Who’s Ollie?

History turns no sharp corners.

—Anonymous

Summer 1985: Gray cigarette smoke filled the office. Files stacked a foot deep on every desk teetered and spilled over onto the adjacent floors. Every desk was crowded in against another, and jammed up against the walls. The incessant clatter of typewriters made conversation oddly confidential; one could hear someone speaking directly to you, if he or she was nearby, but conversations even ten feet away were lost to the rat-a-tat-tatting of the secretaries or desk officers. Phones rang off the hook. Fat middle-aged women in stretch pants sat intensely typing, while trim men in white shirts, suit coats off, moved from desk to desk, or came and went into the hallway. The contrast was striking with the silent, windowless, intimidating linoleum hallway I had just stepped out of, hundreds of meters long, door after shut door stretching in each direction, impassive and unmarked, receding almost beyond sight.

I was reporting to my assignment in the Counter-Terrorism (CT) Office, the Agency’s action branch for countering terrorist attacks worldwide, and in particular, the rash of kidnappings in Lebanon by Hizballah and of plane hijackings. Only a few months earlier I had been writing my last paper for my master’s degree from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, an analysis of Raymond Aron’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s reflexive anti-bourgeois attitudes and moral anarchism, which led Sartre so consistently to defend totalitarian governments or movements of the Left. Aron had noted, wielding typical stiletto-like irony, that “the polite smiles of the genteel, under the tutelage of Sartre, were deformed into grimaces” and that, stripped of condescension and fad, Sartre callously sanctioned mass murder. Now, at last, I had begun my career with the Central Intelligence Agency and had a chance to play my own part in the struggles pitting ideas, ideologies, and countries against one another, and not just read about them in a library.

The secretary looked up as I stood in front of her desk and blinked from the smoke and controlled chaos.

“Glenn? Welcome to the CT office. Let’s go back and I’ll introduce you to your boss.”

We walked back from the hallway through a series of windowless rooms, with maps carelessly tacked or taped to the walls. We stepped into the last room, more a vault than an office. There were a couple of desks, a television, and a computer, one of the only ones in the CIA. It showed that the CT office was on the cutting edge and could obtain whatever equipment it needed to conduct its operations. A thin man in his fifties stood in the middle of the office, a cigarette in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, reading a cable. He picked up a telephone on his desk. An officer’s sword hung on the wall behind him. It was the only personal item in the otherwise nondescript office. He paid no attention to us.

“John, I’d like to introduce you to our new CT,1 Gle—”

John stormed past us, electric, and erupted, “I have no GODDAMNED TIME for a GODDAMNED PISSANT, SNIVELING LITTLE CT! There’s been a GODDAMNED HIJACKING. Get him the hell out of my way!”

The secretary and I stood there, nonplussed.

“John, I . . .”

John was waving his cigarette and coffee mug, his face red. “I have NO TIME FOR A PISSANT LITTLE SHIT. Get him out of here!”

We turned around without another sound and retreated to the secretary’s desk in the front of the office suite.

The secretary had me wait a few minutes in the entryway and then sat me down unobtrusively in John’s—and now my—back office. My boss settled down enough to meet me an hour or so later, but remained standing, and smoking two cigarettes and drinking two cups of coffee simultaneously. He always did.

John looked at me. “A CT? Harvard?”

“Yes.”

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

So was I welcomed to the Counter-Terrorism Office, where as the most junior officer there, I was immediately accepted as number thirteen, on a staff of twelve.

John Carpenter was a former Marine captain, wiry, high-strung but cool about the use of lethal force—I remember him laughing in glee when recounting to me his involvement in a particularly outrageous operation in an especially remote and dangerous part of Africa, in which numbers of people died—nervous around superiors, with an incisive mind and, once he decided he liked you, a gentle soul who got a thrill from taking you, after a morning of planning covert operations, on a wild, careening drive through suburban Virginia, to the imported cheese section of the Gourmet Giant. I identified with him over time, for he never quite fit the standard molds; he was more action-oriented and antsy than analysts, and more intellectual than most ops officers.

John gave me two assignments: desk officer duties, which meant monitoring and answering the basic cable traffic from around the world that concerned terrorism, and manning the secure real-time communications computer—what is now called an instant messaging system—that linked us with all the U.S. government agencies that had a role in our counterterrorism work: Special Forces, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Marines, the NSA, and so on. From this perch I learned about Islamic radicalism, kidnapping, hostages, renditions, and how we went about counterterrorism work. Having a computer showed how cutting-edge we were in the CT office. No one else in the DO had one. I sat long hours, surrounded by John’s cigarette smoke, listening to him curse behind me, staring at the orange monochrome screen, reading and responding to the messages from throughout the counterterrorism community.

I enjoyed the CT office, even though I was a little incongruous there, hockey player or no; “the Harvard guy” who read abstruse books, with a bunch of behind-enemy-lines kinds of specialists. The CT office in the mid-1980s was an offshoot of the Special Activities Division (SAD), the Agency’s action branch, a version of what laymen see when watching derring-do in the movies. Most of the officers were former Navy SEALs or Special Forces officers, or had some military background. They were the ones who conducted the Agency’s paramilitary operations: sabotage, training insurgents or intelligence officers in one godforsaken Third World country or another, using special-shaped charge explosives, clandestine exfiltration of people from countries . . .

One of the big efforts during my time at the CT office was to locate and free the Americans whom Hizballah had taken hostage, among whom was our COS Beirut, William Buckley. Hizballah had kidnapped him as he left his home in 1984, just as I was starting my career. He had rammed one of the cars trying to kidnap him with his own—I distinctly recall silently cheering him for this when I learned the circumstances—but they had caught him despite his resistance. Our SAD guys considered going into West Beirut black—a covert operation, their very presence unnoticed by anyone—across the Green Line, to rescue the hostages from their Hizballah kidnappers; a small unit of elite, clandestine commandos operating in exceptionally dangerous circumstances, with no possible support. In the end, the CT office chiefs and the Seventh Floor decided that the operation was simply too risky—who could back up the team that would go in?—and our intelligence too imprecise, to give the green light. These are the kinds of operations that our SAD officers conducted. Our CT office teams could deploy anywhere, with no notice, go in black, and often get to within meters of a target unknown to any local authorities.

My jump instructor at the Farm—the Agency’s vast training facility where I spent a good part of a year learning various dark arts—was an SAD officer, and representative enough of their sometimes amazing abilities. Typical of many of them, he combined confidence, modesty, and a lack of pretention. He taught us how to jump from 2,500 feet using a static line; he himself was a HALO jumper—high altitude, low opening. He had my fellow CTs and me wait on the landing field after our own jumps one day. He took the plane up to 35,000 feet—seven miles high. The plane was totally lost in the distance and altitude. There was no plane, so far as we were aware. He then free-fell at terminal velocity of 150 to 200 miles per hour and flew himself many miles to the landing zone. We had no idea he was anywhere near until he opened his chute perhaps a thousand feet above us. He landed standing up not more than thirty yards away and walked calmly over to us, as we stood whooping and amazed.

My jump instructor and I crossed paths again many months later in the CT office. We were chatting as we changed in Headquarters’ locker room during lunch hour, having just worked out. He had just returned from a TDY to meet with a liaison partner and to train for potential joint operations.

“Those guys were crazy, man,” my old jump instructor told me, describing what he had experienced in a country where I had already worked myself, although not with the liaison service.

For once, he seemed nonplussed. I cocked my head.

“Oh?”

“You know what they had us do? They had us all get out on motorcycles and ride around practicing drive-by assassinations!” I gaped at him. “Crazy guys. It was crazy. We had to back out of any operations with them.”

The CIA I had entered and served did not commit or engage in human rights violations or, of all things, assassinations. This was a hard-and-fast principle—right out the centrally important Executive Order 12333—and one rigorously taught to all officers.

