WHEN I WAS nine years old, my mother, not long after she separated from my father, picked me up from school one day and announced we were leaving the following week for Europe. Up until then I’d spent my entire uneventful life in California. I didn’t see any need for a change, but I wasn’t asked. My mother said we’d be away for two months. It ended up being two years.
As soon as my grandfather opened a letter of credit on a Swiss bank, we were on a plane to Zurich. We bought a Fiat convertible and spent the summer and most of the fall driving around the continent, doing the grand museum tour. It wasn’t long before I could tell a Canaletto from a Guardi. I picked up some French and German, enough to get by on my own. I learned a little about politics, too. My mother, who had once taught political theory at San Diego State University, decided that impromptu lectures on Aristotle, Plato, Saint Augustine, and Clausewitz more than made up for my absence from grade school. I learned about realpolitik firsthand when we were caught in Berlin in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. But I think my mother hoped most of all I would take an interest in the classics. We spent months traveling around Greece and Italy, visiting every ruin she could find. We spent one snowy Christmas in Rome, touring the catacombs. She even considered depositing me at a monastery school in Austria that taught ancient Greek and Latin.
Training for a future nine-to-five job in suburban America this was not. But I was learning to adapt quickly to other cultures, and the classics my mother insisted I learn would come in extraordinarily handy: Several decades later, I parlayed my interest in them to visit places where Americans were not particularly welcome, from Lebanon’s Biqa’ Valley to the rugged mountains of Tajikistan.
I also learned about money during our European sojourn: about having it and not having it. The Swiss account had a bottom line. Weeks in first-class hotels—the best restaurants, the ballet or opera at night—would be followed by other weeks when we were pressed to put a roof over our heads. One time when we tried to cross the border from Germany to France, French customs turned us away because our car insurance was expired. We didn’t have a hundred francs to buy temporary insurance. The French sent us back to the German side. The Germans wouldn’t allow our reentry for the same reason, but they kindly offered to let us spend the night in their jail while we waited for a shift change on the French side. We stayed up most of the night playing cards and drinking beer with the guards. The next morning the French didn’t even bother looking at our papers.
The first place we settled for any length of time was the Swiss ski resort of Klosters. Flush with a new infusion of Grandfather’s money, Mother rented a chalet right on the slopes. To make up for my lack of formal education, she hired a tutor to teach me German, but I didn’t like learning by rote and soon dropped the lessons. The ski slopes became my classroom.
The next summer, restless and bored with stuffy Switzerland, Mother got it into her head to take a trip to Moscow—a notion that conveniently ignored the cold war and the still smoldering aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. I’ll never forget our interview in Bern with a grim Soviet consul with pale, watery blue eyes. A chain-smoker, he put out his cigarettes between his fingers and almost threw us out of his office when my mother proposed driving all the way to Moscow, camping at night, and taking along our Siamese cat. Eventually, he decided we weren’t spies and gave us visas, but only on the condition that we leave the cat in Switzerland and stay in hotels.
My grandfather eventually lost patience and recalled us. Since he was paying the bills, we caught the next plane home. The first place we put down was Salt Lake City, Utah, so we could skiAlta for a season. The following year, 1964, we moved to Aspen, Colorado. The town we drove into in my mother’s MGB convertible wasn’t the glam sandbox it is today. With a permanent population of about three hundred, Aspen was pretty much a ghost town between ski seasons. Aside from the main highway, only a few streets were paved. Three restaurants stayed open year-round: Pinocchio’s pizza parlor, the Red Onion, and the soda fountain at Walgreen’s drugstore. The Aspen Times was the only newspaper, and it came out once a week. The sole TV channel went off the air at ten P.M.
Our first winter there I joined the ski team, which in those days was one of the best in the United States. (Among my teammates was Andy Mill, later the husband of tennis great Chris Evert.) From September until April we trained without a break. In the evenings, after school, we ran slalom courses under lights, no matter how cold or icy it was. We sidestepped up, made a run, and started up again. I would come home after eight, dead tired. On the weekends we trained on downhill and giant slalom courses at the top of Aspen Mountain. A few summers we trained on the glaciers outside Red Lodge, Montana. No one cared that there wasn’t any time for studying. Ski racing was everything. It became the passion of my life.
