The Reluctant Spy (4 page)

He asked how my job search was going.

Not so well, I told him, explaining that I was getting married in June and, because I needed income, had accepted the job at OPM.

“Well, have you ever given any thought to working at the CIA?”

“No, not serious thought.” And I hadn't: I knew the CIA did analytical work, as well as all the spying, but it seemed to me as alien a government employer as NASA or the National Institutes of Health.

It turned out that Dr. Post, because of his love for the agency, tried to identify potential CIA candidates among the undergraduate and especially graduate student body at GW. He told me he'd been impressed by my analytical and writing skills in his class, and it seemed clear, he added, that I had a great interest in foreign affairs and international power politics. He didn't know whether the CIA and I would be a fit, but I was clearly interested in government service, he said, and the work at the agency might appeal to me. At a minimum, it couldn't hurt to have some preliminary conversations with CIA people.

He was right. Given my job search to date, what did I have to lose? Dr. Post picked up the phone and dialed up a guy he called Bill.
He described my academic background and said a few nice things about me, then suggested to Bill that the two of us get together.

Less than a half hour later, I was ringing the buzzer to an unmarked office in an unmarked building in suburban Virginia, just across the Potomac River. A buzzer let me in, and Bill identified himself, first name only. We chatted for twenty minutes or so—in part about me, in part about the CIA, or at least the sanitized, unclassified version of the role the agency plays in the U.S. government and in the world. He asked whether I was game to take the next step in applying for employment. “Yes,” I told him.

“Can you be at the GW medical school auditorium on Saturday at eight a.m.?” The reason, he said, was a battery of tests to determine whether interested candidates would move on to the next round or be shown the door.

Perhaps two hundred people showed up that Saturday morning; the vast majority, I would learn later, had answered a CIA recruiting ad. The drill involved three tests. First, they gave each of us a map of the world that had the borders of all the countries but no names; we had to fill in the country names. A lot of people, otherwise well educated, have trouble with this kind of exercise. They tend to identify large land-mass countries easily enough—China, India, Russia—but smaller countries often trip them up. Think for a minute about the countries in Central America or parts of Africa. But I'd spent all those years as a child staring at the world map in my radio room. This was a breeze for map freaks.

Then it was on to a multiple-choice test. I still remember one question in particular: “The prime minister of Greece is (a) Andreas Papandreou, (b) U Thant, (c) Mao Tse-tung, or (d) Leonid Brezhnev.” I'd had a paper route for five years as a kid and had read my product every day. And I was Greek. Still, this struck me as fairly elementary stuff for folks thinking about a career at the CIA. You didn't need to read
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
. All you had to do is look at the front pages every day.

Finally, they gave us an extensive psychological exam. Most of the hundreds of questions were agree/disagree, such as “I like boxing.” Well, I don't really have a strong position on boxing one way or the other, but there was no third option; it was either yes or no, agree or disagree. Just pencil in the appropriate circle. Okay, “I like boxing.” Then, three hundred questions later, you'd get the same question again. I suppose you could have riffled back to the earlier question, but it would have been difficult, given the sea of penciled-in circles, and I didn't. It made me wonder what they learned about us from this kind of test, presumably not only from the answers but from contradictory answers. “My father was the disciplinarian in our house.” Yes or no? There was no way I could screw up when that one was repeated. Answer: Yes, sir.

We had until noon, four hours in all, to finish these tests. I was done by 10:15 or so, got up, handed my booklet to the proctor, and walked out. I had absolutely no idea what to expect next.

A week later, Bill called. “Congratulations,” he said. “You blew the doors off those tests.” He asked whether I wanted to move forward. If so, the agency wanted to tee up a physical exam. If all was well, the physical would be followed by an interview with a team of psychologists. Actually, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and an anthropologist, the last striking me as a curious background for a CIA evaluator. But the exercise made sense: In effect, they were asking for expanded verbal answers to some of the yes/no, agree/disagree questions in the earlier test. One of the questions that has stayed with me all these years later: “Have you ever betrayed a friendship?”

