The Spies Among Us

I was reading the UC Alum magazine "Chicago" and came across this interesting article on a UC Alum, Richard Schroeder, who was a field agent in the CIA and now is a member of the board of advisors of the secret CIA spy museum. The article also has a list of shame of UC alums who have gone over to the dark side. The list includes Aldrich Ames and Manhattan Project physicist Ted Hall. Katrina Leung also on the list is alleged to have sold secrets to the Chinese.

Schroeder reminisces about the glory days fighting the Communists.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War, “the hard targets were the Russians, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, and North Koreans,” Schroeder says. “You were really out there on the front lines.” The agency, he adds, expected spouses to join the fight, sometimes putting their careers on hold. “When we got to a new post,” Leah recalls in a recent e-mail, “I had to ‘reinvent myself,’ as Rick is fond of saying.” She helped maintain his cover story, volunteering and entertaining. He laughs, “I can remember showing a Russian KGB officer All the President’s Men.”

He also has a bit to say about current events in the world of spies.

...Schroeder defends the CIA against criticism and denounces those who reveal officers’ identities for political reasons, as happened to Valerie Plame. He believes President Bush’s call for creating a director of national intelligence—part of a post-9/11 revamping effort—is unnecessary. “We already have one,” he says of the agency’s director of central intelligence who also has limited control over the larger information-collecting community.

Still, he knows the CIA and espionage have their faults: “It’s never perfect because it all deals with humans.” He’s not above wearing such a message on his sleeve at the agency’s gym—“My friends went to Iraq to look for WMD and all they found was this lousy T-shirt.” It’s a fashion statement, he concedes, not all his fellow exercisers appreciate.

To minimize mistakes and to make room for new recruits, intelligence officers eventually retire. For Schroeder, it’s just as well. “I don’t want to go out now and stand on the corner in the rain at midnight, meeting an agent,” he admits, then zooms off in his sports car to rendezvous with Leah in the Virginia suburbs.