THE CIA'S YEAR-ROUND CAMP FOR SPIES

By ADAM COHEN

In "Flaps and Seals," students study the finer points of surreptitiously opening and resealing letters. "Tradecraft" course work includes picking up messages from dead drops, clandestine photography of enemy documents and the use of disguises. In another tutorial, a cocktail party is staged where students learn how to strike up a conversation with a potential source. Sometimes even the wives of recruits are taught how to spot foreign agents tailing them.

The Ivy League it isn't. Camp Peary, where accused double agent Harold Nicholson taught from 1994 to 1996, is the CIA's top-secret school for spies, known in agency circles as "the Farm." Students, called career trainees, take a year-long, $150,000-per-recruit program that prepares them to work in the agency's clandestine service. Located on 9,000 acres of barbed-wire-encircled woods outside Williamsburg, Virginia, the Farm looks like a community college, with brick buildings, dorms, a cafeteria and a gym laid out on a bucolic campus. But it also has such uncollegiate features as a mock prison where trainees get to experience solitary confinement, a pistol range where they learn to use firearms, and a private airstrip.

The Farm believes in learning by doing. Students practice infiltrating a hostile country at a fake border, with watchtowers, guards and police dogs. Instructors simulate enemy capture by breaking into dorm rooms in the middle of the night and carrying off trainees to a bare room for days of intense interrogation. It all ends with "hell week," in which students travel to a U.S. city to stage a covert-operations exercise. fbi agents are brought in to play the part of foreign security officers who try to nab the students.

The quality of faculty is on the upswing; for years the posts were filled by agency alcoholics needing to dry out. Still, Nicholson was arrested after allegedly making blunders that would have a Farm trainee staying after class cleaning erasers. In a story filled with cliches, from scheming Russians to a spy accused of selling out his country, this spy instructor's ham-handed technique added one more: those who can't do, teach.

--By Adam Cohen. Reported by Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON