https://www.wired.com/story/mastermind-cia-disguise/
Hey there, welcome. Please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. It’s just $9.95 a month or even better, $99 a year. PS: Follow us also on Twitter @talk_spy. “I Was Molly Hale”—The CIA Man Behind the MaskFormer CIA public affairs officer Jay Krasnow says fielding the public’s questions told him a lot about America
During the last two years I was a supervisor at CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, or OPA. The job involved many typical management functions—including reviewing employees’ work, writing performance appraisals and planning work schedules. Yet one of my most fascinating duties was overseeing the agency’s responses to queries from the general public. By managing the huge volume of questions that CIA receives from both its fans and foes, I gained insight into American culture.
At first, it can seem overwhelming to be tasked with responding to questions submitted “Ask Molly Hale” on the agency’s home page. The site receives a lot of questions, and the team of public affairs officers that read them made a good faith effort to provide responses to well-crafted questions. (Not so the inevitable trash talkers.) These thoughtful queries inform a team of writers at OPA in drafting blog posts that Molly Hale answers on the CIA.gov website. Those blog posts, in turn, are cross-posted on CIA’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. Journalists watch CIA’s social media accounts closely—especially Twitter—and sometimes Molly Hale’s blog posts make it into media reporting. For example, Molly Hale’s blog post on the agency’s take on an applicant’s prior use of illegal drugs generated stories in multiple media outlets. It was a lot of work, but once I got a handle on the job, I became intrigued about the people who wrote to us, no matter the topic. I spent a lot of time quashing misperceptions about the CIA’s mission, as well as the best ways to interact with the agency. As the voice of Molly Hale I learned about people’s attitudes toward the CIA and their expectations of the agency. A lot of what I read in these messages surprised me. After two years overseeing Molly (and at times being Molly), I ended up with a list of 13 things I had learned.
Just like any other employer, CIA has a standard way to apply for jobs at the agency. While many federal agencies’ hiring processes are tethered to the USAJOBS website, anyone who wants a job at CIA needs to submit their application through CIA.gov, the agency’s public website. Despite the website’s clear instructions, however, many people emailed us résumés anyway, along with tales about why the agency should hire them through a back channel—a hiring process that doesn’t exist for career wannabees.
Here’s how those go. (Of course I can’t reveal the exact contents of any.) “Good Afternoon CIA - As a Magna Cum Laude graduate of the World’s Top College, please schedule me to meet with Bill Burns so that I can be placed in an analyst job before I go on summer vacation next month. —Joy” My response: “Good Afternoon, Joy. Please visit CIA’s website, CIA.gov, to review our current job openings. If you see any positions that interest you, and that you believe you are qualified for, feel free to submit an application. – Best Regards, Molly” 2. People don’t respect deadlines. CIA job announcements have deadlines for applying that are clearly posted on its site. Yet prospective applicants frequently asked us to reopen the job announcements that they were “perfect for,” because they said they didn’t have enough time to submit their credentials before the deadline. As a rule, the agency doesn’t make exceptions. Yet we actually got inquiries like this (again, not verbatim):
My response: “Good Afternoon Clyde, Thank you for contacting CIA. If you are interested in a position, but do not see any openings that meet your qualifications, please feel free to check CIA.gov, our public website, for openings again soon. —Best Regards, Molly” 3. People won’t take “no” for an answer. I was surprised to learn how persistent some of the people who wrote Molly were, even when we told them that we weren’t able to accommodate their requests. It wasn’t uncommon for some people to contact us again and again with the same questions. Many of these repeat offenders asked questions about employment. Some people wanted us to bend our hiring requirements just for them. After a while, they became familiar names. Typical: “Good Afternoon, I wrote you last week because my application was rejected. Please consider this my appeal.—Fred” My Response: “Good Afternoon Fred, I’m sorry that your application here wasn’t successful. If you see another position that interests you, and that you believe you are qualified for, feel free to submit an application. – Regards, Molly” 4. People think the CIA offers public tours. A number of federal agencies around Washington offer tours to the public—or at least they did before the pandemic. The FBI is no exception. While CIA has an extensive museum at its Langley headquarters, the building is not open to the public. Nevertheless, CIA gets its fair share of requests from people who plan to be in town, and want to schedule tours of its museum. It’s a shame that they can’t: The headquarters building is home to a number of historical gems, including one of Nazi Germany’s Enigma cipher machines. But many people want to see a lot more than that; they want a guided tour of the whole place. We’ve actually gotten notes like this one: “Hey, Dixon here, and I’m driving to Washington next week from Jonesboro, Arkansas. Wanted to make sure I got in a tour of CIA while I visited my in-laws down there. Please put me down for three to take a tour next Wednesday at 12 p.m. Also, I heard great things about the Director’s Dining Room. It would be great to do a complimentary lunch there and to meet Bill Burns himself. —Dixon” Me: “Good Afternoon, Dixon. CIA is not open to the public. I invite you to take a virtual tour of CIA on our public website, CIA.gov. – Regards, Molly” 5. People don’t know the difference between the FBI and CIA. Being part of the team behind the Molly Hale cartoon showed me just how little many Americans actually know about CIA’s roles and responsibilities in gathering intelligence to protect the United States from threats. For example, people who contacted us frequently confused the CIA with the FBI. CIA’s mission is collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence for U.S. policymakers, including the President. The FBI is primarily a domestic law enforcement agency (although it does conduct some operations abroad, sometimes in partnership with the CIA, particularly in the counterterrorism realm). The FBI employs agents (or more properly, Special Agents). The CIA has “officers” (whose foreign sources are called agents), and analysts. You’d think people who want to work for us would have the taxonomy down, yet we frequently got queries from prospective applicants about working as “CIA agents” in law enforcement. Even some school administrators asked us to send them “CIA agents” to speak at events for students seeking careers in law enforcement. And then there were those police officers who volunteered to conduct law enforcement demonstrations at CIA, an area the agency has no responsibility for.
