Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  At dawn, I took a taxi to the address I’d been given. Nothing at the building’s entrance indicated that it belonged to the CIA. It might have been the regional headquarters of Fidelity, say, or Costco. It was about the size of the other office buildings on the block, six stories or so; its smoked-glass windows reflected the broad, tree-lined suburban street. It was separated from the road by an unremarkable parking lot and a neatly groomed lawn. But an armed guard at the gate stopped my taxi and asked to see my identification. He examined my credentials carefully, then told me to step out and walk the rest of the way to the building’s entrance. More armed guards manned a reception desk behind the sliding-glass front doors, surveying the premises via closed-circuit television. They too asked for my identification, and compared it to a typewritten list. Finally finding my name, a guard picked up one of several phones. “Miss Keller is here,” he said.

  A woman with hair teased and sprayed into a kind of curly blond plumage came to meet me at the entrance. “I’m Tammy,” she said with the musical vitality of a game show hostess, offering me her hand. She was in her late forties, I guessed; she was made up in heavy foundation and false lashes. A laminated badge hung around her neck, knocking against a big, glittering brooch in the shape of a giraffe on her lapel. She escorted me through the turnstiles by the reception desk, swiping her badge against an electronic sensor and punching in a code. “Darn it!” she said when the machine rejected her code three times in a row. “I swear that thing hates me!”

  She asked me if I was nervous and, without waiting for a reply, told me to “just relax and do your best. We’re not looking for geniuses, so don’t worry about that. The problem with geniuses, you know, is that they don’t have any common sense.” She kept chattering as we walked down the hall, her high heels clicking like castanets. She said that the Central Intelligence Agency was like a family and that she had been with the Agency since the age of nineteen. “Nineteen?” I asked. “How did you end up working for the CIA when you were so young?”

  “Oh, they found me,” Tammy answered, and before I could ask what she meant, we arrived at a small medical laboratory, where she deposited me with a flourish. “See you in a few!” She waved and bustled off.

  The walls had the usual doctor’s-office decorations: a poster featuring the food pyramid and another about Lyme disease. I filled out a form about my medical history, proffered blood and urine on command, and suffered myself to be inspected by a physician with an old-fashioned lantern on his head. He tested my vision, whacked my knees with a mallet, listened to my chest, and then sent me back to the waiting room.

  Tammy returned and took me to the psychological-evaluation clinic. At exactly ten o’clock, the door opened and a man with a neatly trimmed beard peered into the reception area. He introduced himself as Dr. Mason and invited me to follow him.

  His small office was tidy and unornamented, as was he. He held my résumé in his hands as if he were looking at it for the first time. I sat down and waited for him to speak. “Well,” he said after scanning the paper for a few more seconds. “You’ve had an interesting life, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve been very lucky,” I answered, wondering when I should mention my outstanding patriotism.

  “So … let’s talk a little about you,” he said.

  “Sure, I’d like that.” I met his eyes and tried to project stability, self-awareness, a positive outlook on life.

  “Have you ever had any emotional problems?” he asked.

  “Well,” I replied, trying to sound as if I experienced appropriate emotion, neither too much nor too little. “Of course I’ve had difficult times in my life. But I’ve never suffered any mental illness.”

  “Mmmmm. Ever hear voices?” he asked. I admired the way he cut right to the chase.

  “Voices? You mean ones that don’t really exist? No, never.”

  “Mmmmm. Ever feel agitated?”

  “Well, sure—sometimes, I guess.”

  “When have you felt agitated?”

  “Well, you know—when I get stuck in traffic or when I get put on hold trying to reach a customer-service representative, you know, the usual.”

  “Mmmmm. Ever feel suicidal?”

  “No, no. Never.”

  “Ever feel worried that everyone is watching you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Would you say you’re in good emotional health?”

  “Well, sure, yes.”

  “Mmmmm. What makes you want to join the CIA?”

  “Patriotism, Dr. Mason. I want to give something back.”

  He nodded; his face gave nothing away.

  He asked a few questions about my parents and my education. I looked for opportunities to mention my patriotism again, but I couldn’t find any. Did I have a history of sexual deviancy? “I think my tastes are pretty normal for an upper-middle-class white woman,” I said.

  “Mmmmm … well,” he answered. “Well. I guess that’s good.” He sounded disappointed.

  He walked me to a nearby conference room and handed me a series of multiple-choice psychological batteries. He told me he would be back in two hours. True/False: I will go to hell because of my thoughts about my mother. I carefully avoided the answers that would peg me as a schizoid or a borderline.

  And then I was done. Tammy took me to the accounting office, where a white mouse of a man reimbursed me in cash for my hotel and travel expenses. I shook hands with Tammy, who wished me luck, and took the Metroliner back to Manhattan that same evening.

  One month later, a letter arrived offering me the job on the condition that I pass an extensive background investigation and a polygraph. The offer came on plain white stationery without letterhead, and nowhere did it mention the CIA. It referred instead to “our organization.”

  “You will be joining our organization at a very exciting time,” it read. I stared at the letter in astonishment, then called my mother.

  “Mom, you will not believe this,” I began. “You simply will not believe this.”

