The Reluctant Spy (3 page)

I had already circled GW as a possibility, which didn't exactly thrill my father. He wanted me to go to the University of Pittsburgh, where he had studied for his Ph.D., finishing all the requirements except the dissertation—the price he paid for my birth in August 1964. Pitt, he said, had a fine Eastern European studies program; besides, it was a lot less expensive for a Pennsylvania kid than GW would be. But I didn't want to go to college only an hour away from home. And, more to the point, I was more interested in another part of the world: My major would be Middle Eastern studies, which didn't exist in the Pitt curriculum. GW was one of only a handful of schools with a quality Mideast program, I said, and it was in Washington to boot. Dad said we'd talk about it again, but he never raised it as I moved forward. I applied for early admission to GW and got applications from Georgetown and the University of Virginia as well. I
was naïve: Georgetown and UVA would be my backup schools, I thought, not caring that they were more competitive than GW. In any event, my grades were good and my SAT scores were strong; GW accepted me and the other applications went into the trash can.

I was ecstatic and told Mom and Dad of my good fortune. They sure knew how to deflate a guy. They sat me down at the kitchen table and explained the financial facts of life to their eldest child. They were happy for me and very proud that I had been accepted at such a fine school, but there was no way they could afford to send me—not with tuition of $4,600 a year, plus the room and board and books and everything else. I would have to go to Pitt.

I walked away from the table like a whimpering pup whose favorite toy had suddenly been snatched away. But then I thought,
This can't be! I've got to make this work
. And I did. Before I was done, I had applied for and won more than a dozen scholarships. Many of them were small—the largest were $500 and $1,000—but they added up to enough to make tuition. I took out college loans and my aunt Chrysanthie helped, too. When I got to GW, I ended up qualifying for a half-tuition scholarship so long as my grades remained good. They did. With that, cumulative scholarships covered my tuition, room, and board—just under $8,000 a year—and a job in GW's music department covered the cost of books and incidentals.

Washington for a college student who happened to be obsessive about politics was about as close to heaven as you can get in this life. Fortunately, my roommate, Ed Harwitz, was as fanatical as I was. We bought copies of
The Almanac of American Politics
and began to digest it, one congressional district or one Senate seat per night. The next day, we'd compare notes. We also used our copies as autograph books. This was the early 1980s, when security wasn't the first order of business at the U.S. Capitol. You could walk around, buttonhole congressmen, even stroll right into the Senate cloakroom. It was amazing how few people turned us down. Ted Kennedy smiled slightly but said no, and Robert Stafford wanted to know if
we were constituents. Neither one of us was from Vermont, so he just walked away. William Proxmire lived up to his reputation for crankiness and wouldn't give us the time of day. But most everyone else was approachable and cooperative: Barry Goldwater, a gem of a guy; Bob Dole, very friendly; John Glenn, just great. Glenn and Gary Hart even stood for pictures with us.

Those were the days when
The Washington Post
published a daily political calendar, listing all sorts of events, including receptions on Capitol Hill. So in our dogged pursuit of autographs, we became party crashers, too. We'd put on suits, head out, and make an evening of it. Security at these things was practically nonexistent. We'd walk in, act like we belonged, and seek out every face we recognized. Once, we spotted Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, talking to each other, with no one else around. We walked up, and I extended my hand and said, “Hey, I'm a big fan of yours. Do you mind signing our political almanacs?” Then it started to go downhill, or so I thought.

“Are you from Tennessee?”

“No, I'm from Pennsylvania.”

“Aw, come on now,” said Gore, who was still in the House at the time. “You're not from my state, you're not from my district, so how're you gonna vote for me if I give you my autograph?”

“Well, I can't vote for you,” I said, “but I'll wish you the best of luck.”

Tipper had been silent thus far, but she suddenly broke into a big smile, looked her husband in the eyes, and said, “Al, are you being an asshole?” Really, she did.

“Naw, I'm just pulling his leg,” he said with a laugh. “Gimme your books, I'll sign ‘em, I'll sign ‘em.” He not only signed them; he and Tipper even posed for a picture with us.

Our closest friends thought we were slightly loopy with all this party crashing, and they started egging us on, challenging us, I suppose, to make bigger and better fools of ourselves. We took the bait happily. After all, these receptions generally featured so-called heavy
hors d'oeuvres, which meant we got free dinners two or three times a week. Once, we spotted a listing for a big bash at the Republican National Committee headquarters, and our buddies dared us to crash it. No problem, we said. But there was a problem. When we showed up, there was a guest list at the door; obviously, we weren't on it, so we improvised, using my home state's senior senator as an unwitting accessory. “Ah, well, we're from Senator Heinz's office,” I said. “Has he arrived yet?” We'd scanned the room and were pretty sure he wasn't there.

“No, no, he isn't here,” the gatekeeper said.

“Well, do you mind if we wait for him?”

“No, by all means, please go in.”

We did. Republican parties tended to outshine the Democrats' when it came to the quality of the food. The Dems always seemed to have hot dogs and burgers or barbecue. These Republicans had sushi—by the boatload, it seemed—and champagne. We got both, moved to a big window overlooking the sidewalk, and raised flutes to our friends gathered below. Then we wolfed down the food and drink and got out before John Heinz showed up.

We were shown the door only once. We had put on our best suits and tried to crash the big dinner of a prominent political group in Washington. But we were young and white and carrying autograph books; we clearly weren't members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the greeters at its annual banquet politely, but firmly, invited us to leave. We went quietly.

