Читать книгу The Human Factor - Ishmael Jones - Страница 11

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Daring Greatly, Perhaps

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

When I was a boy, my family lived in different countries in eastern Asia, Eastern Africa and the Middle East. As I grew up in these dictatorships and tribal kingdoms, I was acutely aware of being different, as an American, and of the special status and privileges conferred by my nationality. My family’s household wealth, ordinary by American standards, was enormous by the standards of our host countries. During upheavals in these unstable places, my family needed only to board the next plane home, while the country’s native inhabitants had to stay and suffer. The United States was a refuge we could always seek in times of trouble.

During our rare visits to the US, I felt a weight lift, knowing that I could think or speak as I chose. Prosperity, openness, creativity, and freedom surrounded me in a great roaring tumult. In Africa and eastern Asia, I’d never seen a road larger than two lanes, usually potholed or unpaved. The Los Angeles freeway system, with its six and sometimes eight lanes, astonished my young eyes. Even then, I foresaw the immigration of coming decades, when getting to the United States became the goal of people everywhere in the world. I understood that a person could earn more in the US in a few hours as an unskilled laborer than he could in a month in most of the rest of the world. Everything functioned in America. The tap water flowed, the electricity worked, and the police were honest.

Despite the disillusionment of the 1970s, I thought an American living in America must be in heaven, going about daily life in a state of elation. I also felt a bit out of place in the US, and as if I had something to prove, to show that I genuinely belonged there.

The most visible Americans in our African city were the Marines who guarded the US embassy. They lived in the Marine House, just a block away from our own residence. Before sunrise each day, the Marines ran in formation through the neighborhood. The tropical climate and open drainage systems kept the city awash in powerful smells. As they ran, they chanted in time with the pace, in restrained voices so as not to awaken the neighborhood. At that early hour, Africans walking to work or setting up outdoor stands selling fruit and bread softly sang out greetings in English and Swahili upon first seeing the Marines, contributing a sort of accompaniment to their chants.

The Marines raised the American flag in front of their house each morning after their formation run. That’s my flag, I said to myself. The Marines were my connection to my home country. I often ran the same route they did on my way to school in the morning.

I came back to the US to go to college and the Marine Corps boot camp for officer candidates—that head-shaving and hollering introduction to the Marine Corps’s unique culture. It took two summers. Most of the candidates from the first summer never returned for the second. I was proud to be one of the few who stuck it out. It was truly difficult to go back for a second summer and endure boot camp all over again.

It was particularly unstylish on college campuses of that era to join the Marine Corps. Fashion dictated that long hair was chic, while shaved heads signified some deep emotional disturbance. It was the path less traveled—not the path of conformism. I was an infantry officer for three years and I thoroughly enjoyed the Marines’ camaraderie and sense of mission. Although most Marines leave the Corps after their first three- to six-year commitment, we all behaved as if we were there for a lifetime career, because the Marines gave us a sense of ownership. The Marine Corps was not a faceless bureaucracy but a living institution, and it belonged to us as our personal property.

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 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.