![]() "You have sixty seconds to cycle the hammer as many times as possible. "This is the trigger pull test," he told me. The last time I'd seen him was at the Washington Field Office three weeks earlier, where he handed me an old Smith and Wesson Model 10 revolver with a red pistol grip. He struck me as a cross between a fraternity rush chairman and the caller at a bingo match. "I have been given authorization to offer you a position, if you think you can make the time constraint," Wayne said. It all sounded simple enough back then, but after more than a year of testing, hoping, interviewing, waiting, and enduring their faceless form letters, I wondered how anyone ever got in. citizens between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-five, with at least a bachelor's degree and three years of work experience, or a graduate degree. ![]() It outlined the applicant criteria: All prospective agents had to be U.S. The two-page form asked for basic things like my full name, date and place of birth, Social Security number - the kind of information most people assume the FBI already knows. I drifted to a quiet evening in 1986 when I sat at the dining room table of my basement apartment and started to fill out the initial application. Though I met the basic requirements, the notion that I might have the chops to join the world's most prestigious law enforcement agency seemed just a bit presumptuous.Īs Wayne's voice rang in my ear, my mind raced back over the months and months of waiting for this one moment. It had been more than a year since I'd mustered the courage to fill out a preliminary application for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Chris," he said, with the assurance of a man who knew virtually every detail of my twenty-seven-year life, "we have a New Agent class scheduled to start in two weeks. Conte of Massachusetts when an FBI applicant coordinator named Wayne called in March 1987 to offer me a job. I was working in Washington, D.C., as speechwriter and press secretary for Congressman Silvio O. The only thing the FBI ever promised me was that I'd get the opportunity to prove myself. ![]()
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