Permanent Record(43)
As a result, TISOs are responsible for knowing how to fix basically every machine in the building, from individual computers and computer networks to CCTV and HVAC systems, solar panels, heaters and coolers, emergency generators, satellite hookups, military encryption devices, alarms, locks, and so on. The rule is that if it plugs in or gets plugged into, it’s the TISO’s problem.
TISOs also have to know how to build some of these systems themselves, just as they have to know how to destroy them—when an embassy is under siege, say, after all the diplomats and most of their fellow CIA officers have been evacuated. The TISOs are always the last guys out. It’s their job to send the final “off the air” message to headquarters after they’ve shredded, burned, wiped, degaussed, and disintegrated anything that has the CIA’s fingerprints on it, from operational documents in safes to disks with cipher material, to ensure that nothing of value remains for an enemy to capture.
Why this was a job for the CIA and not for the State Department—the entity that actually owns the embassy building—is more than the sheer difference in competence and trust: the real reason is plausible deniability. The worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage. The old explanations for why a country might try to maintain a notionally sovereign physical presence on another country’s soil faded into obsolescence with the rise of electronic communications and jet-powered aircraft. Today, the most meaningful diplomacy happens directly between ministries and ministers. Sure, embassies do still send the occasional démarche and help support their citizens abroad, and then there are the consular sections that issue visas and renew passports. But those are often in a completely different building, and anyway, none of those activities can even remotely justify the expense of maintaining all that infrastructure. Instead, what justifies the expense is the ability for a country to use the cover of its foreign service to conduct and legitimize its spying.
TISOs work under diplomatic cover with credentials that hide them among these foreign service officers, usually under the identity of “attachés.” The largest embassies would have maybe five of these people, the larger embassies would have maybe three, but most just have one. They’re called “singletons,” and I remember being told that of all the posts the CIA offers, these have the highest rates of divorce. To be a singleton is to be the lone technical officer, far from home, in a world where everything is always broken.
My class in Warrenton began with around eight members and lost only one before graduation—which I was told was fairly uncommon. And this motley crew was uncommon, too, though pretty well representative of the kind of malcontents who voluntarily sign up for a career track that all but guarantees they’ll spend the majority of their service undercover in a foreign country. For the first time in my IC career, I wasn’t the youngest in the room. At age twenty-four, I’d say I was around the mean, though my experience doing systems work at headquarters certainly gave me a boost in terms of familiarity with the agency’s operations. Most of the others were just tech-inclined kids straight out of college, or straight off the street, who’d applied online.
In a nod to the paramilitary aspirations of the CIA’s foreign field branches, we called each other by nicknames—quickly assigned based on eccentricities—more often than by our true names. Taco Bell was a suburb: wide, likable, and blank. At twenty years old, the only job he’d had prior to the CIA was as the night-shift manager at a branch of the eponymous restaurant in Pennsylvania. Rainman was in his late twenties and spent the term bouncing around the autism spectrum between catatonic detachment and shivering fury. He wore the name we gave him proudly and claimed it was a Native American honorific. Flute earned his name because his career in the Marines was far less interesting to us than his degree in panpipes from a music conservatory. Spo was one of the older guys, at thirty-five or so. He was called what he was called because he’d been an SPO—a Special Police Officer—at the CIA’s headquarters, where he got so bored out of his mind guarding the gate at McLean that he was determined to escape overseas even if it meant cramming his entire family into a single motel room (a situation that lasted until the management found his kids’ pet snake living in a dresser drawer). Our elder was the Colonel, a midforties former Special Forces commo sergeant who, after numerous tours in the sandbox, was trying out for his second act. We called him the Colonel, even though he was just an enlisted guy, not an officer, mostly out of his resemblance to that friendly Kentuckian whose fried chicken we preferred to the regular fare of the Warrenton cafeteria.
My nickname—I guess I can’t avoid it—was the Count. Not because of my aristocratic bearing or dandyish fashion sense, but because, like the felt vampire puppet of Sesame Street, I had a tendency to signal my intention to interrupt class by raising my forefinger, as if to say: “One, two, three, ah, ha, ha, three things you forgot!”
These were the folks with whom I’d cycle through some twenty different classes, each in its own specialty, but most having to do with how to make the technology available in any given environment serve the government of the United States, whether in an embassy or on the run.
One drill involved lugging the “off-site package,” which was an eighty-pound suitcase of communications equipment that was older than I was, up onto a building’s roof. With just a compass and a laminated sheet of coordinates, I’d have to find in all that vast sky of twinkling stars one of the CIA’s stealth satellites, which would connect me to the agency’s mothership, its Crisis Communications Center in McLean—call sign “Central”—and then I’d use the Cold War–era kit inside the package to establish an encrypted radio channel. This drill was a practical reminder of why the commo officer is always the first in and last out: the chief of station can steal the deepest secret in the world, but it doesn’t mean squat until somebody gets it home.