Part 1: Spies and Provocateurs
30 Years of Spooks and Kooks - Rape and Rumpus - Lover of Tragedy, Not Romance
#16
5 September 2022
Part 1: Spies and Provocateurs
30 Years of Spooks and Kooks - Rape and Rumpus - Lover of Tragedy, Not Romance
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike)
TAIPEI - 2022 is the 30th anniversary of my first book, Spies and Provocateurs: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Persons Conducting Espionage and Covert Action, 1946-1991. Released on 1 September 1992, it was a library-bound book for academics, libraries, and the intelligence community (IC).
The book was well received in the intelligence community (IC), including positive book reviews in Cryptolog, Cryptologia, Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, Periscope (AFIO) and The Surveillant. The book was also profiled in the 1995 Whole Spy Catalog: A Resource Encyclopedia for Researchers.
The book defined my career in not just intelligence, but in journalism, and the two seemed at times inseparable as disciplines. This was something John le Carré had warned about in The Honourable Schoolboy, a book that ironically I first read in Hong Kong.
It was a two year effort of spending nearly every night in academic libraries digging through biographies, memoirs, newspapers, magazines, history books, on and on. The 270 books in the bibliography are a testament to my obsession. I was naïve back then to actually believe that a writer had to read all the books in the bibliography. It was a discipline that I continued for the rest of my career. Over the years, I began to notice a profane sloppiness amongst book writers and their bibliographies. It became clear after a while that many had not even done the research and had dumped that duty on their interns or graduate assistants.
This is before the Internet and the first computer used to enter the data had a 286 processor with five-inch floppy disks. At the time, computers still used MS-DOS files and were awkward compared to today’s windows versions. This was negated slightly with the WordPerfect software, but still required a two-inch manual to learn how to write, edit, save, etc. I had used WordStar in graduate school, but it was a nightmare.
Data would occasionally crash losing weeks of work, forcing a reentry of the data all over again until I began backing them up on even more floppy disks (that often failed anyway). I even got a nasty virus because my roommates were using my computer to play video games. During the late 1980s you could rent video games just like renting VHS movies. This was finally outlawed due to copyright complaints by the manufacturers. You could not only play the game, but copy it onto floppy disks. And then one day I looked up at my computer screen to see a skull and crossbones laughing at me.
In 2014, the book was stolen by a publisher in Turkey, Zodyak Kitap, as Ajan Provokatörler. After contacting the publisher, I was informed that “Wendell Minnick” was deceased.
My interest in espionage was partly a silly childhood fantasy from the early James Bond movies of Sean Connery, particularly Thunder Ball (1965). But there was also the Vietnam War that had an insane hold on my imagination during the 1960s and even later when the war was lost.
These were not mature views of intelligence operations or guerrilla warfare, but the seeds were planted very early in life. Growing up in a farming community, we stabled horses, there were plenty of guns to choose from. Wandering around the woods with my friends, we would shoot at beer bottles in the river or aerosol cans just to watch them spin in crazy directions. How we did not accidentally kill each other remains a mystery, but access to guns was as normal as having a bicycle.
In the 1950s, while my father was in high school, he was part of the YMCA’s competitive rifle shooting club, participating in tournaments in the tri-state area. He dragged me out of bed every Saturday morning to practice: .22 longs, Mossberg bolt-action rifle, pipe-fed, using a manual peep sight for vertical/horizontal adjustment. Snow, rain, whatever. Every Saturday, firing over 200 rounds at targets at 100 yards. So 52 weeks equal a year and ten years equal 500 Saturdays. This would come to 100,000 bullets. From elementary school to junior high. Breathing techniques, posing, feeling the flow…I would fire and miss the target, my father would bark at me from his binoculars: eleven o’clock at five inches. I would calibrate the peep sight again and fire. Now it was a hit, but I had overcorrected. Then after turning the sight down and left the appropriate notches, I fired again. Kill shot at 100 yards. It was the U.S. Marine Corps classic shot pattern; the one Oswald used on Kennedy. Miss, Hit, Kill.
