Jayne Hayden assured me she hadn't been followed to the dark corner of the nondescript restaurant where we met for dinner, that the saltshaker didn't contain a bug (I checked the pepper), that she wouldn't have to kill me after telling me about her job and that no one knew she was in Chicago posing under covers for Playboy. She had told her supervisors she was vacationing in New York and would be unreachable. They had taught her how to lie and to do it well, so they believed her. Harder to fathom was that this diminutive beauty has been trained to fire a rocket launcher and an Uzi, persuade someone to betray their country, kick my ass if she had to, study my facial expressions to determine if I was being truthful and transform herself into any of several identities. But isn't that how it goes? The people you don't think work for the CIA always do.
Jayne joined the CIA in 1991 after graduating from college with degrees in political science and Chinese. The agency conducted a thorough background check, then sent her to Washington, D.C. for a year of training. "We would attend mock diplomatic parties where we role-played, pretending to approach potential informants," she recalls. "You could hardly get into the bathroom because there were so many trainees in there taking notes." Because recruiting spies involves blind introductions, subtle negotiations and lots of dead ends, Jayne compares it to dating. "You find someone interesting and approach him with a big smile, trying to catch his interest. Maybe you roll your shoulder a bit. I'm often seen by men as someone they'd like to get to know, and I definitely use that to my advantage. Once you have their interest, you try to charm them so you can peel back the layers like an onion. You're looking for inherent weakness, such as greed with motive. Maybe they want to send their kids to college in the U.S., or they have relatives who need expensive medical care. Most contacts ended up being little nothings, and the agency has become more picky about who it recruits since the fall of the USSR. Nowadays, anyone can get a Russian. The best informants are people motivated solely by a desire to make their country a better place to live. One of the worst ways to control someone would be by offering sexual favors--only the South Koreans have a reputation for doing that anymore." We can still dream, can't we?
Top Secret
