Lindsay Moran
Encyclopedia
Lindsay Moran is a former clandestine officer
for the Central Intelligence Agency
. She is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times
, The Washington Post
, and USA Today
. In 2005 she published her memoir Blowing My Cover, My Life As A Spy, in which she wrote about her experiences as a case officer from 1998 to 2003.
" and James Bond
series and she dreamed of growing up to join the CIA. When she was a child, she often conducted surveillance on the neighbors or communicated with friends through secret codes. A member of Montgomery Blair High School
's graduating class of 1987, she was voted "Most Intellectual," "Wittiest" and "Most Likely to Succeed" by her classmates. Moran used to be a staff writer and editor-in-chief of Silver Chips, where she wrote a series of articles on serious issues like teenage abortion and Vietnam
refugees as well as lighter topics like shopping mall Santa Claus
es. After high school, she attended Harvard College
majoring in English.
After graduating from Harvard, she won a Fulbright
scholarship and then became an English teacher in Bulgaria
.
In 1998, she was employed by the CIA and quit the job after five years.
as a Fulbright scholar, Moran was quickly recruited to work for the CIA. At first, she took great delight in the job since it fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming an officer:
She began her orientation in the Directorate of Operations
(DO), the clandestine branch of the Agency, after which she was sent to "The Farm
", the field academy for clandestine
officers at a base outside Williamsburg, Virginia
. Her year of training included paramilitary
exercises, mock ambushes, parachute
jumps, car crashes and driving power boats. It also included an exercise in which students at a pretend embassy reception sought to recruit "foreigners" to spy for the CIA. She completed the training course in December 1999, a year after the CIA's director George Tenet
declared war on al-Qaeda
.
After graduating from "The Farm", Moran was deployed to Skopje
, Republic of Macedonia
under the official cover of a foreign diplomat. As a case officer for the CIA, Moran's primary job was to spot, assess, develop, and recruit foreigners willing to sell secrets, as well as maintaining the agents who were already under her control. She spent three years there collecting information on Yugoslavia
n leaders involved in the Serbian genocide
in Kosovo
. However, her interest in spy work gradually diminished because of the pressure her career had put on her personal life, as well as her growing disillusionment with the CIA's bureaucracy, especially after the September 11, 2001 attacks
. On the Diane Rehm
talk radio show on January 17, 2005, Moran said that the final straw that convinced her to leave the agency was its slow reaction to the terrorist attacks. She was also disappointed with the agency itself since she felt that her career advancement as a case officer, in general, depended not so much on the quality of agents that she recruited, but rather on the quantity. The more recruits they had, the better. Disapproving of the Iraq War, she worked on the Iraq desk at headquarters during the Iraq invasion and resigned from the CIA after five years there.
Espionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
for the Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
. She is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, and USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
. In 2005 she published her memoir Blowing My Cover, My Life As A Spy, in which she wrote about her experiences as a case officer from 1998 to 2003.
Early years
Lindsay Moran had an interest in everything espionage related from her early years on. Her childhood fantasies were fueled by spy novels, especially "Harriet the SpyHarriet the Spy
Harriet the Spy is a children's novel by Louise Fitzhugh published in 1964. It won the Sequoyah Book Award and the New York Times Outstanding Book Award in 1964.-Plot summary:...
" and James Bond
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
series and she dreamed of growing up to join the CIA. When she was a child, she often conducted surveillance on the neighbors or communicated with friends through secret codes. A member of Montgomery Blair High School
Montgomery Blair High School
Montgomery Blair High School is a public high school located in unincorporated Silver Spring in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States...
's graduating class of 1987, she was voted "Most Intellectual," "Wittiest" and "Most Likely to Succeed" by her classmates. Moran used to be a staff writer and editor-in-chief of Silver Chips, where she wrote a series of articles on serious issues like teenage abortion and Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
refugees as well as lighter topics like shopping mall Santa Claus
Santa Claus
Santa Claus is a folklore figure in various cultures who distributes gifts to children, normally on Christmas Eve. Each name is a variation of Saint Nicholas, but refers to Santa Claus...
es. After high school, she attended Harvard College
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...
majoring in English.
After graduating from Harvard, she won a Fulbright
Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
scholarship and then became an English teacher in Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
.
In 1998, she was employed by the CIA and quit the job after five years.
Clandestine career
After graduating from Harvard and submitting an application that included her language skills and her time living in Eastern EuropeEastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
as a Fulbright scholar, Moran was quickly recruited to work for the CIA. At first, she took great delight in the job since it fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming an officer:
She began her orientation in the Directorate of Operations
National Clandestine Service
The National Clandestine Service is one of the four main components of the Central Intelligence Agency...
(DO), the clandestine branch of the Agency, after which she was sent to "The Farm
Camp Peary
Camp Peary is a military reservation in York County near Williamsburg, Virginia. Officially it is referred to as the Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity under the auspices of the Department of Defense, but it is widely believed to be the location of a covert CIA training facility known...