  I’ll never know how I got through that background investigation. Mind you, I didn’t really have any skeletons in my closet. I’d never killed anyone, if that’s what they wanted to know. I’d always lived a more or less lawful life. But I’d smoked a lot of dope. For God’s sake, I was a Sanskritist.

  According to the CIA website, “recent” or “frequent” drug use could prove disqualifying. The terms weren’t elaborated. I admitted on the form they sent me that I’d had some acquaintance with the cannabinoid family, as they called it, but I left ambiguous the issue of quantity, hoping they wouldn’t ask. When the background investigator, a gray man in a gray suit, came to my apartment to interview me in person, he asked me exactly how many times I’d ever gotten stoned, as if I would have the faintest idea. I fished around for a number that sounded plausible but not excessive.

  “About ten?” Actually, it would probably be easier just to tell you about the times I wasn’t stoned.

  “Are you sure of that number?

  “Um … it’s a little hard to remember. It was a while ago. Maybe less?” Well, sir, I was pretty much stoned all through college. Yeah, I was pretty much stoned the whole time. Once or twice, I stopped smoking to take finals or something, you know? So I’d just say I was stoned, well, technically, four or five times, but for a very, very long time each time, okay?

  “And would you consider this to have been experimental usage?”

  “Yes, exactly.” The experiment indicated a strong relationship between smoking dope and getting high as a kite.

  He looked suspicious. “You sure about that?”

  “Yes.” How could I be sure about anything? I was stoned out of my mind.

  His team was going to interview as many of my friends and neighbors as they could find, he told me. That didn’t concern me; I expected that most of them would describe me as friendly and studious. But I did have a small, nagging anxiety.

  Directly after coming back from India to wri
te up my research, I’d shared an apartment in Manhattan with a librarian named Mildred and a failing jazz pianist, Antonio-the-Untalented. I’d moved in with them following a desperate search for an inexpensive place to live. Mildred had met me at the door when I came to look at the room for rent. She was a stooped, weird sister with black teeth and a shock of white hair. But she was pleasant enough and the room was only $500 a month. The apartment was clean—dazzlingly so, in fact—and the neighborhood safe. I think she was taken with the fact that I was a Sanskritist; she wanted to talk about the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. When she asked if I’d like to move in, I accepted gratefully.

  On the night I arrived with my bags and books, I found a handwritten note under my door. The letters were crabbed and close:

  I should mention my long-term, murderous struggle. People with very good intentions seem to have great difficulty in ascertaining the truth and discerning who is a credible source. So I usually say to roommates that you are free to believe what you choose (though it can be hazardous to hold false beliefs). But I expect you to behave with perfect integrity.

  I am sure that is your intent.

  Mildred.

  I read the message several times, trying to make sense of it. Then I moved the heavy dresser in my bedroom against the door.

  The next day, I asked Antonio what the hell was going on. “Don’t worry about her.” He waved his hand. “She’s a fruitcake.”

  I soon ascertained that Mildred was, indeed, a full-blooded schizophrenic. She believed that a cabal of doctors had stolen her left breast and was conspiring to steal the right one. She held that the government was sneaking into the apartment at night to poison her food and spray toxic chemicals in her face as she slept. She regularly boiled and bleached everything in the house, trying to get the poison off. She believed that my predecessor, whoever he was, had been working as an informant for the government. Sometimes, I would find her sleeping on the living room floor, wrapped in a black plastic bag. “They can’t find me in here,” she’d mutter. I became used to the sound of coins tinkling: She cast the I Ching constantly, allowing the ancients to determine her every decision. “Dark birds,” she crooned, looking at the coins. “Very dark birds.” She wrapped her food in brown paper to keep the government from spraying it with poison.

  One day, Antonio came home to find that Mildred had thrown away his entire week’s groceries. “What the hell did you do that for?” he asked her, his eyes popping with exasperation.

  “They got poison over your food too. You would have been sick if you’d eaten it.”

  “Mildred,” Antonio said slowly. “How precisely do you think ‘they’ got into a locked apartment on the fourteenth floor?”

  “You should know!” she hissed. “You’re the one who’s been helping them!”

  Antonio stared at her, at a loss, then backed out of the room, shaking his head.

  I lived there until I could afford my own studio—it would have taken more than Mildred to make me abandon a $500 room in midtown Manhattan—and I never had a problem with her. She cast the I Ching for me whenever I needed to make a tough decision, and she kept the apartment spotless. Sometimes she sanitized the toilet eight times in a day.

  But the questionnaire I’d been sent by the CIA required me to list everyone I’d lived with for the past seven years, and when I put down Mildred’s name, I felt a dark foreboding. What on earth would she do if a strange man in a dark suit showed up on her doorstep, claiming to be from the federal government and demanding to know whether she’d ever seen me engage in any suspicious activity? Would she scream? Would she try to whack him? I imagined Mildred raising a shovel into the air and triumphantly smashing it down on the investigator’s head.

