties. After two long tours in the Congo, where he had shuffled new
governments like cards, finally settling on Mobutu as president,
Devlin had been put in charge of the agency's paramilitary program
in Laos. And before Laos collapsed he had returned to Washington
to become chief of African Division. One of the CIA's historic great
"operators," he had dealt with younger case officers and agents like
an Irish-American politician, giving out patronage to some and coming
down hard on any who stood in his way.
In Addis Ababa in 1970, he and I had drunk whiskey from midnight
to dawn, when I had delivered him to his plane. In 1974 he took
his agency retirement pension of s22,ooo per year and got a fabulous
four-year contract with a New York financier, based on the fact that
he alone of all Americans still had an intimate friendship with and
•An operations assistant is a secretary, bookkeeper, and "girl Friday" for the CIA
field station. In the three dozen CIA posts in Africa there are perhaps four dozen
such young women. They are generally twenty-two to thirty, although sometimes
older, and make s9000--s15,ooo a year, plus whatever allowances the different posts
offer. In a small post the ops assistant is one of the two or three people in the country
who knows everything the CIA is doing in that country. She types all cables and
dispatches and reads all incoming traffic from headquarters. She keeps the station
finance records and the cash box, and replenishes each case officer's revolving fund.
On a specified day she closes the books and prepares the monthly accounting, which
is then pouched to headquarters. After hours she is generally invited to all embassy
and station social functions and, depending on her tastes and interests, may or may
not participate in the social life of the official community. Her relationship with the
chief of station is perforce close and often intimate. In most posts she is involved
in operations, functioning as a cut-out for agents' reports or money, helping to spot
and assess new agent candidates at cocktail parties, and helping with countersurveillance
when any technical operations are running. If her rapport with the COS is not
good, the tiny field office can be very stuffy. If she is promiscuous or indiscreet, the
station can have serious problems. In one post the ops assistant fell in love with a
leader of the local communist party and resigned and married him! The security
implications for the station and its agents were mind-boggling. There were agents
who would have been in danger if exposed; she knew them all: their names, how
much they were paid, where they met the case officers. One agent who knew that
she was witting of his CIA role offered to arrange for her quiet disappearance. This
was given no consideration whatsoever. Wholesale changes in personnel eventually
defused the threat.