Your Life as Every CIA Black Ops Rank

Level one, the applicant. You apply

online like everyone else. There's a

form on the CIA website. You fill in

your name, your education, your work

history. You click submit and wait. 6

months later, you get an email. They

want to interview you. You fly to

Virginia on your own dime. The building

looks like any other government office.

Fluorescent lights, bad coffee. A man in

a gray suit asks you questions for 4

hours. Where did you grow up? What

languages do you speak? Have you ever

used drugs? Have you ever been arrested?

Have you ever traveled to certain

countries? The questions seem random,

but they're not. They're building a

profile. They're looking for patterns.

They're looking for lies. You pass the

interview. Then comes the polygraph. You

sit in a chair with sensors strapped to

your chest, your fingers, your arm. A

technician asks you questions while

monitoring your heart rate, your

breathing, your skin conductivity. Have

you ever committed a crime you weren't

caught for? Have you ever betrayed a

friend? Have you ever had thoughts about

harming yourself or others? The machine

can't actually detect lies, but you

don't know that. You sweat. You stutter.

You tell the truth because you're

terrified of what happens if you don't.

3 weeks later, you get a letter. You've

been accepted into the clandestine

service trainee program. Welcome to the

CIA. Level two, the trainee. They send

you to Camp Piri, Virginia. The locals

call it the farm. It's 9,000 acres of

woods, swamps, and training facilities

surrounded by fences and armed guards.

For the next 18 months, this is your

home. You wake up at 5:00 a.m. You run 5

miles before breakfast. You sit in

classrooms learning about foreign

governments, terrorist organizations,

and intelligence tradecraft. Tradecraft

is the CIA's word for spy skills. You

learn how to spot surveillance. There's

a car that's been behind you for three

turns. There's a man reading a newspaper

who looked at you twice. There's a woman

on a park bench who is at the coffee

shop this morning. You learn to see

patterns that civilians miss. You learn

how to lose a tail. You duck into a

department store, walk through three

floors, exit through the loading dock,

hop in a waiting car, and disappear. You

learn how to pick locks, crack safes,

plant bugs, and photograph documents

without being detected. You practice on

real equipment. The safes come from

embassies. The locks come from

government buildings. You learn how to

recruit assets, which is their word for

convincing people to betray their

countries. You study psychology,

manipulation, persuasion. You learn the

four motivations: money, ideology,

coercion, and ego. Everyone fits into

one of these categories. Your job is to

figure out which one and exploit it. You

run practice operations in nearby

cities: Richmond, Norfolk, Washington.

Your instructors play the role of

foreign intelligence officers trying to

catch you. If they catch you, you fail.

If you fail too many times, you're out.

The wash out rate is 40%. Some people

crack under the pressure. Some people

can't handle the deception. Some people

are too moral for this work. The people

who make it aren't necessarily the

smartest or the strongest. They're the

ones who can think on their feet.

They're the ones who can lie

convincingly to anyone, including

themselves. They're the ones who can

compartmentalize, who can do terrible

things, and then go home and eat dinner

with their families like nothing

happened. You graduate in the top 15% of

your class. They give you a badge and a

cover identity. You are now a CIA

operations officer. Your real career is

about to begin. Level three, the case

officer. Your first posting is an

embassy in Eastern Europe, a former

Soviet block country still figuring out

whether it's going to be an ally or an

adversary. Officially, you're a

political attache. Your name is on a

diplomatic list. You have an office in

the embassy. You attend diplomatic

functions in uncomfortable suits, making

small talk with people you're secretly

evaluating as potential targets. You

shake hands with local officials and

remember everything they say. You write

reports about economic conditions and

political developments that go into

classified cables back to Washington.

Unofficially, you're a spy. Your real

job is to recruit assets. An asset is

anyone who has access to information you

want. A government official who attends

cabinet meetings. A military officer who

knows troop deployments. A scientist

working on weapons programs. A

businessman who travels to places

Americans can't go. A secretary who

handles classified documents. Anyone

with access is a potential target. You

identify targets. You study their

habits, their weaknesses, their

vulnerabilities. Does he have money

problems? Does she have a sick child who

needs expensive treatment? Is he

ideologically sympathetic to American

values? Is she angry at her government

for some personal slight? Everyone has a

pressure point. Your job is to find it

and press it. Your first recruitment

takes 8 months. He's a mid-level

bureaucrat in the foreign ministry. He

has access to diplomatic cables. He has

gambling debts. You approach him at a

casino. You buy him drinks. You become

his friend. You loan him money to cover

his losses. Then you loan him more. Then

more. By the time he realizes what's

happening, he owes you $50,000.

