IN THE SPRING OF 2007 I came back to DC and returned to my office full of introverts. Because I had been promoted, I was made a division chief, overseeing the work of analysts covering East and Central Africa and serving as a deputy to the office director.
Natsios left, Williamson came in. I stayed with some friends I had known since Kosovo and spent time looking at condos downtown.
Before I headed out to Chad, I had dropped off Jack with my friend Mikey and his kids in Florida. Mike and I had known each other for over twenty years since we had served as lieutenants together in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on the inter-German border. He had a 5,000 square foot house, a boat, and a couple of young daughters; so I thought he was a good choice to ask to take Jack while I was in Chad. He agreed, and I dropped Jack off with him just before I flew out.
When I got back I learned that his daughters were so attached to Jack—go figure—that taking him back would have been cruel and unusual. Jack was probably happier in that big house with lots of people than he would have been with me anyway. I bought a two-bedroom condo a twenty-five minute walk from the office and settled in.
I felt like I was ready to start dating. I went out with an Army intelligence officer who was writing a long graduate program paper about Darfur—we met because she wanted to interview me as part of her research. She was cute, blonde, and fourteen years younger than me. It was nice but not right.
I tried Internet dating on Match.com. It’s funny how people with similar profiles know each other. Within two weeks, I went on meet-up dates with four women who were friends or who had worked together in politics. Weird. Most of those dates didn’t work out, but one was really good. Carole was a Harvard grad who had been in and out of politics and government for twenty years. She was out of government at the time, trying to re-construct an acting career she had dropped to join the Clinton campaign in 1992. It was good. We kept going out.
I was settling down a little, but I wasn’t really home. Through all of this I was still struggling. I was on meds and seeing a psychiatrist once in a while. I had episodes where the fear or the sadness was simply overwhelming. Unlike in Afghanistan, when the images of the dead were clear, when I knew what was just over the horizon—at least for a while until the Prozac had kicked in—there was never anything identifiable, just some arbitrary, tortuous fear or sadness pummeling
That fear, as strong as it was, was no more rational than the moments on the train where, every morning, sitting with my bag on my lap, I had shaken uncontrollably, in terror for my life, afraid of some unknown something, some invisible, ethereal vapor—an attack no one else seemed to realize was imminent.
Sometimes just saying the words would be enough: Senik, Racak, Kisangani, Bunia, Muhajeriyah, or Guereda. Sometimes it would be something else, a smell or a sound that would bring it on. Being in a crowd was bad. Even on my meds, sometimes it still came. I could feel it begin right in the center of my chest. It started with a hollow feeling. I could feel my chest tightening and my breath shortening. It would spread out along my arms and up the front of my body. Most times I would try to stop it. I would control my breathing and I’d think through why it might be coming—cognitive therapy. I would flex and stretch to fight the adrenaline. I walked around and looked at other things.
But sometimes I would let it come on, allowing it, no, urging it to come and wash over me, tossing me about, shaking me loose from the moorings of my normal life, the life the Chirpy Bastards could see. I wanted it. I wanted it to take me somewhere. I wanted it to show me what I was afraid of. I would go with it willingly. It had been with me so long that I didn’t really fear the sensation. I trusted it. It had been part of me so long it had changed my chemistry like my drug of choice. It was mine. It was me.
So when I would let it just come, it would grow and spread and take over my body as it got stronger. And my hands would shake and I’d lose the sensation of touch and feeling in my fingers. My gut would wrench, and I would cross my arms across my chest and rock back and forth. Then, when I couldn’t sit any longer, I would roll into a ball and rock, and feel it laughing at me. Laughing because it—the crazy—knew it was stronger than I would ever be. Laughing because I always thought I could take it but it always won. It always took me further than I wanted to go, but never far enough to show me what was really out there.
Once in a while it would show me some pictures on the big screen. Of course, it always waited until it was fully in control, until it had me shaking and barely breathing and rolled up in a ball, to start the show. And they would always be the same pictures, so I knew what to expect, and that made it worse. The bodies in the well, the butchered family, Senik, the bodies in Podujevo, the Serb with the gun to my head—all the Oscar-winning performances.
But some things were easy. I could get my work done. I knew the players and organizations operating in Darfur and Chad as well as anyone in the U.S. government. Analysts and organizations from across the community invited me to brief them on the war. I was in and out of CIA, DIA, NGA, and NSA regularly. Tactical and biographic analysts envied the data bases I had built while I had been operating in the area. I shared them widely, moving them off the laptop I had used in Darfur and Chad—my personal MacBook—to the classified systems the intelligence community shared.
