SEPTEMBER 2016

John Brennan's broad face remained stoic whether he talked about his 4:00 a.m. weight lifting or how to stop an army of drones from flying chemical weapons into our country, and I wondered how he slept at night.

Outside the tinted windows of the SUV we rode in, cottonwood trees drooped in the still-humid September air. Moss hung from water oaks. The SUV seemed displaced careening down the narrow, one-lane roads.

Brennan wasn't particularly jovial, but I was beginning to see why the people who worked for the man really liked him.

The director of the CIA isn't exactly the poster child for entitlement one might expect from someone in his position. His was a classic Horatio Alger story. Brennan was a first-generation Irish American. His father had been a blacksmith in Kilkenny who slept above his employer's horse stables and immigrated to New York City. Brennan had been a self-proclaimed mediocre liberal arts undergraduate student who toiled for his grades, and eventually answered a New York Times ad recruiting for the CIA. Over a period of thirty years he'd worked his way up the ranks.1

Even though he was sixty-one and nearing the end of his career, his ethics still guided his life. He wasn't just paying lip service to his call for diversity; he was out here pounding the pavement. He seemed earnest about it.

It was the tail end of our journey. Earlier that morning Brennan and I went to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four young girls had been murdered during a 1963 bombing. We'd walked the streets of Birmingham together, the same streets on which the city's commissioner of public safety Eugene “Bull” Connor had ordered officers to turn fire hoses on African Americans during protests in the 1960s, and where my own grandparents had drunk from Colored-only water fountains. Returning to those haunted Southern streets reminded us of how close we were to our past. We are only a few generations removed.

It wasn't that long ago that we also gained real entrance into a democracy that was now being threatened. Some of our most influential citizens had also been raised in Birmingham, such as federal judge Cecil D. Poole and US Secretary of State Condoleezza “Condi” Rice. My father, Joseph Pegues, had also been raised in Birmingham. This was the South where he and my mother had joined thousands of civil rights workers to march with Dr. King and were encouraged to help register other blacks to vote.

I sat in the SUV with Brennan and thought about how that right was again being threatened, how the not-so-long-ago raw struggle for self-determination now made us vulnerable to a foreign invader. It was difficult to explain this transition to citizens who were still walking streets that were haunted with our own history.

We had just left for our final destination, Miles College, a predominantly black school where Brennan had gone to recruit new members. Incidentally, my grandmother Louise Pegues graduated from Miles with a teaching degree. This was of course no small feat for an African American woman raised under Jim Crow laws in the Deep South. At Miles, Brennan spoke about Omego Ware, the first African American CIA operative, who happened to gain entrance in 1955 because he neglected to fill in the race question on his application, spoke fluent Russian, and was well schooled in espionage.2 Brennan also spoke of how we need diverse talent to counter our biggest threats in the cyber realm.

He'd said, “I believe that this change at CIA can continue to draw inspiration from the larger aspirations of the civil rights movement. Now, this is not to diminish the unique significance of the historic struggle that played out here in Birmingham. But as I see it, at the core of CIA's modernization effort is the belief that our own internal integration makes us better. By creating our new Mission Centers, we are breaking down the barriers that kept our people isolated inside their own professional communities. We are allowing our officers to work together as one team.”3

In the car ride, we discussed topics touching on everything from the internet to whether North Korea posed a credible nuclear threat. I circled back to Russia, as I had wanted to do for half the day.

Pegues: Going forward do you expect that there will be more cyber intrusions from Russia or Russians leading up to the November 8 election?

Brennan: I believe that as we come to the election there will be additional attempts to exploit, to collect, and possibly to disclose information that is related somehow to the presidential campaign.

Pegues: Is it already happening?

Brennan: I do think that it will prove to be fertile ground for individuals to try to exploit those electoral systems. At the same time, I think Russia will continue to carry out intelligence activities in the cyber domain. And they may or may not be directed against the US electoral system. But Russia has formidable capabilities in the cybersphere, and [Russian intelligence has] very sophisticated cyber actors. This is one of the things that we as a country need to be on guard to make sure that whatever adversary might be out there—countries, hackers, or hacktivist groups—we protect the systems as best we can.

As the SUV slowed down, Brennan looked out his window, and I did the same. The whole experience had been surreal. In part, the feeling came from traveling with the CIA director to my family's hometown—the place where they had fought for the most basic equalities and my grandfather, a tough disciplinarian who owned a television repair shop, inadvertently forced the integration of a small town. I knew that he would be proud of me.

This was the place where my father had grown up. He'd gone from getting arrested during civil rights protests to becoming fluent in French and working for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Citibank. Both my father's and mother's struggles and accomplishments were responsible for my charmed childhood.

Now, on the one side, we had a CIA director who was revisiting the battle scars of our history and advocating for diversity. On the other, we spent the day talking about alien intelligence, drones, and an impending war carried out through cyberattacks and for which we weren't prepared. If there was something to stand up for in this age, this was it.

We were less than two months away from the election. Brennan had said he was expecting more disclosures of stolen emails and hacked Democratic Party data the closer we got to November 8. He was anticipating a more pronounced effort by Russian intelligence to get further involved in the US election. I also suspected that if he was willing to acknowledge that in this interview with me, there was a lot more he wasn't sharing about the seriousness of the Russian cyber operation. Within months of our interview, Brennan would testify on Capitol Hill about the Russian influence campaign and what he knew.4 He testified that he had been aware of contacts between Russian operatives and people working in the Trump campaign as early as July 2016. He also testified that he was the first to warn the Russians to back off.

In September 2016 while I was in Birmingham with the director, all of that was classified information.

When we arrived at Miles College, I stepped out of the SUV and Brennan jumped out behind me on the same side. It soon became clear he was exhausted, too. I almost said goodbye, but something in his eyes stopped me.

“Do you ever stop asking questions? My God you are just a reservoir of questions,” he said.

He wasn't smiling. Instead, he looked almost as if he wanted to punch me. I didn't regret asking any of those questions, though admittedly we'd been talking for a long time about his worst nightmares. I stood there. Brennan straightened his jacket and turned on the dusty road.