While researching the book I became very critical of conspiracy theories, as I learned that the CIA could just as easily mean Clowns In Action. That intelligence operations went sideways despite the best training and preparation for no better reason than Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
The book was the result of research, not originally intended for publication, as I was undergoing processing for the CIA’s operations directorate. The first time I was processed my case officer was always “sick” and away from the office. Then in what can be called magic, my application was lost in the bureaucratic shuffle of the maze of the CIA’s personnel department. The CIA had moved the entire department to a new office in West Virginia as a Congressional effort to create jobs in a state often confused with the location of the movie Deliverance.
I was told to fill out another 34-page Personal History Statement and that a different case officer would process it quickly. The PHS was an agonizingly detailed report on every facet of your life. I had to get my evil step-mother’s social security number (not an easy task). In fact, when you hear claims by someone that they are ex-CIA, all you really need to do is ask to see their PHS, which they retain as a copy. Too many news outlets interview supposed CIA “agents” only to discover them as frauds later. The other issue is that the CIA does not recruit from U.S. citizens overseas. They have to be within the U.S. for a minimum of three years before processing can begin. This security protocol might weed out potential double-agents, but the CIA loses a large number of potential recruits with boots-on-the-ground language training and experience. Relying on fresh faced college kids unfamiliar with the real world, produces generation after generation of intelligence failures.
I was sent to Camp Perry (the Farm) for an interview, but upon arriving at the gate the guards acted like they were going to shoot me. After calming down they checked their visitor list and I did not appear on it. They called the administration office on campus and no one had heard of me. Then I turned around and drove back to my apartment outside the main gate of Dam Neck Naval Base. After several hours, I finally arrived home and the phone rang with my case office demanding to know where I was today. Was it a stress test? I had read about such stunts in Joseph Smith’s memoir Portrait of a Cold Warrior. However, Hanlon’s Razor was my adopted philosophy with all things spooky: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
A U.S. Navy SEAL at Little Creek would come over to the apartment periodically on weekends for beers and pizza demanding to know about the latest screw-up. He loved ranting about the idiotic 1990 movie Navy SEALs with Charlie Sheen. He despised the Agency in other rants about numerous massive fuck-ups, one involving Operation Prime Chance. He would roar with laughter at my latest interaction and then remind me again and again that CIA meant “Cash In Advance for Clowns In Action”. For the totality of my journalism career, when some CIA front company asked me to do them a “favor” I always uttered the Cash In Advance phrase.
A colleague who was being processed by the CIA at the same time received two rejection letters and one acceptance letter for employment. Each letter was from the same office, but different phone numbers. He called the acceptance letter’s number and served ten years; with his highest appointment in Moscow under the cover of the Regional Security Office.
I was rescheduled for another interview in Chicago, but reminded them I lived only three hours from DC’s Langley Headquarters. I asked if they would pay for the air flight to Chicago, and the answer was no.
After conducting massive amounts of research, I drew up a book proposal to McFarland. They accepted it and I had two years to write it.
The Agency never seemed to notice my letter resigning from the employment process. Instead, I would get letters for years afterward asking me to go here or there for an interview or take another exam. I had already taken a forced choice recognition (FCR) exam at Butler University. The exam asked questions that required yes or no answers, then would repeat the question further-on in the test with a slightly different format. For example, “do you like loud parties?”, then later a slightly different wording, “do loud parties make you happy?”…and so on. Letters from the CIA became annoying as my mailman began to notice and tell the neighbors. I never replied to them and eventually they died off.
After the book was published, I began research on contract for a book on the history of CIA operations in China during the Cold War. I traveled to Hong Kong, Taipei, and the National Archives in Washington, DC. I joined the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) to meet veterans for interviews. After a year the rug was pulled out from under me. The publisher had gone bankrupt. Despite this, the book research effort had made a big splash in Hong Kong:
I gave up on books and began writing about intelligence operations and warfare for a variety of periodicals. It started small, with the Far Eastern Economic Review, but grew to my eventual recruitment by Jane’s Defence Weekly (2000-2006) as the Taipei Correspondent, and later for Defense News (2006-2016) as the Asia Bureau Chief (my first full-time staff position as a journalist).
