[ed. This is very much the theme of Mortals, a great novel by Norman Rush]
When I was twenty-three, I was hired by the CIA. I was working at a Catholic school at the time, coaching squash and teaching seventh-grade social studies—which was funny, since I had never before seen a squash game before and was not even so much as a lapsed Catholic. I lived behind the school in a former convent where the only consistently functioning lights were a pair of glowing red exit signs. My prevailing feeling that year was one of intense personal absurdity, and it was in this spirit that I applied to the CIA (I liked international relations, and who knew they had an online application?) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (I liked writing stories, and what the hell?). These things certainly didn’t make any less sense than coaching squash and living in a convent—though they weren’t really ambitions as much as gestures: reflections of my general hope that I would, someday, do something else. Each was something in between a dice roll and a delusion, a promissory note and a private joke to no one but myself.
Later, it turned out that this was a lot like what writing a novel would feel like.
In some ways, it is hard to imagine two paths more different than being a writer and being a spy. It is certainly hard to imagine two careers with more wildly disparate stakes. And yet there are parallels in the underlying qualities of their practitioners: an interest in psychology, a facility with narrative, a tendency to position oneself as an observer, and a willingness to lie and call it something else.
In The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage, Frederick P. Hitz notes that one of the requirements of a good intelligence officer is “a profound understanding of human nature”—the ability to get into “the heads and the guts of a recruited spy.” Spy running often involves a carefully choreographed pulling of psychic marionette-strings: threads of desire and ambition, paranoia and greed, ideology and pragmatism—all unique to the individual in question and to the broader cultural and geopolitical context. Vanities and resentments are especially important, and CIA officers must play to these without ever acknowledging them outright (Hitz’s book offers a catalog of spies who were motivated, at least in part, by the most minor of grievances—and won over by the most minor of flatteries). Intelligence failures, like literary ones, tend to stem from failures of empathetic imagination.
We do not generally think of spying as an exercise in empathy, since its results are rarely benign. But insight into another person is a tool like any other (everything depends on what you do with it), and empathy forms the only springboard from which we can hope to access it. Spies must be empathetic in gaining understanding and ruthless in using it. In some ways, this is the real-world counterpart of the kind of empathy writers extend toward their characters. Novelists spend years conjuring fictional people—intricately constructing backstories, lovingly sketching minds—so that they can be made to react plausibly to whatever horrors have been planned for them all along. The stakes of this process are, in the scheme of things, nonexistent. Yet to be good at it does demand a non-squeamish imagination, as well as an aptitude for what Keats called negative capability: the ability to accept uncertainties, to sustain incompatible possibilities. This is an uncommon quality, I think—and like insight itself, much depends on how it is used. It lets us consider ideas we don’t completely believe in, inhabit perspectives we don’t totally endorse. It lets us linger too long in liminal spaces where we don’t necessarily want to stay.
A few weeks after I submitted my online application, the CIA contacted me for a phone interview. I was surprised by this—less by the fact that my résumé had passed some initial scrutiny than that somebody had read it in the first place. This, combined with the quick turnaround, left me in the very weird (and possibly unprecedented) position of being impressed with the honesty of the Central Intelligence Agency and the efficiency of the federal government.(...)
Writers and spies share an ability—and a willingness—to hide in plain sight, to deflect attention not only from the nature of their role but from the fact that they have any role at all. A spy obscures his relationship to events in order to affect them, just as a writer hovers anonymously beyond the page in order to exert her tyrannical, obsessive control. What is authorial distance, anyway, but a form of plausible deniability? This willingness to disappear is another difficult quality to gauge in normal terms—it seems to be simultaneously a form of delusional arrogance and its exact opposite. But writers and spies both understand its uses; in both cases, it is the vanishing act that enables the sorcery.
In the fall, I began my teaching job. I wasn’t the only one to notice I wasn’t great at it. Maybe jobs aren’t for me, I thought, and applied to MFA programs. And then the CIA invited me to Washington, D.C., for a three-day interview.
As one does with unforeseen outcomes, I began to make a retroactive case for inevitability—not of my future position as a CIA officer, but of my present position as an apparently viable CIA candidate. For this, according to the CIA itself, was what I was—a fact too bizarre to be meaningless. I still felt almost totally sure I would not get the job—beyond the candidate evaluation lay a vast labyrinth of security-clearance assessments from which, it seemed, almost nobody emerged—but it was time to seriously entertain the possibility.
It was also time to reconsider the question of whether I actually wanted this job. In a way I had wanted it all along, of course, but more like someone who wants to go to space someday and less like someone who wants to leave for a mission to Mars in six months; it was an issue that needed revisiting in light of this new, apparently literal reality. Another question was the ethical one—heretofore academic or, at most, civic. I believed in the necessity of the CIA; I respected many of the things it did or tried to do and was, like all sane people, horrified by other things. I’d raised some of these issues in my initial interviews, but more as a citizen in a unique position to learn how she should regard actions undertaken on her behalf than as a person contemplating undertaking any particular action herself. Should morally alert people shun the CIA, or are they the very people we most need working for it? I’d thought about this question in the way I’d thought about a lot of questions—as a philosophy major. I was going to have to think about whether there was another way to think.
