The timeline of CIA spies jailed abroad

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By Sabir Shah


LAHORE: The history of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers landing behind bars in foreign countries dates back to 1951, when an undercover agent Hugh Redmond was caught in the Chinese city of Shanghai and charged with espionage.
According to the TIME magazine of October 27, 2003, agent Redmond was posing as an employee of a British import-export company. The CIA spy had to spend 19 years in a Chinese prison before actually dying there. In an article shedding light on the shadowy world of “Non-official Cover” spies or the NOCs, the afore-quoted edition of the TIME magazine had also mentioned another incident where the French agencies had rolled up five CIA officers, including a woman, who had been working under business cover for about five years. This incident had taken place in 1995.
Although the NOCs caught in Paris were simply sent home, a former CIA official familiar with the matter had opined,” The NOCs have no diplomatic status, so they can end up in slammers.”
Research reveals that a “Non-official Cover” is often contrasted with an official cover, where agents assume a position at a seemingly benign department of their government, such as the diplomatic service. Diplomatic service provides the secret service agents with official immunity, thus protecting them from the steep punishments normally meted out to captured spies.
This ‘immunity’ actually helps the nabbed agent being declared a persona non grata and ordered to leave the country without being subjected to the rigours of a foreign custody. Agents under Non-official Cover do not have this “safety net,” and if captured or charged, they are awarded criminal punishments, including execution.
A thorough peek into this subject shows that serving as NOCs, various CIA officers even pose as American businessmen in friendly countries, from Asia to Central America to Western Europe.
But unlike most CIA officers, who are stationed abroad disguised as State Department employees, military officials or other US government personnel attached to an US embassy, the NOCs operate perilously without having any apparent links to their government in Washington DC. In fact, all spy agencies in the world are known to depute NOCs, because being under-cover, these operatives are able to approach people who would not otherwise come into contact with their embassy officials. Same goes for the CIA. The revelations about the NOCs (pronounced “knock”) were made public a few years ago by the American media. In recent years, the US NOCs have increasingly turned their attention to economics in countries like Japan especially. Using their business covers, they seek to recruit agents in foreign government economic ministries or gain intelligence about high-tech firms in computer, electronics, and aerospace industries. They also help track the development of critical technologies, both military and civilian. Although former CIA Director William Colby had once refused to comment on his agency’s NOC programme, he did say a few words about CIA’s commercial and economic intelligence activities.
This is what Director Colby had said: “I better stay off of that. It’s a very complicated subject. In deference to my old colleagues, the less chatter about that, the better. But, if American corporate executives do lend their overseas offices to the CIA, they have my strong applause. They only do it because they’re patriots.” The CIA has also used private US companies for cover overseas since its inception.
A former CIA deputy director, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, was quoted as saying,” When the agency was being put together in the late 1940s, they made pretty extensive use of nonofficial cover. Since it was cheaper to station spies in the US embassy, cost-cutting led the CIA to scale down the number of NOCs by the 1960s.” Admiral Bobby Inman had further stated,” The NOC programme shrank further after the 1973 military coup in Chile was revealed.
That clearly scared a lot of US corporations. With them, they also took out the cover billets for the clandestine services.” But innumerable events in the 1970s had again revived the use of NOCs. The phenomenon of undercover CIA agents or the NOC operatives is nearly as old as the life of this premier spy agency, which was formally created in 1947 on orders of President Harry Truman with the signing of the National Security Act. The CIA website, however, acknowledges the fact that the history of American pursuit for foreign intelligence has continued with the same zeal since the time of President Abraham Lincoln in the 19th century. The website states,” As a wartime President whose term in office almost exactly corresponded with the duration of the Civil War, Lincoln received a great deal of intelligence reporting and became by default a manager and practitioner of intelligence. Indeed, Lincoln was the subject of an intelligence operation even before he took the oath of office in 1861.” Based in Langley (Virginia), the CIA is responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior US policymakers and its activities are overseen by both Congress and the Executive Branch. The CIA website further reveals that this agency’s budget for fiscal year 1998 had rested at $26.7 billion. The website reads, “In 1997, the aggregate figure for all US government intelligence and intelligence-related activities (of which the CIA is but one part) was made public for the first time. The aggregate intelligence budget was $26.6 billion in fiscal year 1997 and $26.7 billion for fiscal year 1998. The intelligence budgets for all other years since then have remained classified.”