Mr. and Mrs. Smith? Yes, But No:
A CIA Tandem Couple & their Watches
Sonya Lim and her husband Christopher Turner didn’t intend to join the CIA, but both – akin to a larger number than you would expect – happened onto a career spanning multiple decades of running foreign assets and leading clandestine operations by chance. Sonya, a first-generation Korean-speaking immigrant, was a PhD student when, “two gentlemen showed up and said they were from the CIA. So, my first response was, ‘I never applied.’ They said, ‘We understand’…and they chuckled.” But the Agency had read Sonya correctly – she had an appetite for adventure and wanted to serve her country. After a three-hour interview with numerous “How would you react in this situation?” queries the two provided Sonya cash (untraceable, naturally) to cover her travel expenses.
The path Christopher took to running clandestine ops overseas was more complex. Following a focus on cultural anthropology and archeology in college, and subsequent fieldwork living among pre-industrial tribes in the Philippines (I neglected to gauge his feelings on snakes), he applied on a lark to an Agency advert calling for candidates that lived for risk, foreign travel, and adventure. He noted during the late 1980s the Agency was seeking individuals “doing cool things – living abroad and learning languages, taking on risk and managing it successfully.” All desired traits that fit his life experience perfectly.
Having met each other during Agency training in what is easily the most exclusive dating pool in DC (and likely the world), Sonya and Christopher married and became what is known colloquially as a “tandem couple,” ie: spouses that serve in the same federal agency. Another commonality between the two, along with a passion for the mission? A love of watches and a keen understanding of their utility as tools when performing high-risk ops.
Christopher’s earliest exposure to watches in the Agency should be familiar to readers of W.O.E. Officers wearing Seiko automatic divers issued by the USMIL’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG), which Watches of Espionage (WoE) has written about previously. These much sought after Seiko watches came up randomly during our discussion, and it triggered a memory of his meeting multiple military members in Agency headquarters that had served in the ultra-secretive SOG unit during the Vietnam conflict. Every Friday, he recalled them favoring colorful tailored shirts they had tailored in Southeast Asia during their military days, in leu of suits. And they always had great stories to tell.
Sonya described the qualities required to be an asset handler, namely, mental agility, integrity, thirst for adventure, commitment, and trustworthiness.
All are traits required to be successful in ambiguous situations an Agency officer often finds themselves in – and very few of which are accurately portrayed by Hollywood.
“What we don’t see is them using their brains and using their skills and experiences to talk themselves out of a dicey situation or being able to convince others – potential spies, who you want to recruit – to trust you as [both] a person and CIA officer, and say, ‘OK, I will do what you want me to do,’ whether it be for money or ideological reasons.”
Like Sonya, Christopher thrived at the Agency, becoming an advanced ops tradecraft expert – specializing in sophisticated asset recruitment techniques, he taught his finely honed skills to other Agency officers looking for an edge in tough ops environments overseas. Highly skilled in advanced street tradecraft, he taught surveillance skills, ie: determining surveillance status and losing a tail if required to avoid dragging it to a clandestine meeting or operation. Stakes can be high – if the officer is caught, they get deported, but if the asset is caught, they can spend their lives in prison or be executed.
In the early 2000s and following his war zone tours, Christopher sought out a friend obsessed with watches who recommended an automatic Breitling SuperOcean Steelfish Ref. A19390 (what’s that saying about men that wear Breitling again?). Breitling acquired; more tours followed. More teaching of his hard-won advanced tradecraft to other officers also followed. Christopher did his job well, and after tours in Asia and Europe he retired after 25 years of service with the Agency’s rarely awarded Intelligence Star for Valor in hand.
Like life as an Agency ops officer, tandem couple life has its own unique set of challenges, the foremost being both run risk when engaging in ops or even – in the event the country they are in is hostile to the U.S. – when they do something as innocuous as running an errand. Case in point, in 2008, Christopher was transitioning from a tour abroad via Islamabad, Pakistan. He had just joined friends for dinner at the Marriott when a dump truck filled with explosives detonated outside the hotel, killing at 54 people and injuring hundreds.
Foreign news station coverage carried a picture of Christopher stumbling around in the aftermath, covered in ash. Everything he had traveled with, to include his passport, was destroyed but this didn’t stop him from traveling to the U.S. Embassy to report on what had occurred – and to call Sonya, 7,000 miles away in DC. She lamented, “Of course it was horrifying, but also part of the job. We signed up and we knew those kinds of things happen…It’s very strange, isn’t it?”
Another complication? Overseas posts can be small, limiting the possibility of both tandem spouses finding appealing positions open concurrently. And as careers diverge, fewer positions allow for advancement. But it can also have a ton of advantages – after all, your significant other has the same training and can spot, assess, develop, and recruit foreign spies…and you can assist each other towards successful ops. In 2010, Sonya gifted Christopher something the everyday observer would regard as anachronistic – an open-face Dalvey Ref. 03036 mechanical pocket watch.