You don't ask him to betray his country.

You ask him to share some documents.

Just a few. Nothing important. Just

enough to pay off his debt. He agrees.

He has no choice. You now have an asset

inside the foreign ministry. You file a

report. Your supervisors are pleased.

Level four, the knock. Most CIA officers

work under official cover. They're

diplomats or military attaches or trade

representatives. They have badges. They

have offices in the embassy. If they get

caught doing something they shouldn't,

they have diplomatic immunity. They get

expelled from the country. It's

embarrassing, but not dangerous. Their

families are safe. Their careers

continue. You're offered something

different. non-official cover. Knock,

pronounced knock. It's the most

dangerous job in the intelligence

community. You won't have diplomatic

protection. You won't have an embassy to

run to. You won't have a badge or a

government ID or anything connecting you

to the United States government. If you

get caught, you're on your own. The CIA

will deny you exist. The State

Department will deny you exist. The

president will deny you exist. You'll be

prosecuted under local laws. In some

countries, that means prison. In others,

it means torture. In others, it means a

bullet in the back of the head and an

unmarked grave. The pay is better. The

mission is more important. The risks are

astronomical. You say yes. They build

you a legend. That's their word for a

fake identity. You're now a businessman.

You work for a consulting firm that

doesn't actually do any consulting. It's

a CIA front company with real offices,

real employees, and real clients. None

of them know who you really are. You

travel to countries where America

officially has no intelligence presence.

You meet people the embassy can't meet.

You recruit assets the diplomatic

service could never approach. You live

your cover 24 hours a day. Your

neighbors think you're a management

consultant. Your girlfriend thinks you

travel for work. Your parents think you

quit the government years ago. The only

people who know the truth are your

handlers back at Langley. You haven't

seen them in person in 2 years. All

communication goes through dead drops

and encrypted messages. You are

completely alone. Level five, the

paramilitary officer. They pull you out

of knockwork after your cover is almost

blown in Beirut. A local intelligence

service got suspicious. They started

following you. They photographed you

meeting with an asset. You spotted the

surveillance and aborted, but it was

close. Too close. You're not burned, but

you're compromised. You can never go

back to that region. They offer you a

new path. The Special Activities

Division, SAD. This is the CIA's

paramilitary arm. These aren't spies who

occasionally carry guns. These are

soldiers who occasionally gather

intelligence. The most elite unit within

SAD is the Special Operations Group or

SOG. These are the people who go where

the military can't go. They do the jobs

that are too sensitive, too deniable,

too illegal for official armed forces.

You go through another round of

training. This time it's not lockpicking

and surveillance detection. It's 6

months of the most intense military

training on the planet. Small unit

tactics, close quarters combat,

explosives and demolitions, advanced

weapons training with every firearm made

in the last 50 years, high altitude

parachute operations, combat diving,

survival, evasion, resistance, and

escape. Most of your instructors are

former Delta Force or SEAL Team 6, the

best of the best, now working for the

agency. They don't care about your

recruitment skills. They care about

whether you can kick down a door and

clear a room without getting your team

killed. Your first mission is in

Afghanistan. You're part of a team

hunting high-v valueue targets, al-Qaeda

leadership, Taliban commanders, bomb

makers who have killed American

soldiers. You spend three months living

in a mud compound in the mountains,

eating local food, growing a beard,

wearing local clothes. You work with

Afghan militia fighters who may or may

not be trustworthy. Some of them fought

with the mujahedin against the Soviets.

Some of them fought with the Taliban

before switching sides. Loyalties are

fluid. Money talks. You never know who

might betray you for a bigger payout

from the other side. You call in drone

strikes on compounds where terrorists

are hiding. You watch through binoculars

as hellfire missiles turn buildings into

craters. Sometimes the intelligence is

good. The target is there. Bad people

die. Sometimes the intelligence is

wrong. The target isn't there. Other

people die. Women, children, people who

are just in the wrong place. You try not

to think about the times it's not. You

can't afford to. You have another

mission tomorrow. You're awarded a medal

that doesn't exist for a mission that

never happened in a country where you

were never officially present. Your

family will never know what you did or

why you sometimes wake up screaming.