6. People don’t know that CIA welcomes applications from people with disabilities. While various federal laws protect Americans with disabilities from discrimination, CIA actively encourages people with disabilities to apply to the agency as part of its Diversity and Inclusion Strategy. That includes ‘neurodiverse’ applicants. This strategy says that “neurological differences are to be recognized and respected as any other human variation,” and can include people labeled with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autistic spectrum, Tourette syndrome and other conditions. There’s an “Ability Talent Broker” at CIA.gov who helps provide accommodations for applicants with disabilities during the hiring process. The spy agency’s diversity and inclusion efforts have not gone unnoticed. Some have mocked it. But earlier this year, CIA was recognized by EOP, a publisher of diversity recruitment publications, for being a “Top 20 Government Employer” for equal opportunity. And no less than CIA Director Burns has said recruiting a diverse workforce is important to the CIA’s mission.
7. Kids love the idea of working at the CIA. I was delighted to learn that the Office of Public Affairs regularly receives emails from children as young as seven who don’t want to wait until they’re 18—the minimum age required—to begin their agency careers. One went something like this:
I got a laugh out of some who touted an ability to speak gibberish as a valuable job skill. I found many of these youngsters’ inquiries endearing, and our team endeavored to write personalized responses to them. One of our officers specialized in answering such letters in a particularly engaging way. Occasionally, a kid’s email to “Molly Hale” was so special that it generated a personal, signed letter from no less than the CIA director. 8. People are enthralled with The World Factbook. While the CIA specializes in secret intelligence, it has also published The World Factbook for the public since 1981. Now available online ,The World Factbook provides basic intelligence on the history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, communications, transportation, military, terrorism and transnational issues for 266 countries. I was touched by the steady stream of emails that we received from teachers, parents, researchers and others who wrote us for no reason other than to let us know how much they love it, often with several exclamation points at the end of their sentences. “I love, love, love The World Factbook!!!!!!” went a common letter. “Where can I get a printed copy that I can share with the students that I teach in my elementary school in St. Louis? —Eddy” Me: “Good Afternoon Eddy, Thank you for your kind comments about The World Factbook. While we discontinued the printed edition of The World Factbook in 2008, all the relevant data is captured in the online version of this publication, which may be found at CIA.gov. – Best Regards, Molly” 9. The media loves to publish stories about the CIA. Reporters on the intelligence beat in Washington know how to reach OPA’s spokespeople and deal with them regularly. These journalists typically asked thoughtful questions about the agency’s activities. And to be sure, sometimes they were calling for comment on a story critical of the agency. I left engagement with reporters to the media relations team. But media queries frequently came in via “Molly Hale,” and I often was the first person to read them. While most of the questions were routine (i.e., requests for interviews with senior CIA officials), we sometimes got unusual queries that asked whether the CIA was involved with all sorts of domestic governance areas, such as community policing and federal responses to racist violence.
Two seminal congressional reports stemmed from the Church Committee and the Pike Committee, which were named for Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, and Democratic Congressman Otis Pike of New York. Both committees put CIA and its leadership through the wringer. Their 1976 reports led to a firestorm of criticism of CIA. According to the agency’s own account, now available as a paperback on Amazon, the Church Committee focused on CIA’s involvement in Cold War covert action, including assassinations, while the Pike Committee examined CIA’s analytic failures. As a result, the Senate and House created intelligence oversight committees, and President Gerald R. Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. The agency itself said it would benefit from boosting its resources devoted to analysis and other areas of its mission.
