Driving to a Mediterranean seaport in 1986, Tom Darcy didn't realize he was part of espionage's wave of the future. Most CIA officers operate overseas as U.S. diplomats. But Darcy was posing as a businessman, an operative with what the CIA calls nonofficial cover, or NOC (pronounced knock). Darcy was transporting signal- interception equipment to a CIA boat that would sail off the coast of Lebanon to eavesdrop on terrorists. In front of him, police at a roadblock were searching all cars. If the police discovered his spy equipment, there would be no diplomatic immunity to keep him out of jail.
Darcy had come dangerously close to trouble not long before. The previous year, on a secret surveillance operation in the Caribbean, he had had to convince a Bahamian cop pointing a machine gun at his chest that he was a tourist, not a drug trafficker. Now he kept his cool as border police searched his car. They never found the gear hidden in secret compartments. ``There were a couple times I thought I was coming home in a body bag,'' recalls the spy.
Darcy left the agency in 1993. But more and more of the spies being recruited today are going into his school of hard NOCs rather than the diplomatic corps. For the past four years, the CIA has been quietly expanding its NOC program, placing undercover officers in U.S. businesses that operate overseas. The reason is simple. During the cold war, CIA case officers under embassy cover could cruise foreign ministries and cocktail parties to collect intelligence on the Soviet Union. But, as last week's arrest of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef showed, drug traffickers, terrorists, nuclear smugglers, money launderers and regional warlords aren't found on the diplomatic circuit. To penetrate the new threat, unconventional covers are needed. Indeed, President Clinton's newly nominated CIA spymaster--Air Force General Michael P.C. Carns--will have to continue to grope through the murky new world of espionage. ``General Carns will face a challenge,'' Clinton said last week. ``The cold war is over, but many new dangers have taken its place.''
Even before he figures out how to deploy his spies, Carns will have to deal with the bureaucratic miasma of the agency. Morale is at rock bottom. Young case officers are privately demanding a housecleaning of top officials in the clandestine Directorate for Operations, whose lax management and protective culture allowed Aldrich Ames to get away with selling secrets to Moscow for nine years. Last December the CIA settled a lawsuit with former Jamaican station chief Janine Brookner for $410,000 plus lawyers' fees. Brookner claimed she was denied promotions after she disciplined subordinates for drinking, carousing and, in one case, wife beating. ``They're almost a whole generation behind in their thinking about how to handle a modern work force,'' a recently retired senior CIA official says of the Directorate.