Date: 04/13/22
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.
Today’s Classified Intelligence Brief Spy Tale entry is the initial in that series of “telling it like it was” renditions I have been promising. It involves the fallout from a botched operation, made more lamentable by the heartless coverup that followed.
From a situation early in my career, the story follows one of the initial missions in which I had a larger role. Unfolding in 1983 and centered in Paris, a brief outline of what happened was contained in “Remembering ‘Jake the Snake” in Paris,” Classified Intelligence Brief, December 23, 2020. At the time, the writing provided less of the tale than I would have preferred. But then, “mother” and I were still working out the parameters of what could be said in Spy Tale entries.
Today is the time to provide more of the substance…and to set the record straight.
I recounted it this way in December of 2020:
Situated a stone’s throw from the Arche de Triomphe, I was in a district where people (then and now) come to be noticed by others. At the time, however, the location had been selected for another reason. And that reason required a certain amount of discretion.
It is always somewhat dicey to run an operation on the territory of an ally, especially when that ally is France. Of course, we had a liaison relationship with the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE, the General Directorate for External Security), the French international intelligence organization, and the DGSE relied on the Agency for much of the intel they needed but could not gain themselves in other parts of the world.
But the French have always guarded their territory very jealously. Perhaps being torn apart by two major world wars in the span of a few decades would do that to a country. There is national pride and then there is the French version. The latter is the most intense I have ever encountered.
Think of how Parisian waiters treat American tourists and magnify it a hundred times. That is the attitude of French intelligence.
It meant we were supposed to keep the DGSE and their internal equivalent informed of all our intended actions. That domestic organ is the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure, (DGSI, the General Directorate for Internal Security).
The DGSI spends much of its time in what had been my primary ballpark – counterintelligence – as well as its often more brutal brother, counterterrorism. They can be disagreeable partners, especially if you are playing games in their own back yard.
So, I usually simply ignored the DGSI as best I could and relied on the DGSE relationship as cover.
On this occasion, I was keeping a low profile from everybody…hiding in plain sight (more or less) using a third-floor walkup at 16 Avenue Kléber. It was not as grand a building some forty years ago as it is now, but a very functional base, nonetheless. It directly looked upon a main focus of my attention, as I will explain in a moment.
This is the building in a photo I took a few years ago. We would have had the four windows in the center, much later turned into an awfully expensive luxury apartment.
This location was important because of what was across the street. There at the site of what had earlier been the fabled Hotel Majestic was a certain office of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs nestled in a location used by the ministry for diplomatic conferences. And therein was the desk of one of my most important sources of intel.
Well, things have a way of circling back on you in this city. In 2014, after a massive multi-year renovation (which had its own share of political intrigue) the entire block became the impressive Peninsula Paris. Today I hold international meetings at this hotel, literally across the street from that safe house where I ran operations decades earlier.
This hotel has its own share of recent history, especially one place in particular.
It is now called “Le Bar Kléber.” Located on the ground floor of the Peninsula, it may be the most famous watering hole in recent history. Many of us simply refer to it as “Kissinger’s Bar.” Here, 47 years ago, Henry Kissinger signed the Paris Peace Accords, ending American involvement in the Vietnam War.
It was actually a salon then. But leave it to a US Secretary of State to pick such a location. For those who lived through the period, it has become one of those must see “political pilgrimage” sites in Paris.
It also serves as a convenient place for contemporary discussions on a range of matters. Centrally located between the Arche de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower it is easy to get to for those who want to be seen in the trendy urban district anyway.
That ensures it’s tailor made for meetings I hold.
As it happens, I was there three years ago today (December 23, 2017) celebrating the holidays with Marina and friends in between some testy meetings on other matters. During that stay, something happened that brought me back 34 years earlier and Jake the Snake.
This is what I wrote three years ago, more as an exercise in personal therapy than anything else:
I am opening a bottle of decent red, a normal thing one does here in Paris.
Especially after the day I had.
We have broken up for dinner and down time. But sitting on a balcony overlooking Avenue Kléber and its late afternoon bustle, with a line of sight straight upon my haunt of earlier years, I find my mind wandering.
Something is approaching I have seen before. But it is causing me to review earlier events in my life. The path is back to a time when this city had a different feel.
