How to Control the World

A CIA Guide to Planning the American Century from the Man Who Got Away with Revealing Secrets

“Both the peoples of the old world and the new acknowledge that America must direct, if she does not indeed control, the course of world history in the second half of the twentieth century.”

-Henry Steele Commager, “Five Great Problems of the Next Half-Century,” New York Times Magazine, January 1, 1950

Singapore was Joseph Burkholder Smith’s first overseas assignment with the CIA from 1954 to 1956. His cover story was that he was a United States Information Service liaison officer with the British. At a dinner party with members of MI-6, Smith noted the presence of an unusual array of animals at the house, including a horse tethered outside the front door, as well as pye-dogs, cats and an otter inside.

One attendee Smith could not tolerate was Major Burke, a British police security intelligence officer, who in a drunken ramble exposed how they were all part of the fraternity of intelligence. Burke soon discovered that the CIA officers were on their first tour of duty in the Far East. This revelation set Burke off on a tirade on how the Americans were inexperienced and had no understanding of history. “Oh, you’ve got the power,” Burke continued. “Yes, you and the Russians have the power. But it takes more than power. It takes brains. You’ve got to have the brains, boys. And you’ve got to have a plan. That’s the thing, you know, you’ve got to have a plan. The ruddy Russians have a plan, their damned Communist plan. Tell me, what’s yours? You have more power than they do, but do you have a plan? Now that you’ll be ruling the goddamned world, do you have a plan?”

“Yes,” Smith replied with disdain, “we have a plan, but it’s top secret and I’m not authorized to tell you what it is.”

Smith could not help but be filled with joy when the intoxicated Major later at the event reached down to pet the otter, which was sitting quietly. The otter quickly bit Major Burke on the thumb. A complete success, Smith thought.

How to Get Hired by the CIA

Smith was born in 1921 and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and served as a corporal in the U.S. Army from 1943-1946. Thereafter, he taught as an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College, a private college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. At the outset of the Korean War, Smith felt that continuing to teach history meant remaining on the sidelines while modern-day history was being made. There had to be a job in Washington, DC that could make him feel he was “part of the action.” During the course of his job hunt, eventually landing in the CIA took over a year, as he was unable to discover initially anything about the Agency given its secrecy.

The CIA had a “serious research atmosphere,” Smith’s favorite college professor told him. Smith pictured himself being interviewed by some intellectual type puffing on a pipe, with Smith winning him over by employing his wit and wisdom. Instead he found himself waiting for his CIA interview for hours in an empty building, looking at unadorned walls, and wondering what the place was all about. A young woman came into the waiting room at one point, noticed Smith was still sitting there, and said: “Oh, I’m sorry, I made a mistake” and left him alone again with his thoughts.

When he finally made it to the interview hours after its scheduled time, the two Agency officials conducting the interview surprised him by bringing out a magazine article he had written for an obscure periodical. They were interested in his knowledge about Asia, but asked him only basic questions such as whether he had experience in planning activities and what he thought about Japan becoming active in business in Southeast Asia. Asked if he could still speak Japanese, Smith admitted he was rusty. After a brief discussion on salary, he was told: “Now the problem is that we can’t tell you anything definite today. But we’ll be in touch.” One of the interviewers said to him on the way out: “It must seem kind of strange to you the way we do things, but we have to be that way.” When he got outside, he discovered his car was gone. He had spent the afternoon in the building and it was now 5 p.m. A sign on the street said that parking was not allowed after 4 p.m., but now that he was in the world of espionage, he began to get paranoid: did the CIA do this to him? When he found the car down the street placed on a sidewalk, he had more questions.

