*What an interesting interview. I'll have to follow that blog.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/
(...)
I developed a love of reporting as years went by. My first apprenticeship, at a weekly over in Virginia, involved covering county sewer permit hearings — where I learned that sewer permits are the rosetta stone of future development. It was great, even if I was terribly bored by the suburbs. As a journalist, you're endlessly discovering keys to the way the world works.
But I was also really lucky to have intelligence training and to have learned to think as a spook. The training involved running around Baltimore planting things under benches, hiding them in books in the library, snapping miniature photos of documents with A Minox camera, writing in invisible ink…coming ashore from a submarine in the Long Island Sound, making my way to a motel "behind enemy lines" and contacting a "stay-behind agent," played by some Army Intelligence guy, who you then "teach" everything you've learned—dead drops, brush passes, the whole deal. All the while the "secret police" were trying to find me. You know from the previous class that you're eventually going to be caught and have to demonstrate your counter-interrogation techniques… It was really fun, actually, and I ended up using a lot of those tricks in Vietnam. Spying is a boy's life.
Q: Do you have any favorite conspiracy theories, and do you subscribe to any yourself?
A: Well, conspiracies exist, hello. It's part of life, isn't it? If three of your friends decide to go to a bar and leave you out of it, that's a conspiracy. The CIA and other intelligence agencies, by definition, conspire to do things in secret. Their job is to get other people to commit treason by working for them...
