Agency Rules - Never an Easy Day at the Office by Khalid Muhammad Read Free Book Online Page B

in this room will be allowed to erode it. This service stands as one unit, one force, not individuals. If you decide at any point that you are bigger than the service, you will find yourself outside the service as a target instead of an asset.”
    “This is the beginning, but how it ends, only those who graduate know,” he continued. “We will teach you what it means to be a warrior in the true sense of the word, following a code that embodies integrity, loyalty, honor, selflessness and courage as your guide. You will learn to understand the phrase that every warrior lives by – Never ask how many there are the enemy, just where they are.”
    He spoke with great passion and honor about the achievements and the great men who had made them possible, but just as the plaques on the wall remained anonymous, he never mentioned a name. The service was supreme , Kamal thought to himself, and we are a part of that supremacy as long as the service allowed it .
    “Intelligence is a game of imperfect information. We can guess our opponent ’s moves, but we can’t be sure of them until the game is over. As you will learn during your courses and your time here, this it is not a game. The risks we take are real, and sometimes deadly. We move chess pieces, countering the moves of our opponents, on an imaginary board that could be confined to the location we are in or spread across the entire globe. This is real-time strategy implementation. It isn’t for the weak of heart, it is for those who have the mental drive to be more than they ever imagined.”
    * * *
    The Jungle launched a set of vital concepts for Kamal’s training and career as an operative – the need to know, the need to compartmentalize and the need to validate intelligence and its sources. The first briefings provided the foundation of his espionage education. During training, the candidates were regularly shuffled to locations where their instructors had organized ‘teachable’ moments. Sometimes the prepared location would be on the sprawling 5,000 acres, others could be hundreds of kilometers away. Kamal had a slight advantage over many of his batch mates because of the counter-intelligence training during the SSG course, but that slight advantage became much greater with his actual field experience.
    The instructors at The Jungle, discounting a few devout Muslims, were alcohol-swilling spies ranging from good to amazing. They included seasoned officers like Colonel Akbar, a veteran of the Afghan conflict and a key trainer of the Mujahideen, and non-military personnel like Doctor Waqar Shah, a specialist in psychological warfare. Some had served as station chiefs, or cultural attaches as they were known to the outsiders, others were masters of covert operations whose tradecraft behind enemy lines had become the stuff of legend within the ranks of the military, keeping operations and operatives alive. They had worked in India, the United States, North Korea, China, Israel and other countries, both friendly and unfriendly to Pakistan.
    Other instructors included paramilitary specialists, field operatives and linguists that would help to get the candidates ready for situations and encounters that they would need to extract themselves from. One thing was made clear to all the candidates – if you are caught behind enemy lines, the ISI will distance itself from you.
    In other words, you are fucked six ways from Sunday , Kamal thought to himself. That made the requirement to absorb information quickly and clearly imperative for every candidate. It would be their own skills that would get them out of hot water and to safety – the institution would not be able to save them until they were clear of all threats and then only if the intelligence was valuable to the institution, military and state of Pakistan. The Jungle was replete with stories of operatives that had been turned out into the cold when their objectives went belly up and didn’t deliver quality