A PLUMP, MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN perched on the edge of a battleship gray metal desk. Her expression conveyed intelligence, confidence, humor, empathy—and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Call it an unusual form of detachment: Here was someone who could evaluate you clinically, but do so with such charm that you weren’t put off. She seemed both intrigued and faintly amused by me.
With a three-by-five file card in hand, I had literally wandered in off the street into this unprepossessing, unmarked government office in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the bridge from Washington, D.C. I had no clear idea what I was there for. A series of appointments had been made for me, and this was simply the next one on the list, neatly typed by my congressman’s legislative assistant. Joe Early, Democrat from the Third Massachusetts District, was my wife’s second cousin. My brothers-in-law were precinct captains; my father-in-law had worked in Early’s last election. In a transaction recognizable to those familiar with old-fashioned Massachusetts ward politics, the congressman had done a favor for the loyal extended family of a rather clueless, long-haired twenty-three-year-old.
Long-haired and clueless though I was, “Dotty,” the CIA recruiter, seemed to have all the time in the world for me. She asked questions about my background. I really couldn’t fathom why; there was little remarkable about it. The dutiful eldest son in a Catholic family of seven children, I had grown up in a comfortable house in a comfortable suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts. My childhood had been simple and relatively happy. The nuns who taught me in the local parochial school may have been self-congratulatory in their virtue, but they offered a marvelous education. My summers were spent playing baseball, running through the woods, swimming with friends in our pool, and voraciously reading the biographies of American explorers and military heroes. Unsurprisingly, my instincts growing up were both conservative and deeply patriotic.
In something of a departure for my family, but perhaps reflective of American upward mobility, at least as it’s sometimes expressed in the Northeast, I was sent away at fifteen to Williston Academy, an old-line brick-and-ivy New England boarding prep school, the sort of place where, in those days, the teachers were still called “masters,” and the boys dressed in jacket and tie for dinner. Although the student body was liberally salted with the names of ethnic Catholics like me, and even a few Jews, the history and tone of the place, symbolized by the Episcopal chapel whose spire dominated the campus, was pure New England WASP. It was an environment that suited me. The sense of social privilege and corresponding obligation that subtly but thoroughly permeated the culture of the school felt comfortable.
Even Williston was not immune to the social and political ferment of the late sixties and early seventies, but the radical student activism of that anti–Vietnam War period left me cold. The university protesters of my generation, for all their proclaimed idealism, struck me as anything but altruistic: it seemed obvious to me that they didn’t really care a fig about the Vietnamese; they simply didn’t want to be shot at. The supposed vanguard of my generation appeared to me to be transparently self-serving, self-indulgent, and largely ignorant of the American institutions they denigrated.
Ever since my boyhood brushes with John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, and General Douglas MacArthur, I had dreamed of attending one of the military service academies. During my “Upper-Middler” (Junior) year at Williston, I got a pair of nominations to Annapolis, and went with my father for a guided tour of the campus during Plebe Summer. The evident discomfort of the Plebes notwithstanding, I was intrigued by the culture of the place, and by what I perceived as the necessity to simultaneously embrace and resist its heavy authoritarianism. That, too, suited me. I was ready to go ahead with my application.
Neither the antimilitary spirit of the times not the attitudes of my classmates could dissuade me, but my father could, and did. Ours was a highly independent family, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times my dad tried directly to influence me on anything. But this was one of those times. “Just remember,” he said. “If you join the Navy, you won’t spend your career doing what you think is best for you; you’ll do what someone else thinks is best for the Navy.” That gave me pause; I opted, instead, for a civilian education. But as I look back, I can see a young man instinctively primed for a life of public service, even if he was largely unconscious of the reasons for it, and had no idea where his proclivities might lead.
