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.

Chapter 1

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.

It also asked about criminal activity and drug use. I knew a polygraph exam would be administered before I was hired, so I decided I would be honest about the fact that I'd used drugs. My father's words rang in my ears: "You've smoked pot. They'll never hire you."

Dad might have had a valid point, but I was no less determined to prove him wrong. As soon as I arrived home, I returned to my apartment, shared with two other post-collegefriends, and hunkered down in the makeshift bedroom we'd created for me out of curtains and screens. Using a black ballpoint pen, I began to fill out the application. Eventually, oneof my flatmates called through the curtain, "Are you okay? What are you up to in there?"

Recalling the bald guy's instructions not to tell anyone except immediate family members that I was applying to the CIA, I stashed the stack of papers under a pillow. "I'm fine!" Icalled back, sounding -- I am sure -- slightly panicked. "I have cramps. I'm just lying in bed."

About two hours later, I put the completed application in my desk drawer, intending to send it in the next day. That night, I had a dream in which my family was reunited for a picnic in a grassy park, a place where Mom and Dad had taken us as children to hear Peter, Paul and Mary perform. In my dream, my deceased grandparents were there, sitting on apatchwork blanket spread out over the lawn. Even my mother and father, who in reality had been divorced for years, were laughing together as Mom assembled plates of fried chicken and potato salad. Everybody was got up in the kind of loose, hippie clothing we used to wear. My older brother was with some girl I didn't recognize, but who appeared to be his wife.

I approached the group and went to give my grandmother a hug. She didn't acknowledge me, but rather turned away and sat stonily facing the opposite direction.

"Tell Memo it's me," I said to my father.

"Who are you?" he said.

"It's me!" I cried. "Lindsay!"

My mother laughed. "Lindsay?! We haven't seen her in years."

"You must have the wrong family." Boompah lit his pipe, then dismissively tossed the match over his shoulder.

When I woke, the dream, on the cusp of my decision to apply to the CIA, freaked me out. I couldn't help but interpret it as a sign that I was on a course I would later regret. Perhaps my family was right; maybe the CIA wasn't for me, at least not now. I was too young to embark on such a serious career -- to embark on any career at all, for that matter. And so I never sent that application.

Instead, I moved to California, waitressed in a coffee bar, and worked as an assistant to a man who was writing a "Complete Guide to Cocktails." Later, I went to graduate school inNew York. When New York had exhausted me, I took a job overseas -- teaching English to exceptionally bright young students in Bulgaria, an unlikely and at that time dismal locale,but a country I would come to love and whose people would entrench themselves in my heart. After a year in Bulgaria, I came back to the States and -- eventually -- back to the CIA.

Why? The Agency was like an itch that I had to scratch. In 1997, I was working as a writing teacher at a community college in San Francisco when that itch resurfaced. I had lived overseas and loved it. I missed Bulgaria terribly. Thinking of ways to return, the idea of the CIA resurfaced. Why not spend my future living abroad? I thought excitedly. Why not make a career out of learning foreign languages, experiencing exotic cultures, havingadventures in far-off lands? Why not go through with it this time? Now I was older; now I felt ready.

The CIA also seemed to me a way to fulfill a sense of civic duty. The fact that my brother was serving our country in the U.S. Navy inspired me and provoked my own patriotic urges, but I knew I wasn't military material. Teaching -- a profession of inarguably noble intent that I'd hoped would assuage my feelings of civic obligation -- ultimately left me restless and bored. The CIA began to seem like the answer to me: a way to serve both the needs of my country and those of myself. About the same time that I sent in an application to be a Fulbright Scholar back in Bulgaria, a decent if not sure-fire back-up plan.

I again sent my résumé to the CIA. I was twenty-six years old now, five years older than when I'd originally expressed interest. I wondered if the CIA had a record of me, and whether it would give me a second chance. Again, the Agency responded quickly. Within a month, they had sent me another application, which I filled out and sent in. A few weeks later, someone called and, without introducing himself or saying whom he represented, informed me of an interview the following week at the Holiday Inn Fisherman's Wharf. He instructed me to make no inquiries at the reception desk and to take the stairs, "not the elevator," to Room 219 and knock twice. I briefly wondered if the caller might beone of the few people who knew I was applying to the CIA, my brother or my boyfriend, playing a prank. But a few days later, I presented myself at the rather shabby lookingHoliday Inn, taking the stairs and knocking twice on the door of Room 219. I felt silly and was more than a little apprehensive that I would startle whatever tourists actually werestaying in the room, the predictable punch line of this elaborate hoax.

