by Nada Bakos
Despite my rocky high school transcripts, education for its own sake was always important to me. Even before my senior year in high school, in 1986, I enrolled in a pair of college courses at Montana State University, in nearby Bozeman. I lived for the summer with my brother, who by then worked at the school’s plant pathology lab as a researcher. I volunteered in the lab, charting plant growth, and took a communications class and a psychology class. After I received my final grade, my psychology professor suggested I take the GED so that I could start college courses right away in the fall and skip my last year of high school. That was an exciting proposition, but on the other hand, I was looking forward to the social part of being a high school senior. After giving it much thought, I stuck to the traditional route—but returned to MSU as a freshman in 1987. MSU offered a skiing course in the nearby Bridger Mountains as well as a colt-breaking class as part of its nationally recognized equine science program, and that pretty much sealed the deal.
Soon after arriving on campus, I joined three dozen other women in the Alpha Omicron Pi (AO∏) sorority, mainly because I’m an extroverted introvert and I thought it would mean an immediate group of people to socialize with. People have occasionally been surprised in the years since to hear that I was a “sorority girl.” I’ve never fit the preconception people have of that bubbly stock character; I’ve also always taken pride in defying pigeonholing, and that sorority did, too. It was full of artists, graphic designers, and future engineers and scientists. I learned very quickly how important that sort of old-fashioned social network could be.
One Monday night in mid-October, just weeks after starting my freshman year at MSU, three sorority sisters and I drove from AOΠ’s “big brick house” headquarters, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and West Garfield Street, through the leafy off-campus suburbs surrounding Montana State and over to the Sigma Chi fraternity. Shane—who’d enrolled in college in Utah—and I had agreed to put our relationship on hold for at least our freshman year in college, and Sigma Chi was known for having some of the nicest guys on campus.
There was an electricity in the air as I parked the car across the street from the fraternity and headed off on foot across South Willson Avenue, a simple two-lane road that draws its fair share of lead-footed motorists speeding north and south along Bozeman’s eastern edge. We were talking about our outfits and anticipating what the night might have in store. And then memories stop.
According to eyewitness and police reports, a blocky white Ford Bronco II sport utility vehicle came flying around the corner. It swerved hard to the left, careened across the street, and slammed directly into us. I can’t imagine we had any time to react; I apparently took the driver’s-side mirror off with my head. There are some thirty minutes of my life that have been almost completely blacked out in my mind, save the image of my friend Heidi’s long blond hair splayed out next to me in a pool of blood. I wanted to yell her name, not knowing if she was dead, but I blacked out again. The next thing I do remember after the accident is hearing an EMT, kneeling next to the parked car I’d been thrown into, yelling to bring me back into consciousness. Heidi was in the same ambulance, and they told me she was going to be okay.
Kurt, my childhood friend from across the street, was one of the first people to make it to the emergency room at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital after I woke up. He took one look at my swollen eyes and nose—and at the open wounds on my face from skidding across the street—and fainted. That was my first indication that things were pretty rough.
But another thing I remember still powerfully: the AO∏ sisters were incredibly supportive, and so were many of the men of Sigma Chi. Several arrived at the hospital before even my family could make it. On that day, I formed a bond that has carried across decades—through marriages, divorce, health scares, and more. It’s one I’ve sought to re-create in the circles of women I would later meet on teams everywhere from Langley to Baghdad. In particular, Vicki Sherick, my big sister in the house, was my anchor of stability for much of that first year after the accident. Without her positivity and gentle care for a person she’d met only days earlier, I’m not sure how things would have gone.
That support was even more significant because the doctors at the hospital seemed less than engaged with my case. They clearly felt I was some neurasthenic creature complaining about pain. For five days I recovered there with little medical assistance beyond a leg brace to alleviate the pressure on my right knee, even though I was regularly coughing up blood. It wasn’t until weeks later that my aunt drove me to a specialist who took a few X-rays and said, “You’ve suffered internal bleeding as well as torn ligaments and cartilage in your knee. I am not sure what damage the internal bleeding has done.”
Unfortunately, the legal recourse I sought didn’t go much better. The night of the accident, the driver had tried to flee the scene, but a crew of Sigma Chi brothers had surrounded the Bronco to block his path until Bozeman police arrived. The authorities, however, didn’t give him a Breathalyzer test for something like eight hours, and by then the booze had worn off. He eventually walked away with a “careless driving” citation.
A year after the accident, Shane, my high school boyfriend, transferred to Montana State, and he found an apartment near campus. Some of that likely had to do with being there for me, but at the same time Shane was narrowing his sights on a career and MSU offered more options for him than the junior college he attended in Utah did. I’d never really dated anyone seriously except Shane, and I felt conflicted about the decision. I loved the camaraderie of the sisters at AO∏. And by then, Shane had begun to feel more like a great roommate than a boyfriend. He may have felt the same way, though at the age of twenty-one, neither of us understood the difference. Still, I did miss him, and it was nice to have someone to think through the future with.
