Agents remuneration

The CIA paid Vietnam War spies by ordering them stuff from Sears

In Sep. 1966, Jon Wiant, an American CIA operative, arrived in Hue, Vietnam, to head a bilateral operation with South Vietnamese intelligence. The plan involved running assets in and out of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese “secret zones” along the border with Laos. These assets—a mix of mountain agrarians and indigenous Montagnard (or Degar) people—were the CIA’s “eyes and ears on the ground,” Wiant wrote in an article for a 1994 edition of Studies in Intelligence, a journal on intelligence-gathering published internally by the CIA. They were “recruited to report on Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army troops and facilities they encountered in their travels in the jungles.”