February 19, 2021

I’d already done my inaugural tour in the Washington Field Office and now had an opportunity to bid on my second assignment.

What I really wanted to do was serve on my organization’s version of our SWAT team, but I’d just got married and the job would require me to be away from home for extended periods of time.

One of my former friends did end up serving in that position in his late 40s and he told me he was gone 275 days out of 365.

I knew that if I did that my marriage would be quite short lived. (His lasted 26 years, but such living took a toll on his marriage, and divorce was the eventual result.)

So I looked at the other assignments and chose one that seemed pretty sexy involving some ostensible Spy vs. Spy matters.

As it turned out, most of my time was spent giving briefings to employees going to particular countries and doing data entry for contacts these employees had with foreign nationals from particular countries.

When I first showed up in this office, I noted my predecessor had taken stacks of these forms and shoved them into the back of his safe. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, and since the American taxpayers were paying me so well, I decided I was obligated to do the grunt work and manually file them.

During one meeting with a colleague named Mike L., he snootily informed everyone there that he was too busy and too important to do such lowly work.

I took great offense at that and called him out on the spot.

But, in theory, he was right. I was way overpaid to be doing that type of thing, but they had not yet set up the system to automatically enter the forms through a web based program.

Fast forward a few months and I went by Mike L.’s cube to ask him what he was up to? He told me he was headed out of country for two weeks to provide security briefings to the personnel in his assigned region. I said, “Whoa. That’s awesome. And they signed off on that?” He said, “Yep.”

After that I began hatching my own plot.

There was nothing going on in the office, we had the budget for it, and I had a great boss.

All I needed to do was put together a proposal and he’d sign off on it.

A few short months after I’d talked to Mike L., I’d put together a briefing tour of various facilities in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.

I even brought my colleague Mike O. along with me as backup.

Our first stop was Tangier, Morocco to do some briefings at a highly secure facility a couple miles away from the city center or Maghreb.

Tangier is directly across from the Straits of Gibraltar and has been a highly strategic location to empires for thousands of years. It’s also where heroin junkie beatnik author William Burroughs lived for a while and the locale upon which he based “Naked Lunch” (One of Anthony Bourdain’s favorite books).

In the book, Burroughs called Tangier “Interzone” as it was the transition point between Islam and Western Europe.

We got in late at night after a trans-Atlantic flight and I didn’t have much of a chance to see the city coming in, but I woke up the next morning to the sounds of a busy port city on the Mediterranean. The vendors were hawking, the seagulls were squawking, and the smell of charred meat and incense filled the air.

The mattress in my ostensibly Five Star accommodation was shopworn and spongy and I rolled out of it onto the balcony to behold the sight that lay in front of me.

If I was on a taxpayer funded boondoggle, I was sure going to enjoy it as much as I possibly could. And I had Mike L. to thank for it.

Sadly, Mike L. died shortly thereafter. Cancer.

I thought he was a bit of a stuffy and overly serious person, but to the end of my days I will thank him for planting the idea of that trip in my head.