That time I almost became a spy
Anyone who is a James Bond fan has their preferred actor for the role. My favorite was known to be unfaithful to his wives, but at least he didn’t advocate beating them. I speak of Roger Moore. I like him because of a defining moment in what would become my favorite Bond film: The Spy Who Loved Me.
I’d never seen a Bond movie before, and my parents took me to watch it in theatres when I was nine. In the opening scene Bond is skiing down a mountainside while being chased by evil Soviets trying to kill him. To escape, he skis off a giant cliff. And he falls. And falls. And then he releases his skis. And he continues to fall. And fall. And then he pops a parachute bearing the Union Jack and the “Do do do-doo” music starts, and I lost my fucking mind thinking that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. That movie had nine-year-old James wanting to grow up to be either a stunt man or a spy. And I admit to having done some crazy ski jumps, including off (much much shorter) cliffs, as well as having gone skydiving.
See?
There was also that time that, when I was 35 years old, the federal government offered me a job as a spy.
Fell. James Fell.
It should come as a surprise to no one that the spy game is nothing like what is in the movies. Most of it is considered really fucking boring. And the James Bond shit is only a small part of it. As I wrote about in the “Shit Went Down” column about the CIA: “What the CIA and other intelligence agencies really care about keeping secret is the first part of that quote: the stuff about collecting intelligence and how it influences foreign policy . . . This is the boring part of spying.”
The job I was offered was a “boring” job, although I expect I would have loved it. And it wasn’t just foreign threats, but domestic ones. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is like the Canadian FBI, offered me a job as a spy to fight organized crime. A lot of those criminals were foreigners, so there was crossover. In terms of domestic crime there was also local biker gangs I’d be investigating.
I wouldn’t have been an actual cop. I would have been a civilian working in the Criminal Intelligence Service, beginning as an analyst, and then we’d see where it went from there.
How this came about was that I had been working for a medium-size technology company for a couple of years in their marketing department, controlling a pretty big budget and doing lots of travel across the U.S., and I was still bored as fuck. Also, my boss sucked. So, I began to peruse the Career Section of the newspaper because that was still a thing. I saw an ad and said fuck it and applied.
It was a motherfucking process.
I learned that 800 people applied for four spots. I thought it was my master’s degree in history (where I’d studied a lot about insurrection, insurgency, spying, terrorism, and that kind of shit) that had them interested in me, but it was more about my MBA. These criminal enterprises were enterprises and they wanted someone with business sense.
Forty of us were invited to Edmonton for examination. That’s a three-hour drive from where I live in Calgary. I drove up the night before through winter conditions, leaving my wife at home with our five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. I got a room at a crappy Days Inn not far from the RCMP headquarters where the testing was to begin the following morning at 9am.
I went to bed early and some time after midnight all hell broke loose in the hallway of my hotel.
Fucking Metallica. There had been a goddamn Metallic concert just a few blocks away and a bunch of drunk and stoned fans were screaming and thumping their way down the hall—over and over—for the next hour or so. Assholes.
I wasn’t the most chipper the following morning, but caffeine and adrenaline saw me through. The first “test” was a pile of information. It was various clippings of bits and pieces of info from multiple sources on a case about Nigerians creating false passports. I hope I didn’t sign an NDA on this stuff. I don’t remember doing it. Anyway, we all got a folder and mine was full of a couple dozen bits of info and I had to read it all and make some sense of it and then write down what I thought. I did that, and then we all got a break for a few hours while they read what we wrote. Then I was grilled by a panel of three people about what I’d reported.
One thing I remember towards the end of the grilling was being asked “What is your opinion of the level of sophistication of this criminal enterprise?”
“They seem pretty stupid,” I said.
They laughed, then one asked, “Why do you say that?” I replied that these characters repeatedly did things that telegraphed “I’m doing crime” that made it pretty obvious they were engaged in something nefarious. Their efforts to hide their criminal activities were pretty shitty.
“Why do you think that is?” a panelist asked me, looking for my thoughts on why they weren’t more cautious.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think it’s intended to be brazen. I think they’re just plain stupid. If they were smart, they wouldn’t be criminals.” I realize now that answer wasn’t the best because there certainly are smart criminals, but they liked the answer, and in this case, it was true. These folks I was analyzing were fucking idiots.
I drove home that night and a week passed. Then I was invited to go through security screening.
Holy shit what an ordeal.
The amount of paperwork I had to fill out was obscene. The full contact information of every friend and family member I could imagine plus a bunch of their background information. I had to do quite a bit of explaining over the stepbrother I hadn’t seen in a dozen years and had no idea as to his location, although I was pretty sure he’d done some crime and was probably in their system as not a good person. Everywhere I’d ever worked going back several years, plus having to provide lengthy backgrounds for the people I provided as references. One of them was a former professor in my MBA program who was very familiar with the whole security clearance process and he phoned me after his interview with the RCMP about me to say that I was getting the “microscope treatment.” He said they tried to trip him up and put words in his mouth to get him to reveal something nefarious about me, to spill some secret about how I was actually a bad guy.
“This means you’re a serious contender,” he said.
A while later my next-door neighbor said, “So, the RCMP paid me a visit . . .” They came by and asked him if I was out smoking pot in the back yard or having wild parties or driving like a dick or doing anything untoward. “I told them you always shovel my sidewalk for me,” he said. “They seemed to like that.”
Then I had to be fingerprinted. I imagine they still have them on file 17 years later, so I better not do anything stupid.
Then I went in for another interview with a seasoned old RCMP officer for a couple of hours. He was actually really funny. But I got a sense that he was trying to put me at ease and be all good cop to get me to spill something.
The whole thing took over four months. Then, finally, I got a phone call. I got the job.
In Edmonton.
Fuck.
There were four positions, two of them in Calgary and two in Edmonton. I guess I was third or fourth on the list to get an offer, because the Calgary positions were already snapped up. I did not want to move to Edmonton. I turned them down.
Had there been a Calgary offer, it’s a certainty I would have taken it. I think I would have liked it and expect I would have been damn good at it. I imagine that after a time I would have been promoted and given a position in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Seventeen years later, I might be doing something very different right now.
See, I didn’t want to move to Edmonton because Edmonton sucks and I wasn’t willing to do that for a new job that I might not like. But if I had liked it in Calgary and been promoted to a more senior role in Ottawa, which is a very nice city, I expect we would have made the move.
But I can’t complain about the way it all worked out, because now all my analysis of various acts of human fuckery has way more readers than just some cops, and I get to swear lots.
Still, I wish they didn’t have my fingerprints. Don’t know why, but that makes me nervous. Because cops.
Side Note: I’ve interviewed two Bond women for the Los Angeles Times.
Here is my interview with Jane Seymour, who was in Live and Let Die.
Here is my interview with Eva Green, who was in Casino Royale.