Smith doing,” a senior bureaucrat might ask.
“Smith is in Chinese language school,” came the reply, and everyone would be pleased that Smith was productively occupied learning such an important language. Chances were that Smith would never put this skill to work.
Jonah was back in the HQs area for some meetings and was hanging around a safe-house apartment with one colleague who spoke Japanese and another who spoke Korean. They were waiting to see Roger, to discuss their overseas assignments. Roger arrived and met privately first with the Korean speaker and then with the Japanese speaker.
After the meetings, the Korean speaker said, “Roger just told me that we don’t have any requirements right now for a Korean speaker, and he’s set me up for a two-year language school to learn Japanese.”
The Japanese speaker said, “Damn that Roger. He just told me that we don’t have any requirements right now for a Japanese speaker, and he’s set me up to go to a two year language school to learn Korean.”
Thankfully, my test scores enabled me to avoid the dead end of language school.
Some colleagues made things harder on themselves by demanding certain locations, usually the nicer cities of Western Europe, which severely narrowed the range of possible assignments. Remembering what the Godfather had told me, I made things as easy on HQs as possible by telling them I’d go anywhere overseas. I figured this would mean the Middle East. No one wanted to go to the Middle East. The Middle East wasn’t a nice place to live, and it had been a graveyard for non-State Department officers.
“We only have one officer between Burma and the Atlantic Ocean who isn’t a State Department diplomat,” I said to the Worst Spy. “That’s a stretch covering most of Asia through to North Africa. So we should be able to find a vacant spot somewhere.”
After I made a nuisance of myself at HQs for several weeks, my assignment was finally approved.
HQS SENT ME to another training course, a sort of prerequisite to overseas assignment. Max and I were the only two in this class, and we found ourselves back in Slobovia, land of make-believe. The Agency devoted incredible resources to our training. Much of the instruction involved advanced surveillance detection, and for those exercises there were as many as 30 instructors working on just the two of us.
During classroom portions, we studied the Agency’s problems with a Middle Eastern agent program. Nearly all of the agents had proven to have been doubles or had been exposed and arrested by their own government. As had been the case with Cuba, the Middle Eastern country had fed us massive quantities of false information.14
We studied the psychologies of some of our rogue state targets. A favorite of mine was a fascinating paper on the psychology of Iranian men. It argued that negotiating skills were so important in the ancient Persian trading culture that personal communication had become a high art. Iranian men were masters of histrionics, able to act out emotions dramatically, and skilled with facial movements such as the rolling and flashing of eyes. Almost all Iranian men could cry at will. The handout said the men were spoiled by the females in the family and grew up with megalomaniac perceptions of their abilities and talents.
We learned more about the polygraph during this course. The Box measures physical reactions: Normal people will react less perceptibly to a question like, “Were you born in Pennsylvania?” than they will to, “Have you stolen money or goods valued at more than $25?” The examiners can fail applicants whose reactions are simply too strong. But what Box operators really seek is some admission of guilt. At times in the Agency’s history, operators have been paid bonuses for each such admission.
Box sessions are essentially interrogations disguised as interviews. The operator’s favorite technique is to encourage the examinee to confess a seemingly minor offense so as to “clear up” the exam and allow the applicant to pass. He states outright that most aberrant or criminal behavior is of no consequence: “Look, we don’t care if you once stole $20 from someone. We’re after big stuff: Did you rob a bank? Have you committed a murder? That’s what we’re after here.” Of course, the examinee probably hasn’t murdered anyone, but there was that time he shoplifted a pair of underwear from a department store. He sheepishly confesses, and with that, he’s out of a job. If the “minor” admission truly is inconsequential, the operator focuses on persuading the interviewee to make a larger one.
Edward Lee Howard, one of the first of the CIAʹs turncoats, admitted during a Box that he had stolen $12 from the purse of a woman sitting next to him on an airplane. Howard was fired. The Agency had been preparing him for an assignment to Moscow and he’d been briefed on the identities of several important Russian agents. He sold this information to the KGB.
The Agency suspected Howard of having gone to the other side, so the FBI put him under surveillance. Eluding it, he made his way to Moscow. Years later, Max spotted Howard walking in a park in Budapest. Ideas of capturing him, putting him in a bag, and spiriting him back to the US ran through his mind, but Howard quickly disappeared from view—probably for the best. He was a broken alcoholic by then. He lived in Moscow until he supposedly died by falling down and breaking his neck—the cause was murky—in 2002. He was 50 years old.
Listening to CIA employees talk about their Box sessions can be as boring as listening to people talk about the dream they had last night. Most employees were believers in the machine’s quasi-magical infallibility. “Then, finally,” they’d say, “I remembered the time I had taken a quarter too much out of the office coffee fund, and I admitted that to the examiner. My reactions cleared up!” There is no scientific evidence that the Box actually works, but it has had so many successes in extracting admissions of guilt—“I have been having sex with dogs for the last twenty years”15—from applicants and employees the Agency will probably never get rid of it. It is a great interrogation tool—though, given the power of suggestion, hooking someone up to a photocopier might be just as effective.
MAX AND I alternated exercises, morning and afternoon. If the instructors put me through one in the morning, they’d put him through the same one later in the day. Naturally, we kept in touch about this.
I’d tell him, “The Slobovian agent had information about a planned coup against the regime. Then he got up and went to the bathroom. He left an envelope on the table. I think we’re supposed to open the envelope to see what’s inside and then put it back as if we hadn’t looked at it.”
He did as I said. The envelope contained dates, times, names of the leaders of the coup.
The next day he called back. “The agent threw a tantrum. He’s worried that his status as an agent may have been exposed. I calmed him down and we reviewed our emergency plans. I think that was the point of the exercise.”
A couple of weeks into the course, my phone rang. It was an instructor. I wondered why Max hadn’t called. “Go to 23 Washington Street,” the instructor said. I’d never been to that address before.
When I arrived, I saw some burly fellows in the parking lot. As I walked through the lot, they angled to intercept me. I slightly altered my direction, and so did they. They were law enforcement officers, without a doubt. At last they threw me to the ground, then hauled me into the building for questioning.
The interrogation lasted for hours, which was evidently why Max hadn’t been able to call. After the interrogation, they evaluated my conduct and gave me pointers:
“Con men know to look you square in the eye and give you a firm handshake, so a steely gaze and a firm handshake have no validity as measures of a person’s truthfulness.
“A
