Tom Mangold and former DCI Porter Goss

Daily Mail, 20 February 2011, by Tom Mangold:

BBC veteran Tom Mangold, a seasoned observer of the Cold War, has always been fascinated by the murky world of espionage. So when he heard of a Caribbean cruise with 120 former spies as shipmates, and seminars by some of the most influential men in the CIA’s recent past, he had to go. Here is his diary of a week at sea with the spooks . . .

SATURDAY: Fort Lauderdale

The Holland America cruiseliner MS Eurodam seems as long as Oxford Street and twice the height of John Lewis. I watched gloomily from my taxi as the first batch of more than 800 people boarded.

And that was just the crew. That left 2,194 passengers and more than 5,000 pieces of baggage to follow.

It would be churlish to say that this was not conducted with breathtaking efficiency. There must be an actuarial calculus proving that if you load 3,000 people into a large space they will dissipate in such a way as to make you feel almost isolated on board.

A few statistics: There are 11 decks, two swimming pools, countless bars and restaurants, a casino and shopping mall. My cabin was big enough, with balcony, a bathroom with bath, constant hot water, efficient air conditioning, big double bed.

SUNDAY: At Sea

I’m here for a SpyCruise® at which 120 former spies and a handful of spy buffs attend a seminar comprising lectures and briefings and films (my BBC Panorama films actually). The two big draws are Porter Goss who ran the CIA from 2004 to 2005 and General Mike Hayden who took it over from 2005 to 2006.

As we sit and listen and make notes in three conjoined lecture rooms on Deck 3, saner passengers than us are playing the slot machines in the casino down the way or drinking, eating, shopping or swimming.

Could you imagine former British spooks coming on a public cruise in this way and talking to students and anyone else who recognised them?

I couldn’t work out how their personal safety was ensured. But it turns out they had told the CIA about the cruise and were in receipt of what’s known as ‘discreet security’. There were bodyguards on board to look after them but neither they, nor we, knew who or where they were.

MONDAY: Grand Turk, Turks & Caicos Islands

Disembarkation and reembarkation went unbelievably smoothly. There’s very little on the British overseas territory of Grand Turk island to detain you unless you have an overwhelming interest in old salt pans. A couple of scruffy flamingos stood mournfully at one end of them, well out of camera range.

The place is supposed to have excellent scuba-diving and great beaches. We tried the beach which was OK. This is a classically exhausted Caribbean island. I felt no sadness leaving the T-shirt shops behind and returning to the Casablanca-style Piano bar on board, and gossiping off the record with my two new top ex-spook contacts.

TUESDAY AM: At sea

Why are there so many obese passengers? Finally I get it. These poor people never go on tours, or leave the vessel, because they need to graze, free, all day at the huge selfserve buffet. With their food trays stacked high enough to obscure their faces, they wobble slowly back to their cabins. That said, the food is first-class, and there are several speciality restaurants.

We took my favourite spies to the Tamarind, an Asian fusion place on Deck 11, and discussed the pros and cons of extraordinary rendition, water boarding and life in Guantanamo. Talk about mixing business with pleasure…

TUESDAY PM: San Juan, Puerto Rico

Of the many tour options, we went for the old town tour. General Hayden went, too, and with his baseball cap pulled well down became just another face in the crowd.

The Hispanic culture is absorbing, and I never knew that a youthful Sir Francis Drake was one of the men who attacked San Juan (and failed). Founded in 1521, the old town still contains carefully preserved examples of 16th and 17th Century Spanish colonial architecture, some of the best in the new world.

At the tip of a rocky promontory of the old city is San Felipe del Morro, a dramatic fortress built by the Spaniards between 1570 and 1783.

WEDNESDAY: St Thomas, US Virgin Isles

This is another island, part of a larger chain, that seems tired and tourist-saturated. There are endless, T-shirt shops, Diet Coke sellers at £2 a bottle and little else. We went for the guided bus tour on a vehicle with deeply distressed seats, no leg room, broken shock absorbers and a young lady speaking incomprehensibly into a half-dead microphone. She pointed out trees in people’s back gardens, one or two attractive views from the island heights, but little more. I’ll pass on St Thomas.

We took the ferry to St Johns, a slightly more attractive island with one very good hotel called Caneel Bay. But it’s a long way to go for a basic sun, sea and sand holiday.

We could have stayed on board where there were 49 ship-board events ranging from tai chi through a culinary workshop for children aged from three to seven, to steel drum lessons and the art of towel folding, ending with a Fifties and Sixties night with Vivienne. Much will happen to you on a seven-day cruise such as this one but you’ll never be bored.

