What types of trainees fail during the mental training exercises at the CIA farm?
One of the things that will get you booted from the agency's training program immediately -- and it's kind of ironic -- is lying. From the get-go, they tell you your job is to lie, cheat, and steal, and when you're caught, to deny everything. But those rules apply only once you're in the field and if you're caught by a foreign intelligence service or a foreign police force. While you're actually going through training, you should never lie to your instructors, particularly with regard to monetary issues. As trainees, we were given budgets and allowed to spend money, and if you were not forthright about how you were spending your money, you would immediately get booted from the program. The other thing that will end the career of a trainee very early is if you're not able to detect surveillance. That is, if you're not able to tell if somebody is following you when you're driving or walking around. A lot of the training is devoted to surveillance detection because if you are in a foreign country and you can't tell that you're being surveilled, you're going to blow not only your cover, but the cover of your foreign agent, and for the foreign agent, that could have very grave consequences. So that's the one aspect of the training that they're really not willing to negotiate on. You have to be able to detect surveillance.
