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http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1329/n1_v23/20123837/print.jhtml
Mother Jones
Jan-Feb, 1998
Left out in the cold: Monte Overacre left the CIA. But he could never leave
the Cold War.(former Central Intelligence Agency covert action officers)
Author/s: Robert Dreyfuss
Flying 12,000 feet above the jungle-covered Sierra de Chacus mountain range
north of Guatemala City, the Cessna's single engine faltered and died. The
control tower recorded the American pilot's urgent mayday call, followed by
his anguished explanation: "No gasolina." Seconds later came his final
words: "We are going down. We are in the mountains." It was April 5, 1995.
The next day, a search team recovered the bodies, including that of the
pilot, Monte Overacre, 39, a 10-year veteran of the Central Intelligence
Agency's covert operations unit, who had resigned from the CIA six months
before.
I knew Overacre during those last months, though it was a uniquely '90s
acquaintance. I first encountered him on a CompuServe military forum shortly
after he had resigned from the CIA in disgust. He was a wry participant,
slinging sarcastic barbs about the agency and once posting a message to a
former colleague in January 1995 that read: "When I piss them off someday
(perhaps by providing insight to some journalist), and I plan to, all they
will have is their indignation to vent."
Intrigued, I sent him an e-mail introducing myself as a journalist with
experience reporting on the CIA. He wrote back, but at first remained
guarded. "Just don't be surprised if I set some limits that may frustrate
you a bit," he responded. "I don't want to become famous just yet."
Gradually, a cautious trust developed between us. It didn't take long before
he began to tell provocative stories about the CIA's changing new role--and
to explain the frustration that ended his career as a spy.
"The brave new world CIA is more attractive to sensitive '90s kinda guys who
have never dug a foxhole and boast Outward Bound as being their bona fides,"
read one of his e-mails.
In 1992, after nearly a decade of paramilitary adventures in Central America
and Southeast Asia, Monte Overacre was pulled back to CIA headquarters in
McLean, Virginia, given a quick education in telecommunications, and hustled
off to San Diego, where he suddenly found himself in the white-collar world
of economic espionage. According to associates, Overacre's job required him
to debrief corporate executives from the area's biggest technology companies
who had returned home from overseas trips. More important, he needed to
recruit visiting foreign technology experts to spy for the U.S. back in
their home countries--from South America to Europe, Africa to Asia--to keep
the agency on top of new technological innovations.
It was a radical transition indicative of the changes occurring at the
agency, now marking its first half-century. With the Cold War over, the CIA
has focused its attention away from communism and onto terrorist groups,
drug traffickers, a handful of so-called rogue nations, and new efforts in
economic espionage. But while annual spending on the CIA has remained around
$3 billion in the 1990s, critics such as Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.)
wonder aloud whether the United States even needs the agency anymore.
Overacre, too, began to lose his enthusiasm for the CIA.
He was an adventurer at heart, used to matching wits with the KGB in remote
Third World battlegrounds. Moscow, he explained, was a worthy adversary.
Bitter and disillusioned, he left the CIA in October 1994.
But did a craving for his former life draw him back? In the months that
followed, he started down the path that would take him to Guatemala and to
that lonely spot in the jungle. It's still unclear what exactly took him
there.
"we had it easy," says a former colleague of overacre.
"For a lot of agency types, whose spouses wanted hot and cold running water
and couldn't stand living in Ouagadougou anymore, San Diego was paradise."
The coastline harbors a network of military bases, Navy facilities, and,
like most of Southern California, a growing number of high-tech electronics,
biotechnology, and telecommunications firms. Monte Overacre settled here in
January 1994, assigned to the CIA's National Resources Division (NRD). Part
of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the agency's clandestine service,
the little-known NRD houses the CIA's domestic operations unit and, by some
estimates, has offices in three dozen cities, including San Diego.
"Kinda funny, huh?" he would write later. "NRD, read phonetic--NERD."
The NRD provides the CIA with its primary window into corporate America.
Officers assigned to the NRD maintain regular liaison with literally tens of
thousands of U.S. business executives, who gather intelligence during their
travels. "My primary target was foreign telecommunications," he wrote,
explaining that telecommunications intelligence made up nearly 30 percent of
the NRD's focus, a subset of the growing concentration of CIA resources
toward economic espionage.