“Good lord, I hope not,” I said. “I don't think so.”

“We'll readdress this question on the polygraph,” one of my questioners said. But it was the right answer, and “absolutely not” was not. No one could know with certainty whether a friend had ever been betrayed. Words and deeds sometimes have unintended consequences. It's the ethical intent that matters.

Two weeks later, it was time to schedule the polygraph
examination. I'd never taken a so-called lie-detector test in my life, and the prospect of one was unsettling. I called Dr. Post for some guidance; he was a psychiatrist, after all, and he probably had some experience with polygraph exams in his agency days. He was reassuring. The main thing, he said, was to try to make your mind completely blank. “Imagine you're at a drive-in theater, the movie's over, and all you see is the empty white screen. Visualize that screen and don't think about anything else.” The questions would be yes or no, he said. Just answer them and you'll be fine. He also said the polygraph would probably be the last test: If you pass, you're in.

By the luck of the draw, my examiner was a thoughtful young woman who was both professional and sensitive to my visible anxiety. “I know you're nervous, just relax,” she said. “I'm going to ask you some basic questions and I want you to answer me ‘yes' or ‘no.'” Then, she wired me up: cuffs on an arm and an ankle, some sort of belt around my stomach, little sensors on the tips of my fingers. It was like an EKG. My nervousness was showing again. “Take a minute to calm down,” she said, and apparently I did.

She asked all the normal questions: Have you ever stolen anything? (No.) Did you ever take drugs? (No.) Do you have a drinking problem? (No.) Are you gay? (No.) Are you responsible with your finances? (Yes.) I sounded boring even to my ears and wondered fleetingly whether the CIA could disqualify you for terminal dullness.

I'd answered everything truthfully, but there was still a small red flag. “You're reacting to one issue,” she said. “So I'm going to ask you a couple of questions again.”
Oh, great, what can this possibly be? I didn't lie. Oh, God, please don't be the gay question. Please don't be the gay question
.

In fact, she said I was reacting to something about my personal finances. “My finances are an open book,” I said. “I've got one credit card with no balance, a few student loans, and that's about it.” She asked me a few finance-related questions and we were done.

As I was readying to leave, I asked, “How'd I do?”

“You'll get a letter from us within the next four weeks,” she said—and then she winked at me. The wink was my answer: I had made it. A month later, I got a letter. The return address just said “Office of Personnel, Vienna, Virginia.” I was instructed to report to CIA headquarters in Langley on such-and-such day at such-and-such time to be interviewed by three offices for a possible position.

The first was in the Directorate of Operations. The group of people interviewing me liked my background in Middle Eastern studies and that I spoke a relatively difficult language. As the interview progressed, I thought it was going well. Then one person asked me an unexpected question: “What would your wife think about spending time in a hardship post—Sudan, say, or someplace like that?” The answer to that one was as close to a no-brainer as it gets.

THROUGHOUT HIGH SCHOOL
, I had never dated a Greek girl. This shouldn't have been a big deal, but our Greek American family was typical of most in America: There was incredible pressure to marry a Greek girl, and the pressure started early. By the time I was a sophomore in college, nineteen years old, Greek relatives and friends were looking for any excuse or opportunity to pair me up with this person's sister or that person's cousin. In May 1984, a friend of our family was getting married in Warren, Ohio, and naturally, we were all invited to the wedding. It was a huge affair, maybe five hundred people, Greek band, lots of liquor. Yes, just like the movie. One guy at the wedding, Victor Tsimpinos, called his younger sister and invited her to crash the party; no one would know. I knew Victor but I had no idea he had a sister until my brother, Emanuel, tapped me on the shoulder and made the introduction: “John, have you met JoAnne Tsimpinos?”

