The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones

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      The Marine Corps has an effective and winning culture that inspires a powerful motivation to succeed. When the Corps fails, Marines die. When something goes wrong, as in Vietnam, the Marine Corps studies and improves its weaknesses. Adherence to traditional rank structure actually helps keep management layers flat, and prevents the creation of new management layers.

      While in the Marine Corps, I spent a lot of time traveling with my infantry company, and some time alone on special assignments. One night, sitting on the top of a hill on an island in the Indian Ocean, I realized what I wanted to do next: get married and start a family. I had a vision of my ideal wife. I’d saved most of my pay during my service, so had plenty of money to take time off. I went to graduate school, met the woman I had imagined, and before long we were married.

      After graduate school, I took a job on Wall Street. I went to work early each day and made telephone calls to people who didn’t particularly want to talk to me. Money drives business, and in order to make money it’s necessary to make contact with people. I learned to “make the call,” to make contact even though the outcome might be rejection and humiliation. It’s tough work, and not something one puts up with unless he truly cares about getting what he’s after.

      In the competitive American economy, the rewards go to people who can make contact. I’d learned from talking to military recruiters and to retail stockbrokers. They had to make cold call after cold call, facing rejection hundreds of times a day. As time went on, their personalities seemed to harden and they became emotionally distant, but their hard work made them successful.

      Contact is what drives human progress. Bill Clinton and George Bush have made thousands of contacts to gather money and political support. All businesses are built and sustained by people who get out and meet others. This, the importance of “making the call,” was the most valuable lesson I learned on Wall Street.

      Money, however, had never been much of a motivator for me, so after a few years I found myself feeling a familiar pull to service and adventure, the same pull that had drawn me to the Marine Corps. As Aristotle asked, how should a human being lead his life? I did a lot of pondering about the important things, so to speak—about deeds and destiny. I resolved to send my résumé to the CIA. Weapons of mass destruction had always concerned me. With the proliferation of nuclear and other gruesome weapons technology, I knew it was only a matter of time before an American city was targeted and possibly destroyed. Would the CIA be a path to great things, to preventing a nuclear war or giving advance warning of the next Pearl Harbor?

      A CIA REPRESENTATIVE responded to my résumé and sent me to a local college where Agency recruiters had scheduled a series of written tests.

      I waited with the other applicants outside a lecture hall, all of us wondering how we ought to behave. What if the “testing” had begun already?

      An elderly man called us into the room and administered a battery of tests, some designed to judge intelligence, but many of them 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 СКАЧАТЬ