Overacre operated in San Diego under a cover conveniently provided by the
U.S. Department of Commerce, using his real name. A business card carrying
the seal of the U.S. Department of Commerce reads: "Monte Overacre/U.S.
Foreign Commercial Service/6363 Greenwich Drive/San Diego, California
92122." However, the phone number on the card doesn't ring the Commerce
Department's San Diego office but the CIA's. (While the San Diego office of
the CIA refused to comment on Overacre, a Commerce Department official in
San Diego helpfully remembered him. "He was detailed out here on a research
assignment," says Mary Delmege, a regional director for the Commerce
Department's commercial service. When asked whether she knew he was actually
working for the CIA, Delmege said no.)
Overacre also used a string of aliases--Lincoln J. Barnes, Marshall Sellars,
Shaun Dinnen, and, perhaps most memorably, Eden C. Jetson--on visits to
high-tech firms (including Loral). When he showed up, Overacre would quietly
be escorted into the office of a high-tech executive recently returned from
overseas, close the door, and debrief him.
But his most important job was recruiting overseas spies. Under his
assignment, code-named MXSCOPE, he worked on the campus of a university in
the San Diego area (though he carefully guarded the identity of the
university), where he managed a team posing as telecommunications academics.
Under the guise--or "false flag," as the CIA calls it--of running a series
of seminars on telecommunications, Overacre and his MXSCOPE team would
invite scientists, engineers, and government and corporate officials from
all over the world to come to San Diego. Once there, unwitting attendees
would be scoped out by Overacre, evaluated, and targeted for recruitment as
potential CIA agents, or "assets," after they returned to their home
countries.
"To me, it was like drinking light or nonalcoholic beer--the appearance is
there but the 'kick' is missing," he wrote. "When one is used to chasing the
really bad guys, as last defined during pre-Yeltsin times, the
[telecommunications] stuff is pretty unsatisfying." He described his new
targets as "the types who are often the shrinking violets of the social
circuit."
"Basically, these boys (and some girls) are nerds who seek attention and
respect. They are easy pickings for an average case officer, if he can keep
from being bored to death."
Using classic Cold War techniques, the recruitment efforts were typically
unsavory. "The old methods work even with the nerds, sometimes even better,"
he wrote. "Trips to massage parlors, strip clubs, wild bars with aggressive
white women, etc., make these guys come unglued, just like any truck driver.
Once you have gotten a guy laid and paid the bill for him, you have a friend
for life. Trust me, it almost always works if the assessment shows a lack of
nooky in the target's profile."
Eventually, back home in Paris, Mexico City, or Beijing, the recruits would
probably be handled by a CIA case officer working out of the U.S. embassy
or, more frequently, operating under nonofficial cover, posing as an
American businessman. By then, the new agents likely would be on the CIA's
payroll.
Classified MXSCOPE documents marked "Secret" and dated July 1994 indicate
the worldwide nature of the operation, targeting officials, scientists, and
businessmen from Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Argentina, Germany,
India, China, Egypt, and Africa.
"It is essential to maintain the exposure of MXSCOPE in the world
telecommunications arena in order to plant the seeds of a sustainable source
of validated [foreign intelligence] targets from which to choose scholars
and guest speakers," reads a CIA memo written by Overacre to justify a trip
to Latin America. The memo describes how he and his colleagues would often
travel to conferences, from Berlin to China, to promote the ersatz academic
program and lure the unwitting to San Diego.
The most attractive targets, he wrote in an e-mail, were the experts in such
sought-after technologies as "digital switch architectures, placements,
telecom network design and hierarchies, digital microwave frequencies, [and]
types and manufacture of digital optical fiber being laid to replace old
twisted-pair networks." He explained that this intelligence gathering was
designed to help the U.S. intelligence community--in particular, the
eavesdropping specialists at the National Security Agency (NSA)--tap
telephone conversations, data transmissions, and other overseas electronic
communications. Overacre said that telecommunications operations such as
MXSCOPE fed their information back to an agency called the Technology
Management Office, a secret joint venture of the CIA and the NSA.
"But," he added with grim humor, "it was much more satisfying chasing
commies. They were easy to hate and put up a good fight. I especially liked
the ones willing to die for their cause. I found I kinda truly liked the
[telecommunications] targets and sometimes even felt guilty exploiting
them--nah!"