In those days, and particularly among the prep school set, it was expected that if you did well, you would naturally go to one of the “good” schools. For me, reflecting typical New England parochialism, that meant the Ivy League. When I arrived at Dartmouth, though, something changed. I had worked so hard to get there, but now, to my surprise, it felt like I had merely traded a small prep school for a bigger one. Going to college was supposed to be moving on; this felt like treading water. I rebelled, at least after a fashion. Rather than focusing on my studies, in my first year I set about addressing what I felt were the real gaps in my education. I spent much more time than was prudent hitchhiking around New England to see friends. I learned to drink, was introduced to recreational drugs, and began seriously dating girls. My grades slipped badly. My parents were shocked.
The summer after that first year, my dad pulled me aside for one of our rare little chats. A successful contractor, he framed the problem in straightforward business terms: “When I agreed to pay for your college education, I saw it as an investment,” he said. “Right now, this isn’t looking like a good one.” My grades improved thereafter, but I remained naive, idealistic, and wildly impractical. I had no idea what sort of career I might want, and while I understood the need for money, its pursuit held no interest. College, it seemed to me, was a time to discover fundamental truths: I became a philosophy major.
The Philosophy Department at Dartmouth did not prove a good fit. With few exceptions, my college professors were a disappointment to me. I had expected to find earnest seekers of truth. What I generally found instead were smart, glib fellows who knew a great deal about what other people thought. Hanover, New Hampshire, is a beautiful place, and I enjoyed the company of an eclectic group of characters in the ramshackle, countercultural fraternity I joined. But they and the few compatible professors I found were a limited antidote to the college experience itself. For reasons that said more about me than them, many of those around me seemed self-satisfied, conventional, and oddly anti-intellectual. Eager to get out of school, I managed to complete my studies in three years, which left me with the suddenly acute problem of what to do next.
I had loved boarding school and was eager to return. It may sound strange, but within what some might perceive as a straitjacket of form and tradition, I had encountered far greater freedom of thought, and far more interesting people, than I ever encountered in the supposedly freewheeling intellectual ferment and drug-fueled hedonism of 1970s eastern academia. The economic downturn of the mid-1970s had hit many private secondary schools hard, however, and there were few jobs to be had. In response to the many letters of introduction I sent out, I received only one invitation for an interview.
The position on offer at Concord Academy, outside Boston, was not at all what I had in mind. Concord had for years been a small, exclusive girls’ school, the tone set by the many socialites who sent their daughters there. Caroline Kennedy had graduated a year earlier, before going off to Harvard; the student body was dominated by old-money eastern establishment families, leavened with the offspring of film, television, and theater people. The school had only recently become coeducational, and was looking for a dorm parent for one of its few boys’ residences. It wasn’t a teaching job, but it was a foot in the door. Only slightly older than the charges I was to supervise, I was offered the position.
The following year, which would otherwise have been my last in college, was idyllic. My dorm parent’s stipend was tiny, but came with free room and board. I supplemented my income by substitute teaching in the local public schools, and helped coach the cross-country and baseball teams. I made terrific friends on the Concord faculty, and spent off-hours in the bars and cafés of Boston and Cambridge. It would all have been a good first step toward realizing my goal of becoming a latter-day Mr. Chips, but there was just one hitch: barely out of adolescence myself, I found I had little patience for the emotional trials of younger adolescents. School would be a terrific place, I thought, if it weren’t for the damned students. I was going to have to come up with something else.
That summer, a friend and I formed a house-painting company, and landed a couple of contracts to paint old colonial residences in Cambridge. Lounging in paint-spattered clothes, poring over the newspapers during meal breaks in seedy, working-class diners off Harvard Square, I found myself increasingly drawn to the international pages. I became fascinated by Middle East politics, the post-1973 emergence of the oil-rich sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, efforts to settle the Arab-Israeli dispute, and the Cold War struggle for post-colonial influence in Africa. I followed the maneuvers of Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, and Ian Smith in Rhodesia as though I were reading a weekly serial. I had always had an interest in international politics, but had never really taken the time to develop it. Now, my partner had trouble tearing me away from my reading to get me back on the job. On the basis of nothing more than that and a few romantic movies I’d seen about the Middle East, I decided to get a graduate degree in international relations.
