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Evan McGarvey: "Le Carre had warened me." (Photo: LinkedIn)
Evan McGarvey was a 21-year-old undergrad at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2006 when the Central Intelligence Agency came knocking.
All he really knew about the spy trade is what he'd read in John le Carré novels like "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold." McGarvey had submitted his résumé to a general drop box weeks before a campus job fair at the student union. The CIA mysteriously reached out, perhaps because he had taken Persian classes. Spy agencies are often partial to people with foreign language skills.
Now the freelance writer, who graduated from U-M in 2007 and has a master's of education from Harvard, tells his CIA tale in Slate in honor of le Carré, who died Saturday at 89. McGarvey credits the prolific novelest and ex-British intelligence officer as the reason he rejected the CIA.
He writes:
When I saw the email from the CIA in my inbox a few days before the fair, it looked like a form note. I was an English major who worked at the college newspaper. I was applying anywhere that would entertain me. I thought everyone who left a résumé got the note from the CIA.
Maybe they did. But when I went to the CIA table and introduced myself, the man with the Ned Flanders mustache recognized my name and said he had seen my résumé.
He then said to me: “I think you should meet with my colleague from clandestine. Are you free this afternoon?”
This photo accompanies a CIA recruiting pitch on Instagram.
McGarvey met him that autumn afternoon 14 years ago.
The one-on-one meeting with “clandestine” later that day in Ann Arbor took place in a small room in a part of the union building I had never seen. This CIA agent was older than the first, with a silver bowl cut and full beard. He had a better suit but with a cheap tie with the Detroit Tigers logo patterned across it. I wondered if he had one for every team.
At the end of the conversation, the guy gave him his card and told him if he was interested to arrange to come down to Langley, Va., the CIA headquarters, and he'd introduce him to collleagues.
McGarvey never followed through, and explains:
When le Carré died this weekend, I reminded myself that he probably saved my life back then. I never went to Langley for the interview there, because I thought if I did, I might join the CIA, and the work and the life would lead me to a world that le Carré had warned me about. I would be alone in a skeletal apartment in Tirana convincing someone I was worth trusting when I was comprehensively not. I would be alone in Oslo trying to flip a lonesome student in a creative writing class I taught.