To many in the CIA, the NRD is only for officers who can't cut it in the
clandestine foreign posts or the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, the
analysis branch. But as the need for overseas spies dropped, career CIA
officers took what they could get.
Duane Clarridge, a former senior CIA official who once oversaw the agency's
operations in Central America, says of Cold War CIA officers, "We got more
of them than we need. We try to retread them." When told about Overacre, and
how he left the agency after he was reassigned, Clarridge replies, "He
clearly wasn't retreadable." growing up in southern idaho, where the sky
stretches to infinity, Monte Overacre decided he wanted to fly. Born July
30, 1955, to Sam and Flora Overacre in Gooding, Idaho, he was the first of
six children, with three brothers and two sisters in a close-knit family.
The Overacres struggled early on, as Sam kept a series of odd jobs in order
to make ends meet. But no time was tougher than on March 19, 1963, when
Monte Overacre's younger brother Mitchell, 5 years old, tumbled from a tree
house, entangled in a rope that choked the life out of him. Mitchell and
Monte, who was 7 years old at the time, had been inseparable. "When Mitchie
died," Flora says, "Monte's imagination went down within himself. He had no
one to share it with." Says Sam, "He'd go down in the basement and play
little war games, using a bag of soldiers that he had. He liked that."
With an IQ of 135 and an insatiable curiosity, Overacre earned straight As
through the ninth grade; he'd spent hours systematically taking apart every
clock in the house and putting them back together. His family and friends
tell the story of the time that he disassembled a motorcycle, then put it
back together and promptly wrecked it, almost killing himself.
His curiosity, however, developed into a rebelliousness that by the early
1970s prompted him to wear long hair and smoke pot. At 17, he dropped out of
high school. But then, following a heart-to-heart talk with his father, he
joined the U.S. Army. Over the next 10 years, he became proficient as an
Army aviator and picked up a pair of college degrees in economics and
education before leaving for the Army reserves in 1982, heading back home to
Idaho.
Two years later, he saw an employment ad placed in the Twin Falls, Idaho,
paper by the CIA. Before he knew it, he was traveling down to meet a CIA
recruiter in Salt Lake City. He passed the test with flying colors, and in
August 1984 headed off to the agency's yearlong career trainee program in
Virginia. By 1986, Monte Overacre was in El Salvador, a country which was
then in the midst of a bitter civil war, one that pitted a
military-dominated government against leftist guerrillas allied with Cuba
and Nicaragua.
He believed in his cause and, according to those who worked with him,
repeatedly risked his life to save others, flying in and out of combat zones
in helicopters, under fire, to rescue stranded American CIA officers and
wounded Salvadoran soldiers. "I was with him, in the left seat, in many
helicopters, in situations that were extraordinarily heroic," says Chase
Brandon, a CIA colleague of Overacre's in El Salvador. "He was a great
pilot."
But one particular event has haunted his family. In March 1987, a CIA
colleague and friend of Overacre named Rick Krobock died in the crash of a
Salvadoran military helicopter. "I was one of the last to see him alive,"
Overacre wrote.
Realizing that journalists might report the death of an unnamed CIA officer
in El Salvador, which would alarm his own parents, Overacre called to
reassure his mother. "The phone rang," says Flora, "and it was Monte. He
said, 'Mom, I want you to look at the clock and remember what the date is.
And remember that you talked to me, and I'm OK.'" That way, should reports
later surface of an unidentified CIA pilot's death in El Salvador, they
would know it wasn't him. But Krobock's death augurs another crash that
would take place almost exactly eight years later in Guatemala.
overacre's decision to leave the cia was accelerated by a clash in his
personal life, which included two failed marriages.
His second, in 1989, to a fellow CIA officer, ended in 1993 after one
incident in which Overacre was charged with physically assaulting his wife,
Kathi. The charges were later dismissed, and he underwent counseling and
anger management training at the CIA. In mid-1994, following their
separation, Kathi--posted to the agency's station in So Paulo, Brazil,
posing as a U.S. consulate official--got into a dispute with Monte over
whether Overacre could see their 3-year-old daughter during a trip to
Brazil. (Kathi Overacre declined to comment for this story.) When Kathi
protested to her boss that Overacre's trip might violate CIA security and
blow both of their covers, the agency got involved, and Overacre was not
allowed to make the trip. Though the facts are murky, Overacre demanded an
apology from the agency. (In a letter sent to Sam and Flora after their
son's death, Hugh E. Price, the CIA's deputy director for operations at the
time, wrote, "The organization and parties involved sincerely regret any
discomfort or concern Monte may have felt about this matter.E His reputation
remains intact.")