There was just one holdup to the pursuit of my latest enthusiasm. While at Dartmouth, I had fallen in love with a Boston College nursing student, one year my junior, from a large, extended Irish family. Paula and I wanted to get married as soon as possible, but it would be another year before she could graduate. Not wanting to assume in bad faith the responsibilities of a proper, entry-level position I had no intention of keeping for more than a few months, I took a cheap, walk-up garret apartment in Boston’s Back Bay area and embarked on a series of dead-end jobs while waiting to hear back from graduate schools. When it got too cold to paint, I sold household smoke detectors door-to-door. I later became manager of a twenty-four-hour gas station, employing minimum-wage roustabouts in a tough section of Dedham, Massachusetts, while working a sixty-hour week. That year provided an enormously valuable education. Among other things, it strongly reinforced the lessons I had gleaned during summers working for my father’s construction company, where I had developed an appreciation for the ennobling qualities of hard manual labor. It also taught me that I had a knack for developing close, empathetic relationships with people who did not begin to see the world as I did.
In the spring of 1977, on a Sunday afternoon, Paula graduated summa cum laude from Boston College. We were married the following Friday, in a large Irish wedding attended by 200 people, most of whom I’d never met. Within weeks I was a kept man, studying at the University of Virginia while my wife supported me as a neonatal intensive care nurse at the University Hospital. I was twenty-two, and she twenty-one.
All that led me, some ten months later, to Dotty’s door. After about an hour of amiable but seemingly undirected conversation, she asked: What did I think I was applying for? Somewhat taken aback, I replied that I guessed I’d be interested in working as an intelligence analyst. This was my first encounter with a CIA field operative, a “case officer” in agency parlance, and so it was also the first time that one would lie to me. “We don’t have any openings for analysts,” she said. “But have you ever thought about how the U.S. government goes about gathering secret intelligence overseas?” Without any reflection, I answered truthfully. “No ma’am,” I said. “I’ve never given it a moment’s thought.”
Laughing, she told me about her own career. She, too, had married young, but to a considerably older man, a former ambassador who was one of the State Department’s original “China hands” from the 1950s. Eventually recruited and trained as a case officer by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (now called the National Clandestine Service), she had moved in her husband’s wake, able to take advantage of his contacts with senior foreign government officials and others with access to secrets of interest to the U.S. government. Her job had been to find such people, assess their motivations and their suitability to be spies, and convince them to cooperate, in secret, with the CIA.
We had spoken minutes before about the young French couple I had lived with as an exchange student in Toulouse, France. “What motivated the husband?” she asked. “What did he want in life? Was he happy with his career, with his marriage?” In truth, although I could speculate, I really wasn’t sure. Like anyone, I had lots of idle thoughts and insights into the character of friends and acquaintances, but had never really examined or tested them in any systematic way. As we spoke, I could see that the job she was describing would require me to look at the world from a very different perspective.
“We’re looking for the sort of people who sit down between flights in a crowded airport with a good book, and then never open it,” she said, “because they’re too engrossed in studying the people around them.” A successful case officer, she said, has to have empathy for people and a restless curiosity about the world, a drive to understand how things work, to understand the causes behind events. He must be resourceful and flexible, to think well on his feet. He has to be able to write quickly, succinctly, and well. And he can’t be in it just for himself, because he has to know, going in, that he will never get external recognition for what he does.
She went on to describe the various specializations in the Directorate of Operations, and a typical career progression, from street case officer or reports officer up through ascending layers of supervisory and then management responsibility. It was intriguing and intimidating. I had never particularly suffered from a lack of self-confidence, but I genuinely wasn’t sure I could do this. I kept my doubts to myself.
“You have an impressive background,” she said. “Your academics, your language ability, your time abroad all count in your favor. We can determine whether you have the psychological makeup we’re looking for, and the writing and other skills we need. What you need to decide is whether you want to do this.” My answers were equivocal.
