This Veteran's Day, I wanted to write a tribute to another kind of veteran. These veterans sacrifice just as much, and suffer just as much, and die just as bravely, as any who have ever worn the uniform. But they receive no medals, no parades, and no public recognition. Their heroism goes unreported, their sacrifices ignored, their very existence unnoticed by most. Their own families do not know what they do, or where they go. They see things and do things that leave scars both physical and emotional, but they cannot talk about them. I'm talking about the men and women of America's intelligence agencies, the shadow warriors who operate all around the world, gathering information and foiling evildoers so that the rest of us can sleep safely in our homes.
ONE LAST ROLE TO PLAY
By Lewis
Smith
The twenty young agents ceased fidgeting
and whispering among themselves as the Instructor entered the room. Every pair
of eyes followed her as she took her place at the steel lectern. She carried no notes, no briefcase, nor any
other paraphernalia to designate her status.
She wore the uniform of a staff level officer in the U.S. military, but
like the trainees, she was not active-duty military. Their employer was a different branch of
government altogether, affectionately called the “Beast with Three Initials” by
those it employed. All the students in
this class were intelligence officers in training; most were Americans,
although a few worked for countries closely allied with the USA. Sixteen were men, four were women; all were
young. They had left homes,
universities, and employers all across the world, where their cover ID’s were
scrupulously maintained, in order to attend this four week course in field
operations, although it was referred to under the humorous euphemism of a
“Leadership Conference.”
She swept the room with her eyes,
mentally taking attendance and reading the posture and body language of each
student. For three weeks she had led them
through the advanced training all field operatives must master; alternating
between classroom lectures, physical fitness training, and one-on-one exercises
in everything from reading body language to covert surveillance to reading
micro-facial tics and expressions to determine if the speaker was telling the
truth or not. So young, she thought sadly.
How many of them would live to be even as old as she was, much less to a
ripe old age? It was a dangerous world,
and she knew the odds were that at one or more of these enthusiastic young
agents-in-training would not make it to thirty.
As she studied the class, they studied
her in turn. The Instructor was a mystery that they had discussed in whispers
ever since the course began. Everything
about her – her real name, her age, her history – was the subject of rumor and
conjecture, but in the end, none of them knew any of those things about her,
and it bugged them each in different ways.
How old was she? She was a remarkable specimen of physical
fitness, trim and athletic and able to match them, stride for stride, jump for
jump, and climb for climb in the most difficult obstacle courses. But she wasn’t “butch” at all. The Instructor
was a beautiful woman - tallish, curved in all the right places, with ash blond
hair and piercing green eyes. When she
smiled, every man in the room sat up a little straighter. There wasn’t a single male in the room that
hadn’t thought about what it would be like to bed her - except for Agent
Hoskins, who bragged that he was “so gay he made a Spirograph look
straight.” And yet . . . despite her
lack of facial wrinkles and her well-toned body, despite the ash-blond hair
that cascaded down her shoulders when she let it down during a training session
on disguises, despite the laugh that made everyone in the room smile –the fact
remained that none of them could tell how old she really was. When she acted flirtatious as part of a
lecture on the role of seduction in espionage, she looked somewhere just north
of twenty-five, perhaps. But when she
talked about doing field ops in the late 1990’s, it was obvious she was quite a
bit older than that. And her eyes . . . when she spoke on serious matters, the
spark in those green orbs faded, and the weariness and sadness in her gaze
spoke of long decades of service, sacrifice, frustration, and loss. Once she made a passing reference to her
memories of the mid-1980’s, and the men in the room exchanged puzzled glances,
doing the math in their heads and coming up with an estimate in the low forties
– a clear impossibility! Could she be
lying to them about those recollections?
After all, honesty was not a trait the Agency cultivated. But no one knew for sure.
Her professional and personal history
was another topic of whispered speculation.
Rumors abounded as to her previous assignments, and no one could say
where those rumors came from or how much credence to give them. Someone said she had spent four years
undercover in Moscow, becoming a mistress to one of Putin’s cronies, passing on
critical intelligence about Russia’s latest strategic plans. Others claimed she’d been the analyst who had
pinpointed the location of bin Laden’s compound in 2012. Agent Henderson
claimed to have heard that she spoke fluent Mandarin and operated as a fashion
model and high-end escort in China, eavesdropping on government officials at
cocktail parties. The latest story making
the rounds was that she’d done repeated deep cover missions in the UK to track
down and arrest the financial backers of numerous terrorist organizations, from
the Islamic State to the IRA.
