Retired CIA exec returns to share experiences at Bonner-Prendie
UPPER DARBY » Former ranking CIA official Jack Devine has lived all over the world and has been involved in some of the most iconic global events in the latter half of the 20th century. The 1973 Chilean coup against Salvador Allende and the training of 100,000 Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets are just a couple of the historic moments he was involved in during his 32 years with the CIA.
Devine shed some insight into these events and more during a speaking engagement Thursday morning at his alma mater, Monsignor Bonner and Archbishop Prendergast High School. The class of 1958 alumnus spoke candidly and humorously, about the realities of working at the CIA and how the landscape has changed in the way agents collect their information.
“I certainly did not fit the profile of people going into the CIA in the Cold War in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” Devine admitted. The Delaware County-raised, strapping man at over 6 feet tall with a noted “sinister” look was a teacher at Bonner, the opposite of the Ivy League-educated, rich persons who would fill the offices in Langley.
“As you can see today this is what a spy looks like. It’s a shame Brad Pitt or Matt Damon isn’t here,” he joked.
After reading an expose about the CIA called “The Invisible Government” he wrote a simple letter to the CIA asking to work for them and he was accepted in 1967.
Paramilitary training at the CIA was one of the many fields he was tasked to complete when he first started there, and he had no problem talking about working with explosives and jumping out of air planes.
“Remember, working with explosives is dangerous,” Devine was told by an instructor with missing fingers and a V-shaped scar on his bald head, the description of which made the students chuckle. “Now I’m here to tell you, that’s riveting,” he matter-of-factly added.
His pragmatic tendencies led him to leave a few more inches of detonator wire on his explosives which would make the device go off six seconds after everyone else’s. Such a tactic earned him his lowest training grade in that explosives class.
“They didn’t think it was funny, I thought it was safe; lowest grade,” he said. “But what’s interesting about my file, not a sterling file, is that it said, ‘Whatever you do, do not let this man near explosives.’”
In 1986 he, ironically, he became responsible for more explosives than the CIA had in the history of the CIA when he helped the mujahideen Soviets.
And then there was the jumping from an airplane, another portion of paramilitary training.
“Listen,” Devine was told by an allegedly crustylooking colonel, “jumping out a plane is better than sex. I looked at him and I thought he had a different idea of good sex, that’s all I have to say. And I tested this theory out.” This matter-of-fact description of his training elicited big laughs that echoed throughout the auditorium.
Eventually, he and his family, which included his wife, Pat, and their five children, moved to Chile in the early 1970s for his first assignment overseas. Political tensions at the time were charging up for the U.S.-involved coup of Allende. A bomb set for his neighbor’s house landed in their yard and blew the plaster off the house the Devine family was staying in.
“The problem is it’s my worse personal decision. What was I thinking as that young person the risk, and that somehow this was a normal thing to do?” Devine said about moving to Chile. “As life would have fight the it, one of my agents got the first report that there was going to be a coup to overthrow that government.
“It ended up Pat was in the house and I was in the embassy when the fighting and shooting started … and I was in there when they started to bomb the palace. Life abroad for people serving in the military and intelligence can be very, very dangerous.”
The Devine family OK during the coup.
As his career with the CIA continued he would become a major player in operations that included supporting Afghan fighters against Soviet invasion, pushing the need for the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles in that fight. He also oversaw operations in the military intervention of Haiti and the killing of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, both events in the early 1990s. Devine’s highest position with the agency was acting director of global operations before he retired in 1999.
When Devine started with the CIA the ways of intelligence gathering was a lot slower than the instantaneous results we have now with online technology. Human behavior hasn’t changed, he said, just the means of getting the information.
“The revolution is in the technology,” he said. “I could have controlled the world if I was the only person that could have the phone in your back pocket … Today, very topical, is Russian cyberattacks, manipulation inside of our communication systems. That’s where the revolution is.
“All of the was information available to you was not there. I had to go out and find out what politicians were thinking. Today, you don’t have to leave Washington, you have to get harder, better stuff.”
The use of torture, which may be used by intelligence agencies against suspected terrorists to get information, was also addressed by Devine.
“Well I learned a great deal of torture here at Bonner,” he quipped, letting the auditorium fill with laughter yet again. “Although some of those classes ...” not allowing the joke to come to fruition before returning a serious response that he is opposed to torture and that the government should not be involved with enhanced interrogation. The policies associated with it sound like a cancerous disease, he noted, but there are some practical reasons for it when applied to some ethical situations.
He may have joked about his torturous days at Bonner, but he spoke strongly about the moral character he built up by attending the once all-boys school.
“I lived in an inarguably ambiguous grey world. I can’t tell you where or when, but I began to realize the value system inculcated into you here on right and wrong, the end does not justify the means,” he said. “When (I) had to make life or death decision about people you don’t have time to think about it, it has to be part of your value system in your frame work of thinking. I will tell you that Bonner allowed me to maintain my sanity and personal integrity because I had a value system. If you don’t, the capacity for corruption is huge and the system and individual must value having that framework of looking at the world.”