A Guide for the Aspiring Spy (The Anonymous Spy Series) by Anonymous Spy Page B

promotion, will assess you in all these areas.
     
    You are expected to excel as both an agent recruiter and agent handler in order to excel in your career and to climb the promotion ladder. If you are better at one than the other, then accentuate your strong point while exhibiting a no-quitter attitude for your weaker point. You will be surprised how an experienced, sympathetic supervisor who admires your positive attitude toward your weaker point can make it look strong on your annual proficiency report.
     
    It is also quite helpful to one’s career to latch onto the coattails of a rising star within the Company and make his or her success reflect on you. When the rising star gets promoted, then you get promoted; if the rising star gets plush assignments, you ride along on the coattails. Rising stars are those CIA staff personnel purposely chosen by the leading bureaucracy to be future leaders of the Company. They are placed on the fast track, so to speak, for rapid promotions and higher responsibilities. These are the few people within the agency who are, indeed, chosen for their intellectual prowess. They are trained to think on a different level than the normal field case officer. They are trained to consider regulatory, foreign policy, and political consequences of the CIA’s activities abroad. This is often where the heavy-handed complacent headquarters bureaucracy interfaces with the highly motivated interactive field operations personnel and erupts into internal conflict. At times like these, you will find it advantageous to be on the coattails of one of these rising stars who can go to bat for you and your operations at headquarters while you are isolated in the field.
     
    We have all heard the expression “patience is a virtue.” Well, inside the Company your best virtue can be your patience. For the sake of your career, it is best not to push the envelope of controversy against the bureaucracy even if you are convinced that you are right. However, the bureaucratic memory is often short or even nonexistent. The priorities of the bureaucracy often change and sometimes come full circle to positively consider and adopt an option or plan that was once perceived as completely incomprehensible. So when one of your ideas is turned down as ridiculous by the bureaucracy, just have patience. Your time may come after all and when it does and your idea is accepted and is successful, your career opportunities will soar accordingly. Who knows? You might be one of those rising stars yourself and others will want to hop on your coattails. So for the sake of your career, develop patience and learn how to use it.
     
    Also, you should not be too forthcoming about yourself to your supervisors. There should be some vagueness about you. Leave some mystique about yourself that your supervisors cannot quite put their fingers on. After all, your supervisors are or were once themselves case officers who have instilled within their psyche the case officer mentality. They automatically look at younger case officers in terms of motivations and vulnerabilities, just as they do their agents. Remember, this is what they have been trained to do. They are looking for ways to push your buttons, to get you to respond in predictable and desirable ways to test their own skills as case officers or to achieve their own agenda. If they can push your buttons too easily to get the responses they desire, they will actually lose respect for you. You are too easy, no challenge. If you are too predictable, they view you as intellectually shallow. This is an interesting contradiction. Become a challenge to them by always holding back something about yourself that when revealed continually surprises them. Develop the mystique of a head of lettuce gradually peeling off one leaf at a time to reveal something new about yourself with every layer. This makes you interesting and challenging and reinforces their confidence in themselves as case