Excerpt: 'Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy'
Jan. 31, 2005 — -- Lindsay Moran spent five years living a secret life as an undercover spy for the CIA, recruiting "assets" and buying secrets for the U.S. government. She wrote a book about her experiences called "Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy." Below is the first chapter of her book.
I am in a medical laboratory at the Central Intelligence Agency, waiting to pee in a cup. The sterility of the atmosphere here -- everything is white -- chills me to the bone. I am slightly humiliated by the prospect of a drug test, but I want this job badly enough that I'm willing to submit to it.
I've just finished another test in a soundproof chamber, raising my right hand every time I hear a shrill high-pitched sound, not unlike a dog whistle. One among the many things I must prove over the next few days is that I am not deaf. The sight and hearing exams provide me a surging sense of pride -- perhaps, like one of the pioneer astronauts, I possess "The Right Stuff." The drug test, on the other hand, just makes me feel like a derelict.
"Why would you want to work for an organization that doesn't trust you from the get-go?" my boyfriend had asked me about the week of screening required in my quest to be hired by the CIA.
"Drug tests are normal for any number of jobs," I pointed out.
"Yeah, but a lie-detector test is not," he said, referring to the polygraph, which will follow in the coming days. "Be sure to provide enough urine to reach the designated spot."
A Nurse Ratched look-alike with eyes the color of a corpse hands me a plastic cup whose side has been marked halfway up with a thick black slash. I take the cup and head into the restroom. My eyes dart about the tiny chamber as I wonder if the mirror is made of two-way glass. If not, where is the hidden camera? I sit on the toilet, plastic cup in hand, and think about how I got here in the first place.
Five years earlier, I'd given the commencement speech at my college graduation. I had concluded my -- in retrospect -- sanctimonious talk by saying, "It is my hope that each of us will influence a particular community, and that we will do so not by shouldering the expectations of others but by remaining faithful, foremost, to ourselves."
The day after I made this speech, I sent my résumé to the Central Intelligence Agency. At the age of twenty-one, this was my personal act of faithfulness. My father, who worked for the Defense Department his entire life, was certain the CIA would never take me. "You're not their type," he said. "They look for people who've been the president of the Young Republicans Club."
Maybe my father's doubt impelled me to approach the CIA in the first place. I was intent on proving him wrong. Aside from that, I'd always wanted to be a spy and felt as if I'd spent my entire life in training. In childhood, my favorite books, which I would read over and over again, starred Harriet the Spy. When I'd been naughty and was sent to my room as punishment, I used the opportunity to monitor the movements of our next-door neighbors, the McCormicks. I routinely communicated in secret code, using a flashlight, with my best friend, who lived two doors down. I was expert at rifling through drawers or ferreting around the attic to find the Christmas presents, which I would open in advance and then undetectably rewrap. I also seemed to have no problem lying, especiallyto my parents.
Once, when my father confronted my brother and me about who had defiled the living room walls with green crayon, and neither one of us would fess up, he finally said, "Okay, Lindsay, I know it was you."
"Me?!" I wailed, injured by and indignant over his accusation. "How do you know it was me?!"
"First of all, your brother would not graffiti the walls," my father said. And then, with somewhat more gravity: "Second of all, your brother would not lie."
I couldn't really argue. I was naturally subversive, and always had been. During my teenage years, my albeit mild acts of sedition included skipping school, forging excuse notes, sneaking out of the house, and raiding my father's liquor cabinet. Throughout my liberal arts education -- when I at least excelled academically and everybody was telling me that I should be a writer, or a lawyer, or go into politics -- I always thought, what I really want to be … is a spy.
My fascination with all things espionage was consummate. I devoured spy novels and CIA memoirs, and delighted in the occasional James Bond triple feature at the cheap movie theater in Boston. I wasn't naive enough to think that the life of a CIA agent was all Hollywood glamour, but I was pretty sure I'd be good at it.
Also, I harbored what I now realize was a delusion: that espionage was something of a family legacy, and therefore my destiny. While Dad always had maintained that he worked at "the lab," his inability to talk about top secret projects, coupled with his frequent travel and late-night comings and goings, had me convinced that he must be a spy. I used to go on business trips with him and keep an eye out for possible surveillants. Or I would pack my own luggage in a particular, persnickety way so that I could detect if someone had tampered with it.
Even after I realized Dad was unlikely a covert operative -- and that he probably was the naval architect he claimed to be -- I remained equally suspicious about his dad, my grandfather. Boompah had lived all over the world, supposedly as a U.S. Army engineer. It seemed coincidental, to say the least, that during each of his overseas postings, an unexpected coup toppled the government of the country where he was stationed. Boompah died before I got a chance to question him, but a part of me suspected I would find out the truth if only I could get inside the CIA. In doing so, I also would fulfill my cloak-and-dagger birthright.
I proved my father wrong early on. Within one month of sending off my résumé, I was invited, by way of a succinct letter, to an informational CIA meeting in Washington, D.C.And so, at the tail end of a long, hot summer, I traveled by train from my post-college home of Boston, joining a group of about twenty other slightly anxious-looking young men and women in a banquet room at a Holiday Inn. The CIA representatives who greeted us were somewhat disappointing: a dowdy, middle-aged woman with thick glasses and orthopedic shoes, and a paunchy, balding guy who had the aura of someone just completing a messy divorce.
They explained to us that the CIA had four primary components. In addition to Directorates for Science and Technology (DS&T) and Administration (DA), there were two others thatthe CIA particularly hoped would interest us: the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), composed of overt "information analysts," and the Directorate of Operations (DO). This last, the bald guy said, was "where the real work of the Agency gets done."
Within the DO, there are two main positions, he explained -- reports officers, who take raw intelligence and prepare it for the DI analysts (primarily by making sure the source of the information is obscured), and case officers, the ones who gather the intelligence in the first place. "The case officers are the actual spies," he said.
There was no doubt in my mind when I left the meeting that day: If I was going to work for the CIA, I was going to be a case officer. The DI seemed like a confederacy of dweebs, and the reports officers sounded like glorified secretaries. Like everyone else at the meeting, I left Washington with an application in hand -- a fifteen-page document far more exhaustive than the Harvard application I had filled out four years before.
I found a seat by myself on the train back to Boston, pulled my knees up to my chin, and began thumbing through it. In addition to essay questions and biographic queries abouteveryone in my family, it asked me to list all the places I had lived, and give a personal reference for each location. I thought about the room I'd rented in a Boston University frathouse the summer after freshman year, and shuddered to think what anyone would say about me from those days.
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