70 AMERICAN SPYCIA officer: “Hell yes! It’s my job, remember?”
Polygraph operator: “It’s a yes or no question.”
My psychiatric evaluation was also conducted at CIA headquarters, on
the ground floor Office of Medical Services. The shrink and I discussed a
number of mental health issues related to work as a CIA officer, but what
the doctor could not wrap his head around was the fact that I liked tequila
but had never smoked pot. Since I’d grown up in the seventies, he simply
did not believe me when I told him I’d never even tried marijuana.
He then asked me some routine questions about any medications I
took or any allergies I might have. This interview took place right after the
highly publicized Tylenol scare of 1982, when several people died from
taking adulterated Tylenol capsules.^1
“I’m allergic to aspirin. I break out in hives,” I explained, itching for
the session to be over.
“Take Tylenol instead,” the doctor suggested.
“I don’t think so,” I replied, the Tylenol scare fresh in my mind.
“Why not?”
“Better red than dead.”
I was quite pleased with my clever, topical, and geopolitically relevant
answer, but the psychiatrist did not even smile. He jotted down a few more
notes, closed his notebook, and ended the interview. (For those readers too
young to remember, a common Cold War expression, uttered by CIA types
and others adamantly opposed to Communism, was “Better dead than red.”)
The final step in the process was the in-depth background investigation.
Besides checking multiple government databases for any derogatory infor-
mation, CIA investigators also contacted my friends, neighbors, teachers,
and coworkers in person, even knocking on doors in my hometown. They
wanted to know what kind of person I really was. It was at this stage in the
process where I was convinced my application would go off the rails.
Allow me to explain.
When I first moved to DC, my girlfriend Stacy and I decided that we
loved and missed each other so much that the only way to ease the suf-
fering was to get married. (Okay, it may have been my idea.) And so, we got
married, just before my third year of law school. Manifesting symptoms
of pre-wedding jitters, I sent out the extra wedding invitations as a joke
to a number of celebrities, including the queen of England, Israeli prime