Thunderclaps and Growing Leaves

Resolving never to despair . . .

—Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

My contact and I had arranged to meet for lunch on September 1, 2001, on the plaza at the base of the World Trade Center towers. It was a spectacular early autumn day, with low humidity, the temperature in the eighties. We sat surrounded by thousands, and I watched over her shoulder the incongruous sight of country music singer Carolyn Dawn Johnson leading forty or fifty jacketless businessmen and -women of lower Manhattan in a line dance. “I never thought I’d see this!” Johnson shouted out over her band.

My contact and I discussed a terrorist case I was working. We needed to establish a relationship with a man who restricted himself to a narrow routine and rebuffed any approach by anyone outside his circle of associates. But I knew three things about him that made me confident he was for the having: He jogged every day, he spent a lot of his free time chasing girls, and he did not discuss his skirt-chasing with the people he worked with. My contact was a sophisticated, beautiful young woman. Men turned their heads to admire her as they walked past us. Her dress was refined: gray skirt, white blouse, and heels; yet her clothes hugged her body, her heels were high, her back straight, her regard direct. The slightest, appraising smile briefly hinted at the corners of her lips as I spoke. She evoked strong, momentarily controlled sensuality.

“Of course I’ll do it. I can take care of myself. It’ll be fun.” She looked at me with an expression combining irritation and amusement. “You are all so predictable.”

I told my contact when and where the man we wanted would be jogging, and arranged for her to jog the same route every day, in tight shorts and a tight T-shirt. I told her where to stop and stretch from time to time.

“Got it. This’ll be easy. I’ll let you know.”

Our business concluded, my contact left to take a cab back to her normal life. I smiled slightly myself as I watched her cross the vast plaza, walking with purpose, her white blouse bright in the sun. She stopped about one hundred yards off and crouched to retrieve something, remaining motionless for a moment. At last she slipped from view behind the throng of men and women hurrying in every direction. I returned to Washington, enthused about the operation, confident that I was clandestinely controlling events.

Ten days later, the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Flight 93 attacks caught me at the office, on the phone arguing with our Finance Department. I had not been paid for nearly eight weeks, which I had discovered only when my checks all started to bounce. When my officemate stuck his head through the door and told me that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center, I refused to leave my desk and join everyone else around the television in the front office. Nothing was going to distract me from browbeating Finance into straightening out my pay.

I still refused to go watch when the second plane hit. Then someone spread the news—later proven untrue—that a bomb had exploded in front of the State Department. The finance officer I was talking with apologized and said that he could not do anything for me with the confusion caused by the attacks.

My wife, Sally, was closer to events. An arborist had come to cut away some large branches that were scraping and damaging our slate roof. The arborist had just departed and Sally had made herself her morning cup of tea. She was sitting on the steps in our back patio, sipping from her mug and feeling satisfied that she could check off one item from the never-ending to-do list of home projects. The morning was magnificent, with bright sunshine and cool, dry air.

A deep, long rumble rolled over the rooftops. Strange, she thought. Someone must be demolishing a building somewhere. About a minute or so later, from every direction sirens went off; fire engines, police cars, who knew what. Now, that was very strange. Something was going on. She went into the kitchen to turn on the radio (we had no television in the house yet, as we were just unpacking from a move) and heard about the World Trade Center attacks.

She called me on the telephone to tell me.

“I know,” I said, “but I can’t talk. I can’t talk. We just received the order to evacuate the building immediately.”

“Take the side roads! Take the side roads!” she shouted as I hung up, not knowing if I had heard before the line went dead. I had. It was good advice.

Sally realized that the explosion she had heard was the plane crashing into the west side of the Pentagon, and the sirens the responses of all the fire and EMT units in every direction.

I drove home on deserted secondary roads in Northern Virginia, stopping at an intersection, the only car on the road in any direction, to listen to Dan Rather broadcast, himself largely stunned to silence, the collapse of the towers. I managed to get home before the roads all became virtually impassible with everyone in the city, it seemed, fleeing downtown.

