Wanted: more trench-coat wearers
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
(slk note: For non-Australians, ASIO is our nation’s equivalent of the CIA - only we wear less cool sunglasses.)
DO you have a university degree? An adventurous spirit? A forceful
personality? If so, then the United States Central Intelligence Agency wants you.
It was with some fascination I discovered the world’s largest buyer of
trench coats, micro-wired cufflinks, and small rebel armies is on a
recruitment drive.
US magazine adverts have appeared asking for CIA applicants with the
aforementioned credentials. Recruiting is also at uni campuses, where
entry-level pay from $A46,800 to $A57,300 (depending on whether your work is about pencil-pushing or the clandestine, fall-of-Third-World-government stuff) tends to appeal.
‘‘Forceful personality’’ intrigues me most of all. It’s not a job description you see very often. But I suspect this trait is needed so interrogations don’t all end like this:
CIA AGENT: So could you please tell me your commie leader’s
dastardly secrets and evil plans to nuke Dallas?
FOREIGN DETAINEE: Nyet.
CIA AGENT: Pretty please?
FOREIGN DETAINEE: Nyet.
CIA AGENT: (Sigh.) Well, I gave it my best.
FOREIGN DETAINEE: You will please to give me my bus fare back?
CIA AGENT: Oh, yeah. Sure buddy. (Agent waves cheerily as detainee
departs.)
Must have been a bummer, those early interrogations. Change in
recruitment policy was inevitable.
But the question is: how does the CIA judge a personality to be
sufficiently forceful? I mean where is the line here? Wings off butterflies?
Dictatorial tendencies towards the tea lady? Frisking the mail boy if he
gets suspiciously too close to one’s desk? Taking photos of the guy frisking the mail boy?
Well, I guess we’ll never know without entering the world of
espionage ourselves. Which brings me to a friend of mine, who once decided this was exactly where her career lay. She tells me she once applied for a job at ASIO. True.
She was asked to meet at a hotel at a certain time. Punctual as
ever, she met a man who said very little. But she had won the right to be
asked to meet at another hotel, on another day, at another time. By the end of three weeks, she had met agents in all sorts of hotels at all sorts of times. This, she says, was probably to assess her ability to keep
appointments.
Her final stage was sitting for a three-hour psychological profile
test, which asked questions like whether, at parties, she’d be more likely
to ‘‘dance on tables or sit in the corner of the room quoting Shakespeare’’.
She chuckles that after they assessed her results, she never heard from them again.
Still, I have to say this was exceptionally good news for the safety
of Australia’s secrets. For, apart from being a topnotch professional, my
friend is also an atrocious gossip. Dang if China wouldn’t know her shoe
size by tea time and our defence grid codes by the end of the month.
May the CIA have similar good fortune in fitting out their trench
coats.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser, 25 JAN 2000