DON'T GET ME STARTED 65with my best friend, a kind and brilliant foreign exchange student from South
America. Spending a month in his beautiful Spanish Colonial hometown
with his family just prior to starting college was not only an enriching experi-
ence; it also resulted in further improvement of my Spanish language ability.
All of this served me well during my first CIA assignment in Latin America.
During college spring breaks, my friends and I would take a sleepless
fourteen-hour Mexican train ride from the hilly border town of Nogales,
Sonora, through Culiacán to the vibrant beach city of Mazatlán, Sinaloa.
The American organizers of these low-budget college trips typically spoke
no Spanish, so I’d translate and help the hordes of college students check
in to the hotel. The harried but grateful hotel clerks would typically reward
me with an upgraded room. A gringo speaking Spanish in Mexico will also
attract free margaritas and generally royal treatment. (In contrast, I later
learned that a gringo speaking fluent Serbian in Yugoslavia would often
attract curses and insults, I suppose on the assumption that he’ll better
understand what they’re saying than will your typical, monolingual gringo.)
In college, after I’d saved up enough money ($3,150) to buy my first
vehicle—a 1972 GMC Jimmy with 150,000 miles—my friends and I
would spend weekends camping, quail hunting, and four-wheeling, “Take
it Easy” blaring over the SUV’s stereo speakers. This experience came in
handy when handling weapons and four-wheeling in the wilds of Bosnia,
Croatia, and Iraq. In Latin America, my four-wheeling skills were put to
good recreational and agent developmental use. We’d often take our red
four-wheel drive Caribe off-road to the top of a local mountain, and to
some of the country’s most remote tropical Caribbean beaches.
In college I took one year of Italian and picked it up quickly because
of the similarities to Spanish, and because of a phenomenal language pro-
fessor from Italy. After two semesters of Italian, I spent a couple of months
(ostensibly) studying Italian in Perugia, Italy. In fact, I spent most of my
time traveling solo around the breathtakingly beautiful country by train.
Although I hadn’t spent much time in class, I returned to Perugia at the
end of the course to score an A on the final exam, thanks to my recent real-
world language immersion.
While fluency in foreign languages is not a prerequisite to working as a
CIA ops officer, it’s obviously a plus. At the very least it will help you avoid
situations like the one I had in Rome when I tried to meet up with some