The pace of this job wouldn’t let up when training was over, they said; case officers worked equally long hours in the field. They rarely spent time with their own children, much less their sister’s. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever have children. I’d never seen the point of bringing a child into the world only to leave the poor creature with a nanny. Women in the Agency tended to stay single, because there weren’t many men willing to follow them around the world, playing tennis in the embassy compound in Ulan Bator while their wives disappeared for weeks or months at a stretch without word, afterward unable to tell them where they’d been. Women who were determined to wed tended to marry other case officers, but rarely with lasting success: The pressures of the job took too much out of marriages. One woman, now an instructor at the Farm, had set a record by marrying and divorcing four case officers in a row.
The men seemed to have less trouble finding women willing to follow their mysterious husbands from country to country. The newlywed wives usually described themselves as “really excited” by the prospect. But the rest of us knew that CIA men tended to take off their wedding rings as soon as they assumed an alias, as if the adoption of another name unburdened them of their marriage vows. The CIA protected the secrets of its officers’ indiscretions as vigorously as it did the details of its covert action programs: “What goes on in the field,” we were told, “stays in the field.”
After Iris and I finished our coffee, I walked back from the cafeteria to the block of shared offices where the students kept their computers and papers. I found Stan at his desk getting a head start on the evening’s homework. I kissed him and rubbed his neck as he leaned down to open his safe, trying to massage the rubbery knots of tension from his shoulders.
Out of the blue, Stan said: “Step back.”
“Excuse me?”
“Step back. You don’t need to know my combination.”
We all had exactly the same things in our safes: our textbooks, reports we had written on the same exercises, petty cash. I hadn’t meant to see his combination, but suddenly I wanted to know it.
“Selena, back off. I said that you don’t need to know the combination to my safe.”
“What’s the big secret? What do you think I’m going to do, sneak in under cover of darkness and steal your favorite pencil?” I didn’t budge.
“Get back. You don’t need to know the combination to my safe. We’re professionals. Part of our profession is good security—all the time. If you don’t make a habit of good security, it doesn’t become second nature. If it doesn’t become second nature, you might slip up one day when it counts. Would you want a surgeon who thought it wasn’t so important to count the sponges each time? Who thought, Ah, hell, I think I got ’em all?”
“Stan, you’re being a patronizing prick. Don’t talk to me like that. Screw you and your pencils,” I said. I walked away, stung.
He knocked on my door a few hours later. “I stand by what I said, but I said it like a jerk. We’re both overtired. Let’s not take it out on each other. I’m an asshole, but I love you.”
I didn’t want to fight either. I pulled him toward me. We spent the night close in each other’s arms.
The next day was a Friday, and on Saturday we drove back to Washington and Stan took me to the National Zoo. The scented gardens were in bloom. The animals were gay and fractious, swinging merrily from their vines, roaring and galloping, swatting flies with their tails, displaying their insolent rumps.
“Come on,” he said. “The otters are my favorites.” He dragged me by the hand, almost trotting himself, to the otters’ den, where a male and a female were sunning themselves on a rock. The female was trying to snooze in the afternoon breeze, but the male would have none of it. He didn’t seem to be amorous, as far as we could tell, but he seemed desperate for her attention. He capered madly to impress her. He tossed twigs in the air and caught them, nudged her with his nose, poked her with his flipper-paws, danced on his hind legs.
Stan put words in the animal’s mouth: “Look at me! Look at me! Wanna swim? Wanna roll around in the mud? Mud’s great today! Real warm! C’mon, wake up! Look at me! I’m cute, aren’t I? Clever, too! C’mon! Let’s toss twigs!”
Finally, the female rolled over, swatted her mate soundly, then trundled off to another rock to get some peace and quiet. From then on, whenever Stan wanted my attention, he would pretend to be an otter clapping his paws.
By now he had lost more than twenty pounds. His serious clothes were loose. He didn’t have the bones for handsomeness—his nose and eyes would always be too small—but one could see that if he continued to slim, his doughy ungainliness would be replaced by a pleasing sturdiness. His face no longer looked overstuffed; his chin was shrinking into proportion with his features. His thighs still looked thick, but he no longer lumbered in quite the same effortful way. He was still pale, but the nightly exertions at the gym seemed to have put a bloom in his cheeks. That weekend he didn’t shave, and the dark red shadow on his face subtly transfigured him. His earnestness was obscured; he looked instead like a man with passion and a complicated pirate’s soul. I found that exciting. The otter never managed to attract the female’s attention, but when we went home, Stan had mine, all of it, and afterward I rubbed his belly and told him that he was a very good otter indeed.
Days later, the Deutch scandal made the headlines again. The former Director of Central Intelligence had placed his private diary on an unsecured computer in his home, and in that diary he had detailed the most sensitive of the CIA’s covert action programs. He had then used that computer to surf the Internet and to exchange e-mail with foreigners—one of them a Russian, no less. His unsupervised teenage son, poor horny lummox, had used the same computer to frequent the Web’s more exotic pornography libraries, unaware that he would not only be caught by his parents consorting with amateur housewives, which I’m sure was bad enough, but that his fetishes would become the subject of a federal investigation.