She was attractive, and we chatted for a few minutes before wandering off to talk to other people. But one of my aunts had spotted us, which was all she needed to push me to dance with my new acquaintance. JoAnne and I danced a couple of times, and I said after the last dance, “I'll give you a call sometime.” Does that sound like
a rock-solid commitment? Four or five days later, I got a call from a cousin, who immediately got on my case. “She's been waiting for you to call her,” my cousin said. “If you tell a girl you're going to call, you should call.” So I did. We dated casually until I left in January 1985 for the InterFuture scholarship, and we corresponded on a fairly regular basis while I was gone.

When I returned in July 1985, something was clearly bothering JoAnne, but I couldn't get her to say what. Instead, what I got were long, awkward silences over dinners or drinks or both. She would go silent for days or even weeks at a time, and I would have absolutely no idea what I'd done. It culminated with a scene on August 9, 1985, my twenty-first birthday, when we went out to dinner. This time, she wouldn't even make eye contact. We went to a bar afterward and it continued. Finally, I'd had enough.

“You know what? I'm taking you home. Let's go.” I got up and left; she followed me out and I drove her to her house.

“Call me when you feel like saying something,” I said.

“Call me when you feel like apologizing,” she said.
Apologize? For what? I haven't done anything wrong. This girl has some serious issues, but they're a complete mystery to me
.

Later, I learned what the problem was. A cousin of mine said that a friend of JoAnne's was telling her that I was probably cheating on her in London because that's what all American college boys do when they go overseas. JoAnne apparently was a true believer in this breathtaking theory of social behavior. There were only two things wrong with it: First, I had made absolutely no commitment to JoAnne—no expressions of love, no physical intimacy beyond the hugs and kisses permitted by Greek dating conventions. And second, I hadn't fooled around in London anyway.

I returned to school later that August. We had no contact until the following March, when I called to wish her a happy birthday. We ended up having a couple of dates, then no contact at all until the summer of 1987, when I visited her in Warren in June. Afterward,
I invited her to come to Washington over the July 4 weekend. We had a great time, taking in a concert, seeing the sights, eating at some good restaurants. Just before she was to head back, I blurted out a proposal. Just crazy. And she accepted. Even crazier.

My buddies thought I'd gone off the deep end. A close friend, Gary Senko, reminded me of the repeated fights JoAnne and I had had and how, after the big one on my twenty-first birthday, I'd asked him to stop me—“physically, if necessary”—if I ever said I wanted to get back together with her.

“No, it's okay now, she's terrific,” I told him. He remained skeptical. And with good reason: We married on June 25, 1988, as I was applying to the CIA, and almost immediately started to have problems. It was the silent treatment again, punishment for imagined slights that were never explained, much less addressed. Sometimes, it would last a day or two; occasionally, a week or two would pass without our speaking more than a sentence or two to each other.

SO, A HARDSHIP
post, the CIA interviewer asked. Bullshit was not an option here. I had married a Greek American princess; our marriage, if not already in trouble just four months after the exchange of vows, had more warning signs than a runaway-truck lane on a mountain pass. Making this union work would be hard enough, I sensed, even in friendly confines. Her idea of comfortable living did not include Pittsburgh or Cleveland, let alone Khartoum.

“Honestly, she wouldn't do it,” I said. “I know my wife. She'd hate it.”

There were a few pleasantries to follow, but not many: The interview was over.

A second interview, this one with the Directorate of Intelligence, seemed a success; they liked my academic background and the fact that Dr. Post had recommended me. But I learned later that they were oversubscribed with junior analysts and didn't feel they could take on another one.

The final interview was also in the Directorate of Intelligence, where I was asked about my favorite graduate school course. “The Psychology of Leadership,” I said. That was Dr. Post's course. I must have sounded so naïve to these people; they were all Post protégés, and here I was, a Post wannabe who knew nothing of their history. I stumbled blindly on.

“This guy did a lecture on Stalin's mind-set during the Yalta Conference that I'll never forget.”

“What did he say?” one of them asked. “What was it that really grabbed you?”