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# By Joseph Burkholder SmithWENTY-FIFTII college reunions are great occasions for letting the world know how well you've done, and mine was no exception. All my old classmates, it seemed, had become assistant secretaries of state or vice presidents of General Motors or had acquired some equally impressive titles. So it was a little embarrassing when they'd ask me what i was up to:Not that I hadn't done well myself - I was at the time fairly high up in the Central Intelligence Agency. But I wasn't allowed to say that, 30 when they asked, I had to mumble something vague about being a civilian employee at Patrick Air Force base, an excuse that I could tell, conjured up images of genteel failure (too much drinking perhaps) in the people who heard it.Not being able to impress my old classmates was a small wound, but it symbolizes an important problem for CIA agents. We live in a society where lots of people plan their lives so as to accumulate the greatest possible number of credentials of the sort that will wow their peers at reunions and similar moments. These credentials give many Americans a sense of identity and of security: CIA people are by no means immune to the desire to impress people with credentials, but their jobs are directly at odds with that urge. In that way and several others, we in the CIA have been deprived of the normal ego supports of the American life of our time, and how we dealt with (and didn't deal with) their absence from our lives has had something to do with how our agency has (and hasn't doned its job.It wasn't just our status among our peers that suffered as a result of our work. Normal family life was a victim too. The CIA's Clandestine Services division has for years had the highest divorce rate of any organization in the government Part of the reason is that recruits of my generation of clandestine operators were instructed never to tell their wives what they were really doing. "Just say R's a question of national security," they told us when we had to take one of our frequent absences from home.Of course, many men also discovered quickly what an improvement that ling was over the old "working late at the office" routine and took advantage of it. Still most of the marital problems came not from philandering but from the unspectacular, bitter toll that living under cover takes on people. OfNcers with good marriages might tell their wives in general terms what kind of work keeps them out at night but they have to insist that the wives give to hint The first things a CIA wife learns is never to ask another woman what her husband does, for fear she will be asked the same question.CIA wives also have to join their husbands in keeping their children in the dark. When schools have programs in which the kids' fathers tell their classes about their father's Ing work, she has to help invent reasons why her child can't volunteer his father's participation When the men wants to visit his father's office, the way his friends date must try to ease his terrible feeling of rejection when his father tells him no. This kind of travail makes many women wonder if it's worth the effort.## Talking to YourselvesFACIA AGENT is stationed to Washington, he has to get used to being asked at every party, by every stranger he meets "What do you do? Personal qualities like kindness, good temper, or intelligence - even good looks and money - mean nothing in the nation's capital compared with where one stands in the pecking order. A CIA couple who maintain their cover are quickly selected out of any party they go to and end up in a corner talking to themselves.CIA wives, particularly, feel this instant social failure deeply and resent it. Until the women's movement, most women were raised to channel their ambitions toward the areas of party-giving and cooking. When married to a CIA agent, they felt they were denied these things because of their husbands work, and their marriages got into trouble.When CIA families go abroad they find their lives even more disrupted by status anxieties. The American official community, centered at the embassy, spends more time and effort than the Soviet AGD trying to discover who are the CIA families if a CIA officer is assigned to the embassy under the guise of being in the Foreign Service, the U.S. Information Service, or the Agency for International Development, the real employees of those organizations ferret the CIA agents out and then take pains to treat them as second-class citizens. The government employees who are "legitimate" embassy personnel don't speak to them at all. If they arrive at the embassy under deep cover, with no false identity, then not even the other CIA personnel speak to them.The game of uncovering the CIA people is made simple for the "legitimate" embassy personnel by a number of means The State Department won't let CIA agents call themselves as a cover, Foreign Service Officers they have to say they're "Foreign Service Reserve" or "Foreign Service Staff officers. Real FSSA, as they're called, are fairly low-level and real FSRs are never in political jobs, so that CIA's people - listed as. FSS or FSR "political officers" are obvious to one and all.In the same status-preserving spirit, the State Department used to publish an annual Biographical Register a who's who of the Foreign Service that included information on degrees, jets, and rourky pasty it warat ! 1973 and the murders of several CIA agents that Stato made the Register a classified document.## Envy, Jealousy, and DistrustHERE ARE several ways to deal with the problem of credentials One is to rise above the world of status anxiety. Another is to learn to laugh them off, even if they are painful Unfortunately, however, a more common way of handling the tradeoff between your cover and your status is to give up more of the first to get more ef the second In foreign capitals CIA agents often have been anxious for the matters and the diplomatic community to consider them