THURSDAY: At sea

SpyCruise wraps up with a hairraising and confidential briefing by someone who runs his own spy network in the Middle East.

All the ex-spooks and most of the spy cruisers would not be classified as Obama supporters in the US or Leftie Guardian readers in the UK. One or two of the students have come just to rub shoulders with real spooks in an innovative attempt to join the CIA.

The earnest atmosphere within the lecture rooms contrasts dramatically with the hedonism of the 1,990 other passengers on board who are eating, drinking, gambling and thoroughly enjoying life as the boat turns back to Florida.

The intelligence world is largely a club where members speak the same cautious coded language (it’s called ‘speaking spook’) and tend to mix with each other. They are a largely sober and dignified group. Not that the Eurodam is by any yardstick one of those ghastly booze and bonking cruises.

The passengers were generally older to middle age, with a generous proportion of happily marrieds and a sprinkling of the over-70s. Everyone I asked, liked the vessel, the furnishings, the food, the ambience and the ultraslick organisation.

FRIDAY: Half Moon Cay, Bahamas

We disembark straight into yet another T-shirt heaven. How many vests does a man need in his lifetime? This is a pretty little island with a grand beach, wonderful swimming, and the opportunity to go horse-riding or biking or trekking.

The ship has organised a barbecue lunch (yes, for hundreds of people, and the food was good, and hot, and plentiful and there were no queues). Half Moon Cay is a bit of a find, but before you look up your flight schedules, be warned. Holland America liked it so much they bought the whole island and now you can only get there via their conveyance.

SATURDAY: Port Everglades, Florida

We disembark in carefully staggered groups. I see both Porter Goss (and his son) and General Mike Hayden (and his wife) quietly leaving the vessel to melt into the busy quayside. The spy cruisers comprising ex-FBI and ex-Secret Servicemen also dissipate. They plan to meet on another similar seminar, but I won’t be seeing them again.

En route to Miami and home, to our slight surprise, we discover how much we enjoyed the short week aboard, and how very little there is to complain of. Our snobby friends who laughed at the thought of sharing a vessel with 2,000 others are making a mistake. We would be happy to go again. And this time, we’ll use our dark glasses to protect our eyes and not our identities.

We’ll miss all those intense men and women in the lecture rooms on Deck 3. It took a cruise to bring us all together. Well, isn’t that what good cruises are all about?

Travel Facts: Holland America (0845 351 0557, www.hollandamerica.co.uk) offers a nine-night Eastern Caribbean fly-cruise from £1,249pp including return flights, pre-cruise hotel night in Fort Lauderdale, transfers and full-board cruise.

BBC Journalist Tom Mangold and SpyCruise® SpySkipper Bart Bechtel

BBC Radio 4: Tom Mangold joins a spy-themed cruise around the Caribbean.

Outward appearances suggest it’s just a regular cruise. But as the MS Eurodam sets sail from Fort Lauderdale in Florida, this vast ship is carrying two men who’ve been at the very heart of the US intelligence services. Former CIA directors Porter Goss and Michael Hayden are on board for the SpyCruise®, a seven day trip devoted to issues of national security.

Passengers have paid to hear and mingle with these senior ex-spooks, as well as a range of other former intelligence and military officers. Whilst other passengers on the ship gamble in the casino, play pool games and try their hand at line-dancing, the spy cruisers are locked into a lecture theatre worrying about the state of global security.

Tom Mangold discovers that the cruise is part of an attempt to repair the damaged reputation of the CIA after a string of controversies. In wide-ranging and rigorous interviews, he grills the two ex CIA bosses on extraordinary renditions, enhanced interrogations, water-boarding, and targeted assassinations.

BROADCAST:  Sat 15 Jan 2011, 10:30, BBC Radio 4

BBC/Tom Mangold, 13 Jan 2011: Tom Mangold was Panorama’s senior reporter until 2003. He is now a freelance journalist and author. His documentary Ship of Spies will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 1030 GMT on Saturday 15 January.

There’s no such thing as an ex-spy. There are only spies who pretend they have retired. Or so they tell you. But I have yet to meet a retired spy who walked the dog and pruned the roses all day.

Take Bart Bechtel for instance – an ex-CIA operations officer, a specialist in domestic and international terrorism matters and a US Navy veteran with 31 years of espionage and counterintelligence experience – a spy to his fingertips.

It was Bart Bechtel who decided to organise a seminar for spooks – past, present and future – and their wives, girlfriends and interested parties.