  I tried not to think about it. It was in God’s hands. The Columbia Law library housed an extensive collection on the legal admissibility of polygraph results in court, which I studied closely. The luminaries of American jurisprudence were unanimous: The polygraph was a sham. The CIA might as well have invited Mildred to Langley to cast the I Ching—and perhaps they should have, since Mildred was often eerily accurate, having predicted to the month both the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Asian stock market crash.

  The fallibility of the polygraph was an axiom of forensic science, yet members of the national security community reposed in it an almost reverential confidence. Evidently, the polygraph functioned as an aid to interrogation; people believed it worked, so they told the truth. I was anxious about it. While I had nothing much to lie about, I had many things I didn’t care to discuss. More important, the polygraph returned a disturbing number of false positives, and I didn’t want to become a victim of bad luck.

  I read on the Internet that passing was a matter of evidencing stress when asked the control questions. The trick to showing stress, according to an article I found posted to a chat group, was the cloacal clench. The author of the article claimed to be a former police interrogator. He promised that one well-timed squeeze of the sphincter would cause the subject’s heart rate and galvanic skin response to rise exactly as if he were telling a shameful porky.

  I arrived for my polygraph, in another unmarked building in the suburbs of Washington, with apprehension. The polygrapher came to the waiting room to fetch me. He and I walked together to the polygraph chamber down the hall and exchanged pleasantries about the weather. He then spent a great deal of time emphasizing how scientific the polygraph was, making it sound like electron microscopy. I listened politely. He discussed the questions he was planning to ask: Had I ever committed a crime? Had I ever attempted to gain unauthorized access to classified information? Was I working for a foreign intelligence service? I nodded to signify that I understood.

  I was confused. All of these questions seemed perfectly reasonable. There should have been, according to my research, a relatively trivial question among the others, one designed to evoke a lie—Have you ever told an untruth to a supervisor? Have you ever stolen office supplies? That was where to manifest the strongest response if you wanted to pass. But all of his questions concerned issues with which the government would legitimately be concerned. Oh, what the hell, I thought. I’ll just hope for the best.

  The polygrapher strapped me to the chair and hooked me up to the electrodes and the breathing monitor. The chair was ample and squishy, actually quite pleasant. He switched on the device, intoning the questions in a hypnotic voice. When he asked me the question about my criminal history a second time, I suddenly wondered whether that might be the control question. After all, everyone breaks a few laws now and again. Afraid that I would fail if I didn’t have a strong reaction to something, I made a sudden decision to energize my mula banda, as the yogis would say.

  When it was over, he left the room, saying he needed to review my results. I knew from my research that he was doing no such thing; he was leaving me alone to increase my anxiety prior to the interrogation, the interrogation being the real point of the polygraph. The tactic worked; I was anxious. I sat there by myself, uncomfortable and apprehensive, nervously picking my nose until I realized that I was doing so in view of the tiny camera on the wall before me. I put my hands to my side and straightened myself.

  The polygrapher returned to the room. He sat down across from me and stared at me, his thin lips peevish and cold.

  “Selena, we seem to have a problem here,” he said.

  That was exactly what I’d read he would say. This was where, had I been lying, I was supposed to realize that the polygraph had trapped me and spill my guts. If I hadn’t been lying, I would simply be puzzled.

  “Problem?” I asked.

  “You showed a very strong reaction one of the questions. Do you know which one it was?”

  “Er, no, I’m afraid I don’t,” I said. You lamentable witch doctor.

  He leaned in and glared at me, eyes inches from mine. “The question was whether you’ve ever committed a crime.”

  Oops. Yep, that’s where I squeezed, all right. I guess
that wasn’t a control question. “I don’t understand that. I’ve never committed a crime,” I answered.

  “Well, the charts don’t lie. The charts are scientific. There’s got to be some reason they’re telling me that you haven’t been a hundred percent with us today.”

  Yes, sir, there is. I was squeezing my sphincter when I answered that question. “Well, perhaps I was a little nervous? Could we try that again?”

  “This isn’t something you just try until you get it right, Selena. This is science. The machine is a carefully calibrated scientific tool, and it is telling me that you have something you need to get off your chest.”

  Wrong part of the body, Columbo. I was angry with him and furious with myself. This would have gone fine if I hadn’t been, literally, a smart-ass. I explained again that I hadn’t lied, the irony of it being that I really hadn’t; and he explained to me that the charts never lie, and back and forth we went until he agreed to hook me up again. This time, I abandoned all scientific experimentation. When I left, he was still muttering over the charts.

  In all, I calculated that my chances of getting a security clearance were no better than half.

  · · ·

  It took them another three months to adjudicate my case, three months in which I ran to the phone every time it rang, like an impatient lover. When the call finally came, I had almost given up hope. But when the call did come at last, they told me I had been cleared to the Top Secret level. To this day I have no idea how I slipped through.

  They told me to report for duty in Washington in January, with the rest of my class of trainee spies.

  Training would take place over eighteen months and would be divided between the CIA’s headquarters in Langley and the mysterious facility they called the Farm. During that time, they warned me, I would be scrutinized carefully. At some point, I would be asked to jump from a plane. At the end of training, if I met their expectations, I would be taught a foreign language and then sent overseas. My destination would be determined by the needs of the service.