Battleland pal Jeff Stein offers a noirish, first-person look into the world of military intelligence, and what makes spies tick:
I remember [the instructor] saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if you change your mind.” That’s because we had signed up for something illegal, even immoral, according to some people, he said.
It was called espionage. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but “case officers” — the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said — and betray people who trusted us, if need be.
Check out his full dissection of the espionage mindset, appearing in this Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine, here.