Shedding My Secret Identity

Leaving the CIA

All views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of the CIA. All information presented is unclassified.

I applied on a whim.

I needed a new job. A new career, really. Actually, a new life.

I had done a very un-feminist thing and left my academic teaching job in Texas to come to Washington, DC to marry Kevin. There wasn’t much choice if we were going to be together, as there’s not a high demand for economists in the middle of West Texas.

I knew academia wasn’t in the cards. Pretty hard to get a job, period. In a particular place, on the hyper-competitive East coast, as a non-Ivy Leaguer? Impossible. So I just hoped I could find something else. Anything else.

For the first year or so of our marriage, I was unemployed. Thankfully, money wasn’t a problem. But loneliness was. I found it’s pretty hard to make friends in a new city without a job, even if you’re insufferably extroverted like me. I’d strike up conversations with perfect strangers. If they seemed nice at all, I’d try to invite them to dinner or something. Apparently most people took that as a sign of mental instability because it rarely worked.

Kevin would come home at the end of the day, a socially spent introvert, and I would seize upon him like a dog greeting its owner at the door (for the record, I never wet myself with excitement). He threw me the saddest 30th birthday party anyone has ever had, with four other people in attendance, two of them his colleagues who barely knew me, and the other two my cousin and her husband, who lived in the area.

I would say I got rejected by numerous prospective employers, but that implies getting any attention from them at all. I would have welcomed the opportunity to be rejected. I loved my new husband, but otherwise I felt like a massive failure in a city almost entirely devoid of them.

And I felt adrift. Again. After finally feeling at home in America in grad school and, to a lesser degree, at my teaching job in Texas, I was starting over again. Again.

But just a couple of weeks after I applied for a job at the Central Intelligence Agency, as an Africa analyst, I got an email. It took multiple additional steps and another full year to get in the door. But I finally walked through it on January 23, 2006. And today, I walked out for the last time.

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I’ve been repeatedly asked by well-meaning people when they find out about my strange childhood, “What was that like?” Or “What is Africa like?”

It’s an overwhelming question, like a being asked to describe a sunset to someone who has never had eyesight.

I usually say something bland like, “It was great,” before changing the subject.

I find myself similarly grasping at straws now. What is there to say about these last 19 years that at all captures everything they have taught me, all they have brought me, all the ways they have changed me.

I don’t know if it’s better or worse that people at least have some concept of the CIA, even if it’s mostly not accurate, whereas most Americans have zero knowledge of Africa (labeling it by the continent instead of the country is telling) and even less concept of what it’s like to grow up there as the child of evangelical missionaries. The unknown topped with the bizarre.

But most people think they know the CIA. Maybe they have a positive image based on numerous sexy spy movies. Maybe it’s a more dim view, based on the Agency’s admittedly not-always-great history (especially in Africa). Then there are the bat-sh*t crazy versions of the CIA, birthed in the deranged minds of conspiracy theorists and psychotics and, more recently, a certain President who dislikes anything he can’t control.

None of that is true, of course. The CIA is less powerful, less evil, less heroic, less untamed, and certainly less sexy and cool than anyone out there imagines. At the end of the day, the CIA is just a bunch of fairly typical people—true, better traveled than most—some more talented than others, some more virtuous than others, trying to find answers to questions, trying to understand the world, trying to use information to protect Americans and promote American interests.

And many times just trying to get the damn printer to work. Not even the CIA has decent printers, because they do not exist.

Printer hate is universal.

And, in my particular AOR, trying to protect ordinary Africans, too, and trying to ensure they become more free and prosperous. There was never a time in my work when I felt American interests were in conflict with a brighter future for Africans. The bad guys I metaphorically chased were always dictatorial tyrants, war lords, or corrupt thieves screwing over their own people.

In other words, for an American girl who loves Africa, it was the perfect fit. The ideal work. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it from the start, as I longed to create a cohesive, unified identity. I learned far more about Africa working at the CIA than I ever did living there. And I became more devoted to America, and more specifically to the Constitution, to which I swore an oath, and to the democracy it enshrined.

That was true as I watched African nations claw their way along arduous paths towards democracy. And that was true when I worked under an American President who threatened and violated our own.

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Mostly I made friends. I found family.

I vaguely remember my achievements. They were never just mine, anyway. The best and greatest ones were big team efforts. One in particular in which dozens of American lives were saved.

Mostly my mind is a slide deck of faces and moments and scenes. Laughter and tears and hugs. By the end, I could barely go anywhere in the building without running into someone I knew from this or that team or assignment. Like a friendly small town.

I located the rare tribe of Americans who were passionate about Africa. Some of them were first-generation Americans who had immigrated from Africa. Some of them were my fellow missionary kids, alumni of my school, believe it or not. But most were just regular Americans whose interest in Africa defied all explanation or logic, given how little exposure is to be found here. It always blew my mind that someone from Minnesota or Ohio whose family had rarely left the state decided to study African history or study abroad in Tanzania or learn Zulu.

When I think about my time at the Agency, I’m sure it’s not that different from anyone reflecting on a longtime job that they have loved. The work is one thing—mine was always interesting, mostly fulfilling, sometimes surreal, sometimes frustrating and demoralizing.

But I went in every day for the people. For my friends. To go home. The familiar sets of Hollywood thrillers came to feel like a warm embrace.

A lot changed during my time there. There were reorgs and rebrands and new processes and tech and the metastasizing cancer of red tape that drove me absolutely insane at times.

But mostly I changed. I started there as a childless, frantically striving 31-year-old, who had everyone, most notably herself, pretty well bamboozled into believing she had her sh*t together and had things figured out. She desperately needed to believe that.

I leave having had two kids, a fairly significant mental health episode, and the realization that I had not even a tiny baby sh*t together and knew even less. I’ve shed most of my inherited faith, which turned out to be laden down with fear. I’ve faced demons and slayed dragons. I’ve shed my cover.

Maybe I would have done that anywhere. Maybe that’s just how life goes for most people. They grow and heal and overcome with time.

But for me, perhaps ironically, I did it at the CIA. I entered shrouded in shadows, and I leave bathed in light.

And in that light, it’s clear that leave I must. I needed the Agency over all these years. I needed its community and its structure and stability. I needed the little bit of Africa it offered me. I needed a place to belong.

But now I’m fine on my own. I’m not afraid. I’m not lonely. I know who I am, and I know that’s who I want to be. I know Africa is a part of me that nothing can erase. I know there are other things I need to do for America and different ways I want to fight for democracy. And I know I’m not on my own.

I take some of the best friends I’ve ever had with me.

Love remakes you. The people and places you love become a part of you. Even the ones you have to let go settle deep into your cells and rewrite your DNA.

You couldn’t leave them if you tried.

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My friend

Benjamin Wittes

interviewed me about my career today on his show. Enjoy.