Every two or three weeks, a new development in the story made the front page of The Washington Post. The investigators suspected that Deutch had hoped to cover up the evidence by deleting the incriminating files—which, as he should have known, can never truly be done except when you really need to get the document back. His allies at the Agency had sought to sweep the whole business under the carpet and would have succeeded but for a whistle-blower in the Office of Security, who brought the matter to the attention of certain very interested chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence committees. The scandal exploded.
Dr. Deutch had been a chemistry professor at MIT before becoming Director of Central Intelligence, and his tenure at the Agency had been wildly unpopular. He was reputed to be both arrogant and ignorant of the CIA’s culture. My colleagues said that he had been considered an outsider, some kind of intellectual—and when they used this word, it did not seem to be a term of esteem. The scandal proved what everyone had always suspected: Despite his fancy degrees, the man was a moron.
Deutch’s parents had grown up in Germany, as my grandmother had, and, like her, had fled the Nazis in terror. My grandmother—not surprisingly, given her life story—could discern subtle anti-Semitism in a bowl of noodle soup. “This Deutch business reminds me too much of the Dreyfus affair,” she said.
I reassured her: “No, Grandma, what he did was really very serious.” I added, “If I had done the same thing, they’d be just as hard on me.”
Stan told me that Deutch had never wanted to be Director of Central Intelligence. He had been aiming for secretary of defense, and his appointment to the CIA was a consolation prize. Not much of a consolation, Stan added, given that Deutch had always disliked the Agency. Deutch found espionage distasteful and thought the organization was comprised of congenital liars. I don’t know how Stan knew this. Stan always knew the most intimate gossip about the Agency’s senior ranks. He knew who was in, who was out, who was up, who was down, who was sleeping with whom; he knew who really pulled the
strings and who was just a figurehead. He calculated out loud, deciding which instructors were important to cultivate and which ones weren’t worth the time. “Did you see the way Hertz wouldn’t give up the podium for Simpson this morning? Power struggle. Hertz is going to crush him. Hertz has Panther’s ear—did you notice them together in the cafeteria last Wednesday when he came down from Headquarters?” Linus Panther, the head of the Clandestine Service, was pretty much at the top of the Agency’s food chain.
I hadn’t noticed, no.
While we were lying in bed one night at the Farm, I asked Stan whether Deutch’s actions were truly as reckless as they’d been portrayed—was it really possible that a hostile power had penetrated his computer via the Internet? Or was that just scaremongering, as my grandmother suspected? “You better believe it,” Stan answered grimly. “Likely, even. When you log on, your computer belongs to the whole planet. You might as well just take off your panties and spread your legs.”
I thought about the messages I’d sent my mother and my sister when I’d told them how I’d flunked surveillance detection and was afraid of losing my job. It wasn’t much of a gaffe—it was a handful of messages among billions in the ether. I hadn’t said anything that important, but I’d sure never do it again.
Stan was a hobbyist; he collected stamps, coins, even Oriental rugs. In all of these enthusiasms he was an expert. His passion, though, was fish—not tropical fish but goldfish. As a child he had tended an extensive aquarium, carefully measuring the temperature and saline levels of the water, sending away for newer and more exotic species by mail order. He had once owned two rare Japanese goldfish, named Milton and Sheldrake. They had accompanied him across the country to law school and back, living a dozen years before dying peacefully of old age. He hadn’t owned fish in ages, he told me, but he missed watching them in their tank. “Watching fish swim is so calming that it actually changes your brain waves,” he said. “I saw an interesting study.”
I surprised him one day with two baby goldfish from the Fish ‘n’ Feather near the Farm. I bought a little tank and lined it with bright blue aquarium gravel and plastic plants. I stuck a plastic toad that appeared to be playing a banjo in the tank, although it refused to stay moored and bobbed insistently at the surface. I left the aquarium in his room as a surprise.
When he saw what I’d done, he hugged me tightly. He sat at the foot of his bed and watched them for almost an hour in a delighted, childish, innocently pudgy way. He named them Milton and Sheldrake the Second, and took exceedingly good care of them. Over the following weeks he bought a bigger tank, an oxygen filter, and a tank light. He threw out the bright blue gravel and replaced it with natural sand. He replaced the plastic plants with live ones and retired the banjo-playing toad to the closet. I was tickled that I’d made him so happy. I think we both imagined that raising goldfish together was the first step.
Sometimes, when there is no other way to get close to an especially interesting target, a case officer is forced simply to approach him in public as if by chance and strike up a conversation. In our next exercise, the instructors would play Swedish arms dealers whom we knew to have dealings with Iraq. I was told that mine stayed at the Ramada Inn whenever he visited Turkrapistan; surveillance teams had observed him taking his breakfast in the dining room at roughly eight each morning.
