We are going to conclude earlier than planned, but I’ll make this offer to you. I could share a little bit about my personal story in terms of working for the CIA and later joining the IRD, if you’re interested. Maybe that’s instructive to you as a young person sorting out your own career ideas.  

If you’re interested, I don’t want to impose that on you, and I will not be insulted if you’d prefer not to hear it. Anyone want to hear it? How many minutes can you endure? Five? Ten? You say five minutes back there? Oh, ten minutes?  

Well, just briefly, because I know I went in. I applied with the CIA when I was your age—at age 20—yes, in 1985, as a student at Georgetown University.  

In high school, I had decided I wanted to play some role in the Cold War, which meant, in my mind, either the State Department’s Foreign Service or the CIA. The CIA seemed more aggressive and adventurous, so I chose that. I thought that if I applied as a student for an administrative role, that would mean I was already on the inside by the time I graduated.  

This was back in the mid-1980s. At that point—and I’m sure this is no longer relevant today—you could walk into an office building in Arlington, Virginia, right off the street, unannounced, and apply for a job with the CIA.  

Immediately, they would begin their investigation, and you would come back for a typing test. Do they still have those anymore? I was a very good and fast typist—that was my big selling point.  

The investigation of me—well, for most people, it took one year. For me, because I had always lived in the same place, it was only six months.  

You tell them which people you want them to talk to—those are the people who love you very much—and then they ask around for other people who may not love you very much to get the real story.  

If you make it through that, there’s a polygraph exam, then a physical exam, and then you’re told to report to work. Again, this was many decades ago. There was not a lot of communication, at least for me, about what kind of work you were going to do.  

I began my first job literally the first week of my senior year of college. I reported to a location in a somewhat unpleasant locale of Washington, D.C., that was at that time very dangerous.  

But they were doing fascinating work in terms of satellite surveillance, and I think they had in mind to train me in that, which could have been my career. The men I met with had actually been involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, so that was all very fascinating.  

However, the neighborhood was very unsavory and dangerous, and my school was on the other side of town. So, I requested to be relocated to a much less interesting job at the headquarters in Northern Virginia.

There, I stayed part-time until I finished school and then began a full-time job in the East Asia section. Again, I’m speaking historically, but back in those days, being in the agency generally meant one of four tracks: the scientific part, the administrative part, the overseas part, or the analytical part. I knew I wasn’t going to be in admin or science. I wasn’t quite sure whether I should be overseas or analytical.  

At that point, being in the analytical section required an advanced degree and tended to attract more academic, introverted, and nerdier types of people. On the other hand, the overseas part entailed extroverted, outgoing, and people-oriented individuals who wanted to be overseas all the time and viewed being in the U.S. as virtual captivity.  

I didn’t see either of those directions as necessarily fitting my own desires. So, I ended up going into the overseas part, but as a more analytical person in that role. That was a kind of compromise. I started out covering East Asia and the South Pacific: Fiji, Western Samoa, Vanuatu, and Tonga—strategically very important countries where there’s a lot going on.  

It was fascinating and wonderful. I met and entertained people who came in from overseas while they were spending time in D.C. They assumed, because I was young, that I knew all the fun places to go—which was not necessarily the case.  

And the off-color story I will share, if you can handle it, is: the night before Thanksgiving, I was asked to take a visitor to—I thought it was going to be a bar—but it was a strip club. I had to—well, I didn’t have to—I went to my church service the night before Thanksgiving, taking my grandmother and serving as an usher, and then immediately leaving church to go to the strip club. There, I was paid—not just overtime—but, starting at midnight, paid holiday time because it was Thanksgiving. So, that was quite a unique experience. I think I was there until 3 or 4 a.m. 

If I was ever in any morally compromising situation, that was it. I left that section to join another section that was more involved with covering the United Nations. That also entailed serving during the Persian Gulf War, which was very energizing and tense. I had a colleague whose son-in-law was serving in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, so it was very personal for her.

Covering the UN, I believe our biggest controversy was the revocation of the “Zionism equals racism” resolution. The UN had ratified this in the 1970s, but after the Cold War ended and the U.S. was paramount, it was able to lead the revocation of that infamous resolution. It was a great time of triumph and, in many ways, opportunity. But it was also a great time of boredom if you worked at the CIA, because the Cold War had ended, and so the question became: what happens next?

