My Short Liaison with a CIA Guy

By Kay Ebeling

Men sniff out women like me.  I've always wondered if my encounter with Dave (I don't remember his real name) had somehow been arranged. 

Dave had an office at NASA in Houston in Building One, a ten story structure where the Administrator of the space center occupied the top floor. Dave was on six or seven. You got off the elevator and walked down bare walled hallways until you got to his office, where he sat at a government gray desk. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the top of the desk, maybe a pen holder and calendar, but the room was barren.  With windows looking out at a panoramic view.

From here Dave was an “accountant” I think he said. 

From here Dave left on trips to mysterious places and then came back and called me and we’d spend more time together.

The way I lived my life, that was a long term relationship. 

At one point Dave was going to be gone for several weeks, so he made special arrangements for us to call each other.  By then it was obvious Dave was doing something secret for a living.  While he was gone this time, we held Looooong conversations, sometimes I would call him back, I can't remember the phone arrangements, but it was an unusual way to make a phone call. 

A few weeks after Dave returned, I got my phone bill and all the calls I’d made to him were listed on the bill, with no charge, and the number called just said 000 000 0000

All zeroes.

By that time I was not dating Dave anymore as he’d identified me as a risk to his cover.  When he came home from one of his trips, I was in his air tight bedroom naked between his brand new high thread count sheets, and he was in the shower.  So just for the heck of it, I looked in his closet and on the floor was this heavy woolen military uniform with foreign writing on the sleeves and ribbons.

Dave emerged as I was staring at the uniform on the closet floor.  I asked him what it was.  He spit out the words, “It’s a Syrian officer’s uniform.”

I did not know for sure where Syria was at the time, but I knew it was in the Middle East, so I said, isn’t Syria too hot for a uniform like that.  The coat was thick and wool.  He looked down at me and said, It’s for going into the cold parts of Syria.

I cogitated on that, dressed, and went in to work, but it really bothered me.  So as I waited in the tour guide office to go to my next assignment, I casually mentioned the uniform on the closet floor to my boss.  She had served at an enlisted level in the Air Force, I think she even had some intelligence experience.  She ran the tour guide office with the tyranny of a boss who was a smart high school graduate, and I submitted to her authority. 

She noticed something was on my mind so I spilled it out, without even thinking.  I told her about the uniform on his closet floor and him saying it was a Syrian officer’s coat, and just what strange a person Dave was.

Within seconds, SECONDS, the phone rang in the tour guide office.  The boss answered, and handed it over to me. It was Dave calling from his office that was almost in my view there in the building across the walkway. His voice came stern and cold over the line.

“You weren’t able to keep that secret for five minutes. I can't trust you with anything.”

And he slammed down the phone. 

Any time I tried to call him after that, he did not answer, he would not return messages, he vacated me from his life in that moment, and I don't think I ever saw him on the LBJ Space Center campus again after that.

Although I did not last real long there after that myself.

But to this day I've wondered, how did he know.  Did he put some kind of listening device on my clothes, in my hair, was he just guessing? Is there a "cold part of Syria"? The whole experience remains a mystery to me to this day nearly forty years later.

*****

I was so lost by the time I met Dave.

I was working as a tour guide then at NASA Houston for minimum wage.  Three years earlier I had graduated from The University of Texas and been hired as a public affairs writer- editor with all kinds of responsible assignments and now I was still working at NASA, but for minimum wage as a tour guide. It was around 1980, I had started my climb down the career ladder but still had parking privileges in the lot that connected Building One with Building Two, so parking for the main administrative offices and our section, the Public Affairs department, which housed the news room, the room where they mailed out photos of the Moon to anyone who asked for them, and tours for VIPs and the general public. 

That parking lot is where I initially met Dave.  I was getting out of the Karmann Ghia I had driven from Austin.

I was this oblique bubble headed character in the public affairs department who had been a civil servant for three years, then blew it, but could not leave NASA, so stayed around as a contractor for minimum wage conducting tours. I was so lost, so lost. And as I got out of my car on the way to work that day, Dave emerged from his car very close by and struck up a conversation.  He was handsome tall and fit, and me being who I was, I soon was spending nights in his apartment in Clear Lake City.

A sterile place it was where he lived, a brand new apartment complex where you had everything you needed, a terrace, pool, workout center, all new appliances, all new paint air conditioned from the moment you got up to the moment you slept again, as that is how people survive in Houston, all the amenities at just a little higher price and quality than average.  Here David lived in a one bedroom apartment that was furnished by Rent A Center or some other anonymous provider.

I think often about Dave for a number of reasons, especially in 2016 when Syria has become the focal point of several battlegrounds across the Middle East.

“Some who had been fighting in various wars since the 1960s, told us this was their fiercest combat ever. According to both Isis media and to leaders of the coalition forces, there has been a notable increase in Isis suicide attacks in recent battles. In September 2014 the US president, Barack Obama, endorsed the declaration of his national intelligence director: “We underestimated Isil [Isis] and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army … It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/28/isis-hate-jihadis-recruits

Wonder what Dave was doing in Syria back in 1979-80 when I encountered him. Wish I had been more alert and trustworthy, I could have found out more. Instead that was my Little Annie Fanny period, the years when I conflated my sexuality with my brains to the point where I was at top level meetings in directorates at NASA with my nipples pointing out and didn't even realize it, thought the men wanted me around for my brains. Some of them did. . . 

*****

There is one other reason I remember Dave.  He had this enormous hard long … penis. In fact, my boss knew about him from the week I had to take off because his penis was so long I had damage, had to rest in bed to recover from one of our nights of sex. 
When I figured it out that he was working for the CIA or some organization like them, and I considered that with the outrageous size of his penis, I figured he must have been taking some kind of steroid for the job, and an enormous penis was a side effect.  That's why I wondered if our initial meeting had been a setup to begin with, because by that time people at NASA knew I was having a lot of sex, and troglodytes like farm boy engineers who never left Texas often mistake women who have lots of sex for women who like large penises.  Or maybe my cavern had become so cavernous that the farm boys engineers were discussing it by that time, so they'd lined me up with Captain Dave as I could accommodate him.

You can see I still have little self esteem even after all these celibate years.  I missed out on so much in my personal and career life because of my compulsion and the distraction it caused.  It did not matter how good a job I did, no one promotes a whore, especially not in 1970s and 80s.  I'm pretty sure if I had just not been so screwed up, I would have ended up with a top administrative job at NASA, as they originally hired me straight out of UT school of Communications, in a program where you were guaranteed promotions and entry into mid level management after just three years. 

I screwed that job up, literally.

On another occasion during that same time period, there was a guy actually recruiting me, or testing me, for a CIA job.  They told me after a few encounters that my sexual behavior would make me a security risk, it gave me a vulnerability that the enemy would be able to use against me and I could be easily compromised.

So like I said, my sexual behavior interfered with my ability to have any success in life. 

In today’s world, as soon as someone saw my behavior, they would recognize the cause of it and investigate where the sexual molestation must have happened in my youth, because I was so text book- so was my sister- of the sexual dysfunction that results from childhood sexual abuse.

The guy who got to us back in the 1950s was a popular handsome Catholic priest a celebrity in our small town outside Chicago.  Of course it screwed up my sister and me for life to have been sexualized when we were preschool aged by him.

A situation that has not yet been reconciled.

Posted by Kay Ebeling, Producer, City of Angels Blog

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