Read See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism for Free Online

go back to Tokyo in 1941. If you’d been caught meeting your agent, you’d be lucky to go to jail. And, incidentally, your agent would have been put up against a wall and shot. Sure, the CIA would have done its best to try to get you out. But it wouldn’t have been able to do anything until the end of the war. Four years rotting in a Japanese jail. The same would go for Penang. A mistake in this business is unthinkable.’
    For a moment, I considered the possibility that Scott was trying to talk me out of the job.
    Giving me some time to think, he stood up, walked over to the window, and opened the curtain, letting in the bright midday light as if it would somehow help me make a decision.
    ‘So, what do you think about the DO as a career?’
    I didn’t answer.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘Sure,’ I finally said, faking all the enthusiasm I could muster. ‘I’d be real interested.’ I might have been able to see myself at the president’s elbow, but I was way too immature for the job Scott had just been describing. I also couldn’t stop picturing myself in leg irons, chained to the wall of some dank, foul-smelling Malaysian prison. Then again, the longer I could keep the application process going, the more I could dine out on the story for years to come; and surely the nation’s supersleuths would come to their senses sooner or later.
    Wrong again. In March 1976 I was invited to Washington for more interviews and to take the dreaded polygraph.
    Ironically, or maybe intentionally, I was put up at the Holiday Inn across from the Watergate, the same Holiday Inn the ex-CIA Watergate burglars had used as a listening post when they bugged the Democratic National Committee headquarters. In quick succession, I went through a half-dozen interviews and exams; a couple of DO case officers, a shrink, and a security officer; and a French and German test. All the meetings took place in my hotel room. I was never brought into a CIA building.
    The most impressive person I met was Don Gregg. Don would go on to be security adviser to then vice president George Bush, and ambassador to South Korea when Bush became president. Back then, though. Gregg had just been reassigned to Washington from Seoul, where he’d been XXXXXXX chief. For most of the two hours we talked, he described what it was like to live overseas for most of one’s adult life: the isolation, the alienation from family and country, the physical hardship. Gregg was curious about my background and asked a lot of questions about the time I had spent in Europe. He wanted to know how I adjusted and whether I made friends. For the first time I had a sense that the DO might be interested in me for my overseas experience, an interesting legacy from my mother.
    The polygraph was held on the next-to-last day in an apartment complex several blocks from the Holiday Inn. I found the name Scott had given me on the lobby directory - Dr. Jarmen, third floor. A balding man, about thirty-five, greeted me when I knocked on the door. With his solid white shirt, lime-green tie, and pocket protector, he looked like an accountant. He showed me into a room that was meant to be a bedroom. In the middle was an oversize plastic-upholstered easy chair, a Formica table, and a straight-back chair positioned across the table from the easy chair. Dr. Jarmen, or whatever his real name was, seated me in the easy chair and hooked me up to three pairs of wires and sensors leading to the polygraph. My right index finger was attached to a metal electrode, my chest to a respirator tube, and my upper right arm to a cuff monitor.
    ‘Tell the truth and your perspiration, heartbeat, and breathing will remain pretty close to normal,’ the good doctor advised.
    I was too tense at first to get a good reading, but after a pause to let my heartbeat go down, we restarted with better results. The questions came in a steady rhythm, and my answers followed in even yeses and nos. He asked me about drugs, whether I’d tried