Victims of Delusion

Certainly he scored it, bold, and black, and firm,

In that Indian paper—made his seniors squirm,

Quoted office scandals, wrote the tactless truth—

Was there ever known a more misguided youth?

—Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Could Write

A piercing high-low alarm tone sounded throughout the office. We all had to crouch under our desks immediately. This is to protect us to some extent from any flying or crashing objects if anything bad were to happen. This was the first time I had had to get under my desk.

Years earlier, when I was serving overseas during the first Gulf War, we had to evacuate the office one evening due to a report that someone, presumably Iraqi agents, was going to blow it up. It was a festive occasion then, all of us making flippant, wry remarks. The air was chill and the squares and streets were stunning with their twinkling lights. Then, as I was walking past a beautiful hotel, all the lights in the area went out simultaneously. I had a momentary shock. Was the evacuation more serious than we were taking it? In the end, the blackout was unrelated to the Gulf War, nothing happened and we went back to our offices. This time, none of us felt festive. We took the threat seriously and did not mind the petty indignity of hiding under a desk. We all had to wait there until the loudspeaker announced “all clear.” It had been only a drill.

I had returned to the station and the country where I had interrogated CAPTUS for a rushed few days of cable writing, meeting with liaison, and tying up the loose ends of a complicated case. As usual, each day I worked until my colleagues shut the station down, about 9 or 10 p.m. Peter, the COS, had asked me to write up an overview cable of my work before I left. I agreed, but told him I had written the overview cable from Point Zero and did not know what to add in a cable from here. I put it off.

Near the end of my last day Peter came back to my desk again, in a bad mood because other people in the office had not done what he had expected of them. I had not done the wrap-up cable. I was at a loss, and I also did not want to rub Washington the wrong way more than I already had in my blast cables from Point Zero.

Peter expressed his frustration about various matters and then asked, “Have you done the cable?” It was not the moment to go into an explanation or rationalization for what he could interpret as only my inaction.

“No, I’ve been writing some pretty important reports all day.” He looked expectant, as though he was turning a little of his exasperation to me. “And I don’t want to piss off Headquarters by sending in yet another cable that disagrees with them.”

“Let me simplify it for you,” Peter told me. “It’s your work. It happened here. It is appropriate to do a wrap-up cable from here. I don’t care what Headquarters is pissed off about. It’s late. You leave tomorrow. Do the cable. Got it?”

I looked at him. His eyebrows were slightly raised. “Got it. I’ll do it.” I did it. He was not especially irritated with me; more, my not having done the cable was an end-of-the-day example, after an afternoon’s worth of them for Peter, of how nothing goes as it should and of how the boss can never quite get his staff to accomplish what he would like. He did not want to hear a story; he wanted his subordinates to do what he asked. I was surprised, however, that he had not seen my two cables. I assumed that he had been too busy to focus on my case and that, in any event, as he said, his responsibility was his station, not what I had written many thousands of miles away, out of his charge.

I arrived at the office at 7 the following morning to fine-tune the cable. Peter was in a much better mood. He asked me to write another quick cable. Done, even though my time was short; I had to be out of there by 9 a.m., and our commo guy—communications officers, of either sex, are invariably called commo guys—came in at 7:40 to tell us we had to log off because “I have to bring the system down.”

“You were supposed to do that at 0700. What you’re telling me is that you were supposed to be here at 0700, but you weren’t.” The commo guy laughed. Peter looked at him. He did not laugh. “Next Friday, come in at 0700.” The boss’s day was starting as bosses’ days do.

I went into Peter’s office to summarize my cable and brief him on my work before my departure. Peter had not focused on my departure date. “You’re leaving today? In an hour?” He became very friendly, expressing his best wishes, making suggestions about what I could do back in Headquarters, suggesting people I should talk to about my next assignment. I was touched.

A few minutes later the daily staff meeting began, the whole office gathering just as I had to leave. Everyone smiled, shook my hand, wished me well. I felt true warmth and friendship, that I was a liked colleague and friend. I was moved to feel their goodwill—earned goodwill—toward me. A select, elite brotherhood. Jack, my officemate during my stay, and I shook hands last.

“You’ve got your office to yourself now,” I said to him.

“Given your fetish about urinals, I was going to give you a pot to piss in as a going-away gift, but then I figured you’d need a stool to stand on to use it, so it wasn’t worth it.”

I laughed. “Jack, this is your first tour, and already you have grown to be a fool.”

I would have cherished such a pot.

Then I was out the door, hurrying to the hotel to check out and to catch my plane.

Traffic to the airport was light. The driver was chatty. I did not really feel like chatting. The Chevrolet Lumina felt very big and luxurious. “I’m not accustomed to American cars anymore,” I said. The sun broke through the rain clouds as we arrived at the airport. I had time to read a couple of pages of Le Figaro, then we embarked.

We took off just a few minutes later. Clouds quickly obscured any view. Other passengers were eating, or reading, shoes off, absorbed in their lives, comfortable in their routines. The flight back to Washington was long, requiring a couple of changes of plane. The in-flight films held no appeal to me on this trip, nor did the book or Figaro I had with me. Much of the time I spent staring blankly out the window, peering into the clouds and, eventually, the ocean miles below.

My work on the CAPTUS case had been one of the supreme challenges of my career. It had begun to change my views about the terrorist threat to our nation, and made me aware of grave conceptual errors in our counterterrorism structures and practices. A woman across the aisle was wiggling her stocking-footed toes. A child beside her played with his earphones and station buttons. I tried to spot some detail on the ocean but could not make out what I was looking at. I knew, though, that if only we descended low enough I would be able to see it surging, currents flowing, whitecaps endlessly foaming, rolling, and disappearing back into the waves.

As I looked at the ocean I could not see, I thought about my decision to write my last cables in Point Zero trying to set the CAPTUS case right and stating “No! Enough!” We all shape our actions, and our convictions of what is acceptable behavior, in relation to the norms around us. There are the Ten Commandments, of course, the Golden Rule, millennia of religious precepts and civil laws. These give our societies our sense of right and wrong. But, day to day, our understanding of duty and honor, of how to behave, is bounded and defined by the prevailing beliefs and behavior of those around us. We then, according to our personal lights and moral compass, fit our behavior within this imperfect circle. Some will be punctilious about the rules; others will let them slip; but almost all of us define right actions and right thinking in reference to the bell curve of behavior and belief of those around us. So, only slightly more than a generation ago, it was acceptable to shun those who broke the color line and fraternized with someone from the opposite race. So, until recently, it was acceptable, and even expected, that men should condescend to women and exclude them from meaningful professional activity. Some push the limits of acceptable behavior: my father who advocated sex education at a time when it was illegal to say the word “pregnant” on the airwaves, or those who moved to desegregate groups that refused entry to blacks, or to Jews. But, almost without exception, the parameters that obtain wherever we are bound what we consider acceptable behavior.

But what happens when we are confronted with exceptional circumstances touching on individual rights and social obligations, when what is “normal” and “expected” has shifted to accept, well, abominations? What do you do if you are in a laughing crowd that is about to lynch someone? What do you do if you are assigned, on penalty of death for desertion or dereliction of duty, to guard Jews being marched to the gas chambers? What do you do if, like many people I have lived with overseas, your country is destroyed, hundreds of thousands have died in weeks, you have no hope of opposing your enemy, whose regime is an abomination, and your death is almost certain if you try? What do you do if you are assigned to interrogate someone whom you believe to be a terrorist, and are instructed to use “enhanced measures” if necessary to obtain information that could save the lives of your fellow citizens, measures that the authorities to whom you have sworn service and who for your entire life have represented order and justice have determined are acceptable, but have not defined beyond the standards of “pressure” and of imagined efficacy, and which transgress law, tradition, and what your nation is supposed to represent?

Only heroes, or saints, or monsters can challenge the very order in which they live, their leaders, and the apparent course of events and history. We read about them, or sing their praise, or tell nightmare stories about them, because they are so rare. A hero like this comes only once a generation. The rest of us do the best we can, almost always within the circle of prevailing behavior, pushing against the boundaries if we are unusually strong.

I had flown out at the beginning of my assignment as enthused as one could be to be part of the Agency’s counterterrorism work. I had worked the terrorism target, as we called it, for years (although not exclusively) and I accepted the nature of the threats facing us as presented piecemeal by my institution and our leaders, inferred but unanalyzed as a series of threats, operations, and public warnings amounting to a global jihadist opponent. The 9/11 attacks were no surprise to me; I had been involved in our effort to stop Bin Ladin and had known that al-Qa’ida had been killing Americans, for years. My first extensive experience living in Arab societies these past months had, to be frank, confirmed the preconceptions I had taken with me based, I thought, on a reasoned assessment of the threats facing the United States. I shared the “clash of civilizations” paradigm. I inclined toward the conventional wisdom and pervasive view that Islam was “fundamentally ‘other,’ with core values incompatible to those of the West,” as I put it in a letter to my family, and that jihadists were the frontline warriors in a millennial struggle. I shared the dominant narrative about 9/11 and the other Islamic-based terrorist attacks, that viewed the Islam-West struggle as the defining dynamic of the post–Cold War world. I felt that, as I wrote my wife, “the hope then becomes that the power of Western values themselves will undermine the obscurantism of Islam, before Islam undermines the fragile practices of tolerance and individualism that are the West’s triumph and raison d’être.”

The number of terrorist threat reports is stunning when one first gains access to them. From all over the world, every day, from human sources, communications intercepts, liaison reports, from learned classified analytical pieces, the avalanche of reporting confirms its validity by its quantity.

The work done on the CAPTUS case, over years by many skilled analysts, was impressive. The Agency, the FBI, and other agencies had compiled a huge amount of information, which our analysts concluded tagged CAPTUS as a senior member of the al-Qa’ida network. Upon assuming my responsibilities on the case, I naturally took the collective assessment to be correct. I knew from many years’ experience that regular review of operations is an integral part of DO and DI procedures. CAPTUS was what we believed him to be, or my colleagues who had worked on his case would not have concluded that he presented a grave danger to U.S. interests.

I had been the chief officer responsible for the CAPTUS case for months, however. I was living a specific operation intensely, not reading cables and taking them as accurate-because-written, as so often happens when a report has a SECRET classification on it and has been acquired clandestinely. It is a case officer’s job to know the soul of the target.

Slowly, progressively, first in dismay, then in anger, I had realized that on the CAPTUS case the Agency, the government, all of us, had been victims of delusion. Our premises were flawed, our facts used to fit our premises, our premises determined, and our fears justified our operational actions, in a self-contained process that arrived at a conclusion dramatically at odds with the facts as I came to know them, that projected evil actions where there was, more often, muddled indirect and unavoidable complicity, or nothing much at all. These delusional ratiocinations were all sincerely, ardently held to have constituted a rigorous, rational process to identify terrorist threats. The entire edifice was like Ptolemy’s Theory of the Spheres. We built epicycle upon epicycle, circle upon circle, and all the facts fit to explain the motions of the heavens, orbiting around the earth. It was astoundingly impressive, observation substantiated theory for 2,000 years—and it was all wrong.

I concluded that we had, fundamentally, been spinning in self-referential circles. Each step taken in the case was because we saw the world through the prism of our fears. I started to use a phrase that I would subsequently use as the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats in numerous briefings and speeches, “the closer you look, the less you see.” I started to wonder what else in the Global War on Terror we might have so egregiously misunderstood or done wrong.

I came to this conviction first by discovering that the facts of the case I had been working, and had come to understand firsthand—which no one else had done—clashed with the assessment reached over years of collective effort of the nature and conduct of al-Qa’ida; then by concluding that my institution—as so often has been the case—had projected American cultural norms on a situation and a man where they were largely irrelevant.

Finally, we had been interrogating a man who had disappeared from the face of the earth, for whom habeas corpus did not exist, using methods that entered the gray areas where lawyers argued, justifications were theoretical, but men remained flesh and blood. Doubt and uncertainty define most intelligence operations. Case officers are hired because we thrive in and can see clearly through ambiguity. But this case, this situation, involving men’s lives, approached one of the supreme, “exceptional circumstances touching on individual rights and social obligations, when what is ‘normal’ and ‘expected’ has shifted to accept, well, abominations.” I grew concerned that our fears were coming to define our character. I constantly weighed at what point one must affirm, “No! Enough!” The assignment demanded that I second-guess every decision and action and get them all right, or speak up if I thought we had not. I had tried to do so. That was how I answered Wilmington’s hostile challenge from so many weeks earlier, “Which flag do you serve?”

A passenger walked past me in the aisle and brought my thoughts back into the plane. I pulled down the window shade. The jet engines, as always, cocooned us all in a loud drone and whistle. I was surrounded by passengers but, as always, I was alone. I was always alone. The child across the aisle from me was sleeping now. I had crossed the Atlantic countless times over the years. It was always the same. Yet each time the ocean below had changed, too, whether I could see it or not; and so had I. I reached for the blanket to pull it over my head, but decided I did not want to. I closed my eyes.

I descended from the plane in Washington weary, troubled, but proud. I had entered the Agency to grapple with exactly the kind of insoluble dilemmas, on important issues, that defined the CAPTUS case. I had worked hard to accomplish my mission and to discharge my responsibilities honorably. My job was to collect intelligence on terrorism and I had done so. I had forcefully challenged accepted conventions, conceptual flaws, and dishonorable compromises of principle in the case, and attempted to rectify them.

The customs doors closed behind me and I walked toward the large group of people standing behind the barriers, waiting for loved ones. My seven-year-old daughter, Margaux, with her shining chestnut hair and cute pageboy haircut, saw me first and ran over to me. We hugged and her first words were, “Daddy, you’re so bald!” My wife, Sally, and my nine-year-old son, Spencer, came over a moment later. As Sally and I hugged she whispered in my ear, “You’ve put on weight.”

Beyond the doors I was a man of the shadows, who weighed souls and manipulated men, an interrogator fighting terrorism. A hug and a whisper had transformed me back to a father and a husband, fighting early middle age.