I moved to the Africa division, involved with Southeastern Africa, mostly Mozambique. I had always been fascinated by Mozambique and Angola because, when the Portuguese left in 1975, both became Marxist-Leninist and an integral part of the Soviet bloc. They had horrible civil wars between the Marxist government and anti-Marxist rebels. In the 1980s, the U.S. began supporting the rebels in Angola. Some conservatives wanted to support the rebels in Mozambique as well, but it was resolved that it was better to leverage and negotiate with the Marxist government to wean them off of the, at that point, declining Soviet Empire. This turned out to be successful, and they negotiated peace. A peace agreement was reached the Friday before the Monday I started that account.

That was great for Mozambique, but it was bad for me. The war was over, and there was just the ceasefire to cover. I had maybe two hours of work a day, so there was lots of chatting, sitting around, going out for long lunches, and just filling the tedium. I realized that this was probably not going to be my full-time vocation as I had planned. I, with most people, had just assumed the Cold War would be going on almost forever; almost no one foresaw that it would end in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So, I didn’t know where to go from there.

I looked on in Capitol Hill, but also, I had, throughout my 20s, been involved in church activism in my denomination. One of the problems, from my perspective, was its funding or support for Marxist liberation movements during the Cold War. I had been fighting that through church political activity, and through that, I became involved with the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which was founded to take on that challenge in 1981. So, they just asked me in 1994: “You’re already doing this work, why don’t you just join us and work for us full time?” 

That’s an example of how you may conceive of a career but may shift unexpectedly into a very different direction, although the work was not necessarily entirely different from what I had anticipated had I stayed in the government. Founding Providence as a Christian realism foreign policy journal 10 years ago also benefited from my experience in the government. I was only there for eight years and left as a young man at age 29, but I still learned a great deal about how government and bureaucracy work. I think I learned to appreciate the power and need to be factual in terms of your reporting, to be succinct, to not be overly wordy, and ideally, to be collaborative when you compile your reports. 

Also, I think it inoculated me against any kind of conspiracy outlook—that somehow there were always very powerful people orchestrating and masterminding events. I never saw powerful people masterminding events; I just saw people trying to manage events day by day as best they could as they unfolded. So, I’m glad I didn’t stay, but I’m also glad I was there for as long as I was. It helped shape the rest of my career in positive ways. 

It was also useful for publicity. When I had adversaries in my work at IRD, they would always accuse me of being the “former CIA agent,” or claim, “He never left the CIA; he’s still at it.” I always enjoyed that, although it became silly with the passage of time. Occasionally, it still resurfaces, so I was able to exploit that. Hopefully, that will be instructive and helpful for you as you plot your own career. Any questions or comments? 

Yes, back in the back.  

Question: I always like to ask this question when someone shares part of their life story or career. To preface the question, do you understand the difference between soft and hard skills?

Tooley: Could you explain your interpretation? 

Question: Some people I’ve asked have had a blank stare. From my interpretation, soft skills are communication and integrity. Hard skills would be, for example, typing or public speaking. Does that kind of clarify it?  

Tooley: Yes.

Question: Perfect. So, can you give us an example of one soft skill and one hard skill you wish your co-workers in the CIA better understood? 

Tooley: Oh, that’s a very hard question to respond to. Well, the soft skills to make it through the investigation for employment—any kind of drug history, criminal history, or any record of treason or betraying the U.S. government—obviously would preclude employment. That filtered out a lot of people. Drinking problems, extreme marital infidelity—back in those days, any homosexuality was precluded. So, you often got questions about that topic.

I had a friend who grew up on a farm and was asked about bestiality, which surprised him. Since I was a suburbanite, I was not asked about bestiality. But mostly, my colleagues seemed like people of high character. Although, when you’re moving around the world and in very challenging situations, it’s not always necessarily helpful to marriage and family life.

So, you had those tensions, especially for those who wanted to go to Bangkok—watch out for Bangkok. I think mostly my colleagues had lots of soft skills and hard skills. People sorted themselves out in terms of what track they wanted to be on based on what hard skills they had—whether administrative, technological, or just very good people skills or analytical skills. But that’s a good question. 

Anybody else? Yes, you have had lots of questions the last two days, haven’t you? Which are all very good.

Question: I was just wondering—many people today accuse the CIA and FBI of being corrupt. I was wondering if you have an opinion on that. And if it is corrupt, when did it become corrupt in your opinion, and how could it be fixed?