My first ski coach was Crystal Herbert, a strapping Austrian girl who had recently set the women’s Alpine speed record. Following her down a slope at thirty or forty miles an hour, day after day, taught me about taking life to the edge. I remember preparing for a race at Aspen Highlands, on the fastest downhill run in North America. Halfway down there was a Z-turn that began with an abrupt ninety-degree left, a nearly vertical drop, and then an abrupt right. If you crashed, you would end up wrapped around a thick pine tree. The turn was nicknamed the “Moment of Truth.”
During an inspection of the course, Crystal gave us a little advice as we stood above the Moment of Truth. In her broken English, she said that if we had any hope of winning in life, we’d have to take risks—sometimes grave ones. And if we wanted to win the race the next day, we’d have to let our skis run through the Moment of Truth, not slow down as we had all been doing in the practice runs. Risk it all and you might just win, she said. Hedge your bet and you never will. In the race I let my skis run. I didn’t win, but I placed higher than I ever had in a race, and I never forgot the lesson.
SKIING WASN’T ALL that was going on in Aspen. While I was learning to risk it all on the slopes, the 1960s were taking the place by storm. Hippies set up camp in the mountains around Aspen. Bishop Pike, a rogue Episcopal cleric who had replaced the cross above the altar in his San Francisco church with a fish, showed up in town and led a peaceful antiwar protest in front of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s house. The mayor, Bugsy Barnard, and his drinking buddies went out one night and chain-sawed every billboard from Aspen to Grand Junction—about 150 miles of them—to do their part for the environment.
Never one to miss a political movement, my mother ran for a Pitkin County commissioner’s seat, in the same election that Hunter Thompson, the godfather of gonzo journalism, ran for sheriff. Happily for the proponents of condo sprawl and a drug-free jailhouse, neither won.
In the middle of all this turmoil, I decided that I would ski-race for a living. My plan was simple: Quietly drop out of school and train all day. Before anyone noticed, I figured, I would be a champion. It worked fine until Aspen High School notified Mother that I had attended exactly six days of school that spring and was getting straight F’s. (Okay, there was a D in art.) Mother didn’t wait for me to get home to discuss it. It took her about five minutes to find me at Pinocchio’s. I was sitting in a back booth with my girlfriend, Sue, and a couple of other friends when she stormed into the restaurant.
“All F’s, you son of a bitch,” she yelled across a hushed Pinocchio’s. “I can’t goddamn believe it. You’re going to military school!”
I was in shock at the time, though I can now see that from my mother’s standpoint, military school was about the only option she had; but, always one to put a twist on an otherwise good plan, she pulled me out of Aspen High a month early and took me back to Europe for the summer. If I was headed to military school, she would need to get my political indoctrination right beforehand.
We landed in Paris right in the middle of the May 1968 student demonstrations, the worst civil disturbance in France since the 1871 Commune. Everyone was on strike, the schools were closed, and demonstrators shut down most of the city. Unwilling to take refuge in a hotel, like a sensible tourist might, Mother dragged me into the middle of the demonstrations. One night we were charged by a phalanx of teargas-firing, baton-wielding gendarmes and came within an inch of being arrested.
Looking for a quieter place, we bought a Land Rover and set off for Moscow. To my mother’s way of thinking, it was a perfectly rational refuge. The first stop was Prague, right in the middle of Prague Spring. We spent a week mingling with demonstrators there, too, and once again got out just in time. As we crossed the border into Poland, we were forced off the road by a Soviet armored column bearing down on the Czech capital and its rebellious government.
AS PROMISED, I did enroll in military school in the fall, at Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana. There I learned how to make a bed tight enough to bounce a quarter off the sheet, field-strip an M-1 rifle, and, to my surprise, study. I even started reading books in my spare time. My grades gradually went up to a B+ average. When the academic dean called me into his office in the fall of my senior year to discuss college, I told him I was thinking about the University of Colorado. Culver was a long way from any snow-covered slopes, and I wasn’t ready to give up on my dreams yet. But the dean was a graduate of an Ivy League college, and he had other ideas for my future.
“I see you’ve spent a lot of time in Europe. Did you ever consider a career as a foreign service officer—the State Department?”