On too many occasions I agreed to kill articles that exposed CIA fronts and operations, as required by U.S. Federal Law (PL 97-200). The only time the de facto U.S. embassy in Taiwan, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), would call me was for “coffee” to kill a story. Each time I spiked a story, I sent them a Christmas card to annoy them (no matter the month). This angered both the CIA and Defense Attache Office (DAO), as Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB) was reading AIT’s mail. My sending these out-of-season cards would have served as a red flag to any counter-intelligence community in the world.
The NSB would send people to follow me around for a day, then break off for a while. They finally sent someone to meet and review my file they had. It was surreal, but kind of fun. Some of it was correct, but a lot of it was plain wrong. No, I did not carry a handgun. Yes, I had a Master’s degree. After that, it was like having a new friend. She came to my Halloween and Christmas parties and continues as a friend. The physical surveillance stopped, minus my phone. In a bizarre incident, after hanging up, my phone rang, and it was a recording of my conversation with a source. An accident via the telephone company or a warning? Who knew? Nor, perhaps, did I really care. Jaded journalists are a cliché, but real.
These types of experiences were not unusual, as Mark Pedelty, the author of War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents, remarked: “Reporters were forced to normalize the abnormal and routinize the absurd, while being served constant reminders they were not really ‘in’ on the events they covered. The foreign correspondents were geographically proximate, but culturally distanced.”
While covering military affairs, I did not believe in mixing grapes and grain (helping the IC was in violation of many journalistic ethics; and mixing political and military writing was a big no-no). But I also had to balance my relationship with these folks as sources and friends. When you cover national security affairs as a journalist it was always better to watch and wait. There is a rule I constantly struggle to abide: Engage and Enrage.
But it was impossible to ignore hypocrisy:
But the job was fun. You meet your heroes and legendary members of the IC with honest opinions about the world.
But there were times when it was necessary to turn to brutality. When an AIT officer confronted me in a bar over a story about Gregg Bergersen with a raised beer bottle. I took it away from him before it was smashed over my head. After picking up another one, I took that away too. On the third attempt, I simply mangled him. I suppose I am the only journalist in Taiwan to have pummeled an AIT officer and get away with it. But why? How is such a thing possible?
The truth of the horrific nature of beating someone of such importance at AIT is that AIT most likely should have paid attention. The fight was over a story I wrote about the 2008 arrest of Gregg Bergersen, a senior officer for the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency, for spying for China.
The problem with Bergersen, the AIT officer, and myself, was that we drank too much and too often. Bergersen always had a cigar in his mouth. Bragging about this or that. Bergersen managed Taiwan’s Po Sheng C4 upgrade program under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Program and handled negotiations with Taiwan on the Communications and Information Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA), which allowed the U.S. to release Type 1 Cryptography techniques for U.S.-Taiwan communications (hotline) used during a war. The conscious or subconscious fear is real: does China now has access to the crypto/keying material and algorithms that could allow Beijing to penetrate Taiwan and U.S. networks.
Lockheed Martin’s Taiwan subcontractor on the program awarded the contract for the sophisticated software for Anyu to the Israeli-based company Ness, which also sold sophisticated software systems to China. The subcontractor for the Israeli deal was the infamous Bill Moo, arrested by the U.S. for working for China in 2006. When Moo was released from a U.S. prison, he returned to Taiwan without being arrested even questioned.
Bergersen coordinated on the Anyu 4 air defense upgrade program. Anyu 4 expanded Taiwan’s regional air defense command centers from one to four, involved the installation of the Management Information and Commitment Control System, Ta Chen (Grand Conglomeration) C3I data link system ship-to-ship/ship-to-shore high-frequency (HF) communications project, domestic manufacture of a Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS), Link 16 (Po Sheng) project, and the Army Improved Mobile Subscriber Equipment (IMSE) program. Under the new system there would be an Automated Air Defense System and Regional Operations Control Center (AADS/ROCC).