“I’m going to suggest a book for you to read,” she said. “The Night Watch, by David Atlee Phillips. That will give you a better idea of what this is all about. If you’re interested, call me, and we’ll start the process.”
That night I called Paula from my motel room. I mentioned the appointment with CIA. “Oh?” she replied warily.
“You wouldn’t believe what they want me to do,” I said. We agreed we could never do anything like that.
“Just too weird,” she concluded.
By the time I arrived home the next day, she had already retrieved The Night Watch from the library. Over the next two days, we both read it. Phillips had had an exciting career, encompassing both high achievement and abject disaster. Although heavily involved in the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, he rose eventually to be chief of the CIA’s Latin America Division. What most came through, though, was what a decent, humane fellow he was; he didn’t fit at all the popular image of the cold, calculating, flint-hearted spy. As his life story unfolded, it was easy for us to identify with him and his clever, independent-minded wife. On the morning of the third day we looked at each other. “It would be a job,” she said.
I’ve never been much good at long-range career planning. But I did at least have a marginal talent for recognizing an opportunity when I’d stumbled over it. The application and vetting process was long, extending over seven months. As I went through the stages of submitting a lengthy, 36-page personal history questionnaire and various writing samples, taking a battery of psychological and vocational tests, speaking with a psychiatrist and a senior officer of the Near East Division and, finally, passing a polygraph examination and undergoing a background investigation, it began to dawn on me that I had somehow found precisely what I had been looking for all along. Not for the first time in my life, I discovered that it was much more important to be lucky than good.
I entered on duty as a junior officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the Clandestine Service, on January 14, 1979, the day Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi fled Iran. Less than two years later, after a year of rigorous training and some months devoted to brushing up my French and preparing on the desk, I found myself a member of the Near East Division, on my first assignment in North Africa. Over the eleven years that followed, essentially the decade of the eighties, we moved from one foreign assignment to another, six in all, in locations in the Near East and Western Europe. In all of them, I dealt almost exclusively with Middle Eastern issues. For most of that time I was under “official” cover, posing as a bureaucrat of one stripe or another, typically for a couple of years at a time. What I ostensibly did often bore little resemblance to my actual job. For two particularly exciting years, I traveled almost constantly through Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East, posing in a variety of guises, using aliases and false documents. The personalities I assumed in those days were usually much more interesting than me. It was like acting. I got to a point during that time where I could no longer sign my name without pausing for a split second to make sure I knew who I was supposed to be at the moment.
Wherever I was, my job in those years was to recruit foreigners as intelligence sources—“agents,” or “assets” in CIA parlance—and to “handle” or “run” them as spies. That meant to meet or otherwise to communicate with them in secret, to provide them with direction, and to debrief them for intelligence. The technology involved in the clandestine tradecraft we employed grew steadily in sophistication in those early years of the digital revolution, but ours remained, as it had been from time immemorial, a “people” business, just as Dotty had told me at the outset. People are complicated, and spies perhaps more so than most. Finding the motivational key to persuade someone to betray his or her country or organization, often at great risk, is difficult, exacting, and soul-searching work. Moral ambiguity is the spy’s constant companion. Once recruited, an asset must constantly be assessed and tested for changes in his motivation or his access to information. The price of failure can be high: agents can be discovered and “turned” to work against you, suborned by third parties to serve several masters or, in the case of a terrorist, lead you to your death. And yet, all the while navigating this mental and moral wilderness of mirrors, an officer must maintain a close and empathetic relationship with his or her source, lest the basis of the relationship be undermined. The case officer’s workspace is the palette of human character. In embracing the mix of high-minded and base motives that characterize most sources, you learn similar lessons about yourself.
I found that being a CIA case officer was not a job at all: it was a way of life. There was not a part of my existence it didn’t touch. Excursions with friends or school outings were engineered or manipulated to provide opportunities to meet and develop potential sources. A picnic in the countryside or a day at the beach provided cover to case a site for a subsequent clandestine meeting. I would excuse myself from a seemingly casual restaurant dinner with friends to walk out the back and make an untraceable call to a contact. Nothing in life was simple; everything had a dual purpose.
