EXFIL by Anthony Patton (best book reader txt) 📕

to worry; I was a valued customer from whom payment wasn’t expected. She probably wanted an authentic experience, not the usual fiction, and might have imagined an honest future with me. After all, many GIs returned home with a Thai princess. I already knew I wasn’t going to be that guy, but there was something special about Jewel. Shockingly, I ignored the possibility of security cameras. I couldn’t explain why I had been willing to take such a risk, but something in my gut told me Jewel wouldn’t betray me. I left with a polite kiss on the cheek.

It was clear, at least to me, that this wouldn’t be the last time.

Keeping in mind that Beth would be waiting for me, I spent the next two hours walking the streets and having a few beers to justify being buzzed and ready to sleep. When I arrived, I was relieved to see Beth sleeping, but the silk pajamas and empty glass of white wine on her nightstand suggested she might have considered testing my virility after a night on the town. I turned off the lamp and quietly slid under the sheets, holding my breath. She rolled over, mumbled she loved me, and drifted off into sleep after I’d kissed her on the cheek. That was close—way too close for comfort.

The final discussion with Beth about staying a third year was less difficult than I imagined. She took it in her stride; she knew I had dreamed of being a general since I was a cadet.

Asking me to give this up would be like me asking her to give up her Ph.D. or the teaching position at West Point. Most military couples did spend time away from each other, just as we had when I’d been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the decision to stay in Bangkok for a third year would raise questions in the minds of those who were prone to gossip.

To reduce the risk of getting caught with Jewel, I stayed away from Club Ecstasy until Beth and the boys had left. Afterward, however, our encounters were more frequent, until I bought her a maid outfit to hide in plain sight at my apartment. We never discussed money in a transactional way, but I gave her funds for nursing school and personal expenses, until we arrived at an unspoken price of about $40 each night, two or three times a week. She insisted I was her only special client, that she was using the money to start a new career. I chose to believe her and took consolation in this, but we both knew there was no scenario in which we would end up married.

One of the biggest challenges of the intelligence business was avoiding the temptation to pound round pegs into square holes, or to simulate an assembly-line process for a business that was inherently cyclical. Amateur Intelligence Officers focused on things like counting the number of meetings they had per week or how many reports they wrote per month, with low quality reports being the inevitable result of this methodology.

There were no shortcuts or formulas for quality intelligence, which was a stubborn lesson that many Intelligence Officers learned the hard way.

As anyone in the business knows, the narratives of successful cases are written after the fact. During the daily grind, it was impossible to predict which relationships would succeed and which would fail. The more seasoned officers knew that many variables were beyond their control, which was why the fortuitous collection of a video of Captain Chen having sex with a Thai prostitute turned out to be a game changer.

The owner of a no-tell motel near Club Ecstasy was a retired U.S. Army sergeant named Dale, with a long gray ponytail, beer belly, and early stage whiskey nose.

He agreed to help us if anything ever fell into his lap.

In this case, Dale recognized Chen as a possible Chinese diplomat—his exact words and gestures describing Chen were less diplomatic—and activated a video camera hidden in one of his rooms. Dale explained that some clients paid extra to return home with evidence of their sexual exploits, and he was right to conclude that I would like to have such a video of Chen in his moment of passion. We weren’t normally in the business of coercion, but we were at war. The situation called for courageous leadership.

After reporting this development, noting that it had fallen into our laps—it wasn’t a honeypot designed to trap Chen in a compromising position—the response from Washington was unambiguous: stand down—full stop.

We apparently weren’t in the business of coercing foreign diplomats, not even those who were a clear threat to our national security. In contrast, we had no problem sustaining a never-ending global war on terrorism with boots on the ground and drone strikes. The information was shared with CIA, who also expressed no interest in coercing Chen, adding that this might backfire and result in a demarche from the Chinese. We never got the full story, but CIA usually claimed that our proposed operations would interfere with their sensitive operations, which they couldn’t reveal to us. How convenient.

Washington decided that risk aversion and diplomatic expediency would dictate how this war would be fought. Given our limited success against the Chinese cyber program and the damage they were inflicting on us, one successful attack after another, this was unconscionable.

If I knew anything about Chen, and no one knew him better than I did, he would agree to provide us information after being presented with the evidence. And as it turned out, I was right.

Washington was furious, but everyone was “cautiously optimistic” and wanted to “see where it goes” now that the deed had been done. We never did receive follow-on guidance to terminate the relationship. As the CIA advised us, we now “owned” Chen, including any fallout if the operation went south. The bureaucracy was in risk aversion mode to ensure that no one inside the Beltway would take the fall.

In the