David McCloskey on what spy thrillers get wrong about the spy business
London Station author David McCloskey pens an article about real spy business.
In most Hollywood treatments, the CIA’s superhero spies kill a lot of people, blow things up, and often operate without official sanction, perhaps on American soil. A random sample of spy thrillers on Amazon reveals CIA protagonists with job descriptions that would puzzle the Langley Human Resource mavens: ‘black ops officer,’ ‘assassin,’ and ‘covert operative’ are all common. In other depictions, the CIA is morally bankrupt and ineffectual, its officers are cynical liars and bunglers.
There is nothing wrong with the Hollywood fare, and in any case most offerings are not striving for authenticity. Much of it is loads of fun. Some may even tap into a vein of truth. But none of it sheds light on what it is really like to work inside the CIA. To understand the Agency, instead think of it as a uniquely bipolar organization. The daily work of the CIA is as mundane (and far quirkier) than that of nearly any business; it is also far more high-stakes and exceptional.
On the mundane side: the CIA is a large bureaucracy beset by many of the same issues as Fortune 500 companies. Much of a Chief of Station’s job involves exchanging cable traffic with Langley, a fancy way of saying that, like many middle- to upper-level managers, they send a lot of emails. There are byzantine processes for submitting expenses and booking travel. For example, when I was an analyst, flights had to exceed 13 hours in duration (excluding layovers) to qualify for Business Class fares.
There are plenty of other quirks. Some of Langley’s temporary offices are infested with rats. Officers compete savagely for parking passes to shorten the trudge through Langley’s Disneyland-style parking lot. There is a gift shop that sells Agency-branded swag, including mugs, golf balls, barbecue sauce, and – my favorite – luggage bearing a ‘CIA’ monogram, which Agency officers for obvious reasons cannot buy (in fact, any CIA officer under cover cannot use the gift shop at all).
The fact that the Agency is not just a large organization, but a highly secretive, government organization, means that CIA officers are subjected to additional wrinkles of insanity. Bringing alcohol into the building requires a waiver (confiscations were not uncommon). Because taxpayer dollars cannot be used to fund celebrations, CIA holiday parties recollect the homemade squalor of a church potluck, with volunteers making or buying the food.
But if the bureaucracy is mundane and the quirks far quirkier, the CIA’s mission means that the stakes are much, much higher. Hollywood’s superhero spies do not exist, but the CIA does deal in the exceptional – and deadly serious – business of convincing agents to betray their countries, disrupting terrorist networks, and providing assessments to US policymakers that shape American foreign policy.
The strange reality is that, for a secretive organization dealing in deception, the moral code developed to achieve this Mission is all about telling the truth. This does not mean that the CIA always lives up to this code, but truth is the standard. The search for it is the soul of the place. Analysts pride themselves on ‘speaking truth to power,’ and are encouraged from their first days on the job to be wary of anyone attempting to distort reality.
CIA case officers – charged with spotting, developing, and recruiting human agents – are often portrayed in the media as professional liars. But the nature of their work demands precisely the opposite. They must be able to work independently. Langley must trust them. And it is honesty that delivers this trust. The dynamic with agents is similar. Though the case officer is living under cover and the agent is committing treason, productive, long-term relationships are best formed on a foundation of truth-telling. Case officers are taught early on that lying to Langley is the greatest of all the sins. CIA might tolerate all manner of screwups and mistakes, but it will not tolerate deception.
So, the next time you flip on a spy flick, remember that on the other side of the Hollywood looking glass CIA officers are both struggling with the mundane and playing a serious, high-stakes game to accomplish their Mission: uncovering and speaking the truth.
London Station
by David McCloskey
What if the CIA and MI6 began spying on each other? Artemis Procter returns in David McCloskey's electrifying new spy thriller.
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