All of this led them to wonder, who
was she when she wasn’t doing field ops or instructing younger agents in the
art of espionage? They tried to imagine
this fearful competitor and demanding instructor as a wife or mother, and most
of them couldn’t see her in that role.
The same woman who’d made them stand in place, stone still and silent,
for six hours, and stood as cold and hard as a statue beside them the whole
time, cuddling a child in her arms and reading bedtime stories? The woman rumor claimed had completed the
Crucible four times, asking some civilian man to open a pickle jar for her? It didn’t compute. A couple of the men in class were pretty sure
she was a lesbian, with a soft young wife or girlfriend waiting for her at some
upscale apartment. There was no proof of
this, but all agreed it made for a pleasant mental picture. The truth was that none of them knew.
And the Instructor liked it just fine
that way. Let them wonder, she thought
as she looked at their serious young faces.
As long as they wonder, they will fear. And as long as they fear me,
they will remember what I teach them here – and maybe that will help some of
them stay alive!
She leaned forward on the lectern and
cleared her throat, and then fixed each agent with her gaze for just a
moment. The silence hung in the air for
a few seconds, just long enough for anticipation to build but not long enough
for boredom to set in. Then she spoke.
“There is a week left in this course
by the calendar, but I do not know if I will be here till the scheduled end or
not. I hope to, and plan to, but as the
old proverb goes – ‘Man plans, and God laughs.’ So today, we’re going to ignore the field
manuals, skip the role-playing exercises, and I’m going to level with you as
best I can. I want to warn you of what
all this career can involve. You’re
about to embark on a path that will take you to some of the darkest places in
this world – and inside yourself.
Statistically speaking, one or two of you agents in this room will
probably die ‘on the job’ in the next decade.
No one will know, not even your family, the true circumstances of your demise. They will be told you died in a helicopter
crash, or in a training exercise, or drowned while scuba diving – but the truth
will be something far more painful and less pleasant. Another one out of this group will most
likely put a gun in his mouth because he can’t live with what this job made him
do, or who it forced him to become.
Ex-CIA agents have one of the highest suicide rates of any job
demographic in America, except for military combat veterans. What about the rest of you? Odds are, most of you will quit the Agency
before you complete a decade of service.
One agent in ten completes the full twenty years of service, and about
one out of thirty will make it to twenty-five years.” She paused a moment, savoring the stunned
silence of her audience, and then spoke again.
“As I have done.”
Eyebrows shot up, and some of the men
exchanged glances. She allowed herself a
bitter laugh.
“Yes, that’s right, I was recruited at
seventeen, while I was still in high school,” she said. “And yes, that means I’m in my forties
now. Thank you for your
astonishment! But . . . that’s not
something romantic or cool. They needed
someone young, someone attractive, intelligent, malleable, and willing. I was a legacy, if you know what that means,
and because of the family connection I’d been on their radar since I was
twelve. I was stalked, shadowed,
traumatized, and thoroughly screened before they ever approached me with a job
offer. I was flattered that they wanted
me, that they told me I could be of use, that I could help punish the evil and
save the innocent. That’s the shiny
object they hold up in front of you, the lure they use to suck you in until the
hook is set, and once it’s set, you are dancing on the end of their line - fish
and bait all in one.”
“So it came to pass that while other
kids my age were worrying about prom dates and scholarship applications and
boyfriends and making the honor roll, I was undergoing psychological
screenings, medical evaluations, and classes like this one – on top of all that
other regular high school and college stuff I had to keep up with, to preserve
the illusion of normality. You can’t
begin to imagine the toll it took, how much my relationships with family,
friends, and loved ones suffered.” She paused a moment, lost in memories of those
stressful days, recalling how often the bliss of youth was interrupted and
sometimes ruined by “them,” as she came to refer to her employer.
“At nineteen, I was dropped in a
foreign city, given a role to play. I
was surrounded by people who hated our country, hated our allies, and who would
have killed me in a second had they known who I really was. Some were active agents of terror, others
aided and abetted terrorists out of a misguided sense of loyalty, or religious
fervor, or family ties. I lived among
them, drank with them, joked with them, became one of them – and when the time
came, betrayed them all. Some are still
in jail because of the information I gathered and the situations I maneuvered
them into. A few are dead.”
“Another time I was placed in the path
of a wealthy Arab emigree, a man whose hands were soft and clean, but who
funneled millions of dollars to Al Qaeda and other such groups. He had a weakness for soft, emotionally frail
girls who were easily victimized, because his own daughter was one such, and
had taken her life at fifteen. I became
a frightened little mouse, a shrinking, terrified wallflower who recoiled from
his advances at first in terror. Oh, he
didn’t want to sleep with me – he had a whole harem of women for that purpose. He wanted to help me – and in so
doing, redeem his failure to help his daughter.
