My life as a spy
Was it 15 years ago that the Carmel High School class of ‘58 got together for their 45th reunion? We sat at tables in Tony’s restaurant and reviewed who we were and who we had become. Roger was a butcher, Frankie ran a successful dairy store, sold it for a lot of money and now drives a Mercedes sports car.
Don and Anthony sold pies at first, then went their separate ways. Carol and Kappy were teachers. Barb worked for IBM. George was a dentist as was his father. Unlike his father he was also a spy. At least that is what he told us at our 45th reunion. You could tell by the polite and not so polite eye rolls and unrepeatable comments that this was a rather difficult tale to believe.
“You’re a dentist,” one guy said.
What did you do, pull teeth for the CIA? Implant tiny cameras in bicuspids? Our newly outed spy said basically, “Yes. Look at me. Do I look like a spy? Of course not. It made it very easy for me to do my job. Spies don’t look like the characters in the movies. A lot of people, people you would never suspect, work for the firm.”
Most of the class thought that George, had been too much into the nitrous oxide.
Me? Not so much, because I was one of those unlikely people. I was a spy.
For one summer I was a spy, sort of. When I was an undergraduate, I would go home over summer break and work at some kind of job in Carmel and its environs.
I, being the quintessential Type A, would have found and nailed a job down by the previous Christmas vacation. Then there came the summer after graduate school when the school to which I would return would be the one in which I would begin my teaching career. I hadn’t prepared for a summer job. I have no idea why.
I could have gone home and sponged off my parents, but I had signed a lease for an apartment with three others women. I had my share of the rent to pay no matter what.
Where would I get a job? I asked practically everyone.
I was an annoying nuisance. But it paid off because my beloved Dr. Michael Sawyer told me that a particular company with some ties to SU had just gotten a government contract and was hiring researchers. He made a few calls and told me to report to an address on Comstock that afternoon.
I am not the best about finding places, so I leave for places early. It was a good strategy because I couldn’t find the address. I was looking for a substantial building. That was a wrong assumption.
I found that the address was a series of assorted prefab structures, arranged in no particular pattern near the crematorium. That didn’t bode well, I thought. Where was the main entrance? There were no numbers or names on any of the doors.
I chose a door and walked in.
The building seemed empty; one long corridor with small rooms off to one side. Suddenly, a voice, a strident, threatening voice, asked me what I was doing there. I turned to see a not friendly face, inviting me to leave.
I explained as best I could. The unfriendly face nodded and told me to follow him outside.
I thought that I’d messed this job thing up royally. Escorted to another anonymous door, with a flip of this guy’s head, he said, “This is where you belong.” Maybe belong was too strong a word.
Inside was much the same as the other building with the exception of the man who would be called my boss. I’ll call him Bob, of course that wasn’t his name.
“Who are you? Where is your badge?” the soon-to-be boss asked.
I stammered an explanation. He shrugged and made some comment about owing Dr. Sawyer a favor and asked when I could start work.
“Tomorrow?” I replied.
“How about Monday?”
I smiled, thanked him, turned around and promptly left the building.
As I reached my car it dawned on me that I knew absolutely nothing about this job, not even when to arrive on Monday. So back to the no name building to ask.
I was to report at 9. I didn’t have the courage to ask about the job, what it paid, or anything else. Great. Is this the kind of behavior you would expect from someone who had just earned her MA?
On Monday, I was there at 8:50. I was the only one there until 9:15.
The morning was interesting. Mr. Bob took me through a maze of corridors which were just other buildings attached to each other and introduced me to my co-workers, three other women who, at the time were playing cards and drinking coffee. “Here’s your new help,” he said. “Show her what to do. And get her a badge.” Then he left.
The gals took me through the buildings to another “God knows where” and I filled out an employee form, got my picture taken and was issued a badge which I was only to wear, and this was emphasized, while in the rabbit warren of buildings.
“Do not wear this except in these buildings.” I wondered if the badge were some kind of tracking device should I get lost.
Back to the coffee and cards room, I got my assignment. One of the women ripped a page out of one of those marbled notebooks like those we used in high school and asked me if I had a pen. Then she took a three ring binder from a shelf. “Pick a number from 1 to 26,” she asked.
I had no idea what was going on, but I picked 17.
She opened the book to page 17, removed the page and gave it to me.
“Copy these words on to the paper. Then put the page back in the folder in order,” she said.
All the words were in German or French. I had two years of college French but had no idea what the words meant. I could say “Where is my baggage” in German. I did seem a bit underqualified.
The gals explained that I was to take my list and prepare a bibiliography for each word using all of the reference materials in the SU library.
By that they meant the card catalog, the social science index, the readers’ index, special interest and corporate publications. I should exhaust all possible entries in any reference materials that used each word.
I asked why.
They shrugged. As they left me, one said, because we are getting paid to do this.
Mr. Bob came back as I was writing my list and sat on the desk.
“This is important,” he said. “You are not to tell anyone what you are doing,” and he emphasized the anyone, with a list that included my parents, siblings, roommates, etc.
This is top secret stuff.
Stupid me, I asked, “For whom?”
He shook his head with one of those half closed eye punctuations and repeated, “This is top secret stuff.” Then he offered, “You know one of those government three letter agencies.”
Wow. Who was I doing this work for? OK I was doing it for this company, but who would ultimately use this information? Was it the FBI? The CIA? Of course, it could be also the FHA or even the AAA. What did I know?
No one came in from Q to give me some special equipment beyond the page torn out of the composition book.
I had no idea what kind of information I was collecting. It could have been recipes for stews for all I knew. There was no internet in those days. Information gathering was work. I tracked down a librarian who read German and French. He told me that the words all referred to types of or methods of manufacturing armaments.
Aha! A clue, sort of.
You cannot imagine how boring it is to comb through hundreds of sources looking for a word. But I did for eight hours a day for a dollar an hour.
I finished in a month and proudly bought my thick packet of results to Mr. Bob, who looked at me and said. “Are you sure that you have finished this because when you have, your job is finished. I’d go back and recheck your work , that is if you want to work until the end of the summer.”
This never happened in a James Bond movie. Did M ever say that to James?
OK, so maybe I wasn’t a spy or even an analyst, but somewhere in the hierarchy of spyness, I provided a government agency known by three initials with a lot of reading references which should have kept them busy for a year. The other three gals probably did the same.
I often think about this when I hear that the intelligence agencies miss something. When the news tells us that one of these agencies didn’t have the staff to sort through all of the data … I certainly understand.
Was it because some lower echelon flunky was busy stretching out a job?