I stopped at a Circuit City, determined not to have my life dominated by terrorists. The store was deserted. All the salespeople were bunched around one of the dozens of televisions on the wall, watching the ruin in Manhattan, the reports of a plane down in Pennsylvania, of the grounding of all the planes in the entire country, and of chaos in Washington. I interrupted a young saleswoman.

“I’d like to see some of the televisions.”

She looked momentarily stunned, then returned to herself. “Oh! Of course. Yes. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

We examined the wall of televisions, all of them reporting on the terrorist attacks. After five minutes literally surrounded by dozens of moving images of smoke, fear, and rumor, I had to concede that my self-conscious effort at normality was hollow. To the woman’s visible relief, I thanked her and returned to my car, the only one in the shopping center’s parking lot.

When finally I arrived home, we picked our kids up from school and, like everyone else, watched and listened to the day unfold. I continued my project of the moment, with the radio on in the background: painting our house. “I will not have my life disrupted by these schmucks,” I thought.

September 11 was our son, Spencer’s, eighth birthday. “They’ve ruined my birthday,” he said. That night, as we watched the news reports, he sat on the floor, made World Trade towers with his Legos, and flew his toy planes into them.

The country was in turmoil with the 9/11 attacks. A week later letters containing anthrax spores arrived simultaneously at a number of news media offices. The authorities and the public assumed that the letters came from al-Qa’ida. It was clear that our government was preparing to attack Afghanistan. But normal life continued, sort of. I took our children, Spencer and Margaux, to the adjacent Air and Space Museum, only to stumble upon police and men in bio-chem suits. I said nothing, and learned later that anthrax had been found inside the building, part of the anthrax attacks that everyone assumed to be a follow-on to the 9/11 attacks.

But what consumed my energies, and hindered my focus on work, was the terrifying and mystifying descent of my wife into what I feared might be insanity.

My home life had been in chaos in the months before 9/11, and I struggled to understand why. I did not know what had happened to Sally, or why, or what to do about it. She became shrill, capricious, hypersensitive. She slept for long, long periods, refusing to get out of bed. Yet, she was exhausted all the time. Everything I did was wrong. She was angry at my absences, irritated at my every word, and resented me when I was present. She stopped taking care of the routine tasks of daily living, such as the dishes, or grocery shopping, or making the kids’ school lunches. And when I did them, she became angry with me. She would not go out with me, to the movies, or to friends. She stopped seeing her own friends. We could not have anyone over, as it was too demanding. I was at a loss. I assumed that her behavior toward me had to be due to my work. Being a case officer can place a huge strain on married life.

Often I worked long hours, and returned to find the kids in bed, but Sally passed out on the sofa, or half in bed. If I spoke to her, she lashed out, or became uncontrollably emotional: giddy, or despondent, or teary, or viciously, impossibly, irrationally angry. I tried to shield the children from these moods, while maintaining a normal demeanor with them. I tried to keep everything normal. I did a good job at it; our kids remained happy and trusting, from what I could tell. But it came to the point where my pulse rose every night as I approached my front door after work, and throbbed in my ears so that, literally, I could not hear anything else. What crisis would I find behind the door this night? I guiltily thought that if I came home later, there might be less to deal with. But of course I could not do that, however much work I had to justify staying late at the office; I had to take care of the kids. I had to be mother and father. I had to make home a loving, safe, and happy place. And I had to work.

But I started overlooking occasional minor details at work and in day-to-day life. I laughed it off, pointing out to anyone that “absentmindedness is a sign of genius, you know.” I then added a typical self-deprecatory humorous coda, “Of course, my mother always replied to me when I told her that, ‘I’m sure that is true, Glenn. But what, then, is your excuse?’” Always a sociable, friendly loner, I withdrew into myself. I spoke with no one about my concerns. I needed to handle this myself.

Sally was a highly successful fashion designer in Paris by profession. Blond, blue-eyed, feminine but strongwilled, she was in her element in the Paris fashion shows she organized or canoeing the coastline of Maine with me.

I married Sally in part because she looked me in the eye and spoke for herself, always. I wanted someone who would challenge me and support me. So her descent—our descent—into what appeared increasingly like madness bewildered me. I thought I needed to consult a psychologist, to learn what was happening, and what I should do. I had tried to cope on my own too long and had delayed past good sense. The situation was paralyzing.

At first, my errors at work were inconsequential. I often worked until the wee hours, sometimes to 3:00 a.m. I was working to the limit of my strength, and excelling—recruiting sources, providing important intelligence, and leading a “normal” professional life, too, so far as my non-intelligence officer peers could see, with all its own demanding responsibilities. I received several exceptional performance awards for my work during this period. I thrilled to my job to an extent I had never felt before and gave more than I had to give. I was determined to use all my abilities, and not to let any personal problem stop me. And, even though I often felt a knot in my stomach about my home crisis, and about work, I smiled, laughed, focused intently, and excelled. I compartmentalized well: one moment I would think of my personal issues, the next my work, the next my “public” life, and at each switch I would, so far as I was aware, simply put my other concerns out of my mind. I wore earphones at work as I wrote my reports and cables, listening to Shania Twain or Joe Cocker. The music blocked out distractions so that I could concentrate, and made me happy. Of course, I was alone in the office when I finally went home, and therefore was responsible to secure it, engaging the various systems, locks, and devices that protected the office from any kind of intrusion. All routine. I had done this many hundreds of times, for over fifteen years.

I was also frequently the first in to my part of the office, arriving about 7:00 a.m, sometimes only four hours after my departure. Last out, first in. I reversed the security measures, opening one thing or another, opened my safe, and opened up the office. One of these mornings I took each of these steps and, at last, came to my own safe. The safe was closed, but I found that the combination lock had not been “spun off.” The tumblers were not fully engaged. I had forgotten to spin the dial as I had left. Despite the numerous other systems successfully engaged, and the certainty that there had been no compromise of security, I was in violation of security procedure. Irritated at myself, I reported my error to our security officer and received the standard “security violation.”

But for all my compartmentation, focus, and intensity, I was distracted, stressed, and exhausted. I was also unlucky. Not too long later I secured the office again. One of the door sensors would not engage. I called the security office to report the problem. They could not engage it, either. I called the main security office at Headquarters to inform them. All other systems were engaged. We had a guard present. The system was faulty. After more than two hours of staying at the door, in the hallway, the security people and I decided I could do no more, that the office was not at risk of compromise, and that I had informed all relevant authorities. I went home. But, I received another violation.

A number of months later I had to secure a different door, in a different part of the office. I had never had to secure this particular door before. Officers in my category rarely went to this part of our office. But, this day, I was responsible for it. I was apprehensive about having received the violations, after a career without any. I asked a superior, who was also a friend, the deputy of the branch in which I worked, to secure the door with me. I wanted to be extra careful. We secured the door together, making sure it was secure. We both signed our names on the security check list.

But, we were wrong. There was an additional lock to spin off. We had not known. We missed it. Yet we were responsible for it. Again, no system was compromised, but we both received violations.

By this point I had become extremely nervous about securing the office, and had established a pattern of problems. Any further violations could be disastrous for me professionally. I never mentioned these accumulating problems to Sally. She and we were already overwhelmed by her own—our own—problems. I feared that they would simply anger her more, and that she would add painful criticism about these failings to all the other strains I was trying to cope with—even to understand—between us. No, I had to handle this myself.

I continued to work unsustainable hours, to excel, and I remained, at root, lost about how to help Sally and myself. Sometimes I wondered if I were burying myself in my work in an effort to simplify my life. I tried to pay extra attention to my security measures.