I raced to catch up on credits I missed after a freshman year cut short by the accident and the subsequent surgery and rehabilitation I underwent to repair my knee. Ultimately I decided to transfer to the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, for my senior year. By then I’d become an economics major, and Montana State offered only an agricultural economics degree at the time, which seemed far too narrow a focus and far too similar to the life I’d already lived. I wanted to learn about whatever it was that existed outside my comfort zone, and Utah offered an economics program with an international focus. Shane, being at that point a year ahead of me academically, had recently graduated, which meant that he would be free to follow me to our new home in Salt Lake City, Utah. It would be the grand start of our new life together.
Days prior, on a sweltering August Saturday in 1991, Shane and I had stood in the basement of Denton’s tiny Methodist church—the one for which my great-grandfather had built the pews, altar, and baptismal font. Shane looked dashing in his tan tuxedo; I wore a silk wedding dress my grandmother had bought for me in Lewistown. Shane had just turned twenty-two. I’d turned twenty-two the day after he did.
Standing in that church basement playing with our black two-year-old Saint Bernard–Lab mix, Nixon, who was wearing a white bow tie, we’d listened as seemingly the entire town arrived at the church and found their seats in the pews above us. I was antsy. The back door was open on that boiling summer Saturday; we both walked toward it to catch a bit of the early afternoon breeze.
He cast a nervous glance at me. “Should we get out of here?” he said.
“Oh, God, can we?” I said. “With all these people here?”
Shane and I stood quietly in that doorway until we eventually turned and walked upstairs together. After the wedding we moved to Salt Lake City, and I prepared for my senior year.
Soon after starting at the University of Utah, I met an economics professor, Dr. Rajani Kanth, who influenced my next path, after college; in the years since I took his courses, Dr. Kanth has held visiting professorships at Duke, Harvard, Oxford, and Tufts. I was so taken with his classes that I blew right past my required graduation credits, moving on to graduate
-level economics classes before ever receiving my degree. Thanks to that drive—and because in 1992, I graduated right into the tail end of a recession—Dr. Kanth suggested that I continue my studies at one of his previous teaching locations: Jawaharlal Nehru University, or JNU, in New Delhi, India. With his help, I enrolled in one of JNU’s yearlong graduate programs, focusing on a burgeoning agricultural-feminist movement flourishing in the northern part of the country. Shane, who was still settling on what his future would hold for a career, decided to join me on this adventure.
At the time, my international travel experience was limited to one college spring break in Mexico and a few trips to Canada, so in retrospect, I’m really not sure how I expected things to go. To the uninitiated, New Delhi is a climate of extremes: scorching summers lead to blinding monsoons before autumn tumbles into dreary, foggy winters. Montana had prepared me for unpredictable weather. The stray dogs were a nuisance, the wild monkeys were highly entertaining and feisty—and the bureaucracy throughout the nation at the time had very little to offer in terms of clarity. The best example of that was when JNU “mismanaged” its enrollment list for the coming semester. Two days before classes were to start, my admissions status was unclear, though they happily offered to rectify their error for a gargantuan fee. There was no way I could, or would, pay, so I asked to audit courses until the enrollment issue was resolved. Eventually they allowed that. I was mesmerized by the colors of India and the engaging landscape. I was hoping to make this work, but it seemed increasingly less likely.
With all the potential for culture shock, I thought I might be completely overwhelmed. But I wasn’t. I was interested in the cultural dynamics and the everyday patterns of the locals: where they shopped, how they got around, how women bargained with merchants and kept men from bothering them. I wanted to appear local, to fit into an urban landscape I had never experienced before. I was slowly cracking the code of the city’s inner logic, and except for the snafu at the university and a food-borne illness, I loved almost every minute of it.
Shane, however, never felt the same way. He longed to be back in Montana, starting his own career. I knew how he felt. His frustration turned into bitterness, which then became resentfulness.
Finally, the tension—coupled with my dwindling faith that the administrative issues at JNU would ever be resolved—became too much to bear. We gave up on India, and we spent the money we’d saved for our time abroad bouncing around Europe. We eventually settled back in Missoula, Montana, where Shane enrolled at the School of Law at the University of Montana.
When we’d headed off to New Delhi, I’d had lofty visions of a nonprofit career spent helping to improve the lives of women and children in agrarian and rural societies around the world. Back in Missoula, however, a different sort of reality set in, and to help pay for our house, my horses, and our expenses, I took a nine-to-five job at a local bank. At least I had a bachelor’s degree in economics. I felt confident that I could do the work of an entry-level loan officer. But those were the jobs being given to equally qualified male applicants.
Instead the bank offered me a position as a teller. I worked behind the drive-through window listening to the whoosh of the pneumatic tube, spending my days cashing checks and telling people how to fill out a deposit slip.
I became resentful. I didn’t want to live in Montana at this point in my life, and I certainly didn’t want to work the pneumatic tube. I still had dreams of a life overseas, and every day at the bank I began to feel like the walls were closing in on me. In my restlessness, I took a job in organizational development in human resources at a nearby metals-mining company. Somehow, seven years melted away.