In the notes taken for Smith’s job interview, only one of the two interviewers recommended him for employment at the CIA. Despite this mixed view of his candidacy, in September 1951 Smith learned he got the job. He submitted voluntarily to a polygraph exam, which was portrayed to him as an experimental test to help the government. During the test, he was “asked if I had ever been a member of the Communist Party, if I ever knowingly associated with Communists, and if I had ever had a homosexual experience. These were the important questions.” One of his interviewers, Christine Collins, soon welcomed him to the Agency holding out her hand: “You’ve just joined the cold war arm of the U.S. government.” His other interviewer, whom Smith called “John,” revealed his entry process had involved deception when it came to the polygraph: “Did he really use that line about volunteering for a special experiment? That’s terrible. A lie-detector test is standard procedure for all of us. I don’t know why they think they must trick people into signing a statement that the test is voluntary.” Soon he was to learn that the Clandestine Services used deception not only externally, but also internally: “changes in assignments, scheduling of duties, requests to perform overtime work were usually handled by telling the employee a cover story and not the truth.”

His superiors outlined the role of the CIA, specifically his group, euphemistically called the Office of Policy Coordination. It was in fact responsible for “covert psychological warfare, covert political action, and covert paramilitary action—including sabotage, counter-sabotage, and support to anti-Communist guerrilla groups.” His superiors tried to downplay the idea they were a “dirty tricks” operation: “that’s too superficial a thing to say. What we are doing is carrying out the covert foreign policy of the United States government. Obviously, we can’t let the Soviets or Chinese or anybody else know this is the case, but everything we do is authorized by the President’s own National Security Council and, organizationally speaking, our chain of command is through the NSC directly to the President. We’re put under CIA because CIA’s intelligence collection and preparation activities afford the necessary amount of secrecy to protect our work. Defense and State are too loose security-wise and they’re too open to public scrutiny to provide us the protection we need. In other words, we give the President the opportunity to carry out programs that he doesn’t want his diplomats or his generals to talk about.” They pointed to an organizational chart to show where they fit in the Agency: “You see, we are under the [Deputy Director for Plans], and you notice that his title, like OPC, is a cover. He’s not in charge of plans. He directs all the covert operations of the CIA, the really secret part, the action part.” They also explained, that the DDP was now Frank Wisner, who had replaced Allen Dulles, now Deputy Director under General Bedell Smith, the Director of Central Intelligence. Smith’s job was to work in the “Plans” staff of the Far East Division, known as FE/Plans, headed by Richard G. Stilwell, an Army general who had commanded U.S. forces in China, Burma, and India during World War II.

Despite their diminishment of the word “Plans” in their title, the group was responsible for drawing up plans for psychological warfare and political warfare in every country across the globe, with FE/Plans focused on Asia. There were two former military officials developing plans to support guerrilla movements and develop escape routes for officers stuck behind enemy lines “in case the cold war turned hot.” There were another two officials working on economic warfare plans to stage boycotts, buy key goods preemptively, and otherwise disturb economies of nations if needed. Collins, who happened to be the highest ranking woman in the Agency, explained that even though Smith had applied to be an intelligence analyst, the OPC needed him immediately to work on these plans. He would be skipping the typical CIA training process for the time being; Russia was possibly about to launch World War III. “What do you think of what we’ve told you so far?” she asked. Smith marveled that the work sounded like “the most interesting job I can imagine.” Besides clarifying what his job would actually entail, he had other questions for them that were weighing on his mind: had the CIA moved his car during his interview? Was that some sort of psychological test? It was probably the police, they informed him.

How to Plan World Domination

“I did not ask myself why the United States needed a covert as well as an overt foreign policy. It did not bother me that we had an overt ‘hands off’ policy on the Chinese Communist-Chinese Nationalist confrontation and a covert policy of helping Chiang Kai-shek get back on the mainland. Why we rejected the overt proposal of General MacArthur to cross the Yalu River in hot pursuit of Chinese Communist troops, while we spent vast sums to infiltrate guerrillas into the territory held by the North Koreans and their Chinese allies, I never asked.”