Despite the incident, when he bailed out of the agency in October 1994,
Overacre had no trouble finding a golden parachute. For many CIA officers in
the National Resources Division, leaving the agency for the business
world--at a much higher salary--is a piece of cake. Most NRD officers have
extensive contacts with senior industry executives, often at a very high
level within their companies, and the intelligence that they've gathered
certainly makes them attractive job candidates. Before Overacre jumped ship,
Jenny Fisher, his former boss, had left for Motorola.
Overacre was offered a job as sales manager for Loral in South America. For
him, it was an ideal position, paying $70,000 a year. Concerned about his
CIA years, Loral designed the position specifically to keep him out of
Central America, a safety precaution meant to prevent him from running into
old friends--or enemies.
Yet just three months later, in February 1995, to the shock of his family
and friends, Overacre abruptly quit--taking a job with roughly the same
salary managing a struggling oil operation in Guatemala.
the company that sent overacre to Guatemala, Glickenhaus Energy Corporation
(chaired by Seth Glickenhaus, an octogenarian Wall Street money manager),
funded Crescent Petroleum, a tangle of entities based in Houston. Crescent
operated the Chocop oil field in Guatemala's northern Peten panhandle.
Chocop itself was a small, unproductive oil exploration area near the
village of El Naranjo in Peten. Remote and inaccessible, the field never
made money while Crescent Petroleum ran it. Beside it was a small, rutted
dirt landing strip that could handle small planes. Nearby was a Guatemalan
army base, and for years anti-government guerrillas associated with the
leftist National Guatemalan Revolutionary Unity movement--the bitter enemies
of the CIA-supported Guatemalan military-- operated in the area, along with
bandit groups prone to violence.
After investing several million dollars in Chocop, Crescent Petroleum had
nothing to show for it. According to three different people familiar with
the firm, Crescent was in serious financial straits. Thomas Stroock, the
former U.S. ambassador to Guatemala and a Wyoming oilman, briefly considered
investing in Chocop, but says he abandoned the idea because "the financial
end was such a mess." Stroock also says that one of the principals in
Crescent, an independent Texas oilman named Gary Lewis, diminished his
interest in the company, saying only, "We made an effort not to become
involved with Mr. Lewis."
Why would Overacre abandon a job that apparently required little from him
and paid him a healthy salary? The friends, family, and colleagues with whom
I spoke believe that what attracted him back to Central America may have
been a chance for one last freelance assignment for the agency. "To this
day, I'm convinced that Monte had gone back to work for the CIA when he was
killed," says his father.
While we may never know whether that's true, one fact is clear: The CIA
played a role in introducing Overacre to his final employer.
In late January 1995, Overacre received a phone call from then-CIA Houston
station chief Chase Brandon, with whom Overacre had flown helicopter rescue
missions in El Salvador a decade earlier. Brandon introduced Overacre to Jim
Rieker, the president of Crescent, who wined and dined Overacre over a long
weekend at his ranch near Houston. Then Brandon, Overacre, and Rieker flew
up to New York City with Gary Lewis to introduce Overacre to Seth
Glickenhaus over dinner at the Harvard Club. At that time, Glickenhaus
offered Overacre a job managing Crescent's operation in Guatemala.
Brandon's connection with Crescent is unclear; asked how he knew Rieker, he
replies airily, "I just know a lot of people." As head of the Houston office
of the CIA, Brandon had wide contacts with oil industry executives in Texas.
Brandon says Overacre took the job with Crescent for the sheer adventure of
it, and that the CIA had nothing to do with it. "When I called him, I said,
'Look, this is a little oil company and they're out in the middle of the
damn jungle in Guatemala and they're looking for someone who can fly
airplanes and meet with government officialsEget security around the oil
derricks at night to keep the guerrillas out.' And I think that sounded to
Monte like the closest thing to CIA heaven that he was likely to find."
He ridicules the notion that Overacre was performing any work for the
agency. "He walked out of here neat, clean, and irrevocably," Brandon says.