I got involved with the College Democrats, naturally, and ran the group's speakers committee. Late in 1983, I read that George McGovern was considering a run for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. I knew, of course, that McGovern had challenged Nixon in 1972 and had managed to win exactly one state—Massachusetts—and the District of Columbia. He couldn't even carry his home state of South Dakota. Another run would be quixotic even under the best of circumstances, but I sensed an
opportunity for GW and for our College Democrats. I wrote McGovern, introduced myself, and suggested that, were he to run, the George Washington University would be a fine place to declare his candidacy. I heard nothing for a couple of weeks. Then one morning I was awakened by the phone in my dorm room. I picked it up, still groggy from sleep.

“John?”

“Yes.”

“John, this is George McGovern calling.”

“Oh, come on, Tom, I know it's you.” My friend Tom Fitzpatrick knew I'd written McGovern and, I thought, did a pretty good imitation of the former South Dakota senator.

“No, really, this is George McGovern.”

Now I was on full alert. That high nasal voice—no one could imitate that! McGovern said he'd be delighted to accept my kind offer and announce for the presidency on a stage at GW. I made all the arrangements, lured the TV networks to cover the morning event, and even got to introduce the candidate myself. Later, after the press had left, McGovern turned to me to say thanks. “You want to have lunch at my place?” he asked. So we retired to his condominium on Connecticut Avenue along with his wife, Eleanor, and daughter Mary. The candidate made the tuna fish sandwiches.

I STUCK WITH
my major, Middle Eastern studies, to the mild surprise of many friends and relatives. What could be better? The region was at once rich in history and contemporary in its near-constant tension. The Iranian hostage crisis was history, but now Iran was at war with Iraq, a conflict started by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. No matter: In the Middle East, the maxim that the enemy of my enemy is my friend has special meaning, and our government was certainly leaning in Saddam's direction. Then there was the seemingly endless Arab-Israeli conflict. Egypt and Israel had signed a peace agreement in 1979, but it was a cold peace, and the region was plagued by
political brushfires and worse. By the time I started at GW in late August 1982, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was two months old. I was consumed by the subject matter, adding to the core study program all sorts of related electives—the politics and economics of oil, for example, and course work in Judaism and Islam.

A year abroad seemed like a good idea, too, and I used it as a junior at the University of London, frankly to take a break from the Middle East. I'd been working part-time at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union international headquarters in Washington my sophomore year, so I thought I'd study its counterpart—the Union of Shop, Distributive, and Allied Workers—in the United Kingdom. An InterFuture scholarship paid for the second half of an academic year; when it was over in mid-May 1985, I spent the next couple of months traveling all over Europe by train, and I made my first visit to Greece.

By the time of graduation in the spring of 1986, I had accomplished much. My knowledge in my major field of study was considerable. I had taken advantage of a program among universities in the Washington area to study Greek at Georgetown. I'd learned the language at home, but it was all slang and idiom, with no formal training. By the time I finished the two-year course at Georgetown, I was fluent.

So there I was, about to be a freshly minted graduate of the George Washington University. Okay, fine. Now what? I wasn't quite ready to face the real world yet. But I was in Washington, where politics rules and public policy occasionally counts for something, too. I was still consumed by the game and reckoned I might be able to play at a higher level. GW had an unusual three-year program at the time, offering a master's degree in legislative affairs. It seemed perfect: The reluctant undergraduate could enter graduate school and learn how the legislative sausage is made, then land a job on Capitol Hill as a top aide to a senator or House member or as a key committee staffer.

What I didn't fully understand until I started was that the
program was geared specifically to Capitol Hill staffers already several years into their careers. All the classes were held in the Hall of the States building on the Hill because it was easier for the young professionals to get from their offices to school. There were a couple of core courses on the philosophy and ethics of policy making, but most of the curriculum dealt with the arcane minutiae of the legislative process: budgetary policy making; handguns and public policy; agricultural subsidies and public policy.

GW was about three and a half miles away; to save money, I walked it most days instead of taking the Metro. I was, by a full decade, the youngest person in the program; I took classes during the summer and finished in two years instead of three. That last semester, I started to apply for jobs, shooting off résumés to the Senate foreign relations committee, the House intelligence committee, and dozens and dozens of House members and senators, especially the ones from Pennsylvania. By the time I graduated, I'd probably sent out hundreds of résumés. The other people in the program were either going back to their old jobs or parlaying their new graduate degrees into better spots in the vast network of unelected employees that make Capitol Hill function. But toward the end of that last semester, I was coming up empty and getting desperate. Finally, I accepted a position at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management as a federal investigator doing background checks on other federal employees seeking security clearances.

Then, on a May afternoon in 1988, just before graduation, one of my professors asked me to stay after class to discuss a private matter. I didn't know much about him, but I'd heard he had a big reputation as an expert in his field, and I'd certainly been impressed by what I'd seen in his class on leadership. In any event, I met with him after class, and it turned out to be the single most important meeting of my young life.

DR. JERROLD POST
was a superstar at GW. He was a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, and his principal course was on the psychology of leadership. What I didn't know was that he was also a former employee of the CIA. In the years since he left the agency, Dr. Post has appeared on many news programs as an expert in analyzing what makes various foreign leaders tick. He has been described in those interviews as one of the country's top profilers of foreign heads of state.