Then, at home, I had a revelation. Hanging up my coat one evening, I noticed a large, half-empty bottle of wine in the back corner of the closet, in among the boots and shoes. I marked the level of wine. The mark did not help me. The next day, the entire bottle was replaced with another, also half-empty I felt obtuse not to have seen what was happening. But she did all her drinking in secret. I felt a pang of recognition: My family’s friend, Michael Dukakis, had been pilloried when he ran for president in 1988, for supposedly not having been aware of his wife’s substance-abuse problems. He was denounced as cold and out of touch. How could such a brilliant man be so unaware? Now I understood. I had been unaware, too.

I confronted Sally with the bottle I had found. I spoke to her about what I at last knew was a serious drinking problem. Ignorant for so long, now I raised the issue over and over, week after week. Of course, that had no effect, except to make her resentful and to cause rancor. There was already enough of that, with her mood changes. I did not know what to do. I started to arrange with a psychologist to have an intervention. This was a whole new universe for me. No one in my family drank. No one talks about these matters. At least, nothing had registered on my consciousness. I kept telling the psychologist, “I want to help my wife. I don’t have a problem myself.” He looked at me and did not contradict me, but repeatedly explained how alcoholism was a family problem and was affecting me as much as Sally. “I don’t drink!” I replied in some exasperation. We scheduled the intervention for a couple weeks later. I started calling family members and friends for their help. Everyone was supportive, which was heartening.

But the horrors grew even worse. The psychologist and I were not fast enough. One evening I was working on the computer in the bedroom, not wanting to think about work, or home; I just wanted to turn off my brain. Sally was cooking in the kitchen. I heard a plate crash. I paid no attention and was barely aware of it. Ten minutes later I wandered into the kitchen to get a soda from the refrigerator. Sally lay unconscious on the floor. I was angry, disdainful. I decided to leave her there to sleep it off. I stepped over her . . . into a huge and growing pool of blood. It covered half the kitchen floor.

“Oh no! Sally! What have you done?” I crouched down to look at her head. It was all bloody, and I saw a bright white bit through her hair. It was her brain. “Sally! Sally!” I wanted to revive her, but not to awaken and terrify the kids with this scene.

I sat her up. She was breathing. What I thought was her brain was her skull. She had passed out and hit her head on the corner of the kitchen counter, the blow just missing her temple. She had been bleeding terribly since I had heard the crash. I applied pressure to her gash with one hand—I was afraid she had cracked her skull—and dialed 911. She came to vague awareness in the interminable time before the EMTs arrived.

Three hours later, when she had recovered enough to speak at the hospital, the doctor asked her, “Have you been drinking?” Sally denied it. But she looked at me later from her emergency room gurney and said, “I’ll never drink again. I don’t want to. Please. Please. Help me.”

This terrible episode served as the intervention. I managed, with numerous painful disasters along the way, over a long period of time, to get Sally into an inpatient program. She drank herself into a stupor in fear and spite the night I drove her to the first inpatient program. When she came around in the car, she shrieked at me in anger that I was forcing her to do anything. First, she tried to jump out of the car as I drove us through the Lincoln Tunnel, heading toward Pennsylvania. Then, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, she broke free. She punched me in the side of the head while I drove at sixty-five miles per hour. She opened the door and started to jump out of the car. She got one leg outside. I grabbed her by the shirt and yanked her back, the car swerving wildly as I tried to drive and hold her down. For the next two hours I bodily restrained her with one hand, while driving with the other. I got lost. I could not consult a map, hold her, and drive at the same time. I stopped to get my bearings in the middle of nowhere. She leaped out of the car and ran off into a cornfield and the freezing night. I found her after fifteen minutes of searching in the dry stalks and the dark. We made it to the facility.

