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To recruit NOC officers, the CIA, working through phony front companies, will place advertisements in major newspapers asking for young business- school graduates who want to live overseas. Or the front company will hire corporate headhunting firms that remain unaware that they're finding candidates for the CIA. Applicants are told to show up at a northern Virginia business, where the vetting begins. Eventually, the recruit is told about the real job he's being asked to do. If he agrees, training begins at a secret location away from the ``farm'' at Camp Peary, Virginia, where other CIA officers are trained. The NOC classes are small, no more than two or three students, all of whom are given new names. Their real names will never appear on any personnel list in the agency's computers at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Intelligence officials say that placing NOC officers overseas can be four times as expensive as assigning officers under an embassy cover. It can cost the agency as much as $3 million to set up a CIA officer as a corporate exec in Tokyo. Elaborate clandestine communications must be established so the NOC officer can pass his intelligence on to special handlers, who are often based in another country. The CIA's Office of Central Cover must assign a staff member to handle a NOC officer's personal affairs and keep his real-life bills paid while he leads his cover life. Companies providing the cover are understandably skittish about having it blown. Time contacted half a dozen Fortune 500 firms to ask if they accepted NOC officers. Most either refused to comment or said they do not participate. ``There's a real serious concern about the risk of exposure,'' said an executive for a high-tech company that once accepted NOC officers but no longer does.
NOC work can take its toll on the case officer as well. NOC officers cannot count on just being expelled from countries like officers with diplomatic immunity. Their post-cold war enemies don't trade captured spies as the KGB would. NOC officers in Colombia who have set up import-export companies as covers--bribing drug couriers on the side for intelligence--have been wounded or killed in gunfights with traffickers. A NOC officer serving in Africa was beaten up and jailed for a month. Another, grabbed by a Hizballah faction in Beirut, managed to talk his way out by convincing his fundamentalist captors that he was a U.S. narcotics agent fighting evil drugs. ``You've got to be your own life-support system,'' says John F. Quinn, who once worked as a NOC officer in Tokyo collecting economic intelligence. ``You're out in the cold. You're alone. You have to be a tightrope walker all the time, balancing your corporate job, your intelligence job and your mental sanity.''