NOC

NOC (pronounced “knock”) is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program revived by the late director William Casey in the 1980s, which engages the spy agency to corporate America for gathering intelligence on economics, trade, and technology. Since the end of the Cold War, CIA officials have held on the idea of collecting clandestine economic data in order to justify the CIA's inflated budget, even as the Agency’s abilities and its very existence have been questioned.

Only a small percentage of the CIA's employees (perhaps less than 10 percent of the agency's estimated 10,000 to 20,000 workers) are clandestine officers involved in operations, the traditional spy materials that includes recruiting sources, executing covert missions, and gathering intelligence. The remaining 90 percent are analysts, managers, scientists, and support staff. Because of their various roles, CIA employees require different levels of protective cover:

No cover: Upper management, college recruiters, and congressional liaisons. These men and women are publicly acknowledged CIA employees.

Light cover: Many of the CIA's analysts and scientists fall under this category. Their families and friends might know who they really work for, but publicly, they claim to be employed by some other government agency or group.

Official cover: Most CIA employees engaged in operations overseas are given official cover: a facade job in the U.S. embassy that affords them diplomatic immunity. These spies work under varying degrees of secrecy, the CIA station chief in a major ally nation may be well-known on the diplomatic cocktail circuit, but his subordinates, who actually recruit new informants, may not be. Such spies probably confide in their immediate families, but otherwise are unlikely to reveal their true occupation. The advantage of official cover is that if officers are caught, they enjoy the benefits of diplomatic protection; at worst, they'd be publicly ousted and sent home in disgrace.

Nonofficial cover: NOCs are the most covert CIA operatives. They typically work abroad without diplomatic protection (often they pretend to work for some commercial enterprise). If these spies are caught, there's no guarantee that the United States would admit their true identities.

NOCs are among the government's most closely guarded secrets, because they often work for real or fictive private companies overseas and are set loose to spy solo. NOCs are harder to train, more expensive to place and can remain undercover longer than conventional spooks. They can also go places and see people whom those under official cover cannot. They are in some ways the most vulnerable of all clandestine officers, since they have no claim to diplomatic immunity if they get caught.

For decades, a varying number of NOCs have been installed abroad in big multinational corporations, small companies or bogus academic posts. The more traditional rules of espionage do not apply to NOCs. When the Soviets caught a diplomat doing spy work during the Cold War, they roughed him up a little and sent him home. Unmasked NOCs, on the other hand, have met with much harsher fates: CIA officer Hugh Redmond was caught in Shanghai in 1951 posing as an employee of a British import-export company and spent 19 years in a Chinese prison before dying there. In early 1995 the French caught five CIA officers, including a woman who had been working as a NOC under business cover for about five years. Although the NOC caught in Paris in 1995 was simply sent home, it might not have been so easy in an Arab country.

NOC is a designation within the CIA which means "non-official cover." This means that an agent is working under such deep cover that said agent cannot be officially associated with the American intelligence community in any way, shape or form. In order to keep covered, a NOC will work for the CIA out of a front company, which provides the illusion that the agent is just an ordinary accountant, lawyer or businessperson.

Between the CIA and the agent, a process is created to construct an identity which obscures completely the reality of the agent's true employment. The training of these NOC agents, along with the creation of the cover stories requires millions of dollars and delicate work. Little or no protection is given to an exposed NOC agent by the American government, an arrangement that is understood by all parties involved. Because of this, the cadre of NOC agents is small and elite.

The CIA has used private U.S. companies for cover overseas since its beginning in 1947 and used nonofficial cover extensively ever since. Dozens of U.S. corporations including Fortune 500 companies, small companies, and high-tech firms secretly assist the CIA in allowing the Agency to place full-time officers into their corporate offices abroad. These include some of the most familiar firms in corporate America, such as RJR Nabisco, Prentice-Hall, Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, General Electric, IBM, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Rockwell International, Campbell Soup, and Sears Roebuck. Shipping lines, mineral and oil exploration firms, and construction companies with international operations, like the Bechtel Corp., often house NOCs.