But instead of hiring a dreary university lecture hall in a Washington suburb, he invited students to come on a seven-day Caribbean cruise (for which they would pay) and spend most days on lectures, briefings and rubbing shoulders with the principal speakers.

And the big draws? Top of the bill were no less than Porter Goss, former head of the CIA from 2004-2006 and his successor Gen Mike Hayden who ran the super-secret National Security Agency (US equivalent of GCHQ – the UK’s secret intelligence agency) for six years before taking over the CIA from 2006-2009. He is the highest ranking and most senior former spy still alive in the US.

This pair were guest lecturers but they were also, in a sense, trapped onboard ship, therefore journalistically accessible in a way that had me scurrying to join the cruise and spend private time with these significant masters of the secret world.

Can you imagine their British equivalents joining a huge 2,000-strong cruise ship, mixing with ordinary passengers, spending hours of face-time with reporters, and speaking frankly about such walking-on-broken-glass subjects as targeted assassinations, water-boarding, the torture of enemy combatants, and extraordinary rendition? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

“This is not a pleasure trip for me,” Porter Goss told me. “This is a trip to spread the message about how important the intelligence function is.”

‘Discreet security’

Former US President George W Bush nominated Porter Goss to be the head of the CIA from September 2004 And what about their personal security on board Holland America’s giant cruise ship, Eurodam?

“The agency knows when I travel, they’re alerted to that,” Gen Hayden explained. “I suspect they do what it is they think appropriate, but I don’t have to know about that.”

In other words, there were bodyguards but no-one knew who or where they were. But they were there unseen, minding at sea and on land for tourist excursions.

The spook seminars with about 120 students took place in three dedicated lecture rooms on the promenade deck, spaces squeezed between the huge ship’s shopping mall and an even larger casino area where the one-arm-bandits sang out day and night.

For Bart Bechtel, this was a golden opportunity to proselytise. “The intelligence community is under attack, badly understood, the civil libertarians are trying for scalps. There are all kinds of indignities.”

There was an uneasiness about President Barack Obama and liberal Democrats in general.

“Our commitment to war is a little uneven at this point. The fact of the matter is we are at war but it’s not evenly understood.”

Bart Bechtel and the other sponsors of the seminar – Henley-Putnam, an online university that offers postal and internet degrees in several disciplines of espionage including counterterrorism – were keen to drum home the message at every opportunity.

So we had talks and confidential briefings on Iran, Hamas, Israel, Pakistan, rogue states, failed states, al-Qaeda and a host of other threats to national and international security.

And all this happened as 1,900 fellow tourists ate, drank, gambled and danced around us. Bizarre.

My role, as a defence and intelligence reporter and writer, was to show a couple of my BBC TV Panoramas to the audience and take questions.

It was also to make a documentary for Radio 4 and, to this end, both Porter Goss and Mike Hayden came willingly to my cabin and spoke freely (where were those bodyguards? how come I never spotted them?) but with occasional and justifiable caution about the spy business and especially the CIA’s hugely controversial role as a new paramilitary force since 9/11.

Day trips

On shore excursions, both former spy chiefs merged imperceptibly with fellow tourists. I was part of a tourist group with Mike Hayden that wandered lazily around the old town of San Juan in Puerto Rico.

The general wore a large-brimmed baseball hat, pulled well down over his forehead, and became unrecognisable.

Gen Mike Hayden in work mode But back on board, both men spoke freely to those tourists who recognised them. Gen Mike Hayden explained why he felt a need to be open.

“We exist in a society that distrusts secrecy and power most of all. In order to be successful espionage services have to be only two things – secretive and powerful. So you’ve got that cultural tension and I feel a certain sense of responsibility to try to defuse that.”

Other guest speakers and lecturers at the seminar included a clutch of old Cold War warriors.

Some had formed a private spy agency to report in Southern Lebanon on the military activities of Hezbollah and its Syrian allies.

Others have made it their business to publicise every possible threat the West faces.

Even Gen Hayden is deeply pessimistic about the situation with Iran and remains “pretty certain” that unless there are fundamental changes very soon, the West will have no choice but to use what he gently describes as “the kinetic option”.

Among the paying passengers who formed their audience on the cruise were a novelist, a soccer coach who wanted to be a spy and a National Security Agency worker whose wife bought him the cruise as a present.

“We have to buckle down – many Americans – their heads are in the sand,” one told me.

All had a special interest in the security of the US. “I’m just sorry that more members of my country don’t get involved,” another lamented. “They simply don’t participate. They watch television.”