Not only did the Dalvey serve as backup to his wristwatch, Christopher told me he wore it as his primary watch to attract less attention in inhospitable areas where petty thievery was rampant. I’ve made the acquaintance of a few watch aficionados in the Intelligence Community during my time in the Federal Government, and this was the first time I had heard of anyone doing this…and it makes perfect sense.
Advanced tradecraft, indeed.
Over the duration of Christopher's career, he likewise served in war zones and chose a series of Luminox watches – the tried-and-true choice of those operating in austere conditions the world over.
He noted to me his preference for the Luminox Navy SEAL Ref. 3001 wristwatch, based on its reputation for durability, reliability, and visibility during the day.
But the Luminox design stood out in particular during night ops, the bulk of his work then. He religiously wore his Luminox night and day for years – and as a trained pilot by the age of 17, he could use its functions to navigate, as well.
Christopher recounts his first recruitment as sticking out the most in his mind – he wasn’t certain what he had learned at the Farm would work. He knew to look for an asset that was calm, discreet, loyal, and importantly exercised good judgment.
He noted, “When you make the pitch…you shouldn’t have any significant fear the answer is ‘no.’ You should already be there.” (I’ve heard it likened repeatedly to a marriage proposal – if you aren’t confident in the answer, you shouldn’t ask).
Sonya would spend the next 24 years honing her “unique skillset” in a slew of Agency job roles in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, to name a few: undercover asset handler, two-time Chief of Station, Chief of Operations, and Senior Executive Officer.
On the way to asset meetings, Sonya recalled numerous hours running surveillance detection routes (SDRs) to reveal possible hostile surveillance, “It depends on the type of mission. If you were to carry out a very sensitive mission then you would need to be extremely careful and thorough in making sure you don’t have anyone following you, be it physical surveillance, people or cars tailing you, or technical surveillance like CCTV…so you need to make you are ‘completely clean’ before you carry out that sensitive mission.”
Always shunned during SDR’s? Cell phones and smart watches (the latter should always be in my opinion, but that’s a topic for another time). Non-smart wristwatches are the discrete secure tool of the trade, as WoE has also written about before.
Although her career took her to war zones during her career, office politics formed an altogether different sort of challenge as a woman who shattered multiple glass ceilings to obtain influential senior positions in an Agency historically dominated by male officers, “As a female, sometimes it might’ve been hard for a few of my male colleagues to have a woman as their boss.”
For an Iraq war zone tour, Sonya – seemingly opposite of Christopher’s Luminox decision – chose a tank-style Coach watch. When I asked her about the more refined choice in watch vis-à-vis her husband, she explained she found her office in Baghdad’s Green Zone to be “such a fortress” she didn’t feel any imminent danger. Like the professionals both were, tandem spouses had logically examined the nature of their respective ops environment and chose their tools accordingly.
Sonya noted the challenge of being dismissed, as a woman, by perspective assets particularly within patriarchal cultures. Regardless, she was able to turn this to her advantage to lower levels of suspicion, which allowed her to move about relatively unnoticed. Sonya used her mental agility to her advantage to build genuine bridges in her ops relationships. After all, the manipulation used by America’s adversaries only goes so far and usually breeds resentment.
Once Sonya returned to DC, she sought to up her watch game for the well-attired Agency headquarters hallways and bought an Arabic-dialed Raymond Weil automatic dress watch.
With the same intent, she also picked up – in Germany – a watch from German brand Bruno & Söhne, given the distinct Bauhaus-style dial made for ease of reading at a glance, possibly to steal a surreptitious glance during a tedious headquarters meeting?
Spy life isn’t all glamor, all the time, it seems.
Sonya continued to work overseas, so Christopher began his third career after he retired, an author. Inspiration struck while exploring a Central European country, when he noticed tributes in churches for people he discovered were part of a America’s most effective spy ring during World War II.
Utilizing German-language documents, his novel "The CASSIA Spy Ring in World War II Austria" was the result, with four novels subsequent.
Now having departed Federal Government service, Sonya presently sits on the board of The Network, an intelligence-driven anti-human trafficking organization, where she contributes as an area and tradecraft subject matter expert and helps devise and implement Network strategy.
Both Christopher and Sonya continue to write articles on various foreign relations issues, to include for The Cipher Brief here and here, and the Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda, and Security Studies.
Importantly, both Sonya and Christopher have now accepted it is perfectly normal not to awaken to a daily crisis.
This article has been reviewed by the CIA's Prepublication Classification Review Board to prevent the disclosure of classified information.