The Reluctant Spy Read online

  Those were the days when The Washington Post published a daily political calendar, listing all sorts of events, including receptions on Capitol Hill. So in our dogged pursuit of autographs, we became party crashers, too. We’d put on suits, head out, and make an evening of it. Security at these things was practically nonexistent. We’d walk in, act like we belonged, and seek out every face we recognized. Once, we spotted Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, talking to each other, with no one else around. We walked up, and I extended my hand and said, “Hey, I’m a big fan of yours. Do you mind signing our political almanacs?” Then it started to go downhill, or so I thought.

  “Are you from Tennessee?”

  “No, I’m from Pennsylvania.”

  “Aw, come on now,” said Gore, who was still in the House at the time. “You’re not from my state, you’re not from my district, so how’re you gonna vote for me if I give you my autograph?”

  “Well, I can’t vote for you,” I said, “but I’ll wish you the best of luck.”

  Tipper had been silent thus far, but she suddenly broke into a big smile, looked her husband in the eyes, and said, “Al, are you being an asshole?” Really, she did.

  “Naw, I’m just pulling his leg,” he said with a laugh. “Gimme your books, I’ll sign ‘em, I’ll sign ‘em.” He not only signed them; he and Tipper even posed for a picture with us.

  Our closest friends thought we were slightly loopy with all this party crashing, and they started egging us on, challenging us, I suppose, to make bigger and better fools of ourselves. We took the bait happily. After all, these receptions generally featured so-called heavy hors d’oeuvres, which meant we got free dinners two or three times a week. Once, we spotted a listing for a big bash at the Republican National Committee headquarters, and our buddies dared us to crash it. No problem, we said. But there was a problem. When we showed up, there was a guest list at the door; obviously, we weren’t on it, so we improvised, using my home state’s senior senator as an unwitting accessory. “Ah, well, we’re from Senator Heinz’s office,” I said. “Has he arrived yet?” We’d scanned the room and were pretty sure he wasn’t there.

  “No, no, he isn’t here,” the gatekeeper said.

  “Well, do you mind if we wait for him?”

  “No, by all means, please go in.”

  We did. Republican parties tended to outshine the Democrats’ when it came to the quality of the food. The Dems always seemed to have hot dogs and burgers or barbecue. These Republicans had sushi—by the boatload, it seemed—and champagne. We got both, moved to a big window overlooking the sidewalk, and raised flutes to our friends gathered below. Then we wolfed down the food and drink and got out before John Heinz showed up.

  We were shown the door only once. We had put on our best suits and tried to crash the big dinner of a prominent political group in Washington. But we were young and white and carrying autograph books; we clearly weren’t members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the greeters at its annual banquet politely, but firmly, invited us to leave. We went quietly.

  I got involved with the College Democrats, naturally, and ran the group’s speakers committee. Late in 1983, I read that George McGovern was considering a run for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. I knew, of course, that McGovern had challenged Nixon in 1972 and had managed to win exactly one state—Massachusetts—and the District of Columbia. He couldn’t even carry his home state of South Dakota. Another run would be quixotic even under the best of circumstances, but I sensed an opportunity for GW and for our College Democrats. I wrote McGovern, introduced myself, and suggested that, were he to run, the George Washington University would be a fine place to declare his candidacy. I heard nothing for a couple of weeks. Then one morning I was awakened by the phone in my dorm room. I picked it up, still groggy from sleep.

  “John?”

  “Yes.”

  “John, this is George McGovern calling.”

  “Oh, come on, Tom, I know it’s you.” My friend Tom Fitzpatrick knew I’d written McGovern and, I thought, did a pretty good imitation of the former South Dakota senator.

  “No, really, this is George McGovern.”

  Now I was on full alert. That high nasal voice—no one could imitate that! McGovern said he’d be delighted to accept my kind offer and announce for the presidency on a stage at GW. I made all the arrangements, lured the TV networks to cover the morning event, and even got to introduce the candidate myself. Later, after the press had left, McGovern turned to me to say thanks. “You want to have lunch at my place?” he asked. So we retired to his condominium on Connecticut Avenue along with his wife, Eleanor, and daughter Mary. The candidate made the tuna fish sandwiches.

  I STUCK WITH my major, Middle Eastern studies, to the mild surprise of many friends and relatives. What could be better? The region was at once rich in history and contemporary in its near-constant tension. The Iranian hostage crisis was history, but now Iran was at war with Iraq, a conflict started by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. No matter: In the Middle East, the maxim that the enemy of my enemy is my friend has special meaning, and our government was certainly leaning in Saddam’s direction. Then there was the seemingly endless Arab-Israeli conflict. Egypt and Israel had signed a peace agreement in 1979, but it was a cold peace, and the region was plagued by political brushfires and worse. By the time I started at GW in late August 1982, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was two months old. I was consumed by the subject matter, adding to the core study program all sorts of related electives—the politics and economics of oil, for example, and course work in Judaism and Islam.

