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Episode #633: “We’re in the dreams-come-true business.” Barry Broman uses that line to explain the human side of espionage, but it also captures the path that took him from teenage photojournalism in Thailand to combat service in Vietnam, twenty-five years in the CIA’s clandestine service, and eventually the station chief’s office in Rangoon. His career was built around access: finding people, earning trust, entering closed places, and learning what could not be understood from a distance.
Broman first reached Thailand in 1962, when he left college for a year and became an Associated Press stringer in Bangkok. He later studied Southeast Asia and Thai, served as a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam, and entered the CIA only fifteen days after leaving the Corps. In the Agency, he made his reputation as a recruiter of human sources, a method that later shaped his work on Burma and the Golden Triangle.
As chief of station in Rangoon from 1994 to 1996, Broman worked in a country where U.S. relations with the military government were poor but narcotics cooperation remained possible. He helped pursue intelligence against Khun Sa’s heroin network, defended working relationships with Burmese military officials, and drew a sharp distinction between corruption and state-directed trafficking. He rejects claims that the CIA itself participated in the regional drug trade, while acknowledging that later developments in the borderlands extend beyond the period he knew firsthand.
After retiring, Broman kept returning to Burma with cameras rather than classified reporting, producing books and documentaries on the country’s rivers, architecture, ethnic communities, narcotics economy, and politics. One film took him to Aung San Suu Kyi under surveillance; another brought him into Wa territory. Now the war has shut down many routes he once traveled along the Irrawaddy, Chindwin, and Andaman coast. For a career built on going closer, Burma has again become a place where access itself is uncertain.