This was a mistake. There are rules I should have followed and didn’t.
Back in the U.S., and particularly inside the Building as it’s called in the State Department, there are rules. Having operated so far and so long outside the low hum of bureaucracy, I had discounted how important some rules were taken to be. I’d transferred unclassified data from one computer network to another, this one a classified network in a quick and efficient, but un-approved method. Maybe I did it more than once. I don’t know. It was a simple electronic transaction like sending an email with an attachment. I used a thumb drive given to me in Chad by someone in the defense attaché’s office; when I was done with it I gave the thumb drive to some officers at DIA.
One of my regular tasks was to brief senior officials on the war in Darfur. I met the man who had been nominated to become the next U.S. Ambassador to Chad, and spent time talking to him as he prepared for his confirmation hearings. Before he left for post, he selected me to be deputy chief of mission (DCM), his number two at the embassy in N’Djamena.
This changed everything for Carole and me. If we were serious, she would have to go with me—which meant we’d have to be married. If she were going with me, she’d need language training—which meant we’d have to be married. So we decided to take the leap after only having known each other for about nine months. We went to California to spend Passover with her family. After the Seder, we drove up the coast to Big Sur and got married on a deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We were deliriously, giddily happy.
Back in DC, she enrolled in French language training. I went to a mandatory training course for DCMs. I was surrounded by senior officers going out to Japan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and other big, important countries. I was probably the most junior officer in the course.
One afternoon in the middle of class, the course director handed me an envelope. Inside was a note that instructed me to be at an office in the Building the next day at 9:00 a.m. to be interviewed by Diplomatic Security agents.
I went to the interview. I had broken rules regarding the protection of classified information when I transferred the data on the thumbdrive to the network. They asked some questions and I answered them; I thought we were done. In the previous twenty-four-plus years of my service I had never had so much as a security infraction, much less a violation. This sort of thing usually resulted in a minor admonishment or a formal note marking the infraction.
But, two weeks later the phone rang on my desk. The woman on the other end told me my security clearance had been suspended, and that I was to turn in my diplomatic passport and State Department access badge. I could no longer access computers or any classified information.
This is an administrative death sentence to an intelligence officer or a senior foreign affairs officer. I did as I was told, and returned my passport and access badge to the security agents that afternoon. I stopped in at a bar on the walk to the Metro and had a beer. I wondered what I was going to do.
My boss told me to try to stay current on the goings-on in Darfur, but not to bother coming into the office. I couldn’t work, no one could share classified information with me, and I would have needed an escort to even walk around in the office. I did some research and learned that these types of cases could take six to seven years to resolve—some took even longer—and for that period the officer was usually stuck in a make-work job with no chance of promotion, no opportunity to do substantive work, not really working at all. In the patois of the Department, this is called “walking the halls.”
So I sat at home. With nothing else to occupy my mind, I became paranoid. I spent every day listening for the turn of wheels in the drive, for the knock on the door and the flash of the badge when the security agents came to arrest me.
I was terrified that I would relapse under the stress. My lawyer advised me not to reveal my mental health problems and the consequent memory issues, to the security agents. I couldn’t imagine they didn’t already know, but in all the interviews, it never came up. It was in my records, so surely, I assumed, they had access to it.
In interview after interview, I couldn’t answer their questions. I just didn’t remember what they wanted to know, and I didn’t have the thumb drive. They brought in a supervisor. I still couldn’t resolve their questions.
When, late in the year, a colleague was arrested and admitted to spying for the Cubans, I began to understand their tenacity. They thought they had in me another major case, another big spy. In fact, they had a middle-aged guy with PTSD who couldn’t remember a simple electronic transaction: the transfer of a couple of documents from one computer system to another with a thumb drive.
I talked to the lawyers and learned that I could just walk away, and all the pain would end. I discussed it with Carole, and we decided I would retire. I notified the Department and my lawyers that December 31st would be my last day in government service.
But making this decision didn’t lower the stress level much. After the initial giddiness had worn off, I was still at home every day with nothing to occupy my mind. The stress of the investigation sent me reeling. I wasn’t sleeping enough. I was drinking too much. I started to have the images in my head again.