John invariably referred to SAD officers like my jump instructor as “the methane breathers.” He told me that he called them that because “their offices are so deep below ground here at Headquarters that no one ever sees them and the atmosphere consists only of the heavier gases” and “besides,” he said, his cigarette flaking ashes and smoke puffing from his mouth, “these guys are so incredibly primitive that they breathe methane to survive, anyway.”

I laughed, and forever after referred to SAD officers as methane breathers, earning my own laughs over the years. Of course, their and every other DO officer’s sometimes not-so-complimentary moniker for officers from my ultimate home division was “Euro-weenie.”

The CT office was developing a special action team, too, during my time there, that opened my neophyte’s eyes wide, of foreign agents, dispersed in various countries, who could perform the same black, in-hostile-territory, muscled interventions to rescue hostages, or “render” dangerous targets who were beyond the reach of our laws or where we did not want to show any American hand. These foreign CTC agents stood ready, in response to a simple clandestine communication, to rendezvous and enter into action anywhere in the world. Once together, they would form a highly trained rendition team, theoretically not attributable to the United States, and possessing more operational flexibility XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX. The reasoning was that foreigners could travel to places and take certain actions that American CIA officers, and people who looked American, could not. As the creator of the action teams, CIA officer Dewey Clarridge, characterized them in his book, A Spy for All Seasons, they were “chosen for a wide variety of special skills, including use of weaponry. . . . The foreign national-staffed action team came primarily from the Middle East. . . . I wanted to surround [our officers] with heavy countersurveillance—preferably with sawed-off shotguns under their raincoats.”

Developing such a capability in the CT office was controversial in the DO, however. A number of officers argued that the DO could not control the actions of this foreign action team at all times, which contravened a cardinal principle of tradecraft and sound operations; that they were XXXXX and would act in foreign countries; that the risk of death, to one of them, to one of their targets, or to a third party, was high; and that the “blowback” potential—the risk to the Agency and to U.S. policy interests—far outweighed any supposed gain from having a team of foreign assets engaged in kidnapping terrorists for return to the United States.

I observed this high-stakes debate play out, lacking at that point sufficient professional knowledge to know whether the concept of using foreign action teams for operations was foolhardy and out of control or creative and appropriately aggressive. I recall one of my superiors, whom I admired, commenting during the internal wrangling over how, or whether, to deploy this team:

“What? We’re going to arm some foreigners, with their own hates and axes to grind, and send them to kidnap people they are hostile to, in a foreign country, beyond the control of any CIA officer?!”

As I grew in experience and competence, I became less wide-eyed and I came to share the views of the action team’s critics. At the time, however, I observed, played my minor support role as a junior officer, and tried to learn how the DO functioned, what were the guiding conceptual issues one needed to apply to operations, and what went into sound, reasoned, and prudent tradecraft.

The project was shut down, after the team had been set up in various countries overseas, but before they were ever issued any action order. The men were disbanded and sent back to their respective normal lives.

I had been working at the CT office for a number of weeks. The day was routine, quiet. We had no operation ongoing. I sat, as I did every day, before my amber monochrome screen and monitored the exchanges on deployments, requirements, meetings, occasionally answering a request for information or confirmation from the CT office. Usually I did not dare take part in the electronic banter that appeared on the screen between formal messages from the officers manning their own screens in the various branches of the intelligence and military counterterrorism community. I was too green, too junior; who was I to make a flippant comment to someone in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or the Marines at Quantico, whom I did not know, when I did not know what I was doing or how things were done? The one or two efforts I risked were, it seemed to me, condemned by silence. I was not a full member of the tribe yet, and perhaps had not learned how to sound like one.

A message from the White House appeared on the screen. It said something like,

I’d like everyone in the Community to know how much we here at the White House appreciate your efforts in the recent operation. It was a great job. We really appreciate it. Keep it up. Good work.

Thanks,

Ollie

I swung my chair around to the left to look at John as he stood before his desk on the other side of our little windowless vault.

“Hey, John,” I said. “Who’s Ollie?”

John wheeled on me. His eyes bugged out.

