As the Central Intelligence Agency celebrates its 50^th anniversary, many South Florida residents might be surprised to learn that hundreds of former spies are among them. 

     They’re living in south Palm Beach County neighborhoods and running central Palm Beach County businesses.  

     After a 33-year career with the CIA, working in places like Latin America, Donald Winters has retired to Boca Raton.  

     Next month, Winters will bring lessons of the Cold War into the classroom with a course called “Undercover in Latin America” at Palm Beach Community College’s south campus in Boca Raton.  

     With the break-up of the Soviet Union, “Most people question [whether] the U.S. needs an effective intelligence [gathering] service,” Winters said.  “I hope the students will leave [my class] with a little better appreciation of what intelligence is all about.”  

     The class will be from 1:30 to 3:30p.m., Nov. 10 to Dec. 15, at PBCC on the grounds of Florida Atlantic University, off Glades Road and east of Interstate 95.  The class is part of PBCC’s Learning Unlimited-Continuing Studies program.  For information, call 561-367-4550.  

     Winters and other former CIA agents say the agency is shifting its focus.  Instead of trying to protect the United States from nuclear war, the agency is working to stop drug trafficking and international terrorism.  

     “Who else is going to do it?” Winters asked.  

     Winters is not the only spy who has come in from the cold to settle in sunny South Florida.  After 24 years as an undercover CIA agent in Europe, Asia and Africa, Fred Rustmann retired to Palm Beach in 1990 and started CTC International Group, a firm in West Palm Beach that specializes in business intelligence.  

     Using a network of former CIA agents, the firm investigates clients’ competitors, completes competition analyses, does background checks on current and potential employees and provides litigation support.

     Rustmann and his wife, Teri, a former undercover CIA agent in Europe and Africa, run the company with her sister, Lisa Ruth, a former CIA analyst in Central America and the Caribbean.  Ruth now lives in Delray Beach and also teaches at PBCC.  

     “A lot of former CIA officers are using their skills from the CIA in the business world,” Teri Rustmann said.  

     Among the true stories that Winters plans to tell his students: The fateful day in 1982, when he answered the telephone and the person on the other end of the line asked him, “How soon can you get to Honduras?”  

     “I was sent to Central America during the Contra period, and we ran a war,” Winters recalled.  

     He was put in charge of organizing an army.  

     I started with 500 rather ragtag people, and turned that into 10,000 fairly disciplined troops [who] challenged the Sandinista government.”  

     More than 200 former CIA, DEA and FBI agents now living in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, including the Rustmanns, are members of the Palm Beach County chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.  The group’s goal: educate the public about the importance of “a strong and responsible national intelligence establishment,” Rustmann said.  

     Members lecture to groups and teach at colleges and universities.  They write newspaper stories, magazine articles and nonfiction books.  

     “People need to understand the importance of the intelligence community.  It makes me angry when they don’t,” Teri Rustmann said.  

     “If the U.S. doesn’t have somebody watching the store, the other country’s intelligence agencies [will] watch us to get the strategic advantage.”