At 1800 hours on a recent Saturday Colonel Angelo M. DiLiberti sits in the bar at Rex’s Cork and Fork in Saint Charles waiting for the spies to come in from the cold. One by one they enter, through both the front and back doors, shedding coats and scarves as they case the dining area for colleagues and greet them with conspicuous displays of handshaking, backslapping, and saluting. Many in the group–mostly retired military intelligence officers, with a sprinkling of ex-CIA–have brought wives no longer willing to be widowed by their husbands’ classified careers. The room fills with chatter until Captain Bruce Walker stands. Gifted with a jaw so square it looks molded to military specifications, Walker raises his manhattan and proposes a toast to the new president of the United States of America.
“Angelo,” calls out Brigadier General Frank R. Julitz. “You should find out what military base is near Vegas.”
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Former employees of the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other groups banded together as the AFIO in 1975 to lobby against congressional budget cuts in government intelligence. Membership ballooned after the Carter administration pink-slipped several hundred field agents. “The higher-ups decided gentlemen don’t spy on gentlemen,” says Julitz, a kindly grandfather of 11, who served in the navy, Illinois National Guard, and army reserves before retiring in 1982. But “when you’re in the business of finding out what the other guy is doing you don’t worry about being a gentleman. You’re worried about self-preservation.”
Julitz, who in 1968 was with a military intelligence unit based in Evanston, offers a historical example of how analysts pull together essential elements of information–“EEIs”–to tell a story, in this case about the Chicago Seven.
“A lot of people I talk to, they did their turn in the service. Maybe they were drafted. They went in for a year, year and a half, two years max, and a lot of them had never been in a firefight. So they find it interesting if somebody can say how it was. Sometimes after 50-odd years it’s hard to remember how it was. It gets that way. You know, you read these books and if you were in the same operation and you start talking about it, now you don’t know if you’re talking about what you did or what the author said in these books.”
The speaker tonight is Robert Back, a slim, gray-haired gent with a crooked grin. As a Yale graduate student in 1959, Back was recruited by the CIA to serve on the front lines of the cold war. The company indirectly paid Back to be a delegate to the Vienna Youth Festival, an international conference funded by the Soviet Union. He traveled to Vienna and then behind the iron curtain, ostensibly as one of the dozens of young American communists on a mission of peace and friendship. “You were basically to go over there with the festival, paid for by the communists, and break it up,” says Back. “They had big meetings and our job was to simply come up with a contrary opinion in the middle of a meeting, where everybody was saying one thing. And I’d mention Tibet and Hungary and all these hot words. I was to really break the spirit. There was kind of a propaganda spirit, and my job was to interrupt it.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
