by Rizzo, John
I met separately with the general counsel, John Warner (no relation to the future U.S. senator), and his two top deputies. They all looked to be in their late fifties and were polite and avuncular. I have no recollection of anything they said to me, or anything I said to them. An hour later, the interview was over, and Sue Nolen reappeared to escort me back down to the lobby and out the thick glass front doors. It seemed to be raining harder.
As soon as I was outside, I noticed two things that had escaped my attention on the way in. One of them, about fifty yards to my left, was a squat structure that looked like a large flying saucer with a rounded, circular roof. I would later learn that it was called “the Bubble,” and that it was a five-hundred-seat auditorium used primarily for promotion ceremonies and speeches to the workforce by the CIA director and other visiting dignitaries.
The second object was much smaller and was situated about halfway between the Bubble and the headquarters front doors. It appeared to be a life-size statue of a man placed on a square concrete pedestal.
I had no idea if I would ever be coming back to the Agency again. It occurred to me that this could be my only opportunity to see what the statue was. After quickly looking around to make sure no one was watching, I trudged through the rain to get a closer look. It was a statue of the Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, the first U.S. spy in the nation’s history, who was uncovered, captured, and hanged by the British. And there he was, in bronze, staring directly at the CIA front entrance, depicted with his feet bound and his wrists tied behind him. Wrapped around the base of the statue was a carved inscription of what observers at his hanging said were his immortal last words: “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
The heavy rain made the statue glisten, and I noticed that the trickling streams of water from its head gave the eerie impression that ol’ Nathan was crying. It was a strangely poignant, moving moment. Together with the carved stars on the lobby wall, the statue quietly conveyed an unmistakable message to anyone entering the building: People who work here must be prepared to die for their country, and sometimes they do.
And then I snapped out of my reverie. Whoa, I told myself, don’t get so carried away. If I were ever to join the CIA, after all, it would be as a paper-pushing lawyer, not a spy. How perilous could that be?
I stood there for a full minute, staring at the statue. Then, thoroughly wet, I walked across the front quadrangle to the small parking lot, got in my car, and drove out through the main headquarters gates, not knowing when, or if, I would ever return.
The next phone call came more quickly than the first. A couple of weeks after the interview, one of John Warner’s deputies called and came right to the point. Would I like to come on board as a member of the CIA legal team? After mulling it over for about five seconds, I said yes. It was the call I was waiting for.
The easiest part about getting a job at the CIA is getting the offer itself. Far more arduous is the elongated period an applicant faces once he or she accepts the offer, because it is only then that the security and medical processing begins. Anywhere along the way the applicant can be told that he or she has been disapproved on medical or security grounds, with no further explanation. Over time, and particularly with the advent of the computer age, the CIA’s processes have been streamlined and refined considerably. But in 1975, when I had to run the gauntlet, it was far more plodding.
The first step was slogging through what the CIA calls a Personal History Statement (PHS), which was basically a government employment application on steroids. The thing I was given to complete was as thick as a novella. Even a current federal employee like me, already possessing fairly high security clearances, had to start from scratch. I had to list all manner of dimly remembered details from my past, like every place I had lived, every foreign trip I had taken, every non-U.S. citizen I had met, every friend I remained in contact with from high school onward, and so on.
The PHS was primarily used as a reference point from which the CIA Office of Security launched its background investigation. It always takes weeks, if not months, during which time the applicant is kept in the dark about its progress. Somewhere in this interregnum I remember being summoned to the Agency for a two-day-long physical and psychological examination by the medical staff. This all went smoothly—the CIA gives wonderfully thorough medical examinations, and the staff, unlike my draft board five years earlier, largely shrugged off my history of kidney stone attacks.
Then, near the end of the security process, I was called in for the requisite polygraph examination. It is impossible to convey a truly accurate description of the polygraph experience. During my CIA career, I took a half-dozen or more of them. I never looked forward to them, and I never got used to them. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would come to learn over the years that lawyers are generally lousy at taking polygraph exams. There are no empirical data on why, but my hunch is that it has something to do with the way law schools train students to analyze questions in class or in written examinations. Typically, the questions are deceptively subtle and nuanced, even when they seem simple and direct on the surface. So a law student is taught to methodically process each question to spot the subtlety, the nuance, in order to arrive at the correct answer.
Questions asked in CIA polygraph examinations are simple and blunt. There is nothing subtle or nuanced about being asked, for instance, if you are in contact with a hostile foreign government or if you are currently using drugs illegally. It’s either yes or no. But lawyers instinctively pause to ponder and mentally parse the most basic, black-and-white questions before answering, and when that happens during the polygraph exam, the needle on the polygraph machine tends to jump.
Later, when I hired new lawyers for the office, I would see this phenomenon occur time and again. I vividly recall an instance in the ’90s when I got word that a very promising young attorney we had recruited was having a terrible time passing (“clearing out,” in CIA parlance) his entrance polygraph exam. I asked our Office of Security for an explanation of the problem, and a polygraph officer dutifully came to see me.