-Joseph Burkholder Smith

Smith was assigned as the psychological warfare specialist for Southeast Asia, despite lacking any experience in the field. Collins assured him: “it’s a brand-new field. We are all learning. You remember, it was one of Hitler’s strongest weapons. The Communists depend on it a lot too. We figure that if we analyze what they’re doing and study the countries in our area closely, we can beat them at their own game.” His job specifically involved drawing up plans for six Southeast Asian countries and assisting each desk officer responsible for each country with suggestions for propaganda and psychological warfare campaigns, which would then be passed on to stations in the field. He learned that his group, FE-3/OPC, was responsible for Vietnam, Thailand, Malaya (later known as Malaysia), Singapore, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines.

In reading through the materials provided to him, Smith learned that the CIA was attempting to set up hundreds of paramilitary officers in North Korea. What struck him as spectacular secret was a CIA cover organization called the SEA Supply Company. In a few years, this group would be training police forces in Thailand, but in the immediate term Smith discovered that SEA Supply was involved in planning an invasion of China through the CIA Station in Taiwan with the help of the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang or KMT), stationed in Burma. Publicly, President Truman was being accused of having abandoned the Chinese Nationals, but behind the scenes with the CIA, the truth was quite different. “Of all the acts of this gutsy little President, I have always remembered that never once did he blurt out his secret,” Smith remarked. Over 600 staff members of FE/OPC were training guerrillas, providing logistical support, spreading propaganda through radio and leaflets, among other tasks. Their cover was a group called Western Enterprises, a sister organization to SEA Supply. Stilwell’s deputy, Desmond FitzGerald, ran the operation, which had the goal of invading China from Burma through Yunnan province.

The last CIA-sponsored invasion of China occurred in August 1952, when 2,100 KMT troops led by General Li Mi were turned back by the Chinese army after penetrating 60 miles inland. Li Mi and his U.S. advisors had not expected to conquer China with these troops alone; they anticipated the invasion would spark an uprising that would switch local allegiances from Mao Zedong to Chiang Kai-Shek, the head of the KMT. After three failed attempts, Li Mi gave up on his goal of taking over China and instead focused on controlling the opium trade with his 12,000 troops located in Burma. “Li Mi’s troops would not give up their Burmese poppy fields,” Smith wrote. Decades later in 1985, as the State Department worked on publishing their historical studies of this period in history, the Agency requested that their role in SEA Supply Company remain hidden “because of the problems that it could lead to in this still explosive part of the world.”

While Smith believed he had been assigned “stepchildren” countries, he found he was overwhelmed with having to develop propaganda themes and ideas for operations in the six nations in Southeast Asia. He read intelligence reports, radio station transcripts, and studies of the countries in attempt to discover potential psychological vulnerabilities that would “make them scorn Communist appeals.” Smith had trouble prioritizing his tasks, so he consulted a CIA colleague he knew previously in college to ask him what to do. “Joe, you must become an expert on one country,” he advised. “The big trouble around here is that there is simply not enough solid, genuine expertise. Once you’ve established a reputation as such an expert, you’ll be on your way to the top.” He suggested that Smith choose Vietnam: “There’s no one in the U.S. government who is a real expert on Indochina,” he reasoned, “and it will soon be terribly important that there be one.”

As a consequence, Smith spent a lot of time in 1952 at the Vietnam desk, learning about CIA operations underway there. He listened to radio broadcasts from the Viet Minh, the national independence coalition formed by Ho Chi Minh and wrote slogans to counter their land-reform programs, their claims of victory, and undermine their status with workers, which included slogans and fabricated news stories. When he suggested the idea of pitting the region’s religions against each other, Smith was told by the employees at the Vietnam desk that this proposal would not work. The CIA only had agents in the French-speaking Catholic minority, they explained, which amounted to 1.6 million out of 26 million total population. Smith later thought this provided “a clue to the miserable failure the United States made of all its efforts in Vietnam.” Maybe the Agency should put some thought behind adding officers who were not Catholics and spoke Vietnamese, Smith offered. “If you wanted to do convincing psychological warfare in Italy and all you had to work with were a couple of Buddhists,” he reasoned, “don’t you think it would be wise to try to find some additional personnel?” The desk officers agreed it was a sound point.

