History prof takes break from CIA to teach at OU
By Lisa Wakeland, Staff Writer
March 9, 2007 | 7:23 p.m.
Some students know very little about the professors teaching their courses at Ohio University. Students in History of Espionage were probably surprised to learn that their professor, David Black, is a member of the CIA.
"I hope this will not come as a terrible shock to people, but the CIA does not have some underground bunker here in Athens or in Western Appalachia, to my knowledge," he said jokingly.
Black is in Athens for two years with the Officer-in-Residence (OIR) program, teaching various courses on espionage, including history and espionage fiction. The OIR program has been around for more than 20 years, encouraging the study and knowledge of the intelligence profession. An important part of the program is openness, which is why Black was required to inform his students of his job.
After finishing graduate study at Princeton University and a three-year active duty term in the Navy, Black joined the CIA in 1979. Originally, he wanted to be an English literature professor, but a tight job market in the humanities fields and experience in the navy steered him toward the agency.
It began as a crazy impulse, but Black made it through the intense selection process, which included multiple interviews, medical exams, background checks and intelligence tests. Then it was on to training, which he says is nothing like it is in the movie "The Recruit," starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell.
"The work of intelligence collection is not a muscle-bound trade," Black said. "You have to be healthy and in generally good physical condition because it does involve working a lot of long hours."
Most of his time in the agency was spent in Central and Eastern Europe, and his favorite countries were Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Hungary. Black was primarily involved in intelligence collection, and he emphasized the importance of learning about the countries he worked in and how societies work on a day-to-day basis. He likened his work to that of diplomatic personnel in the state department and foreign correspondence.
"What I loved about the work is that wherever you were working became your second homeland," he said. "Without that tactile awareness, you often miss the boat when you are trying to understand that country's problems."
The European countries where Black worked became a second homeland to his four children. All of them were born in Europe and had most of their pre-college education there. His youngest son is the only one to finish high school in the United States.
When tackling the misconceptions about the CIA, Black stressed that the agency has two components: collection and analysis. "The core of the CIA has always been an operations directorate – collection activities around the world," he said. "Its products are based on information provided by CIA, NSA, military services, FBI – all the other parts of the intelligence community."
And, Black said, just being part of the intelligence community is not enough to enjoy complete access to classified information. A security clearance is required, and information is given on a need-to-know basis. Black estimates he has access to about one percent of the total information in the U.S. intelligence community; most of it was related to the work he was doing, which kept him busy enough.
"I never felt that I was in the dark," he said. "You don't even want to know any more than you need to know because you don't have time to process it or make any sense out of it."
Although he is a self-described pathological bibliophile with hundreds of books filling the shelves in his office, Black noted that most spy fantasies are older than real spy services. He said he enjoys spy fiction, but his background prevents him from taking the plots and events as absolute truth.
There are two categories of spy fiction, he said. One is the serious realistic version, which is generally written by people who have been in the business or have close connections with it. The other category is escapist, which is where James Bond novels and movies fall.
Black said James Bond is a macho portrayal of a spy. He is "an upscale version of the gun-toting private eye, which is totally preposterous because the job is to obtain information," he said. "It is not to shoot guns at people or to blow up things or anything like that. The purpose is to avoid that."
The intelligence business is important because the collected information influences policy that affects the majority of the world. It tries to tell us about our world and how humans behave in unusual circumstances, Black said.
After leaving the OIR program, Black might retire, or he might work on another project for the agency if it interests him. He’s already been around seven years longer than he anticipated, but he enjoys it. "Although the sands are running out of the hourglass, one does have to grow up and become a fully functioning adult sooner or later," Black said.
His plan always was to teach at a university, and his training makes the profession an easy transition to the classroom. Black said he enjoys scholarly research and teaching and will probably pursue a career along those lines once he retires from the CIA.
And if a career as a college professor doesn’t suit him, Black would like to write books about intelligence work, Machiavelli, Shakespeare as a Renaissance historian and political thinker, and many more subjects. But his career in the CIA is not one of his topics, although many of his colleagues worldwide have written books.
"Becoming a spy just seemed a little far-fetched," he said. "But I can't imagine any other career that I could have had that I would enjoy as the one I have."