Spy for Life

Jim Olson: Eschewing Cynicism in the Face of Evil

If you ask the gray-haired, mild-mannered professor emeritus from the Texas A&M Bush School of Government if “Jim Olson” is really his name, he will tell you, “It is now.” Jim must be coy about identifying himself too cavalierly. There are dangerous people all around the world who are not too fond of him, mostly because of how successful he was at stealing their secrets.

After serving as the CIA’s Chief of Counterintelligence, Jim could tell you plenty of stories about his career as a spy. He describes his most dangerous mission as one that began by slinking down a Moscow manhole. Alone at night, he navigated below the Russian streets to place a listening device on one of the Soviets’ top-secret communications cables. If caught, he would have undoubtedly been executed and his disappearance explained away with a cover story.

It’s a night that lives as a vivid memory for Jim, but in one way, it was not unique at all. On this and every mission, Olson recalls that, “I had this physical feeling—very palpable—that I was not alone. That [God] was there. I could feel his protective presence. I can’t tell you how much strength and confidence that gave me.”¹

His name may not always have been “Jim Olson,” but one thing about him that has never changed is the faith that emanates outward from the core of his being. That faith motivated him to confront evil wherever he found it. And he has spent a lifetime doing just that.

Doing Something

After rising to the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, Jim attended law school at the University of Iowa. In his final year there, he was approached by a CIA recruiter. After an initial interview and pledge of confidentiality, Jim was subjected to rigorous vetting that left no area of his private life untouched. But the further he moved through the process, the more intrigued he became with it. With the haunting specter of the Cold War looming in the background, Olson saw Communist totalitarianism as an existential threat to freedom around the world. Joining the CIA seemed like an answer to the call he felt to go out and do something about it.

Once established in the agency, he met Meredith. They were soon married, and they went on to operate as a husband-and-wife spy team in Paris, Mexico City, Vienna, and Moscow. Tom Clancy used the couple (without their permission) as the model for the central characters in his Cold War spycraft novel, Red Rabbit. The Olsons helped penetrate every important entity in Russia—the foreign ministry, the defense ministry, and the KGB. They provided unprecedented, incredibly valuable information to the U.S. government. But they were doing it at great personal risk.

Their children were in constant danger—at one point in Vienna, threatened directly by name at their home address. They had close friends who began to vanish in the 1980s, victims of moles inside the CIA who were selling out their fellow agents for cash. One of the moles was a colleague they had known since 1976—the infamous Aldrich Ames, who sold secrets to the Soviets from 1985 to 1994. Jim holds him in contempt to this day, not just for selling secrets, but for his culpability for the murder of several fellow American agents.

The Biblical Case for Spying

The Olsons manipulated, coerced, and stole from the enemies of America. They lied every day of their lives, not just to their targets, but to their family. For the 31 years they operated undercover, Meredith’s parents believed their daughter had married an underachiever who couldn’t hold a steady job, who barely eked out a living, and who moved his family all over the world for no apparent reason. The Olsons lived a double life—but they did all of it with a clear conscience.

In his book, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying, Olson makes the case that all of it was consistent with their faith. In the hierarchy of moral realism, they were fighting in a greater global war against the evil of atheistic Communism. Done with proper oversight, says Jim, “Spying is biblical.” But there are limits.

What constitutes acceptable moral behavior in any given operational scenario has too often been left to the judgment of individual intelligence officers, their supervisors, or other senior officials. This has been a recipe for confusion, abuse, and cover-up. No profession, particularly one that can hide behind a veil of secrecy, should police itself.²

Pursuing moral clarity was not just a theoretical enterprise for the Olsons. It was a way of life.

The Moral Evil of Our Time

The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in January 1973 stands as another vivid memory for Jim Olson. The pure evil of it struck him like a lightning bolt:

Meredith and I were face-to-face with a lot of Communist evil. It was vicious and cruel. But abortion—the slaughter of innocent human beings—is the greatest moral evil of our time.³

When they left the CIA in 1997, the Olsons were given the opportunity to confront evil in a new way. In 1998, a year after Jim began teaching at the Bush School of Government in College Station, Texas, Planned Parenthood opened an abortion center across town.

A few years later, four young members of the local Coalition for Life held a prayer vigil as a first step in trying to bring an end to abortion in their community. Their campaign of prayer and fasting, community outreach, and peaceful vigil over a 40-day timespan eventually became the basis for the pro-life ministry now known as “40 Days for Life.” Jim Olson was the founding board chair of that organization.

Today, the ministry Olson helped launch has spread to dozens of countries on six continents. One such location is in Moscow. That’s ironic in itself, but the Olsons’ fight against evil has come full circle in more ways than that. Today, the very building that housed that College Station Planned Parenthood now houses the 40 Days for Life headquarters.⁴

“Eschew Cynicism”

For 50 years, Roe enjoyed legal dominance in America. Much like the Cold War Soviet Union, it seemed too formidable a nemesis to ever be defeated. During his time in the CIA, Jim Olson couldn’t imagine he would ever witness the collapse of the USSR. Likewise, he never believed Roe would be overturned. But he approached both of those battles in the same way. To Jim Olson, persistence in the face of evil is not optional, no matter how futile the cause may seem.

On his office desk at the Bush Center, Olson displays a sign he had custom-made to greet his visitors. The sign reads, “Eschew Cynicism,” and he explains why:

You’re going to see things in government, or even the pro-life movement, that will depress you. You’re going to see politics, careerism, dishonesty, corruption, illegality. It’s very easy to become cynical and disillusioned—to think it’s pointless and the forces against you are winning. But if you lose hope or your idealism, you’ve lost everything. You have to stay focused on your vision, your mission. That’s what will give you the strength to carry on.⁵

Very few of us will ever serve as spies or found a global pro-life ministry. But every one of us can apply Jim Olson’s outlook to whatever we do in our little corner of the world. Fighting evil is always the right thing to do, whether or not we ever see our efforts pay off this side of eternity.

Notes
1. “Under Cover with CIA Spy Jim Olson,” 40 Days for Life Podcast, Season 8, Episodes 15 & 16.
2. James Olson, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying (Potomac Books, 2006), Preface.
3. Podcast, Ep16.
4. See Unplanned (2019) for the film version of this story.
5. Podcast, Ep16.