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Sunday, March 6, 2011

Answer the Shoe Phone, Dummy!

It seems that I used to work for the CIA.

The only problem is, I didn't.

But people don't want to hear that. America isn't buying my story.

It has another idea about me which it seems to prefer hands-down to the boring truth.

Over the past 50-plus years, the republic has become so besotted with spies and spying, soaking up books, plays and movies about the fun-filled world of Spookdom, that now, anyone and everyone who has read a John Le Carre novel or seen Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor thinks that he or she has the subculture of international espionage all figured out.

Telling people that I used to work for the State Department, and then denying their sneers, winks, guffaws and innuendos about what they're absolutely sure I was really doing overseas, is like telling someone that you had dinner with Justin Timberlake last night and that you just forgot to bring along your cellphone-camera, so you have no photo to back up your claim.

Eyeballs roll. (After the winking of course.) And then you get those grins.

You know the kind of grins I mean. The kind you get when you're trying to convince your friends that you and your date really DID run out of gas on Paradise Road last night.

I've been dealing with this ever since I left the State Department in 1999. Tell someone that you used to be a State Department employee working in overseas embassies and consulates, (which I was), and right away the person you're talking to assumes that you must have been under cover, getting your real paycheck from those nice folks at Langley who brought you god-knows-how-many expensive, failed coups d'etat -- (and who knows how many other mind-bogglingly stupid wastes of your money?) -- since they tried to get rid of Fidel Castro more than 50 years ago (and weren't able to get rid of him then, or in all the years since.)

Actually, I was dealing with this phenomenon before I even left the State Department. It's sort of an ongoing vaudeville act in which nearly anyone who has ever been on the payroll of the Foggy Bottom Brown-Nose Brigade has occasionally to play straight man (or woman) to some random moviegoer's stand-up comedian.

The more you deny it, the firmer they believe it.

I joined the State Department in 1985 as what was then called a Support Communications Officer. (Yeah, yeah, like those guys in The Falcon and the Snowman. Huh boy.)

I went overseas for the first time in 1986. My first assignment was the American consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. I pulled traffic, stuffed pouch bags, sent cables, shuffled paper, swept floors, went out to Offenbach to fetch the mail and to Rhein-Main Air Base for diplomatic pouch-swaps, was pulled out of bed at all hours of the night for "high precedence" traffic, and drank a lot of beer.

When I came home for a visit two years later, I found that everyone seemed to have a clearer idea of what I was doing in Germany than I did.

I went to visit the family of my late high-school friend Randy, a more-or-less regular habit I had acquired since his death in 1977.

Randy's dad, Ron, was watching the San Diego Chargers on TV when I walked in. He didn't acknowledge my presence in the room until there came a commercial break.

"Now, where have you been, again?" he asked me.

"Frankfurt. Germany. I was working at the American consulate."

"My grandson Danny says you're working for the CIA."

"Huh?"

"After you left for Washington, Danny stood right where you're standing and told us over and over, 'I'm telling you, he's working for the CIA.' "

"I'm not."

I winced as Ron grinned one of those "jist-between-you-'n-me" grins that I've been seeing so much of in the years since. "I wouldn't put it past you," he chuckled.

"Well, then you must know something about me I don't. Because I'd put it past me," I said. "I don't work for the CIA. Never did. Never will."

Mercifully, the pitch for Nissan or maybe it was Toyota ended, and Ron's attention turned back to the Chargers, as usual getting trounced by Denver or whoever. I hadn't convinced him of anything, I'm sure. But I'm just as sure that he forgot the whole conversation as soon as I was gone.

Why am I bringing this up now? Now, more than ten years after I left the halls of government, vowing never to return to that trillion-dollar playpen of smiling, ass-kissing, back-stabbing, prevaricating, two-faced don't-rock-the-boat types, that overpaid, underworked, benefit-showered, tax-fattened, double-dipping, budget-padding horde of professional meeting-attenders, clock-watchers and paper-shufflers? Those wasters of the taxpayers' money, from whose ranks I was so glad to escape? 

Because the subject came up again just last night.

I picked up a couple in my taxicab shortly before midnight. They wanted to go to Taco Bell. I took them to the drive-thru there. After they had placed their orders and handed me money to pay for them, (I do this for my customers all the time) I overheard the woman reminding the man that they were at Taco Bell because he had complained about McDonald's.

"They made me pay extra for maple syrup," he grumped.

Overhearing, and with my usual inability to avoid pitching in my $.02, I said, "When I was in Germany I went to Burger King and was annoyed when I had to pay extra for ketchup."

"Where were you in Germany?" he asked.

"Munich, that time," I said.

"What were you, in the Army?"

