The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      At the safe-house office the next day, Max and I sensed that something was amiss. When Harry spotted us, he barked, “You two, Max and Ishmael, get into the conference room.” There, we found a panel of instructors.

      “What the hell were you guys thinking at the party last night?” Harry demanded. The others scowled and grumbled. They were genuinely upset.

      “Well, I thought the exercise went well,” I said. “We found our targets, struck up good conversations, and then prepared to set follow-up meetings. I thought everything went fine.”

      The instructors’ grumbling increased. When Harry saw that Max and I had no idea what we’d done wrong, he patiently explained that diplomats never drink directly from beer bottles at diplomatic cocktail parties. “I tried to help you out,” said Harry. “Don’t you remember me asking if you’d like a glass?” I did remember: I’d thought Harry was just trying to be nice. Max and I acknowledged our mistake, but the instructors never let us live down our faux pas.

      THE INSTRUCTORS LED US in classroom work and exercises on tradecraft and agent recruitment. The classroom portion was most difficult for me, because it meant long hours sitting in a closed, curtained, airless room, listening to Agency veterans drone on. At least they were paid a reasonable hourly rate, nothing like the free-for-all that erupted years later, after 9/11. They were restricted to a thirty-nine-hour work week, without overtime. This meant our training day was usually held between 8 and 5, and night work was rare. Of course, if an instructor hadn’t booked his 39 hours in a given week, he could extend Friday evening by speaking on any topic that tickled his fancy until he hit the mark. As is true of many older men, the instructors loved to talk and to be listened to. It was a blowhard’s dream.

      The classroom was a hard slog, and after many months of it I built up an aversion to long talks. To this day, I have trouble accepting dinner invitations for fear of being trapped with a bore.

      The instructors had videotaped themselves talking during previous training courses, so if they had an appointment and couldn’t deliver the lecture in person, they’d pop in a video of themselves and torment us from the VCR. We watched Roger present a three-hour lecture on “international finance,” much of which consisted of him holding up foreign currency and saying, “This is a German mark. This is a British pound....”

      I considered the training a necessary evil, an obstacle that had to be overcome to get out to an overseas field assignment and protect our nation—anything to make me feel like a genuine case officer. Jonah did a better job of handling the frustration, keeping a look of engagement on his face and asking questions designed to show interest and enthusiasm. Yet every day that I sat in that classroom, I felt weaker. Every day Charlie spent conducting espionage, he got stronger. Time is all we have on this earth, and I knew that I wanted to spend my time battling America’s enemies. I also knew that my instructors were sensitive to “attitude,” so what I needed to do first and foremost was wipe that bored scowl off my face.

      I came up with a solution. My foreign language skills were lacking, so each day before work, during breaks and lunchtime, and after work, I drew up lists of foreign words and phrases to memorize. While seated in the classroom, I kept the list in my lap so I could glance down at it surreptitiously. While the instructors prattled on, I memorized. Listening to the lectures and memorizing at the same time, I felt challenged and productive. The bored scowl gradually disappeared.

      I also rose early each day to exercise, running in parks near my home or working out on a weight set I kept in the basement. I saw the poor physical condition in the faces and bodies of colleagues, especially graduates of mid- and late-1980s training classes, and I wanted to keep myself in top shape. I did exercises I could measure, like distance running, pull-ups, and resistance training, to keep track. If the numbers stayed the same or increased, at least I knew that I wasn’t falling apart.

      Training outside the classroom involved meetings with instructors role-playing as agents or potential agents. We’d perform surveillance СКАЧАТЬ