While working on plans for each of the six countries, he marveled that from Washington he was mapping out the futures of these societies, accounting for all contingencies. One important consideration regarded the potential situation of countries being taken over by Communist guerrillas and what the effect of assassinating their leaders would have on the cohesion of these groups. “For example, in Indochina, would the Viet Minh fall apart if Ho Chi Minh were assassinated?” he was left to ponder.

Assassination was always included in their contingency plans, but approval had to be sought from the NSC before it could be attempted in practice. Even if the action were approved, the Agency had the operational problem of figuring out how to carry out the killing. Smith read case studies for inspiration such as the 1940 assassination in Mexico of Leon Trotsky, who was murdered by a Soviet agent originally from Spain using an ice axe. This example turned out to not of much use as “the Soviet service exercised a control over its agents we could not impose, certainly not on Asians.” The CIA, as a result, was left with only “criminals and cranks” to fulfill the assassin’s role.

Dominating Asia in the latter part of the year took a back seat in the CIA to the impending merger of the Office of Special Operations (OSO) and the OPC within the Agency. Future colleagues from both teams finally introduced themselves to one another, previously preferring the silo approach. The two groups were to be merged and some employees were fearful for their jobs. Countering this notion was that they were to gain two new buildings, which bode well for most of the two groups staying in their roles for the time being. They were also planning a Christmas party for December 24, which Smith attended. He noticed one exchange he found to be significant: “Dick Stilwell turned up in a Confederate forage cap and gave a couple of rebel yells. Lloyd George, OSO division chief, knocked Dick’s hat off. All this took place in a friendly boozy way, but I thought I saw who was going to be the chief of the newly merged division.” This turned out to be a correct guess, but the only actual mergers he saw taking place at the time were ones “some officers made with some secretaries at the Christmas party.” The actual OSO-OPC merger dragged on for almost a year, until intelligence gathering and covert action became one function. The modus operandi of the organization of seeking information was now blurred with using those same sources to take action. “The new style of operating may not have led straight to the Bay of Pigs, but it helped speed us on our way,” Smith surmised. “Some of the same Cuban agents who helped in the landing also gave us the information that the Cuban people would rise up against Castro immediately when our battalion hit the beach.”

How to Conduct Psychological Warfare

In the winter of 1952, Smith finally was offered to opportunity to attend to undertake some training to learn more about his assigned work. Author Paul Linebarger’s seminar in psychological warfare was held at the instructor’s home, every Friday for eight weeks. In the seclusion of Linebarger’s living room with the drapes closed, he offered his expertise as a former U.S. Army psychological warfare officer and East Asia scholar, who had worked in Chongqing, China during World War II. Linebarger was known to the public under the pen name Cordwainer Smith, a writer of science fiction books and short stories. The instructor emphasized to the students that the main purpose of psychological warfare was to manipulate people such that they were unable to detect it. Wartime psychwar meant undermining the will of both the enemy’s military and civilian population in the conflict.

Any methods could be employed in this effort and Linebarger explained three types of propaganda. Black propaganda was identified as operations that were disguised to hide or misrepresent the source of the material. In contrast, white propaganda had a clearly identified author meant to influence a population. Light gray propaganda was not attributable to the United States, for example, but from a source known to be friendly to the country; medium gray was from a neutral source and dark gray from a hostile source. The training group spent time coming up with “ways in which we could manufacture statements denouncing the Chinese brainwashing of U.S. prisoners in Korea and attribute them to leaders of the Congress Party of India...If disinterested India didn’t like brainwashing, it must be bad.” Through use of a 1951 Reserve Officers’ Training Corps Manual, the group was told about how German black propaganda worked in World War II. German operators employed tactics such as sending letters to French soldiers addressed from their hometowns informing them their wives were having affairs or had sexually transmitted diseases, providing mourning dresses for women to wear on the streets of Paris, and intercepting telephone communications to give orders that confused the enemy.