"No. At that time I worked at the American embassy in Bonn. I was with the State Department."

Immediately the guffaws began. "Oh, yeah. State Department. Sure. You mean CIA." (Grin, snicker.)

"No!" I said. "I was NOT with the CIA. I was with the State Department. Not all State Department employees are spooks in disguise, never mind what you might have picked up from Oliver Stone. In fact very few are. You know, I sometimes wish I HAD been with the Agency. I'm sure I would have been paid better money, given better quarters, probably promoted faster, and I certainly would have gotten more respect."

More snickers. "Sure. That's part of the cover, right?"

"What, you mean being underpaid? If it were, they wouldn't get many volunteers."

But I could see that I wasn't getting anywhere, so, having played this game so many times before, I decided to cash in my chips.

"Okay," I conceded, tired of having this conversation with people in any case. "If you want to think I was CIA, fine. Does make me seem more glamorous, I guess."

Where do people get the idea that intelligence work is glamorous? (I think I answered that question above. See "books, plays and movies.") The late William F. Buckley Jr. did some intelligence work for the CIA in the 1950s, and he told an interviewer years later that one of the reasons he gave it up was because it was about as exciting as waiting for a pot of goulash to boil over. "You might spend eight hours staring at a building," he said, "your only instruction being to make a note if anyone walks through the front door."

Do you remember Antonio Prohias' truly great cartoon series in Mad Magazine, Spy vs. Spy? I certainly do. When I was in the sixth grade we loved these cartoons. You can still get them in book form on Amazon.com.

The cartoons were wordless. And priceless. They featured two characters, the White Spy and the Black Spy. They were identical except that one of them wore white and the other wore black. They both slightly resembled pelicans wearing sunglasses and giant Panama hats, (one white, the other black) and they spent about 30 years in the funnies, basically taking turns blowing each other up.

Often their shenanigans included tiptoeing around and ducking behind potted palm trees in a building with a sign out front reading "EMBASSY."

Whether Prohias' brilliant buffoonery had much to do with it or not, somehow over the years, Americans from kindergarten up have absorbed the idea that embassies are a sort of AMC Family Fun Center for spies.

Well, in all honesty, embassies are used for spying, by everybody, and by "everybody" I don't mean every employee, but every country. In the spook world, embassies are known as "stations," and the head spook-in-residence, the boss of all the little spooks, is called the "Chief of Station." And by the way, for those of you who weren't paying close enough attention at the local cinema eight-plex, CIA employees directly involved with espionage are not called "agents," they're called "case officers." Case officers don't do the spying; they recruit other people to do it, e.g. natives of the host country willing to rat-fink on their own government for a few bucks. It's those people who are called "agents." 

But all of you movie buffs out there already know that, don't you? Still, counterintelligence is far from being the only thing that embassies do. But let's face it: diplomacy, visa interviews and passport-stamping are as dull as dry cleaning. War, political destabilization and espionage, that's the stuff movies are made of.

Ironically, I think that Hollywood's thrill-factory has actually inflated The Agency's puissance (to use a word that Shakespeare liked. Ah, go look it up), not to mention its general competence. I once commented that I wouldn't trust the CIA to deliver a pizza.  "It would end up on the wrong continent," was my surmise, based on things I had seen with my own eyes. Let us not forget that these are the people charged with keeping tabs on the innermost workings of foreign governments, and for forty years they obsessed about the Russians. So why did the collapse of the USSR in 1991 take them as much by surprise as it did anyone else?  I have some idea. See my "pizza" comment, above.

For the truth is, I did have my share of contact with agency people during my years overseas. I never worked for them, (except for doing the dirty jobs that their telecommunications people wouldn't soil their hands with) but I worked in close proximity with them. Some were even personal friends. I dined out with them. Had them over for dinner. Had dinner at their homes. Went shopping with them. Rubbed elbows with them at social gatherings. Chatted with them in the embassy cafeteria.

When I mention these things to people, they always ask, "How did you know who the spooks in the embassy were, if they were all under cover?"

Well, in fairness to the agency, usually you didn't. And you were told not to express too much curiosity, so we didn't. But when I'm asked this question, I always remember the classic quip of my last roommate in California before I headed east in '85 to go to work for the State Department. Sitting around bullshitting over a drink one night, he and I, we discussed this very question. "How are you gonna know who's who?" (That is, if you care. And I didn't. Not enough to ask, anyway.)

Jeff had a quick, sometimes devastating wit. His guess: "They'll be the ones wearing those fake glasses with the plastic noses."

I almost suffocated with laughter.

But actually, as experience was soon to teach me, he wasn't all that far off.

