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artists’ bullpen, learning to work with linguists and experts who had studied foreign travel and security controls. When I arrived at the bullpen, I was the low man on the totem pole. The office was headed by Franco, a heavy-set, jovial, often demanding guy who was also very fair. If you wanted to work a little harder, he made sure you got credit. If you solved problems, you got rewarded. He was a great first boss. His deputy, Ricardo, on the other hand, was very competitive with his staff. If he saw a weakness, he would pounce.
    I had many challenging projects over the twenty-two months I worked in the headquarters bullpen. Perhaps the most difficult ofthese, though, was dealing with Ricardo. Everyone would leave their artwork mounted down on their desk at the end of each day, and Ricardo would come in early the next morning to check everyone’s progress, going around to each desk to see how the artist was doing. After he did his inspection he would make very small blue arrows on each artist’s work indicating the areas they needed to work on. So first thing in the morning you would come in and see your artwork from the day before and find these small arrows all over it. It seemed he would get a certain pleasure from making those small blue marks. To the artists it was infuriating.
    In order to break the tension, we had installed a dartboard, which we would use during breaks. Instead of throwing three darts a standard distance of nine feet, we developed a more macho, high-pressure game—one dart, at a distance of eighteen feet, for a dollar a throw. Ricardo proved to be a master, and could launch a dart with the cool accuracy of a scorpion flicking its tail. What he would love to do was get you in a dart game and take your money in front of the others. When I finally beat him, I wouldn’t give him a rematch, and for a time I feared for my life. But he did appreciate my work enough that when he left for an assignment to be chief of graphics at our Far East base a year later, he specifically requested me to be his subordinate, ahead of other artists with more seniority.
    As artists we were reproducing mostly personal identity documents that could be used for operational purposes such as travel, renting safe houses or hotel rooms. They could also be used for exfiltrations, false flag recruitment, entrapment, or crossing international borders. The forgeries sometimes were designed to discredit individuals and governments, just like the KGB did to us. Their program was called Special Measures. Our program had noname—we just called it covert action. Other documents that we produced could take the form of disinformation, letters in diaries, bumper stickers, or any other graphics item that could influence events of the day. We were able to reproduce almost anything that was put in front of us; the only restrictions were matters of statecraft, such as currency. Making the other guy’s money at that time was considered to be an act of war. But bombing a country with leaflets instead of munitions was a capability that we gladly provided.
    After my time in the bullpen, I spent the next seven years, from 1967 to 1974, living and working in Okinawa and Bangkok and other far-off places, traveling the world as an undercover CIA technical officer. Throughout that time I continued to work as an artist-validator, but I also branched out into other areas such as disguise and exfiltration, helping to rescue defectors and refugees from behind the Iron Curtain. A big part of this was due to the fact that I had helped to usher in a new “generalist” program, which cross-trained technical officers in various disciplines like disguise or documents or whatever was required for the particular region they would be working in. Not only did this give us a new skill set as technical officers, but it also allowed us to be more agile in responding to the potential needs of our station chiefs and case officers, who often asked techs to do a little