The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones
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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 inspector went berserk and tried to force his way in. Max placed his hand on the instructor’s face and pressed him out of the room, screaming, “Get out of here, you geezer.”
Max earned a failing grade, but the violence of his response so frightened the instructors that their criticism of his conduct was surprisingly subdued.
Perhaps by coincidence, he convinced HQs to let him stay in the program.
TOWARD THE END OF the training course, Max was convinced that there would be a climactic final exercise involving days and nights of challenges—something to push us to our limits and beyond. He was eager for it. I didn’t see why the course, having flowed like a lazy river so far, should suddenly get any more difficult. As graduation loomed, I taunted him: “Three days left, Max, how tough do you think it’s going to be?” Finally the course ended with a big blah.
At our graduation ceremony, Roger said, “You know, you guys were a good bunch, but you ought to see the next training class. Those guys have some amazing qualifications. They’ll be the best we’ve ever had.” Thanks, Roger. We all could have seen that one coming.
The director of the CIA and some other HQs mandarins attended our ceremony as well. The entire class graduated. We didn’t have a final ranking as far as I knew, but at a celebration that evening at a nearby bar, a classmate took me aside and said, “The instructors ranked me first in the class.”
Another classmate confided, “Harry told me I was the top graduate in the class.”
A late-arriving classmate: “Just got done talking to Roger. He says I was ranked number one in our class.”
Coming out of the restroom, still zipping up his fly, Jonah said, “Hey, Ishmael, you know I was ranked at the top of the class?”
I decided that if so many people were at the top, surely I must be at the bottom. “I learned today that I was ranked last in the class,” I said.
Word spread to Max that I’d been ranked last. Confronting me in front of a group of our classmates, he jabbed me in the chest and said, “Sir, you are a liar. I was ranked last in the class.”
“My friend, I am sorry, but you are mistaken. None other than the director of clandestine operations told me that I was ranked last in the class.”
“Ishmael, stop the lies. I have been personally informed by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency that I was ranked last.”
The next day, we said goodbye to our instructors. They’d taught us everything they knew. I thought the training course could have been quite a bit shorter, but the instructors meant well. My training class was assigned to stations located within the US for “on the job” training (OJT). I left immediately for my assignment, eager to pursue better living through espionage, but my classmates hung around the area for a few more days.
Jonah, finding himself alone in the empty safe house with our only female classmate, backed her into a corner and said, “You know you want it!” He’d sensed her signals of desire throughout the training course; now was their opportunity. It turned out she hadn’t sent any signals. Shoving him away, she fled the office. She was engaged to be married. We’d all met her fiancé.
At the end of the course, I took a State Department language test in German and on the scale of one to five, in which three is fluent and five is native, I scored a four-plus in reading. (Sometimes I’d challenge my wife to open up the German dictionary and try to find a word I didn’t know.) My understanding score was three, my speaking score a two, but I hadn’t had anyone with whom to practice. Encouraged by these test results, I turned immediately to the study of Arabic.
The training year hadn’t been too bad. I’d made good progress in two foreign languages, completed the case officer course, made some good friends, and had a new baby in my family. Still, all I could think about was getting to my new assignment and doing real case officer work.
★ 3 ★
American Apprenticeship
Must I not serve a long apprenticehood
To foreign passages, and in the end,
Having my freedom, boast of nothing else
But that I was a journeyman to grief?
Shakespeare
The next phase was an on-the-job training tour at an Agency post within the United States. We were now certified case officers, so we’d be able to work on espionage cases, but only under close observation by our domestic offices’ management.
Before I joined the Agency, I’d read that the CIA and the FBI essentially split their operations, with the CIA operating in foreign countries and the FBI operating within the United States. Americans didn’t want a domestic spy agency that could become a threat to liberty, a potential Gestapo or KGB.
In fact, most of the Agency’s offices and people were located in the United States, at HQs and countless stations, bases, and other offices throughout the country. Some employees located in US offices made occasional and brief trips to foreign countries, but most spent the bulk of their careers operating within the US. Eighty-five percent of Agency employees are located domestically at HQs at 24 unmarked offices within the United States, according to one author.10 I suspect the percentage of Agency employees in the US is higher—more than 90 percent. Years later, after 9/11, the number of US offices grew dramatically. Today it is certainly much higher than 24.
My family flew to our new city and I drove our car, stuffed with household odds and ends. In making a move, bank accounts have to be changed, a rental lease signed, the car put in good shape, the home furnished. The mundane chore of moving from one US city to another is the same for a spy as for anyone else, involving a series of small tasks requiring measured amounts of self-discipline. Before 9/11, the Agency treated its employees located in the US the same as any other federal employees. It paid some moving expenses, but the bulk of the move was on the employee’s dime.
Making