154. Socialization File, Pt. 37 (Pascale, pt. 1)

This next text is:

Pascale, Richard. (1985). The paradox of "corporate culture": reconciling ourselves to socialization. California Management Review, 27(2), 26-41.

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"An MBA joining Bain and Company, the management consulting firm, is surprised by the incredible number of meetings he must attend - company meetings, recruiting meetings, office meetings, case team meetings, and near-mandatory participation on sports teams and attendance at social events. The objective is to build cohesiveness, participation, and close identification with the firm. There are a set of imperatives for working at Bain: "don't compete directly with peers," "make major conceptual contributions without being a prima donna," "demonstrate an ability to build on other's ideas." In aggregate, these features of Bain's culture are viewed as the underpinnings of success -- both internally and with clients." (p. 26)

This is presented as one of 4 case study examples of the kind of thing the author is going to discuss in the article, but I'm going to discuss it as a comparison point to my experience in Vienna.

Bain and Company (as presented here) is not an exact replica of what I found in Vienna, but there are elements of similarity nonetheless. The main thing I want to bring out here is the "near-mandatory participation on sports teams and attendance at social events." I didn't have any quibbles with attendance at organized social events like the monthly organization-wide women's meetings (including wives) nor the monthly all-staff meetings, as those seemed reasonable and certainly weren't excessive, but it rather, it was the sense that my whole free time and all my relations were within the realm of what the mission wanted (seemingly) absolute sway in, and anything less than that risked opening me up to suspicion and being labeled "independent" (as my father so aptly put it after I'd returned home for good).

The question seemed to be not "How much do I owe the mission?" but "How much freedom will the mission grant me?" These are two completely different mindsets, in which the first one postulates that if I do everything the mission requires of me, then the rest of my time and energies are at my discretion, and the second one is premised on the attitude that I will do only that which the mission has given me permission to do. The mission's demands in either case might be explicit or otherwise.

In the first approach, I might leave the office at 5:00, for example, and consider my time my own and do whatever I want thereafter until the next morning when I will return to the office again. But in the second situation I might return home and stay home (except to maybe go grocery shopping or the like) until I get some indication from the mission as to what I should do during this "free time." In the latter, situation I would be much more dependent on the mission and would be much more maleable as well. This enhanced maleability might even be the only reason for assuming this attitude, although it is highly probable (in my opinion) that security issues are the real issue (at least somewhere down the logical underpinnings of such a demand).

Now I don't know what you're take on this kind of thing is, but to me it ended out feeling rather cultish, manipulative and controlling. Even Bain and Company wouldn't have made such demands on its members. Maybe the CIA would have, though.

***

This next case study / example concerns certain aspects of the recruitment process of Procter and Gamble; the details aren't relevant to my experience with the Vienna mission, but the concluding statements are:

"Notwithstanding the intensity of this screening process, the recruiting team strives diligently to avoid overselling P&G, revealing both its plusses and minuses. P&G actually facilitates an applicant's de-selection, believing that no one knows better than the candidate whether the organization meshes with his or her own objectives and values." (p. 27)

On one hand this recruiting mind-set might have proved valuable in averting a catastrophe (my landing in an almost completely ill-fitted position within an ill-fitting organization), but on the other hand this would be an impossible tack for the mission to take. It should be clear by now what I mean by avoiding a catastrophe, but the second half of this sentence could bear some fleshing out. The issue, of course, is why couldn't it take such an approach to recruitment?

The reason is, in my opinion, that to reveal the "minusses" would be akin to organizational suicide. To reveal the minusses, the mission would have had to reveal these aspects of the mission to the front line recruiters in the 15 missions that make up the mission; after all, it was these missions that would be doing the initial recruiting and that had the face-to-face contact with applicants. A good chunk of these missions worked on standard mission settings (i.e., non-'closed countries') and might not be so versed in the unique mindset that had developed in East European missions. So in this need-to-know culture of East European missions, you'd have a new whole big (and disparate and widely dispersed) class of people who would be in a need-to-know position regarding issues probably viewed (more or less) as organizational secrets. The whole need-to-know concept, at least in this context, is based on security concerns, so this would have not only massive p.r. implications but would also compromise security, not just of the mission itself but also, potentially, each of the 15 composite missions, some of whom focused solely on Eastern European ministry.

In this manner, it becomes clear that facilitating an applicant's deselection by revealing "minuses" along with the "plusses," would have been nigh impossible for the Vienna mission. This becomes even more important if you consider that possibility that my intention to work in Eastern Europe could have been hampered by my father's work as a program manager in Boeing's Strategic Defense Initiative line of work. It may have been difficult to directly hinder my entrance into full-time East European ministry. It is more likely that the U.S. government might have clout with East European missions than with those on the hiring end of things, who may have not been East European ministry insiders. I'm not saying that my work was in fact affected by my father's work, just that if it was it might have been harder to have influence on the hiring end of things.

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I'm going to end here for this post to get on with my day. Thanks for sharing part of your day with me.

~ Meg

64. Espionage (CIA, KGB, FBI) File, Pt. 6 (Sarbin & Eoyang, pt. 1) (Was: Spy File, Part VI)

I know I'm asking a lot of you, the reader, by providing discussion of these texts before the events in my life to which they may or may not have pertained. So you have to either make a snap analysis of me (and perhaps think I'm really out in left field), or suspend judgment until you actually hear my story.

