The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones
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personality-oriented or psychological, with questions like, “Would you rather write a poem or watch a movie?” Some of the “yes or no” questions were phrased a bit archaically: “Do you like to cut up at a party?” Others were downright creepy: “Do you wake up sweating at night,” “Do other people talk about you when you are not around,” “Are you being followed,” or, “Do you sometimes just want to hurt others?” I never saw any of the other applicants again.
Shortly after the tests, my telephone rang at work. “Be at your residence at 1900 and we’ll talk,” said the caller. I made sure to be home well before 1900 and sat next to the phone. It didn’t ring. I made sure to be at home at 1900 for the next several days.
A few months later, I finally heard from the caller again. “I see what happened,” he fibbed. “The person who called you last time handed me your phone number, and this 3 looked like an 8, so I wasn’t able to reach you.” He scheduled me for the next series of tests, the Agency’s polygraph examinations.
The polygraph device comes in a small suitcase, nicknamed the “Box.” My “Box” exam took place in a hotel room near Washington, D.C. The curtains were drawn. My examiner was a massive and intimidating man with a head that must have weighed fifty pounds. He hooked me up to the “Box” with wires to the fingertips, a belt around the chest, and a pressure band around my upper arm. Later he switched the pressure band to my calf, saying that it would give a better reading. The examiner went through about ten questions, from simple ones like “Are you applying for a job with the Agency?” and “Do you come from Casper, Wyoming?” to more significant ones like “Do you use drugs?” and “Are you currently working for a foreign intelligence service?” My test took most of the day. The examiner peered at the charts. He seemed troubled by some of my reactions. He repeated certain questions and created new ones.
Evidently I answered these to the Box’s satisfaction, because the Agency proceeded with my security investigation. It sent an investigator to interview several of my friends and acquaintances as to my trustworthiness and reliability. Running into them years later, they’d give me sideways looks and ask, “Do you remember when that guy came to interview me, the guy with the dark suit and the white socks, who asked whether you could be trusted with important US government secrets? What did he want? What was that all about?”
THE NEXT PHASE of the application process was a series of interviews in Washington, D.C. These were held in hotel rooms, always with the television set on in the background. Our first interview was with the man in charge of the training program. He was missing the fingers on his left hand, but in his mind they must still have been there, because he pointed and gestured with the phantom digits.
My wife had come to the interview with me. Roger asked my wife whether she knew what organization was conducting my interview. He’d recently interviewed an applicant who had not informed his wife of the purpose of the interview, and, to his question, “What do you think about a career in the CIA,” she’d screeched, “A career in the what?”
Roger said he’d rejected that applicant because he thought he should have been honest with his wife. I sympathized with the applicant, who must have only been trying to do the right thing by his wife. Nearly twenty years later, a CIA memoir tells a similar story1, but I suspect that the story was apocryphal, a bit of Agency folklore. Roger had followed it with: “In any case, don’t worry, we don’t really ‘terminate’ people!”
Prior to the interviews, I had assumed that all Agency officers were members of the State Department under diplomatic cover in embassies, but Roger asked if I would consider working in a non-State Department program.2 Iʹd lived in foreign countries and had also had a business career, so he thought I’d be a good candidate. I agreed to it.
He explained that the purpose of the non-State Department program was to get at potential human intelligence sources who were inaccessible to diplomats. Terrorists and nuclear weapons scientists, naturally, do not talk to them. Iranian diplomats were expressly forbidden by their government to speak to American diplomats. Indeed, Agency managers during our interviews said flat-out that the State Department’s embassy system wasn’t effective any more. The non-State Department program would be the future of the CIA.
After my interview with Roger, several groups of three or four heavy-set women arrived to discuss various more mundane personnel topics, such as salary and insurance. Typically only one woman actually spoke during a meeting, while the others listened and nodded.
More interviews followed, and I was in full interview mode, perched on the edge of my chair and ready to give eager and energetic answers. But the questions never came. The interviewers just introduced themselves, sat down, and talked about themselves. I sat upright and nodded attentively at appropriate moments, wondering if it was all a test. Did they want me to interrupt, to show aggressiveness? 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.
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