Wednesday, May 30, 2007

So basically what constitutes a "covert" agent within the CIA is that they travel overseas sometimes using an alias, sometimes using their true name.

Wow.

Just wow.

I mean a foreign country would never keep tabs on the real names of agents would they? But hey, she was "covert".

In 1951, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), yet served for less than a year. Little has been published regarding Buckley's work with the CIA, but in a 2001 letter to author W. Thomas Smith, Jr., Buckley wrote, “I did training in Washington as a secret agent and was sent to Mexico City. There I served under the direct supervision of Howard Hunt, about whom of course a great deal is known.”

In a November 1, 2005, editorial for the National Review, he recounted that:

When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens.

While in Mexico, Buckley edited The Road to Yenan, a book addressing the communist quest for global domination, by Peruvian author Eudocio Ravines.

In 1951, the same year he was recruited into the CIA, Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was published.