Summer Job with the CIA - Or Not? Part II of II

Part I of this article revealed how Multinational Business Guides, aka Guides to Multinational Business, hired me for my looks; and that was no compliment. Multinational Business Guides' interest in my looks stemmed not from attractiveness but from my looking enough like everyone else in the office that without much effort, we could have passed for one another. Or, so I suspected. After all, the office manager expressed interest in hiring me when my friend working there told her how people confused us with one another. She arranged for me to be hired to type, despite my inadequate typing skills. And once I was on the job, she discouraged me from typing and pointedly told me to play a game instead. A game that involved learning the identity of foreign government officials, top to bottom, power player countries to the most obscure countries in the world. She insisted that this was all in fun, but let someone suggest a different game for fun, and she quickly redirected us back to this game. Though we questioned her with increasing curiosity about the nature of the work, she remained unflappable and pleasantly uninformative. Was she the ideal CIA agent? Or just someone who could have been?

The boss of this operation was a man we barely saw. He was not the approachable sort, in any case. Not the guy you would run up to and blurt out, "Hey, is this the CIA, or what?" He was elusive. We never knew where he was or what he was doing except on the rare occasions he stepped into our small quarters to erupt. He never erupted at us; we were all but irrelevant to this operation.

When the phone rang at 4 Brattle St. in Cambridge, only the office manager was authorized to answer. Christine and I and the other two typists collectively spoke 5 foreign languages: French, Portuguese, Spanish, German and Russian. Whatever language these phone calls were conducted in was none of those. It sounded sing-songy; perhaps it was a Scandinavian language.