Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  * * *

  —

  Angleton was the start of that culture. The counterespionage folks constitute a small group within the Counterintelligence Center, not exactly a center of excellence in my opinion. I mean, if you can’t gather intelligence, you’re put in counterintelligence, like Putin. If you’re a star they want you out on the street, shaking down Russians or Yemenis or, as was the case in my case, Chinese. If you’re a star you don’t sit at a desk. At least not a counterintelligence desk. These were the dumbest people at the Agency with the exception of the people in security.

  * * *

  —

  They do have a silver bullet. Or perhaps I should call it the absence of a bullet. They don’t have the burden of proof. They have no standard. You are guilty as charged because they feel you’re guilty as charged. A polygraph is a Rorschach test, Anna. A polygraph is a hammer in search of a nail. Like the Bavarian Illuminati, the absence of proof becomes proof itself. If you’re under suspicion, you’re under suspicion. Sic erat scriptum. Only there is no script. Once the poly is complete it’s sent to Quality Control. Yes, “quality control,” for a coin flip at the circus.

  They don’t let you leave believing you passed. You’re supposed to leave that room, return home, panic, then come back and tell them all the things you thought about overnight. Come back and confess. I remember one conversation. It went like this:

  POLYGRAPHER: Why don’t you respect this process?

  ME: I’ve read the literature.

  POLYGRAPHER (horrified): Why did you read the literature?

  ME: I don’t know—I want to be educated?

  POLYGRAPHER: I don’t understand.

  ME: Exactly.

  For a long time I thought that all that this problem needed was a little adult supervision. I was wrong. I had a close friend in the general counsel’s office, a serious attorney, Yale Law and all that. Some of those attorneys process the polygraphs. They also see the admissions, some made under the duress of the poly, some given freely. And there are serious admissions. You know, so-and-so was in Vietnam and threw a kid out of a helicopter. That’s a serious admission. Admitting you had dinner with a Chinese girl once during your tour in Asia is not a serious admission. But these are people who have likely known China only via eating spring rolls at Tysons Corner. So what do they know. Throw a kid from a helicopter. Think about that. There is a spectrum of serious and there is a spectrum of crime. The process of the poly explodes and mocks these spectrums.

  The person who invented the polygraph is William Marston, whose other great achievement in life was writing the Wonder Woman cartoons. Do you remember her magic golden lasso of truth. We’re talking about magic lassos. We’re talking about you, in a freezing room, in this high-backed chair with tubes strapped on to you. When I asked them, “What are you looking for,” their response was, “You’re not adequately respecting this process.”

  * * *

  —

  I find it interesting that when a theory of enhanced interrogations was required, no one called in the polygraphers. Though I shouldn’t say that. That’s not adequately respecting the process, is it. Your father only wanted to do the right thing, which in my case was saving a life.

  Koan.

  Anna learned from her father that the word koan came from the Chinese. He explained how it was a compound of two characters: the character 公—public, official, governmental, common, collective, fair, equitable; and the character 案—table, desk, case as in law case, record, file, plan, proposal. It amused him that what one might misread as governmental plan or official record was a thing neither certain nor clear. “Plans and records tell us what will happen, or what has happened,” he would say. He loved the idea of koans, that they are questions posing as riddles, questions not designed to teach by providing answers but rather by freeing a mind, by provoking doubt and confusion. “Why do I need to provoke doubt and confusion” Anna would ask. “I’m a teenage girl—I’m already mired in all that.” On the night before her college graduation, the koans came up again. They’d gone for ice cream at the local place—her father always asked for vanilla in a sugar cone. They’d walked back to her dorm and into her room, which was empty except for the bed, and boxes. Looking at the boxes, she teased her father, “I feel doubt and confusion are provoking me.”

  Even then she knew certainty isn’t any more useful than that summa cum laude. Doubt, now we’re talking. Her father had put his arm around her which was his way of saying he understood. She would have liked to stay academic after school, but life intervened. After school she was living at home, sleeping in her childhood bed, and eating alone most nights. She wasn’t making any money and felt anxious about that though her father would always say, “Money’s not the metric,” by which he meant the metric for a life deeply lived. Depth is elusive in your early twenties, and Anna was no exception. Everything at that time felt temporary and light. And yet she was changing. She was growing out of the girl she had been, out of optimism. Studying Russian novels or koans had once struck her as serious. Later these things would strike her as silly. Literature, ha. Enlightenment, Anna would tell her twenty-two-year-old self, employed at the Ford Foundation, how absurd. In this way she was growing, yes, but she was also letting go of something she perhaps wasn’t even aware she once had: faith in herself. It was only much later that Anna welcomed faith back and in doing so finally understood what the metric is.

  Q.

  A.

