would make their border crossing less risky. Since the police at the border knew that his traveling companions were drug smugglers, they followed him to his hotel.
As the Worst Spy finished his sorry tale, another manager came by to tell his story. He’d been on a foreign assignment for a few months when he began to suspect that he was under surveillance. He hadn’t been able to confirm it, but he’d spotted furtive movements by people on the street. He begged HQs for help and advice.
HQs thought he was seeing “ghosts”—incidents that look like surveillance but aren’t. But his persistence convinced them, and they spirited him back to the US. Later, the Agency learned that he had indeed been under surveillance and that his host country had been on the verge of arresting him for espionage.
“Bet you don’t have any plans to go back to that country on vacation,” Max said. “Probably don’t want to get on any airplanes that plan to make a fuel stop there, either.”
MY TRAINING CLASS enjoyed hearing that we were the best and most qualified they’d ever had, but there was a definite edge to the praise, a hint that there was more to the story. We eventually learned why.
The Agency had been promising to separate itself from the Department of State for years. Today, intelligence targets, human sources in WMD programs, or members of terrorist groups are all inaccessible to American diplomats. Everyone admitted that our Department of State diplomats weren’t getting the job done and that the Agency needed to find new ways of doing business. But it was hard for a bureaucracy to change.
During the early 1980s, Director William Casey ordered the Agency to increase its non-State Department capabilities. In response to his orders, the Agency hired and trained large classes during the mid- and late-1980s. My class entered shortly after this, and we had front-row seats for the aftermath.
The individuals in these classes encountered strong bureaucratic resistance, with a failure rate of nearly 100 percent. Within a few years, only a few of these non-State Department officers were operating successfully overseas, and most had left the Agency. A few continued to work at HQs in other jobs, and a few switched over to become diplomats with the State Department. The official explanation within the Agency was that Casey had pushed the Agency too hard and too fast, so that it had had insufficient time to properly evaluate the new people before hiring them.
We saw these forlorn individuals wandering our safe-house apartments, and we listened to their sad tales. They looked like they’d been through a rough time physically: out of shape, unsmiling, bags under their eyes. Andy, a member of a class of about twenty recruits during the mid 1980s, said that most of his fellow trainees were qualified but a few were indeed a bit strange. Several of them barely spoke English. One man made loud snorting noises and occasionally grabbed his crotch.
Another had an odd habit of repeating the last few words he heard spoken in a sentence. If the instructor said, “Today we will talk about surveillance,” this fellow would mutter, “About surveillance.” During a break, the man went outside, lit a cigarette, and then put the entire cigarette in his mouth and chewed. Then he pulled his trousers down to his knees and fell to the ground in a trance. When he awoke a few moments later, he didn’t remember anything about what he’d done. It turned out that he had a medical condition which had led to a fit and seizure. The instructors transferred him into an HQs job.
Andy said a fellow classmate had approached him and said that she planned to have a little plastic surgery done, and would he be so kind as to pick her up at the doctor’s office afterward, as she might be feeling a bit woozy. When Andy arrived at the hospital, the minor work turned out to have been a major facial reconstruction. The woman was bloody and semi-conscious. The doctor said, “So, you’re the boyfriend,” and showed him how to insert the anal suppositories that she would need to control her pain. She was bedridden for a week, and he nursed her back to health.
Bad luck haunted this class. Once, while filing out of a safe-house training site, the class was photographed as a group by a man who passed by in a car. The class noted the car’s license number and traced it. The plate had been stolen from an elderly woman in Iowa. A few days later it happened again, with a different car, and this time traces revealed that that license number did not even exist.
A rumor circulated at HQs that some of these trainees’ IQ scores were quite low. Another had it that one of them was an ex-convict.
Day after day in the airless and artificially-lit classrooms, tension mounted between the mid-1980s classes and their instructors. The trainees spiked their instructors’ coffee with Ex-Lax and let air out of their tires. The instructors fought back by flunking several trainees. A lawyer in an office below the safe-house apartment noticed the odd comings and goings and began telling clients that the CIA lived upstairs. When the office’s location became widely known in the neighborhood, the Agency closed the office and moved the training class to a different location.
Two decades later, the Agency was still pointing to the debacle of these training classes as a reason not to push the Agency to separate from the State Department. Officers who’d entered before or after this period were careful to point out that they weren’t part of that big hiring wave.
I’d met a lot of the people from the mid-1980s classes, and thought that most of them could have been successful if properly led. None of them had joined thinking, “I’d like to be a failure.” Bureaucracy thrives in office environments, and Casey had pushed upon the bureaucracy a whole bunch of case officers who would be operating in a freewheeling way. I figured the mid-1980’s classes had been eviscerated by the bureaucracy because they presented a threat to them.
The way these people were abused by the bureaucracy was tough on their families as well. They’d go to a domestic office for six months and then get sent back to HQs. Those few who got an overseas assignment were usually given a one-way ticket home within a few months, only to remain indefinitely in temporary housing. Some spent years with their families in the Oakwood, a popular temporary housing complex in the Washington, D.C. area. There’s nothing wrong with the Oakwood, a clean and efficient housing service, but to be in limbo there was to be in a kind of hell. I swore to my wife that we’d never do time there.
One man had returned to the US after deciding, he said, that the intelligence service in his country of assignment was on to him. (I doubted this story: The country in question was a terrible place to live, and I suspected he’d just done it for his family’s sake.) When he left the country with his family, he didn’t bother to let HQs know where he was or what he was doing. He took a ship, a train, and a plane on a circuitous route out of the country, so it took him several days to get back to the US. HQs was panic-stricken. The man and his family got themselves stuck in the Oakwood for a year and a half. Surely its use as an instrument of punishment says something about the desirability of a long visit there.
IN THE WANING DAYS of our training course, a manager at HQs belatedly realized that Max had once been a paramilitary “knuckle dragger” with the Agency and suggested that this made him unfit to be a non-State Department officer. The manager wanted him removed and sent back to the paramilitary group. Max wanted to stay, and he put up a fight.
While he negotiated with the bureaucracy, he continued his training. In the “building inspector” exercise, a trainee meets with a role-player acting as a Slobovian agent. During the meeting, a knock comes at the door. It is another role-player acting as a Slobovian building inspector. It’s an easy exercise. The correct thing to do is to stay relaxed and ask what you can do to help the inspector, to prevent him from developing suspicions and potentially calling the police.
Max felt that he’d put up with enough play-acting foolishness. He said, “Go away. I don’t have time for you.”
The building
