In 1966, as the war in Vietnam was intensifying, CIA operative Jon Wiant took over an operation running North Vietnamese agents into the field to gather information on enemy troops and the Viet Cong. He compensated them with items from the Sears catalog, including “six boys’ size … red velvet blazer vests with brass buttons,” he described in Studies in Intelligence, a trade journal for spies.
CIA operatives like Wiant sometimes pay their agents through a barter system, because cash payments run the risk of attracting too much unwanted attention. Instead of cash, they might, for instance, give their agents guns or prescription drugs. North Vietnamese agents, with whom the agency was working in 1966 near the border with Laos, had little need for money and local leaders were taking portions of the rice they had been giving these agents.