Obama supporters were in short supply – I found only one in 120 people. The seminar was no place for beards, sandals, liberals or Wikileakers.

But I admire Mr Bechtel’s initiative in sugaring the pill of a fairly politicised seminar with a general jolly around the sunny Caribbean on a luxurious liner.

Who says spies can’t have some fun too?

Globe and Maiil/Colin Freeze, 26 Nov 2010: I had never gone on a cruise before, never harboured any interest. But when I caught wind of SpyCruise®, I was deeply intrigued.

A lecture series by covert operatives? Spies on a boat? My one reservation – and it was fleeting – was along the lines of “I hope al-Qaeda doesn’t find out about this ship.”

So I bought a ticket. And that’s how, last week, I found myself chatting up American spies in the Caribbean.

I was targeting one in particular: Michael Hayden, a man who has probably forgotten more state secrets than most spies will ever know.

The Air Force general acted as president George W. Bush’s eyes and ears while heading an ultrasecretive electronic-eavesdropping agency. Then he was made head of the Central Intelligence Agency, a job that is like being the president’s brain – and covert fist.

Once at sea, it wasn’t hard to buttonhole Hayden, a featured SpyCruise® speaker.

“I’m as much of a civil libertarian as the next guy, frankly,” he told me when we sat down together. He argued that the CIA had been very restrained during the war on terror. “The little voice in your head says be careful whatever you do – you’re going to have to live with the consequences the rest of your life.”

He was so affable I had to keep reminding myself that spymasters are the most Machiavellian men on the planet. In Langley, Va., he would have helped decide who gets killed in Waziristan and Yemen – the badlands where CIA drone planes blow up presumed terrorists with Hellfire missiles. Recently retired, Hayden had traded his four-star general’s epaulets for civilian shirt sleeves.

When we docked, I went on a guided horse ride through a rain forest – the general, I heard, swam with dolphins.

Casino Royale

My unofficial maxim for SpyCruise® was this: “All work and no play makes Jack Bauer a dull boy.”

The Eurodam was built two years ago by the Holland America cruise line. She’s an engineering marvel, 12 floors tall and a quarter of a kilometre long. In her belly, there are high-end restaurants and bars galore, and she’s home to a pool, library, gym, spa, disco and a full-size basketball court.

Her diesel engines propelled us so gracefully that the sensation of sea travel was an afterthought. How smooth was the ride? While winning at blackjack in the ship’s casino, I stacked my chips into precarious towers. Nothing rattled their foundations … nothing nautical at least. It was left to the pretty card dealers from Eastern Europe, women with oddly rhyming names like “Galyna” and “Sabina,” to cut down my stacks.

Still, there was always this discombobulating to-and-fro aboard the Eurodam. I wasn’t seasick – it was the weird pitching and rolling from mindless mirth to serious security seminars and back again.

Days were spent chewing over topics along the lines of the growing Iranian hegemony in the Shia Crescent. Evenings were spent savouring shiraz, sucking back “sake-tinis” – delicious – and watching showgirls strut onstage. Even as I eyeballed the Eurodam’s ostentatious luxury, my mind’s eye kept imagining the specific kinds of brute force being employed in some of the world’s failed and failing states.

Spies among us

So who signs on for a SpyCruise®?

Our group numbered just over 100. We were woven into the fabric of the Eurodam’s 2,000 passengers, most of whom had no idea we existed. We were given lapel pins – a U.S. Secret Service insignia embedded into an American flag – so we could identify each other as friendlies.

Among the friendlies were two former CIA directors – the aforementioned Hayden and his predecessor, Porter Goss, along with retired intelligence officers, an ex-CIA station chief and various writers. And, of course, the organizer, a retired CIA “operations officer” named Bart Bechtel, who has put together four SpyCruises so far. A true-blue patriot, Bechtel was working at a California liquor store when first recruited by the CIA. “If I can sell a bottle of Jack Daniels, I can sure as hell sell America,” he recalls thinking.

Joining the speakers were the civilian audience members – predictably, many retirees. Many of these, though, had worked for the CIA or the Pentagon. There were some young people in the audience, twentysomething wannabes who hoped that the spy seminars would boost their prospects of paid national-security work.

A few SpyCruise® passengers mystified me. They claimed to work for non-governmental terrorism-fighting groups and to be really good at dredging up sensitive information. That seemed fishy to me. I would have preferred speaking to serving government spies, but none were aboard the ship – so far as I could tell.

The participants’ politics were, broadly, red state. President Barack Obama was not popular with this crowd. Nor was the American Civil Liberties Union. Nor were the WikiLeaks disclosures.

