Foreign Affairs
Does the CIA have a double standard when its spies cozy up to foreigners? Veteran female officers speak out.
"Look, in the late 1960s and early '70s, most of the men fooled around," adds attorney Brookner, who started as a case officer in 1968. "They'd hire women, put on sex shows, take turns with hookers at a hotel. Everybody was having an affair with everyone else. If you slept with foreigners, you didn't report it. The guys were mostly married—of course they didn't report it."
Nonetheless, tough questions continued to be asked about long-term relationships with foreigners. For Bearden, who ran offices in a dozen countries over his long career, it was the "shoes in the closet" test for case officers. "If you look in the closet and her shoes are there, that's when I need to deal with this," he recalls. In 1984, when Bearden himself met a French woman in Nigeria he wanted to marry, he had to offer his resignation and submit to an investigation and polygraph.
Attitudes hardened in the mid-'90s, with revelations of the Aldrich Ames case. Ames, the agency's most notorious traitor, had an affair in Mexico City with an agent he was supposed to run and then concealed plans to marry her. It was but one sign of many that CIA security officers failed to heed. In the end, Ames compromised some 100 operations and led to the execution of at least 10 agents working for the West. The crackdown that followed his 1994 arrest devastated CIA morale and forced many good officers out, agency veterans now agree. A key culprit, agency veterans say, was the Security Center's overreliance on the polygraph, the widely disputed "lie detector" machine that measures stress, not deception.
The crackdown also gave unprecedented power to the Security Office, which few at the agency are willing to cross even today. As one insider explained, "No one wants another Ames." But the secrecy of its work and a series of questionable cases have left the Security Center open to charges of lack of accountability. The rest of the agency is terrified of it since Ames," says Brookner, who has had repeated run-ins with the office while defending her clients. Making matters worse, say critics, is that security officers have a financial incentive to extract admissions from CIA staff—in the form of bonuses and performance awards of as much as $3,000.
Overblown? Agency officials respond that such charges are overblown and that the Security Center is subject to oversight from CIA management, the agency's inspector general, and congressional intelligence committees. Even some sympathetic to Brookner's current case say the office is evenhanded. "I think there's a tendency to overlook men, but on the other hand I've seen men fired for close and continuing relationships," says CIA veteran Robert Baer, on whose career the movie Syriana was based. "In my 21 years, I've never seen Security gratuitously go after somebody."
Bearden, who ran the Russian/East European division during the fall of the Soviet Union, suggests that women have gotten into more trouble simply because the intelligence world is full of men. "The main difference is that so many of the women's relationships were operational and liaison, and they developed into something," he says of the cases he saw. "Guys didn't bring home an intelligence contact because most of the people they were dealing with were male."
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