Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story Read Online Free Page B

wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to the way we had been instructed to carry a machete into the swamps.
    “Why should he?” I thought. “He’s an experienced warrior.”
    We were no more than a hundred yards into the jungle when he tripped and slid down on his machete. He let out a shriek and began bleeding so profusely that he had to be evacuated to the medical facility. As the hardships mounted, I realized it was some of the least likely officers who performed best under stress. From then on, I kept this in mind whenever I needed to assemble a team: look beyond the obvious.
    The final task in the program was jump training, in which we would be expected to make five parachute jumps from a cargo plane. This was optional, but if you opted out, you were given two weeks of administrative leave. That sounded good to me. By that time, I was weary of training in general. Then, as we neared the decision date, Pat urged me to sign up anyway. She felt I would miss out on the camaraderie and fun involved in jumping from an airplane at fifteen hundred feet. She may have been right, but she wasn’t persuasive enough. The next person who urged me to jump was the commander, an ex-paratrooper colonel. Jumping, he said, is “better than sex.” That got my attention, but I quickly concluded he was missing a bolt or two. By then I’d made up my mind: it made no sense to me to voluntarily jump out of an airplane. Had it been mandatory, I would have done it. But volunteer to do it?
    As luck would have it, we had arrived at the point where you selected, or were selected for, a specific line division or staff. I was a little uncertain how covert action programs were organized within the Clandestine Service, so I asked to join the Covert Action staff, a unit within the service that ran political, economic, and covert propaganda operations. Shortly thereafter, I had an interview with its chief, Hugh Tovar. Tovar was a legend. He’d served as station chief in Laos. He was also an accomplished parachutist; his office was strewn with jumping memorabilia.
    I walked through his door for the interview. He looked up and said, “Have you jumped yet? It’s the greatest thing a man can do.”
    Without missing a beat, I said, “No. But I’m really looking forward to it.”
    Off to jump training I went.
    *   *   *
    Once I had a better understanding of the difference between the Covert Action staff and the ongoing activities of the Agency’s primary operating units, I switched my interest to the Soviet Division. Near the end of the operation training course, I had a private chat at the base club with Rocky Stone, then chief of that division, during which he encouraged me to sign up with them. Stone was a legend, too. A very charismatic senior official, he suffered from profound hearing loss and relied on a hearing aid, which he supplemented with lipreading and focusing on facial expressions. He had been one of the key players in bringing the Shah of Iran to power in 1953.
    My career counselor, a man who had played an important role in the Bay of Pigs operation under the alias Tom Bender, was not encouraging. “You’re too tall for Soviet operations,” he said, chewing on his cigar.
    I failed to see the connection between spying and height. The trick was to do everything with sleight of hand in a natural setting, not hiding behind bushes. In any case, Bender was a Latin Americanist and he was recruiting for the Latin America Division. He took me to see William V. Broe, yet another legendary officer, who had joined the CIA in 1948 and served as chief of the Western Hemisphere Division (later renamed the Latin America Division) from 1965 to 1972. I remember Bender telling Broe, “This guy belongs in LA Division”—and hardly because of my height. Theirs was a division that was heavily invested in covert action and therefore just the right spot for me. Not long after, I’d get my first overseas assignment: Chile.
    By the time I had