But a man answered the door and, after darting his head out and looking up and down the hallway, quickly ushered me into Room 219. This man, who introduced himself as "Dave,"seemed more auspicious than the previous CIA recruiters; at least he was young and fit. As Dave walked across the room to the small table by the closed blinds, I noticed he had a slight limp. I was pretty sure that he had been shot in the leg, performing some kind of super sleuth derring-do. Years later, Dave -- who would end up being one of my instructors -- confessed to me that he had sustained the injury in a softball game againstsome guys from the FBI.

As we began our conversation, Dave turned on the television -- "sound masking," he explained -- to an episode of Teletubbies. The singing, dancing, and hugging multicoloredcreatures were incongruous, not to mention distracting. I strained to focus as Dave spoke.Dave said that he was a case officer and described some of the places he had served, all of which sounded exotic and exciting. He spoke several languages, had lived all over the world, and seemed slightly annoyed at spending a year stateside, conducting interviews for new recruits.

Still, the interview went well, and at the end of it Dave said he thought I was a strong candidate to be a case officer. At his recommendation, I probably would be called to Washington for a week's worth of screening and further interviews. I left the meeting giddy with excitement, even though my family and boyfriend were all dead set against my joining the Agency. My father remained convinced I would never be hired, owing to my liberal, lawless ways. My brother, on the basis of his military experience, felt this male-dominated profession would be hard on any woman and would especially curtail my free spirit. My mother was just plain worried: She was sure I'd go to some godforsaken place and immediately get myself killed. My boyfriend merely thought I was insane."What if you ever want to quit?" he said. "Will they, like, terminate you?"

Looking back, I think they were all a little bit afraid they'd lose me -- if not literally, then figuratively. Or at least they would lose the person that I was then: open and friendly, always telling stories -- even if those stories were often a bit exaggerated -- and ever ready to share a laugh.

"What's the point of having adventures," my boyfriend asked, "if you can't ever tell anyone about it?"

My mother concurred. "My friend Rhoda's next-door neighbor works for the CIA," she said. "Rhoda said he's the most boring guy she ever met."

"I hope you're prepared to give up marijuana," my father warned me ominously, as if I seldom made it a day without smoking a bowl.

My brother sent me an article about a group of female employees who had sued the CIA. "None of them could get anywhere in their careers," he cautioned later on the phone. "Areyou sure this is what you want?"

"I haven't even been hired yet," I countered their valid concerns. "Anyway, I probably won't make it through." I fell back on this retort for lack of any other adequate response. But a part of me thought I would make it through, and -- buoyed by this inexplicable confidence -- when invited, I readily traveled back to Washington, D.C., for the week's worth of screening.

The CIA put me up at the Hilton in McLean, Virginia. I had received a letter warning me that I was not to share with anyone the nature of my business and that I should report to Building X, not far from my hotel, at eight on Monday morning. The first order of business was a complete physical and the drug test. I had smoked pot once between the time of my initial application -- in which I'd reported drug use as "a few times in college" -- and the current test. Seated in a barren conference room, eight other candidates and I were handed slips of paper and told that, before undergoing our drug test and the polygraph, we should write down any "criminal activity or incidences of drug use" that we had not previously reported. I was the only person sheepishly to pick up a pen.

After the physical exam, we took a series of multiple-choice tests. One particularly asinine test contained in excess of two thousand questions. There were bizarre true/false statements like "I would rather be a florist than a firefighter," and confusinglyworded ones such as "I rarely like to torture small animals."

Still, I thought I was doing okay until the following day when I met with one of the Agency psychiatrists. A shriveled old man, the psychiatrist wore a white lab coat and 1950s-stylespectacles perched on his hawkish nose. Judging by his appearance, I was pretty sure the guy had worked for the Agency back when it was the OSS, and that this building had beenerected around him and his sterile little desk. I got a bad feeling, but I was also aware that he must be some kind of ancient gatekeeper of sorts. I was eager to please, or at least to prove to him that I was as sane as they come. The doctor began by telling me that I had scored the highest among all the candidates on the verbal and the mathematicalaptitude exams. I felt myself beaming with hope and pride.

Then he turned to the "psychiatric" portion of my evaluation. "There were some disturbing results on your psychological exam," he started out. I was taken aback. A classic overachiever, I was used to acing every test.

"Some very disturbing results." He clicked his tongue disapprovingly. My heart sank. Clearly, I was out of the running. "For instance," he went on, "you designated false in response to the statement, I have never wished that I were a member of the opposite sex."

"Well, sometimes, occasionally, I have thought it would be nice, I mean, you know, easier to be a boy."

The old man continued to stare at me impassively.

"I'd like to earn a dollar to a woman's sixty cents!" I joked, failing to elicit so much as a smile. The old man jotted down something in my file.