The person closest to Overacre at the time of his startling decision to
leave Loral and rush off into the jungle was Lora Dillon, a fellow ex-CIA
employee who was Overacre's girlfriend in San Diego. Dillon at first
cooperated with this article, though she admitted, "Being sworn to secrecy,
I don't know how much I can tell you." In an interview, she described
Overacre's state of mind after returning home from the interview with
Glickenhaus. "His eyes were so bright," she said. "I told him, 'I thought
I'd got you after you'd sowed your oats,' and he turned to me and said, 'No.
Not yet, babe.'" She added, "You can't say anything to a man whose eyes are
so bright. I'd never seen it before. They shone."
But when asked about the details of his death, Dillon tersely said, "Talk to
Chase." When told Brandon said Overacre did not go back to work for the CIA
in Guatemala, she laughed bitterly.
One person who might know some of the answers is Gary Lewis, who would not
return repeated calls for this story. Described by former associates as
flamboyant and hot-tempered, Lewis--the man former Ambassador Stroock
considered disreputable--is also, say several sources, the proud owner of a
Russian MiG fighter plane, housed at Houston Hobby airport. Lewis had a
close working relationship with Brandon, including during the period when
Brandon was CIA chief in Houston. Brandon calls Lewis a friend, and says his
involvement with Crescent was simply an attempt to help his friend salvage a
troubled oil investment. But their friendship raises the question of whether
or not Brandon and Lewis were more than friends, cooperating on agency
business as well.
At Overacre's funeral, Brandon and Lewis showed up together and handed out
business cards that described them as representatives of a company called
Patriot Petroleum of Baytown, Texas. Brandon's card identified him as
Patriot's vice president and chief of operations. Brandon now acknowledges
that Patriot was a fictional entity designed to provide cover for his CIA
role in Houston.
His close relationship with Lewis, therefore, begs the question: Was
Crescent part of a CIA covert operation, too?
Even the man holding the purse strings, Seth Glickenhaus, admits to having
his doubts. "Underneath it all," Glickenhaus says, "I had some suspicions
that [Overacre] may have taken the job as a representative of the CIA,"
though he hedges, calling his skepticism a "fanciful, wild suspicion."
But after Overacre's crash, Crescent's Guatemalan oil operation ceased to
exist. It vanished. Drilling halted, and, according to a company insider,
within days all of the computer records at the Guatemala office were gone.
"We lost millions [in investments]," says Glickenhaus.
the guatemalan government did little investigating into the crash. Nor has
the U.S. government pursued its own investigation: The embassy in Guatemala
City did not look into the crash--Marilyn McAfee, the ambassador at that
time, says the issue never came to her desk.
Overacre had two passengers who died with him that day: an American
businessman named Wayne Eggleston and a Mexican field hand from the oil
field named Rigoberto Castro Ramirez. According to the transcript of
Overacre's conversation with the flight control tower, there was no
indication of any trouble--no engine breakdowns, no weather disturbances, no
fuel problems--until the sudden announcement that they were out of fuel.
All that is known is that in the last month of Overacre's life, he was
scared. "He started running into people he knew from the old days, people in
the Guatemalan army, from the air force, people who knew him from his days
with the CIA," says his brother Dave, to whom Monte sent a copy of his last
will and testament. And, says Lora Dillon, Overacre "started doing some
countersurveillance" to try to make it harder for anyone to tail him.
Like many who knew him, Overacre's family simply cannot believe that his
death was an accident. How, they ask, could a veteran Army flier and 10-year
air operations specialist for the CIA, with 4,500 hours at the controls of a
wide variety of aircraft, simply run out of gas?
Sam Overacre, who once visited his son in El Salvador, laughingly remembers
that Monte would often sit on a flak jacket while piloting the helicopter,
saying, "I don't want a lead enema!" Today, proudly displayed in a cabinet
in Sam and Flora's home in Kimberly, Idaho, is a jaunty photo of Overacre,
armed and standing in front of a helicopter, in battle fatigues, with the
scrawled message: "Dear Mom and Dad, Getting older but still playing little
boys' games. Love both, Monte."
They can't help but think that what lured him down to Guatemala was one last
assignment. They just don't know if they'll ever discover the truth.n
Robert Dreyfuss is a Mother Jones contributing writer. He received funding
for his research in part by the Fund for Constitutional Government.
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