Permanent Record

particular Comfort Inn served as a makeshift dormitory for the Warrenton
Training Center—or, as folks who work there call it, the Hill.
When I checked in, the desk clerk warned me not to use the stairs, which
were blocked off by police tape. I was given a room on the second floor of the
main building, with a view of the inn’s auxiliary buildings and parking lot. The
room was barely lit, there was mold in the bathroom, the carpets were filthy with
cigarette burns under the No Smoking sign, and the flimsy mattress was stained
dark purple with what I hoped was booze. Nevertheless, I liked it—I was still at
the age when I could find this seediness romantic—and I spent my first night
lying awake in bed, watching the bugs swarm the single domed overhead light
fixture and counting down the hours to the free continental breakfast I’d been
promised.
The next morning, I discovered that on the continent of Warrenton, breakfast
meant individual-size boxes of Froot Loops and sour milk. Welcome to the
government.
The Comfort Inn was to be my home for the next six months. My fellow
Innmates and I, as we called ourselves, were discouraged from telling our loved
ones where we were staying and what we were doing. I leaned hard into those
protocols, rarely heading back to Maryland or even talking to Lindsay on the
phone. Anyway, we weren’t allowed to take our phones to school, since class
was classified, and we had classes all the time. Warrenton kept most of us too
busy to be lonely.

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If the Farm, down by Camp Peary, is the CIA’s most famous training
institution, chiefly because it’s the only one that the agency’s PR staff is allowed
to talk to Hollywood about, the Hill is without a doubt the most mysterious.
Connected via microwave and fiber optics to the satellite relay facility at Brandy
Station—part of the Warrenton Training Center’s constellation of sister sites—
the Hill serves as the heart of the CIA’s field communications network, carefully
located just out of nuke range from DC. The salty old techs who worked there
liked to say that the CIA could survive losing its headquarters to a catastrophic
attack, but it would die if it ever lost Warrenton, and now that the top of the Hill
holds two enormous top secret data centers—one of which I later helped to
construct—I’m inclined to agree.
The Hill earned its name because of its location, which is atop, yes, a
massive steepness. When I arrived, there was just one road that led in, past a
purposely under-marked perimeter fence, and then up a grade so severe that
whenever the temperature dropped and the road iced over, vehicles would lose
traction and slide backward downhill.
Just beyond the guarded checkpoint lies the State Department’s decaying
diplomatic communications training facility, whose prominent location was
meant to reinforce its role as cover: making the Hill appear as if it’s merely a
place where the American foreign service trains technologists. Beyond it, amid
the back territory, were the various low, unlabeled buildings I studied in, and
even farther on was the shooting range that the IC’s trigger pullers used for
special training. Shots would ring out, in a style of firing I wasn’t familiar with:
pop-pop, pop; pop-pop, pop
. A double-tap meant to incapacitate, followed by an
aimed shot meant to execute.
I was there as a member of class 6-06 of the BTTP, the Basic
Telecommunications Training Program, whose intentionally beige name
disguises one of the most classified and unusual curricula in existence. The
purpose of the program is to train TISOs (Technical Information Security
Officers)—the CIA’s cadre of elite “communicators,” or, less formally, “commo
guys.” A TISO is trained to be a jack-of-all-trades, a one-person replacement for
previous generations’ specialized roles of code clerk, radioman, electrician,
mechanic, physical and digital security adviser, and computer technician. The
main job of this undercover officer is to manage the technical infrastructure for
CIA operations, most commonly overseas at stations hidden inside American
missions, consulates, and embassies—hence the State Department connection.
The idea is, if you’re in an American embassy, which is to say if you’re far from