If you’re interested in digging further into that era, a good start for my money can be found in The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, by John Ranelagh. Published in 1986, it’s a bit dated, but it covers the meaty parts of CIA’s history that the Church and Pike committees investigated. Alas, too many people are fixated on that long-ago past. I frequently got messages from the public that started off something like, “Please direct me to the website where I can learn about CIA’s involvement in …” But even for the most off-the-wall queries, we did our best to assist the people emailing us. I frequently found myself directing members of the public to CIA.gov and the National Archives—which holds declassified CIA documents—or encouraging them to file a Freedom of Information Act request for anything they couldn’t find through other means. Then there’s stuff like this: Question for CIA: “I heard that CIA had a secret pact with aliens. Is it true? – Zach” My response: “Good Morning Zach, All publicly available information about CIA is on CIA.gov, our public website. If you are unable to find the information you are seeking, you may file a Freedom of Information Act via CIA.gov.” 10. People are impatient for CIA responses. While members of my team could respond to some queries immediately, others required considerable internal coordination before we could reply. The reason for these delays was that frequently CIA attorneys, protocol experts and security officers—to name a few—had to weigh in with the ground truth before public affairs officers responded to the people making the queries. Most people waited patiently for our responses, though some people would follow up on their queries less than 24 hours after their original messages. “Hi, I sent you a question about a job posted on your website this morning. Did you get it? I haven’t gotten a response.—Lisa” My typical response: “Good Morning Lisa, I am in receipt of your message from this morning. I will respond shortly. —Best Regards, Molly” 11. People don’t expect CIA to respond.
While responding to public queries is hard work—and sometimes involves coordinating with multiple offices across the agency—OPA makes a good-faith effort to acknowledge well-crafted queries. I have a hunch that the same people who expected us to ignore their emails were pleasantly surprised when they received information-rich responses to their queries. Here’s a hypothetical example of someone writing us who doesn’t expect a response (and my hypothetical response):
I should mention that, depending on the amount of messages we received on a given day and other office priorities, requestors often got responses within an hour—and sometimes less. 12. People don’t know that only American citizens can join CIA. The CIA.gov website clearly states that you must be a U.S. citizen to be an employee of the agency. Yet, many foreign nationals—including Legal Permanent Residents—emailed us to inquire about joining the agency as analysts, operations officers and other roles. Frankly, the enthusiasm that some foreign nationals showed in their interest in joining CIA as full-time employees caught me off guard. They went something like this: Question for CIA: “Hello Molly, I am a citizen of Lower Slobovia who lives in Lower Manhattan, and I’d love to work for you. What can you tell me?—Fritz My response: “Good Afternoon, Fritz. You must be a U.S. citizen to work here.—Best Regards, Molly” 13. People love the new CIA.gov website In January 2021, the agency gave its public website its first makeover in over a decade. The new CIA.gov website devotes a great deal of attention to applicant outreach, career opportunities and a streamlined application process. Some in the Twitterverse inevitably mocked it. But after the website reboot, OPA was overwhelmed with emails from the public, many of whom said how much they loved it. Again, I can’t quote from any real messages, but a number went like this: “Your new website is amaaaaaaazing!!!!!. I’d love to help make it even better. (I’ve been building websites for 15+ years. —Jimmy” Me: “Good Morning Jimmy, Thank you for your kind comments about CIA’s website. For employment opportunities, please visit our website, CIA.gov. If you see any jobs that interest you, and you believe that you are qualified for them, feel free to submit an application. – Best Regards, Molly” A Few Final Words About ‘Molly Hale’ Being ‘Molly Hale’ wasn’t all fun, or particularly glamorous. Depending on the hot topic of the day, responding to public queries was sometimes an all-consuming job for both myself and members of my team. Yet I found it an honor to represent CIA to people who wanted to know more about it. And in doing so, I interacted with a broad swath of the public that had a wide spectrum of queries and opinions about the agency, though most of them were positive. Some people wanted our help doing research on CIA and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency’s World War II predecessor. Other times, people had questions about relatives who they believed once worked at CIA. Whatever the questions, we did our best to give the most appropriate and complete responses to the queries—provided that the individuals wrote questions that were clear, grounded and showed genuine interest in obtaining information about us. For me, because acting on queries required that I collaborate with officers who worked across the CIA enterprise, managing the Molly Hale portal was a delightfully surprising networking bonanza. But most of all, being ‘Molly Hale’ opened me up to a world of CIA’s not-so-secret admirers, not to mention the fans of Molly Hale herself. That far outweighed the laborious and even bad stuff. That’s something I’ll never forget. And neither will anyone else who’s now picked up her mantle.
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