First - I almost worked at the CIA following my undergraduate degree in Russian Studies. I also had a schoolmate who did work for the CIA for a few years. A current co-worker of mine worked for Karl Rove in the 1980s and actually programmed for his mass-mailer application. And I worked for 2 years with the smartest group of folks I've ever worked with - at Enron - a company that I had studied with classmates during my MBA only a few years earlier and had shaken my head at my inability to understand how they could be so successful pursuing business the way they did. We could only decide, "Ken Lay and the other folks at Enron must know something we don't..."
The CIA, like all forms of public service, attracts people for a variety of reasons - not usually the money. Market forces being what they are, one might try to make one of two possibly conflicting assumptions about this:
- The CIA (and other government institutions) attracts people who join because they are highly motivated believers
- The CIA (and other government institutions) don't attract the best people, because the best people go where they can earn the best salaries
I applied for the CIA 15 years ago. I was finishing my degree in Russian and and went to a recruiting conference. It was held in a hotel that was under construction next to the airport, presumably either for privacy or affordability. Who knows? It was pretty amusing because the 50 or so of us who showed up weren't talking to each other much. So solemn I had to restrain laughter at the ludicrousness of it.
They had a lady from Intelligence and a guy from Covert Ops who did presentations. The Covert Ops guy was very gregarious - he started off talking about misunderstandings about what Covert Ops does and flipped open his jacket, saying, "See, not packing heat," then went on to explain that one of the most challenging things you can do is to convince someone to betray their own country.
After the presentations, we lined up to meet briefly with either the Intelligence lady (they're pretty much just analysts) or the Covert Ops guy. I was in the Intelligence line and when the lady asked my major and I told her Russian, the Covert Ops guy snapped up and asked, "Want to work in Covert Ops?" "Not particularly," I told him.
I turned in the initial screening application and got invited to do the long application. I did that and next made it to screening tests. They were pretty amusing - besides some standardized tests to assess verbal and math skills, there was a "think on your feet" timed exercise as well as a couple psychological/motivation/lie detector tests.
The "think on your feet" test involved, I kid you not, being given the following scenario: "You are to enter a locked building at night, infiltrate undetected by security to a locked office, enter it, open a locked desk and remove an item, then exfiltrate without detection. What would you consider for this task? (list as many things as you can in 2 minutes)."
The psychological/motivation/lie detector tests were even funnier. What you had was a massive (as in several hundred questions) multiple choice/true-false test that was timed where you had bare seconds to consider each short question. Some clever fellow who created it probably hoped to "trip someone up" or "catch them in a lie" by getting inconsistent answers to similarly worded questions spread "innocuously" throughout the test. Stuff like, "I don't get along with my parents - True/False" followed 50 questions later by "I have poor relations with my father - True/False" followed 100 questions later by "Describe on a scale of 1-10, 1 being worst and 10 being best, how you relate to immediate family members (i.e., parents or siblings)."
After this test screening, I was next up for full background investigation, lie detector tests, hardcore interviews, more tests, etc.
By this time, I had reconsidered my whim application (simple gut-check: "Want to work for these folks? Choose one of the following: 'No,' 'Hell no,' 'You're kidding, right?'") so withdrew my application.
My schoolmate also confirmed much of my impressions of the CIA: there are some good people there, there are some dumb fucks, and it's frankly a lot like any other organization you will encounter - you've got different kinds of people with varying abilities - some good ideas are generated, some bad ideas, some good ideas have bad execution, some bad ideas succeed due to dumb luck or good timing.
Regarding Karl Rove, my co-worker acknowledges that he's without a doubt a very smart guy in his own area of expertise. And he once saved the disk drives of Rove's business from a fire (something he now sort of regrets, but it was his job at the time). But Rove's not the puppet-master pulling strings on all the marionettes, including the opposing side, somehow always one step ahead and even setting up situations like Valerie Plame back in 2003 in order to somehow reap the political rewards over 2 years later.
Success - whether you're succeeding in plans that are evil, good, or shades of grey in between - relies on two things:
- Your own abilities
- External factors that provide the right environment
People who succeed for awhile know enough to exploit advantages within a favorable environment, but the key thing to understand is that favorable environments don't last forever, and one's ability to adapt to the new favorable environment is gradually going to be trumped by someone else's - as well as sheer dumb luck (bad or good).
The other thing to remember is that people make mistakes, and one mistake successful people make is forgetting that their current success relied on so many external variables to make it possible and not just on their abilities.
In the mid-1990s in the course of getting an MBA, we studied Enron in some case studies. We were fascinated that its expansion and business activities seemed at odds with its success. For one simplified example, how was it possible to make such aggressive investments in physical plant assets in developing nations - where you incur enormous sunk costs and face small rates of return when the assets become finally operational, as well as face unpredictable political risks - and do so in such a breakneck fashion and yet make such wonderful profits?
When I worked at Enron, I was struck by how smart the people were that I worked with. I was also struck by something else - the lack of basic common sense that I frequently saw. A lot of it was arrogant and stubborn refusal to admit that genius alone couldn't prevail, or that a track record of success couldn't be derailed by events outside one's control. Consider "When Genius Failed" about the Long Term Capital Management affair or any of the myriad books written on the Enron debacle.
For example, I noticed within a few months that while we actively traded over 30 commodities around the world, most (as in 90+%) of the revenue was coming in from the domestic natural gas and power side. Our rhetoric to the outside world was that Enron's core business advantage was that we were a market maker as well as our ability to translate our success into any market. I didn't see much translation happening. I saw certain inherent advantages we had that explained much of our success in trading natural gas and power in the U.S. Crude oil was a more equal playing field and we would typically lose money to the players, such as BP Amoco, who had better inherent advantages. Likewise, we lost money in our forays into other established commodity markets including trading wheat, porkbellies, lumber, pulp & paper, coal, etc.
Our market making, most notably broadband but also including advertising, DRAM chips, water (under Azurix), and power in markets like South America, Japan, and Europe also produced mainly losses - once you cut away the bullshit of over-valued deals: think of owning something that no one else really wants - you can say it's worth whatever you want, until you try to sell it, that is.
I recall commenting to co-workers that I thought maybe we were better at doing press releases than in actually running our business, although even I didn't have an inkling of how bad things actually were.
All the while, Wall Street analysts and others outside the company admired the "black box" that Enron presented, a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma. Like we dumb MBA students in the 1990s, they marvelled that because Enron's self-reported success defied conventional wisdom, "the folks running Enron must know something we don't." Yes, they knew something all right: it was all smoke and mirrors hiding a steaming pile of shit.
The Soviet Union was always misunderstood by most U.S. policy-makers. Its black box nature, like Enron, like the CIA, like Karl Rove, invited more creative speculation than just plain common sense. I understand it's human nature to assume it's all iceberg theory "well, we only see a small part, so the majority has to be below the surface." But often, that just isn't the case.
As we discovered with the Soviet Union afterwards, not only did they not have the significant edge we thought they had that sparked the arms race, they also were far more vulnerable to a U.S. strike than the other way around - for the longest time the vast majority of their missile forces weren't exactly "press a button" type weapons but instead required several days of preparation before launch. Likewise, while our rhetoric in the nuclear confrontation in Germany in the 1980s centered around the fairness of deploying Pershing 2 missiles to "counter" the Soviet SS-20, the Russians read something different since the SS-20 was a medium range strategic missile whereas the forward-deployed Pershing 2 was practically tactical, being the most accurate nuclear missile made, lower-yield, and designed for decapitation first strike purposes.
My advice for anyone who over-rates Karl Rove, or the CIA, or any other inscrutable opponent: there's no shame in admitting they're smart, but smart people make mistakes and often make more due to the hubris of over-rating their own abilities and under-rating the role that external events played in their own success - and that stuff cuts both ways because good luck and bad luck both happen eventually. Ponder where you think Bush would have been without 9/11 both creating his initial surge of popularity at the time a nasty recession was just beginning to really be felt and provided a context for him and others to advance their plans?
Sure, some may, despite their mistakes, still survive due to once again, dumb luck saving them: Ollie North's testimony saved his ass in Iran-Contra. Charles Hurwitz ruined United Savings, gouged the government for "fair value" for selling the redwoods in the Headwaters forest, sued the FDIC as an innocent victim of their vendetta against poor him, and was deeply involved with Michael Milken and Drexel in the whole junk bond fiasco but wasn't chosen as a target for pursuit. Lou Pai, who oversaw one of the two biggest money-losers at Enron - Enron Energy Services - which was guessed to be about $1 Billion in losses but really who knows - and also was the far and away top winner of all the executives by cashing out more - $350 Million - than even Ken Lay or Jeff Skilling, now resides on the largest ranch in Colorado, 100,000 acres, probably beyond prosecution because unlike the others he had apparently a valid reason for selling out that wasn't dependent on insider knowledge: his wife filed for divorce over his affair with a stripper.
Maybe Rove will end up with his own "get out of jail free" card courtesy of external events as disparate as a stripper. But please, don't over-estimate this guy.
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