I was to find an excuse to approach him, and since we had no idea if he would welcome an overture from the CIA, I was to do so without raising his suspicions. My goal was somehow to befriend him and, if I judged him receptive, reveal my affiliation and persuade him to return to Iraq on the CIA’s behalf. I was to do this within four meetings. The target would be a man I had never seen before; this was often the case in the field. I was to look for someone in his early fifties, heavyset, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a ruddy complexion. That was all I knew.
I arrived at the lobby of the Ramada Inn at the appointed time, having spent several hours assuring myself that I wasn’t under surveillance. I saw him immediately; he was sitting alone in the dining room reading a paperback. Oh thank God, I thought. I’ve read that book. I strode over. “Hey! You’re reading A Tour of the Calculus! What a coincidence. I’m so glad I saw you. I just finished it last night, and I am so confused about the mean-value theorem. It’s driving me crazy! Do you understand it?”
“I haven’t reached that part yet,” he answered, putting the book down on the table and regarding me with real pleasure. “I’m only halfway through. But it’s a terrific book, isn’t it? I really love the author, he’s so poetic—”
We launched into an animated discussion of this book, other books, the teaching of mathematics in high school, literature in the late twentieth century. He was a soft touch. Some instructors were like that, and others were real brutes. I’d heard this was supposed to be a tough exercise; many of the instructors played this role close to the chest, refusing to engage in conversation, pretending to be annoyed by the intrusion. This one was doing all the talking, though, and it almost seemed he was hinting that he’d like to invite me to dinner, although that would have been far too easy: The exercise book said explicitly that finding an excuse for another meeting was my job.
“So,” he said after we’d been chatting for a quarter of an hour. “What do you do?”
I went along with the scenario from the exercise book. “Me? I’m a diplomat.”
“Really? What interesting work! What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’m posted here.”
He looked a little lost. “Here? What do you mean? Where do you work?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ve seen the building, it’s right by the Ministry of Defense, on the Street of the Martyrs of the Revolution, you know it? What about you? What part of Sweden are you from?”
Now he looked even more perplexed. “Sweden?”
Had he forgotten who he was supposed to be? The instructors played multiple roles, and sometimes they didn’t read the exercise books carefully. “Yes—Sweden? That is a Swedish accent you have, isn’t it?”
“No,” he looked at me, a baffled expression passing over his mild features. “It’s not.”
“I see—” I had a horrible feeling, a glimmer. “Where would you be from, then?”
“Uh, Baltimore?”
Son of a motherless goat!
Panicking—I was now late for my real meeting—I made my excuses as quickly as I could. But where was the real instructor? There he was, in the other corner. Salt-and-pepper beard; portly. I rushed over frantically and struck up a conversation. I asked him where he had bought his watch, told him I wanted to get the same kind for my father. When I looked up, I saw the first man staring at us, eyes round with bewilderment.
Of course, most of the longtime residents in the area knew perfectly well that they lived near a CIA training facility. One well-situated fence post in the nearest town bore over sixty inch-long chalk marks, and if you kicked over a rock in the countryside, you’d likely as not find a detailed diagram of the PFLT’s hillside training compound. So maybe he figured it out eventually.
The merry instructor who played the Swedish arms dealer didn’t hold my gaffe against me. He wrote a lovely review of my performance, calling me a natural, even including a little poem he’d composed about the mishap:
There once was a buxom young lass,
The belle of her espionage class,
When she asked some poor dweeb
If he might be a Swede,
He thought, “She’s got her head up her ass.”
I showed the poem to Stan. “What a fucking idiot,” he said.
“Oh, come on, it’s funny.”
“It might be funny, but he’ll get himself fired if he sends something like that to the wrong person. He’s an instructor; he’s in a position of power over you, and he’s sending you poetry about how buxom you are? Moron. And doesn’t he know you have a boyfriend?”
“I suppose. I still think it’s funny.”
Stan and I were
driving back to his apartment from the Farm the following week when I took a wrong turn. We ended up in the vicinity of my friend Byron’s house, and when I realized where we were, I asked Stan whether he’d like to call Byron and his wife and ask them out for a drink.
Byron worked on the Hill as a lobbyist for the National Apartment Dwellers Union—or something like that—it had to do with apartments, anyway. He was a handsome black man, entirely African in appearance, and an Orthodox Jew. He had his mother’s name as well as her blood—Byron Lefkowitz—and the congressmen to whom he introduced himself on the phone were often taken aback when he pitched up at their offices in the flesh: “You’re Lefkowitz?”
His wife had been a professional ballerina once, but she stayed home now with their two young daughters. I was fond of their family but hadn’t seen them for almost a year because I’d had no time, and besides, I felt weird lying to my friends about where I worked.
Stan said sure, he would be delighted to meet friends of mine, so I called them. Byron answered and sounded happy to hear from me, said it had been too long, he would love to meet Stan, what great news that I’d finally met a nice guy, and why didn’t we come over right now? His wife was preparing a barbecue—she’d bought way too much food—and no of course it wouldn’t be an imposition, not in the least. We agreed. On the drive over, Stan and I rehearsed the details of my cover and his, arranging a story to explain how we had met—in a wine-tasting class, we decided, in Washington.
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