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door.
    Perhaps two hundred people showed up that Saturday morning; the vast majority, I would learn later, had answered a CIA recruiting ad. The drill involved three tests. First, they gave each of us a map of the world that had the borders of all the countries but no names; we had to fill in the country names. A lot of people, otherwise well educated, have trouble with this kind of exercise. They tend to identify large land-mass countries easily enough—China, India, Russia—but smaller countries often trip them up. Think for a minute about the countries in Central America or parts of Africa. But I’d spent all those years as a child staring at the world map in my radio room. This was a breeze for map freaks.
    Then it was on to a multiple-choice test. I still remember one question in particular: “The prime minister of Greece is (a) Andreas Papandreou, (b) U Thant, (c) Mao Tse-tung, or (d) Leonid Brezhnev.” I’d had a paper route for five years as a kid and had read my product every day. And I was Greek. Still, this struck me as fairly elementary stuff for folks thinking about a career at the CIA. You didn’t need to read
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
. All you had to do is look at the front pages every day.
    Finally, they gave us an extensive psychological exam. Most of the hundreds of questions were agree/disagree, such as “I like boxing.” Well, I don’t really have a strong position on boxing one way or the other, but there was no third option; it was either yes or no, agree or disagree. Just pencil in the appropriate circle. Okay, “I like boxing.” Then, three hundred questions later, you’d get the same question again. I suppose you could have riffled back to the earlier question, but it would have been difficult, given the sea of penciled-in circles, and I didn’t. It made me wonder what they learned about us from this kind of test, presumably not only from the answers but from contradictory answers. “My father was the disciplinarian in our house.” Yes or no? There was no way I could screw up when that one was repeated. Answer: Yes, sir.
    We had until noon, four hours in all, to finish these tests. I was done by 10:15 or so, got up, handed my booklet to the proctor, and walked out. I had absolutely no idea what to expect next.
    A week later, Bill called. “Congratulations,” he said. “You blew the doors off those tests.” He asked whether I wanted to move forward. If so, the agency wanted to tee up a physical exam. If all was well, the physical would be followed by an interview with a team of psychologists. Actually, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and an anthropologist, the last striking me as a curious background for a CIA evaluator. But the exercise made sense: In effect, they were asking for expanded verbal answers to some of the yes/no, agree/disagree questions in the earlier test. One of the questions that has stayed with me all these years later: “Have you ever betrayed a friendship?”
    â€œGood lord, I hope not,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
    â€œWe’ll readdress this question on the polygraph,” one of my questioners said. But it was the right answer, and “absolutely not” was not. No one could know with certainty whether a friend had ever been betrayed. Words and deeds sometimes have unintended consequences. It’s the ethical intent that matters.
    Two weeks later, it was time to schedule the polygraphexamination. I’d never taken a so-called lie-detector test in my life, and the prospect of one was unsettling. I called Dr. Post for some guidance; he was a psychiatrist, after all, and he probably had some experience with polygraph exams in his agency days. He was reassuring. The main thing, he said, was to try to make your mind completely blank. “Imagine you’re at a drive-in theater, the movie’s over, and all you see is the empty white