“Ollie? Ollie?! That’s Ollie Fucking North! You mark my fucking words. That fucking North is going to fuck up this fucking government!”

I thought John was, typically, a little overexcited. I just nodded and said nothing, my eyebrows raised. This was the first time I had heard of Ollie North. John had been so vehement, though, his remarks stayed with me.

I was green, but I was learning fast about the political, legal, and constitutional dangers of zealotry and of too passively accepting orders from superior officers. Formally, the CT office was the lead agency in the counterterrorism community, but over the ensuing months it became clear to me that the CT office and the CIA were being kept out of the loop on various operations run by the White House and Ollie North. We could tell there were operations going on but did not know what they were. I felt at the time some frustration but figured that the White House was the boss, and that it could conduct its business without involving the CIA if it wanted to.

Eighteen months later the Iran-Contra scandal exploded, nearly bringing down President Reagan’s administration, and ultimately showing Ollie North to have bypassed the normal checks and balances on intelligence operations, in the belief that he was right, as his secretary Fawn Hall said, to “go above the written law.” A number of my colleagues, one of whom had been among my superiors at the CT office (everyone was my superior at the CT office), were caught up in North’s (and William Casey’s) machinations, had followed orders from the White House, and were indicted.

John had known exactly what he was talking about.

Working in the field over the succeeding years, or managing operations from Headquarters, the terrorist reports one saw, and the work in which I was sometimes involved, created the impression that al-Qa’ida and Islamic terrorists posed a coherent, serious, and growing threat. In the 1980s, as a desk officer on the Lebanon and counterterrorism branches, our work occurred in a context of kidnapping, torture, and bombings of Americans and American facilities. On the Lebanon Desk and in the CT Office, I literally saw what Hizballah and Islamic Jihad did to our colleague, William Buckley, simply to spite us and to enjoy his agony. It was sadistic, and perverse, acts of domination and humiliation perpetrated by callous men, serving a twisted organization, unconsciously exorcising a culture of failure. I worked with colleagues who had survived the 1983 bombings of our embassy and our Marine barracks in Beirut. They told me of what they had experienced, of floors falling from under their feet, of walls falling on top of them, of rubble, smoke, cries, spurting blood, and shockingly white bones jutting through torn flesh—the results of our terrorist enemies’ operations.

From 1997 through August 2001, I worked the Afghan target, which meant, as far as the CIA was concerned, trying to detain or, eventually, kill Usama Bin Ladin, and to disrupt and destroy al-Qa’ida. During these years the Agency substantially increased the pressure on him and his organization. Largely ignored by the public, the tensions and lethal maneuvers steadily increased. The Agency, from DCI George Tenet on down, was highly focused on the Bin Ladin threat. To its credit, so was the Clinton administration, which fully appreciated the risks al-Qa’ida posed.

In 1998, Bin Ladin issued his fatwa calling on “every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.” Later that year, al-Qa’ida blew up our embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es-Salaam, while we broke up a similar plot to our embassy and personnel in Tirana. In December 1998, DCI Tenet sent to all CIA officers involved in counterterrorism work a message “declaring war” on al-Qa’ida. He sought, and obtained, authorization for the Agency to take much more aggressive action, including the use of lethal force if necessary. Late in 1999, I worked on the Millennium Bombing plot, in which an alert U.S. Customs officer, and subsequently the FBI, stopped a plot to set off a bomb in Times Square that New Year’s Eve.

Like most, my attention to the issues was sporadic, a series of disjointed perceptions among a large range of unrelated cases and challenges, and so, as we all do, I relied on two-dimensional characterizations that were short on distinctions, mental shorthand that lumped together dramatically different Islamic societies, and the challenges they posed to the United States.

But after fifteen years of observing, and periodically working on, terrorist cases, it appeared to me, as it did to most of my colleagues in the DO, that Islamic terrorists posed a serious, coherent threat to the United States and the West, and that Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida were the key to our problem.

1 CT—Career Trainee, the officer corps in training at the Agency.