Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  But that wasn’t the end of the matter.

  About a week later, the buzz started. Someone—the culprit was assumed to be a woman—had taken it upon herself to call the head of the Human Resources Department to complain that she had felt harassed. Apparently, someone thought that the sight of these guys waving their dicks around and yodeling amounted to a hostile work environment. And whaddya know, Human Resources took this seriously. Very seriously. You just knew that they were thinking about Tailhook and imagining the jokes on Leno.

  That’s when Joe and Kirk began their descent into their own personal hell. The internal investigators started hauling students away to get to the bottom of the matter. Interviews were conducted. Cleared attorneys took affidavits. There was talk of convening a special disciplinary panel. The word lawsuit was in the air. Someone started a rumor that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was going to hold hearings. People started calling it Dorkgate. Joe, once the soul of conviviality, grew pale and quiet. Kirk spent a lot of time with the punching bag in the gym.

  Everyone had an opinion. The class became bitterly divided among those who thought they should be sacked immediately for their lack of judgment and those who could see the lighter side of it. I was in the latter camp; in fact I couldn’t stop sniggering every time the subject came up. Stan was in the former: “This is not a fraternity house, this is the C-I-fucking-A! They exposed themselves in public! In front of their co-workers! On federal property! What kind of morons do that?”

  “Well, I can’t defend that … but don’t you think they’ve been punished enough? I mean, think how embarrassed they must be … and in the history of CIA screwups, this isn’t exactly the Bay of Pigs.”

  “It’s a judgment issue. If these people don’t know their own culture well enough to know that’s not going to go down well, what are they going to do in the field? Would you want to be out with those clowns when they pulled a stunt like that in Tehran? Would you want your life to depend on people who can’t figure out that that’s not a good idea?”

  No, I wouldn’t. I realized he was right—I couldn’t really hold up my side of the argument—but my heart went out to them, especially to Joe. I would always remember how kind he’d been to me during paramilitary training. His judgment may have been a little off that night, but I thought he was exactly the kind of man who would run into a burning building to save a child, no questions asked.

  For weeks, it was the sole topic of conversation—not just among our class, but apparently among everyone in the intelligence community. Everyone wanted to know what had really happened that night. The guys’ friends swore that nothing had happened at all. By God, this was a mountain made of a molehill, a tempest in a teapot—hell, the Ladies’ Sewing Circle would have felt perfectly at home hosting its annual quilting bee in that bar. Their enemies recounted a tale of degeneracy and obscenity that dwarfed the Profumo affair, claiming, among other things, that Joe had relieved himself on a statue of Bill Casey and Kirk had needed to be restrained lest he rape a terrified finance officer. Few people could back up these claims by reference to identifying anatomical features or specific dimensional details, an avenue for the establishment of the truth that I, for one, in my passion for veracity, investigated thoroughly.

  We all wanted to know who’d squealed. Jade was the chief suspect, although the finger was pointed at almost everyone sooner or later. Allison collapsed under the weight of suspicion; she was held to be a likely culprit because she had once worked in a rape crisis center, which most of the men took to be an assertion of a feminist radicalism no less arduous than Andrea Dworkin’s. Condemning her, I understand, after some kind of secret trial, the men stopped speaking to her, which proved to be too much for her to bear. She was found shaking in her bathroom, weeping, covered in psychosomatic hives.

  Joe and Kirk walked around dazed, looking like deer caught in the headlights. Nothing in the Marines or the Green Berets had ever prepared them for this.

  I had just returned from a meeting with an asset when we were summoned for an urgent unscheduled meeting in the auditorium. The head of the Clandestine Service himself, the venerable Linus Panther, had traveled to the Farm from Headquarters, descending upon us like Judgment Day to deliver himself of a stern rebuke.

