Review - Blowing My Cover by Lindsey Moran
Okay.
So, I finished reading Blowing My Cover by Lindsey Moran. I really liked this book. It did two things for me. The first was to realize that my personality is conducive with the personality that is necessary to succeed with the CIA. Second, that the CIA has problems that are so deeply rooted that it will probably take years and the destruction of the CIA - as an Intelligence body - before those problems are taken care of.
Basically, Lindsey grew up wanting to work for the CIA. Her father worked as a Naval Architect and, like many of our fathers who worked for Uncle Sam, really couldn't talk about the work he'd done. Therefore, as a child you begin to wonder if your father actually worked for the CIA or the FBI or some other organization that specialized in subterfuge. In my case I actually wondered if dad worked for the FBI mostly because I knew that he stayed stateside, we stayed stateside, and the description it seemed we were given to tell people about what he did was, "Federal Agent". As we got older that meant that he did things, "… like the FBI."
Most people would say, "So your dad's with the FBI," and instead of using all of the acronyms to describe what organization and investigative authority he worked through my reply would be, "Something like that."
Anyway, as the book begins it drew me into the similarities between my experiences and the Lindsey Moran's experience. We both grew up wanting to be like what we thought our dads were. We wanted to grow up to enter the CIA.
Like me Lindsey has gone through life jumping from one choice to another. She's studied at various prestigious universities and taught English in Bulgaria and writing in San Francisco and ended up, before entering the CIA, as a Fulbright Scholar back in Bulgaria. Lindsey gives me the impression that she has a flakey side to her that was, in part, put in line when she entered the CIA, went through all of the training, and eventually had to live under a pretty strict regime of intelligence and paranoia before realizing that what was important to her wasn't what was important to her employer.
The process of becoming a spy begins when you decide you want to work for the CIA. In her case that happened a couple of times. The first was right out of college (Harvard) and then again five years or so later when she felt that this was her way of giving a part of her life to public service - like serving in the armed forces. She took the Fulbright scholarship, got offered a job with the CIA, and spent time at The Farm learning how to be a traditional spy complete with dead drops and learning how to detect and evade tails and shadows.
Most of the book actually deals with her experiences going through CIA training. Most of her experience, with the CIA, seems to be at The Farm where she developed relationships and excelled at most things. Driving was one exception. She did not excel at the driving course.
The book begins with her trying to get in, continues through her experiences, and then spends the last quarter to a third with her experiences in Macedonia where she worked as a case officer and had taken over several informants that, we are told, were useless and that the CIA paid a lot of money to maintain. As the book moves toward its conclusion September 11, 2001 happened and Lindsey Moran began to wonder whether or not what she was doing was even useful. To answer this question she begins to talk about the experiences she had with the natives of Macedonia and the contacts she was developing for the CIA that had ties to terrorist cells and Al Qaeda. When she began the development process with these potential spies she was informed, from Washington, that she needed to cease and desist contact with them because they had ties to terrorists.
That's the problem. That was her problem with the CIA. The very people they are trying to protect were let down on September 11, 2001 and continued to be let down afterward because the old boys who had created and run the CIA wouldn't change their modus operandi enough to take into account the idea that we needed people with ties to terrorists in order to determine what was being planned in the terrorist communities and among the individual cells.
Lindsey Moran also talks about the final experiences with the CIA, her finishing up her work there, her decision to quit, and her meeting and eventually marrying her husband James. In the end, she discovers that what is really important to her, what she needs to be doing with her life, isn't what she's been doing.
This is a really good book. At the same time this book shares some of the details regarding what happens once you get into the CIA and what takes place once you are inside, the training involved, and finally what it means to be a spy.
Being a spy isn't what it's like in fiction or in the movies. It takes a lot of effort, it deals a lot with staying out late, drinking a lot of alcohol and spending time with people who are somewhat seedy or really seedy, who are trying to make a fast buck, who have nothing to offer but are desperate enough to make you think they do. Being a CIA case officer is not what the James Bonds or the Sams of the world make them out to be.
If you've ever been curious to know more about the guts of the United States intelligence community or thought about being a spy then this is the book for you. If you just want a good read then you should pick this book up. It doesn't take a lot of time and Lindsey Moran is a talented writer whose views and expression of those views help make what she is writing about intriguing and interesting.