One of the main goals of the training was to help the officers develop methods for causing their Communist enemies to fight with one another or turn the general population of those countries against them. Rather than simply stating the Communists were doing evil things, the objective was to “do or say something that was considered wrong or even abhorrent, by the peoples of the countries we were addressing, and do it in the name of the local Communist Party…Doing something evil, disguised as Communists, would have real credibility.” One hypothetical example discussed was fabricating an order that William Pomeroy, an American army officer with ties to the Filipino guerrilla movement known as the Hukbalahap, was about to conduct a massacre of woman and children with the Huks in a village in the Philippines. If the fake order was made to look like it was sourced from a disillusioned Huk militant and was mailed to the Manila Times, the effect would be greater than any editorial could produce. Skeptics calling the evidence fake could then be branded as “sympathetic to the cause of a band of butchers.” No one at the seminar, Smith noted, was a criminal as they would have never obtained the security clearance. Now, however, they were discussing the intricate details of producing forgeries: “how to obtain authentic paper, how to be sure to use the same kind of typewriter that Huk orders were usually written on, and of course, how to be certain to use the proper language that would make our work indistinguishable from the real thing.”

“Look,” Linebarger instructed them, “can’t you remember how you fooled your brothers and sisters and your father and mother? Try to remember how old you were when you first trick one of them.” One woman explained how as sixth graders she and friend would skip out on school to listen to their favorite radio program. “The whole thing actually hinged on the fact that we were both thought to be such nice little girls,” she explained. “You have got the idea,” Linebarger responded.

The training instructor later offered a recommendation for reading: “I want you all to go out and get a copy of David Maurer’s classic on the confidence man. It’s called The Big Con…That little book will teach you more about the art of covert operations than anything else I know…Maurer’s book will give you a lot of ideas on how to recruit agents, how to handle them and how to get rid of them peacefully when they’re no use to you any longer. Believe me, that last one is the toughest job of all.” Smith devoured the book, focusing particularly on the following statement: “Big-time confidence games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast except the mark knows his part perfectly.”

Linebarger sung the praises of two CIA leaders, who he believed were excellent examples of implementers of successful propaganda. They were Edward Lansdale, OPC station chief in Manila, and E. Howard Hunt, OPC station chief in Mexico City. While working in the Philippines against the Huks, Lansdale used Filipino lore to come up with an operation to fly aircraft over Huk areas to broadcast messages in Tagalog warning that those villagers who gave Huks food and shelter would be cursed. Some Huks were starved and surrendered using this method, but the plan worked only in the rain, when clouds hid the airplane from those listening down below. Left out of the training was this method described by Lansdale himself in his memoirs:

A combat psywar squad was brought in. It planted stories among town residents of an asuang living on the hill where the Huks were based. Two nights later, after giving the stories time to make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along the trail used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the asuang had got him and that one of them would be next if they remained on that hill. When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.

Hunt’s example as told by Linebarger was far less drastic: After learning that a Communist front in Mexico was planning to host Soviet visitors, Hunt obtained the invitation, which promised the offer of drinks and a lunch to be provided. He went to a printer and had three thousand copies made, distributing them widely. On the day of the reception, the CIA had achieved the desired the result: chaos ensued as too many unwanted visitors were in attendance and the event had to end early. Soviet-Mexican relations were “definitely damaged, at least for a while.”

The seminar inspired Smith to launch a black operation of his own. When an announcement was made that the Soviets and Indonesians were on the brink of opening diplomatic relations, this meant that Soviet officials would be moving to Indonesia and Smith saw an opportunity to disrupt the process. The team proposed that a fake cable be written to Indonesia asking if two hundred houses were available. The Indonesian official receiving the message was greatly upset and demanded an investigation into the size of the Soviet mission. The CIA’s press assets added to the mix by speculating in newspapers that the Soviets were planning to send a large number of spies under embassy cover to the nation’s capital. Smith noted with pride: “Exchange of formal diplomatic missions was held up for six months as a result. Conservative Moslem elements, without any contact with us, saw to it that the Indonesian government examined carefully the matter of how many Russians would be coming to Djakarta before agreeing to let any into the country at all.”

