by Nada Bakos
A few days later I was driving to a nondescript office park in Virginia, more nervous than I’d ever been for a job interview. I’d spent the last of my savings on a navy pantsuit from Brooks Brothers, just for this meeting—I wanted to look the part.
I had no frame of reference for what to expect. They say six degrees of separation can connect any two people in the world, but coming from Denton, I’m not sure that would have been enough to connect me to anyone who’d ever worked for the CIA. It was an organization I’d read about and seen in the movies—far more an abstract concept than a real place. Reading through the packet, I was amused, thinking mine would be the quickest background check they ever did: around noon on any given day, they could find at least a handful of people who knew me at the Denton Café and finish the interviews all in one shot. But my smile faded as my mind kept settling back on the same aching question: What if I’m not smart enough?
After I arrived at the office park, my first interview was with the senior-level officer I would report to, Jim. He was quirky and brilliant, with a PhD in chemistry, and he said all the right things about charting my own path at the Agency. I liked him immediately. Within moments of starting that conversation, I wanted the job—and the Agency apparently wanted me, too. A few weeks later, more paperwork arrived in the mail from 20505. Again I tore the envelope open; this time, it was a conditional offer of employment, contingent upon my passing a background check and returning to the office park for a battery of tests.
My confidence grew with every step I advanced in the process. The pressure was higher at the second interview, but I felt somehow more collected as I walked back into the visitor center. Around a dozen fellow applicants were there that day; no one spoke as we all made our way up a side stairway to the second floor. We barely even looked at one another.
In the applicant-processing office, I approached the check-in counter to register. The administrator handed me a pen. “First name only,” she said. I was called into a back room shortly thereafter.
There a doctor administered a basic medical test, including a hearing and vision check. A technician drew a vial of blood and requested a urine sample.
Then came a ninety-minute psychological evaluation using a personality test. That questionnaire is made up of 567 seemingly nonsensical true-false statements, including “I believe I am being followed,” “I drink an unusually large amount of water every day,” and “I like to talk about sex.” I could almost swear I saw “Do you ever dream about setting your mom on fire?” on there. Once completed, my answers were compared to a database of prior results from test takers who are known to have psychological disorders. Happily, our answer patterns didn’t match.
Next up were the IQ and knowledge tests, and evidently I did fine on those.
Finally I was ushered into a tiny office for a polygraph test. What I presumed was a two-way mirror ran nearly the length of one entire wall. A friendly-seeming technician asked me how my day was going and pointed toward a chair directly across from a small camera positioned in the upper corner of the room. The setup didn’t look anything like the bulky polygraph machines I’d seen in movies, with skittering arms dancing across a readout. Instead, all that sat on the table beside me was a laptop and a machine the size of a few old VHS tapes with various tubes and sensors attached. The technician strapped a corrugated tube around my chest to gauge any changes in my breathing patterns and tightened a blood pressure cuff around my upper arm.
“On this piece of paper, I need you to write down a number between one and five,” he said. “Then lie when I guess it. Ready?”
“Yup,” I said.
“Four.”
“No,” I said, making my best sincere-looking face.
He glanced at his computer screen. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s begin.
“Are we in Virginia?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Have you ever tried to overthrow the US government?”
“No.”
On we went for at least an hour, and unlike so many people who wring their hands before taking the test, wondering what it must be like, I found that my first experience came with unexpectedly little stress. I even fessed up to trying marijuana in college.
A few weeks after the testing, in the spring of 2000, I was officially brought into the Agency at the General Schedule, or GS, level 13. Those grades form the US Office of Personnel Management’s government-wide pay classification system for just about all white-collar federal employees. There are only fifteen levels in total—though each of the levels is broken down into ten individual pay grades—so entering the CIA at GS-13 made for a semilivable salary. It also covered the new computer I needed now that my laptop keys were either completely stuck or squished whenever I typed.
My first day was scheduled for later that summer. It was time to start over.
CHAPTER 3
Career Analyst Program X
The organizational development work at the CIA proved to be an easy transition into an opaque bureaucracy. The Agency was restructuring some of its departments prior to 9/11, and not long after starting I was tasked with leading a steering committee to reshape hierarchies between officers at headquarters and those in the field. It hadn’t taken many meetings, however, before I realized how intractable those established hierarchies had become over the decades, and I wondered just how many ensuing generations it would take to shift that paradigm.
Nonetheless, the job gave me the opportunity to work with, and make a good impression upon, some of the Agency’s top executives in the vaunted halls of the headquarters’ seventh floor. And there were other pluses to the job—particularly the travel.
In the late summer of 2001, roughly a year after I’d started at the Agency, a coworker and I were sent on a weeks-long European fact-finding tour to discuss some of our realignment ideas with US government officers overseas. Those meetings proved to be informative enough, but what I distinctly remember was the Agency culture, and the sense of adventure—at times gritty, at times urbane—that influenced the way we did business.
