information and disinformation to the Americans.
The supposedly meticulous Eastern Europe division, in fact, suffered one of the worst breaches of the entire Cold War. Aldrich Ames, one of the agency’s most senior officers responsible for Soviet counterintelligence, turned out to be working for the Soviet Union. His betrayals led to the capture—and execution—of countless American spies in Russia. El Alpinista knew him. Everyone who was high up at the agency did. “I did not have a high opinion of him,” the Mountain Climber said, “because I knew him to be a lazy drunkard.” But he and his colleagues never suspected that Ames was a traitor. “It was unthinkable to the old hands that one of our own could ever be beguiled by the other side the way Ames was,” he said. “We were all just taken aback that one of our own could betray us that way.”
The Mountain Climber was one of the most talented people at one of the most sophisticated institutions in the world. Yet he’d been witness three times to humiliating betrayal—first by Fidel Castro, then by the East Germans, and then, at CIA headquarters itself, by a lazy drunk. And if the CIA’s best can be misled so completely, so many times, then what of the rest of us?
Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?
1 The CIA makes a regular practice of giving its agents lie-detector tests—to guard against just the kind of treachery that Aspillaga was describing. Whenever one of the agency’s Cuban spies left the island, the CIA would meet them secretly in a hotel room and have them sit for a polygraph. Sometimes the Cubans would pass; the head of the polygraph division personally gave a clean bill of health to six Cuban agents who ended up being doubles. Other times, the Cubans would fail. But what happened when they did? The people running the Cuban section dismissed it. One of the CIA’s former polygraphers, John Sullivan, remembers being summoned to a meeting after his group gave the thumbs-down on a few too many Cuban assets. “They ambushed us,” Sullivan said. “We were berated unmercifully.…All these case officers were saying, ‘You guys just don’t know what you’re doing,’ et cetera, et cetera. ‘Mother Teresa couldn’t pass you.’ I mean, they were really very, very nasty about it.”
But can you blame them? The case officers chose to replace one method of making sense of strangers (strapping them to a polygraph machine) with another: their own judgment. And that is perfectly logical.
Polygraphy is, to say the least, an inexact art. The case officer would have had years of experience with the agent: met them, talked to them, analyzed the quality of the reports they filed. The assessment of a trained professional, made over the course of many years, ought to be more accurate than the results of a hurried meeting in a hotel room, right? Except that it wasn’t.
“Many of our case officers think, ‘I’m such a good case officer, they can’t fool me,’” Sullivan said. “This one guy I’m thinking of in particular—and he was a very, very good case officer—they thought he was one of the best case officers in the agency.” He was clearly talking about the Mountain Climber. “They took him to the cleaners. They actually got him on film servicing a dead drop. It was crazy.”
Chapter Two
Getting to Know der Führer
1.
On the evening of August 28, 1938, Neville Chamberlain called his closest advisor to 10 Downing Street for a late-night strategy session. Chamberlain had been the British prime minister a little over a year. He was a former businessman, a practical and plainspoken man, whose interests and experience lay with domestic affairs. But now he faced his first foreign-policy crisis. It involved Adolf Hitler, who had been making increasingly bellicose statements about invading the Sudetenland, the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia.
If Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, it would almost certainly mean a world war, which Chamberlain wanted desperately to avoid. But Hitler had been particularly reclusive in recent months, and Germany’s intentions were so opaque that the rest of Europe was growing nervous. Chamberlain was determined to resolve the impasse. He dubbed his idea, which he put to his advisors that night, Plan Z. It was top secret. Chamberlain would later write that the idea was “so unconventional and daring that it rather took [Foreign Secretary Lord] Halifax’s breath away.” Chamberlain wanted to fly to Germany and demand to meet Hitler