Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA

After he leaves, I fold the document into pleats, like the geisha fans we used to make in elementary school. Then I set the accordion on its end atop the toilet bowl water and light it on fire. It’s an old Russia House trick to keep the smoke to a minimum and contain the ash. When our agreement is converted to floating black flakes, I flush and set

We’re impossibly young to have the fate of the world in our hands. But such is the way of the Agency. By thirty-five, any operative worth their salt has gone hard enough at their job to erode their cover. My chief explained it to me once in training: “You could sit in a closet for twenty years and your cover would remain pristine, but you wouldn’t

I meet Jim for drinks. I look him in the eye and I lie. “Yeah right, I bet they just told you to say that,” he says. I start to cry. “I wish,” I say. He seems taken aback. He’s never seen me cry. He comforts me. Believes me. But I’m not crying to make him believe. I’m crying because I’ve lost the last friend who knows my truth.

In the movies, a Glock is a spy’s best friend. In real life, it’s the humble index card, lined on one side for meeting notes, blank on the other for hand-sketched diagrams, schematics, and maps. These three-by-five-inch rectangles of sacred information are our reason for existence. Operatives have killed and died for words written on similar cards

“You want me to stop selling.” He mulls it over. “Who d’you work for? CIA?” “Not stop, exactly. And yes, I work for CIA.” He looks up at me. I resist the temptation to fill the silence. “So, what? I have to work with you or you arrest me?” “Nothing like that, Jakab. I respect you far too much to pull anything like that. Look. We’re friends. I know

humans see the same truth but call it by different words. In the West, we call those balls of fire Orion’s Belt, to honor a heroic hunter. In Arabic, the same stars are called the String of Pearls, to honor the wisdom that grows from suffering.

There is a wall between us, and we can’t follow the age-old advice—communicate!—because we’re explicitly forbidden from saying anything that might suggest vulnerability in our marriage anywhere in-country. We take walks sometimes, when the tension becomes unbearable, around lakes in parks, my hands on my rounded belly as we talk out of the sides of

Aum Shinrikyo, the apocalyptic cult that choked Tokyo subway commuters with sarin gas in 1995, turned out to have nearly a billion dollars in the bank and a uranium-mining operation in Australia—

He pulls an assessment paper out of his back pocket. There are a dozen or so categories students are to be judged on. Beside each, there is a box to check: Satisfactory, Less Than Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory. There is no Good. In this business, it’s survive or not. Thrive is not an option.