"Another statement which you indicated as false," he said. "I have never engaged in unusual sexual practices."

I could feel my face reddening. "Well, I … I guess that depends on what you consider unusual," I stammered.

"I would be curious to know what you were considering to be unusual," the old man leaned forward, "when you marked this statement as false."

"Well, perhaps I am wrong," I was already angry at myself for letting the old man get the better of me. "But I assumed the question referred to anything other than, say, missionary position sex."

This was followed by an agonizing silence. The old man's eyes bore into me even more intently. "I mean, if other positions and, you know, experimentation are considered unusual, then I guess I'd have to say I've engaged in unusual sex. … But I …"

"What sort of experimentation?" he shot out.

Should I just get up and bolt? But I had come so far; I wasn't about to let some second-rate shrink intimidate me.

"I mean anything, ahem, oral … or otherwise," I said.

The old man now was scribbling furiously in my file. "Yes," he said at last, looking up. "I would classify that as unusual … even deviant. You clearly have some sexual deviancy, of which I have made note in my evaluation of you."

I was stunned, and surely visibly upset. I couldn't tell if he really believed me to be a sexual deviant, or if he was just trying to throw me off. I left, shaken, and went back to my hotel.I plopped down on the bed, called my mother, and told her, with a lot of embarrassed hedging, what had occurred. My mother was outraged. "That's not deviant," she hollered into the phone. "I could give him something deviant, for chrissake!" Once we both hadcalmed down, my mother and I agreed that the guy was probably a pervert who was just getting his rocks off.

"Are you sure you want to work for these people?" my mother said before she hung up the phone.

Oddly, I was surer than ever; now I had not only my father to disprove but also that dirty old psychiatrist. Furious, but all the more determined, I decided that I would not let the polygrapher -- by whom I was to be interrogated the following and final day -- coerce me into making any kind of confessions, the way the shrink had.

Early the next morning, I showered, dressed, and headed out for another generic, red brick building in Northern Virginia, where the polygraph would be administered. One thing I would come to realize for the first time that morning, and on several occasions later in my career: The prospect of taking a lie-detector test is a surefire cure for constipation.I spent the half hour prior to my poly running back and forth from the waiting room to the restroom, nervous energy acting as a virulent laxative on my already queasy system.

One by one, the examiners opened a door at the far end of the waiting room and called us in by our first names. By now, those of us still in the running had formed a loose camaraderie, notwithstanding the fact that we were all competitors. We winked at one another and mouthed the words "good luck." I was heartened not to be chosen by one startlingly handsome polygrapher around my age -- I wasn't wholly convinced I could make it through the next few hours without crapping my pants.

My polygrapher turned out to be a sturdy, attractive African-American woman who introduced herself as "Kathy." Much later, I would realize that everyone with whom we came into contact used a fake name. Like the other polygraphers, Kathy seemed incapable of managing so much as a smile. Wordlessly, she led me to a small windowless room and seated me in a BarcaLounger, stationed in front of a desk. Behind the desk was a swivel chair, and a computer whose screen I couldn't see.

Kathy matter-of-factly explained that the test would measure my physiological reactions to each question she asked, and that when I was lying, it would show up on her computerscreen as well as on a printout. She handed me a waiver stating that if, during my polygraph, I revealed having committed any serious crimes (such as murder, rape, or any federal offenses), the CIA was required by law to turn that information over to the Department of Justice or the FBI. I was pretty sure that my short-lived career as a petty shoplifter at the age of seven would not land me in a federal penitentiary, so I signed.At dinner the night before, one of the other candidates had regaled us with polygraph lore: a story about a man who, with shockingly little probing, had admitted to killing his wife, dissecting her body, and then storing parts of her dismembered corpse in mason jars in his cellar. Surely, whatever offenses I'd committed would pale in comparison.

By the time Kathy had strapped coils around my chest and waist, a blood-pressure gauge around my arm, and nodes around two fingers on each hand, I was less nervousthan I was curious, and even a little excited. Kathy ran through a series of what I considered physiologically unchallenging questions: Was I a member of any terroristorganization? Had I ever willfully damaged any government property? Did I intend to answer all the questions truthfully? Was I working for a foreign intelligence service? Other than the instances I'd already reported, had I used any illegal drugs? Had I committed any crimes? Was I keeping from the CIA any relationships with foreign nationals?

