Columnist Benjamin Grove: Real-life spying nothing like in the movies

Benjamin Grove

Friday, July 26, 2002 | 4:01 a.m.

A BOISTEROUS CROWD flocked to the splashy grand opening of the International Spy Museum earlier this month -- this city loves a good museum like Vegas loves a new casino. Opening ceremonies included dancing aerialists in trench coats rappelling down the building's facade.

Easily lost in the crowd was a quiet, unassuming, middle-aged guy -- small in stature with a receding hairline, but otherwise completely unremarkable in appearance.

He chuckled over a prominently displayed replica of the Aston Martin from the James Bond movie "Goldfinger." Real-life spies don't drive fancy cars, he said.

This man would know. He was a spook for 19 years.

Bill -- he asked that his real name not be used -- spent 13 of his 19 years with the CIA on foreign assignments in places like northern Africa, South Africa and Europe. Most of the time he led a double life as a spy and diplomat.

But he never had a car like 007. Most real-life spies have to buy and use their own cars just like everybody else, he said. Occasionally the agency would scrounge up some dull sedan for a particularly dangerous night assignment, when the car was likely to get banged up.

"It was never a sexy or fancy car," Bill said, admiring the Aston Martin. "That's Hollywood. Pure fiction. You have to pick a model that blends in with local traffic."

Bill is now a top adviser to Nevada Congressman Jim Gibbons, who oversees the nation's spy network as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence.

Gibbons got a VIP invitation to the museum opening that granted the two men a sneak peek at the museum's exhibits an hour before the official opening.

Since Sept. 11 the two have spent much of their time in closed-door committee meetings on Capitol Hill, tackling daunting issues that face modern-day U.S. spies all over the world. They were curious to get a look at a museum that illustrates the colorful history of international espionage. The museum itself is part entertainment attraction, part history archive. It mixes trinkets from Hollywood spy movies with real-life spy tools and equipment, including an original World War II-era German enigma code machine. Other exhibits include a 1965 KGB single-shot lipstick pistol dubbed "The Kiss of Death" and a 1777 letter from George Washington, urging the creation of the nation's first spy network.

As Gibbons and Bill strolled the quiet rooms of the museum, they reflected on what real spies face on the job, how the U.S. intelligence community lost its focus in the decade leading up to Sept. 11 -- and Hollywood stereotypes.

Bill noted that movie spies are heroes. Real spies are anonymous nobodies, for obvious reasons.

A good spy has a deep desire to help his or her country "in a big way" but shuns recognition for it, he said.

"You can't have any kind of a need to be liked," Bill said. "The satisfaction has to be very personal."

Most spies are driven by an adrenaline rush that Bill calls "the need for the juice."

"Certain types of people need that stimulus," he said. "It's a tremendous rush when you have gone into an extremely dangerous situation and come out with valuable intelligence."

Spy recruits are personality tested. Only cool ones make the cut, Bill said -- people who can remain calm when an assignment unravels.

For a spy, deceit is a 24-hour job, every day. There is no relaxing on weekends.

"I don't think most people can relate to that level of stress," Bill said.

Similar to Hollywood depictions, spying is often at its most dangerous during what spooks call "entry ops" -- getting into position for surveillance. Sometimes spies have to go in several days in advance and then wait, enduring mind-numbing boredom.

"It's a very intense experience," Bill said.

Of course, real-life espionage is frequently dull, too. Agents spend a lot of time waiting for something to happen and often nothing does. Agents sit around in motels and snowy fields, with nothing to do but wait, Bill said. Many times contacts never show up; meetings never materialize.

And unlike in the movies, the plot never works itself out into a neat ending. The truth rarely reveals itself.

"Another prerequisite is that you have to be able to deal with ambivalence, and just not knowing. Most people want to know what is going on, but (spies) have to get over that. I'd often wonder, 'What happened to my guy?' But you can't know. A lot of times you never find out what really happened."

Gibbons, too, knows a thing or two about the spy game. He flew intelligence missions as a special operations officer with the U.S. Air Force, collecting surveillance data over Russia in the 1960s and 1970s, and over Iraq before the Gulf War began.

Now as a member of the Intelligence Committee, he has a high-security clearance and a classified view of the huge challenges spies face in thwarting future terrorist attacks.

Gibbons also served on a 10-member panel that investigated pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures. This month the panel reported that intelligence agencies had stumbled badly. The panel drew some criticism for not faulting any one person. But Gibbons said the panel's most important mission was accomplished: identifying how to focus U.S. intelligence agencies back on the job of spying.

America got in trouble in the 1990s when it began to trim budgets for overseas assignments for agents and analysts, Gibbons says. Gibbons believes that during the last decade the CIA's focus drifted away from obtaining hard information about military and terrorist threats, and settled more on economic and political data gathering.

Now the agencies are undergoing a massive change in culture in their effort to train, recruit and place spies where they are needed most: chasing after terrorists, Gibbons said.

"We have come a long way in getting the intelligence community to realize that they need to focus on the core issues," Gibbons said. Gibbons peered into exhibits of bulky tape recording briefcases, flashlight guns and button-hole cameras, objects of bygone eras of espionage that seem almost quaint compared to modern technology.

"The threat is always ebbing and flowing," Gibbons said. "What are we focused on this week? Who is our enemy today? We constantly have to be asking that. Enemies change." But America's need -- and love -- for spies never will.