My parents both retired from the NSA.
One having been a Russian linguist and code analyst, the other a Russian Army troop analyst says she, now in her 80's. Our family used to joked about hearing the pause on the home rotary phone and clicks before we connected with anything. Every year or so after I left home while my mother was still working for NSA, my where abouts and my sister's was looked into because of her clearance. Because I was born in North Africa on a US Nuclear Air Base during the cold war. My family has been under scrutiny until my mother finally retired from the NSA 10 years after my father. All told 30 years or so. Maybe longer because my father worked as a domestic contractor for the FBI, congressional members and State Dept as a commercial air taxi pilot. Some one had to quietly fly Gorbachev's advanced teams around the east coast to inspect alternate emergency airfields to see if the runways could handle a large Russian jet settling on them and speak fluent Russian with an NSA level security clearance. He was happy, got a pay check to fly an airplane, and felt like his country still needed him.
