Jeff Circle

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When I left a small Pennsylvania Bible college in 1987 (think Foot Loose) to join the U.S. Army Reserve (think Stripes), I was only looking for a part-time service commitment to fund my critical pizza expenses. Plus, the recruiter made being an intelligence analyst sound really cool. When I asked what it was, he said, “I have no idea. They don’t tell us. It’s like James Bond shit or something.”

With that, I was 100% in.

I got more than I bargained for, however, when army basic training changed my life and left me wanting more. After cruising through eight weeks of muddy push-ups and drill sergeant screaming, I knew that my real calling in life had nothing to do with preaching to the hungry in downtown Dhaka or Ouagadougou like my homiletics professor wanted. That’s when a rash decision, over a bag of bad Wendy’s French toast sticks, led me to join the U.S. Army full-time.

After graduating from the U.S. Army Intelligence School in Arizona, I asked to be assigned to Hawaii. They sent me to Korea. Jerks. After I was confined to an infantry unit studying Soviet tactics and the blustering North Korean leadership structure, only sixteen miles from the DMZ I might add, I asked to be sent to Langley, VA where they kept the CIA people. Real analysts, I thought. They sent me to Ft. Hood, Texas. Within eighteen months of my new assignment to General George S . Patton’s Hell on Wheels 2nd Armored Division, they rounded me up for a tour of duty in the Gulf War of 1990-1991. And the hits just kept on comin’.

After months of eating in the dark and asking what that smell was from the burn pits, the Tiger Brigade Task Force finally rolled north and kicked some ass. Sandy and ragged after a flight home from Iraq, I transferred to the Ft. Hood, TX Criminal Investigation Command (CID) to be an investigator. It’s like NCIS without all the whiny glamour and hot lab techs. Fun fact: working at CID was the first time I ended up in handcuffs. After five years of a pretty good Army experience, I took off the uniform. Since then, I’ve stayed in touch with an interesting and, sometimes sober group of individuals, who each claim to have performed insurmountable feats on missions for the U.S. government. I suspect they’re lying, just like my recruiter.

Over the years, my military and law enforcement exploits have served me well. (Yes, someone let me be a cop in South Carolina.) Somewhere along the way, I stumbled into some incredibly boring management positions with MCI WorldCom and General Motors, and later independently consulted on various mind-numbing management issues because I convinced someone I knew what I was talking about. I’ve been editor-in-chief of two corporate newsletters and have written and presented hundreds of boring business reports, unheeded training manuals, and delivered dozens of motivational speeches, most of which were blatantly disregarded by a terribly narcoleptic audience.

All that corporate BS was enough to make me chuck it and move to the U.S. Virgin Islands where I worked on a dive boat and wrote travel articles from my apartment on St. John. True story.

In 2008, after masquerading as a federal background investigator in Kentucky, (yes, I have stories about that) I moved to Italy and later to Germany, to work for the U.S. Army Africa and U.S. Army Europe as a senior antiterrorism subject matter expert. That’s when Langley finally came to me in the form of someone I later called “the benefactor.” But I can’t talk much about that. Not because it’s classified. I just don’t remember much. Wow, those people can drink!

That was a fun five years of pretending to be Jason Bourne stuck in an office. To date, I have over twenty years’ experience in counterintelligence and credibility assessment, security operations, personnel vetting, protection, policy, investigations, Red Team, insider threat, and crisis management. Yeah, I pulled that right off the LinkedIn page I was allowed to put out there.

One night at a security conference in Montreux, Switzerland over a vat of grappa (the Italian equivalent to moonshine), I talked a magazine publisher into accepting some security articles I told him I could write. He ended up printing four of them in Security Today. It’s the Indian edition, so only like a billion people read it. I sent copies to Langley, but I never heard back. I think my Army recruiter got a job there. Might even be on the seventh floor where they keep the Matrix control room. Who knows.

I’m huge in India now.

After that, I went to Afghanistan to work for the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force under the auspices of providing counterintelligence support. Among other things, I got to Red Team FOBs around Regional Command-East. That’s by Pakistan. Seriously, happened. All those Blackhawk and CH-47 Chinook pilots were pretty darn good getting us through those snowy mountain passes and avoiding the occasional RPG launch. A few years later, I ended up at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul for a few more years doing other fun things like insider threat investigations and polygraph stuff. Hey, the embassy had hot food and running water. That was pretty cool, until we gave it away to the Taliban.

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