The last question bothered me, mostly because of the Bulgarian rock climbers. I already had provided the CIA a complete list of my foreign friends, most of whom I'd made when I took up mountaineering while living in their country. I'd felt awful providing their names in the first place and wondered how they'd feel knowing I had reported them to the CIA. It was one thing to subject myself to the U.S. government's scrutiny; it was quite another to hand over the names of others. I justified it with the assumption that the Agency would just check them against a database of foreign spies. And, on the very remote chance that one among my friends was some kind of bad guy, shouldn't I know about it?

After several rounds of the same questions, Kathy said that we were going to take a break. Relieved, I assumed that I was doing okay. But then she plunked herself -- almost angrily, it seemed -- in front of me with a clipboard in her hand and a nasty look on her face."You're not doing well," she said.

Once again, I was taken aback. Ever since I'd begun pursuing an intelligence career, my tendency to excel had faltered increasingly.

"You're holding something back," Kathy said. "I think you should tell me what and why."

"I'm really not," I said. "I'm telling the truth."

"If you were telling the truth, we wouldn't be having this conversation," Kathy said. At that moment, I noticed that Kathy's blouse button had come undone and her black brassiere andample bosom were showing. I wondered if I should tell her. I even wondered if it was part of the exam! I said nothing and averted my eyes. My unwillingness to make eye contact must have aroused Kathy's suspicions further. "You're having issues with one particular question," she said. "I want you to tell me which one it is."

"I have no idea," I said. "I mean, I was honest about using drugs … Maybe I did 'underestimate' by a few occasions the number of times I smoked pot, but…"

"It's not drugs!" Kathy said firmly.

"Well, then, I really don't know. I reported all my foreign contacts."

"It's crime," Kathy said. "You're having a reaction to the question about crime."

"You've got to be kidding?!" The crime question was worded something like: Since the age of eighteen, have you ever committed murder, rape, or theft of items worth over $200 U.S.?

"I'm telling the truth," I said defiantly.

"Have you ever stolen anything?"

"I stole candy bars when I was seven," I said. "But not $200 worth!"

"What about when you were a teacher?" Kathy continued. "Ever steal paper from the Xerox machine?"

"Certainly not," I was starting to get angry. "Once in a while, I may have reproduced a 'Far Side' cartoon with the school copier, if that's what you're after. But it was usually forthe benefit of the entire faculty. I mean, I would put it on the fridge in the teachers' lounge!"

Standing abruptly, Kathy said she was going to leave for a while to consult with her "superiors." During that time, I was to ponder what other crimes I'd committed that I was not revealing and, if need be, compile a list. I decided Kathy must be a complete nutter. While she was gone, I stared at the wall and wondered how I had gotten myself into this mess. What if they didn't believe me and then turned me over to the feds?! I thought aboutspending the rest of my life behind bars for some unknown crime that I didn't commit.

Meanwhile, I glanced around the room, wondering where the hidden camera must be; we had heard that all of the rooms were equipped with a discreet video-surveillance apparatus so that the testers could observe your behavior while they were out of the room. I tried to look cool and unaffected.

Finally, Kathy came back, her blouse rebuttoned. Not surprisingly, she informed me that her superiors were also convinced that I was lying about something.

I was incensed. "I've told the truth," I said. "I don't have anything else to say."

"I am going to give you one more opportunity to get everything off your chest," Kathy sat in front of me again, her legal pad crooked in one arm, pen in hand.

"I'm not lying," I said. "And I have nothing to get off my chest."

Kathy sighed. "Well, we can give you the test again … or you can come back tomorrow."

I had a flight back to San Francisco the following day. I already had been sitting in the chair for over two hours. I was starting to feel that this was a lost cause. "I don't care," I said. Kathy hooked me up to the machine again and we ran through the same questions, but this time she asked the "crime" one between every other query. That alone made meso nervous that I was sure my physiological reactions were off the charts. Finally, Kathy told me I could relax (Yeah, right! ) while she consulted a long scrolling printout of my results.

"I'll be back," she said snappishly as she again left the room.

When Kathy returned, she looked even more serious and unfriendly than before."You passed the exam today." She began uncoiling the wires from around my chest and waist. "Thank you for your time." With that, Kathy led me silently down an interminable hallway back to the waiting area.

Oddly, as I left the building, I did not feel gratified in the least. To the contrary, I felt humiliated and foolish for submitting to this degrading process. I flew back to San Francisco convinced that my miserable performance on the polygraph and psych exams would prevent me from being hired anyway. I went back to teaching and tried to put thoughts of my aborted career in espionage behind me.

One day I found in my mailbox notification that I had been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Bulgaria, and I excitedly began making plans to return to Eastern Europe.Three weeks later, I received another letter, this one offering me a job -- as a case officer with the CIA.

Excerpted from "Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy" by Lindsay Moran. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Group USA, a division of Penguin Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © 2005 by Penguin Group USA.