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INTERVIEWS: "TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE" AND RACISM IN THE D.O.
Second interview was with a couple of Directorate of Operations officials. One introduced herself as an OO, or Operations Officer (same kind of job I was applying for), while the other said she was a CMO (forget what the initials stand for - basically somebody who is a go-between, linking the Operations Officers in the field with CIA headquarters).
The CMO said she was there as an observer, but during the course of the interview I figured she's with CI, or counterintelligence. Didn't think much of it at the time - I reasoned they're the folk who do security clearances, they probably take an active part in the pre-screening of applicants as a matter of course, and I wasn't worried about them finding anything that I hadn't already told them about - smoked weed and had a misdemeanor when I was a teenager/ back in my younger and wilder days, before the real world, college, law school, work and responsibility reared their ugly heads and put a stop to all that fun.
Besides, I could afford to be philosophical - if that disqualified me from being a spook, well, I still had a pretty good career in law ahead of me, which had been the plan all along, before 9/11. Might not be as fun as a few years' adventure in the Middle East, but it's fun enough, safer, and the pay is a lot better.
Anyway, the second interview was a bit similar to the first - not as intellectually stimulating far as going into current events and geopolitics, but more focused on the nuts and bolts of assessing poise and ability to think on one's feet. Role playing a bunch of tricky scenarios, what you'd do to get out of them and why, answering sudden awkward questions, etc.
Aside from differences in the details of the posed problems, navigating that interview was in many ways similar to, and less demanding than, navigating through a problem while getting grilled by a prof in front of the class in law school - listen, identify the major issue, ignore the fluff, remain calm, then come up with a solution based on your best analysis. That's basically it - the rest is just self confidence and style.
If you're like me, a guy who doesn't mind attention, it works out even better. So I did well in that second interview. I mean, at the end, both interviewers went on and on about how they liked the way I handled myself, my poise, how I went about it with "great aplomb" (wasn't sure what it meant at the time, but figured it was good), how it was just "exceptional" for somebody without training to handle himself like that, etc - it became embarassing after a while. So I just kept muttering thanks after each compliment re how well I did. I mean, I knew I did well, and had gone into the interview knowing I'd probably do well, but I didn't think what I'd done was that exceptional - at least not for me.
Well... it was exceptional, and that was apparently a problem. What I didn't know at the time was that I had apparently done "too good" far as the Directorate of Operations' security folk were concerned. As it turns out, they did some mental jujitsu and concluded that I was too highly qualified to want to work for the CIA, so I must have a hidden agenda – “yellow flags” were raised, is what I was told much, much, later.
There were quite a few things that sucked about the CIA far as I was concerned, but that tidbit moved high up the list when I found out about it. I mean, there I was, thinking I was being all patriotic and what have you - it's a few weeks after 9/11, and I've been watching that depressing footage day in and day out, coupled with all that stuff in the news about how the intelligence folk/ CIA dropped the ball because they had too few people who knew anything about the Middle East. I was born in the Middle East, spoke fluent Arabic, was young, single and unattached, fancy free and footloose. You know, the kind of guy Mueller and Tenet had been asking to step up after 9/11.
So I send out a resume and cover letter, which seemed like the decent and patriotic thing to do. Little did I know at the time that patriotism and idealism as motives, at least by the lights of too many within the CIA's Directorate of Operations, was reserved for people who "look patriotic" - code for white and right wing conservative. In a pinch, just white will do - poor, benighted, and misguided liberals but ones who can understand patriotism nonetheless. Otherwise, patriotism according to the Directorate of Operations is basically too high brow and noble a sentiment or something for those who don't look like your average Counterintelligence ("CI") officer.
Kid you not - third millenium, twenty first century, and that's a mentality that not only survives, but thrives in the CIA's Directorate of Operations.
Anyhow, turns out that by the lights of CIA thinking, I was "too highly qualified", a practicing attorney in a firm elite within its field, fluent in Arabic, scored high enough on the CIA tests and did well enough in the interviews to get my application sprinkled with notations like "EXPEDITE" - and so somebody figured that was "too good to be true," and a cause for suspicion raising what the counterintelligence people call "yellow flags."
One assumption was that nobody could be that good or want to give that up to work for the CIA - which is a bit pathetic and perhaps indicative of the poor morale and low self esteem inside the Directorate of Operations.
That wasn't nearly as bad as the second operating assumption - that I didn't "look" patriotic. I mean, some whitebread John Smith, III, from Idaho with similar qualifications and test scores applying for the same CIA job is a talented or gifted guy acting out of laudable patriotism, but some Black guy with an Arab name doing the same must have sinister ulterior motives. Just goes back to that underlying racist worldview inside the CIA's Directorate of Operations, that assumes anybody who isn't white is supposed to be a tad dim-witted, incapable of "high brow sentimentality" along the lines of patriotism or something.
That kind of mindset probably says something about the standards the CIA aspires to, and helps explain why they have a serious problem attracting and retaining capable personnel in sufficient numbers, but still... I didn't know about those assumptions until much, much, later, but things were apparently headed in a bad direction from the start. Made me rethink the second interview, where one of the interviewers went on and one about how I had done extraordinarily well, had handled myself with exceptional poise and aplomb, and observed that it was almost too good for somebody without previous training. Didn't seem like a compliment now, but I was used to compliments and at the time assumed that was just another one, so did an "aw, shucks," thanked her, and forgot about it until I found out that the very fact I had done so well was a problem.
Might seem perverse that a prospective employer would hold against a job applicant the very fact that he excelled, but there you have it. Next time there's a disastrous screwup by the intelligence folk and they whine about the dearth of quality in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, well... now you have an idea why that's the case - a corrupt cabal of poorly supervised officials who are too incompetent to get things done themselves, but who are so bigoted that they chase away those who could help.
At the time, I was blissfully unaware of that racist mentality and its ramifications. All I knew was that I had just gone through a few interesting albeit unusual interviews, and apparently did pretty good in both.
Anyhow, I'd passed through the first round. A few days later, I get a call from the CIA, scheduling me for a second round of interviews, again, spread out over a couple of days, to take place in mid March of 2002, followed by a confirmation letter.
For the most part, the March round consisted of various medical examinations and tests. An interview or two were tossed in there, but nothing really memorable except that these guys started at ungodly hours - I think the first scheduled event was for 6:30AM.
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