No, I decided. They just wanted to talk about themselves. None of the interviewers had prepared any questions because none of them had any interest in questioning me.
When the last interviewer and the last herd of administrators had gone, a corpulent man who identified himself as a chief of the non-State Department program blustered his way into the hotel room. Omitting the usual chitchat, he fixed us with a steely glare and was silent for what felt like a very long time.
At last he said, “You’re seeing me now for the first time. Tell me what you perceive about me. Tell me what you know about me. What makes me tick.”
My mind raced at this unexpected challenge of my spy’s perceptiveness and intuition. I opened my senses to draw in and analyze the situation and the man, and what it all meant. His personal appearance was awful, but I was sure he knew it, and that was part of the test. I’d fail unless I gave him a straightforward analysis.
“You’re morbidly obese,” I said, “and it’s a ‘hard’ sort of obesity caused by stress and a bad diet. Bags under the eyes and yellowish skin. You have a darker aura about you as opposed to the pink, jolly glow that some heavy folks have. This suggests—”
“I own a stake in a business in Portland,” he snapped, gathering the direction I was heading in and having heard quite enough, “and I’ve been doing this job for thirty-five years. I can retire any damn time I want to. I can take my retirement check, plus I can go to Portland to work in my business any time I damn well choose.” He slipped into the conversational style similar to the other interviewers and talked about himself, describing his past CIA assignments by location and length of time spent in each.
He had been closely involved in planning the failed attempt to rescue the American hostages held in the American embassy in Tehran. He had figured out how the vehicles to be used in the rescue attempt, otherwise too tall to fit in the helicopters, could be made lower to the ground by having their tire pressure reduced. He told us this as if the hostage rescue mission had been a success, rather than a disaster for the ages that had helped take down a President and made America impotent in the eyes of its enemies.
While in Vietnam, he said, he had paid a gang of elephant drivers to report intelligence to him. The men traveled with their elephants and heard and saw things, so he devised a bamboo stick with a radio in it that they could use to send messages. When he first gave the bamboo stick to the elephant drivers, they looked concerned. They explained that the type of bamboo he’d brought grew only in South Vietnam and would look suspicious to people in North Vietnam. He’d had to scramble to get them the right kind of bamboo. Correct bamboo notwithstanding, the Viet Cong eventually became suspicious and killed all of the elephant drivers and all of their elephants as well.
“The point of these stories,” he said, “is to show that case officers have to be ready to do a lot of different things.”
After talking without pause for nearly two hours, during which my wife and I were completely silent, he finally checked his watch, excused himself, and left.
The interviews were over. Despite my near miss with the chief, I received instructions several days later to report to the Washington, D.C. area for the start of the training course.
★ 2 ★
Training Days
Two months of training crammed into a year.
Anonymous
We were assigned fictitious names to use during training. Although they were throwaway aliases meant only for the course, they stuck and we tended to use them throughout our careers among our friends and colleagues in the Agency. I was called Ishmael. My enthusiastic new class began its great adventure by gathering in a set of offices in a low-rise office building in the Washington, D.C. area. This was a training “safe house,” specifically chosen not to be connected in any way with the State Department, and thus presumably better cover for the training of non-State Department officers.
A psychologist visited during the first few days of our training and discussed the psychological and personality tests we’d taken before joining. He said that we’d been selected because those tests had showed in us a mixture of extrovert and introvert. We could work well with others but were also capable of spending extended periods alone. I asked him about some of the tests’ more bizarre questions, like, “Are you being followed?” and “Do you sometimes just want to hurt others?” They’d seemed too obviously designed to weed out crazy people; surely no one would be so foolish as to answer “yes.” He replied that some people really do believe they’re being followed, and some really want to hurt others. Such people don’t find anything unusual about the questions, so they do, believe it or not, answer “yes.”
The psychologist also explained that the Agency sought to weed out anyone who had a strong belief in unquestioning obedience, because our work would require us to break many foreign laws. We’d have to guide ourselves by our mission and our judgment, not a foreign country’s rules. “We want people who question,” he said, “people who would have made poor concentration camp guards.”
Roger welcomed us on this, our first official day, by saying, “This is the best class we’ve ever had.” I assumed there must have been an assassin’s bomb, or a knife fight with a terrorist, behind those missing fingers of his. “Nah,” said Max, one of my new classmates. “He lost those to a lawnmower.”
Our chief instructor, Harry, welcomed us to the course, also saying, “This class is vastly superior to previous classes, much more highly qualified.” Most of the speakers who followed him also congratulated us on how much more qualified we were than previous training groups. All the speakers emphasized the Agency’s push to move away from embassies, and how we represented the future of the Agency.
The first week was a “Hell Week” of cruelty far worse than the mere push-ups and abuse of a Marine boot camp. For ten straight hours each day, with rare breaks, we sat in an airless conference room—shades drawn, of course—as a procession of Agency employees talked about themselves, their day to day lives, their opinions and feelings, and their past assignments. Each speaker arrived late, which was of no consequence, since the previous speaker usually hadn’t finished talking yet. None of the speakers used notes or had organized their talks in any way. They arrived, got a cup of coffee, sat down, and spoke in a monotone. I penciled a note to my classmate Max, asking for an explanation. He replied, “Welcome to the Agency speaking style. The highest-ranking guy in the room gets to talk for as long as he wants. The lower-ranking guys sit and listen.” It was excruciating.
Getting to know my new classmates, I learned that my hiring path into the Agency was unusual. Most of the new hires had come in through personal connections—or through “blind ads,” newspaper ads for employment at unnamed companies geared to people with experience with international business, foreign languages, and foreign travel. I’d sought out the Agency as a patriotic duty, so I was wary of that hiring method. Blind ads respondents hadn’t come to the CIA out of a feeling of obligation; they were mostly unemployed people looking for jobs. My classmate Jonah, a tall, red-haired man, had answered a blind ad and described the process. “Just imagine how I felt when I found out who it was behind that blind ad!” he said. After being hired, Jonah had first worked as a desk officer at HQs.
Max, however, had been recruited from the paramilitary branch of the Agency and called himself a “knuckle dragger.” He had a hard, military look, complete with a flattop haircut. He didn’t fit the typical profile of someone who traveled a lot and spoke foreign languages, but he was confident and had a lot of Agency experience. We had similar military backgrounds