Linebarger wrote a letter of commendation for Smith’s participation in the 1952 course that ended up in his personnel file: “He brought the capacity of a reflective and richly educated mind to this new field and demonstrated a real talent for seeing the opportunities presented by novel and unconventional methods of attack upon Communism.” Linebarger also offered a caution to the training group on the use of psychological warfare tactics: “I hate to think what would ever happen if any of you ever got out of this business and got involved in U.S. politics. These kinds of dirty tricks must never be used in internal U.S. politics. The whole system would come apart.”

How to Elect a President in a Foreign Country

“John Foster Dulles had already found that ‘unleashing Chiang Kai-shek’ was not a feasible project. It might turn out like Des FitzGerald’s Li Mi operation. Evidently he was going to ‘unleash’ Ramon Magsaysay instead. If we couldn’t liberate the Soviet Union or China just yet, at least we had found something else to do.”

-Joseph Burkholder Smith

As the Eisenhower administration formed in early 1953, Smith had no idea how closely the Dulles brothers would work together to achieve foreign policy ends. If Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had a situation that could not be influenced through diplomatic pressure, the new CIA Director Allen Dulles would have the Agency step in. Early on in their respective tenures, this occurred in the Philippines, where the CIA intervened to win an election on behalf of a preferred candidate.

Smith’s training came to life when Ed Lansdale was selected to lead the effort in electing Ramon Magsaysay, who had previously served in the Philippines as the Secretary of National Defense from late 1950 to early 1953. The CIA provided $1 million ($11.8 million today) for the operation, with additional funds sourced from U.S. corporations and a Coca-Cola franchise based in the Philippines. Des FitzGerald recruited a New York politician, Gabriel Kaplan, to assist in the effort. Kaplan ran the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) to monitor the election with funding from the CIA station, while boasting publicly that sponsorship came from local civic groups. The Agency then moved on to ensuring that the nomination process for Magsaysay ran smoothly. Some of his competition included Jose P. Laurel and Claro M. Recto, who had previously worked on the development of the Philippine constitution and served in the puppet government established by the Japanese in the early 1940s. The CIA found Laurel and Recto easy to convince and have them join forces with Magsaysay, as they in turn thought Magsaysay was an unintelligent soldier who would be easy to control. Years later Recto confided in Smith: “I thought it amusing to arrange a deal with the American military who spent most of their time unjustly defaming me. As for Ramon, he was so dumb I knew I could handle him.”

While Magsaysay had previously run under the Liberal Party banner, he was now running for president with the Nacionalista Party. Five years later, while serving a tour of duty in Manila, Smith discovered by accident how the Liberal Party vote was split and eventually migrated partially to Magsaysay’s camp in the 1953 election. The day Smith moved into his new house in Manila, he was introduced to Senator Fernando Lopez. After meeting him, a Magsaysay contact revealed to Smith: “Your landlady has been Lopez’s mistress for years…When he was vice-president and secretary of agriculture at the same time, I was working in the agriculture department and I found out he had a side room, next to his office, where the two of them spent a lot of afternoons. So I got some equipment from the station and bugged the room. In fact, we discovered there was a bed in the room, so we bugged that too. Boy, we got some interesting recordings.”