Level six, the team leader. After 5

years in SAD, you're promoted to team

leader. You run your own unit now. Eight

operators, four paramilitary officers

like yourself, career CIA, four

contractors who used to be special

operations forces. They make three times

your salary, but you make the decisions.

You're responsible for the mission.

You're responsible for their lives. Your

team is deployed to Libya during the

civil war. Gaddafi is falling. The

country is chaos. Militias are fighting

each other in the streets. Weapons

depots are being looted. Your mission is

to locate and secure chemical weapons

before they fall into the wrong hands.

The wrong hands could be al-Qaeda, could

be ISIS, could be any of a dozen groups

that would love to have mustard gas or

sarin. You spend 6 weeks in Tripoli

while the city burns around you. You

operate at night. You sleep during the

day, 2 hours at a time in safe houses

that change every 48 hours. You bribe

militia commanders for information. You

interrogate prisoners captured by

friendly forces. You pay informants who

might be lying, might be setting you up,

might be working for the other side. You

raid weapons depots in the middle of the

night, kicking in doors, never knowing

if you'll find empty rooms or armed

guards. You find three caches of mustard

gas that the official report said didn't

exist. 15 tons of chemical weapons that

could have killed hundreds of thousands

of people. You destroy them in place

because there's no safe way to transport

them. You rig explosives and incinerate

everything. On your last night in

country, your convoy is ambushed. One of

your men is killed. Two are wounded. You

carry one of them half a mile to the

extraction point while bullets snap past

your head. The helicopter arrives. You

get out. The mission is classified as a

success. You write letters to the

families of the dead and wounded. The

letters are lies. You can't tell them

what really happened. You can't tell

anyone. Level seven, the station chief.

You've been in the field for 15 years.

Your body is breaking down. Old injuries

that never healed, right? A shoulder

that dislocates if you move it wrong

from that fall in Afghanistan. Knees

that ache every morning from too many

parachute landings. Ringing in your ears

that never goes away from too many

explosions. You're 42 years old and you

feel 60. The doctors tell you that you

can't do field work anymore. Too many

concussions, too much damage. They offer

you a desk job, but not just any desk

job. Chief of Station, COOS. You're now

the senior CIA officer in an entire

country. This is one of the most

powerful positions in the intelligence

community. Every operation, every asset,

every piece of intelligence flows

through you. You manage 40 officers,

case officers, reports officers,

technical specialists, security

personnel. You manage hundreds of local

assets, agents who report to your

officers, informants who provide tips,

access agents who can get into places

you can't. You meet with the ambassador

every morning to coordinate with the

diplomatic mission. You meet with local

intelligence services to maintain

liaison relationships. Some of them are

allies. Some of them are adversaries

pretending to be allies. Some of them

are assets you recruited years ago who

are now running their own services. The

politics are exhausting. Washington

wants results. The embassy wants to

avoid incidents. The local government

wants to know why Americans keep showing

up in places they shouldn't be. You

balance all of it. You approve

operations that could start

international incidents if they go

wrong. You kill operations that could

produce valuable intelligence but carry

too much risk. Every decision is a

gamble. Every success is classified.

Every failure ends up on the front page

of the New York Times. You sleep 4 hours

a night. You haven't taken a vacation in

3 years. Your marriage ended during your

second tour in the Middle East. Your

kids are grown now. They don't really

know you. They know the cover story.

They know the person you pretend to be.

Level eight, the black site commander.

They need someone to run a facility that

doesn't exist. A black site. It's in a

country that will deny it's there. The

host government has been paid off. The

local security services provide

perimeter protection and ask no

questions. The facility itself is

unremarkable. A warehouse, a former

factory, an abandoned military base.

Inside there are cells. There are

interrogation rooms. There are medical

facilities to keep the prisoners alive.

The prisoners are high-V value

detainees, terrorist leaders, bomb

makers, financeers, couriers who know

where the networks operate. They were

captured in raids across a dozen

countries. They were never formally

arrested. They never appeared before a

judge. They have no lawyers. They have

no rights. They have no official

existence. As far as the world knows,

they vanished. Your job is to extract

intelligence from them. The techniques

you use are classified. Enhanced

interrogation. That's the official term.

Sleep deprivation, stress positions,

temperature manipulation, waterboarding.

Some of these techniques were legal when

you started using them. Some of them

were made legal retroactively by Justice

Department memos. Some of them are still

being debated by lawyers in Washington

who have never been in a room with

someone who knows where the next attack

is coming from. You tell yourself it's

necessary. You tell yourself the

information saves lives. You tell

yourself the people in those cells would

kill millions of Americans if they had

the chance. Some nights you believe it.

