When I was still a teen, I’d read somewhere that the CIA’s ideal recruit was a “PhD who could win a bar fight.” I think Bill Donovan had said it.
I then spent the next 20 years trying to be that ideal recruit.
I read all the CIA history books (there weren’t many), and all the John le Carré novels.
I joined the Air Force and worked in intelligence.
I built my six-foot frame from a scrawny 142 lbs upon entering basic training to 190 lbs by the time I was legal drinking age.
I learned a foreign language and traveled to as many countries as my circumstances allowed in order to be “worldly.”
I got into fights outside bars and clubs before eventually learning how to fight for real.
I got a PhD and eventually became a defense intellectual.
Jack Ryan was the archetype I wanted to become and I took it very seriously.
But by the time I’d transformed into the CIA ideal, I’d changed. The world had changed. And my view of both the CIA and the national security state had changed too.
Imagine making yourself into the thing you obsess about, the thing you put on a pedestal, only to realize that it was the wrong thing to want. That it wasn’t the noble profession you’d fetishized. That it was instead an overmilitarized, morally compromised life of binge drinking and petty bureaucratic knife fights.
There should be a German word for that.
Seeing power from the standpoint of its victims changes everything. Despite the ability to peer through the mystifications of nationhood and American exceptionalism, some part of me refuses to apologize for having served my country. That service was in support of a regime of global militarism whose body count would make satan himself blush. That brought Trump to power! And yet.
The naïveté of an American imperialist.
To make a religion of state power, and to genuinely believe that you’re righteous because you worship an abstract ideal that demands blood sacrifices without consent from millions, billions even. The only thing I can compare my inner life to since coming to class consciousness is going on a grainy ‘90s talk show after escaping Scientology or the Jim Jones cult. “Set The Cup Down! How I Survived Drinking the Kool-Aid.” It’s not that I don’t feel melancholy or embarrassment; it’s that it’s not enough to keep me quiet when there’s an urgent need to warn others.
So of course, Trump’s CIA has cut a new promotional recruitment ad. Of course it’s explicitly looking for “A PhD who could win a bar fight.” And of course pangs of embarrassment hit me—less for the fool I had been than a vicarious embarrassment. I know how many young men without real prospects in life are ready to be the fools of the next generation.
You might have heard that subscriptions to newsletters have fallen off a cliff. It’s true, and it’s making me rethink the economics of this entire project. I really don’t want to bring back the paywall, and I also don’t want to abandon the project altogether. So if you value Un-Diplomatic and have the means to keep it going, please consider the less than $2 per week that it takes. And if you can’t, please consider sharing the post with others.
On Becoming Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears
My 20s sucked. I was still serving in the military for part of it, so there’s that. But I was also working frantically, the living embodiment of what would, in the Obama years, come to be called (and later mocked as) “hustle culture.”
Falling Out: The Politics of Generation GWOT
I’m part of a war-addled subset of Millennials the media now calls “Generation GWOT.” I came of age professionally during the Global War on Terror (GWOT), joining the US Air Force a little over a year before the attacks of 9/11.
Strategy & Conscience (The Book Review We Need)
One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion. (195)
You did get the PhD. And you don't have to worry about the bar fights anymore.