Baseball in the Polymeropoulos family is our life. We spend the majority of our year engrossed in my 17-year-old son’s fledgling career, playing across the country in travel tournaments, and helping his high school baseball team with volunteer work. The travel is relentless, and sometimes it rains.
I also have a real job or had one, until my recent retirement. I worked for 26 years in national security and have spent some time in CIA. This professional journey spurred my thinking about the parallels between our baseball life and work at the Agency.
I’ve been on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq, so let us be clear, baseball is simply a sport, it is not war. There is no real sanction for failure on the diamond, unlike what the men and women from CIA face, along with our colleagues in the U.S. military. Yet the lessons one can take out of both a simple game and the basic espionage profession involving the recruitment of human agents, are actually quite profound. There is a mental game played in both fields, so much so that one defeats their adversary based not only on talent, but on work ethic and the ability to compartmentalize the repeated bouts of failure. Here are my favorite takeaways:
Hit .300……and scream “Lets Go!” Failing 7 out of 10 times are excellent odds for baseball, and even more so for recruitment operations. Simply put, hitting a baseball is very hard, and gaining a foreign adversary’s trust so that they betray their country is also a highly complex and difficult task. If you succeed, you make an all-star team, or receive an Exceptional Performance Award and maybe a note from the division chief, and in both cases your teammates and colleagues are mighty jealous. Hitting .300 will keep you on the top of both professions.
Never Miss the Hit and Run Sign...ever. When your coach gives you the hit and run sign, your only responsibility is to swing the bat. At CIA, the ability to execute a simple task (procuring a safe house smartly and securely) is the first in a series of events that leads to a successful operation. Such support roles are as important as the home run, or the takedown of an HVT, because neither happen if the ‘other’ guy or gal doesn’t set it up. So, the lesson here is simply “don’t miss the sign.”
Adversity Builds Character….but it is painful. In baseball, you learn to fail and suffer. If you can’t handle the failure, you can’t succeed in the game. In recruitment operations, or hunting HVTs in Iraq, the same applies. You will fail sometimes. You cannot give up, because no one else is standing on the ramparts guarding America. Such adversity builds solid ball players and intelligence officers, who are so mentally tough that they can brush off the negative and tackle the next challenge without any peripheral noise in their head. I once knew an officer who used to say to himself after something went terribly wrong “wow, that sucked, let me really think about how I feel, because I don’t want to feel this way again.” That officer was of course, me.
Pick up your teammates…they are you brothers and sisters in arms. If you move a runner over in a game, with a bunt or a sacrifice fly, your teammates are up on the steps of the dugout ready to give you a high-five. Your statistics don’t tell the real story, but you did your job and you gained enormous respect as someone who can be counted on. At CIA, the support officer who provided you a business class ticket for that miserable 14-hour flight to Baku also deserves some serious thanks and a pat on the back (not on the rear of course, like in baseball). Bottom line: selfish behavior will come back to bite you, so don’t do it. Always be a great teammate.
Trust the Process…..baseball and espionage are way older than you are. Baseball is a game of process. There is a rhythm to a season, from tryouts in the winter, the first days of practice, to opening day. For espionage operations, it is similar, as you make contact with a target, develop a friendship, and then slowly over time, gain their trust so they are telling you things that they should not. This could take a year of romance, but essentially for both, the process never changes. Trust it, don’t short circuit it, as it exists because it works. Ultimately, you can’t ever cheat the game.
No one Tells the Truth…..but the Truth Will Set you Free. In baseball, coaches lie to players, coaches lie to parents, players lie to players, and social media is the epitome’ of complete garbage where every catcher has a 1.9 pop time. But the players know the truth — who really is good both in the locker room and on the field, or who has a team first attitude and who is only in it for themselves. At CIA, the same applies - we lie for a living, especially to foreigners. And sometimes we lie to each other, blurring the lines of acceptable behavior. But the truth, your integrity, is what sets you apart, as you so often operate on your own, with no supervision other than your conscience or your God, or both. A clear mind, from practicing honesty, will allow you to sleep at night.
Crazy Parents, Crazy Coaches, Crazy Bosses….but not always. Baseball brings out the absolute worst in the other parents, who are 99 percent of the time rooting AGAINST your kid, as they see it as a zero-sum game. Some parents do cheer for others and some coaches really do care about the development of their players. At CIA, a generation of bosses practiced rule by tyranny, and often took advantage of their positions of power in an inappropriate manner. A newer generation of CIA managers practice inclusive styles of management, and find value in seeing their employees succeed. In baseball and the CIA, you know a good coach/boss when he/she comes around. Follow them if you can.
Learn a foreign language…and don’t hate on foreigners. A Cubs minor league catcher, speaking without a whiff of xenophobic or racist bent, once told my son "If you catch, you better learn Spanish, because the Dominican pitchers don’t know English, and they will talk behind your back about how much you suck if you don’t understand them.” So, my son, who indeed is a catcher, decided to learn Spanish. During a trip to the Dominican Republic last summer, he put this to good use, and friendships were formed. At CIA, those who learn Arabic, Farsi, Korean, Chinese, and Russian will find themselves in the thick of the fight, with a leg up on their colleagues who stopped at middle school French. It’s a big interconnected world out there.
Injuries are a part of the Game…..but they suck. Injuries can thwart development, come in waves, and are sometimes freakish in nature (my son just pulled a chest muscle from coughing). At CIA, we too are taken out of the fight for reasons beyond our control. Medical issues derailed my career, causing my retirement, after too many hard years in bad places. Tomorrow could always be your last game, or last agent meeting. Never take that for granted.
Appreciate the Ride…as you hang up the cleats eventually. I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours with my son driving rural roads and despite the uncertainty of whether he will receive a college baseball scholarship, we are to this day incredibly close. It is the ride that really matters. Similarly, my colleagues in the national security sector are lifelong brothers and sisters. Whether dodging rocket fire in Afghanistan or grieving over the graves of colleagues killed in the line of duty, our love of all things American, whether baseball, or doing our part to protect the country, are the things that will keep us together.