", the field academy for clandestine
Covert operation
A covert operation is a military, intelligence or law enforcement operation that is carried clandestinely and, often, outside of official channels. Covert operations aim to fulfill their mission objectives without any parties knowing who sponsored or carried out the operation...
officers at a base outside Williamsburg, Virginia
Williamsburg, Virginia
Williamsburg is an independent city located on the Virginia Peninsula in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area of Virginia, USA. As of the 2010 Census, the city had an estimated population of 14,068. It is bordered by James City County and York County, and is an independent city...
. Her year of training included paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
exercises, mock ambushes, parachute
Parachute
A parachute is a device used to slow the motion of an object through an atmosphere by creating drag, or in the case of ram-air parachutes, aerodynamic lift. Parachutes are usually made out of light, strong cloth, originally silk, now most commonly nylon...
jumps, car crashes and driving power boats. It also included an exercise in which students at a pretend embassy reception sought to recruit "foreigners" to spy for the CIA. She completed the training course in December 1999, a year after the CIA's director George Tenet
George Tenet
George John Tenet was the Director of Central Intelligence for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University....
declared war on al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...
.
After graduating from "The Farm", Moran was deployed to Skopje
Skopje
Skopje is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Macedonia with about a third of the total population. It is the country's political, cultural, economic, and academic centre...
, Republic of Macedonia
Republic of Macedonia
Macedonia , officially the Republic of Macedonia , is a country located in the central Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991...
under the official cover of a foreign diplomat. As a case officer for the CIA, Moran's primary job was to spot, assess, develop, and recruit foreigners willing to sell secrets, as well as maintaining the agents who were already under her control. She spent three years there collecting information on Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
n leaders involved in the Serbian genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
in Kosovo
Kosovo
Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...
. However, her interest in spy work gradually diminished because of the pressure her career had put on her personal life, as well as her growing disillusionment with the CIA's bureaucracy, especially after the September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
. On the Diane Rehm
Diane Rehm
Diane Rehm is an American public radio talk show host. Her program, The Diane Rehm Show, is distributed nationally and internationally by National Public Radio. It is produced at WAMU, which is licensed to American University in Washington, D.C....
talk radio show on January 17, 2005, Moran said that the final straw that convinced her to leave the agency was its slow reaction to the terrorist attacks. She was also disappointed with the agency itself since she felt that her career advancement as a case officer, in general, depended not so much on the quality of agents that she recruited, but rather on the quantity. The more recruits they had, the better. Disapproving of the Iraq War, she worked on the Iraq desk at headquarters during the Iraq invasion and resigned from the CIA after five years there.
Book published
In 2005, Moran published her memoir Blowing My Cover: My Life as a Spy detailing her time in the CIA. Some find it surprising that the CIA allowed Moran to speak freely about her top-secret work, especially due to the negative press this book generated for the Agency. Moran responded in an interview:See also
- Philip AgeePhilip AgeePhilip Burnett Franklin Agee was a Central Intelligence Agency case officer and writer, best known as author of the 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, detailing his experiences in the CIA. Agee joined the CIA in 1957, and over the following decade had postings in Washington, D.C., Ecuador,...
- Frank SneppFrank SneppFrank Warren Snepp is a journalist and former chief analyst of North Vietnamese strategy for the Central Intelligence Agency in Saigon during the Vietnam War. Five out of eight years in the CIA, he worked as interrogator, agent debriefer, and chief CIA strategy analyst in the US Embassy, Saigon...
- John StockwellJohn StockwellJohn R. Stockwell is a former CIA officer who became a critic of United States government policies after serving in the Agency for thirteen years serving seven tours of duty. After managing U.S...
- Ralph McGeheeRalph McGeheeRalph Walter McGehee is an American former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency . He worked for the CIA from 1952 to 1977 yet went on to be a critic of the agency.-Life and career:...
- The RecruitThe RecruitThe Recruit is a 2003 American spy thriller film directed by Roger Donaldson, starring Colin Farrell, Al Pacino and Bridget Moynahan. It was released on January 31, 2003 in North America by Touchstone Pictures....
- Spy (BBC)Spy (TV series)Spy is a British television programme originally made by Wall to Wall for BBC Three in 2004. It has been one of the most-exported UK television shows of the present decade; according to the Producers' Alliance for Cinema and Television , it had been sold to 129 countries by April 2005.The series...
- Valerie PlameValerie PlameValerie Elise Plame Wilson , known as Valerie Plame, Valerie E. Wilson, and Valerie Plame Wilson, is a former United States CIA Operations Officer and the author of a memoir detailing her career and the events leading up to her resignation from the CIA.-Early life :Valerie Elise Plame was born on...
External links
- Lindsay Moran, ex-agent at Paul Harris Show Audio.
- Review of: Blowing my Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy