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

there was Colby, on hand to accept personal goodbyes by the workforce. As the line inched forward, I was feeling a bit out of place—I had arrived at the Agency just days before, after all. What could I possibly say to this legendary figure?
    When we finally came to face, all I could think to do was to blurt out the truth. Having read that he had a law degree, I stuck out my hand and said that I was a lawyer, too, who had just joined OGC, and that I was sorry that I wouldn’t have an opportunity to serve under him. It was at once an awkward and presumptuous thing for a twenty-eight-year-old rookie to say. And for a couple of seconds he just impassively stared at me through his clear-framed eyeglasses. Then, with a tight, enigmatic smile that I would never forget, he tapped me lightly on the arm and quietly replied, “You’re a lawyer and you just got here? Well, you are going to have an interesting time.” He then turned his eyes to the next person in line.

    In those first couple of weeks, I realized that I was not the only rookie there. The OGC had doubled in size during the previous six months, going from nine to eighteen (with me being the eighteenth). The Church Committee, which had just completed its work, had recommended thatthe small, insular office—made up of mostly middle-aged men who had spent their entire adult lives at Langley—needed to grow, with younger blood and a fresher perspective. The idea was that an influx of lawyers without any CIA “baggage” would bring more objectivity and rigor, with an ability and willingness to spot and deter any future abuses. It was the first of many attorney-hiring binges I would witness at the CIA during my career, most of them coinciding with the inevitable postmortem of some flap or controversy that the Agency reliably, if unfortunately, managed to embroil itself in every few years. Whenever that happened, the cry would ring out, from Congress and/or the CIA leadership: By God, the Agency needs more lawyers! Inside the CIA, it would become a truism: A scandal would be awful for the Agency institutionally, but it would be great for the OGC’s growth potential. I was part of the first wave. We called ourselves the “Church babies.”
    Coming from the lumbering and impersonal bureaucracy of the Treasury Department, I was startled and delighted by the working environment I found myself in. I noticed from the very beginning how everyone was energized and enthusiastic about what they were working on, and that, provided no outsiders were within earshot, they would talk shop everywhere inside the large cone of silence that was CIA Headquarters—not just in their offices but on the elevators, in the gym, walking out to the parking lot, in the employee cafeteria, and so on. The institutional camaraderie, the feeling of we’re-all-in-this-together, was palpable.
    Everyone I encountered in those first few weeks—the security guards, the secretaries, the analysts, the operatives, and yes, even the lawyers—radiated a sense of pride and esprit de corps. For someone just arriving from another part of the government, it was a revelation. I would come to understand that a lot of this camaraderie and sense of shared mission derived from the fact that everyone in the CIA, no matter where one is in the pecking order, had to endure a long and exhaustive security clearance process (especially that great equalizer, the polygraph exam) in order to enter this new secret world, and we were all pledged not to discuss any of our classified work to anyone on the outside. The knowledge that we were all part of an exclusive, selective, secret club—that no one on the outside could ever really fully know or understand—created an unspoken but unique and unbreakable bond.
    It gradually dawned on me that working in a secret intelligence organizationinevitably affects an employee’s personal interactions outside the office. In my case, it was never as stark as it is for someone who is