I hadn’t, but I promised him I would, and when Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., accepted me, I wrote back to say I was coming. Skiing would have to wait.
I managed to make it through Georgetown, but not by much. I worked nights in a Georgetown bar, spent as much time as I could in New York City, where I had friends, and lit off for Aspen on every break, often returning to school weeks late. Sometimes merely goofing off wasn’t enough. One night I rode a motorcycle with a girl I’ll never forget through the basement of Healy Hall during a reunion of the class of ’63. The blue blazers and khaki pants parted like the Red Sea. I rode the same motorcycle through the main reading room of the library during final-exam week. For an encore, I rappelled off the top of the Kennedy Center one evening while a performance was going on inside.
A fellow student who watched my pranks from a distance was George Tenet. I wouldn’t see him for almost twenty years, and that was at a meeting in the White House. By then he was in charge of the NSC’s intelligence programs—a big fish who would get even bigger when he was named head of the CIA in 1997. I hadn’t forgotten Tenet, but I was hoping his memory wasn’t as good as mine. Alas, it was. “This is the last place I ever thought I’d run into you,” he said when he pulled me aside. I couldn’t help but agree.
My mother, meanwhile, continued to drift to the left. She moved from Aspen to Venice, California, where she opened up a used bookstore near the pier and turned muse to a couple of lefty writers and poets who would sit around her bookstore debating Marx late into the night. One of them, Ron Kovick, had a measure of success. Paralyzed from a wound in Vietnam, he wrote a memoir entitled Born on the Fourth of July. Active in antiwar protests, Kovick and his friends periodically took over Senator Alan Cranston’s office in Washington. Kovick invariably would call my mother, just to check in. We’d laugh about the FBI wiretappers puzzling over the eccentric old lady with the used bookstore in Venice.
After Georgetown, I went to Europe to “refresh” my French, which is to say I went to ski, hoping I could pick up all the French I needed after the lifts stopped. Around Christmas, though, the money ran out, and I had to come home and find a job. I considered going back to Aspen to take up acrobatic skiing, which was just coming into its own, but instead I went to San Francisco to look for a job. After all that education, I figured I should at least give it a try.
I picked San Francisco because an old friend from Culver, Mike Kokesh, agreed to let me camp out on his couch until I could find my own place. One Saturday morning Mike started reading out loud from the employment section of the classified ads. Since he already had a job he liked, I suspected that he wanted his couch back. When the classifieds proved fruitless, Mike patiently counted off all the professions he could think of that paid a salary you could live on.
“How about the federal government?” he finally offered.
I’d taken the State Department’s foreign service exam in my junior year at Georgetown. I hadn’t done too badly, either, falling short by only a few points.
“Take it again,” he said.
It wouldn’t be given for another year.
“Apply to the CIA,” Mike said, laughing.
Mike never dreamed I’d take him seriously. This was San Francisco in 1976, one of those bastions of the counterculture where it was a toss-up whether the CIA or Richard Nixon was worse. But what I didn’t admit to Mike was that I was curious about the CIA. In my senior year at Georgetown, the CIA had been on the front pages of the newspapers daily. Frank Church in the Senate and Otis Pike in the House headed up committees of inquiry that seemed to unearth a new CIA scandal every other day or so. I didn’t follow the hearings closely, but I was left with the impression that behind the dirt there must be some deep, dark, impenetrable mystery—a forbidden knowledge. Joining the CIA would be sort of like signing up with the Knights Templar. I had never read a James Bond novel, never had a single cloak-and-dagger fantasy, wasn’t in the least the sort of type-A personality who wanted to go out and charm the world. But traveling with my mother had given me a romantic view of the world, and for all the taint on it, the CIA seemed for a moment like romance itself.
Without saying a word to Mike, I called the federal center in San Francisco on Monday and asked for the CIA’s telephone number. The operator gave me a number in Lawndale, California. The woman who answered the phone took down my name and address and promised to send me a personal history statement—an application—and an admission ticket for a written exam.
The personal history statement was the longest, most detailed form I’d ever seen in my life. Besides every conceivable question about my current circumstances, there were several pages asking about my extended family, friends, clubs, associations, and political affiliations. It took me two weeks and a lot of telephone calls to fill it out. A psychological questionnaire had arrived along with it. I remember one question about bed-wetting.