It is fair to say that I had doubts. But doubts, I reasoned reasonably, were not a reason not to go to Washington. Doubts were a reason to go and get more information. And maybe they were. But the bigger thing was this: I was curious.
by Jennifer duBois, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: “The Crow Spy Talks to the King of Owls and His Ministers,” Kalila wa Dimna
When I was twenty-three, I was hired by the CIA. I was working at a Catholic school at the time, coaching squash and teaching seventh-grade social studies—which was funny, since I had never before seen a squash game before and was not even so much as a lapsed Catholic. I lived behind the school in a former convent where the only consistently functioning lights were a pair of glowing red exit signs. My prevailing feeling that year was one of intense personal absurdity, and it was in this spirit that I applied to the CIA (I liked international relations, and who knew they had an online application?) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (I liked writing stories, and what the hell?). These things certainly didn’t make any less sense than coaching squash and living in a convent—though they weren’t really ambitions as much as gestures: reflections of my general hope that I would, someday, do something else. Each was something in between a dice roll and a delusion, a promissory note and a private joke to no one but myself.
Later, it turned out that this was a lot like what writing a novel would feel like.In some ways, it is hard to imagine two paths more different than being a writer and being a spy. It is certainly hard to imagine two careers with more wildly disparate stakes. And yet there are parallels in the underlying qualities of their practitioners: an interest in psychology, a facility with narrative, a tendency to position oneself as an observer, and a willingness to lie and call it something else.
In The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage, Frederick P. Hitz notes that one of the requirements of a good intelligence officer is “a profound understanding of human nature”—the ability to get into “the heads and the guts of a recruited spy.” Spy running often involves a carefully choreographed pulling of psychic marionette-strings: threads of desire and ambition, paranoia and greed, ideology and pragmatism—all unique to the individual in question and to the broader cultural and geopolitical context. Vanities and resentments are especially important, and CIA officers must play to these without ever acknowledging them outright (Hitz’s book offers a catalog of spies who were motivated, at least in part, by the most minor of grievances—and won over by the most minor of flatteries). Intelligence failures, like literary ones, tend to stem from failures of empathetic imagination.
We do not generally think of spying as an exercise in empathy, since its results are rarely benign. But insight into another person is a tool like any other (everything depends on what you do with it), and empathy forms the only springboard from which we can hope to access it. Spies must be empathetic in gaining understanding and ruthless in using it. In some ways, this is the real-world counterpart of the kind of empathy writers extend toward their characters. Novelists spend years conjuring fictional people—intricately constructing backstories, lovingly sketching minds—so that they can be made to react plausibly to whatever horrors have been planned for them all along. The stakes of this process are, in the scheme of things, nonexistent. Yet to be good at it does demand a non-squeamish imagination, as well as an aptitude for what Keats called negative capability: the ability to accept uncertainties, to sustain incompatible possibilities. This is an uncommon quality, I think—and like insight itself, much depends on how it is used. It lets us consider ideas we don’t completely believe in, inhabit perspectives we don’t totally endorse. It lets us linger too long in liminal spaces where we don’t necessarily want to stay.
A few weeks after I submitted my online application, the CIA contacted me for a phone interview. I was surprised by this—less by the fact that my résumé had passed some initial scrutiny than that somebody had read it in the first place. This, combined with the quick turnaround, left me in the very weird (and possibly unprecedented) position of being impressed with the honesty of the Central Intelligence Agency and the efficiency of the federal government.(...)
Writers and spies share an ability—and a willingness—to hide in plain sight, to deflect attention not only from the nature of their role but from the fact that they have any role at all. A spy obscures his relationship to events in order to affect them, just as a writer hovers anonymously beyond the page in order to exert her tyrannical, obsessive control. What is authorial distance, anyway, but a form of plausible deniability? This willingness to disappear is another difficult quality to gauge in normal terms—it seems to be simultaneously a form of delusional arrogance and its exact opposite. But writers and spies both understand its uses; in both cases, it is the vanishing act that enables the sorcery.
In the fall, I began my teaching job. I wasn’t the only one to notice I wasn’t great at it. Maybe jobs aren’t for me, I thought, and applied to MFA programs. And then the CIA invited me to Washington, D.C., for a three-day interview.
As one does with unforeseen outcomes, I began to make a retroactive case for inevitability—not of my future position as a CIA officer, but of my present position as an apparently viable CIA candidate. For this, according to the CIA itself, was what I was—a fact too bizarre to be meaningless. I still felt almost totally sure I would not get the job—beyond the candidate evaluation lay a vast labyrinth of security-clearance assessments from which, it seemed, almost nobody emerged—but it was time to seriously entertain the possibility.
It was also time to reconsider the question of whether I actually wanted this job. In a way I had wanted it all along, of course, but more like someone who wants to go to space someday and less like someone who wants to leave for a mission to Mars in six months; it was an issue that needed revisiting in light of this new, apparently literal reality. Another question was the ethical one—heretofore academic or, at most, civic. I believed in the necessity of the CIA; I respected many of the things it did or tried to do and was, like all sane people, horrified by other things. I’d raised some of these issues in my initial interviews, but more as a citizen in a unique position to learn how she should regard actions undertaken on her behalf than as a person contemplating undertaking any particular action herself. Should morally alert people shun the CIA, or are they the very people we most need working for it? I’d thought about this question in the way I’d thought about a lot of questions—as a philosophy major. I was going to have to think about whether there was another way to think.
It is fair to say that I had doubts. But doubts, I reasoned reasonably, were not a reason not to go to Washington. Doubts were a reason to go and get more information. And maybe they were. But the bigger thing was this: I was curious.
by Jennifer duBois, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: “The Crow Spy Talks to the King of Owls and His Ministers,” Kalila wa Dimna