Lopez broke away from President Elpidio Quirino, who ran in 1953 on the Liberal Party ticket, choosing to join as Carlos P. Romulo’s VP candidate under a Progressive/Democratic Party banner. The latter ticket eventually dropped out of the race and threw their support behind Magsaysay. Smith asked if this move had been due to the surreptitious recordings: “I’m going to plead the Fifth Amendment,” the contact replied. The CIA, through the FE Division in headquarters and Manila station, sent reporters from the United States and Asian countries to monitor the election. Some of their news stories “were the result of direct contact” with the Agency. The New York Times, in an editorial on September 17, praised the CIA efforts indirectly, writing that “the Philippines is the showcase of democracy in Asia” through the efforts of groups like “the National Movement for Free Elections” which was working “to make this election the same sort of model as was that of 1951.” After Magsaysay won in a landslide with 68.9% of the vote, President Eisenhower also praised the Agency indirectly: “This is the way we like to see an election carried out.”

The successful operation in the Philippines gave the CIA the sense that their ideas regarding paramilitary action, psychological warfare, and political maneuvers could work anywhere at anytime. Lansdale thereafter moved on to work on creating the Ngo Dinh Diem government in South Vietnam. As president, Magsaysay was once told by his finance secretary that their plans for spending more were blocked by the law of supply and demand. “Let’s repeal the damned law!” he exclaimed. The CIA and elite in the Philippines had their puppet in place for the moment; however, he later died in a plane crash in 1957, which resulted in the loss of the region’s only truly dependable asset to the CIA, Smith lamented.

How to Set Up a Fake CIA Commercial Business

Later in 1953, Smith was transferred to the Indonesia/Malaya/Australia Branch to replace an officer who had unsuccessfully attempted to take his own life. In the newly merged OPC/OSO organization’s FE Division, Southeast Asia was handled by three branches now instead of one. FE/4 covered Indochina, Thailand, and Burma; FE/5 covered Indonesia, Malaya, and liaison with Australia’s intelligence services; and the Philippines had their own dedicated branch. The man he replaced had been working on a project Smith admitted “might well have stimulated suicidal thoughts,” aimed at providing cover for status and cover for action in Indonesia through a chain of fake bookstores and a phony company set up in New York City. “Cover for status” was CIA jargon for a fake occupation to provide cover for espionage activities and “cover for action” meant an activity providing a believable story as to why the spy was meeting with certain people and acting the way he was in the foreign country.

When Smith inherited the bookstore project, he felt the idea was idiotic given the barriers to entry for a foreign company establishing bookstores; only one had been put in place in two years, with one officer staffing it: “He begged us and New York just to keep sending textbooks lest he be interrogated and thrown out of the country.” The officer was still “continuing to build his cover,” accomplishing no real work in the interim. The Commercial Division overseeing the CIA’s business enterprises was upset with the $100,000 ($1.2 million today) per year cost with almost no return cash flow, including a Madison Avenue office for the fake New York company.

The rationale for the bookstores, Smith explained, was related to “the need for unofficial cover positions in Indonesia, the potential operational leads for press and political recruitments our bookstore personnel might develop, the way these could be exploited not only for psychological warfare purposes but also to meet intelligence reporting requirements.” Smith sat quietly at the committee overseeing the project and without saying a word, Chief of Operations Richard Helms granted $10,000 to fund a trip for Smith and the company’s fake president to visit Indonesia and come up with a recommendation on what to do with the initiative.

Smith traveled to Jakarta in the summer of 1953, where he met the company president, who claimed he had established appropriate cover by traveling first through Tokyo, Taipei, Saigon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Singapore. All of this travel was necessary, the fake president assured him, to keep up the pretense that he was in fact the head of a large company instead of “just supplying one small bookstore in Indonesia.” Later at the hotel, Smith doused himself with cold water, taking a shower in the only bathroom in his hotel. He listened to music being played and sung in the distance and he began to think that the locals “really didn’t have time for reading anti-Communist books.” Returning home from the trip to the U.S., Smith found his “gastrointestinal system was never the same again.” The expensive New York office for the company was dropped, but the Indonesian bookstore never amounted to anything operationally. The officer stationed there used his knowledge gained to get a publishing job once he returned to the United States.

