paper Wrote:
Kabul? what the fuck do you do for a living?
I work for an entity within the alphabet soup three letter US Agency system. Post 9/11 when the US intel system realized no one was talking to each other positions were established within NSA, CIA, and most importantly the DOD/DIA and State Dept with the sole purpose of serving as an intermediary between agencies. At one point it was thought this would only serve to facilitate cross talk within the system, however, we have now moved into a position where we are sharing intel with more countries, particularly non-second party countries, than ever before. The idea of empowering the countries to act based on our information.
That being said, we obviously aren't going to release everything, and there is massive amounts of policy for each country on what to share, who to share with, systems to use, rules for HUMINT vs. imagery for example, and within that there are of course the old positions of debriefers and handlers and LNOs etc. So you have this pinwheel for lack of a better word with each agency having it's own set of rules on what it shares, how they operate in country and out of country, and in the center of that you have the country ambassador who in all honesty doesn't understand all the ins and outs of the nonsense and who really doesn't care to, or need to, so you have people like me, who control the system and ensure that information flows as it should, fight the agencies on behalf of the host country and ambassador to get them to share their information IAW prescribed doctrine, and get the neccesary information to the ambassador and handlers for further tasking and results.
Probably way more than you cared to know, but I love my job, and could ramble on about it all day long.
That being said, I am excited about Kabul (though after getting out of the military I never thought I would be back in the AOR). Bottom line is like with any other job you have to pay your dues. I am still young for the system and have been down here in Tucson for a couple of years working a crap position (especially post-Ingrid and US hostage rescue), and though I love the South America AOR, those jobs in country are choice and I am not in a position to get moved to Brazil right now, I just don't have that kind of pull. So, I still get a field site job, in a high-vis country, and will hopefully be able to come back spend time in DC and then start pushing for Turkey or Azerbaijan or somewhere I really want to go.
Language is still an issue for me though. I've spent the past year working almost exclusively on Pashtu and still only tested at 2+, 2+, which was the minimum for this post. So, I need to spend a lot of time there (while hoping to retain proficiency in Spanich and Portugese) as well as pick up Erdu and Hindi over the next year, or else my options will still be pretty limited.
Damn, I'm going to stop now as you don't care to know that much. Sorry.
. Similar story, last time I was in country for a meeting down in Colombia we had a couple of Senators come through and had no idea they would be walking into the cell, so there's just two of us in the office and I'm blasting Khanate when they come walking in. As they walked off overheard one of them make the comment, "That sure wasn't very pleasant, was it?" I turned it up more, and mark that as a career highlight to this day.