“He’s nervous as a cat, reacting to even the most basic questions,” the officer patiently explained to me. “He can’t even confirm his place of birth.”
“How could that be?” I asked, bewildered.
“He says he can’t be sure because he doesn’t remember being there at the time.”
The young lawyer eventually did pass the exam. The CIA Office of Security has always shown understanding in navigating the unique psyches of attorneys.
Anyway, I remember my first polygraph in 1975 as being very long and very uncomfortable. I was asked a long string of detailed questions about my personal habits and predilections going back to my high school years. But I finally got through it, and that was the final hurdle.
On January 18, 1976, I drove through the headquarters gates, reporting for duty. It was my first day of employment at the CIA. I was twenty-eight years old.
The first rite of passage for me, like any brand-new Agency employee, was to attend a basic orientation course (“CIA 101,” as it is informally known). When I arrived in January 1976, the course was one week long, and in the years since has periodically varied from three days anywhere up to two weeks. Its purpose has remained unchanged: introducing fledgling personnel to the CIA’s history, its organizational structure, its various assigned missions, and both the benefits (insurance, retirement, other bread-and-butter topics) and responsibilities (protection of classified information, security awareness) accorded to every employee upon first walking through the door.
Today, the CIA website provides at least some of this basic background data to aspiring candidates. In 1976, publicly available information about the Agency’s inner workings was nonexistent, so all of us new arrivals had one thing in common: We had joined an organization, and a culture, about which we knew virtually nothing. My class was about twenty people, a polyglot of newcomers: analysts, scientists,
secretaries, even fledgling spooks. The majority of us were twentysomethings, but there were those in their forties and fifties as well. For five days, we sat together around a large oval table in a paneled conference room at headquarters, listening to a parade of CIA officials—some stern, some jocular, some professorial—offering a collective primer on the organization. On and on they came, immersing us in seemingly everything imaginable about the Agency. And all of it—the papers we were given, the slides we were shown, the lectures we listened to—had a big red SECRET stamp affixed to it.
If the intent of the orientation was to simultaneously educate, thrill, and indoctrinate a neophyte, that SECRET stamp was the coup de grâce.
There was at the time one piece of breaking news that the orientation course didn’t cover: President Ford had just fired the CIA director, the iconic Agency figure William Colby. He was a casualty of the recently concluded Church Committee investigation, but not because any abuses had been uncovered. Ironically, he was sacked because Ford, egged on by his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was furious at Colby’s perceived overwillingness to share too many of the gory details of the past with the committee. Colby, a member of the initial “Good Shepherd” generation after World War II service, had joined the Agency after serving as a derring-do OSS operative in Europe. His Agency career had also been marked with controversy—while heading up operations in Vietnam in the ’60s, he oversaw the infamous Phoenix program of organized assassination of Vietcong leaders.
Colby was a complex, shadowy character in CIA lore. In many ways, he was a transitional figure in the Agency’s history, and I remember being oddly disappointed when I learned about his abrupt departure. I wanted to see him, at least once. So less than two weeks after I joined the Agency, I got into a long line of employees snaking into the Rendezvous Room (its official name), a large, open room adjacent to the CIA cafeteria used for official receptions. In the distance, at the front of the line, there was Colby, on hand to accept personal goodbyes by the workforce. As the line inched forward, I was feeling a bit out of place—I had arrived at the Agency just days before, after all. What could I possibly say to this legendary figure?
When we finally came to face, all I could think to do was to blurt out the truth. Having read that he had a law degree, I stuck out my hand and said that I was a lawyer, too, who had just joined OGC, and that I was sorry that I wouldn’t have an opportunity to serve under him. It was at once an awkward and presumptuous thing for a twenty-eight-year-old rookie to say. And for a couple of seconds he just impassively stared at me through his clear-framed eyeglasses. Then, with a tight, enigmatic smile that I would never forget, he tapped me lightly on the arm and quietly replied, “You’re a lawyer and you just got here? Well, you are going to have an interesting time.” He then turned his eyes to the next person in line.
In those first couple of weeks, I realized that I was not the only rookie there. The OGC had doubled in size during the previous six months, going from nine to eighteen (with me being the eighteenth). The Church Committee, which had just completed its work, had recommended that the small, insular office—made up of mostly middle-aged men who had spent their entire adult lives at Langley—needed to grow, with younger blood and a fresher perspective. The idea was that an influx of lawyers without any CIA “baggage” would bring more objectivity and rigor, with an ability and willingness to spot and deter any future abuses. It was the first of many attorney-hiring binges I would witness at the CIA during my career, most of them coinciding with the inevitable postmortem of some flap or controversy that the Agency reliably, if unfortunately, managed to embroil itself in every few years. Whenever that happened, the cry would ring out, from Congress and/or the CIA leadership: By God, the Agency needs more lawyers! Inside the CIA, it would become a truism: A scandal would be awful for the Agency institutionally, but it would be great for the OGC’s growth potential. I was part of the first wave. We called ourselves the “Church babies.”
