Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy

I loved this book. Moran nails the inner turmoil that one has with the Agency. It is a love hate relationship perpetually that she captures. From the very get go, recruitment and benign instructions starts candidates off in a wilderness of mirrors. Self doubt, peer doubt, ethical doubt. It is a life of questions and uneasiness. And the fact that she did ops only further puts a target on her back from the enemy and peers. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. There is no confidential HR rep to call, no manager to chat with. Unless you are on the inside, you will never know what it is like---unless of course you read Lindsay Moran's account.Agency life is like tequila. When you are having fun, it's great. Other times you swear it off only to get the itch again. Nothing changes, but you still do it. Moran captures this in spades.The book is honest, well written, funny, and sad, which showed me the author gave it her all and spoke from the heart.I highly recommend the book to anyone who ever wanted an unvarnished glimpse of the CIA. If you are looking for an account of how clan service lets you develop high level targets and see them become dictators run by the CIA, read fiction. If you want to know how you can sit in front of an asset for hours wanting to gouge your eyes out and stop your bleeding ears as they tell the same story over and over, but you have to stay on it in case they drop an exploitable nugget, this is the real world story.Well done.

In Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy author Lindsay Moran tells the true story of her relatively brief career with the CIA, a five-year stint that straddled the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Moran begins with her early interest in espionage--childhood fantasies fueled by spy novels and James Bond matinees--and her first application to the Agency, right out of college, which she did not pursue past an informational meeting in a Washington D.C. Holiday Inn. ("The CIA representatives who greeted us were somewhat disappointing: a dowdy, middle-aged woman with thick glasses and orthopedic shoes, and a paunchy, balding guy who had the aura of someone just completing a messy divorce.") Five years later, however, Moran reapplied to the Agency, over her family's objections, and this time she saw the process through to the end.Moran spends a little more than half of her book detailing the intensive training that she underwent at The Farm, the CIA's site in Virginia. She and her fellow would-be spooks learned how to defuse bombs and jump out of planes. They practiced wearing disguises and ramming beat-up Cadillacs through walls and fences and lines of parked cars. Plunked down separately in a wilderness area, they were required to navigate to a specified location using only a contour map and a compass, a feat the trainees accomplished with varying degrees of success. ("Sally was found close to dark, half naked in a swamp. Frustrated by her inability to find her destination, she'd inexplicably decided to bathe.")After graduating from The Farm Moran was sent to Skopje, Macedonia, a post for which she learned Serbo-Croatian (and such handy phrases as "Some of the women were raped, but all the men were killed.") As a case officer for the CIA, Moran's primary job was to recruit foreign agents--people who had access to information and would be willing to sell it--and to maintain the agents who were already under her control. Some of her job had a cloak-and-dagger excitement to it--clandestine meetings and coded signals--but much of it was dull, from the reams of paperwork she was required to fill out to the necessity of listening to some low-level agent's marital complaints during a meeting. Perhaps it is a reflection of the banality of much of her work as a spy that Moran's narrative, downright fascinating in the first half of the book, is less compelling in the second.Two themes run throughout Moran's book. She complains often about the difficulty she had as a CIA operative maintaining non-Agency relationships. The easy lies and ostensibly bizarre behavior of spies--the odd hours and unexplained departures--take their toll on friendships and love affairs. And Moran was ill at ease even during her training about the nature of the work she would be required to do as a CIA case officer, preying on targets, approaching them under false pretences, and using their vulnerabilities as a means of convincing them to sell their state's secrets. Moran's loneliness on the job and her moral discomfort with it were jointly responsible for her decision to resign from the Agency in 2003.Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

I bought the book because I heard the author on "CLEARED HOT" Podcast with Andy.The authors sounded interesting on the podcast and several of the chapters of the book we're covered by her, maybe inadvertently, during the podcast and the reading the text was a rehash.I understand it was just her story, but it was barely interesting though it was a short read.

Five stars: one each for candor, humor, bravery, persistence, and moral sense. The negativity of some reviews is appalling; I suspect many are projections of attitude unaccompanied by significant service to one's country. Lindsay Moran volunteered, she served, she wasn't paid much, and she didn't stop until she hit a moral pothole of a size she could not leap. The secret reserve of all the great intelligence services has been the free thinker. The Abwehr, KGB, OSS, and MI6 all had them. The free thinker possesses a highly developed moral sense, and a self-awareness that allows her to articulate thoughts that all of us have, but lesser minds suppress. It seems Moran's detractors are confused by her articulation of private thoughts. But enough dry histories and white papers have been written; what Moran gives us, quite uniquely, is a peek into an actual living mind, as it navigates the bureaucratic stultification of what the C.I.A. is today. Moran lasers in on the big problem: intelligence work puts the case officer on the razor's edge of moral choice, frequently forcing the choice called "the greater good", which our society officially abhors making. Most memoirs aim to add to the historical record, but have no immediate relevance. But for this reader, the book actually cracked a puzzle. As our society has evolved, and become more decent, this same decency has squeezed out the free thinkers, replacing thought process with bureaucracy. Thus Moran was not allowed to approach someone with terrorist ties. Whether Moran was actually correct we cannot know. But though George Smiley was fiction, there really were great, masterful, multicultural minds of genius who rose above the strictures of society to save the future. They are dead now, and they left no intellectual heirs. Ms. Moran, I am sorry I have not had the chance to meet you.

This book was okay, it gave a bit of an insight into the CIA, unfortunatey this lady didn't really have an interesting jobs given to her, so it was just a bit mundane, but worth a read.

Not common but very interesting testimony. Easy to read. I used some extracts with my ESL students. They loved the story.

funny and informative.