The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones
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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 and soon became friends.
Given their prior employment within the Agency, Max and Jonah knew their way around. I asked them for an insider’s view of the polygraph. My own exam had taken almost a whole day. Max said, “That’s nothing.” He explained that when he’d first joined, they used the Box to filter out homosexuals. His Box operator didn’t like his reactions to that set of questions and thought he was concealing something. The operator put him through a new test based only on questions about homosexuality, among which was the question, “Have you ever held another man’s penis in your hand?” After the test, the operator still didn’t believe him, but let him into the Agency anyway provided that he sign a special form confirming that he was not a homosexual and promising not to engage in homosexual behavior. “I think you got off easy,” Max said.
For me, the Box had been a grueling all-day affair. It had taken Max two days to complete. Jonah’s experience was different. He boasted, “From the moment I saw the operator until the time I left, I took twenty-five minutes.”
Our instructors were retired case officers, mostly with careers in Western Europe. Harry had spent time in East Asia and the Middle East, and had been the chief of station in a country during its revolution. I’d been there as a child at the same time. We even realized that we had a few acquaintances in common.
The night of the revolution, my family could hear the small arms fire. The shooting went on all night, rifles and pistols being shot into the air. For all the noise, it was considered a bloodless coup, and few people were hurt. Because my family had just arrived, we lived in a temporary apartment in the city center. My father snuck out the next day to find the family some food. He returned in one piece, and when it felt safe to go outside, we went tentatively into the streets. They were covered with spent shells and, here and there, a ricocheted bullet. In an odd twist on boyhood beachcombing, I filled a box with these mementos. I still have it in my basement somewhere.
THE AGENCY TRADITIONALLY had deployed spies through the State Department, so our training course was still designed to teach us how to work as diplomats. The course, which set our spy activities in the fictitious country of Slobovia, is still the basic foundation of Agency training.
The instructors took delight in inventing and discussing obscure facts about Slobovia: the personality traits of Slobovian leaders, Slobovian historical anecdotes, and so on. The Slobovia scenario had been designed in the 1950s and edited only lightly since then. We paged through a thick binder of information about this fanciful nation. “The best trainees are method actors, people who convince themselves that they really are in Slobovia,” one instructor told us. My classmate Jonah made an intensive study of his Slobovia book, and, later, an ostentatious show of his Slobovian mastery.
The fundamental work of the clandestine service was to find people with access to secret information of interest to the US government and to recruit them to provide human intelligence, or “humint.” The traditional means of meeting new contacts overseas was on the diplomatic cocktail party circuit. Our exercises began by attending a faux embassy cocktail party to meet instructors who role-played as potential human sources.
Moe, a hulking youth, was in charge of our safe-house apartments. The afternoon of our first faux cocktail party, he arrived at our safe house to stock the refrigerator and cabinets with a collection of alcoholic beverages, which Max dubbed “Moe’s Private Reserve.” Moe lined up sample beverage selections on a conference room table and set himself up as bartender.
Max and I arrived at the party, asked Moe for two bottles of beer, and went to work, mingling with our Slobovian “guests.” We’d been assigned specific people with whom to try to build a personal connection, in hopes of making a more private future appointment. I made my way around the gathering, met my target, and got his phone number for a lunch meeting. Max did the same thing with his target. It seemed like a fairly simple introduction to spycraft.
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