I liked to think of us as the men and women who operated underground and lived in shadows. Less fancifully, we were the earnest passengers who sat in a dim third-floor conference room watching PowerPoint presentations, while the carefree loafers on the main deck soaked up the sun.

On politics and torture

The Bush-appointed spymasters ruminated on terror-fighting strategies, on Beltway politics and on leaks of classified information. Disappointingly, neither came remotely close to spilling a state secret.

In fact, when I asked Goss a question about the CIA’s covert drone strikes – about the world’s worst-kept secret – he denied knowing anything about them. He also said that nothing would ever make him violate the oath of secrecy he swore as a young intelligence officer to CIA director Allen Dulles.

That was in the 1960s, before Goss served as a Republican congressman, and before Bush returned him to the CIA as director in 2005. After a short and rocky run, he was replaced by Hayden.

“Mike has a calming personality,” Bush writes fondly in his new memoir. Obama was less charmed – he cold-shouldered the general and replaced him once the Democrats took over.

Today, Hayden likes to point out that Obama has stuck with many controversial CIA programs. He is outraged, however, that the administration ordered a criminal investigation into the spy service – specifically a probe of the CIA’s destruction of videotapes showing “waterboarding” interrogations of top al-Qaeda terrorists.

The general didn’t sound like much of a civil libertarian as he expressed fears that “risk aversion” is hobbling the CIA. “When you’re operating out there, somebody’s got to have your back. And it’s got to be your government, not a particular administration,” he told me. “What the agency has gone through in the last two years has shaken that trust.”

Spies should be encouraged to be aggressive as lawfully possible, he argued.

One night in a bar called the Silk Den, while talking to the former CIA directors, I called them Doubting Thomases. Centuries ago, the most circumspect apostle, Thomas, had demanded to see Christ’s wounds before acknowledging that the crucifixion took place. These days, the CIA refuses to admit that torture has gone on in Middle Eastern prisons to which it has sent individuals suspected of terrorism. Hayden inspired my remark by mentioning that he is Catholic – but found it off the mark and out of line. He finds “torture” to be an ugly word and fiercely denies that the CIA ever encouraged it or acquiesced to it anywhere.

Bad blood and bad jokes

There were other speakers. Several writers, including an ex-CIA station chief, talked about their works of spy fiction. A former Lebanese intelligence officer tried to stir up a greater U.S. interest in tackling Hezbollah. We were shown many maps purporting to show the global spread of militant Islam. And several participants expressed hopes that the U.S. intelligence community may yet find those missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Their continuing absence still gives Bush a “sickening feeling,” according to his new memoir.)

Organizer Bechtel’s presentations on the continuing threat of terrorism were replete with pictures of the World Trade Center Towers burning and bald eagles whose bodies consisted of stars and stripes. The message: “Dear Terrorists: Sleep with One Eye Open – We’re Coming.”

With so much talk of terrorism, some audience members gravitated to black humour. Some SpyCruise jokes got real hackneyed real fast.

Representative question: “Where’s the conference room?” Representative deadpan response: “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”

There were more inspired quips by audience members, including one zinger along the lines of “Forget shuffleboard, we’re going to learn how to shoot stingers off the back of the boat!”

“Stingers,” surface-to-air missiles, were covertly supplied by the CIA to the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s Cold War.

We were never actually given any weaponry during SpyCruise.

Still, we had fun.

But I felt for the Eurodam’s staff after learning they numbered about 800 seafaring souls who typically spend 10 months a year working. Beyond obsequious, the Indonesian cabin stewards and Filipino food servers act as if they exist to carry your bag, take your food order, fetch a bottle of wine. I was assigned an Indonesian steward, Ridho, who was a pro: I couldn’t leave my cabin for an hour without him covertly entering to give it an expert cleaning.

His special skill: origami. Every day, he wrestled new bath towels into animal shapes – leaving behind a squid, a scorpion, a monkey hanging from a clothes hanger. (Oddly, the monkey seemed disturbingly reminiscent of a captured enemy combatant placed in a “stress position.”)

Near the end, Ridho asked me the question that had apparently been bothering him for days. “Mr. Freeze,” he asked, “are you a spy?”

How had I blown my cover? I had never even mentioned SpyCruise to him.

Then Ridho pointed out that I had six books about the CIA on my nightstand. (I admit I was having too much fun to even crack the spines.)

I let him in on a little secret.

“I’m not a spy,” I replied. “But there are many aboard this boat…”