This is sort of a risk I have to take, because while I did this research afterward most of the events occurred, I knew what I was experiencing (although I didn't necessarily understand why or what the significance may have been for any particular experience). You, however, don't have that advantage of being there, so I think it would be harder for you to believe me without some potentially helpful background information. But I don't know you either, and it's quite possible that you have some knowledge or experience pertinent to one thing or another that I address here and may actually be able to offer some new insight that I don't have.

It's sort of a catch-22; I can't be sure 100% that approaching my story this way is the best way, but my inclination is that it is the best way, so I'll continue on unless I become convinced otherwise somewhere along the way. When I reveal my true identity I'll be able to provide more documentation too.

***

This next source is a book:

Citizen Espionage: Studies in Trust and Betrayal. (1993) Sarbin, Theodore R., Carney, Ralph M., & Eoyang, Carson (Eds.). Westport, CT: Praeger.

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Chapter 3: A History of Recent American Espionage, by Katherine L. Herbig

"Within the community of those holding security clearances, another more ironic source of suggestibility for committing espionage is provided routinely by well-meaning security staff: the briefing on hostile intelligence service methods. It would be irresponsible to clear people for access to sensitive information and then not to war them about the interest of foreign intelligence services in obtaining such information. Civilian and military defense employees and contractors all receive such briefings." (p. 48)

So this clearly would apply to my dad, as having had such briefings. So he must surely have known about risks of my interest in the Soviet Union. At least it's hard for me to imagine otherwise. But then maybe he thought I'd be safe and secure in the hands of missions that cooperate very nicely with the U.S. government, thank you. So there you have it, risk diverted. And everyone lives happily ever after. Of course this is speculation, but not completely unfounded.

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"...[M]otivatioin is among the most individual and unpredictable of human qualities, and the motivations for espionage are similarly idiosyncratic." (p. 48-49).

If I was a subject of a sex lure, they tried 3 times and it was only on the 3rd try that they got it right. But there are still a lot of things that aren't completely clear there either, including what exactly the motive was. Several important contextual things happened in those 3-4 years though that may have disrupted initial plans, especially if it was to use me to get to my father.

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"The spy puts himself, his need for money, thrills, or some other satisfaction, above the well-being of his fellow citizens and the nations." (p. 55)

If there were a possibility I would be a spy, I'm not sure which of these they'd use. At this point, I'm not very emotionally attached to my country, so I wouldn't care too much about that though. Also, I even thought there was too much of the spy thriller type work in East European missions and eventually wanted more long-term residential (vs. traveling in and out) ministry. I wasn't drawn to that part of the world because of it being Communist and thus an "exciting" place to work, so that kind of thrill-seeking wouldn't have been a call for me. I'm sure if my dad had remained in his job they would have probably found some way or another to snag me though. At least, that's how I see things.

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Okay, here's a big one - I'll test you afterward to see if you caught it:

"The second trend that increased vulnerabilities to espionage by overloading the security system was the growth of highly classified 'black' research programs with severely restricted access policies during the 1980s. Details about these programs are by their nature closely held and, therefore, not described in the press. Nevertheless, it was apparent that programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative and others generated a new category of secrets under the rubric of 'Special Access Programs' within the industrial contractor community." (p. 63)

Are you with me? Do I need to spell it out? My dad was a program manager in the "industrial contractor community" in SDI; he oversaw engineers and scientists as they wrote proposals for defense contracts and then carried them out.

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"Nations can temporarily lose the voluntary loyalty of their citizens if their leaders disillusion them or betray them..." (p. 65)

I'm taking this a bit out of context here, but it's true that my loyalty to the US (although I also wasn't in a position requiring special loyalty either) has weakened with my interpretation of events in my life pointing to me not having constitutional freedoms to live my life as I choose... all because of my dad. Maybe that's an overstatement, but how I've felt for a long, long time now. For me to be vulnerable to being open to working with the Soviets, however, I think they would have had to prove themselves to be better than the US. I would have been pretty slow to believe that that was the case, given all that I already knew about them prior to me even going to Vienna. I'd researched how they treated believers, heck, I even read the Gulag Archipelago (complete version) cover to cover. They would have had a pretty hard time convincing me they were better than the US, no matter how badly I thought of the US.

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Here's an interesting tidbit that's actually a footnote to this chapter:

"Security clearance investigations are not centralized; rather, responsibility for them resides with at least seven different agencies; the Defense Investigative Service does them for the Department of Defense, which has the most clearances; Office of Personnel Management does them for civilian agencies, largely the Department of Energy with its nuclear responsibilities; the Federal Bureau of Investigation does them for high-level political appointees, White House staff, and some employees of federal courts and congressional committees; and the CIA, NSA, State Department, Secret Service, and some other agencies do their own investigations for their employees...." (p. 66-67)

I was a contracting librarian for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Central Library a few years ago and they did a, what seemed to me rather thorough, background check on me. I had to have references for every place I'd lived, every job I'd had, etc. back 5 years. When you've moved around as much as I have that can be pretty daunting, especially since it's hard to get to know people very well under such circumstances (moving around so much). Anyway, I passed and they let me in. And I can assure you I never did anything to abuse that privilege. Well, I mean, I was tempted to yell out "yoo-hoo all you idioti (that's the Russian plural for 'idiots') down there in New Orleans, guess what? We have lots of research dating back 5 or 10 years that shows that you've been eroding the grasslands which makes you more vulnerable to hurricanes!!"* But I didn't do that, I quietly fumed and directed my curses at the TV instead. I trust that didn't qualify as a betrayal of the national trust bestowed on my in that venerable position of contracting cataloging librarian.

~ Meg

*Actually it wasn't just the people in New Orleans, but others involved in various ways in the erosion.