Excerpt of An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg
(Page 1 of 10)
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1
Several months before I was scheduled to leave for , I was assigned
to the office in
. In my case, I was
shipping out in August, so I would be in for most of the summer.
It was a busy time in , but the officers running country desks
liked to handle their own work. They’d give me an occasional name
trace to run, or have me coordinate a cable with another division. But
I wasn’t busy. I’d read the morning traffic—cables from the stations
in , and what ever traffic was
coming in. I’d stop by my friends’ offices throughout the building or
meet them for coffee in the cafeteria. And one or two days a week, I’d
take care of various tasks I had to accomplish before going abroad,
like and getting my
final medical clearance.
Other than that, I spent a lot of time reading. I had a stack of
books on my desk about the history and politics of , and I
wanted to get through them all before I left. People at the Agency
weren’t really "book people," and when colleagues stopped by my
cubicle and saw me reading, they’d usually chuckle or say, "Good for
you," in a sort of half-admiring, half "I wonder if you really belong
here" way. This was the same attitude I’d gotten from the Chief of when I’d needed him to sign off on an course I
wanted to take at the Department. He’d said, "Nobody ever
takes these," although after thinking about it for a few seconds he’d
signed and said, "See if you get anything out of it."
One day, the Deputy Chief of , a bland, decent guy stuck at
GS-13 or 14, called me into his office. There’d been some sort of routine
request from Congress about and , and he
wanted me to do a file review of all of the office’s cases, active and inactive, going back five years, to find the information. He was apologetic
about it, since even the words "file review" implied something wasteful and dull. But I didn’t mind. I’d read a few case files while
working on various matters, and they were an interesting window into the work I’d be doing once I went abroad.
The office’s files were stored in long, low cabinets that ran the length of the wall between the Deputy Chief and the Chief ’s offices.
There were probably about of them, going back ten years. Inactive
cases older than that were sent to Archives.
labeled TRBALLOON, pronouncing both
of the first two letters, and then the word.
either typed on a label
or written directly on the folder. They varied in length, with the
longer ones filling two or three of the orange folders.
Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury USA.