The written exam, which was given at the Federal Building in San Francisco, was a cross between the SAT and the Foreign Service exam. The other people taking the exam looked older than me but normal enough. I wondered if they, too, were taking the test mostly out of curiosity.
In truth, I figured I’d never hear from the CIA again. Sure, anyone could take the entrance exam, but even if I aced the test, my personal history statement was sure to weed me out. Even apart from my lefty mother, I had absolutely no experience. The last regular job I had held down was washing dishes in Georgetown.
I was wrong. One morning, about a month after the test, I received a long-distance call from a woman asking if I would be available for an interview. She gave me the time, the address of a downtown hotel, and the name of a man I was supposed to meet—Jim Scott. It wasn’t until after I hung up that I realized she hadn’t said she was calling from the CIA, but since I hadn’t applied for any other job, it stood to reason.
The night before, I was nervous, not because I was serious about going to work for the CIA but because this was my first interview for a real job. I wanted to do well. I dug my only suit out of a trunk, hung it up in the bathroom, and ran the shower on hot to steam out the wrinkles. I paced the apartment, trying to imagine what Jim Scott would ask me and how I would respond. I didn’t even have a number for him. What if I’d gotten the name of the hotel wrong? I had no way to call the CIA, except the office in Lawndale.
The next morning I called Scott’s room from the hotel lobby, right on time. He told me to call back in thirty minutes. That’s strange, I thought. It was only nine, and he couldn’t possibly be in another interview. I waited in the lobby imagining all sorts of things. Maybe someone was watching me to see if I was alone. When I called back a half hour later, Scott told me to come on up.
With his slicked-back hair, tweed coat, and club tie, Jim Scott looked more like a college-football recruiter than how I pictured a CIA agent. I noticed that the bed in his junior suite was made up and there wasn’t a suitcase in sight. He must have spent the night somewhere else. There was no way anyone could see in the window, but he still closed the curtains so that the only light came from a bedside lamp.
We sat down on either end of the couch. A wafer-thin manila folder sat on the coffee table. It must have been my file.
“You probably already know a lot about the CIA, but I think it would be helpful to give you a quick overview,” Scott started.
I wasn’t about to admit that I knew next to nothing about the CIA.
Scott must have given the same spiel a dozen times a week. Essentially, the CIA is divided into two houses: the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence. There are other directorates, he said, but they play mostly supporting roles. The Directorate of Intelligence—or the DI, as it’s called inside—is made up of analysts: regional experts, psychiatrists, physicists, sociologists, and so on. As the name suggests, the DI analysts evaluate information and put their conclusions on paper. Information collectors, on the other hand, run the Directorate of Operations, or the DO. They are called case officers. Working mostly overseas, they gather information from their sources—agents, as the DO calls them—and pass it to the DI, where it becomes grist for the analysts.
Scott opened up the manila folder. “I see you’ve applied to Berkeley’s graduate school in East Asian studies. It seems like you might be a possible match for the DI.”
In fact, I had applied to the University of California at Berkeley after making a cursory survey of San Francisco’s job market and deciding the best thing to do was punt and go back to school. I’d even started a Mandarin Chinese course and found a part-time job as a night teller at the Bank of America in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. It didn’t pay much, but the hours would be perfect if Berkeley accepted me.
“You’d love the DI,” Scott went on in his even, soothing, friendly voice. He was a good recruiter. I didn’t realize it at the time, but our meeting was my first lesson in how it was done. “It runs very much like a university. An analyst reads the same books as a graduate student or a university professor. He keeps current in his speciality by reading periodicals and newspapers. And being in Washington, D.C. is a special advantage. He can walk in and take out books from the best library in the world, the Library of Congress.” What’s more, he told me, DI analysts get to travel a lot, learn new languages, and go to conferences. They go on sabbaticals, too.
“If you were to go to work for the DI, you could even continue to study Chinese,” Scott said. “But the DI is a lot better than a university. Do you know why?”
I had a feeling Scott was setting the hook, but I didn’t care. The DI was starting to sound better and better, maybe even a place I might really want to work. It was like getting paid to go to school.