It was not a question of what I knew about these programs, it is what Bergersen allegedly provided China that AIT should have been concerned about. AND why was there a brawl involving dancing beer bottles and the brutalizing of an AIT officer over my article?
I guess AIT has more than enough problems without worrying about me manhandling one of their employees like a rag doll.
For example, recently the CIA Chief of Station (COS) found himself at the end of his espionage career. As many expatriates do while living in Taiwan, AIT employees sometimes marry local women. For the COS this was a mistake.
There is an old expatriate phrase about Taiwanese women that serves as a warning for new arrivals: Psycho Xiaojie. This term is common amongst male expatriates retelling horror stories about ex-girlfriends. In the COS case, he married a local woman not knowing she was a member of a bizarre local cult. There are a few weird cults in Taiwan: Rulaizong and Chunghwa Daily Good Deed Association. Her antics turned his life into a nightmare, as well as operations in his office. He was fired, no pension, returning to the U.S. in humiliation. This is where even CIA folks use the moniker “Clowns In Action”.
Shenanigans are not surprising in the intelligence community (IC) and military world. For many, the famous Eisenhower phrase about the military-industrial complex gets reworded: “military-industrial-entertain complex”.
I was never a generalist; covering all things, all the time. I was a specialist. I was the anti-Christ version of the heart doctor or the brain surgeon or the bone guy. I was only interested in the tools used to initiate a heart attack, brain hemorrhage or fracture bones.
Someone once told me that you could be a journalist or a human being, but never both. How absolutely fucking true…
However, military journalists are a different breed of hack. They have the same mindset that a sports journalist has when covering baseball games. Avoid at all costs angering the club’s manager or coach. This is not that different from journalists covering the military industry for Jane’s, Defense News, Shephard, Aviation Week, etc. It is a small group. They ALL know each other. More of a fraternity, than anything resembling the tooth-and-nail competition between wire services and newspapers fantasizing over Pulitzers.
They go to the defense expos all over the world. Drink with the big corporate “merchants of death”: Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop. Listen to their lies about collateral damage; something you do not hear from the Israeli companies who brag with glee about their confirmed kills, complete with a video of their weapons wasting a building. The Israeli’s had their death dealer reputation to consider and their honesty made for huge sales.
Military journalists, unlike general news correspondents, actually cooperate, trade information, photographs, etc. They are not as competitive, because they are always under attack. Lied to, manipulated, threatened, etc. These journalists, like myself, have a serious love affair, even if it is dark, with the tools of creating carnage and tragedy. These are the guys who put model airplanes together as kids. These are the ones who badgered their older relatives with questions about the war. These are the guys who made pipe bombs with the tips of match sticks. And because they knew so much at an early age, they knew the corporate PR folks were full of shit.
If an editor killed a story because a big corporate defense entity threatened to cancel a $100,000 full-page advertisement, the writer would turn to one of his peers to publish it. No matter how successful the threats, they were always just a band aid. The story would see print somewhere. No one was worse than the Singaporeans who used every type of manipulation short of physical torture to stop a story.
There was little in the way of hypocrisy among this type of journalistic fraternal order. During defense expos in the darker corners of the Middle East, India, and Asia, this card was circulated amongst us. We might not be human rights lovers, but we were never naïve. The card was part of game using a point system that earned you beers at the end of the night. We were not journalists in the same vein as a wire service correspondent. We were more like tricksters and these shows attracted the worst human rights violators on the planet. The list for the game below was based on the 2012 Freedom House rankings.
The worst scum of the earth would show up at defense expos like China’s Zhuhai Airshow, Malaysia’s Defence Services Asia, and Thailand’s Tri-Service Asian Defense and Security Exhibition. These Lord of War playgrounds were complete with sexy girls encouraging attendees to enjoy the shapes and curves of weapons that truly destroy men.
END OF PART 1 of Spies and Provocateurs