One of my favorite scenes of any movie occurs in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We find out that a beautiful Austrian archaeologist named Elsa had intimate relations with both Indy and his father (separately). She is seized at that moment by a Nazi, who threatens to kill her if Indy does not surrender a precious diary that will lead them to a holy relic.

“Oh yeah?” says Indy’s dad, who is in no way in love with her. “Go ahead!”

Indy, though, who has developed feelings for her, shouts, “Wait!” and hands over the book.

There’s a lesson there for U.S. personnel who are working abroad. Love is a tricky business in the clearance community, but it is especially tricky if you fall in love while overseas. And if you want to marry a foreign-born man or woman? Then things get really complicated.

A Brief Primer on Love and Marriage While Abroad

If you are overseas and growing fond of a certain someone, there are a few overarching best practices for preserving your clearance while navigating the rocky rapids of romantic relationships. In all areas of the clearance world, if questions ever arise, the fate of your clearance is agency by agency, posting by posting, security officer by security officer. What your adjudicator ate for breakfast can determine whether you walk out with a TS/SCI, or a rescinded job offer.

Another problem for clearance holders (in this matter) is the nature of love—something humankind has been grappling with since the first caveman met the first cavewoman. If Shakespeare couldn’t crack the code, there’s little chance that some guy at the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency has it all figured out.

To wit: when does a fling become dating? When does dating become a relationship? When does a relationship become cohabitation? (Oh don’t act like keeping a separate address means you’re not living together. If you keep a toothbrush there and can rummage through the fridge without asking, you’re more than dating.) When does cohabitation become an engagement?

Sure, we do our best as human beings to make things official. Every young relationship has a conversation early on that begins, “So what are we, anyway?” And at some point, what we are is de facto engaged—if only in deed and not word. You just know. (Marriage, at least, involves paperwork, but even then, if you found out tomorrow that your marriage certificate had a clerical error and you were not legally married, would you just move out as if the whole thing had been an extended sleepover?)

What the intelligence community is dealing with here is hard, particularly if you fall in love while abroad, and especially if love blossoms into the desire to be married. To get to the bottom of things, I talked to two experts, both of whom are ClearanceJobs regulars: Sean M. Bigley, a security clearance defense attorney, and Kel B. McClanahan, a national security lawyer and professorial lecturer in law at George Washington University. Here is what they had to say.

Casual fling? No problem. Sometimes.

Casual flings and no-strings-attached relationships can be risky business when you’re stationed overseas, says Bigley, as they open the clearance-holder up to blackmail, coercion, and general manipulation. He explains that although single clearance holders serving abroad are a generally smart and world-wise bunch, they sometimes inadvertently come across as targets for foreign intelligence services by seeking out the wrong type of romantic companionship.

“I’m no love doctor,” he says, “but the best advice I can offer clearance-holders serving overseas is precisely that: take it slow and use common sense.”

It is vital, he says, to report your relationship to your facility security officer. First of all, it is simply required. Whomever you are interested in pursuing romantically will have to be vetted: at the very least, security officers will verify that your would-be paramour is not on the terrorist watch list or a known foreign intelligence operative. Secondly, doing the right thing right now can pay dividends down the road, should the relationship progress.

…but UNLIKE MARRIAGE, CASUAL DATING is still sort of expected.

Oftentimes, McClanahan explains, casual dating is just factored into the equation of life for a cleared worker abroad. As he puts it: “If they started to yank the security clearance of every guy or girl who started dating a foreigner while overseas, no one would ever go over.”

A lot of it, he says, is wrapped up in outdated notions of human sexuality. “There’s an attitude that ‘Boys are gonna be boys’ and ‘We can’t stop our people from casually dating when they’re overseas.’” He says that there’s a certain belief that cleared U.S. personnel working abroad are going to get their kicks somehow, and that’s sort of OK—but the line is drawn at marriage.

How OK are you with your partner being killed?

Which brings us back to Indiana Jones and his father.

“You have to report whomever you are dating to security,” says McClanahan. “I mean, you just have to—you can’t just not do it. They might do a casual record check to see if the person you are dating has a name that they recognize.” And all of this might subject you to a little bit of heightened scrutiny, but nothing too arduous.

Once you cross the line from dating to cohabitating, or even engaged, everything changes. “Security will see that as a bond of affection which can now be leveraged by foreign entities to compromise you,” says McClanahan.

Not, he explains, by the man or woman you want to marry, but by someone, as Indiana Jones learned.

McClanahan explains, “If I’m dating a girl and we’ve been going out for two weeks, and someone says, ‘If you don’t give us secrets we will kill her,’ the belief among security officers is that I am going to respond differently than if she is my wife or my fiancé.” It may be right, it may be wrong, but as a psychological argument, that is what it boils down to. How much does a relationship like marriage versus dating compromise you and open you up to pressure?

Shaken, not stirred

If you have reported every romantic interlude you have ever had with a foreign national, and kept your security officer apprised of the state of any ongoing relationship you have established, you might be in the all-clear. (But you might not; it might, to some security officers, represent a character flaw.) As a romance grows, so too will the scrutiny from your officers, but in the best case scenario, you should have no difficulties. You’ve followed all the rules.

Marriage, says Bigley, means a more intensive vetting of your other half, plus your new in-laws.  “The same rules and guidelines apply, but it starts to become more of a game of Russian roulette—especially when we’re talking about large extended families, or relatives who work for foreign governments, and potentially dicey countries like China, Iran, or Russia.” A clearance-holder marrying a foreign national, he explains, will want to do everything possible to bolster his or her ties to the United States (for example, by closing any foreign bank accounts and selling any foreign property) in order to minimize ties to the spouse’s country of citizenship.

McClanahan’s advice is succinct: “Report it and update your resume. You may not need it—but you might.”

In the end, it makes you wonder about James Bond. All this time, we’ve thought he had commitment issues with the ladies he meets on his glamorous international missions. But maybe it has always been much simpler than that. Perhaps it was just easier to report a few rolls in the hay with Vesper Lynd, Tiffany Case, and Strawberry Fields. What if Bond’s playboy ways were simply because he was afraid to settle down and risk losing his clearance?

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David Brown is a regular contributor to ClearanceJobs. His most recent book, THE MISSION (Custom House, 2021), is now available in bookstores everywhere in hardcover and paperback. He can be found online at https://www.dwb.io.