I sat in my study at home in McLean, Virginia and reflected. I had just finished the biggest assignment of my fifteen-year career as a CIA agent. One of the nice things about working for the CIA had been living in McLean near CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Patricia, my wife, and our two kids loved the Eastern Virginia area and as my career often called for sudden, unexpected travel, it was reassuring to know that they were in a place they really liked.
As I finished the second glass of a Chateau du Cedre Marcel Malbec, 2020, matched with a pungent, earthy blue cheese, I began to think back to how it all began, not just for me, but for the Agency as well.
Since the founding of the Office of Strategic Services (055} in June 1942 under William J. “Wild Bill” Donavan and its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, U.S. clandestine intelligence had always been shrouded in intrigue.
Allen Dulles, as CIA Director, received much of the blame for the Bay of Pigs debacle and decades later, it is still unclear what role, if any, Dulles and the CIA played in the Kennedy assassination. Clearly, there was ample motivation as Kennedy blamed the CIA, in large part, for the Bay of Pigs disaster and fired Dulles as CIA Director in November, 1961.
Throughout the following decades, the spy craft of the CIA remained rudimentary. Disguises, phone taps, hollowed out coins and plastic explosives were the tools of the trade. The era of James Jesus Angleton and William Colby used techniques not far advanced from those developed in World War II by “Wild Bill” and others. Recruitment and training of agents remained static as well. The Ivy League campuses, particularly those of Yale and Princeton, were the pipeline to recruit new agents. That is how Thomas “Bud” Swanson was introduced into the CIA.
Bud graduated from Yale in 1969 with a history degree and had been drafted. During his time in New Haven, he came under the influence of William Sloane Coffin, the anti-war chaplain at Yale at the time. Although the charismatic Coffin had galvanized the anti-war movement on campus, Bud remained largely ambivalent about the war. He took a nuanced view and thought that most geopolitical issues were several hues of gray.
Upon graduation, Bud was drafted. His time in Viet Nam was transformative for him. Like many others, he returned disillusioned with the war, but did not dismiss the “Red Threat.”
When he returned stateside in 1971, like many others of that era who had indefinite career plans, he applied to law school. He was admitted to Georgetown Law, but soon realized his mistake. The law school curriculum bored him.
Although many of his classmates immersed themselves in torts and contracts, Bud found the law school environment enervating. The only thing that held his interest was a fellow Ll student, Patricia Thayer.
Their dates often included nights in the law school library. Pat’s attention was on the pages of the legal texts while Bud found himself distracted and his glance often focused on Patricia’s legs. By the beginning of the second semester, two things were clear to Bud, he wanted to leave law school and he wanted to marry Pat. They became engaged on Valentine’s Day and their plans began to fall into place. Pat would remain in law school and Bud would contact one of his Yale friends who was in the CIA. Years later, Bud would often comment that the only thing good he got out of Georgetown Law was meeting Patricia.
Doug Jenkins was two years older than Bud. They had both been in the 190 weight class on the Yale wrestling team and had become friends. It didn’t take Bud long to track Doug down and rekindle their old camaraderie.
Doug and Bud had a common world view. The counterinsurgency initiative that William Colby had conceived in Viet Nam had been a failure. However, the threat from Moscow was real. To think otherwise was naive. The legislative and executive branches within the Beltway had been effete for years. The meetings with Doug helped crystallize Bud’s plans. Entry into the CIA also satisfied Bud’s psyche – he liked living on the edge. Although he had become convinced of the futility of the Viet Nam conflict, he had often fed off the “rush” of combat. The risk inherent in a CIA career was part of its allure.
After joining the CIA in late 1972, Bud became absorbed in its culture. He came under the influence of the legendary, or notorious, depending on your point of view, James Jesus Angleton.. Angleton was the head of counterintelligence of the CIA from 1954 to 1975.
Angleton considered that communism was the existential threat to the future of mankind, and needed to be eradicated covertly, if not overtly. Bud fell prey to Angleton’s charisma, as well as his paranoia, and both men viewed Bud as Angleton’s protege. Angleton was a hard-liner. There was no gray area in his geopolitical view. Angleton thought many of those in the executive branch in the 1970s were soft on communism. Kissinger had placed his bet on diplomacy, not armed conflict. Like the country, within the CIA, there were two camps, hawks and doves. Angleton was clearly the leader of the hawks. Bud remembered years later, witnessing Angleton express, without hesitation, to a group of senior CIA officers, “Kissinger’s diplomacy has not deflected the Kremlin for its basicobjectives. Detente is a sham…”
However, in the 1970s, the geopolitical landscape was changing as was the CIA. Some within the Agency described Colby as a soldier-priest not only because of his devout Catholicism but because of his geopolitical beliefs toward coexistence as being almost dogmatic. Angleton, on the other hand, was considered as a poet spy. This was due to the fact that he had founded a literary magazine, Furioso, while a Yale undergraduate, and because of his innate paranoia, personally and professionally. At CIA headquarters at Langley, he thought there was a mole behind every door. He never let down his guard. It is ironic that the only person he trusted implicitly, his friend, Kim Philby, ultimately betrayed both Angleton and his country.