“DI analysts not only have access to libraries, magazines, and newspapers, but also to a lot of information not available to universities—like reports from embassies, from CIA offices overseas, and from other agencies that have access to ‘indispensable’ information unavailable to a university. DI analysts have access to the Truth, and not just part of it. You can’t claim to be an expert on a subject unless you have all available information.”
Scott paused a second to let it all sink in. “But that’s not all. There’s something else unique about the DI. The DI has a very special reader. Do you know who that is?”
Scott didn’t bother waiting for an answer.
“The president of the United States.”
He paused again to make sure I completely understood what he’d just told me.
“The president,” Scott went on, “more than anyone else, needs to know the truth about the world. But it isn’t possible for him to be an expert on every country in the world or every subject. And that’s where the analysts come in. They are his fact book, reference, and adviser. How can you do better than the president sitting at your elbow, listening to you explain a complicated problem?”
It was, as I would find out one day, the purest sort of baloney. Pigs will fly before the president sits down for a cozy one-on-one with a DI analyst. Intelligence passes from Langley to the White House through a tight political screen. But, as I said, Jim Scott was a good pitchman, and at the tender age of twenty-two, I was a perfect mark. As he talked, I pictured myself walking the president through some knotty international crisis. I would do my best not to sound too pedantic, maybe even introduce a bit of humor. Who knows, maybe the president would take a liking to me and bring me over to the White House permanently.
Scott interrupted my thoughts: “Would an analyst’s job interest you?”
“Absolutely,” I shot back.
Scott picked up my application again and silently leafed through it. He looked back at me and cleared his throat.
“Frankly, it’s a long shot. Without a Ph. D. or even a master’s degree, I’m pretty certain the DI can’t use you right now. After Berkeley, maybe. But in any case I’ll pass on your application.”
Oooof. The wind came out of my sails in a rush.
“But let’s go back to the DO,” he went on, almost without missing a beat. “It’s a different kettle of fish entirely.” I detected a change in his voice, an enthusiasm that hadn’t been there before.
“Case officers run the DO,” Scott said. “They’re CIA staff employees who run agents. Agents are almost always foreigners. Being foreigners, they go places where Americans, our case officers, can’t go, like inside their governments or their countries’ secret scientific establishments. At the case officer’s direction, the agents steal secrets, plans, documents, computer tapes, or whatever. In other words—let me be blunt—agents are traitors.”
Scott had dropped his voice so that I had to strain to hear him—as if he were afraid someone was eavesdropping on us.
“And what do I mean, exactly, by spying and secrets? Let’s take a hypothetical: Pearl Harbor. It’s 1941. Assume there was a CIA back then, and you were in it. You’re assigned to Tokyo. One night in late November you’re working late. You’re about ready to go home, dead tired from a long day at work. The telephone rings. The caller apologizes for dialing the wrong number. But you know it’s not a wrong number. You recognize the voice. It’s one of your agents, an ensign in the Japanese navy who works in naval headquarters. He’s just signaled that he wants a meeting.
“At first you have a hard time following the agent as he rambles on in Japanese. He’s excited. Then, all of a sudden, you realize what he’s telling you: Japan is preparing to attack Pearl Harbor. He hands you a top-secret document. It’s the plan for the attack, he says.
“You rush back to the office, wondering if your agent has lost his mind. You get down to translating the document. It’s all there, just as he described it. You fire off an encoded message to Washington. The U.S. Navy disperses the fleet, and you’ve just altered the course of history.
“Knowing about the Japanese attack is information that cannot be obtained anywhere other than from a human being, an agent. There’s no way we could have known with this precision about the emperor’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor as early as November 1941, except from the ensign or another agent like him. Satellites and intercepts can’t see inside someone’s head. You need a person to do that. Agents and the secrets they steal are the crown jewel of American intelligence. It is what the intelligence business is really about.”
Scott got up and went to the minibar and got us two Cokes.
“You’ve got to admit, that’s a goddamn exciting job,” he said when he sat down. “But I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t have its downsides. In fact, there are very few jobs in the world tougher than a case officer’s. First of all, almost every case officer has two jobs. There’s his daytime job, his cover job, what he does between eight and five. More than likely it’ll be a boring, routine, meaningless job. You might very well be sent overseas as a shipping clerk working for an import-export company, let’s say in Penang, Malaysia. You’ll have some dreary office in the port. All day long you’ll fill in import applications. Occasionally, you call the home office, let’s say in Passaic, New Jersey. The person who answers the phone will have only the vaguest idea where Penang is, or even care. Everyone will take you for a ne’er-do-well. You can never tell anyone what you really do for a living. It’s a thankless, anonymous job.