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home and surrounded by untrustworthy foreigners—whether hostiles or allies,
they’re still untrustworthy foreigners to the CIA—you’re going to have to handle
all of your technical needs internally. If you ask a local repairman to fix your
secret spy base, he’ll definitely do it, even for cheap, but he’s also going to
install hard-to-find bugs on behalf of a foreign power.
As a result, TISOs are responsible for knowing how to fix basically every
machine in the building, from individual computers and computer networks to
CCTV and HVAC systems, solar panels, heaters and coolers, emergency
generators, satellite hookups, military encryption devices, alarms, locks, and so
on. The rule is that if it plugs in or gets plugged into, it’s the TISO’s problem.
TISOs also have to know how to build some of these systems themselves,
just as they have to know how to destroy them—when an embassy is under
siege, say, after all the diplomats and most of their fellow CIA officers have been
evacuated. The TISOs are always the last guys out. It’s their job to send the final
“off the air” message to headquarters after they’ve shredded, burned, wiped,
degaussed, and disintegrated anything that has the CIA’s fingerprints on it, from
operational documents in safes to disks with cipher material, to ensure that
nothing of value remains for an enemy to capture.
Why this was a job for the CIA and not for the State Department—the entity
that actually owns the embassy building—is more than the sheer difference in
competence and trust: the real reason is plausible deniability. The worst-kept
secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays
is to serve as a platform for espionage. The old explanations for why a country
might try to maintain a notionally sovereign physical presence on another
country’s soil faded into obsolescence with the rise of electronic
communications and jet-powered aircraft. Today, the most meaningful
diplomacy happens directly between ministries and ministers. Sure, embassies
do still send the occasional démarche and help support their citizens abroad, and
then there are the consular sections that issue visas and renew passports. But
those are often in a completely different building, and anyway, none of those
activities can even remotely justify the expense of maintaining all that
infrastructure. Instead, what justifies the expense is the ability for a country to
use the cover of its foreign service to conduct and legitimize its spying.
TISOs work under diplomatic cover with credentials that hide them among
these foreign service officers, usually under the identity of “attachés.” The
largest embassies would have maybe five of these people, the larger embassies
would have maybe three, but most just have one. They’re called “singletons,”

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and I remember being told that of all the posts the CIA offers, these have the
highest rates of divorce. To be a singleton is to be the lone technical officer, far
from home, in a world where everything is always broken.
My class in Warrenton began with around eight members and lost only one
before graduation—which I was told was fairly uncommon. And this motley
crew was uncommon, too, though pretty well representative of the kind of
malcontents who voluntarily sign up for a career track that all but guarantees
they’ll spend the majority of their service undercover in a foreign country. For
the first time in my IC career, I wasn’t the youngest in the room. At age twenty-
four, I’d say I was around the mean, though my experience doing systems work
at headquarters certainly gave me a boost in terms of familiarity with the
agency’s operations. Most of the others were just tech-inclined kids straight out
of college, or straight off the street, who’d applied online.
In a nod to the paramilitary aspirations of the CIA’s foreign field branches,
we called each other by nicknames—quickly assigned based on eccentricities—
more often than by our true names. Taco Bell was a suburb: wide, likable, and
blank. At twenty years old, the only job he’d had prior to the CIA was as the
night-shift manager at a branch of the eponymous restaurant in Pennsylvania.
Rainman was in his late twenties and spent the term bouncing around the autism
spectrum between catatonic detachment and shivering fury. He wore the name
we gave him proudly and claimed it was a Native American honorific. Flute
earned his name because his career in the Marines was far less interesting to us
than his degree in panpipes from a music conservatory. Spo was one of the older
guys, at thirty-five or so. He was called what he was called because he’d been an
SPO—a Special Police Officer—at the CIA’s headquarters, where he got so
bored out of his mind guarding the gate at McLean that he was determined to
escape overseas even if it meant cramming his entire family into a single motel
room (a situation that lasted until the management found his kids’ pet snake
living in a dresser drawer). Our elder was the Colonel, a midforties former
Special Forces commo sergeant who, after numerous tours in the sandbox, was
trying out for his second act. We called him the Colonel, even though he was just
an enlisted guy, not an officer, mostly out of his resemblance to that friendly
Kentuckian whose fried chicken we preferred to the regular fare of the
Warrenton cafeteria.
My nickname—I guess I can’t avoid it—was the Count. Not because of my
aristocratic bearing or dandyish fashion sense, but because, like the felt vampire
puppet of