Blowing My Cover (book review)
Kirby Urner
Re: ISBN 0-399-15239-3
For those of you curious about how it looks, from a young person's perspective,
to enroll in today's CIA and go through the hoops, Lindsay Moran is your tour
guide. She takes you through the application process, including multiple
sessions with the polygraph, psych checks and the like, then on to The Farm,
where much derring do is expected in para-military training, and she rises to
each challenge, by her own account, but also in the eyes of her instructors.
There's a lot of irony in her story, as she's already fully embedded with
Bulgarians from the start, and has to withstand a lot of CIA scrutiny into her
love life as a result. Plus when she's assigned a station in Macedonia (there's
a complicated story about the name of that place) she keeps zipping over to
Bulgaria to hang with her non-CIA friends, who know she's a spy, but know
they're not supposed to talk about it, so it's all rather silly and awkward.
Then-DCI Tenet makes a couple appearances in this book, once at the graduation
for those few good souls making it through the Farm and big city experiences,
and once working out in the gym, still handsome but starting to show the strain
of 911. Lindsay wants out when she sees how the CIA is starting to believe in
some neocon vision of itself. Let's find a juicey quote:
---
Ironically, in early 2003, not long after my return from Macedonia, I was
"surged" to the Near East (NE) Division in order to help gear up for the
invasion of Iraq. During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman
who had covered Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program for more than a
decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive
evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq
presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States.
Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I'd solicited about the connection between
Al-Qa'ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said "They
both have the letter q?" And a colleague who worked in the office covering
Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a
boss had gathered together his minions and announced, "Let's face it. The
president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it."
---
So as a reflection of her own integrity, she storms into some office and demands
the right to blow her own cover i.e. to out herself, to break out, to stop
living a double life for what was clearly a then-sinking ship. Her willingness
to buck the herd took real courage (reminds me of that guy at CENTCOM in
'Control Room', see: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2004/10/busy-day.html ).
This book is a lasting contribution to the literature and provides an intimate
and well-written account of one spy's short but illustrious career as a case
officer. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants a clear picture of
the CIA from the inside, and about how real world complications may intrude.
Kirby