“And there’s another downside, a lot worse than the hardship of living your cover—getting caught committing espionage. Espionage is illegal in every country in the world and, in all but a few, a capital crime. Let’s go back to Tokyo in 1941. If you’d been caught meeting your agent, you’d be lucky to go to jail. And, incidentally, your agent would have been put up against a wall and shot. Sure, the CIA would have done its best to try to get you out. But it wouldn’t have been able to do anything until the end of the war. Four years rotting in a Japanese jail. The same would go for Penang. A mistake in this business is unthinkable.”
For a moment, I considered the possibility that Scott was trying to talk me out of the job.
Giving me some time to think, he stood up, walked over to the window, and opened the curtain, letting in the bright midday light as if it would somehow help me make a decision.
“So, what do you think about the DO as a career?”
I didn’t answer.
“Well?”
“Sure,” I finally said, faking all the enthusiasm I could muster. “I’d be real interested.” I might have been able to see myself at the president’s elbow, but I was way too immature for the job Scott had just been describing. I also couldn’t stop picturing myself in leg irons, chained to the wall of some dank, foul-smelling Malaysian prison. Then again, the longer I could keep the application process going, the more I could dine out on the story for years to come; and surely the nation’s supersleuths would come to their senses sooner or later.
WRONG AGAIN. In March 1976 I was invited to Washington for more interviews and to take the dreaded polygraph.
Ironically, or maybe intentionally, I was put up at the Holiday Inn across from the Watergate, the same Holiday Inn the ex-CIA Watergate burglars had used as a listening post when they bugged the Democratic National Committee headquarters. In quick succession, I went through a half-dozen interviews and exams; a couple of DO case officers, a shrink, and a security officer; and a French and German test. All the meetings took place in my hotel room. I was never brought into a CIA building.
The most impressive person I met was Don Gregg. Don would go on to be security adviser to then vice president George Bush, and ambassador to South Korea when Bush became president. Back then, though, Gregg had just been reassigned to Washington from Seoul, where he’d been 
chief. For most of the two hours we talked, he described what it was like to live overseas for most of one’s adult life: the isolation, the alienation from family and country, the physical hardship. Gregg was curious about my background and asked a lot of questions about the time I had spent in Europe. He wanted to know how I adjusted and whether I made friends. For the first time I had a sense that the DO might be interested in me for my overseas experience, an interesting legacy from my mother.
The polygraph was held on the next-to-last day in an apartment complex several blocks from the Holiday Inn. I found the name Scott had given me on the lobby directory—Dr. Jarmen, third floor. A balding man, about thirty-five, greeted me when I knocked on the door. With his solid white shirt, lime-green tie, and pocket protector, he looked like an accountant. He showed me into a room that was meant to be a bedroom. In the middle was an oversize plastic-upholstered easy chair, a Formica table, and a straight-back chair positioned across the table from the easy chair. Dr. Jarmen, or whatever his real name was, seated me in the easy chair and hooked me up to three pairs of wires and sensors leading to the polygraph. My right index finger was attached to a metal electrode, my chest to a respirator tube, and my upper right arm to a cuff monitor.
“Tell the truth and your perspiration, heartbeat, and breathing will remain pretty close to normal,” the good doctor advised.
I was too tense at first to get a good reading, but after a pause to let my heartbeat go down, we restarted with better results. The questions came in a steady rhythm, and my answers followed in even yeses and nos. He asked me about drugs, whether I’d tried anything aside from marijuana, whether I’d had homosexual relations, whether I’d stolen anything or had any relationship with a foreign government, and so on.
The exam lasted a little under four hours. After running through the same questions three times, Jarmen gathered up his charts and went out of the room. He came back ten minutes later, unhooked me, and said he wasn’t sure whether I’d passed or not. He would have to show the charts to his supervisor. It could take up to a week for a decision.
When I told Scott how long the polygraph lasted, he gave me the thumbs-up. “You passed.”
