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C.I.A. EMPLOYMENT SEMINAR
Fast forward to late January of 2002, the date of the seminar. I get there, and there are about a thousand or so attendees. Mostly young men and women in my then-age group - mid to late twenties. Mostly white - I think I saw only two or three other African Americans in there. Mostly nervous and jittery folk - gave you a good idea who was going to get culled from that herd. Typical employment seminar.
Eventually, everybody registers, a signal is given, and we get herded into a big ballroom. I think we then got divided based on whichever CIA directorate we'd applied for a job with. I ended up in the Directorate of Operations part. Then we were given hotel stationery for jotting down notes, and spent the rest of the day listening to intelligence community folk telling us about life in the CIA - stuff like explaining jargon, ala what's an OO, and how does he differ from a CMO or SOO? Walking us through a typical "asset recruitment" (landing a spy) scenario. The difference between a covered and a non covered spook. And, which was uppermost on the audience's minds - how the rest of the application process will work out (series of tests, rounds of interviews, security clearance forms and processes, followed by a quasi-military twelve month course at a place called "the Farm," where you learn how to blow stuff up, shadow people and evade being shadowed, and otherwise do all that James Bond stuff).
We were told that there were two courses offered every year, in July and December. What with the security clearance process and all, those of us who made the final cut could look at starting the clandesting training course about ten or eleven months later, in December of 2002. December worked fine by me - my fellowship with Trial Lawyers for Public Justice was set to expire around that time anyway. And that, plus other scattered tidbits and odds and ends, concluded the presentation.
Of course, the info provided in the seminar was mostly BS and misdirection. The majority of the people in that ballroom weren't going to make the cut for any of the subsequent stages described in the presenation. There are a few presentations, just like that one, each and every year. The pool of people who'd gone through that presentation already numbers in the thousands, and grows by an additional few thousand each year. You know you can't keep them all quiet - it's just human nature for people to talk and gossip. A few drinks, an urge to impress or seem important or sound knowledgeable, and we're off to the races. So, since you can't keep them from yammering, let them yammer about something that, when coupled with a faux irate "the Agency neither confirms nor denies" or a "no comment" comment by the CIA's PR folk, will misdirect a gadfly journalist or smug spy thriller writer into showboating their "insider" knowledge of the CIA's hierarchy, training, and, most important for purposes of this story - command and control.
As a result of that kind of misdirection, carefully nurtured for years, the impression out there is that the CIA is a cagey and secretive corporation that gathers information abroad, kills a few opponents of US policy every now and then, but is still basically like your dad's image of what a corporation should be - strict command and control, and clear hierarchy. Think an IBM or GM corporate HQ crowd, with guns.
That image is supposed to be reassuring, considering just how much power and authority we entrust those people with, and just how little we know about how that power is actually used. People would be a bit more alarmed if they knew that the reality on the ground was more a combination new age cult that dabbled in drugs, brainwashing, hypnotism and behavior modifcation, a poorly supervised bad-boy and bad-girl wanna-be-gangsta fraternity whose members get their jollies off from juvenile hazing rituals, voyeuristic dirty old men and women, and corrupt officials eager to supplement their incomes via kickback schemes, bribery, and extortion, plus a bunch of other things that are a far cry from your dad‘s image of the GM or IBM corporate HQ crowd.
Anyhow, eventually things start to wind down, we turn in our essays, and the employment seminar comes to a close. A few days later I get a call from the CIA setting up my first round of formal interviews, for February 13th and 14th.
Next: CIA Directorate of Operations Interviews