One of the most valuable lessons I have learned is to distinguish between invention and innovation. Invention is coming up with a completely new product, process, or explanation. In contrast, innovation is applying something already existing in a new way.
Real inventions are rare. Most genuine human advancement has come from innovation. The way that emerges is almost always eclectic. You just never know from where the borrowing will come or where the resulting application will take you.
Innovation is still important in what I do. But in my “earlier life,” pursuing that often-frustrating phantom called national security, it literally was a life saver.
I ran into some unusual people in those days. Upon occasion, they were downright unpalatable. Just meant I had to hold my nose and dive in with whatever assets were available.
Leading me to the guy I am thinking about today.
We called him Jake the Snake and his base was a fake storefront in the commune of Nanterre.
We ended up subsidizing its use in return for his services. Nanterre abuts Paris on the west, these days has some of the highest buildings in the city’s environs, and is home to major international banks and corporations
However, back then, Nanterre was still a working-class area concentrated around industries that moved there a century ago but had seen better times. The street politics decidedly leaned communist. It was often regarded as the buckle in the “red belt” surrounding Paris.
Now Jake wasn’t his real name, of course, and what he did usually had him traveling elsewhere on the continent. We would pay for that as well, even though there would rarely be receipts provided (enraging bean counters back at the “office.”).
On the other hand, the snake label certainly did fit. He was slimy and frequented the underbelly of Europe. These were places I could not, should not, or would not go.
My base was London in those days. But that still resulted in frequent hydrofoil rides across the Channel. No Chunnel back then for a quick train ride to Calais.
When I needed to run folks and projects under the noses of the DGSE and the DGSI, I would do so from safe houses like the one I found myself in over Christmas 1983.
Jake was blunt and often said things for the sheer joy of shocking people. Perhaps it was his way of maintaining control over a situation in which he found himself (often of his own creation).
I put up with him because he was of some benefit. But in late December 1983, he simply disappeared off the face of the earth taking an op of mine with him.
Something he once told me has stuck ever since. It was a typical Jake phrase, but I ended up applying it to all manner of operational situations (and these days to investment opportunities). Consider it verbal innovation in the form of a “how to look at the world” guidance.
As only Jake could put it: “Unless they find a body, there is no murder. The son of a bitch is just a missing person.” (“Á moins qu’ils ne voient un corps, il n’y a pas de meurtre. Le fils de pute n’est qu’une disparue.”)
Decided to move back inside from the balcony, taking along my computer and the half-filled bottle. The weather has grown much colder; with the early setting sun, some snow is coming.
Much like what I have been hearing.
Since returning to Paris two days ago, I feel back three decades ago with clouds again forming. I find Jake’s colorful caution once again of use.
That’s because the environment rapidly emerging seems only too familiar.
Frankly, I have never experienced as pronounced an un-American attitude, at least in this part of the world.
OK, the French have always been dismissive, even haughty when it comes to Yanks. But nothing like this. And most of these folks populating my sessions are not French.
A stark and continuous refrain permeates just about everything in my meetings. There is clearly a conclusion becoming widely shared that Trump sees allies as unnecessary burdens, preferring to pursue whatever foreign policy emerging as a “go it alone” American endeavor.
Nevertheless, no one can ignore the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. The US is still too big and powerful to be completely discounted. Yet it is not preventing plans being made to ignore, as one Parisian bank colleague put it this morning, “le enfant gâté résidant à la Maison Blanche” (“the spoiled child living in the White House”).
This is a group I have advised now for years. They are very global, exceptionally heavy hitting, and expect to get their own way using a thick check book and thicker political connections.
I expressed the concerted opinion that this “going alone” approach is easier to espouse than to accomplish. The US presence remains too large economically and strategically. I further remarked that the audience I was addressing often trends toward overreaction when Washington moves in a direction they don’t like.
That led to some silence and an unannounced break for coffee.
These exchanges aside, there is something significant coming. Plans are underway for a new global round of merger and acquisition (M&A) along with the necessary investment. To the extent possible, it will roll out without the usual American involvement.
Additional matters likely to be discussed over the weekend may oblige that I carry initiatives along for my Frankfurt meetings with the Iranians beginning shortly [that turned out to be February 2018].
