Ah! I finally got round to see the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy... fantastico! Great flick, go for it if you get the chance.
Bit of nostalgia too, as it brought to mind my own personal weird tangential Cold War history with the Agency on our side of the pond... at the time around 1980 or so I was an undergrad at Georgetown University - situated, if you don't know, in the very heart of the Death Star itself ... Washington D.C.
And I was into Mandarin studies there (along with comp sci) in a big way. You gotta understand the times... back then nobody studied Chinese. Not like today where every freaking little kindergardener is mainlining Chinese via IV drip in the maternity ward. People stayed away in droves. Many universities didn't even offer Chinese language instruction. Despite a short-lived mini boomlet in the early 70's when Tricky Dick reopened the silk road between DC and Beijing, by 1980 it had all gone back to sleep and there were no good textbooks, websites, Skype tutors, iphone vocab apps, or dictionaries, nuttin. Nevertheless I was already fluent from hanging around Taiwan with Kung Fu teachers who spoke no Eng, and I attended GU to deepen my immersion in classical Chinese studies in their Chinese/Japanese language dept. graduate seminars. Plus picked up Japanese.
Anyway, it all began when somebody told me I should take the USA State Dept. Foreign Service Officer written exam. Of course, GU has an actual Foreign Service academic program, but I'd had no truck with that whatsoever and had never remotely thought of taking the text or getting near any such Imperial madness. But I can't resist a lark so I figured fuck it ok I'll take it... next thing you know I had passed the written and was called in for the Oral Exam. By that point I was ready to chuck the lark, gone far enough, but somebody convinced me just go in for the Oral, as a joke, make good after dinner conversation some day...
So I went in for the Oral, given at that time at State's language school in Rossyln... grilling by pairs of State Dept examiner, man what a bunch of weirdo's. Anyway, somehow I pass that also, beggaring belief really in that I was only like 22 or something and the average age of passee's was like 29 or something at that time, mostly with master's degree's and some kind of professional background. Then they wrote me saying report for the physical and so on... I just chucked the notice.
But wait we were talking about me and the Agency, right? The Company. Well I only brought up the FS exam thing because I don't know if it's related or not but right about that time, I get this call out of the blue at my home phone, and was I surprised because I had never contacted or even thought of the Company in any way whatsoever, so I've never known whether they earmarked me for contact via the State test thing above? Or through the University office, or the Chinese department? Or what - I don't know and they wouldn't say. But they identified themselves as the C ... I ... AGENCY (you know!) and they wanted me to come in (no, not come in from the cold, come in for a job interview).
Well since I'd just done the State thing and even though still no interest to be sucked into the Imperial shitstorm but hell I thought, in for a penny, sheep as a lamb, right? So hopped the Metro to their interview location which I won't disclose and had to go through all kinds of searchs and frisks and pass through many bullet proof barriers and finally made it with my escort to the little interview room. And first thing they did, they tested my spoken Chinese. And no I'm not going to tell you how they did that, but I will say - they were blown away, totally. Thus setting the stage for the real interview per se, and thus I met seriously I think the weirdest, freakiest human being I have ever encountered in any kind of professional capacity (or actually, weirdest overall I've met in any capacity whatsoever really, apart from homeless panhandlers at Van Ness and Market). He was a male (to the extent he was human at all), that's all I can say. Not an alien I don't think ... maybe a hybrid?
Anyway this guy threw me a lot of screwball questions and then, seemingly satisifed, he leaned back and began to paint a very glamorous picture of my future with the Company. He said I would be trained on their super-selective fast track, for covert work (I am not kidding here), it was a very special very intense program, but well paid, I had a great career waiting for me with them, blabitty blah blah. But frankly this guy had weirded me out so much by that point that I thought, "ok then in 30 years I can look forward to ending up like you? Fuck you lemme outta here!"
And so it came to pass that's as far as I got in my clandestine operations career... too bad I'm sure I would've been great at wet work... But this movie even though actually centered on Brit intell service still flashed it all back to me... what might have been.