NOCs pose as American businessmen in friendly countries, from Asia to Central America to Western Europe. There, they recruit agents from the ranks of foreign officials and business leaders, steal secrets, and even conduct special operations.

The NOC program, one of the CIA's most sensitive and closely held secrets, has grown to its present size, some one hundred and ten officers according to a recent CIA retiree, without any public scrutiny, and with no open debate within the companies whose interests could be harmed by a spy scandal.

By joining the CIA in clandestine activities, a company accepts that some of its employees could routinely break the law in another country and, if exposed, embarrass the company and endanger its other overseas employees.

Unlike most CIA officers, who are stationed abroad disguised as State Department employees, military officials, or other U.S. government personnel attached to an American embassy, NOCs operate without any apparent links to the U.S. government. They are able to approach people who would not otherwise come into contact with a U.S. embassy official. The CIA's operations within terrorist, drug trafficking, and arms dealer networks often involve NOCs, who can move more easily in such circles without raising suspicion.

In recent years, NOCs have increasingly turned their attention to economics. Using their business covers, they seek to recruit agents in foreign government economic ministries or gain intelligence about high-tech firms in computer, electronics, and aerospace industries. They also help track the development of critical technologies, both military and civilian.

NOCs frequently stay 5, 10, or more years in one place. During that time, the NOC is truly out in the cold and completely isolated. Their contacts with control officers in the CIA station are strictly limited; they do not have access to embassy files; and they must report through secret communications channels and clandestine meetings.

Because NOCs do not have the diplomatic immunity that protects CIA officers operating under embassy cover, if they are exposed they are subject to arrest, imprisonment and can be even executed as spies.

Since it was cheaper to station spies in the U.S. embassy, cost-cutting led the CIA to scale down the number of NOCs by the 1960s. The program shrank even more after ITT's involvement with the CIA in the 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende's government in Chile was revealed. That scared a lot of U.S. corporations but events in the 1970s revived the use of NOCs.

When William Casey took over the CIA in 1981, one of his decisions was to strengthen the NOC program. As a result of the closure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, the CIA had virtually no presence in Iran. A NOC program, Casey thought, would at least give the CIA a grip inside the country. In the 1980s Casey was also concerned about economic intelligence, technology, and trade secrets. That gave him another reason to expand the NOCs. He tripled their number in 1986.

Perhaps the most damaging outcome of the NOC program is that, according to many of the people who are risking their lives for the program, it has wasted millions of dollars while producing precious little of real value to decisionmakers.

Retired CIA officials reveal that the NOC program is overwhelmed with clumsiness, corruption, and poor tradecraft. The program is so badly run that NOCs are even resigning from the Agency, after serious mistakes by the CIA that could have resulted in their exposure, arrest, or even execution.

Though it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a NOC in an overseas corporation, CIA officers serving under embassy cover are hardly ever correctly trained to work with NOCs. When errors involving the CIA program do come to light, CIA headquarters always corrects the problem in a way that favors the inside officers, and not the NOCs. The CIA also pressures NOCs to produce intelligence, so their information is often questionable.

Critics and CIA loyalists alike contend that the vast bulk of economic information necessary for government decisionmaking can easily be obtained from newspapers, magazines, trade and technical journals, trade shows, and conventions. Most of the CIA's economic spying produces little or nothing of real value for America's policymakers.

A NOCs ability to run silent and deep has led Ohio Republican Mike DeWine, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to press the CIA to invest more heavily in NOC officers, adding that the CIA's traditional spies, posing as diplomats and trained to infiltrate governments, are not well positioned to penetrate gangs of terrorists who don't go to embassy parties. He called for a larger NOC program in a report issued by Congress but the agency has resisted such efforts before, arguing that NOCs are too expensive and too dangerous to expand the program by much.