  There’s terrorism and there’s long-term strategic interests. Some might say fighting terrorists is a clearer game, with a more immediately identifiable set of risks and rewards. Others will argue espionage in essence is about the long-range, about understanding enemies operating on a different clock. It’s chess versus checkers. Your father preferred chess.

  * * *

  —

  China is the second-largest economy now, and gaining. Soon they will overtake us in everything. Even though it’ll be a while, they’ll eventually also overtake us in technological capabilities. The time it will take for that depends on how much they can steal, and how quickly. We say they’re trailing us, yes, but you see they can simply steal what’s new. Morality is a different concept to them. They’re not Catholic. They don’t have guilt. It’s almost imperative, in their view, to steal to get ahead, especially from foreigners. I am talking about a people I love. I am talking about a country I love. I am talking about a service I admire. If you have empathy, you can understand. It’s a question of culture.

  * * *

  —

  Chinese intelligence describes itself as having a “thousand grains of sand” philosophy. What does American intelligence do when it wants to know what the beach at Cap d’Antibes is like. It enlists the National Reconnaissance Office to take and study satellite images of the Mediterranean. It orders the National Security Agency to bug phone calls coming to and from the area. CIA sends in a human agent, he or she walks around, eats a crepe, speaks to surfers. The navy commands a sub to troll the coast.

  If Chinese intelligence wants to know what the beach at Cap d’Antibes is like, they send a thousand tourists there. “Tourists.” Each tourist collects a single grain of sand. Then those tourists return to China, and Chinese intelligence rebuilds that beach, at their base, one grain at a time.

  * * *

  —

  The China Ops course takes place in a little white house on the Langley grounds. It’s exclusive. Say we have a case officer in Africa who’s beginning to develop a Chinese asset. CIA will invite that officer home and he can spend a few days in that house learning how to recruit a Chinese official. You’re not learning tricks, really. It’s more of an emotional, cultural education. You often have the Old Wise Men, senior officers working in China, come and talk. It’s cerebral, and not boring. In an office like China Ops, there’s no sharing or trust; it’s hard to learn. Th
e little white house was an exception to that. There, people opened up. People talked about their lives and conversations had a different depth. That house is where I learned about the grains of sand. It’s where I listened to a lecture on Chinese prison protocols, delivered by your father. He knew some things. And he always cut the hard parts with humor.

  * * *

  —

  We were taught about the Chinese “century of humiliation,” how even during the founding of the Communist Party, millions of Chinese died. We learned how in the eighties, China started to get its shit together and now she’s riding high. Look at a map. Hong Kong. Macau. Taiwan, soon. They have border disputes with every single one of their neighbors. Every truck you see in Africa is Chinese. That’s soft power. Now they’re in talks to build a base in Afghanistan, the Middle East, think about that. They have one aircraft carrier, the United States has eleven. Eleven isn’t so many more than one.

  * * *

  —

  Americans may have the idea of being American, but not in the same way the Chinese have the idea of being Chinese. There are people who identify as Chinese who haven’t been to China for generations. Go to Vietnam, or Malaysia. You’ll find a lot of leaders in those places who self-identify as Chinese, and that has implications. My family originally came from Scotland but if someone said, “Hey, we’d like you to spy for Scotland,” I’d tell them to fuck off. Imagine a nation at once aggressive and untested militarily. Picture a child with a gun. Wait, a child with a nuclear weapon. This seems to me like a huge strategic problem. I mean, larger than guys running around Iraq and Syria waving black flags.

  * * *

  —

  Asia is interesting and important to CIA for a number of reasons. Malaysia was the place where all the key 9/11 hijackers met before the attacks. Indonesia was the place where the majority of Al Qaeda bombings, through its regional affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah, took place in the early 2000s. And let’s not forget North Korea. I’d define a thirty-year-old with an atomic bomb as a problem, not that age is always correlated with wisdom. Kissinger was barely forty when he served as foreign policy adviser to the Rockefeller campaign. Kissinger understood China. He knew China would never be a case of Here comes another bomb plot—let’s put measures in place to prevent it; the Chinese don’t think that way. To understand someone else you must see her as she sees you. To understand China you must see her as she sees you. Kissinger understands the answer to the question What does a problem look like when it cooks for a decade, or three, rather than an hour. It looks like the South China Sea.

  Buddhists.