Tooley: Well, I haven’t been there in 30 years, so I can’t speak to the current situation. But when I was there, the people who said it was corrupt or dangerous were people on the political left who made that allegation. I remember there was a fairly large demonstration in the late 1980s at the headquarters, focused on Nicaragua and U.S. support for the Contras, which was an ongoing topic of controversy. The demonstrators were outside the headquarters, waving signs with pictures of people purportedly being killed by the Contras in Nicaragua.  

Jimmy Carter’s daughter, Amy Carter, was there. I didn’t see her, but supposedly, she was there. That was a typical CIA critique—that it was trying to overthrow governments around the world and generating war and strife ostensibly in pursuit of American interests, but maybe actually in defense of corporate interests.  

This idea of the political right now having this critique of intelligence agencies is relatively new, and I find it personally disturbing and largely detached from reality. Beyond that, I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question. But again, these critiques are often based on a more conspiratorial mindset that imagines there is more there than there actually is.  

Anybody else?  

Question: Yes, I have to be careful with my comments in the presence of the former CIA agent, Mr. Tooley. No, I just wanted to thank you, the IRD, and Providence for hosting us. This has been an excellent conference. I know the topic has been national security, but since you’ve been in and around Washington, D.C., where do you see the biggest need for Christians in public life?

Tooley: In terms of the federal government or anywhere?

Question: Either one. The federal government would be interesting, but in general as well. Well, actually, in general: organizations or federal government.

Tooley: Well, obviously, Christians are always needed. As some of our speakers have cited, the government, in principle, is ordained by God to establish justice and defend the innocent from the aggressive and the criminal. So, Christians, I think, can—with good conscience—serve almost anywhere in government, and they are always needed.  

But, again, in sync with our theme of Christian realism: if you approach it with an extreme, I call it “pietistic moralism,” that can certainly discourage you, distract you, or give you unrealistic expectations, in which you will find public service as being distasteful. However, I’m not sure it’s any more distasteful than any other arena of human life—including the church.

So, you have to approach it with human nature is what it is. But you’re there to be a force for good, hopefully, and to be a redemptive influence. The situations are always going to be not ideal, but how can you make the best of those non-ideal situations? This can be disconcerting when you’re young, but hopefully, as you age, you accept that reality and just deal with it.

I guess another lesson I would offer up would be: since I went into the government, or I applied at age 20, I hadn’t thoroughly investigated what I wanted to do at the CIA. I just had an almost mythic idea of what I would be doing there. I liked the novels of John le Carré. Is anyone here an espionage novel fan? Okay. Anyone under the age of 40 here read John le Carré? You have? Well, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has been a book and a TV series, so I encourage you to read those.  

I despise James Bond, which just seemed to be absurd fantasy about villains with gold teeth living in castles underwater. I just thought, “I want to fight communists. I don’t want to fight villains living underwater with gold teeth.” So, the John le Carré novels—he was formerly in British intelligence—were known for their gritty earthiness and reality. I identified with George Smiley, the ongoing hero in the novels, who was not flashily heroic. He was just gray and kind of mundane, but very thorough, and just worked out of London with occasional trips to Paris and West Berlin—which, to my idea, seemed ideal. I would just have a beautiful office here in Washington, D.C., and occasionally jet over. 

It was a lot more complicated than that. 

Question: What about Tom Clancy? 

Tooley: Well, yes, that came along a little bit later, and I tried to read his first novel, which was not Patriot Games but the submarine movie Hunt for Red October. Yes, a great movie, but I couldn’t get into reading the novel. I was a little bit older then at that point.

Anybody else?  

Yes, if you’re going to go into a particular field, you need to fully investigate what that will entail—not just have a mythological concept of what you hope it will entail.

Anybody else? Comments? Questions? Overview? How did we fail you in this conference?  

Well, you’ve been a great audience with great questions and comments, so it’s been our pleasure spending time with you. I hope you will recommend this to your friends for next year, and that you will become, if you’re not already, regular readers of Providence. For those of you who are older, especially the professors, if you would consider—if you’re not already—writing for Providence, we would love to receive your submissions. Again, if you’re in the D.C. area, Providence hosts a monthly lunch, typically with a foreign policy expert. Our next November lunch will feature a German who works for the Henry Stimson Institute, so he will be very interesting. If you’d like to be on that invite list, let us know or specifically approach James Diddams.