Read an Excerpt
The Craft We Chose
My Life in the CIA
By Richard L. Holm D Street Books
Copyright © 2011 Richard L. Holm
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4956-0040-1
CHAPTER 1
An Intangible Difference
Washington, D.C. 1961
My career with the Central Intelligence Agency began unofficially just before Thanksgiving 1960 when I drove my black Volkswagen convertible from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to the recruiting office on 16th Street, Northwest, in Washington, D.C. I had purchased the VW during my stint of nearly two years at Camp Bussac, north of Bordeaux, France, where I had worked in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps.
During that time, for reasons I'll explain, I became interested in joining the CIA after my discharge. But when I mailed in an application they responded by informing me that I could not apply from overseas. So when I arrived at Fort Dix I resolved to drive down to Washington and apply in person, which I did, on an overcast morning in late November.
After I filled out the forms and took the requisite tests the interviewing officer said I could start work immediately — in the file rooms on the night shift. He added that if I performed satisfactorily I could begin advancing through the ranks. But I found the prospect of night work and a long, slow climb to a meaningful assignment disappointing. So I pushed a little, mentioning that I was a college graduate with military experience.
"Oh, this is standard," he responded.
"But it isn't what I was hoping for. Aren't there any other possibilities?"
"There's Junior Officer Training — the JOT program — but I'm not sure there are openings just now."
"What's that program like?"
He explained that JOT prepared promising young candidates for operational assignments abroad.
That sounded more like it and I filled out another application.
The interviewer cautioned me that JOT's standards were high. Suddenly I regretted the hours I had spent back in college playing basketball and bridge instead of studying in the library, and I wished my grade point average had been higher. On the other hand I had done well on my Graduate Record Examination, enough to earn a slot in the master's program in economics at Washington University in St. Louis. But given my draft status it was also something I hadn't pursued. Still I thought it might help my chances.
JOT acceptance or not I decided to wait out the verdict by visiting my family in Kansas City where my parents had moved the summer after I graduated from high school.
I was born on June 20, 1935, in Chicago in the middle of the Great Depression. My parents were both children of immigrants. My father, Carl Willard Holm, was the eldest of three sons in a Swedish family. My mother, Constance Cecilia Laux Holm, was one of eleven children descended from a Prussian grandfather who had made his way to America at the turn of the 20th century.
Both families had modest means and my parents married in 1934 with minimal fanfare. Dad graduated at the top of his class at Lane Technical High School, one of Chicago's best. He was offered and happily accepted a job with the Illinois Bell Telephone Company, where he was one of about 20,000 employees at the time. In the mid-1950s Dad transferred to AT&T where he helped in the early effort to develop area codes.
When I was about 7 years old, in what was considered at the time a bold move, Dad signed a mortgage and bought our house, a brick bungalow in Elmhurst, a small, quiet, middle-class town about 25 miles west of Chicago. No one on either side of the family had ever left the city but each workday Dad commuted to Illinois Bell's office by train.
My parents were splendid role models for me and my two brothers, Bob and Greg, and my sister Diann. My childhood in Elmhurst was idyllic and I retain fond memories of my life there, of my friends, of Boy Scouting, and then as now, of sports.
Sports were my passion. We played football in the autumn, baseball in spring and summer, and basketball almost year-round. In the process, as all children do who participate, I learned about winning, losing and playing on a team — I preferred winning.
I resumed my basketball passion a bit when I returned home on that pre-CIA visit. Along with reading as much as I could about the world of intelligence, I played in a lot of pickup games at the local YMCA in between enjoying Mom's home cooking again.
In February my parents introduced me to a neighbor who had recently fallen into a decent inheritance. When he learned that I had just returned from France he asked me to guide him on a trip to Europe, in return for which he promised to cover all of my expenses. I accepted but told him that I wouldn't be able to leave until I had heard about the job in Washington.
That news arrived in early April when the agency's interviewing officer called to tell me I had been accepted. A separate letter arrived a week later instructing me about where and when to report. I would start my training in June along with 25 other JOTs.
My immediate future assured, I took off with my neighbor for Europe. First stop, England, where I bought myself a present: a brand-new, Triumph TR3 convertible in British racing green. We broke the car in over the next six weeks driving through France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland, and then I shipped it home duty-free.