At first my superiors were supportive. Then they decided my family problems were consuming me. A number of months after work learned of my crisis, the deputy chief of my unit approached me after a staff meeting. One always heard the best news, or the most revealing asides, or learned the true state of affairs, in the half-whispered exchanges with colleagues while walking out of staff meetings. “The boss wants you to know that you have to straighten out your personal life. You need to make a decision. Do you understand? Are you going to carry all your wife’s problems? That’s your decision. But he wants you to know you can’t move forward with your . . . situation. It’s your choice.” I said that I understood. I was impassive. What a disaster, I thought. What a prick.

And then I made a ruinous mistake. One night I had an operational meeting, which had finished about midnight. The following morning I had a meeting in one part of town, and also had to be at a second meeting across town at the same time. I had my notes with me in my briefcase from the previous night’s meeting. I would write them up when I finally managed to get to my office, sometime mid-afternoon.

The people at the first morning meeting were foreign colleagues, with whom I worked nearly every day, some intelligence officers like me. I left the first meeting early, saw that it was impossible to find a taxi, and literally ran about a mile across town to get to the second meeting in time to participate. I sat down and began to take part, totally focused on the issue under discussion, the previous night’s, and the morning’s first meeting, now completely out of my head. I was struck by the cool sensation of my sweat running down my cheeks in a strongly air-conditioned room.

Then, my nerves jolted down my arms and in my chest. I remembered that I had left my briefcase at the first meeting, with my foreign colleagues. I had forgotten to take it with me. It had my work notes and materials in it. This was a catastrophe. I was finished. Even without the accumulation of violations, indicating that something dramatic had been happening to me, which work could not ignore, this error was at least a tour-ending disaster. And I was responsible for it. I had done it.

I retrieved the briefcase in about two hours. But, for that period it had been out of the control of the responsible CIA officer (me), and in the control of what one had to assume might be a hostile party. My boss and I spoke about what happened about two hours after the event. He was terribly dismayed, for me, and angry. How could I do this? What was he to do now? There was nothing I could say, or un-do. “I just forgot my bag,” I kept repeating, bereft, staring obliquely away from his regard, seeing nothing. Of course, my boss had to take appropriate action. The wheels of the security establishment that turn after a “flap” like this started to turn. I knew they would grind me up.

I had to tell Sally about this one. Late the afternoon of the day I forgot my bag, she and I talked as we walked along a street near our office. She was horrified and angry when I told her—it meant almost surely a dramatic change in our lives. Unstated, but ever-present, was that this would add to our personal woes. Yet, this problem was of my doing.

“Do you have to tell anyone about this?” she asked. “Can’t you just fix it and move on? There was no harm done.”

There was nothing else I could do. “Of course I do. I did it. I’ve got to. There’s nothing I can do. I did it.”

She looked at me, realizing I was right, and that I was doomed.

Various offices with which I had been working formally requested that I be allowed to stay in my position, valuing the work I had been doing on critical issues. These were small, but ineffective, consolations as my disaster played out. The decision remained to bring me back to Headquarters.

I was moved out of my assignment, brought back to Headquarters, and given non-operational work pending a decision on what to do with me.

Then, in a cataract of falling disaster, we were buried in another crisis. For years, Sally had coped with severe ulcerative colitis. Now, it struck again. I had to rush her to the hospital emergency room. She was hospitalized for many weeks with serious intestinal bleeding. She shockingly withered to ninety-six pounds. Massive amounts of steroids finally stopped her serious internal bleeding. She swelled up dramatically, even as she weakened. Her colon had hundreds of precancerous polyps.

I tried to be positive at work, and to focus on my responsibilities, but there was no gainsaying the personal and professional catastrophes overwhelming me. My career and home life were intertwined, and both had spun out of my control, despite all my efforts. I was devastated that I was not playing as active a role in our work hunting Bin Ladin as I would have wished—I had worked this problem directly for years and I was now an officer with nearly twenty years’ experience, no common thing; that I had been undone by simply forgetting my bag; that my concentration and career were affected by my personal woes; that I did not know what to do about them. I felt unworthy even to think of attributing any professional failings to personal issues. I was responsible for my acts, both successes and failures.

