A Senator, A University and...CIA Farmboys?

A Story I Heard from a Spy Once

This is a story I heard; sole-source, and full disclosure, I don’t know whether its true, but it sure had the ring of truth, so I relay it here and hope you hear it in the same way you’d hear a story from a stranger at the bar or bar-b-que pit; decide on your own if you believe it.

The story has a little bit of everything; spies, cops, suspected drug dealing and a couple nights in jail. It all starts at a sleepy little place between Williamsburg, Virginia and Yorktown, Virginia, just of Interstate 64 on the James River called Camp Peary.

CIA people and Tom Clancy aficionados know it as “The Farm” the place CIA operations officers are first initiated into the cult of Intelligence; after applying, applicants are then interviewed and subjected to psychological tests and background investigations; if they are hired on, they then spend time up walking around the halls or being read into different operations and operational history at CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia waiting for a training slot to open up.

When they finally get to Camp Peary, they adopt a pseudonym that will follow them the rest of their career, it is what they will be known by internally, it is their cult name. Joe gets used to being called Steve and Steve gets used to being called Bob while Kim learns to go by Lauren and Sarah becomes Melissa; they’d had to stop training people under true names because an instructor named Harold Nicholson—who’d been a CIA operations officer type himself for years—sold out his student rosters to the Russians.

Think of the Colin Farrell movie The Recruit

That’s Hollywood, but entertaining Hollywood.

This is a story about when a CIA instructor, a CIA student were doing a simulated agent meet in a public place—on a university, in fact—and it went bad.

I’m about to tell you real world stuff.

But.

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