As a result of Dana Priest’s three-part article, Top-Secret America, published in the Washington Post, pundits have been falling all over themselves in their rush to describe the size and implications of the elephant in the living room. Forget that none of these pundits has seen fit to write about the elephant before. More important is the fact that the elephant has dimensions Dana Priest never even touched upon.
In 1985, I was contacted by Larry, a CIA officer who had had a breakdown and wanted to talk to me. He had served as a deep cover agent overseas for over 15 years at that point. He had been recruited from the Marines in Vietnam, and given a fake life in which his father had been an Australian soldier in World War II, and his mother a Filipino who died in childbirth. The Australian soldier had abandoned the mother before she gave birth. The father had later died in World War II, and Larry, having been brought up in an orphanage, was adopted as an infant by a couple in the United States.
To make a long story short, after Larry’s breakdown, the CIA got him a job as a manager of a Playboy club in Detroit. Later they transferred him to Washington, DC, as manager of the Four Ways restaurant. When I met him there, his Filipino wife and entourage were staffing the facility, along with his CIA hand-holder, who handled finances.
Again, to make a very long story short, Larry explained that the CIA manages a parallel society to American society, where deep cover agents like him, as well as retired CIA officers and their agents, are provided with comfortable employment in their retirement years, or when they otherwise need recompense for their service. Many of these agents have no resume that is suitable in the modern professional world. So there is this parallel universe that they are folded into, as managers of the local Ford dealership, or Chinese restaurant, or hotel, or in hundreds and thousands of other jobs.
