Eventually, all these efforts led to Adamski agreeing to become an agent. While trying to stage “accidental” meetings with Adamski, Clarridge rents a fishing boat, travels to a nearby tourist town, buys a gift (a piece of embroidery) for Adamski’s wife, and helps him procure an abortion drug. Clarridge doesn’t pay this mutual friend-“I knew that any mention of compensation would be offensive to him,” he writes-but he does give him small gifts. Since he’s having trouble meeting up with Adamski, Clarridge starts by taking a mutual acquaintance for lunch and asking for help connecting. Clarridge identifies a possible agent, a man he calls Adamski. In his memoir, A Spy for All Seasons, Duane Clarridge, a former CIA officer who led the Latin American and European divisions, walks through the recruitment of a source. Cost might include: booze, food, and other enticements (pornography, in some places). Often, this work starts with socializing. One of the main tasks of a case officer out in the field is to identify people who might be valuable assets, gain their trust, and convince them to clandestinely collect and share information. 1975-77 (Photo: Courtesy of the International Spy Museum) But some have much more unusual requests.Įyeglasses with a concealed cyanide pill designed for CIA agents, c.
Some agents simply want to be paid for their efforts. intelligence officers staying at luxury hotels and spending as much as $500 a day eating out.īut some of the most intriguing expenses that intelligence operations rack up come from the requests of agents-the well-placed people that intelligence officers recruit to secretly pass along valuable information. The expenses for setting up an operation might include sourcing equipment, creating supply caches, arranging safe houses, and training people one court case in Italy revealed records of U.S. Spy memoirs don’t spend a lot of time recalling the hours spent on filling out paperwork, but, on the other hand, boring paperwork, if it included line-by-line accountings of expenses, could show how an officer operates-and how lavishly he or she spends. Information about expense reports for intelligence operations is somewhat hard to come by, both because it’s mundane and potentially revealing. “Meals, miles, parking, small gifts, other expenses, receipts if they had them, some kind of ‘certification’ if they didn’t.” “They’re the same as the reports any businessman would submit after meeting a client,” says Chris Lynch, former FBI and CIA counterintelligence officer and author of The C.I Desk. It might be incongruous to think of spies having to account for expenses, like any old suit on a business trip, but in reality, people working for intelligence services do have to keep track of the money they’re spending, file expense reports, and even hound their company (the Company, in this case) to reimburse them. (Photo: Courtesy of the International Spy Museum) The OSS was a wartime intelligence agency and a predecessor for the CIA. Time-delay pencils and detonation device, created for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), c. They weren’t to be spent frivolously,” says Peter Earnest, a former CIA operations officer who’s now the executive director of the International Spy Museum. ”And that was enforced by a pretty bureaucratic accounting process.” “We were very conscious of being accountable. But the people holding the purse strings back in the seat of government do want to know what the tax dollars they’ve committed are being spent on. The nature of the business might mean that unexpected expenses come up and not all can be documented with receipts. Much like other kinds of work, it turns out, with a few key differences. But how do expenses work if you’re a spy, doing secret work? Like every other business, clandestine operations have a budget and like every federal agency, that budget is examined by scores of government workers. Her takeaway, as a bureaucrat? “Needless to say,” she writes, “my accountings did not balance that month.” She sped to the airport, where she met the defecting officer and the CIA station chief, handed them the money, and sent them on their way to the United States. “I immediately drove to the office, opened the strongbox, pulled out wads of currency without counting, and then proceeded as fast as I could to the airport,” Vertefeuille writes. The intelligence officer and his family needed to get out of the country, fast, and they needed money for the plane tickets and travel expenses. “Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties,” the former CIA officer writes in Circle of Treason, the book she co-authored in 2013, “and therefore I could get into the strongbox where we kept our money.” In 1961, when a KGB counterintelligence officer showed up at a CIA station in Helsinki, Jeanne Vertefeuille held the keys to the office safe.
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