But I could not keep quiet, for reasons that go back to my first tour as a freshly-sworn vice consul. I had been at the embassy in San Salvador for only three months when a new acquaintance invited me to travel with her to the eastern border of the country. My friend worked as secretary to the CIA station chief and her boss was sending a plane to the seaport town of La Union. There were empty seats on the aircraft and she was flying down on her day off. Did I want to come along?

I didn't give her an answer right away. I was nervous, wondering why the CIA had chartered the aircraft. I didn't know what the Agency was doing in that part of El Salvador. But I was intrigued, too. I hadn't been out of the capital and I wanted to see more of the country. I told myself that my friend was a secretary, not an agent who would be mucking around in covert operations. And catching a ride on a half-full plane sounded like something an ordinary person might do in a war zone.

I said yes, and the next Sunday I found myself climbing into a Piper Seneca at Ilopango, the military airport on the outskirts of San Salvador. There, I met the pilot and the third passenger, the woman for whom the unmarked twin-engine plane had been chartered. I was relieved to discover that she also held a desk job. She was an analyst from CIA headquarters in Langley, on temporary assignment to San Salvador. She claimed the co-pilot's seat and spent the flight with her battered briefcase planted firmly between her ankles, chattering to the pilot in a colloquial Spanish I couldn't follow.

We landed in La Union, the analyst went to the CIA's waterfront villa, and my friend and I were entrusted to a laconic paramilitary type--our tour guide. He spent the morning showing us the town, taking us boating on the Gulf of Fonseca, and buying us each a beer in a seedy hotel bar where he looked quite at home.

At one o'clock, he brought us back to the villa. We lunched with the analyst and the CIA's man in charge of the outpost, plus a half dozen other casually-dressed males who clearly did not know that I wasn't part of the family. From their unguarded remarks, I realized that the analyst had just given them a briefing. And I learned that some of them had traveled to La Union from the other side of the Gulf of Fonseca--from Nicaragua. Later, the head man took me aside and told me not to tell anyone about my day in La Union. That got my attention. Everybody working in an embassy knows how to handle classified information. Such a specific warning meant something unusual--and probably shady--was going on.

I made that trip in the fall of 1982, before the extent of CIA support for the Contras was widely known. Three months later, when a NEWSWEEK cover story exposed the CIA's "secret war" in Nicaragua, I understood better what I'd witnessed. The men I lunched with were Agency contractors who advised the Contra soldiers. And the analyst was there to interpret for them the up-to-date intelligence products she'd brought in her briefcase from Langley.

So why did they invite me, an outsider, to be present for this illegal transfer of finished intelligence to anti-Sandinista forces? Weren't they worried that I'd blow the whistle? No, and with good reason. I was new in-country and I worked in the consulate, not the political section. It wasn't likely I would figure out what was going on. And my friend and our escort kept me busy during the briefing. If the men at that lunch table had kept their mouths shut, I wouldn't have had a clue what they were up to.

The CIA was more concerned about my better-informed colleagues back in the embassy. What if a high-ranking American official started wondering why an Agency analyst had gone to La Union? To sidestep that question, they tucked the visitor into a trio of sight-seeing women, one of whom wasn't even a CIA employee. My friend recruited me for camouflage.

Deploying me as an unwitting asset was a minor transgression for the CIA. It doesn't belong on the list of sins the Agency committed in Central America during the 1980s. I felt foolish for a time, but I got past it. I made other friends in the intelligence community. Still, I keep that early lesson in mind: when you dance with the spooks, you have to watch out they don't step all over your toes.