The first time I had traveled the European continent was on a slow train from Hamburg, Germany, carrying myself and other troops through Holland, Belgium and France. I had been fascinated by just about everything and spent most of the time standing between the rail cars gazing at the passing sights: the signs in foreign languages, the posters, the clothes and automobiles, and the stations. I remember watching some French railroad workers talking with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The cigarettes would move with their lips but never fall out.
My assignment at Camp Bussac afforded me many pleasant opportunities to live and travel beyond the base. The on-site work quickly became tedious, but my occasional forays into the surrounding area or the region were interesting and enjoyable. From time to time I met with liaison officers in Toulouse and Perigueux to discuss, for example, the activities of the Russian and Polish consulates or the movement of Soviet bloc ships into the port of Bordeaux.
Most fascinating to me were the reports I obtained from my sources on and off the base. I had been given the names of several longtime contacts when I arrived. I saw them regularly and developed links of my own. I hesitate to call these people "agents," because the CIC's efforts were not very sophisticated. But they were carefully selected, unpaid individuals who knew what was going on in circles of interest to us. They also were pro-American enough to take the time to talk discreetly.
Gathering this information and compiling reports was useful in two ways. First, it enabled me to move around and use my French, because official liaison contacts were part of the effort. Second, it was clearly a learning process. In my discussions with French contacts and by reading the French press I gained a better understanding of the country and its culture.
All of it established a direction for my future. I became interested in the craft of intelligence and in living abroad. Both would become integral parts of my 35-year career in the CIA.
Before I left for Washington my parents told me they felt uneasy about the choice I had made. Dad asked me if I really knew anything about the agency. I told him I had read a lot about it and learned a little more during my time in France. That didn't seem to satisfy him, but he eventually dropped the subject and apparently accepted my decision.
In any event I was elated as I headed east in the TR3. I loved that little car, particularly then. It fit my mood. My prospects were looking good, I had been accepted into the program I wanted, and I eagerly anticipated training for the start of my professional life.
Back in D.C., I stopped by the JOT office. The receptionist gave me some leads on housing, and soon I settled into an old place along MacArthur Boulevard across from the reservoir in the western part of the city. I lived with five other men, three of whom were also JOTs. Of the two others, one served in the Air Force at the Pentagon and the other already worked as an analyst in the agency's Directorate of Intelligence. That made many things easier. We often commuted together in town and subsequently to the Farm, the CIA's training facility in southeast Virginia. With so many things in common we bonded easily, and our friendships have lasted through the decades.
We spent the first six weeks in one of the "temps," rows of low office buildings that had been erected in haste during World War I to house the War Department — the Pentagon's precursor — and weren't removed until the 1970s. Located along Constitution Avenue near the Lincoln Memorial and its reflecting pool, the uniformly dingy buildings ruined the otherwise beautiful setting.
My fellow JOTs impressed me. Twenty-two young men and three young women — plus me — we represented the 10 percent of agency applicants who had achieved the highest standards. Almost all had served in the military, though at the time that distinction was fairly common because of the draft. Many had earned graduate degrees and the group had pursued a broad range of college majors.
Except for four of us from the Midwest and a couple from the West Coast, all were graduates of eastern schools. I felt lucky to be among them. My own service background, plus my bachelor's degree from Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois, had landed me a spot I never could have imagined while in school.
Our instructors began by giving us the history of World War II intelligence. Then they moved on to the origins of the agency and its four directorates: Plans, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Administration. We all were destined for Plans, which eventually became Operations and then the National Clandestine Service.
Next they presented a detailed look at the intelligence community and how it served policymakers. A review of postwar events followed, including the beginnings of the Cold War, which would continue to dominate the world scene for three more decades. The confrontation between the Free World, led by the United States, and the communist-inspired totalitarianism practiced by the Soviet Union, China and their satellites, would drive all of our efforts.
This wasn't the first time I had been presented with a clear picture of the communist world. Back in France at Bussac, I had met Tim Lawson, a civilian who periodically sold cars on the base. I bought the VW convertible from him.
Tim was the kind of guy you instinctively didn't trust too much. At the time I had no doubt he was making money in other ways — some probably illegal. He had served in the Army and was stationed at Bussac from 1955 until 1957, the year before I arrived. He decided to stay in France after his discharge and found the car-sales job after bumming around a bit. He was living with a French woman, appeared to have lots of local friends, and knew quite a bit about happenings in the little towns around the base. I often had trouble sorting out his rumors from facts, but I joined Tim for a cup of coffee once in a while.
