88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary Read Online Free Page B

which would otherwise have been my last in college, was idyllic. My dorm parent’s stipend was tiny, but came withfree room and board. I supplemented my income by substitute teaching in the local public schools, and helped coach the cross-country and baseball teams. I made terrific friends on the Concord faculty, and spent off-hours in the bars and cafés of Boston and Cambridge. It would all have been a good first step toward realizing my goal of becoming a latter-day Mr. Chips, but there was just one hitch: barely out of adolescence myself, I found I had little patience for the emotional trials of younger adolescents. School would be a terrific place, I thought, if it weren’t for the damned students. I was going to have to come up with something else.
    That summer, a friend and I formed a house-painting company, and landed a couple of contracts to paint old colonial residences in Cambridge. Lounging in paint-spattered clothes, poring over the newspapers during meal breaks in seedy, working-class diners off Harvard Square, I found myself increasingly drawn to the international pages. I became fascinated by Middle East politics, the post-1973 emergence of the oil-rich sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, efforts to settle the Arab-Israeli dispute, and the Cold War struggle for post-colonial influence in Africa. I followed the maneuvers of Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, and Ian Smith in Rhodesia as though I were reading a weekly serial. I had always had an interest in international politics, but had never really taken the time to develop it. Now, my partner had trouble tearing me away from my reading to get me back on the job. On the basis of nothing more than that and a few romantic movies I’d seen about the Middle East, I decided to get a graduate degree in international relations.
    There was just one holdup to the pursuit of my latest enthusiasm. While at Dartmouth, I had fallen in love with a Boston College nursing student, one year my junior, from a large, extended Irish family. Paula and I wanted to get married as soon as possible, but it would be another year before she could graduate. Not wanting to assume in bad faith the responsibilities of a proper, entry-level position I had no intention of keeping for more than a few months, I took a cheap, walk-up garret apartment in Boston’s Back Bay area and embarked on a series of dead-end jobs while waiting to hear back from graduate schools. Whenit got too cold to paint, I sold household smoke detectors door-to-door. I later became manager of a twenty-four-hour gas station, employing minimum-wage roustabouts in a tough section of Dedham, Massachusetts, while working a sixty-hour week. That year provided an enormously valuable education. Among other things, it strongly reinforced the lessons I had gleaned during summers working for my father’s construction company, where I had developed an appreciation for the ennobling qualities of hard manual labor. It also taught me that I had a knack for developing close, empathetic relationships with people who did not begin to see the world as I did.
    In the spring of 1977, on a Sunday afternoon, Paula graduated summa cum laude from Boston College. We were married the following Friday, in a large Irish wedding attended by 200 people, most of whom I’d never met. Within weeks I was a kept man, studying at the University of Virginia while my wife supported me as a neonatal intensive care nurse at the University Hospital. I was twenty-two, and she twenty-one.
    All that led me, some ten months later, to Dotty’s door. After about an hour of amiable but seemingly undirected conversation, she asked: What did I think I was applying for? Somewhat taken aback, I replied that I guessed I’d be interested in working as an intelligence analyst. This was my first encounter with a CIA field operative, a “case officer” in agency parlance, and so it was also the first time that one would lie to me. “We don’t have any openings for