The CIA was created as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services, which had been formed during World War II to coordinate espionage activities among the branches of the United States military. The intention was to provide the president and other leaders with the ability to see beyond the horizon in order to protect their people and interests against attack. The concept for a powerful, centralized civilian agency to coordinate all the intelligence services was embodied in the National Security Act of 1947, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. Its role was refined the following year by a White House directive that gave the CIA the authority to carry out covert operations “against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups.”
From the outset, the secrecy and deception at the heart of the CIA’s mission conflicted with the openness enshrined in American democracy. Soon after the agency’s creation, Dean Acheson, who was soon to become secretary of state, wrote, “I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.” Truman’s successor as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, shared some of Acheson’s concerns, later referring to intelligence operations as “a distasteful but vital necessity.” The contradiction is not lost on thoughtful CIA officers. One longtime agency official, whose career included stints working undercover overseas before he retired, explained the inherent tension between a democracy and an effective espionage service. “It is important for U.S. policymakers to know that we have a CIA to do things that are unpalatable, things that we may not be able to achieve through diplomacy or any other way,” said the former officer. “We’re the agency of last resort.”
In the years after its creation, the organizational structure of the CIA evolved into two separate and unequal halves. The less powerful segment, known as the Directorate of Intelligence, is where analysts process the intelligence collected from the field and strive to provide the president and other policymakers with accurate and timely assessments of international developments. The DI, as it is known, is chronically underfunded and underappreciated, existing in the shadows of the intelligence gatherers in the Directorate of Operations, otherwise known as the DO. The DO was set up as home to the various components of the agency that carry out the covert actions commonly associated with the world of espionage. Its officers are responsible for spying on foreign governments and recruiting double agents to collect human intelligence, or “humint.” They are sent into the world with false identities and the training to lie and, if necessary, break the laws of foreign countries, in the name of protecting the United States. They are focused on combating the most dangerous security challenges confronting the country, such as threats from foreign governments and terrorist organizations, narcotics trafficking, and the spread of nuclear weapons.
The counterproliferation mandate was relatively low-profile within the CIA until the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. The discovery that Saddam Hussein had come close to building a nuclear weapon without the knowledge of the United States and its allies sent shudders through the agency and led to the creation in 1994 of the Counter-Proliferation Division within the DO. Experienced operatives from various specialties within the DO were recruited to join the new division, where they would combine espionage tradecraft with scientific understanding of nuclear weapons. The Counter-Proliferation Division differed from most CIA divisions because it was organized around a topic, nuclear proliferation, rather than by geographic boundaries. The fledgling division’s low status was reflected in its real estate. Most of the workers were relegated to subterranean office space divided by shoulder-high cubicles. Its mission was regarded with skepticism by the established power centers within the CIA, resulting in what one of its officers described as “savage bureaucratic turf battles.” CIA stations around the world often ignored requests for information and cooperation from the nuclear experts.
One of the division’s early recruits was a young woman named Valerie Plame. In her 2007 autobiography, Fair Game, Plame described her new colleagues as “undeniably brilliant and experienced.” One of them was a grandmotherly woman whom Plame first encountered in an elevator wearing a Chanel suit and pushing a baby carriage. Plame looked into the carriage, expecting to see a child, and instead saw two pugs wearing Burberry plaid jackets and collars. Another case officer in the division was a wiry, intense veteran who was nicknamed “Mad Dog.” To Plame, the group seemed so quirky that she referred to the division as “the island of misfit toys.”
Plame was one of the fortunate few to have an office with a window, and she shared her quarters with the team of case officers who had been assigned the task of tracking and bringing down A. Q. Khan. The leader of the Khan team was Jim Kinsman, the officer known as Mad Dog. *
Kinsman had joined the CIA in 1980 after graduating from law school. He had trained to be a case officer within the DO. Two years later, he received his first overseas posting, to Switzerland. His job was to gather information by recruiting assets among the assortment of Swiss government workers, bankers, and foreign operatives who moved through one of the world’s great financial centers. The confluence of business and finance had made Switzerland fertile territory for spies throughout the world. Switzerland was the leading center for bank secrecy and home to untold billions of dollars in illicit fortunes. It was also a country where the high-tech industry was noted for its willingness to sell anything to anyone.
Case officers are known for their ability to think outside the box, for solving problems in the field in creative, unconventional ways, and Kinsman is a prime example. He soon established a reputation as a recruiting wizard and his skills later won him a coveted posting in Paris in 1989, a plum assignment that allowed him to indulge two of his passions—wine and running. Kinsman was a passionate runner, clocking six to eight miles a day no matter what the weather and no matter where his peripatetic job took him. He was more whippet than pit bull, all endurance and stamina. In Paris, one of his favorite running courses was through the Bois de Boulogne, the two-thousand acre park on the western edge of the city. The route took him past the Jardin d’Acclimatation, an amusement park with a small zoo, and along a strip of roadway that becomes the city’s most prominent red-light district at night. He usually passed a number of large dogs, which the prostitutes used for protection.
Early one morning in the summer of 1989, he passed a particularly large German shepherd and the dog barely raised its head. Then Kinsman felt a searing pain in his right calf and halted mid-stride. The dog had attacked from behind, in complete silence, and sunk its teeth deep into the muscle. He pried open the animal’s mouth and staggered a couple of steps. The dog snarled and started to attack again. Kinsman grabbed a stick and brandished it, which was enough to send the dog back to its resting spot.
Kinsman limped home and went to the medical office at the United States Embassy, the imposing building overlooking the gardens of the Champs-Elysées from the northwest corner of the Place de la Concorde. The bite was serious, so the nurse sent him to the Pasteur Institute, the research hospital named for Louis Pasteur, its founder and first director, who had successfully developed the first antirabies serum in 1885. Cautioning Kinsman that the dog might have been rabid, the physician ordered up a painful regimen of injections. Kinsman was impressed; the CIA officer’s first thought was whether he could recruit the doctor who treated him at the famous institute. The attitude reflected nothing about the doctor’s potential as an asset, but rather the lens through which Kinsman viewed the world.
Later that morning, when he finally arrived at the CIA offices inside the embassy, Kinsman joked about the incident with his colleagues, warning that he was going to bite every official back at Langley who had ever thwarted him. Someone referred to him as “Mad Dog,” a nickname so appropriate for the driven and obsessive man that it stuck. The agent embraced the moniker and in later years he occasionally wore a cap with an embroidered bulldog and the words “Mad Dog.” In many ways, those two qualities, the drive and the obsession, made Mad Dog an ideal member of the clandestine arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.
When the Counter-Proliferation Division was established in 1994, Kinsman was a natural choice for the team. As a teenager, he had read Hiroshima, John Hersey’s transformative book about the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city during World War II. The image of sixty-six thousand people killed instantly was seared into his memory, and he later told friends he was awestruck by the devastation that a nuclear bomb could deliver. In the back of his mind, there was always the lurking threat of nuclear holocaust. Part of his motivation in joining the CIA had been to keep such devastating weapons out of the hands of the wrong people.
* The real name of the agent known as Jim Kinsman, aka Mad Dog, is being withheld.