Free Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA by John Rizzo

can’t even confirm his place of birth.”
    “How could that be?” I asked, bewildered.
    “He says he can’t be sure because he doesn’t remember being there at the time.”
    The young lawyer eventually did pass the exam. The CIA Office of Security has always shown understanding in navigating the unique psyches of attorneys.
    Anyway, I remember my first polygraph in 1975 as being very long and very uncomfortable. I was asked a long string of detailed questions about my personal habits and predilections going back to my high school years. But I finally got through it, and that was the final hurdle.
    On January 18, 1976, I drove through the headquarters gates, reporting for duty. It was my first day of employment at the CIA. I was twenty-eight years old.

    The first rite of passage for me, like any brand-new Agency employee, was to attend a basic orientation course (“CIA 101,” as it is informally known). When I arrived in January 1976, the course was one week long, and in the years since has periodically varied from three days anywhere up to two weeks. Its purpose has remained unchanged: introducing fledgling personnel to the CIA’s history, its organizational structure, its various assigned missions, and both the benefits (insurance, retirement, other bread-and-butter topics) and responsibilities (protection of classified information, security awareness) accorded to every employee upon first walking through the door.
    Today, the CIA website provides at least some of this basic background data to aspiring candidates. In 1976, publicly available information about the Agency’s inner workings was nonexistent, so all of us new arrivals had one thing in common: We had joined an organization, and a culture, about which we knew virtually nothing. My class was about twenty people, a polyglot of newcomers: analysts, scientists, secretaries, even fledgling spooks. The majority of us were twentysomethings, but there were those in their forties and fifties as well. For five days, we sat together around a large oval table in a paneled conference room at headquarters, listening to a parade of CIA officials—some stern, some jocular, some professorial—offering a collective primer on the organization. On and on they came, immersing us in seemingly everything imaginable about the Agency. And all of it—the papers we were given, the slides we were shown, the lectures we listened to—had a big red SECRET stamp affixed to it.
    If the intent of the orientation was to simultaneously educate, thrill, and indoctrinate a neophyte, that SECRET stamp was the coup de grâce.
    There was at the time one piece of breaking news that the orientation course didn’t cover: President Ford had just fired the CIA director, theiconic Agency figure William Colby. He was a casualty of the recently concluded Church Committee investigation, but not because any abuses had been uncovered. Ironically, he was sacked because Ford, egged on by his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was furious at Colby’s perceived overwillingness to share too many of the gory details of the past with the committee. Colby, a member of the initial “Good Shepherd” generation after World War II service, had joined the Agency after serving as a derring-do OSS operative in Europe. His Agency career had also been marked with controversy—while heading up operations in Vietnam in the ’60s, he oversaw the infamous Phoenix program of organized assassination of Vietcong leaders.
    Colby was a complex, shadowy character in CIA lore. In many ways, he was a transitional figure in the Agency’s history, and I remember being oddly disappointed when I learned about his abrupt departure. I wanted to see him, at least once. So less than two weeks after I joined the Agency, I got into a long line of employees snaking into the Rendezvous Room (its official name), a large, open room adjacent to the CIA cafeteria used for official receptions. In the distance, at the front of the line,