Books
Secret Contenders
Melvin Beck (Sheridan Square Publications, US 1984)
The CIA Christmas party of 1958 found 48 year old all-American boy, Melvin Beck, getting the offer of overseas work with Clandestine Services. He “struck like a hungry bass” and landed in Havana in 1959, just as the first Russian freighter was arriving.
Fairly early on Beck’s narrative begins to resemble the ‘Get Smart’ TV spy spoof. He dresses up as a tourist and hangs around the docks with his Brownie, in the bar of the Hilton, and at a travel agents’ convention which appears more like an international gathering of secret agents all getting pissed together.
CIA stations carry our propaganda and study the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS) and local left activity. But Beck learns that by the 1960s RIS had long since ceased using foreign Communist Parties for espionage. In Havana he manages to identify the local KGB chief, but that’s about all, even after endless tailing.
Because CIA chiefs are so paranoid about RIS penetration, officers are only given instructions and told nothing about the ‘big picture’ developed by the information processors at HQ. Beck blames this in part for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Officers didn’t know if what they were reporting was important or just drivel. They resented being kept in the dark and not being allowed to trade info with each other.
The Cuban agents who were used were often abandoned to their fate when operations went wrong. Bargaining for their release would mean an admission of CIA guilt. Beck says “Case officers led safe if not sane lives. Others took the risks.” Agents usually made contact with case officers rather than vice-versa, usually out of fear of having their travel prospects to the US curtailed. This was especially so in Mexico City where Beck went to handle double agent cases after the US spooks were thrown out of Cuba. He writes:
“Any case officer contemplating a double agent operation assumes the opposition knows of his or her CIA connections and that he or she may be a plant. What ensues may be likened to a game of chess in which moves and counter moves are studied, projected and applied. That is the simplest description of what double agent operations are – games.”
The aim is to tie up opposition resources.
The best example Beck gives of what the CIA and KGB are mostly about is the chapter on Mexico City University in the sixties. US students who played sports or hung out with Russian students were expected to report on their conversations to the Embassy where the CIA would either recruit them or warn them not to fraternise with the commies. The recruits would report on other US students who didn’t report their contacts with Russians. The KGB did the same with Russian students. The intelligence value was nil.
In the early sixties the CIA placed a lot of hopes on ‘mind control’, experimenting with drugs, hypnosis and programming a la ‘Manchurian Candidate’. The most bizarre episode in Beck’s book concerns an attempt by a CIA shrink to hypnotise a suspected double agent with the agent’s knowledge. A spectacularly embarrassing failure results.
Beck looks back on his career as a lot of fun but generally futile. The book was written in 1975 and blue-pencilled by his former employers at that time. The indicated deletions (never more than a few words) get a bit irksome in the section on the Bay of Pigs. One wonders if Beck hasn’t covered up a lot of the CIA’s more murderous activities and left a lot of stuff out. But then his bosses, who were always reminding him that ‘only bad guys get results’, were probably aware of his oddball nice-guy tendencies and kept him off the worst cases.
David Black