Another self-involved thing passively rejected by Russ. I thought it was very cute when I wrote it, but now I don't know what I was thinking. November 2018.
My
Life and the CIA
For a little while there, early in
the Reagan Administration, the CIA was hiring just about anybody. I was lousy
with languages, my Yale transcript was crap, I had no graduate degree, and I'd
hardly ever been out of the country. But the Agency was interested. This was
mainly because I'd aced their day-long battery of Spy Aptitude Tests, although
I liked to think it was because I looked good: "lanky" (in the
interviewer's description), physically fit, someone who could handle herself in
a tight corner. Because, you know, intelligence work can be dangerous.
I was interviewed by someone from
Clandestine Services. He, not I, gave the sales pitch. The Agency is a great place to work these days, you
bet! High morale, now we've got Bill Casey in charge! We got rid of The
Admiral!
"The Admiral" was the
despised former Director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner. He got the
job by accident. Jimmy Carter's first few choices for DCI said no or had blots
on their record. So Jimmy went down the list and came up with Turner, a
black-shoe admiral with no background in intelligence. He slashed operations
and fired hundreds of seasoned officers. But
then Ronald Reagan came in, and installed elderly, mumbly William Casey. As
DCI, Old Bill brought back the big budgets and expensive toys, and he let the
spooks get on with their job.
And what a
job, what an era! We didn't know it, but we were seeing the last shimmering
Aurora Borealis of the Cold War. The new Soviet premier was Yuri Andropov, an
old KGB hood who sent the tanks to Budapest in '56 and to Prague in '68.
Andropov heard the fresh buzz coming out of the CIA, counted our new Pershing
II missiles in West Germany, and got his country revved up for war. Anytime
there was a NATO war game or nuclear exercise, Andropov said America was
getting ready to launch a "first strike," with warheads that could
wipe out Moscow in four minutes.
This 1983 war scare was sudden and
startling. For years the USSR had been soft-selling disarmament propaganda to
the West. Memorably there was a "No Nukes" campaign that dovetailed
neatly with anti-nuclear-power protests. You saw happy-sun pinback buttons
("Atomkraft? Nein Danke!"), stickers, pop songs, films; and then
astroturfed Nuclear Freeze groups, with fatuous "women's peace
encampments" outside missile bases. After Reagan's election the propaganda
got intense, with endless newspaper and magazine articles about the horrors of
"nuclear winter," and warning that our new President was a
trigger-happy cowboy who was going to start World War III.
And now the wheels were coming off
the peace wagon. The Soviets got so jumpy they shot down Korean Air Lines
flight 007 (with a congressman aboard) and then denied it. Later on they offered the
incredible excuse that they mistook the widebody 747 commercial airliner for a spy plane. Meantime, Cowboy Reagan had
turned out to be an unexpectedly effective and popular President. His Teddy
Roosevelt-style interventions were a total delight: invading the pipsqeak
island of Grenada in October to protect American students at a crummy offshore
medical school!
Americans followed these stories
round-the-clock now on Ted Turner's CNN, a habit we got into back in May 1982,
when Margaret Thatcher had her glorious little Falklands War. War and militarism
were sexy again!
So there I was, in early October
1983—halfway between the KAL 007 shootdown and the Grenada invasion—sitting
with my spy-guy interviewer in an East 52nd St. hotel suite, and we were
talking about world events. He was an old operative, maybe 58, beefy with a
florid face that looked to have been lifted recently. He was also very twitchy, like someone with high-blood pressure
from too much boozing. Or maybe he was just eager to tell me about the
thrilling operations he'd been in on over the past thirty years. Only of course
he couldn't tell me, because!
That must get frustrating. I on the
other hand can tell you all I know, because I bailed out of the intake process
a couple months later.
Through the recruitment period I
kept receiving packets postmarked McLean, Virginia. One was the full
application and background-check dossier, about three-quarters of an inch
thick. I put that aside. Other mailers had bumpf thanking me for making myself
available to Clandestine Services. No discussion of what the hell Clandestine
Services did, however. ("We buy hats
for the poor and make the world a happier place!") It was all
very murky. The Agency wanted me to be something called a desk officer, but I
saw myself running spies into Czecho. My whole picture of intelligence work
came out of John LeCarré.
There was a reading list for new
recruits. Some books were pop histories of the KGB and the Communist Menace.
Shallow stuff, airport reading. And then Cord Meyer's Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. This is
a dreary memoir where the author apologizes for having been a pinko peacenik in
his 20s, during a brief hiatus between Yale and the Agency. At Clandestine
Services he ran the notorious "Operation Mockingbird" project,
overseeing the same sort of media manipulation that the KGB was now doing with
its Nuclear Freeze antics. That's not in the book though. Cord's ex-wife, Mary
Pinchot Meyer, was the JFK girlfriend who got mysteriously murdered in Rock
Creek Park; but that's not in the book either. Like my interviewer, Cord had
lots of juicy stories, but he couldn't tell 'em.
In the end I never got around to
filling out my application, and here's why. It had to do with my orthodontist.
I was going through a protracted ordeal of adult orthodontia. We would chat
about my CIA business, and one day the orthodontist remarked that the FBI would
probably be coming by to ask questions about me. This had happened before,
whenever one of his old patients was up for a security clearance.
Well this was unnerving. Somehow it
hadn't really registered with me that the background check would go that deep.
But apparently so; on my fat application I had to account for the past 17
years. Schools, family, medical professionals . . . anyone you ever worked or
lived with.
That killed it for me. I didn't mind
the Bureau boys dropping in on my employer or orthodontist, but I couldn't have
them bothering my relatives. The idea of G-men visiting my parents, when I
hadn't seen them in years, was too awful to contemplate. My parents were mad as
hatters.
A perfectly reasonable excuse for dropping
out of my CIA recruitment, I think. The only trouble was, for years and years I
couldn't explain it to anyone. The story was just too embarrassing.
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