“Yes, why not? Start over from scratch. Smaller, smarter, tougher. The current establishment is a stubborn but terminal cancer patient. Pull the plug! It does more harm than good. It wastes money. It perpetuates fraud. It is a product of the cold war, the bureaucratic repository of fifty years of secrecy. Sure, truth occasionally pops out—we’re Americans, after all, we can’t lie all the time. But it’s a surreal world. You can’t understand how bad it is, because you’ve never experienced it. But trust me. No other U.S. government agency is as sick inside. As exhausted by having repulsively mediocre men proclaim that the organization is more elite than Harvard, which they say to every Career Trainee class, every year—never mind the Howard case, and the Ames case, and a dozen other cases you don’t know about. The place is built on lies. You cannot repair it. The Old Guard will beat you. They control personnel, they control the IG’s office. They control SGSWIRL—”

“Wait! What’s SGSWIRL?”

“The polygraph. And don’t believe all that crap about how useless it is. With nice, middle-class Americans like the people who join the organization, it’s fabulous. A good polygrapher can get you so nervous you’re ready to confess anything. One of my worthy colleagues recently confessed to making love to a dog, for heaven’s sake. It creates pressure, and under pressure Americans lose their minds. That’s why the polygraph doesn’t work with Italians, Latin Americans, Middle Easterners—because they’re always out of their minds, bouncing back and forth between fact and fiction, they don’t really register the difference. But with us, it’s a weapon. By the way, do you know one of the first questions they always ask? Hmmmm? They ask: ‘When did you last have contact with a journalist?’”

That seemed a pointed reminder of the risks he was taking in meeting with me. “Have you quit yet?” I wondered.

“Not yet. A few more months. I have to sign all kinds of papers. So, please, don’t write anything about me. I’m vulnerable. The Brahmins would not be pleased to know that I was talking to a member of the press. My comments are solely for your edification. Your personal intellectual development.”

“Fair enough.” I was disappointed, but I could wait. He was worth the trouble. “Let’s talk about your new career,” I said. “What makes you think you want to be a journalist?”