  He began by staring us down wordlessly for a full thirty seconds. With his bushy white hair, he looked like an enraged Q-tip. I suddenly felt squirmy and embarrassed, the way I did in the fourth grade when the principal came down to talk to the girls—only the girls; the boys were allowed to leave—to say that someone had been chucking balls of wet, wadded-up toilet paper at the ceiling of the girls’ bathroom, where it was sticking, and that while we might think this was funny, it was seriously inconveniencing the janitor and that when the culprit was found—and she would be found—she was going to have some serious explaining to do. Of course I was the one who had been chucking the toilet paper, along with my friend Sally Duxbery, and we never did get caught.

  Panther finally spoke, tremulous and affronted as a Baptist preacher confronting Original Sin: “Many of you know about the incident in the bar three weeks ago.”

  We all bowed our heads and tried to look as if we had no idea what he was talking about.

  “And I gather—” his voice rose, like Moses urging the smashing of the idols “—that some of you may even find this incident amusing.”

  I composed my features into an expression that said, I hoped, No, not me, not me. I’m outraged. I too am so very very disappointed by the behavior of a few, and it is only a few—

  “Well, let me explain something to you. Not one of you has graduated from this course yet. Not one of you. Do you understand me?” We all nodded vigorously.

  “You are being trained to represent our country overseas and to hold the most sensitive and responsible jobs in the United States government. If you think for one minute that you can represent our country adequately with your pants around your ankles, you do not deserve the honor of being here. Your graduation barbecue is canceled.” He paused again for emphasis. “No one should be amused that there are people in this room who have the morals of a goat!”

  We were excused. From then on, we were infamous. We were the Class with the Morals of a Goat.

  Two weeks before the end of the course, Joe and Kirk were relieved of their positions. When the news came, they were hustled off the base within an hour, given only enough time to pack their things. I never even had the chance to say good-bye.

  Panther relented and sent word that we would be allowed to have our graduation barbecue after all, not that anyone cared, since by that point we all hated each other and just wanted to go home. But before the graduation, Hal Hertz, the course director, called us back to the auditorium for one last warning. He had got wind of a rumor that some of the students planned to find a goat somewhere and bring the thing to the barbecue. “Well, gang, let me tell you this,” he, said, his dark eyebrows narrowing to the midpoint of his long, thin nose. “Come graduation day, if so much as the snout of a goddamned goat is found on these premises, if so much as a goat whisker makes its way near that goddamned barbecue grill, you will all be fired on the spot. And if you think I’m kidding, gang, just try me.”

  The closer we came to finishing, the longer the hours got and the more Stan and I longed for it to be over. We never got more than a few hours of sleep at night. The pressure never eased. We counted the minutes until we could leave. Time seemed to be expanding. The days were endless and the weeks almost infinite. Stan told me that a colleague of his from Headquarters had warned him: “You know how most things, even if they suck, one day you’ll feel nostalgic for them? That’s not true about the Farm. That place will make you feel sick and anxious for the rest of your life. If you have to go back there for a conference or anything, your heart will sink when you drive in.” I believed it.

  We fantasized about what we would do when the training was done. Language training sounded great. Nine-to-five days would be a vaca
tion. We imagined our new apartment. I wanted to plant a summer garden on the balcony, with fresh tarragon and thyme. I imagined Lou and Caesaria chirping, fuchsia hanging in the garden, bougainvillea climbing the walls. For some reason, whenever I imagined this new home, it was improbably transmogrified in my mind into one of those glorious sun-splashed Spanish villas you see in House & Garden, with a vista that stretched over a whitewashed balcony toward the limpid sea beyond.

  We would have a week of administrative leave when the class finished. Maybe, Stan proposed, we should get into his car, his old convertible Chevy, which rattled like a Calcutta taxi, and drive somewhere far away. Neither of us had ever been to Kentucky. It sounded romantic—Kentucky. We could spend a week talking about anything but espionage. We could bring watercolors and paint, or we could just be outside and stroll hand in hand through the bluegrass, which I imagined, literally, as blue.

