My year-long rotation at Al Udeid brought with it an impressive amount of travel opportunities. Trips to Oman, Kuwait, and the UAE became nearly boring in their repetitive nature.
Nearly.
The travel brought with it some inquisitive personnel, many if them expatriates or travelling business people. And they all ask the same few questions.
“Where are you coming from?”
“What brings you here?”
“What do you do for work?”
As a general rule, we try not to expose ourselves as a travelling group of US military, but we didn’t want to appear to suspiciously standoffish. We all needed covers: quick, hard to verify lies to serve as a false backstory.
So Spencer the Canadian Journalist was born. He is from Thunder Bay, Ontario and was in the middle East to cover the unpleasantries occurring between the Gulf Cost Cooperation (GCC) countries. You’ve probably never seen his name on an author line on a news article, but you have likely read one of his stories. He just sells his stories to news outlets to run under their retained Author’s taglines.
It was a successful cover, by all accounts, although it often led me to hope that the inquisitive person prying into my business did not realize the pen I was using to take notes basically amounted to an ink-filled aluminum shiv.
I once “interviewed” an attendee of the Kuwait Oil and Gas Symposium while drinking my coffee before heading to work for the day. She was standing in line next to me and asked what I was doing in Kuwait, presumably because I was a Caucasian face she did not recognize in the Middle Eastern country that had very few of them. Once I told her I was a journalist, the young woman enthusiastically told me all about her work, and even answered my cursory questions (“with the rise in Fracking, do you see this as a threat to the current status quo in the middle east?”). I left her with a quick thank you and promise to email her with a link to the article when it was published.
I used the journalist cover all over during my travels. On airplanes and in airports. To hotel bar attendees and Gas station employees.
It was easier than I thought it would be. All it took was carrying a notebook and pen, a bit of knowledge about the major topics of the day, and either a good method of excusing myself from further conversation, or a willingness to listen as if I was actually interviewing.
I hope none of them are looking for my articles.