Welcome to what I believe is a Cold War redux. The players are not the same and the opposition includes those who used to be (and on other matters may still be) our friends.
Jake would have relished all of this. In his own brash way, he would have found all too many connections between how we approached the first Cold War and how we will react to this one.
The bottle is now almost empty. One last glass left. Enough to raise in a heartfelt toast.
“Here’s to you, Jake.”
Wherever the other son of a bitch finally buried you.
Above is what had been written in the 2017 and 2020 versions of the tale. Given the agreement with “mother” at the time, I took the easier way out. Here is the more complete story, and while I learned the specifics only after closing up shop in what had become a busted operation at the end of 1983, I bear complicity in how it played out.
Jake actually died in a bungled attempt to save one op by compromising another. The objective when this happens is usually to save a more important mission by “scrubbing” a less important one.
Unfortunately, that almost always results in collateral damage, putting agents (foreign nationals providing intel for us) at risk, or worse. The calculus applied to the situation seeks to obtain the best solution from a nasty situation where two ops are colliding and risk emerges that both will collapse.
Rarely upon occasion, people die when there is an abrupt cancelation of an op while it is in play. Once the snowball starts moving down the hill, the situation is rife for unintended circumstances.
Except this time, the reason for the move and Jake’s death was quite something else. It was intentional; it would not have happened without active interference.
Let me emphasize that one of the hallowed rules of intel (at least the way we ran it) is that you protect sources and methods. Sources include your agents. I did not like Jake personally. There had been few walking the earth in those days who did. He was the personification of sludge. But you don’t kill somebody because he had become an inconvenience.
Except, apparently in this case.
Jake was killed either personally by or at the direct order of a US intelligence officer.
The initial element in all of this (a more personally heavy one will be provided shortly) that has bothered me all these years is why somebody in our organization decided Jake had to go. It had nothing to do with national security or the integrity of what we were doing.
Rather, the “other” op involved one of the more unpleasant situations the Agency would find itself in and the hit decision had more to do with protecting the backsides of others up the chain of command.
Jake inhabited the murky world of life. Much of what he did or in which he was involved, to put it mildly, could not pass the smell test. It was in that underworld that his activities, run largely with my (and others) knowledge, collided with something else.
Among many other occupations, Jake was a smuggler. He would move things that could not pass customs into and out of various parts of the world. It is, after all, one of his skills that we (I) would use upon occasion. This time, his activities crossed what was underway in another initiative.
That other op, the one I did not know about until the proverbial material hit the rotary oscillator at the end of 1983, was a surreptitious move of money to an unsavory group on the West’s list of terrorist groups. In pursuit of “higher ends,” we were actually funding some of the bad guys (who would come back to bite us anyway years later).
Jake had stumbled upon the operation, thought it a good opportunity to siphon off some cash for his own uses while the money was in the pipeline, and was killed for it.
I still have no idea where Jake was buried. But the earlier rendition of this story was not completely honest. I did know “the other son of bitch” who buried him (or, at least, had him buried). Under the new agreement forged with “mother” and after some exhaustive vetting by several in “mother’s” family, I am not required to use a pseudonym. Because he died in 2012.
The guy’s name was Brian Higgins. He ultimately rose in the Company and retired with a full pension. He had a love of country. But he had a greater love for his own career and promotion prospects. And he was the officer running the conflicting op.
I would never have brought Jake home to dinner or introduce him to my wife and kids. But I would not have killed him either.
Well so much for my taking the high ground.
There is a procedure that is followed in an after-action report when such in-field screwups take place. It includes detailed debriefings of all personnel involved. That included me.
By the time my interview occurred back at Langley, I knew the entire story and Higgins’ primary complicity in it. I could have provided a final element of justice and responsibility in Jake’s death.
I did not. Rather, the story of another rat in the sordid smuggling line as responsible came out of my mouth as it had from Brian, and his boss, and his boss’s boss. I lived to fight another day but was complicit in the coverup from that point on.
Jake died at our hand, to protect the use of taxpayers’ money in an objective that never would have worked anyway.
Over the years, that has taken a lot more than one bottle of red wine and a toast to Jake in compensation. Sometimes what you do in life just downright sucks.
Dr. Kent Moors
This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it. Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations).
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