For six weeks while Sally was in the hospital I worked half days, hurrying home in my sporty red hatchback to meet Spencer and Margaux at the school bus stop. I explained to them that “Mummy has a bad boo-boo in the tummy,” but she was getting better and would be home soon. Sally came home, over the worst of her intestinal crisis. But at first her moods were no better.

The bad events had come with thunderclaps and crises. The good news, when there was any, was like a growing leaf, so slow and slight did it come. But the help Sally received, and more than anything Sally’s own struggle, gradually brought small bits of my wife back to me, and brought Sally back to herself. Her battles with the disease sapped what energy she had. Yet, after many months and many setbacks, one evening she smiled spontaneously at some inconsequential remark I made as we were driving somewhere. She did not realize it, but I did. It was something, tiny as it was. Once in a while there were other small, good signs: She took my hand as we shopped; the mood swings diminished; she could once again, progressively, offer me incisive advice. Her confidence slowly returned. My ears did not pound so when I returned home at night. But this took so long; there were so many contradictory and painful episodes that often in the moment it was hard to see much change.

Then Washington was rocked once again. In the beginning of October the Washington Sniper started to kill people as they walked to their cars in shopping centers and at gas stations. A couple of the victims were killed only a mile or two from our home. We were caught in the traffic jams after these shootings, as the police set up instant dragnets after each shooting, trying to catch the killer. Perversely, however, the sniper scare helped Sally and me heal a little bit more. We took to buying gas together, so that she could fill the pump, standing between the pump and the car for safety, while I sat in our other car at the edge of the station providing surveillance for security. So the fall of 2002 was a time of flickering but growing light, after a long period of darkness, as Sally slowly regained her physical health and showed signs once again of her true nature, as a generous, focused, witty, fun, and challenging woman. She was trying so hard, so desperately to overcome what had seized hold of her.

And then Rob stuck his head into my office. The assignment was important for the Agency, I had no doubt. It was also critical for me professionally and personally. It would put me back in my career track; it might begin my rehabilitation. I thought of the comment the deputy had made to me about choosing my career or my spouse: My “choice” was to do my job as well as I was able to, and to help my wife, and myself, with all I had, imperfect as I was—and damn my boss and the Agency that spawned him.

Sally helped me pack my bags. She knew not to ask too much about work, especially this time. Just before I got in the taxi for the airport, though, she did say, with uncertainty in her eyes, “Can you tell me how long you’ll be gone? And where you’re going?”

These questions made me ill at ease, and I was worried about her reaction. “I’ll be gone a couple of months, at least, I think.” I paused a moment, and considered. “I’m going to Paris, to start. I’ll see after that. I can’t say, really.”

I would pass through Paris. At least that much was true. Margaux wrote a little each day in a journal. She gave me her entry to take with me: “Daddys are a good thing to have. They love you.” Spencer gave me a Yu-Gi-Oh card to take along. He had written on it:

“Daddy, this is your card it repesents [sic] you because it is strong and it can keep us safe!”

I worried about Spencer and Margaux as I boarded the plane at Dulles. What if Sally took another bad turn? They were only six and eight. I hoped Sally had regained enough strength to cope. But I had learned that she had to wage that fight herself. Sometimes one can help too much and contribute to bringing everyone down.

The plane surged down the runway, pushing me back into the seat. The rumble of the tires ceased and we angled up, starting a swing north around Washington. CAPTUS was my problem now. I would shortly be CAPTUS’s problem. All my years of work on terrorism cases, all my years as a case officer, would now come into play. It was clear that this would prove to be one of the supreme moments of my professional life. I could not wait to look him in the eye, and get him to reveal the inner workings of al-Qa’ida.

An hour or two later I looked out the plane window and could see nothing, no stars, no lights below, not even the wing. The cabin lights were off. Most people were sleeping. It was cold. I pulled a blanket over my head.