I WAS FEELING PRETTY GOOD about my trip until I got back to San Francisco and saw the boa constrictor sleeping on the landing outside my apartment door.
The boa constrictor was my roommates’ pet, not mine. When it came time to move out of Mike’s apartment, I had gone to the Berkeley student union to check the bulletin boards. Two students, a couple, had a vacant room in an apartment close to campus that would have been perfect if I had ended up at Berkeley in the fall. I noticed the boa in its aquarium when I inspected the place—there was no way to miss it—but I didn’t mind snakes, and the couple seemed pleasant enough. It was only after I moved in that I learned they were dyed-in-the-wool anarchists and that from time to time the boa would escape the aquarium.
Then, it had all seemed part of the local color. Now that I was jobshopping at the heart of the American establishment, it mattered deeply. I figured it would take some CIA gumshoe about five minutes of talking to the neighbors to find out about the anarchists and the boa—evidence enough of a serious character flaw on my part. I’d be lucky if the CIA didn’t turn my application over to the FBI. I hadn’t even been hired, and already I was developing a streak of paranoia.
One morning about six weeks after I came back from my Washington interviews, the doorbell rang. I was alone in the apartment. A gray-haired man in his early sixties, wearing a suit and tie, was standing on the stoop. He had a briefcase in one hand and a map in the other. I thought he was one of those evangelical Christian missionaries who would sometimes try their luck in Berkeley.
He apologized for disturbing me so early and asked if I was so-and-so. Geez, I thought, what a coincidence, he’s looking for one of my Berkeley friends. I was about to give him the proper address when it occurred to me who my visitor was—a CIA background investigator who had mixed up my address with that of a friend I’d listed as a reference. He was in midsentence, apologizing for the mistake, when I began to push him out the door. I didn’t want him to catch sight of the poster of Mao on the landing, underneath which was neatly written THE EAST WIND BLOWS RED, or the boa, which was sure to slither around the corner at any minute. Admittedly, if I had thought about it a little harder, I might have realized that an organization that couldn’t even get a legman to the right address was unlikely to pick up such subtle cues as anarchist landlords.
I WAS ASLEEP on the last Monday morning of July when the telephone rang a little after eight. It took me a moment to recognize Scott’s voice on the other end.
“Can you be in Washington in two weeks? Security cleared you, and the Directorate of Operations is offering you a job.”
A job? I hadn’t had any contact with the CIA in three months. The DO, I figured, was toast. The only thing remotely long-term on my mind was Mandarin Chinese, which I’d started during the summer session at Berkeley.
Scott was impatient. “If you can’t make it in two weeks, it may be at least six months before I can get you into another class.”
“Are you absolutely sure security cleared me?”
Hadn’t the CIA checked with the FBI and found out about Ron Kovick or the trips to Paris and Prague? The motorcycle through the library? The anarchists and the boa? I couldn’t believe they hadn’t put it all together.
“Yes, at least for three years,” Scott said.
I took a quick look around my shabby apartment. I thought about how far behind I was in Mandarin. I thought about another night standing at my teller’s window. And then I thought about a ski run I’d made when I was fifteen. There were six of us on our last trip down when we ran into two ski patrolmen we knew, probably the wildest pair in Aspen. They invited us to come look at a new jump they’d built. We followed them off the main run to an old, abandoned mining camp. In a clearing sat three houses in a line on a steep incline. Their roofs were collapsed. Right above the highest house was a six-foot-high jump. The idea was to pick up enough speed to clear all three houses. If you took it too slowly, you risked landing short—in the middle of a house. When one of the ski patrolmen pushed off, I followed without a second thought. As I sighted the jump between my ski tips, the line of houses began to look like a high-rise, but I felt a sense of inevitability. It was totally irrational. At any moment I could have turned off and avoided the jump. But I didn’t. I just kept going.
I now felt the same way about the CIA. “Sure, Jim. I can be there in two weeks. I could even be there next week.”
After I hung up the phone, I thought, What the hell. I’d finagle an assignment to Switzerland, meet from time to time with one of those shady agents Scott had talked about, gather up a few pieces of information that would save the world, and spend the rest of my time on the ski slopes. A tour in Switzerland and then out. How much trouble could I get in?