How to Dispose of a CIA Agent

With time now to spare in between assignments, Smith was finally trained at the Farm, the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Virginia. There he was coached in the basics of espionage by former Army Counter Intelligence Corps officers and other military officials who had never worked in the CIA. This gap in experienced trainers was due to the fact that CIA supervisors had no interest in giving up their personnel to become instructors.

The teachers pointed to the Soviets’ successful use of blackmail and recounted stories of how Soviet agents had used sex for this purpose, luring diplomats in Moscow into honeytraps and taking photos of them in compromising situations as leverage. To demonstrate how this could work, the students were taken through old houses equipped with different varieties of two-way mirrors and shown training films demonstrating how Soviets had seduced secretaries to obtain information or recruit agents.

In the parlance of the Agency, “agents” were individuals recruited to obtain information or accomplish tasks in a secretive fashion. Once agents were no longer of any use to the CIA, there was the matter of how to dispose of them. In a training course, the students and instructors discussed potential methods for carrying this out. The more extreme perspective was taking the disposal terminology literally, which brought Smith back to his earlier contingency planning work at headquarters. There remained the same “practical problems”: who would conduct the assassinations? The students agreed that hiring criminals as cut-outs to separate case officers from direct involvement was superior to any other method. The vast majority of those in attendance, however, according to Smith, believed that terminating agents in this fashion was too drastic and agreed with the “lame solution” to pay unneeded agents a large bonus at the end of their service.

How to Plant Fake Stories in the Press

“Smith is happily married to an intelligent young lady, and they have two attractive daughters. His wife is willing to go anywhere her husband desires on assignment for KUBARK [CIA].”

-CIA Fitness Report for Joseph B. Smith, July 24, 1956

“My god, it’s hot,” Smith’s wife Jeanne complained. She was not only upset about the climate in Singapore, but also the unacceptable living accommodations provided by the CIA in Smith’s overseas assignment, which began in 1954. After hearing the couple’s complaints, the local CIA assistant Wilma, whom Smith described as a “tall, buxom blonde,” found them a better place to live: “It’s actually a house far above your rank but there is no one higher to claim it now,” she informed them.

Smith’s predecessor had quit in disgust when Robert Jantzen, the current Station Chief in Singapore, had been selected over him when the merged station was created. He left behind a legacy of two local news agents on the CIA payroll, who had not been active for some time, but were still receiving monthly salaries. Smith decided to put them to work after receiving a cable from headquarters urging “an all-out effort ‘including black operations’ to bolster the French side in the negotiations at Geneva by showing China to be deeply involved in supporting the Viet Minh Communists.” After employing the tradecraft methods he had learned at the Farm, including the use of code words to communicate with his selected agent, he scheduled a meeting with Li Huan Li, an assistant to a wire services bureau chief.

Smith’s talkative assistant Wilma suggested that she and Smith have lunch on the day of the meeting so as not to arouse suspicion and to discuss logistics. At 1 p.m., the two arrived at a three-story building called the Orange Grove Flats in advance of the 3 p.m. agent meeting. As most people in Singapore closed their shutters in the afternoon to ward off the sun, Wilma described to Smith how the apartments provided the necessary privacy: “You see what I mean? When Li gets here we can have the shutters drawn like everyone else and people won’t see him coming into the living room. Of course, you’ll be able to have your meeting in the air-conditioned second bedroom in complete privacy.” Smith was impressed and the two had martinis over lunch. Wilma had flattering things to say, including that Smith was “exactly the kind of man she liked to work for” and that she could sense he would have a successful tour.

After lunch, Wilma suggested they next inspect the proposed meeting room. In the large room, Smith saw a table and several chairs that would suffice to hold the meeting. There happened to be a double bed in the room and an air conditioner installed by the CIA station, which provided welcome relief from the sweltering heat they had endured downstairs. Wilma gave Smith a long look and then sat on the bed. This move had not been covered as part of the signals training offered by the CIA at the Farm, Smith thought.