Some nights you lie awake staring at the

ceiling wondering if you're still one of

the good guys. You run the facility for

2 years. When you leave, they give you a

commendation that will never appear in

any record. The facility continues to

operate. Someone else is running it now.

You don't ask who. You don't want to

know. Level 9, the division director.

You're back at Langley now.

Headquarters. The building you first

entered 25 years ago as a nervous

applicant. Now you walk past the

memorial wall with 139 stars for

officers who died in service. Some of

them were your friends. Some of them

died on operations you planned. You run

an entire division of the National

Clandestine Service. Maybe it's the Near

East Division covering the Middle East.

Maybe it's the Special Activities Center

overseeing all paramilitary operations.

Maybe it's the Counterterrorism Center

hunting the people who want to kill

Americans. Hundreds of officers report

to you. Thousands of assets worldwide

feed information into your systems.

Billions of dollars in black budget

funding flow through your accounts.

Money that doesn't appear in any

congressional report. Money that

officially doesn't exist. You brief the

president on covert operations. You sit

in the situation room at the table with

the secretary of defense and the

national security adviser while

decisions are made that will never be

acknowledged. You recommend targets for

drone strikes. You authorize operations

in countries where we're not officially

operating. Syria, Iran, Pakistan,

countries that are technically allies,

countries that are technically enemies,

countries where the line between the two

changes week to week. You sign off on

activities that would be war crimes if

anyone ever found out about them. You

testify before congressional

intelligence committees, but the real

briefings happen in closed sessions with

no transcripts. The senators ask

questions. You give answers that are

technically true, but carefully

incomplete. Everyone in the room knows

the game. They don't want to know the

details. They want plausible

deniability. You give it to them. The

operations continue. The bodies pile up

in countries most Americans couldn't

find on a map. The intelligence flows.

Some of it prevents attacks. Some of it

leads to more attacks. The whole thing

is a machine that runs on secrets and

blood. And you're one of the people who

keeps it running. Level 10, the ghost.

You retire after 30 years. 30 years of

secrets. 30 years of operations that

never happened. 30 years of assets

recruited and betrayed and sometimes

killed. 30 years of decisions that

changed the course of history in ways

that will never be written in any book.

There's a small ceremony in a conference

room at Langley. 50 people attend. Most

of them you've worked with for decades.

A few are officers you mentored who are

now running their own divisions. The

director gives a speech about your

service to your country. He talks about

sacrifices. He talks about dedication.

He talks about the price of freedom.

Your colleagues applaud. Some of them

are crying. You receive a medal. The

distinguished intelligence cross. The

highest award the CIA can give. It will

sit in a box in your closet because you

can't display it. You can't explain it.

You can't tell anyone what you did to

earn it. You sign more non-disclosure

agreements. You're reminded that

everything you did, everything you saw,

everything you know is classified for

the rest of your life. You move to a

house in Virginia, far from the city.

You don't have many friends. The people

you worked with are scattered around the

world or dead. The people you knew

before the agency are strangers now. You

can't tell them where you've been for 30

years. You can't explain the scars. You

can't explain why you wake up at 3:00

a.m. and walk the perimeter of your

property looking for threats that aren't

there. Your pension is generous. Your

healthcare is excellent. The government

takes care of its own, at least

financially. But you're alone with your

memories. The assets you recruited who

were caught and executed. The operations

that went wrong, the people you

interrogated, the people you killed.

None of it officially happened. None of

it will ever be acknowledged. You are a

ghost. You did things that your country

needed done. Things that would horrify

most citizens if they knew. You carry

that weight alone. You'll carry it until

you die. And when you die, there will be

a star on a wall at Langley. No name,

just a star. One more anonymous

sacrifice in a war that never ends.

Somewhere in a college dorm room or a

suburban apartment or a military

barracks, a young person is filling out

an application on the CIA website.

They're dreaming of adventure. They're

dreaming of serving their country.

They're dreaming of being part of

something bigger than themselves.

They're imagining Jason Bourne and James

Bond and all the fictional spies who

make this life look glamorous. They have

no idea what they're really signing up

for. They don't know about the

loneliness, the moral compromises, the

things they'll see that they can never

unsee. They don't know that this job

will hollow them out and fill them back

up with secrets. But they'll learn. They

always do. The cycle begins