  In her early thirties, Anna attended the wedding of a family friend in Klosters. The groom was a young British filmmaker who had spent time finding himself after Oxford, and when he found himself he found religion, too. He had become a Buddhist. The bride seemed fine with that, and no one pressed back on what it really meant. The dinner following the ceremony, which had taken place in the small, stone village church, was on top of the mountain. Guests had to ride the gondola up, and while it was June, it was cold, and boys were offering girls blazers. The best man, who definitely wasn’t Buddhist, offered his to Anna. It was almost dark by the time everyone reached the top, where there were waiters in a long line as they exited the cars, each waiter holding a roll of colored fabric to offer to the guests. Unfurled, those rolls revealed themselves to be Bhutanese prayer flags. Anna watched as her old friends tied flags to a wire the bride had had suspended from two chairlift poles, her gift to the groom. “To bless the marriage,” she told people. Though even absent the blessing, the visual effect was stunning. Everyone angled iPhones to catch the colors against the light. Anna’s father put his arm around her and she remembered thinking he was going to say something about marriage, something about one day her prince would come, or maybe even something about her mother, who wasn’t there, who hadn’t been there in some time, speaking of prayers. Instead he said, “Belief isn’t for the faint of heart.” He wasn’t mocking the flags exactly, he was stating a case. Anna didn’t go home that night with her father she went home with the best man who was roguish and drunk so in the morning, over late croissants, her father expressed concern about her choices. This was becoming a talk they had regularly, as she entered the era when everything was seen through the lens of finding a future, and a family.

  “Only, the thing is, I knew,” she said, deflecting, as if knowing made it acceptable, or painless. “I knew what I was doing.”

  * * *

  —

  The hotel’s little breakfast room was filled with couples, ones who’d hooked up the night before which is to say ones who’d happily slept in. Anna imagined them all moving swiftly from flirtations and first kiss to a second then third child, haloed in the confidence that comes from getting it right. She had never had that confidence; she was chronically convinced she would never get it right, all evidence to the contrary. Which is perhaps why she so often threw the game.

  “How are you,” her father said, breaking the silence. They hadn’t connected for a meal in some time; he’d been busy.

  “I don’t know, I think I am slightly tired of waiting.”

  “Waiting for what. One can’t rush it,” he said.

  “Rush what, life?”

  “Life, love. Cheese soufflé. You really can’t rush anything.”

  “Yes, it’s all marathons, not races, isn’t it.”

  “Marathons, not sprints, darling. A marathon is a race,” he said. She was looking at the best man, who sort of careened into the room without acknowledging her. He possessed that obscene yet casual pride only the really pretty ones can carry off. She looked at him but she spoke to her father.

  “How do you always get it right. How do you always know?”

  “When someone tells you who they are, you listen,” he said. And then he looked at the best man, who was lighting a Marlboro in sly disregard for rule. “People usually tell you.”

  * * *

  —

  Within six months he would purchase the chalet in Switzerland and announce his intention to spend winters there. “Are you becoming a Buddhist,” Anna would tease. For years, whenever she thought about Switzerland, she thought less about prayers and more about that breakfast, what they’d discussed, this idea that people tell you who they are. As of people, so of things: A thing can elicit emotion, too, can tell you what it is, and you should believe it when it tells you. Sometimes a thing looks like a riddle when it’s a clue. The thing that arrived in Anna’s mail after her father died, after the burial and the honeymoon, looked like a riddle but was actually a clue. It was trying to tell her something. You might say it was shouting.

  Q.

  A.

  I thought it would be useful for my advancement to have studied in China, but the people in the Office of Security have the final say on everything that could count as a threat. They determine if and when you come or go, stay or leave. And they know that they won’t ever really lose touch with you. They know that you know once you enter, you will be reporting back to them in ways for the rest of your life. You want to take a course on seventeenth-century poetry after you’ve left the Agency? Well, if you write a paper on John Donne that you want to publish in The New York Review of Books, you will have to submit a request.

  * * *

  —

  Documents provide a record, of course. And in theory what we’re recording is the truth. If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen. My favorite document is the “Unofficial Foreign Contact Report.” Any foreigner with whom you have a close and continual relationship requires this form. Close and continual has a bit of a muddy definition but it’s essentially anyone you are close to, or who has unescorted access to your house. A maid. A driver. A lover.

  These reports are like vitamins, never at the top of your list. Though God forbid you come home and haven’t filled them out properly, you’re crucif
ied. Whatever excuse you come up with is interpreted as a lie or a cover, which it may well be. Yes, it’s ironic. We were in the business of learning to lie, only don’t lie back to the Mothership. “Don’t bait the Bavarian Illuminati,” your father would say.

  Heaven.

  Inside the package she received after the avalanche, after the delayed honeymoon, Anna found a tiny silver USB she of course immediately opened. On it was a collection of videos, divided neatly into “chapters,” each titled with one word. The first, “Rooms,” opened with a little boy talking about Heaven and God. A voice-over, set against a black screen.

  There is a room where you go and you can know that God exists. And there is a room where one knows that the sun always comes up. And also there is a room where one goes to die. A room where one rests after dying. And also there is a room where one goes to understand. And also there is a room, where one dies.

  This vision of Heaven was the exact vision of Heaven her father had once described to her. “If Heaven exists, what do you think it’s like,” she’d asked, after friends had gone partying and crashed their car and one was in critical condition.