  A year abroad seemed like a good idea, too, and I used it as a junior at the University of London, frankly to take a break from the Middle East. I’d been working part-time at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union international headquarters in Washington my sophomore year, so I thought I’d study its counterpart—the Union of Shop, Distributive, and Allied Workers—in the United Kingdom. An InterFuture scholarship paid for the second half of an academic year; when it was over in mid-May 1985, I spent the next couple of months traveling all over Europe by train, and I made my first visit to Greece.

  By the time of graduation in the spring of 1986, I had accomplished much. My knowledge in my major field of study was considerable. I had taken advantage of a program among universities in the Washington area to study Greek at Georgetown. I’d learned the language at home, but it was all slang and idiom, with no formal training. By the time I finished the two-year course at Georgetown, I was fluent.

  So there I was, about to be a freshly minted graduate of the George Washington University. Okay, fine. Now what? I wasn’t quite ready to face the real world yet. But I was in Washington, where politics rules and public policy occasionally counts for something, too. I was still consumed by the game and reckoned I might be able to play at a higher level. GW had an unusual three-year program at the time, offering a master’s degree in legislative affairs. It seemed perfect: The reluctant undergraduate could enter graduate school and learn how the legislative sausage is made, then land a job on Capitol Hill as a top aide to a senator or House member or as a key committee staffer.

  What I didn’t fully understand until I started was that the program was geared specifically to Capitol Hill staffers already several years into their careers. All the classes were held in the Hall of the States building on the Hill because it was easier for the young professionals to get from their offices to school. There were a couple of core courses on the philosophy and ethics of policy making, but most of the curriculum dealt with the arcane minutiae of the legislative process: budgetary policy making; handguns and public policy; agricultural subsidies and public policy.

  GW was about three and a half miles away; to save money, I walked it most days instead of taking the Metro. I was, by a full decade, the youngest person in the program; I took classes during the summer and finished in two years instead of three. That last semester, I started to apply for jobs, shooting off rés
umés to the Senate foreign relations committee, the House intelligence committee, and dozens and dozens of House members and senators, especially the ones from Pennsylvania. By the time I graduated, I’d probably sent out hundreds of résumés. The other people in the program were either going back to their old jobs or parlaying their new graduate degrees into better spots in the vast network of unelected employees that make Capitol Hill function. But toward the end of that last semester, I was coming up empty and getting desperate. Finally, I accepted a position at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management as a federal investigator doing background checks on other federal employees seeking security clearances.

  Then, on a May afternoon in 1988, just before graduation, one of my professors asked me to stay after class to discuss a private matter. I didn’t know much about him, but I’d heard he had a big reputation as an expert in his field, and I’d certainly been impressed by what I’d seen in his class on leadership. In any event, I met with him after class, and it turned out to be the single most important meeting of my young life.

  2

  DR. JERROLD POST was a superstar at GW. He was a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, and his principal course was on the psychology of leadership. What I didn’t know was that he was also a former employee of the CIA. In the years since he left the agency, Dr. Post has appeared on many news programs as an expert in analyzing what makes various foreign leaders tick. He has been described in those interviews as one of the country’s top profilers of foreign heads of state.

  He asked how my job search was going.

  Not so well, I told him, explaining that I was getting married in June and, because I needed income, had accepted the job at OPM.

  “Well, have you ever given any thought to working at the CIA?”

  “No, not serious thought.” And I hadn’t: I knew the CIA did analytical work, as well as all the spying, but it seemed to me as alien a government employer as NASA or the National Institutes of Health.

  It turned out that Dr. Post, because of his love for the agency, tried to identify potential CIA candidates among the undergraduate and especially graduate student body at GW. He told me he’d been impressed by my analytical and writing skills in his class, and it seemed clear, he added, that I had a great interest in foreign affairs and international power politics. He didn’t know whether the CIA and I would be a fit, but I was clearly interested in government service, he said, and the work at the agency might appeal to me. At a minimum, it couldn’t hurt to have some preliminary conversations with CIA people.

  He was right. Given my job search to date, what did I have to lose? Dr. Post picked up the phone and dialed up a guy he called Bill. He described my academic background and said a few nice things about me, then suggested to Bill that the two of us get together.

  Less than a half hour later, I was ringing the buzzer to an unmarked office in an unmarked building in suburban Virginia, just across the Potomac River. A buzzer let me in, and Bill identified himself, first name only. We chatted for twenty minutes or so—in part about me, in part about the CIA, or at least the sanitized, unclassified version of the role the agency plays in the U.S. government and in the world. He asked whether I was game to take the next step in applying for employment. “Yes,” I told him.

  “Can you be at the GW medical school auditorium on Saturday at eight a.m.?” The reason, he said, was a battery of tests to determine whether interested candidates would move on to the next round or be shown the door.