  Or maybe we would fly to the Caribbean. It would require doing a bit of paperwork, because technically it was foreign travel and we would need permission, but I liked the thought of paddling in a turquoise sea, watching the fish sparkle through a glass-bottomed boat. I would wear a white bikini and Stan would pet me while I stretched like a cat in the sun, and he would tell me how pretty I was. As we drifted off to sleep at night, we would discuss our plans and count off the number of days left. “Twelve days.” “Eleven.” “Single digits.”

  Finally, we entered the last week. “This week,” explained Hal Hertz to a visiting congressional delegation, “tests the candidate’s ability to resist sleep deprivation.” Every time we thought nothing else could come down the pipe, they threw another crisis at us. At two in the morning, a Libyan refugee walked into our mock embassy claiming to have information about the PFLT’s chemical weapons laboratory in the Greater Turkrap Mountains. Six hours of debriefing, then eighteen more hours of writing the reports.

  They showed up with monstrously detailed but imperfectly memorized floor plans of the facility in question, these defectors; we spent hours trying to understand and sketch the details. The instructors amused themselves by dressing up as real refugees—in old, stinking furs, or reeking of vodka—and pretending to speak only Pushtu or Amharic. They picked up letter openers from the desk and threatened to plunge them into their own hearts if we didn’t promise them asylum in the United States. Our assets failed to show up for scheduled meetings, forcing us to revert to the backup, wasting the hours we had spent assuring ourselves that we weren’t under surveillance and making us do it again. We received word from another source that our most reliable informant was a dangle. Nan was complaining; an instructor overheard her and said, “Get used to it, Nan. This is the way it is in the field. Always.”

  On the final night of training, having slept no more than three hours the night before and each night prior for the past week, the mock station’s prize asset, the assistant to the Turkrapistani defense minister, told me in our clandestine rendezvous that Turkrapistan had the Bomb and was planning to use it. I sprinted back to the office to tell the rest of the station. The news meant even more work: Something this urgent had to be disseminated in a special, attention-getting format used only for nuclear emergencies, and since we had heard Wally’s lecture on the subject months and months before—and hadn’t paid attention anyway—none of us remembered how to do it. We would have to teach ourselves from the manual. “Is this really that critical?” Kevin asked. “Couldn’t we just send it in the normal way?”

  “Kevin,” I said irritably. “They’re planning to drop a fucking nuclear weapon on Manhattan—what could be more fucking critical? Are you waiting for Mars to attack?”

  He saw my point. We dutifully did the research, wrote up the report, and sent it out in the right format. When it was finally over, the next morning—the class ending with a final sentimental broadcast from the TBC, the impending nuclear holocaust defused, thanks to our timely reporting—no one felt like celebrating. We wanted only to sleep, but most of us were too wired from caffeine and days of sleeplessness even to do that. We lay in our beds and twitched.

  I found out the next morning that I had passed. My adviser told me in his office the next day that support for me among the instructors had been unanimous. “Toward the end,” he said, “your record in detecting surveillance was perfect. The teams had no trouble at all with your demeanor or your driving—you actually did better than most of your classmates. You overcame a lot of handicaps, and everyone was impressed by your determination. You didn’t let anything beat you. Congratulations.” He handed me my final performance appraisal to sign; it was, despite all my fears, exemplary.

  I was at last an envoy of our government’s clandestine arm, fully qualified to recruit and handle spies for the United States. I would learn where I would be posted before the end of the week. I knew that I owed my success to Stan. I was too tired to be triumphant, but I was quietly relieved and terribly grateful to him.

  Following graduation, we were supposed to have a week off to put our neglected personal lives back in order, but directly after congratulating me, my adviser handed me a note telling me to report to the Special Investigations Branch the following Monday at eight in the morning. Goddammit, I thought, looking at the message. Can’t they just give me one fucking day of peace?

