"The Complexity of the Game is Endless"

OK, having got my complex thoughts concerning the genesis, meaning and complex implications re: Traitorgate or how the Vice President of the United States may have personally indulged in and executed an act of premeditated treason during a time of war - I believe it is known as 'High Treason' and execution is the punishment - right off of my chest [see previous post] I'd like to bring to your attention a tangential titbit which I gleaned off the interweb today.

Namely this article from Stratfor which analyzes the duties and MO of the CIA's Non Official Cover agents (NOCs): what they do, how they're recruited, trained and operated and why they're the lifeblood of the agency, each one an irreplaceable asset taking literally decades of cultivation.

That's why the willful exposure of an NOC specializing in nuclear proliferation operations was so ironic - in the way a heart attack is ironic. But what struck me quite intensely was the bizarre, rigorous, almost conceptual duplicity (literally, as in living two parallel lives neither one intersecting with the other) with which the NOC must structure their existence:

NOCs come into the program in different ways. Typically, they are recruited at an early age and shaped for the role they are going to play. Some may be tracked to follow China, and trained to be bankers based in Hong Kong. Others might work for an American engineering firm doing work in the Andes. Sometimes companies work with the CIA, knowingly permitting an agent to become an employee. In other circumstances, agents apply for and get jobs in foreign companies and work their way up the ladder, switching jobs as they go, moving closer and closer to a position of knowing the people who know what there is to know. Sometimes they receive financing to open a business in some foreign country, where over the course of their lives, they come to know and be trusted by more and more people. Ideally, the connection of these people to the U.S. intelligence apparatus is invisible. Or, if they can't be invisible due to something in their past and they still have to be used as NOCs, they develop an explanation for what they are doing that is so plausible that the idea that they are working for the CIA is dismissed or regarded as completely unlikely because it is so obvious. The complexity of the game is endless.

These are the true covert operatives of the intelligence world. Embassy personnel might recruit a foreign agent through bribes or blackmail. But at some point, they must sit across from the recruit and show their cards: "I'm from the CIA and...." At that point, they are in the hands of the recruit. A NOC may never once need to do this. He may take decades building up trusting relationships with intelligence sources in which the source never once suspects that he is speaking to the CIA, and the NOC never once gives a hint as to who he actually is.

It is an extraordinary life. On the one hand, NOCs may live well. The Number Two at a Latin American bank cannot be effective living on a U.S. government salary. NOCs get to live the role and frequently, as they climb higher in the target society, they live the good life. On the other hand, their real lives are a mystery to everyone. Frequently, their parents don't know what they really do, nor do their own children -- for their safety and the safety of the mission. The NOC may marry someone who cannot know who they really are. Sometimes they themselves forget who they are: It is an occupational disease and a form of madness. Being the best friend of a man whom you despise, and doing it for 20 years, is not easy. Some NOCs are recruited in mid-life and in mid-career. They spend less time in the madness, but they are less prepared for it as well. NOCs enter and leave the program in different ways -- sometimes under their real names, sometimes under completely fabricated ones. They share one thing: They live a lie on behalf of their country.

[....]

The problem is not recruiting them -- the life sounds cool for many recent college graduates. The crisis of the NOC occurs when he approaches the most valuable years of service, in his late 30s or so. What sounded neat at 22 rapidly becomes a mind-shattering nightmare when their two lives collide at 40.

This job's like a living conceptual puzzle.

A Philip K Dick memory game, a Borgesian mirror life, a Baconian inner hell enshrined in the secret profession of the national security state.

It's like living life as a 3-dimensional chess game, in two personalities, which has a beginning but no mortal end, no rules and no referee. What psychological mind state does one inhabit in this kind of existence?

And when the game has no limits and no separation, once you start - how do you ever see yourself again?