  Perhaps two hundred people showed up that Saturday morning; the vast majority, I would learn later, had answered a CIA recruiting ad. The drill involved three tests. First, they gave each of us a map of the world that had the borders of all the countries but no names; we had to fill in the country names. A lot of people, otherwise well educated, have trouble with this kind of exercise. They tend to identify large land-mass countries easily enough—China, India, Russia—but smaller countries often trip them up. Think for a minute about the countries in Central America or parts of Africa. But I’d spent all those years as a child staring at the world map in my radio room. This was a breeze for map freaks.

  Then it was on to a multiple-choice test. I still remember one question in particular: “The prime minister of Greece is (a) Andreas Papandreou, (b) U Thant, (c) Mao Tse-tung, or (d) Leonid Brezhnev.” I’d had a paper route for five years as a kid and had read my product every day. And I was Greek. Still, this struck me as fairly elementary stuff for folks thinking about a career at the CIA. You didn’t need to read The Washington Post and The New York Times. All you had to do is look at the front pages every day.

  Finally, they gave us an extensive psychological exam. Most of the hundreds of questions were agree/disagree, such as “I like boxing.” Well, I don’t really have a strong position on boxing one way or the other, but there was no third option; it was either yes or no, agree or disagree. Just pencil in the appropriate circle. Okay, “I like boxing.” Then, three hundred questions later, you’d get the same question again. I suppose you could have riffled back to the earlier question, but it would have been difficult, given the sea of penciled-in circles, and I didn’t. It made me wonder what they learned about us from this kind of test, presumably not only from the answers but from contradictory answers. “My father was the disciplinarian in our house.” Yes or no? There was no way I could screw up when that one was repeated. Answer: Yes, sir.

  We had until noon, four hours in all, to finish these tests. I was done by 10:15 or so, got up, handed my booklet to the proctor, and walked out. I had absolutely no idea what to expect next.

  A week later, Bill called. “Congratulations,” he said. “You blew the doors off those tests.” He asked whether I wanted to move forward. If so, the agency wanted to tee up a physical exam. If all was well, the physical would be followed by an interview with a team of psychologists. Actually, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and an anthropologist, the last striking me as a curious background for a CIA evaluator. But the exercise made sense: In effect, they were asking for expanded verbal answers to some of the yes/no, agree/disagree questions in the earlier test. One of the questions that has stayed with me all these years later: “Have you ever betrayed a friendship?”

  “Good lord, I hope not,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll readdress this question on the polygraph,” one of my questioners said. But it was the right answer, and “absolutely not” was not. No one could know with certainty whether a friend had ever been betrayed. Words and deeds sometimes have unintended consequences. It’s the ethical intent that matters.

  Two weeks later, it was time to schedule the polygraph examination. I’d never taken a so-called lie-detector test in my life, and the prospect of one was unsettling. I called Dr. Post for some guidance; he was a psychiatrist, after all, and he probably had some experience with polygraph exams in his agency days. He was reassuring. The main thing, he said, was to try to make your mind completely blank. “Imagine you’re at a drive-in theater, the movie’s over, and all you see is the empty white screen. Visualize that screen and don’t think about anything else.” The questions would be yes or no, he said. Just answer them and you’ll be fine. He also said the polygraph would probably be the last test: If you pass, you’re in.

  By the luck of the draw, my examiner was a thoughtful young woman who was both professional and sensitive to my visible anxiety. “I know you’re nervous, just relax,” she said. “I’m going to ask you some basic questions and I want you to answer me ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” Then, she wired me up: cuffs on an arm and an ankle, some sort of belt around my stomach, little sensors on the tips of my fingers. It was like an EKG. My nervousness was showing again. “Take a minute to calm down,” she said, and apparently I did.

  She asked all the normal questions: Have you ever stolen anything? (No.) Did you ever take drugs? (No.) Do you have a drinking problem? (No.) Are you gay? (No.) Are you responsible with your finances? (Yes.) I sounded boring even to my ears and won
dered fleetingly whether the CIA could disqualify you for terminal dullness.

  I’d answered everything truthfully, but there was still a small red flag. “You’re reacting to one issue,” she said. “So I’m going to ask you a couple of questions again.” Oh, great, what can this possibly be? I didn’t lie. Oh, God, please don’t be the gay question. Please don’t be the gay question.

  In fact, she said I was reacting to something about my personal finances. “My finances are an open book,” I said. “I’ve got one credit card with no balance, a few student loans, and that’s about it.” She asked me a few finance-related questions and we were done.

  As I was readying to leave, I asked, “How’d I do?”

  “You’ll get a letter from us within the next four weeks,” she said—and then she winked at me. The wink was my answer: I had made it. A month later, I got a letter. The return address just said “Office of Personnel, Vienna, Virginia.” I was instructed to report to CIA headquarters in Langley on such-and-such day at such-and-such time to be interviewed by three offices for a possible position.

  The first was in the Directorate of Operations. The group of people interviewing me liked my background in Middle Eastern studies and that I spoke a relatively difficult language. As the interview progressed, I thought it was going well. Then one person asked me an unexpected question: “What would your wife think about spending time in a hardship post—Sudan, say, or someplace like that?” The answer to that one was as close to a no-brainer as it gets.