A FEW YEARS AGO, IN DISREGARD OF THE DISCRETIONARY CONTRACT I signed in 1955 on entering the CIA, I embarked on a memoir that looked to present a candid picture of twenty-five active years in the Agency. I expected the work to be of average length, but my account proliferated until it may now be the longest reminiscence ever written by anyone within the Agency. Perhaps I was captured by Thomas Mann’s dictum that “Only the exhaustive is truly interesting.”

This attempt, then, to follow the changes in my character and outlook from 1955 to 1965 (for indeed I have managed to carry my account no further as yet) is not to be read as a memoir. It is rather a Bildungsroman, an extended narrative of a young man’s education and development. Any sophisticated reader of spy novels picking up this book in the hope of encountering a splendidly plotted work will discover himself on unfamiliar ground. As an Agency officer, I certainly encountered my fair share of plots, initiating some, concluding others, and serving as messenger for many, but I was rarely able to see them whole. By bits and pieces they passed before me. It is even a reasonable conclusion that this is the way of life for nearly all of us in CIA. One learns to live with the irony that we who spend our lives in intelligence usually read spy novels with the wistful sentiment, “Ah, if only my job could turn out so well shaped!”

Nonetheless, I hope to offer my private insight into the nature of our daily lives and our intermittent adventures. They are sometimes exceptional for the complexity of the inner experience we encounter while spending our professional years on the team that plays this unique game.