  I knew instinctively that the note meant something bad, but I had no idea what. Nor did I know what the Special Investigations Branch did. It specialized in security or employee discipline—that much I surmised from the name—but beyond that, I had no clue. My adviser didn’t know what it was about; he said Hal Hertz might. I went to Hertz’s office and knocked on the door. He kicked it open with his foot, saw it was me, nodded, and slammed the door closed again. I listened for voices in his office but heard nothing. Finally, after I’d passed about ten minutes standing stupidly in the corridor, he erupted: “Come in! Now!”

  He was sitting over a stack of paperwork, at which he continued to stare when I entered, acknowledging my entrance only with a curt pump of his glabrous head. The sharp angles of his skull and his long, flared nose made him look like a bird of prey. When he looked up at me, it was as if I were an unwelcome intrusion.

  I asked him if he knew why the Special Investigations Branch wanted to see me. He began rhythmically stamping EYES ONLY on the folders on his desk. “Beats me.” He shrugged. “We’re just passing on the message.” I was sure he knew what the appointment was about, but obviously I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him. I resigned myself to waiting, and wondered if I had done something wrong. I told myself that this might be a routine reinvestigation—the kind they scheduled for all of us every few years. Or perhaps this was about someone else.

  When I left his office, I heard Jade’s harsh, bronchial voice. She was telling everyone within earshot that Iris had failed.

  Iris was dumped unceremoniously from the Clandestine Service—on graduation day, no less. Her adviser said, “It seems to have been an attitude issue. Some of the instructors felt you didn’t accept criticism well.”

  I found her on the staircase near the auditorium. She was trembling. I knew that if the others saw her cry it would be an unbearable humiliation. I put my sweater around her shoulders and hustled her to my room, where she would be safe.

  “Did you have any idea this was coming, Iris?”

  “None. Not at all. None. None.”

  She finally began to cry, in great heaving sobs. I gave her a tissue, then another, and let her weep. Her breath became ragged, then the sobs quieted. “Which one of them put the knife in my back?” she asked.

  “It’s probably not a good idea to torture yourself wondering about something you’ll never know the answer to.”

  “How could they have let me get to the last day without warning me?”

  “They’re assholes. Complete assholes.”

  “What do you think I did wrong?”

  I stroked her hand. I told her how sorry I was. I told her they had made an appalling mistake.

  “W
hat am I going to do now?” She had quit her job to join the CIA; she had sold her house; she had even given away her dog. She couldn’t list what she’d been doing for the past eighteen months on her résumé, because it would compromise the cover entity she’d been using. She supposedly worked for a company called Mayquest. If she revealed that Mayquest didn’t exist, everyone else who supposedly worked there would be blown. But if anyone called Mayquest for a reference, they’d get that same CIA flack who, having no idea who Iris was, would say, “She’s in a meeting. I’ll have to have her call you back.”

  Iris was barred from attending the graduation ceremony. She was given only that afternoon to adjust to the news, compose herself, pack her things, and get off the CIA’s property. It was an article of faith at the Agency that people who had been fired must be separated from classified material as quickly as possible, lest they be tempted, in their spite, to help themselves to a few state secrets and sell them to the highest bidder. I helped her pack.

  I got dressed for graduation and went to the auditorium. I found my assigned seat and sat down next to Mark, the former stockbroker who would have let a plane explode to protect GONZO. He offered me his hand. “Congratulations,” he said. I could tell by the way he looked at me that he was preparing a little speech. “You know,” he said. “I want to tell you something.” Here it comes, I thought. Bring it on, killer. “When I first met you, I didn’t trust you. You seemed to think you were smarter than everyone else. I’m just telling you so you know, okay? You should really know what kind of impression you give other people. I’m just telling you this as a friend, Selena. Because after watching you all this time, I’ve realized you’re okay. You might have more higher education than the rest of us, but you busted your ass just like everyone else. You’re a good officer, and I’d be happy to serve with you anywhere.”