How long has this been here? Will it give me food poisoning? Do I care?
I stared at the desiccated lump of cheese and meat lodged in the corner of a Pyrex dish. The hour was 3 a.m.; the place was the CIA Counterterrorism Center; and the date was mid-September, 2001, a few days after the 9/11 attacks. I’d been called in to the night shift on short notice and no sleep. I had three hours to go and a stack of situation reports to review. I was hungry and flagging. The vending machines were empty. The agency cafeteria was closed. The feast donated by spouses and laid out by the coffee mess was gone except for this Salmonella casserole. I emptied crumbs from several potato chip bags into my palm and attacked my situation reports.
When I wrote Intelligence, I used food as a symbol of an unhealthy, unhappy time. My protagonist, Maddie James, worked long hours in a cube farm full of Type A personalities. It was a few years after 9/11, but lives remained on the line, and management still viewed self-care as unpatriotic. Maddie often made a meal out of a mug of strong coffee and whatever salty or sugary junk she could scrounge. She went for the short-term boost in mood and energy. She would think about the long-term consequences later.
Maddie belonged to the first generation of women to enter the intelligence field in large numbers. When they arrived in the early 1980s, they found the work compelling and the atmosphere often toxic. Making their voices heard in a world built by and for men was the hardest task of all. Sometimes Maddie slapped her palm down on the conference table when men talked over her. That’s how she got her reputation for being difficult to deal with. That’s why she kept a stock of gummy bears in her desk drawer. She bit their little heads off to keep from biting larger heads off.
Maddie is an amalgam of the women I met when I transferred to a job in the CIA Counterterrorism Center in 2000. Most of them had already been there for years. They had done painstaking and pioneering work on the al-Qaida organization. They persisted when their warnings were ignored, and then they took an outsize share of the blame after 9/11. They are some of the best people I have known in my life. I raise a mug of strong, hot coffee in their honor.
Thanks for stopping by to share your food for thought, Susan!