Many within the White House considered Colby as being too media friendly and divulging too much information to the press. In late 1975, President Ford, at the urging of Henry Kissinger, replaced Colby with George H.W. Bush as CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Schlesinger with Donald Rumsfeld in what became known as the Halloween Massacre. Kissinger had once said to the Catholic Colby at a White House meeting, “The trouble with you, Bill, is that whenever you go up to the Hill, you think you’re going to confession.”
I first met Bud Swanson in June of 2012. As I got to know him better, I realized that his years in the CIA had not been kind to him. His days as a 190 pound Yale wrestler had faded into the rear view mirror. Bud tipped the scales at 230 pounds. His odobene mustache and button down solid white shirts accentuated his jowls. Despite his high-end suits, he always seemed a bit rumpled and often looked like eleven pounds of potatoes stuffed into a ten pound bag.
Despite his unimpressive physique, what struck me was his intellect. Unlike his body which was no longer nimble, his mind was. Listening to Bud opine about foreign affairs was like auditing a political science class at a top university.
I had graduated as a magna at Cal Tech, seven years before and then got my doctorate in chemical engineering. I went into industry, but soon became bored. The way that Bud had felt about Georgetown Law was the way I felt at DuPont. I remember vividly Bud’s overview of the changing CIA that he shared during one of our early encounters. When the Iraq War ended in late 2011, the Agency leadership decided that there should be a change in the espionage technology that was being utilized. That is when Operation Gyges was hatched. It was described as the “moonshot” of espionage and it had to pass muster up the chain of command until it reached Obama’s desk.
Everything in the CIA gets a moniker, so it became Operation Gyges which derived its name from the Ring of Gyges described by Plato. It was a legend where Gyges of Lydia discovered a ring in a cave that rendered him invisible. It did not take long for the Agency powerbrowkers to realize the potential of making agents and weapons invisible.
I remember how my involvement in Operation Gyges. My PhD from Cal Tech helped. During Bud’s tenure at the CIA, the Agency had shifted from
recruiting from the halls of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the campuses of MIT and Cal Tech. The Agency came to fully embrace high-tech and its applications.
In a nutshell, the project had a single goal- develop the technology that was emerging to render individuals invisible. The science involved was not straightforward. It gave me the opportunity to work with some of the best scientists in the country, if not in the world.
The technology involved was known as meta materials and involved a new science, transformation optics. It has its foundation in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It controls the paths of light rays. It depends on the way that light curves when the space itself is curved; something that is caused by strong gravitational fields, as predicted by Einstein.
John Pendry of the Imperial College of London and Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews independently used metamaterials to create “invisibility shields”. The principle they employed was that light rays are bent smoothly around an object placed in the middle of a metamaterial shell and then recombined on the other side. To the viewer, on the far side, it is as if nothing has happened to the light during its passage and both shield and internal object are invisible.
The technology was complicated and there were missteps along the way, but finally after years of research among the Agency and collaborators in the U.K., a prototype of a “carpet cloak” was developed. It was much like an astronaut suit, although much lighter and covered me head to foot.
We then commenced with an intensive trial utilizing the “carpet cloak”. I consider myself a good scientist, but perhaps an even better politician. Although I had been part of the science team that had developed the cloak, it was because of my youth that I was chosen to be the person within the cloak.
The Operation Gyges team within the CIA was now faced with the decision as to the time and place to unveil the cloak. It was obvious to all, that there was a compelling, ideal target-Vladimir Putin.
It is enough that I shared with you the existence of Operation Gyges. To let you know how I was able to enter the Kremlin, even allowing for the fact that I was invisible, would endanger too many valuable assets within the CIA and KGB.
Suffice it to say, that I managed to arrive at Putin’s conference room with its 15 yard table totally unnoticed. He was sitting in his chair, reading documents and suspecting nothing. It had been decided beforehand, back at Langley, to avoid the use of invisible weapons that would increase the risk of detection. I simply walked up from behind and silently and slowly, but oh so slowly, strangled him. My last words before he gasped for his last breath were, “Beg for mercy, you bastard.”
Suddenly, I felt a firm poke in my ribs. Had the metamaterial cloak failed? Had I been detected? I suddenly heard my wife’s voice, “Honey, wake up. You always get sleepy when you drink Malbee. Come to bed, its almost midnight, we have to go to work in the morning.”