One memorable stop was a town in the province of Kosovo, then part of Serbia, which was slowly regaining its footing after NATO had bombed the country two years earlier. Those air strikes had ended awful human rights abuses against the Kosovars at the hands of the occupying Yugoslavs—and it was only once we’d left that someone explained to me why entire portions of the hotel had been roped off to guests. The hotel’s garage was the site of a prison prior to the war.
At a work stop in neighboring Albania, where an Italian influence still reigned, my coworker and I agreed that nothing put a long day of meetings behind us like a bottle or two of a dry red wine inside the walled compound where we stayed, alone except for a couple of local guards. The entire experience seemed to validate my decision to move to DC and as that trip wrapped up, in early August of 2001, I felt energized about returning to the Langley campus. I felt like I wanted to do every job the Agency could offer.
Then, a few weeks later, I was at my cubicle in the organizational development office. It was 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001. There, I watched the streaming news footage from Manhattan on my computer.
The impact of the first airliner crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center silenced everyone around me. I mumbled to myself, “This has to be al Qaida.”
Five years earlier, I knew, Usama bin Ladin had published a thirty-page fatwa in the independent London newspaper Al Quds al Arabi entitled “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” That religious decree asserted that “the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators” and that there was “no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land.”
Bin Ladin had expanded the battlefield with a second fatwa in February of 1998, concluding, “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and militar
y—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” Six months later, on August 7, 1998, bin Ladin coordinated the bombing of two US embassies—in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania—killing 224 people. The date marked the eighth anniversary of US troop deployment to Saudi Arabia.
By the morning of September 11, bin Ladin’s name was familiar to everyone in Langley. And by the time United Airlines flight 175 ripped into the South Tower, nearly twenty minutes after the North Tower was hit, talk in the office had already shifted from who was responsible to what would come next.
Pictures and video footage of the towers ran for days in newspapers and on news broadcasts around the world. Today, however, I don’t so much remember the planes hitting the towers or the ensuing scramble in my office. Instead I remember tears running down my face as I sat at my desk, watching as people jumped from the towers’ windows. The questions it forced me to ponder—about hate and fear, courage and mortality—were far too awful to digest.
Just over half an hour after the South Tower was hit, American Airlines flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon. Within the hour, the Agency began evacuating nonessential personnel. I hurried out to my car, then out to Tysons Corner, Virginia, roughly six miles away. That route was the long way home, but it wasn’t clear if the Capital Beltway—DC’s monolithic, sixty-four-mile interstate, which wraps around the city—was open. This route also let me make a quick stop.
A few months earlier, I had moved out of the English basement into a three-bedroom apartment on a leafy street in DC’s Cleveland Park neighborhood. It came with more space and more sunlight and an eclectic pair of roommates. One of them, Laurie Lindsay, had become my first real friend in the city, and she was working in Tysons that day. “They might end up closing the bridges,” Laurie said as we met up inside her office. “We should head home.”
As it happened, my mom was visiting DC and staying with us that week. I’d tried calling her several times before leaving work, and when I finally got through I told her to simply turn on the TV and wait by the phone. “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” I said.
Laurie and I found that the Beltway was still open—but also eerily quiet minus the military vehicles as we headed northwest around the Beltway. We dialed each other’s cell phones and laid them on the passenger seats next to us. We barely spoke, but even that silent connection was comforting.
Once through Bethesda, Maryland, we hit the interchange for Route 185, which led us toward our apartment. As we turned south, an ashen cloud appeared on the horizon, billowing up over the Pentagon. Suddenly the quiet was broken by the staccato chop of an army medevac helicopter roaring overhead and then off into the distance.
Arriving home, I found my mom struggling to make sense of the events and the disjointed news coverage. I told her what little I knew; then we all retreated to a familiar place: the Park Bench Pub, a now-defunct underground watering hole a few blocks from our apartment. It had become a reliable spot for first dates, a trusty last stop on ladies’ nights out, and now it was just the sort of comfortable place where we could think through a day that seemed unthinkable.
That new reality was only underscored when, as we neared the bar, a fleet of armored military vehicles raced past on Connecticut Avenue heading downtown. Laurie and I just stared. “What is this?” she finally said. “Northern Ireland?”
Over the following days, I realized that I felt out of sync around the office. When I walked across that giant CIA seal on my first trip to Langley, I felt like I’d been welcomed into Oz. But it occurred to me that it hadn’t taken too many weeks of analyzing and organizing data in spreadsheets before my mind began drifting off toward new roles at the CIA, roles that would put me at the center of the action. I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to make a difference. That’s why I’d left Montana.
Every day I felt honored to be a part of the CIA, but I wondered if everyone else in the office could tell I was eager to leave the HR department. Once the shock of the attacks had worn off, I applied for work in the Directorate of Intelligence, or DI—the land of the analysts.