But he was so psychotic that even his sympathy and desire to rescue me
were marred by fits of anger and violence.
He hit me more than once, and another time he fired a gun so close to my
ear I suffered permanent hearing loss on that side. And I took it. I had to take it, because if I struck back,
or broke character even for a second, I would lose my appeal, and the
opportunity to take him down would be lost.
Today he is serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison, and a
financial conduit that armed his terrorist cronies with state-of-the-art
weapons that they would have used to kill thousands of people was shut down for
good. What was my reward? I’m a target
for assassination to this day and have spent a decade and a half watching my
back.”
“I could go on all day telling you
about ops I’ve done or assisted with.
I’ve been the ‘eyes in the sky’ for troops in combat zones, and later on
was dispatched to such places myself, even though it was illegal for me to be
where I was. I’ve abducted people off the streets in first world countries,
sometimes in broad daylight. Bad people,
mostly, or people who we could use as leverage with the bad people they were
close to. I’ve seen men killed right in front of me, and
I’ve come within inches of being captured by terrorists who would have taken
their time with me before they let me die.
Understand, agents, I am not telling you this to brag on myself in any
way. Truth be told, if I had it to do
all over again, knowing what I know now, I would have told the Agency’s
recruiters to go to hell, and pursued a career in academia instead.”
Agent Moore gave a nervous laugh. “Are you trying to talk us out of our
commitment?” she said.
“No,” she said. “I doubt I could if I wanted to. All of you
have swallowed the bait, and the hook is set.
By the time you reach this level of training, you’re committed. What I want you to do is LISTEN!” That last word crackled with an aura of
command that caused every pair of eyes to fixate on her.
“This may be the last lesson I teach
you,” the instructor said. “Or it may
not. But it IS the most important thing
I will impart to you. There is no wasted
time in this course – everything I have done, everything I have made you do,
has served a purpose. But even if you
forget or disregard every other lesson I’ve taught, please remember this
one. It can save your life – it WILL
save your life, at some point, if you are committed to this career. And it just might save your soul, if you
believe in such things, or your family, if you have one.”
The students stared at her,
fascinated. The mask of the Instructor
had dropped, and instead they found themselves looking into the eyes of a
mentor, a friend, a sage who was desperate to pass on something of great value.
“You probably think the essence of
covert operations is to pretend to be someone else,” she said. “That’s a lie. If you go out there pretending to be someone
else, you’ll most likely bungle the operation and you may get yourself killed
in the process, or perhaps get one of our other agents or foreign assets
killed. You have to BECOME someone else. You have to take that identity that
the Agency will craft for you and embrace it to the core of your soul. Take the person you are, the parts of you
that you value, the things that make you, YOU – and lock them away. Store them in a secure place, deep in your psyche,
and don’t touch them, don’t recall them, don’t even think about them, until the
op is over. Until you are home, where
you can be you again. When I became ‘the
Mouse,’ I had to set aside everything I prided myself in being – my strength,
my independence, my physical prowess. I
had to shrink – in every sense of the word – to become this nervous, frightened
creature who would draw the pity of a man who funded terrorists around the
globe. I could not break character for a
second. Oh, how my true self pounded at
the bars of the cage I’d shoved her into, longing to punch that smug, pitying
face! But I did it, I let him yell at me
and then hold me, punch me and then weep with repentance. I let him do it, knowing he would do it
again. But I was the Mouse, and I did what mice do. I cowered, and tried to run, and then froze
in fear and let him catch me all over again.
Until the day came that I caught HIM.
Now he’s locked away for the rest of his life, and I’m here teaching
you. Become the role. Your life depends
on it. Never break character, even when you are alone. Never let your true self out of its cage till
the op is done. Remember the smallest details of your cover story! One of our agents was sent to London in the
80’s to infiltrate the IRA. He had the
cover ID down pat, the accent, the phony credentials, everything. He’d spent a solid year training for the
mission, but once he got in the field, he was dead within a week. Why? Because he never got entirely used to the way
traffic flowed in the UK. He always
glanced in the wrong direction first when he was about to cross the road, and
someone noticed. We never found his
body, but a captured enemy asset told us he was tortured for a week, then cut
to pieces and dumped in the Thames.
Pretending is not enough, playing a role is not enough. Become your cover, period.”
She paused, making sure she still had
their focus, and then took a sip of water before continuing.