I can't remember how we had raised the subject, but on one such occasion he suddenly launched into a long tirade about the 1956 Hungarian uprising. I was in college at the time, and though I had heard about it from news reports I was far from well-versed.
Tim told me that shortly after the uprising began, he and some of the other soldiers in the motor pool — where he was serving as a truck driver — heard via shortwave radio the Hungarian freedom fighters calling for help from the United States and Western Europe. Send them weapons and they would do the rest, they said. As the situation grew worse and Soviet intervention seemed imminent, the freedom fighters continued to plead for assistance from the West.
Tim said he became so agitated and frustrated that he actually had considered stealing a motor-pool truck and driving it to Hungary to fight at the side of the rebels. He insisted that others, including some young Frenchmen he knew, would have gone with him. But in the end no one went. The Russians invaded and crushed the uprising, and the freedom-fighter broadcasts stopped abruptly.
What struck me at the time was Tim's outrage, which seemed entirely heartfelt. Although he had no understanding of the international politics involved — nor did I — he still felt angry, three years later, at the Western governments for not responding.
Tim's anger had sprung from several questions — obvious ones:
Why would President Eisenhower, a military man, refuse to act?
Why would he allow the freedom fighters to be slaughtered, particularly because he knew the Europeans would follow his lead if he decided to counter the crackdown?
And how could the Russians be so brazen? How could they openly smash a rebellion in another country when the Hungarian people clearly opposed their government?
I was no expert, but given the Cold War and the geopolitical situation that prevailed, the answers seemed self-evident. The Reds had shown no restraint in brutalizing their own people, so they couldn't be expected to do so in Hungary. And the West, still war-weary in the mid-1950s, had forsaken a military response, which might have escalated into another global conflict.
Tim would have none of that, which was why he said he still felt pained that the Free World had allowed Soviet tanks to shred the Hungarian revolt.
Listening to Tim's rants forced me to think, more than I ever had before, about the Cold War, communism and the international situation in general. Sure, I had grown up with a sense of patriotism and a belief that the American position was right — whatever it was. Communism was bad, the Soviets were bad, and what happened in Hungary was just awful. It reinforced my negative feelings about communism and the efforts by its practitioners to spread their ideology so forcibly around the world.
Though I didn't realize it then, that conversation laid the groundwork for my decision to spend a career in intelligence, working to counter the communist ideology. It had made me think differently about why I was in Europe and why a U.S. base like Bussac was essential. If the Russians ever did attack Western Europe we would need every military asset we had there.
We attended several weeks of classes on international communism, presented from scholarly and historical perspectives as well as from intelligence-gathering and operational viewpoints. I had studied communist and socialist economics in college but I knew little about the politics.
Learning about the organization and inner workings of a communist cell gave us much food for thought, and we discussed it at length during breaks. Communism was a lousy system that needed to be resisted. Despite our varied backgrounds we agreed that communism had no merits.
We also began learning how to write intelligence reports and how to master the prevailing style. It was a little like newspaper writing: straightforward prose that emphasized precision and detail, and no opinion unless clearly labeled.
Some of the nuances about writing, evaluating and disseminating reports we learned from someone who would later figure prominently in my life: Wallace R. Deuel. Wally had started his career in the late 1920s after graduating from the University of Illinois. He accepted a teaching post at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon. He met his wife Mary there as well.
Wally later joined the Chicago Daily News and worked as a foreign correspondent. The paper assigned him to Rome during the early and mid-1930s, and then to Berlin during the latter part of the decade. But he grew so intensely opposed to Hitler that he left Germany in 1939.
Based on his experiences Wally wrote a book titled People under Hitler, which he first published in 1942. He also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, our wartime intelligence agency and the CIA's predecessor. He later helped to write a history of the organization. When the Cold War began he recognized the need to resist another totalitarian movement, so he joined the newly established CIA to help stop communism from taking over Europe.
Along with his impressive background Wally was an articulate and entertaining public speaker with a wry sense of humor. An expert on the subject — he had developed many of our rules for writing reports — he influenced some in the class to pursue careers as reports officers and analysts.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Craft We Chose by Richard L. Holm. Copyright © 2011 Richard L. Holm. Excerpted by permission of D Street Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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