months, before I heard anything further.
I was not particularly concerned or anxious in any case. Summer school was coming up, and I was committed to reserve duty as the assistant officer in charge of an air traffic control unit at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro; and there was always my dissertation. Odds seemed long that the Agency would actually accept me, and it wasn’t anything I had my heart set on, anyway. To my surprise, though, Jim called the very next day and asked if I could again make the hour-long drive to Marina Del Ray, as there was one other issue he wanted to discuss. I didn’t mind the drive, but I wasn’t thrilled about hauling out the coat and tie again.
In this second interview Jim laid out the basics of a special program managed by CMS in addition to the standard Career Training (CT) program entered by the great majority of DO officers. This CMS program was designed to place a few selected first-tour officers overseas as quickly as feasible, reducing the amount of time the trainee spent in Washington, where one of the favorite pastimes among its more knowledgeable denizens is playing “spot the spook.” Participants in this special program (of which there were but one or two per class, if that) were given a more solid background, or “cover,” making it harder for observers to discern their true employment. Graduates of the program were expected to be less detectable to host government security services and hostile intelligence services operating in the same locale. The increased operational security was expected to translate into more effective recruiting and handling of sensitive sources. The program sounded fine to me, and the possibility of participating in it served to jump-start my interest in an Agency career. I had been attracted to the Marine Corps in part because of its reputation as an elite, action-oriented, can-do organization, and now I appeared to be on the verge of entering another highly selective organization through an even more demanding program.
In August I flew to Washington for testing and interviews, including a polygraph. The only troubling part was a language aptitude test the first morning. Jetlag had left me sleepless the night before, and I actually dozed off during the test. The ability to learn foreign languages is essential to an overseas operations officer, and I was concerned that a poor showing would sink my chances. Everything else, including the polygraph, went well, however, and I departed Washington in an optimistic mood, a state of mind justified when, in October, Jim called and asked if I could join the January 1979 class. I could.
I entered on duty with the Central Intelligence Agency the morning of 8 January 1979, receiving the oath of office in a safe house in the Virginia suburbs from Jim’s immediate boss, with Jim looking on. We then drove through a light snow to CIA headquarters to complete the paperwork. Standing in Jim’s second-floor office in C Corridor, looking through the window at the snow dusting the inner courtyard, I was struck by the tranquility of the scene. I thought of this picture often in later years, and it was the image I recalled as I left headquarters for the last time in September 1996. The next morning, feeling odd at being introduced in alias, I joined the new CT class that had also entered on duty the day before, but sworn in as a class at headquarters.
For the next four weeks we shared our introduction to the CIA and the espionage business, lunched together, hit Friday night happy hours at various watering holes, partied on Saturdays, brunched on Sundays, and made lifelong friends. And then, full of piss and vinegar, we left Washington for the Agency’s primary training facility three hours away to begin the Initial Operations Course. This training period lasted another four weeks; on the last Friday my CT classmates headed back to headquarters to experience six months of “interims,” eight-week rotational assignments with two operational desks and one analytical office in the Directorate of Intelligence. At the end of interims, my classmates would return to the remote training facility for the Field Tradecraft Course (FTC), sixteen weeks of intense instruction and field practicum concluding in their certification as operations officers in the Directorate of Operations.
But I didn’t go with them; my program meant forgoing interim assignments and remaining at the training facility as a student in the next FTC. I spent a President’s Day long weekend at Chincoteague on the Chesapeake Bay and then met my new classmates on Monday morning. This was the class that had entered the Agency immediately prior to mine; they had just finished their interims and were returning for the FTC. The class had been together for a year and had bonded closely, as CT classes do; it was at first awkward for me and, perhaps, for some of them. But there were also eight “internal” DO employees joining the class, experienced officers who had been serving in operations support or non-operational assignments and had been selected for the FTC without moving through the CT program. We “outsiders” were grouped together for instruction and we bonded in our own way.
The FTC was challenging and intense, requiring long hours and hard work. Our instructors handed out frank but friendly criticism in response to honest mistakes, and other types of criticism when the mistakes were due to a lack of thought or effort. But it was also a hell of a lot of fun, made more so by the developing friendships with classmates and the positive teaching attitudes of the instructors. Many of the staff eschewed the traditional teacher-pupil relationship, instead interacting with the students more as colleagues working together in a mutual endeavor. This not only enhanced the learning experience but also turned many of the instructors into friends. This burgeoning professional collegiality did not in any way lessen their willingness to let us know in rather explicit terms when we royally screwed up. But it did inspire most of us to work harder for our mentors.
In all, the FTC was much more enjoyable than I had imagined it would be, and, rather to my surprise, I discovered that I possessed a modest talent and some instinct for operations work. I enjoyed it so much that I factored a tour as an instructor into my long-range career planning. Eleven years later, after serving as a CT recruiter, I returned to the training facility as a member of the instructor cadre and had the great pleasure of training many of those whom I had recently helped to hire. And to my joy, several of my former instructors, now retired, were back teaching in the FTC on contract. All of these elements melded to make this tour the very best of my Agency career. But in 1979, that pleasure lay far in the future.
There was one major advantage—and likewise, one related draw-back—to my special program. The advantage was graduation, certification as a field operations officer, and a full-grade promotion just six months after joining the Agency while the other CTs labored nearly eighteen months in training. The negative aspect—which actually came to be a blessing in disguise later in my term of captivity—was that I went overseas with an astonishingly small knowledge of the DO and how it did its business. By not sitting on operational desks, not writing cables to the overseas field stations, and not following actual operations in progress, I missed out on a chance to learn a great deal. But the program designers knew this, of course, and had always anticipated that graduates of the program would eventually catch up with their classmates. Our first chief of station (COS) had to be aware of this shortfall, of course, and willing to accept some initial limitations in return for the advantage of having a good officer in deep cover.
Despite my lack of experience I managed to do well in training, even against my veteran colleagues. I was particularly captivated by the stories told by the instructors from the DO’s Near East (NE) Division and by the challenging situations found in the Middle East; I decided that I wanted my home base in NE. Just at that point, during a Saturday visit to headquarters, the deputy chief of NE (DC/NE) raised the possibility of assignment to Tehran, currently among the highest national priorities in the intelligence community, even though I possessed no academic knowledge of or practical experience with anything Iranian.
By the time of this conversation in the spring of 1979, the Tehran station was in the midst of coping with postrevolutionary Iran. The shah of Iran had fled the country on 16 January, and soon thereafter—on 1 February—Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to oversee a government founded on his perception of a fundamentalist Islamic state. Also of import to later events, U.S. embassy and station personnel had been taken hostage by Marxist guerrillas for several hours on 14 February 1979, in what came to be called the St. Valentine’s Day Open House.1 This event triggered an almost total