The real world's short answer to that question is: basic stupidity. "They compromise themselves more than we ever compromise them," said a now-retired co-worker in Frankfurt who had much experience in embassies and knew what he was talking about. The things "they" did to protect their "Mr. Hyde" personae while playing Dr. Jekyll in daylight were sometimes risible.

For instance, at one embassy where I worked, there was a guy working under cover who, to protect his "real" identity, would take the back stairs, not the main stairwell off the lobby that the rest of us used, whenever he wanted to go from his "cover" office to the one usually called  "The spook house."

Smart, real smart. He might as well have had a sign scotch-taped to his back reading "GUESS WHO?"

Fortunately for him, the rest of us kept our observations of his Barney Fife-like attempt at "discretion" amongst ourselves. Whether the locals working in the embassy noticed it or not I couldn't say, but my own experience working in embassies taught me that diplomatic and consular posts are hotbeds of gossip, particularly among the Foreign Service Nationals, as embassy local employees are called, so most likely his "secret" was no secret to anyone.

Then there was a case I heard about, but didn't see because it happened at another embassy, one where I hadn't worked. According to the story, some under-cover nitwit decided that instead of keeping "them" scattered about the chancery in various offices, "they" should all be consolidated in one place under a fake office name, "Pol2," or something like that.

For unadulterated, shining brilliance, this ranked right up there with Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner by combining metallic bird seed with a giant electromagnet ordered from the Acme Corporation. If some "unfriendly" host country individual wanted to know who the spooks were, all he or she had to do was get hold of a copy of the "old" embassy telephone list, put it alongside a copy of the "new" one and let the old fingers do the walking.

"Sheer genius!" as Wile E. Coyote himself might have said.

I have reached the age where I can no longer assume that everyone I'm talking to "gets" the jokes. But no baby boomer could fail to recognize the picture I put at the beginning of this rant: Don Adams in the role of secret agent Maxwell Smart in Get Smart, Mel Brooks' inspired sendup of the "007" movie craze of the 1960s.

But for those born later than 1980 or thereabouts, I'll have to explain.  The show premiered on NBC television in the fall of 1965, the same fall that I had my tenth birthday.

All kids loved Get Smart. The loony humor was irresistible, the punchlines ("Missed it by that much!") delectable, and for the older crowd there were the inside digs at Washington and at bureaucracy in general, guaranteed to tickle the funnybones of an America shocked by the murder of John F. Kennedy two years earlier, then started on a long road to cynicism by Lyndon Baines Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War in the same year this show premiered.

But I read an article a few years ago that tickled not only my funnybone, but my sense of irony. The zany gadgets that were always popping up on Get Smart, from Max's famous "shoe phone," a rotary-dial ancestor of the iPhone, to the infamous "Cone of Silence," the ever-malfunctioning tempest-and-sound-proof plexiglas dome which Max would always insist be lowered over the Chief's desk when they discussed classified matters, were apparently very close to some of the "real world" gadgets of government monkey business. So close, in fact, that eventually the CIA became suspicious that someone was leaking information, not to the Russians, the Cubans or the Chinese, but to those incorrigible subversives Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, the producers of Get Smart. (I especially loved the portable Cone of Silence, twin plastic bubbles into which Max and the Chief would seal their heads, then shout at each other through a plastic tube.) And who could forget David Ketchum as Agent 13, the poor slob who was always couped up inside a mailbox or the back of an ice-cream truck ("Does the light really go off when the door closes?") from whence he conducted "surveillance."

I always think of these guys, and their toys, whenever anyone leers knowingly at me upon being told that I used to be with the State Department. I have a touch of claustrophobia, so I probably wouldn't have enjoyed performing surveillance from inside a garbage can or a water cooler, but on the other hand I would have given almost anything to watch some officious Secret Twit tell his supervisor to "lower the cone of silence," only to have the damn thing crash through the boss' desk and keep going right through the floor, as it did once on the show.Your tax dollars at work.

It's odd: mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent was forever having to perform quick costume changes and feats of legerdemain to protect his "real" identity, Superman. Over the years I've had to deal with the opposite problem, that of people thinking I'm "Superman" (so to speak, although I can assure you that none of the agency people I've ever known, as loony-tooney as some of them were, ever resorted to wearing capes and tights, which doesn't necessarily mean that some of them didn't) and I have to try and convince them that I'm just Clark Kent and nobody else. No "secret identity" here, no Mr. Hyde, just simple, unassuming Dr. Jeykll, who served his time in the duller of our overseas bureaucracies, and was damned glad to put it behind him and go back to the private sector, where lunatic behavior certainly exists, but it isn't so consistently and relentlessly rewarded as it is in government.

Now, if you'll all excuse me, my shoe is ringing.


















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