It was somewhat unprecedented for a person to transfer from an administrative position to a substantive position at the pointy end of a spear. I knew that at the DI I would be viewed as an outsider initially—or, perhaps more succinctly, not the “Ivy League” version of an analyst. I was so set on getting the job and trying to become part of the substantive work that I didn’t focus on the perception. I just wanted to get going.
My favorite part of working at the Agency was the ability to create my own career path and to continually reinvent myself. There was never a lack of amazing things to research and study—particularly outside the HR department—and I’d spent my share of lunch breaks surfing the Agency’s internal job-postings database. As in any organization, the best jobs at the CIA are found through connections, which means that there are definite rewards for applying yourself in ways that don’t necessarily get discussed at an annual review. That “hall file”—the reputation that precedes you among your coworkers—is often as important in hiring decisions as the tangible things you’ve accomplished. In my case, I wasn’t sure how my organizational development experience translated to the DI, but I hoped my hall file would help clear any early hurdles on the way out of HR.
The Directorate of Intelligence—or the Directorate of Analysis, as it is now called—employs analysts to anticipate and quickly assess rapidly evolving international developments and their impact on US policy concerns. Analysts provide written products and briefings to the White House, the cabinet, Congress, and other leaders.
Thanks to my background as an international economics major, DI coordinators placed me in the Office of Transnational Issues, making me an analyst in the illicit finance wing. I was “following the money,” mapping out relationships among illicit organizations and foreign threats, which was at times incredibly cool. Which is not always the same as exciting.
As much as the CIA cultivates its mystique, its aura of secrecy—as do many of its employees—a lot of what you read in the newspapers and hear on TV is, frankly, bullshit. The Agency is an unusual bureaucracy, perhaps—but there are some decidedly routine things about the actual work. They just come with a twist.
There’s an overpriced company cafeteria, for instance, that offers Chinese food and has a Burger King within it, and on nice days, you can eat outside in the central courtyard. It reminded me of any other white-collar environment except for the sign by the door reminding you not to take classified material outside.
And, as at every other company I’d worked for, training seminars pinballed between stress- and snark-inducing at a moment’s notice—especially among a workforce that’s capable of being a little too smart for its own good. I saw that firsthand in May of 2002, a few months after being reassigned to Transnational Issues, when I was sent to CAP, the Agency’s Career Analyst Program.
At some point during the first year on the job, every analyst is pulled away from his or her department and sent to the sixteen-week-long CAP. The course, held in a sprawling office building not far from headquarters officially known as the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, aims to provide “the basic thinking, writing, and briefing skills needed for a successful career,” according to the Agency description. At first blush, the underpinnings felt unmistakably like spy school, including one teaching module called “Fundamentals of Denial and Deception.” Inside the classroom, my two dozen classmates and I wore special blue name badges that authorized us to access computers labeled TOP SECRET.
So yes, the place crackled with energy. But instead of being newly minted college grads, most of my classmates and I were midcareer professionals with outside experience. A majority of people in the room probably had graduate degrees and PhDs. We weren’t shy about pointing out to our instructors when the hit-or-miss curriculum, still evolving at the time, really seemed to miss.
One day, to practice draf
ting memos and briefing products for lawmakers, the class was broken into teams and given hyperexaggerated Middle East rainfall data to thumb through. We were told to draft a “bottom-line assessment”—basically, what middle schoolers know as a topic sentence—that anchors the inverted-pyramid, bottom-line-up-front writing style demanded of analysts. The style is so standard that fellow analysts just call it BLUF. Our hypothetical subject matter for the exercise: the geopolitical implications of heavy rainfall in Iraq.
Sitting in that classroom, I couldn’t get past the fact that I knew you could count most of the country’s inches of annual rainfall on two hands, if not one. This is silly, I thought. There was no realistic example we could have used? I rolled my eyes.
The instructor soon went around the room, asking teams for their assessments. “Factoring in projected population growth by 2030,” one said, “climate change that produces more rain in Iraq will likely forestall the impending rise in poverty and malnutrition that would have been expected under current environmental conditions.”
“More rain will lead to increased political stability in the region, as enhanced water infrastructure will better facilitate industry, municipal water quality, and sanitation for the general population,” another said.
The teacher looked at us.
“After examining all the available outside evidence,” our team concluded, “it turns out that vast swaths of Iraq are actually still just desert.”
The instructor pretended to smile. “Why don’t you try again,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
We thumbed through our list of rejected bottom-line assessments. “Oh!” we said. “Prospects still iffy for Saddam’s new ‘Mother of All Waterslides.’”
There was no smile that time. Then, as the newness of the experience and our nervousness wore off, the tension escalated.
One day a professor played a clip from the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was. The movie was based on an actual benchmark operation from the tail end of World War II known as Operation Mincemeat. That mission involved a spy unlike any the British had ever used before: a dead one, pulled from a London morgue. Intelligence officers invented a fake identity for the guy, then dressed him up, stuck fake plans for a Greek invasion in his briefcase, and dumped his body on a beach for the Germans to find. Voilà: denial and deception.
