One day in 2004, I got a telephone call from a senior intelligence official. “You’ll never guess what I did yesterday,” he began. “I spent four hours hooked up to a polygraph. The security guys wanted to know why I was talking to you.”

I thought he was kidding.

Three years later, I have a first amendment lawyer and a renewed appreciation for tenure.

I used to wonder why more academics didn’t study U.S. intelligence agencies. Not anymore. Getting data about spies and G-men is extraordinarily difficult. And sometimes it’s very very creepy.

Forget about obtaining classified materials. I keep my one and only Freedom of Information Act request on my bulletin board as a reminder not to bother. It’s been pending for 2 years and seeks declassification of a 1996 Pentagon letter to Strom Thurmond opposing intelligence reform. Here’s the kicker: the contents of the letter were summarized in the Washington Post more than a decade ago.

No, it’s the unclassified but embarrassing stuff about organizational weaknesses in U.S. intelligence agencies that I find really interesting. Trouble is, that’s often deep-sixed, too. Squirreling away information doesn’t require a top secret stamp. It just takes good bureaucratic stalling. In “Survivor: Beltway,” outlasting is all you need to do to win.

When I first started researching Spying Blind, I requested several documents from the FBI that I thought might show how and why the Bureau failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism in the 1990s. These included the FBI’s own unclassified 1998 strategic plan and information about Bureau employee awards. For years I got nothing. And then last year, after interviewing FBI Director Robert Mueller (on the record), a Justice Department package suddenly arrived at my office. In it was – I am not making this up – a “data package” that consisted entirely of color photocopies of the FBI’s web site. (I eventually got all my data from other sources.)

The CIA isn’t much better. All but 19 pages of the agency’s 2005 internal 9/11 review remain classified, despite repeated requests by Congress to release them. And those 19 pages saw the light of day only because Congress finally passed a law last summer requiring it.

Recently, I learned about an important document I never knew existed: an unclassified report examining the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center before 9/11. I’m told it includes many criticisms and was finished in the summer of 2001. But apparently it’s marked “for official use only,” which means that it sits in the vast twilight zone of government materials that are technically public but not really available.

When paper records are that hard to unearth, people matter more. But many insiders are afraid to talk with outsiders – even minivan-driving-soccer-mom professors like me. Who can blame them? As my polygraphed source put it, “I didn’t care, but imagine if I were a GS-13. No way would I be talking to anybody again.”

Of the 75 government officials I interviewed for Spying Blind, 70 spoke on the condition that they remain anonymous. Most undertook considerable professional risk to share their insights about what’s broken in the CIA and FBI, and why. Some asked that I never tell anyone I’d ever met them. And one, a high-ranking FBI official, who spoke to me only because people even higher up made him, got so angry during our interview that he unleashed a flurry of F-bombs at me. His tirade prompted the public affairs officer listening in on the call to ask nervously, “Professor, are you by any chance recording this interview?”

It wasn’t the swearing or the venom in the official’s voice that unsettled me. It was his job. Here was one of the Bureau’s leaders, a man with the full power of nation’s premier law enforcement and domestic intelligence agency behind him. And he was pissed off. At me.

I understand why. Nobody likes hearing criticism of their organization from an outsider, especially when that organization is working 24/7 to stop the next terrorist attack and the outsider is an Ivory Tower academic who’s never put her own life on the line to protect the country.

But as my mind pondered all of this, my hands were shaking. Was I intimidated? You bet I was. For a brief moment, I got an inkling of what my source must have felt when he was hooked up to the polygraph.