“Have you ever had a secret for your wife”, asked the lie detector operator.
For nearly twenty years, I had prepared myself to be the perfect candidate for one of America’s top intelligence services. These institutions demand absolute loyalty, which means you’re supposed to protect their secrets, not get them.
“Oui”, I answered.
I sat up straight and kneaded the plastic arms of the chair. I had a black thread around my chest and another attached to my fingertips. My heart was pounding so hard it drowned out almost every other sound. I felt a bead of sweat roll down my armpit along my ribs under my shirt.
I was telling the truth.
A stigma still there
If every fiber of my being was burning to keep my secrets, I knew I had to come clean and answer the question.
I painfully explained that I hadn’t told my wife about my family’s complicated past, I hadn’t told her that my father’s association had led to him being accused of crimes related to a terrorist enterprise after the September 11 attacks, and that, as his son, I had been placed on a list of terrorist suspects when I was 18 years old. Even though my dad was eventually found not guilty in federal court (while still being convicted of a firearm-related misdemeanor), the stigma was still there. Moreover, if I joined the army and then continued in intelligence, it was mainly to try to cleanse us of all that by loyally serving my country, which I did and whose I am proud.
I had been interrogated by intelligence agents when I was in the navy, but that was nothing compared to that. At the time, I had sweated and screamed, but I was innocent and I knew it. There, it was different. I was guilty of hiding things from my wife – and not just about me, but about my family’s past.
The bad habit of hiding everything
Our marriage was like a long-distance relationship – a distance caused by a lack of confidence. We had met in Japan when I was posted there. At the beginning, I had a good reason not to say anything about my personal life: it’s not really an encouraging start to tell your date that you’ve been placed on a list of terrorist suspects or that your father was accused of having links to terrorism. But once you get used to hiding your past, you tend to hide everything.
I had researched the detects