I was one of the early "modern" female FBI agents. I graduated from college in the 1970's, with an unusual combination of a both accounting and computer science degrees and a CPA. I also ran track in college and was in pretty good shape. I applied to the FBI and was accepted, and after my training and probationary work I found myself assigned to a white collar crime unit.
It was boring and routine for many months, as we downloaded transaction records and used time sharing computer terminals (this was before PC's and spreadsheets) to compare and match bank transactions with potential criminal activities. Much of stuff we found was handed off to other agencies – potential counterfeiting or money laundering to the Treasury pukes, some foreign transactions were deemed "espionage related" and handed over to the FBI units specializing in counter intelligence, and a lot of potentially exciting stuff went to the OC weenies.
I spent all my time in a cubicle tracing transactions and trying to get bank MIS managers to volunteer data without a warrant and to output tapes in a format we could read. Except for my trips to the firing range, and the occasional special training, my glamorous FBI career seemed no different than those of my accounting classmates who took jobs at the Big 8 accounting firms (there were eight then, but not anymore!).
My sex life was not much more exciting – I had a few college boyfriends but none that really lit my fire, so during college and especially after I started at the Bureau there was lots of fantasy and masturbation. I had two older brothers and an older sister, so when I was growing up I not only got to read Playboy and Penthouse Forum, but I also discovered porn magazines hidden in drawers, and snuck in to watch 16mm porn films projected on my brother's wall when they thought I was asleep. But I got most of my sex information from my sister's Cosmo and Redbook magazines, and eavesdropping on her stories and those told by her friends when they slept over at our house, plus another more advanced course of study by listening to the other girls at college.
Then there was finally some excitement at the FBI field office when our boss announced that several special agents, including me, were to be temporarily assigned to a task force to work with the ATF and the DIA on a weapons smuggling case. Things began to move fast when we were told that there was considerable attention to our case from not only the FBI directors' office, but the White House. There are often great budget implications in the outcome of something like this, and careers can be made or broken in the rush to show quick results.
At first I was given a huge file of records from an expensive escort service that had been "turned" by the local cops, and then handed over to the FBI when it was discovered that it operated in several states. This operation provided super high end ($5K per night in the 1970's!) call girls who were in real life sorority girls good looking enough to be models and willing do just about anything the client wanted!
I took the files to my office and then recruited two secretaries to do rapid data entry all night and then my months of boring experience paid off. I was rapidly able to identify most of the clients, their credit cards, their schedules, and I even found some amateurishly 13 letter code encrypted journals with notes on their sexual preferences. These were easy to decipher and I typed them up too.
When I turned this information over to my boss, he scanned it, got visibly excited, and then went into the SAC's office and they called the Bureau HQ in DC, even though it was already late evening there. He didn't let me listen to the call, since this operation was officially compartmented, but by what I could hear through the door and from the tone of the voices on the speaker phone, I could tell there was great urgency to get more information.
The next morning the SAC called me into his office alone, which in itself was unusual. He was bypassing my direct superior and several members of my team. He first gave me a brief "attaboy" for working through the data so quickly, but he soon grew thoughtful and spoke in hushed tones.
As I later learned this usually means they are about to try get you to do something that will either earn you a big promotion if it works or get you in trouble with OPR if it doesn't. Your boss will get most of the credit if it works, but will have to act really sad when they fire you for coloring outside the lines if you don't get results.
"Connie," he said, "You are the only agent with a chance to break this case and to perhaps advance your career in a very short time. But you will have to tread carefully. I want to make sure that you understand I am not asking you to do anything that puts you at risk or makes you uncomfortable. Is that perfectly understood?"
I paused for a minute and asked "What exactly are you asking me to do, sir?"
He adopted a conspiratorial tone like he was reading me in to secret stuff I really shouldn't know: "One of the escort clients you identified is a major player in the arms smuggling operation we are trying to track. He has been seeing the same girl for almost a year, but she has paid off her student loans and will not go on any more dates with him or anyone else. The madam is so worried about getting us to reduce her sentence that she will do or say anything we want. There is a big party planned and the escort service is sending 4 girls to the hotel suite. We want to put you undercover as the new replacement date for the top arms dealer."
It took me a minute to process the possibilities here. "What information do you think I can get, and what do you want me to do to get it?" He paused, and chose his words carefully: "We want to know who he is selling to and when. It may be that one or more of the other guys at the hotel are the buyers, and we can actually make an arrest before the party really gets started. But you are going to have to make a judgment call on that. You will be the one to signal when we should make the raid."
Being lucky enough to have it all go down that night seemed unlikely to me, and I asked "What if it's just a party and no transactions take place for a long time?" He considered this, and replied "If you don't feel you can continue the operation, try to get out without signaling for a raid. If we don't alert him, maybe we can just keep a team following them after the party breaks up, and that will get us what we want. These guys are freaks for counter surveillance, and have a team following them and snooping all the time, so we won't be able to wire you and listen in."
The walls started to close in on me a little bit, and I asked "If you are not listening in, how can you tell when I want a raid?" He pulled out a pager on a clip like all the doctors wore in the 70's. "Take this with you. All the escort girls have them. The service pages them to call for their messages and also the madam pages them and they have to call her from each date to tell her they are okay. All of the girls do this and your target knows all about it from his times with the previous girl. We have modified this pager receiver by adding a low power transmitter so that if you press the squelch button three times quickly it will send an alert signal to our surveillance team. It only transmits when you are ready for the raid, and if we tried to send any other signals they would sniff them out and the deal would be blown."
"Why are you giving me this thing now?" I asked. "Because the party is tonight, and it will take some time to get you ready, so you have to decide right now". He looked at me expectantly. I needed some more information. "What do we know about the client? Who is he?" He looked troubled. "You are supposed to be meeting him for the first time. If you know too much about him it may jeopardize your cover story." He did not put me off. "I still need to know more about this guy to gauge the risk – to decide whether or not to try this at all."
He made a grimace. "We don't know that much anyway. He's supposed to be in his early thirties, former Army Green Beret with combat duty in Vietnam, then a mercenary and now an arms dealer. Calls himself Danny Colangelo, but that's probably an alias. Six two, two hundred pounds, blue eyes, brown hair. Nothing else I can tell you. Are you in?"
What was being left unsaid was that all these arrangements were tailor made to make me the cutout and the bearer of all the risk. If I didn't send the signal, my boss and the rest of the team would blithely assume there was no problem. If I sent the signal too soon without getting any evidence on the arms transactions, I would have been the one to "chicken out" and ruin the operation. And if I stayed undercover until I got good information, who knows what I would have to do with "Danny" for how long while my bosses stayed blissfully ignorant?
"Why me" I asked. He spoke immediately: "Because you are about the same age and background as the recent college graduates the madam recruits. You will be completely believable if you tell them you are doing it to pay off your college loans. And although you don't normally dress like a hooker, our consultant says that he can tell from the pictures we sent him that you are in good shape and have a nice figure. He says he can "tart you up" and make you look like a hot call girl! And no one else who could pull off that look knows enough about the case to be useful given our short time line."