Part Four | “The CIA do fuck-all for you.”
In this final instalment of our four-part series interviewing an ex-CIA operative/spy, we close the discussion by talking about his relationship with the CIA, leaving The Agency and what happens next… If you need to catch up, the first three excerpts are here, here and here.
I realised The Agency was taking advantage of me…
Ruby: You said you were tricked by the CIA… To be tricked by the people who are deploying you for the country, that’s crazy. I can see why you would bond with people over it. That’s quite a hard thing to reconcile, right?
Agent: What’s hard to reconcile is what to do next.
Ruby: Get off the path?
Agent: Yea, but there are lots of people who don’t, and that’s what breaks my heart. They realise their husband is cheating on them, or this boss is embezzling them, or this client is manipulating them, and they stay. How do you ever come to terms with that? I realised the agency was taking advantage of me. I called them out, they denied it, and I punched out.
Ruby: I think for some people, there’s safety. You know your husband is cheating, you read the texts, you’ve seen the lipstick on the collar, but there is a safe space in remaining in that kind of denial because it’s comfortable.
Agent: Right… I’m still in contact with some of my former covert officers who were on the inside, I’m public enough that they reach out to me sometimes. I have a friend who’s been trying to get out for years, man. We both wanted families and wifes and children. I have that now, he has nothing. He still goes where the agency sends him obediently. You end up sacrificing so much. I don’t know how he does it, but - essentially - he’s excellent at what he does, so we’re all safer because he doesn’t have the courage to say no. I have to see that…
The CIA is a bit like the mafia…
Ruby: So we’ve spoken about leaving the CIA, but what are the actual options when you’ve left? I mean, it’s not the kind of thing you can really put on your resume, right? I know you’ve moved into private agent work, but what do most people do? Is that part of the CIA handing you off, that they build you a background?
Agent: Tell me if I use this British phrase correctly, but the CIA does shit-all for you.
Ruby: Ah [laughs], we say “fuck-all.”
Agent: That’s basically what they do. They do fuck-all for you. It’s a bit like the Mafia. They have invested a fortune into you and your training and your abilities and your skill, and now you’re exercising your right as an American to say, ‘I’m done, thank you very much.’ They don’t want to make that transition easy. If anything, they want to deter you from the day that you sign that sheet of paper from ever making that decision.
Ruby: They make it hard to leave, like that abusive parent thing you mentioned…
Agent: When you leave, it’s painful. If you’re undercover, they write your resume for you so that it’s something that can be formally approved by the government as “unclassified” but you didn’t do any of those real jobs and the person writing your resume isn’t actually invested in your getting a good job…
Ruby: So even your resume isn’t real…
Agent: Exactly, now you’ve got this resume that makes you look like you just don’t care for a bunch of skills that you can’t actually do.
You look like an unreliable employee…
Ruby: What was your resume like?
Agent: When I left the agency, I had a horrible resume, it was embarrassing. It looked really good until 2007. I’m an Air Force Academy graduate, I was a pilot, I was a nuclear officer, I had a TOP SECRET clearance, et cetera, et cetera, and then from 2007 to 2014, it looked like I had totally fallen off the wagon…
Ruby: Nothing…
Agent: Nothing. Nobody takes you seriously because you look like an unreliable employee and you can’t blame anybody…
Ruby: You’re essentially unemployable. The only person that can employ you is you.
Agent: Exactly. The whole reason my business exists is because after six months of my wife and I both leaving the CIA and not being taken seriously in the employment world [whilst having a 1-year-old], we realised we trying to do this based on a resume that was fake. But we had skills the corporate world could use. Two weeks later, we were both hired into a Fortune 100 company and we were off to the races.
I am the first person to admit I’m ethically and morally flexible…
Ruby: We’ve essentially spoken about mental health around leaving the CIA. Did they help with that? You and your wife were both dealing with such mentally draining things.
Agent: To a certain extent, you know from the hiring process, which is very robust, that you already have a high tolerance for the discomfort that drives a lot of mental health issues. You’re morally flexible. I am the first person to admit I’m ethically and morally flexible, and I’m not ashamed to admit that anymore because it’s just the reality. My wife is the same way. Every situation kind of deserves its own consideration.
Ruby: Were both you and your wife like that prior to working at the agency? Was that innately in you both as characteristic do you think?
Agent: I don’t think it was innate, I think it was conditioned over our experiences in life, but The Agency had a method to identify people who lacked that sensitivity. There are plenty of people who go through the application and hiring and ultimately get rejected because they don’t have enough flexibility in that area.
Ruby: Isn’t it dangerous to have that many people working together who are so morally flexible as you put it?
Agent: It’s interesting to be around people with the same level of moral flexibility that you do, and the jokes you make, things you decide to do, and operations that you plan… A lot of the bad stuff you hear, it’s not surprising to me - you get five people together who all have the same bad idea, then suddenly it’s a good idea.
We’re dead to the CIA and have no value…
Ruby: And once you leave, you don’t hear from them?
Agent: There are all sorts of interesting relevant history where the agency doesn’t talk to its former intelligence officers, like a bad relationship. Now they’re starting to be the question of if that’s really wise, because if CIA doesn’t talk to former CIA officers but MSS from China starts talking to former CIA officers and Mossad talks to them and Ruby Pseudo talks to the CIA, shouldn’t CIA also be learning from all we’re doing on the outside? It’s interesting, because culturally, it’s totally anathema to them. We are dead to them and have no value.
Ruby: That’s harsh…
Agent: We have seen the wizard behind the curtain and they don’t want us to talk about it.
Ruby: So here we are...
End note: payment for this interview was donated to charity...
Photo Credit: E M