Carole and I had only been married a few months, and suddenly I was under investigation and at risk of losing my job or maybe going to jail. I know she was worried about me. I didn’t go to work, I couldn’t. I sat at home every day reading articles on the internet and watching the window for agents coming to arrest me, listening to every car that passed on the street, and fearing it would be the one.
The agents never came, the cars never stopped. But every day I sat, paralyzed by fear, waiting for the knock on the door, imagining the arrest and seizure of assets, visualizing my life crumbling around me.
I wasn’t sleeping well, so in the middle of the night I would go upstairs and sit in the dark. Carole would come upstairs in the mornings to find me sitting alone, shaking and crying, terrified of that unknown something out just beyond the perimeter.
Obviously, she knew my history. She worried. “Promise me you won’t kill yourself,” she said. “Promise me you’ll ask for help, that you’ll come to me before things get that bad.”
“What?” She asked.
“Before things get that bad, again,” I said.
Once I had decided to retire, she took a job on Capitol Hill as communications director for the congressional committee in charge of the Obama inaugural ceremonies.
As the clock ticked down to the inaugural, she couldn’t miss work to care for me. So, I got a dog. One of Carole’s friends runs a rescue group that drives a van every weekend down to South Carolina to pull dogs out of kill-shelters before they are put to the needle. We picked a dog called Cotton out of the line-up one weekend and brought him home. He was skinny and petrified, but I thought there was something behind the eyes that looked promising. We renamed him Harry.
He had some dings in the flap of his ear—he was said to be half Labrador and half coonhound, so he had some ears—and a couple of scars on his muzzle that the vet said would probably never go away. The woman at the rescue shelter said he had been used as a bait-dog in a dog-fighting ring. I had to do some research to figure out what that meant.
“They use very sweet-natured dogs to train other dogs to fight, because those dogs will not fight back—they’re called bait dogs,” said Dr. Patricia Latas of the Humane Society in an interview that I had heard on the radio. The humans who run dog-fighting rings tie the good-natured, sweet dogs to poles so they can’t escape the attacks of the fighters. Apparently, few bait dogs survive the process. When we heard this, instead of thinking that we had a challenge on our hands, we were immediately suspicious of the gut-grab sell, such as when a humanitarian aid NGO shows a starving kid with big eyes on its ads to get you to donate.
Harry had spent ten months in a shelter before we got him. He needed contact with humans and was deathly afraid of a cage. Hounds are master escape artists. He broke out of every crate we put him in, and twice broke out of our house and through a hole in the fence. After a neighbor brought him home once, we spent a couple thousand dollars replacing the fence—money we were planning to spend on a trip to Paris. The second time he scaled the six-foot fence and went on the lam for five days. On day two, we later figured out, he was hit by a car. The vets who treated him afterwards assured us he was looking for us, not running from us. But it was a traumatic time for him and us. He had $7,000 worth of surgery, repairing all four paws and re-building his shattered ulna.
It wasn’t until Harry had been shaved for surgery that we knew the bait-dog stories were true. The puncture and rip scars all over his neck, shoulders, and legs said what he couldn’t.
For the next few months, Harry and I sat at home: me waiting for the security agents to come with a warrant for my arrest, and Harry healing and gaining weight. I still wasn’t sleeping well, so in the middle of the night if I got up to go upstairs to my office Harry would be right behind me. He would curl up on the floor directly behind my chair, so if I moved he’d know it. During the day he would position himself between me (wherever I was) and the door, doing his best to be my protector and staying in sight of me to help calm him down. It got to the point where Carole started calling him Velcro.
Weeks went by after we got him back, but I couldn’t leave him at home. He was still too freaked out to be alone, so he came along with me in the car wherever I went. He owned the back seat of my car. The vet behaviorist said we would probably never be able to leave him alone or let him off leash. But we began to try.
It took four months to get him to the point where I could leave him for an hour. Then, once, I was late, and he panicked. We had to start over: one minute, two minutes, five minutes. We put him on Prozac. Every morning I’d roll a couple of the pills in a ball of cream cheese and give it to him. I’d take my meds right alongside him. Together, slowly, we began to heal.
Carole and I went to a show at The Kennedy Center on New Year’s Eve. It ended just before midnight, and we headed home to have a dessert and some champagne. At midnight my retirement from government service became effective. For the first time in twenty-five years, I was unemployed.