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Article Excerpt
In regard to this story, Bruce McAllister reports that he continues to meet intelligence analysts and operatives whose stories are well worth fictionalizing. He could tell us more, but then he'd have to kill us all.
If his latest story leaves you with an increased desire to wash your hands, rest assured you're not alone.
In fact, you're never alone.
THE RETIRED OPERATIVE SPEAKS TO a CLASS
YOU DO WHAT YOU CAN FOR your country. I'm sixty-eight years old and even in high school--it's 2015 now, so that was fifty years ago--I wanted to be an intelligence analyst ... an analyst for an intelligence agency, or if I couldn't do that, at least be a writer for the United States Information Agency, writing books for people of limited English vocabularies so they'd know about us, our freedoms, the way we live. But what I wanted most was to be an analyst--not a covert-action operative, just an analyst. For the CIA or NSA, one of the big civilian agencies. That's what I wanted to do for my country.
I knew they looked at your high school record, not just college--and not just grades, but also the clubs you were in and any sports. And your family background, that was important too. My father was an Annapolis graduate, a Pearl Harbor survivor and a gentle Cold War warrior who'd worked for NATO in northern Italy, when we'd lived there. I knew that would look good to the Agency, and I knew that my dad had friends who'd put in a good word for me, too, friends in the Office of Naval Intelligence.
But I also knew I had to do something for my high school record; and I wasn't an athlete, so I joined the Anti-Communist Club. I thought it was going to be a group of kids who'd discuss Marxist economics and our freemarket system, maybe the misconceptions Marx had about human nature, and maybe even mistakes we were making in developing countries, both propaganda-wise and in the kind of help we were giving them. I didn't know it was just a front for Barry Goldwater and that all we were going to do was make election signs, but at least I had it on my record.
Because a lot of Agency recruiting happens at private colleges, I went to one in Southern California--not far from where my parents lived. My high school grades were good enough for a state scholarship, and my dad covered the rest. It was the '60s, but the administration was conservative; and I was expecting the typical Cold War Agency recruitment to happen to me the way it had happened to people I'd heard about--the sons of some of my dad's friends. But it didn't. I went through five majors without doing well in any of them; and it wasn't until my senior year, when I was taking an IR course with a popular prof named Booth--a guy who'd been a POW in WWII--that I mentioned what I wanted to do. He worked, everyone said, in germ warfare policy--classified stuff--at Stanford; and I figured that if I was about to graduate I'd better tell someone, anyone, what I really wanted to do in life: Not sell insurance or be a middle manager or a government bureaucrat, but work for a civilian intelligence agency--get a graduate degree on their tab maybe--and be an analyst.
I could tell he wanted to laugh, but he didn't. He was a good guy. The administration didn't like him because he never went to faculty meetings; and he didn't act like a scholar, even though he had his doctorate, and he wasn't on campus much. But when they tried to fire him, the students protested--carried signs, wrote letters, and caused enough of a scene that they kept him. This was back in the '60s when you did this kind of thing.
He was smiling at me and I could see those teeth--the ones he hadn't taken good enough care of in the POW camp, the ones that had rotted and were gone now, replaced years ago with dentures.
He looked at me for a long time, very serious, and said, "I could put in a good word for you at the USIA. You're a good writer, Matt."
"I'd rather be an analyst."
"Have you thought about the FBI?"
I had to laugh at that.
"Okay," he said, laughing too.
"I shouldn't be doing this. Your grades are terrible and I can't say much about you except that you're a good writer. In fact, I'm not sure why I'm even considering this. You're a pretty tame guy. You're even tamer than I was your age and I was pretty tame. I stole hubcaps at least."
We both laughed.
He got serious. "You want to do something for your country, right?"
"Yes."
"But you don't want to join the military like your father did. You love and admire him, but you don't want to join the military."
"Right."
"No one's enlisting these days anyway," he said. "Can't blame them. JFK and his brightest aren't fighting this war very well. Look at the Chinese--how those crossborder ops brought them in. Jack's greenbeanie darlings."
"Yes, sir."
"And the Army won't take you anyway, right?"
"Yes. I've got some scoliosis, and you can see how thick my glasses are, sir."
"That's what I thought. What you need to do is send for the Agency application. Make two Xeroxes of it, send one to me, fill out one for yourself rough draft, send a copy of that to me, and I'll help you with it. You'll have to have a physical, just like the Army, and a polygraph, and you'll have to have your doctor send your records. How does your dad feel about this?"
"My dad's always been for it," I answered.
"He not very political, is he."
That was true.
"No," he said quickly, grinning, "I haven't been talking to your dad, but people say he's a good man."
What people?
"You're right," I said. "He's not political, and neither am I, I guess."
"Maybe that's why I'm doing this."
"Sir ?"
"You can't analyze a situation if you're blinded by your own politics, Matt."
"You've taught us that, sir."
He laughed again.
"And you don't have to kiss ass, Matt. Remember that in the interview. Either they want you or they don't and either way you'll never figure out exactly why."
SOME PEOPLE--maybe one in one hundred thousand--can get infected by an epidemic disease and not get sick and die. They don't even get the symptoms, but they can carry it and they can give it to others. They're called "chronic asymptomatic carriers," or CAC's. You've heard of Typhoid Mary maybe, in health class or history. She was one. Not to the degree that the history books say she was, but she was. She didn't even know she was one until they told her how many people she'd probably killed; but she was one and it drove her crazy to find out. It drove her crazy and the government dropped their case against her. That was about 1910, I think, and it was here in America, during an epidemic.
That's how hard it can be on a person when they find out they're a carrier. That's what I'm saying, I guess.
I don't know whose pull did it. I know it wasn't my record. The Anti-Communist Club certainly wouldn't have been enough and my grades in college weren't very good, though Booth was right. I was a good writer. Both of my parents were good writers. My morn had a master's degree and my dad did a lot of writing for the admirals he served. Maybe it was the writing, but I also knew they could get all...
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