By then Shane and I fought more often than not—about past frustrations we couldn’t let go of and about a future that seemed increasingly hard to picture. And in April of 1998, we had to let our dog, Nixon, go after he suffered a bout with cancer and underwent a thirty-day experimental treatment at Colorado State University. Nixon was the glue that kept us together for a while. He seemed wiser than both of us put together. Shane began staying out late with the friends he’d made in law school. I put in long hours at the office. We saw each other and spoke to each other less than we ever had. Eventually, and yet somehow suddenly at all once, we realized there was nothing left to be said.
I’m still sad to think that our marriage almost permanently ruined a great friendship. I know that at the age of twenty-two neither of us had any real grasp of who we were or of the sacrifices and compromises marriage entailed or of the pitfalls that might lie ahead. Thankfully, our divorce was amicable. He even officially requested annual “visitation rights” to my grandmother’s farm for her famous raspberry-rhubarb pie.
We divided our debt, and I quit my job. I packed my Ford F-150 with no plan other than a destination: Washington, DC. I was sure I could find a job there that would let me make a difference in the world, that would take me overseas—that would do the things I’d felt I wasn’t accomplishing in Montana.
I started the ignition and aimed for the East Coast. Thirty hours later, I arrived at a one-bedroom “English basement” apartment in the bottom of a row house on the north side of Dupont Circle. My rent cost nearly twice as much as I’d paid each month for our mortgage in Montana. But that holiday season in 1999, I forgot all about those things during my evening walks along Massachusetts Avenue, with its blocks of lights and holiday decorations sparkling along Embassy Row.
I had no job in hand when I arrived and no particular job in mind. I had just turned thirty and wasn’t entirely sure what I could parlay my résumé into. But I knew the nation’s capital was the nerve center for the State Department and was home to nonprofits such as Amnesty International and the Washington delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Any of those seemed like great places to work. Even just exploring the city, I found myself inspired by overhearing work conversations on the Metro. The city seemed like the perfect place to relaunch my career, this time with a global focus.
One particular organization stuck out in my mind. By the time I’d moved, my mom had remarried, and as I papered DC with my résumé, I remembered an ad her husband had shown me in the Economist. It announced an upcoming hiring spree at the Central Intelligence Agency. “Don’t think,” he had said. “Just apply. Why not?”
On the Agency’s website, I found an opening for an organizational development analyst, focusing on internal institutional design and supporting “data-driven management strategies and strategic workforce planning objectives.” It had significant crossover with organizational development work; the Agency was looking for someone with a business background to devise and implement an organizational strategy inside a massive bureaucratic government entity. It was a job I was qualified for, and at the very least, I figured, it was a gateway to an organization I’d been fascinated with for some time. If I could get my foot in the door, I figured, I could get a great overview of how things work there and then carve out my own path.
That was an invaluable thread of optimism to cling to during an otherwise unsettled time. My grandmother had advised me not to make too many grand life changes at once, yet in the previous few months I’d gotten divorced, quit my job, and moved across the country to a city where I knew hardly anyone—and then, soon after my arrival in DC, Grandpa had a stroke. Days after I submitted my application to the CIA, I got a call from my mother telling me that if I wanted to say goodbye, I had to come right away.
I landed that night at Billings Logan International Airport and drove ninety minutes in a rental car to the hospital. I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d say when I saw my grandfather. For most of my childhood, he’d been the only real male role model I’d had. Peering into his hospital room, I felt helpless at the site of that large, forceful man struggling to breathe. My mom, her sisters, and my grandmother had gathered around his bedside. Noticing me in the hall, my mother motioned for me to join them.
I walked over to my grandfather’s bed and wrappe
d my hands around his. Even in his old age, they remained toughened from decades of farming. I thought about those hands on the combine steering wheel next to mine decades earlier, when he’d taught me how to drive it. My grandfather’s eyes were closed; I watched his chest rise and fall. “I love you and it’s okay if you want to go, Grandpa. We will be okay,” I said. Ten minutes later, he drew in one last deep breath and was gone. My grandmother hugged me. “I think he was waiting until you got here,” she said.
Amid that backdrop, any response to my CIA application would have been a welcome surprise. I was back home in DC a few days later, sitting in front of my laptop computer, reading the news and devouring a tray of takeout sushi, when the phone call came. I glanced at the caller ID as I propped the phone on my shoulder. It read BLOCKED.
“Hello?” I said.
The caller said she was from the Agency recruiting office. I leaped to my feet—and dumped wasabi and soy sauce all over my keyboard.
“Shit!” I mouthed. Or at least I think I mouthed it, because the caller went silent for a moment. Then she picked back up with a few preliminary interview questions. A few minutes later she asked, “Can you come in for a formal interview?”
I flipped the laptop over and tried to shake the soy sauce out of the keyboard.
“Sure,” I said.
A week later, a package of paperwork in a plain brown envelope with a return address of “Recruitment Center” arrived in the mail. I noticed that it came from the Agency’s telltale 20505 zip code, and I tore it open. Inside I found a giant application, various other forms to complete, and even a suggested reading list featuring memoirs by prior directors of the Agency. I’d never been simultaneously so excited and terrified to fill out paperwork. The opportunity represented everything I’d hoped for when I’d left Montana.