Coming from the lumbering and impersonal bureaucracy of the Treasury Department, I was startled and delighted by the working environment I found myself in. I noticed from the very beginning how everyone was energized and enthusiastic about what they were working on, and that, provided no outsiders were within earshot, they would talk shop everywhere inside the large cone of silence that was CIA Headquarters—not just in their offices but on the elevators, in the gym, walking out to the parking lot, in the employee cafeteria, and so on. The institutional camaraderie, the feeling of we’re-all-in-this-together, was palpable.
Everyone I encountered in those first few weeks—the security guards, the secretaries, the analysts, the operatives, and yes, even the lawyers—radiated a sense of pride and esprit de corps. For someone just arriving from another part of the government, it was a revelation. I would come to understand that a lot of this camaraderie and sense of shared mission derived from the fact that everyone in the CIA, no matter where one is in the pecking order, had to endure a long and exhaustive security clearance process (especially that great equalizer, the polygraph exam) in order to enter this new secret world, and we were all pledged not to discuss any of our classified work to anyone on the outside. The knowledge that we were all part of an exclusive, selective, secret club—that no one on the outside could ever really fully know or understand—created an unspoken but unique and unbreakable bond.
It gradually dawned on me that working in a secret intelligence organization inevitably affects an employee’s personal interactions outside the office. In my case, it was never as stark as it is for someone who is “undercover,” that is, a CIA employee who is posing as an employee of another U.S. government agency. They are required to “live their cover,” sometimes even with their relatives and friends. For them, routine, day-to-day private business transactions—like getting a commercial bank loan or buying life insurance—can become awkward and complicated.
CIA attorneys, on the other hand, are allowed to freely acknowledge our Agency affiliation to family, friends, and the outside world (except when traveling abroad). Still, I decided early on to be somewhat circumspect in whom I told about working for the CIA. My family knew, of course, as did my close friends from college and law school. But I was careful around strangers—people I would run into at bars, on airplanes, and so on. For one thing, you can never be sure who you are talking to. Besides, dropping the CIA name to people you don’t know frequently prompts questions like “No kidding! So what kinds of things do you work on?” Which, obviously, you can’t talk about. On top of that, you then have to endure a lot of dumb James Bond or Maxwell Smart jokes.
As my years at the CIA wore on, I became more comfortable about maintaining this pose in public, but during my first months at the Agency I found it rather frustrating. The place and the work were so fascinating that the natural human instinct was to want to talk about it. I thought being at the CIA was extremely cool, and I will admit to a youthful temptation to flaunt it. Holding it all in, especially when I was still under thirty, was tough.
What’s more, I was struck by how much scope and impact CIA lawyers, even one as wet behind the ears as I was, had on the day-to-day mission of the Agency. The OGC had about the same number of lawyers in it as my former office at Customs, but the OGC—and the rest of the Agency—was much less hierarchal, and we lawyers were given wide sway and discretion in the way we did our jobs. From the first day, I was not only allowed but encouraged to write and sign my own memos and letters going outside the office, which sounds like a small thing but was something I had never experienced before in my brief legal career. And whatever any of us said or wrote seemed to be accepted and followed—albeit on some occasions with some grousing—by our clients in the Agency. (I always considered everyone in the CIA as a “client,” from the director on down. I viewed myself as an attorney for all Agency personnel, and that my job was to advise them on the law and protect them from jeopardy for doing their jobs.) It belied the perception that many outsiders had of the CIA be
ing an untrammeled, anything-goes monolith that did whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, regardless of the law. If that had been true in the ’50s and ’60s—and it apparently was, to a large extent—that was not the CIA I found when I arrived.
To me the atmosphere at the CIA seemed so bracing, so alive in my early days there. I was too new, too starry-eyed to realize that the Church investigation, and the opprobrium from Congress and the media it had spawned, had left the organization dispirited and on the defensive. It was a state of affairs that I would come to understand all too often in the years to come.
In the aftermath of the Church investigation, Congress and the Ford administration had rapidly put into place a series of reforms that established the legal and political framework under which the CIA has operated ever since. Committees were created in the House and Senate to monitor and scrutinize the activities of the CIA and other intelligence agencies; laws were passed that for the first time mandated prior presidential authorization of covert operations; President Ford issued a detailed executive order (which has been reaffirmed by subsequent presidents and remains virtually intact to this day) setting out the criteria under which the intelligence community can collect information on U.S. citizens while also prohibiting the assassination of foreign leaders and covert actions inside the United States; and, for its part, the CIA began to establish a wide range of internal regulations governing how it would henceforth interact and establish relationships with sensitive sectors of American society, including the media, the clergy, and the academic and corporate communities. Although I didn’t know it at the time, these would be the areas that would occupy me for most of my career at the CIA.
At the end of January 1976, George H. W. Bush succeeded Colby as DCI. I remember hearing some of the Agency’s old-timers grouse. This guy had no intelligence experience, they would mutter as I nodded sympathetically. He was a longtime political partisan, had even served in Congress, and was obviously a henchman for the president, coming here to dismantle the place.