“There’s another thing,” she
said. “A relative of mine said something
about our employer years ago: ‘We’re bastards, but we’re useful bastards.’ This job will require you to do horrible
things. Things the real you would recoil
at, unless you’re a true sociopath – which I suspect some of our more
successful agents are! Unless you are a person who can cheerfully live with
innocent blood on your hands, who can betray people who trust you, who is
willing to not just lie but to live a lie, and live it so deeply that it
becomes your truth; someone who can spend months winning the trust and
affection of another person and then see that person marched away in handcuffs
to be interrogated and imprisoned - you have to become your cover story. That
way, when you return to your “real” life, to your family, your parents, your
spouse if you have one, you don’t wake up screaming over the things you had to
do ‘over there.’ Because YOU didn’t do
them. It was that other person, that
person you became, that person who ceased to exist the moment you returned safe
to your native soil. The real self, the
self you kept under lock and key while you carried out the mission, would never
do such a thing. You have to not just
tell yourself that but convince yourself of it.
Because the alternative is to admit you’re just as big a monster as the
monster you were trying to slay.”
“Here’s another thing – don’t expect
rewards. Your actions may save thousands
of lives, but not a one of them will ever know it, ever thank you, or even be
aware that they were saved. Only your
closest friends and family will even know who you really work for, and those
who do know, will not ever know what you have been required to do. They will just know that you’re gone,
sometimes for weeks and months at a time, and never have the comfort of even
knowing where you are or what you’re doing.
They don’t know when, or if, you will return. Public recognition is not our thing. Praise is not our thing. There’s little glory to be had in this
job. Most of the time, even our fellow
agents don’t know what all we’ve done, unless you do an op together – and when
that happens, don’t count on being assigned that partner again. The less we know about each other, the less
that can be tortured out of us if things go south. The only reason I am telling you as much
about my career as I have is that my career is in its final weeks.”
“Last of all, and most importantly –
there is one last role you will have to take on, one last cover you will have
to invent. This one isn’t crafted for
you by specialists at Langley, and it’s not designed to deceive terrorists, or
foreign agents, or government investigators.
It’s designed to fool the people you love most.”
She sighed, looked down at her hands
for a moment, and continued.
“You see, no matter how careful you
are to become whoever the mission requires you to be, no matter how deeply you
bury your true self, no matter how hard you try to return to normality, to deny
that you are the one who did the things the job required – it’s all
bullshit. In your deepest self, you know
and will always know that you did those things.
You betrayed people who trusted you, you lied, you deceived, you may
have slept with murderers and thugs, or got drunk with them, or watched as they
wreaked horrors on the innocent. You may
have caused ‘collateral damage’ – what a nice, sanitary phrase that is to
describe blowing up the wrong people!
Why do you think the Agency employs so many shrinks? No matter how good you are, you can’t always bury
the things you’ve done. Even if you
don’t think about them in your waking hours, they will haunt your dreams. That’s why you have to create this last role,
and why you have to completely and totally immerse yourself in it.”
“Most of you will fall in love at some
point, and many of you will marry.
Agents have a very high divorce rate, primarily because most of them have
never learned what I am trying to teach you now. You see, that last role you have to create
and immerse yourself in, the last person you have to become – is YOU. The version of you that never did these
things, that doesn’t remember them, that isn’t tormented by them, that doesn’t
have nightmares about them. You have to become a normal wife, husband, father,
mother, son, and lover. You have to wrap
yourself in a blanket of emotional normality for the sake of those you love,
because if you don’t, they will pay just as high an emotional price for the
things this job requires as you do. And
no one wants that for the people they love most. So, when you are home, when you are with them
– become that person you might have been if you had told the Agency’s
recruiters to go to hell, and embraced a normal life instead. Please, Agents, don’t forget this. This last role, the role of the you that you
would have been if you’d never set foot in this room – that is the most
important character you will ever assume!
That is all.”
With that, she stepped away from the
podium and perched on a stool, the force of her words having drained her
strength for the moment. What happened
next surprised her, and more than anything she’d experienced with this roomful
of rookies, it touched her heart, reaching deep into her true self.
For at that moment, they all began to
applaud. The Instructor rose to her feet
and gave a small bow; acknowledging their gesture with genuine gratitude. The agents fell silent, many of them
regarding her with something approaching awe. Finally, Agent Moore raised her
hand.
“Just one thing I wonder,” she
said. “That last role – the role you
play for your family and those you love – how long do you have to keep doing
that?”
The Instructor froze, and in that
moment all semblance of youth fled from her, and the eyes that looked out at
the class were a thousand years old.
“I don’t know,” she said softly, and
left the room.