Although never directly affiliated with CIA in any way, Paula had in effect signed up for this with me, and she and our young family became an integral part of my dual life. I found she often had better, more instinctive insights into people’s character than I did, and I learned to pay attention to them. Many nights she lay awake into the wee hours with instructions as to whom she should call if I failed to return from some late-night assignation.
On one occasion, disaster struck: A “principal agent” I was running, a known enemy of a rogue, terrorist-supporting state, whose job was to manage a network of subagents, was betrayed by one of them, a childhood friend, and slain by a hit team. Fearing I might be next, my superiors in Langley demanded first that we take a “vacation” in the mountains, and then that we leave the country, permanently. We had to say good-bye to our home and to our friends, on very short notice.
It was passionate, all-encompassing work. In the words of a female colleague, in CIA your job becomes your mistress. As such, it inevitably takes a toll over time on marriages and families, and at various points ours was not excepted. But life in those years was hardly grim; it was intoxicating. For every night Paula spent worrying as I stalked through some seaside slum, there were others spent at chic dinner parties or elegant receptions. She was able to find nursing work whenever she liked, in embassies, in private schools, for oil companies, for the Peace Corps. We made wonderful friends, of many nationalities and from many walks of life. Life in poor developing countries had a colonial feel, with large houses, servants, and leafy tennis clubs. Vacations took us from exotic medieval towns in Yemen, to Roman ruins in North Africa, to the teeming markets of Hong Kong, to the topless beaches of Antibes.
Among my relatives and friends, only my parents knew that I was working for CIA. My in-laws went to their graves not knowing what their son-in-law did for a living. My father, in particular, was skeptical of my chosen profession; for the first decade or so, he thought of it as a phase that I would eventually outgrow. My mother, though, was more curious. On one of her visits, we spoke alone in the garden, away from possible microphones. She asked me pointedly whether I liked what I was doing. “Mom,” I said truthfully, “I love this so much it scares me.”
As the years passed, my skills as an officer and my devotion to the organization developed easily, and in tandem. The autonomy, clarity, and personal discretion offered by fieldwork, I would learn, had no equivalent in the pestilence of Washington’s bureaucratic politics, even for the most senior officials. My progress was recognized in steady promotions, and I was given two field commands of my own, first as a “base chief,” subordinate to a chief of station located elsewhere in the same country, and then as a station chief in my own right.
To outsiders, however, my success was not apparent. Advancement in my “cover jobs” kept pace for a time with hidden reality, but then necessarily plateaued. Although no one said it, it soon appeared to friends and family that my career must have stalled. This was an inevitable part of the clandestine life, just as Dotty had warned. But I also recognized that the near-total reliance on the good opinion of those inside CIA had the effect of reinforcing a potentially dangerous arrogance and a suffocating insularity in an organization whose work already inclined it toward both. I enthusiastically shared that culture, but was wary of it.
For many of my colleagues, collecting human intelligence was an end in itself: for them, how others used the intelligence we gathered may have been a subject of interest, but it was someone else’s worry. That was never the case for me. Our basic training in the Directorate of Operations (DO) had included a couple of weeks of familiarization in all-source analysis provided by the Directorate of Intelligence (the DI), the analytic wing of the CIA. My DI instructors offered me the opportunity to leave the DO for the analytic ranks. I didn’t take them up on it—the lure of overseas adventure was too compelling—but I retained a strong interest in what they did.
Having worked hard and taken risks to gather human intelligence, I was keen to ensure that it was accurately reflected in the finished product that went to policymakers. In my intelligence reports, I frequently included comments to provide context and perspective. And when I felt the analysts were getting something wrong, I would sometimes write to complain. On occasion, field stations overseas were asked to comment, and to provide an on-the-ground perspective on major analytic pieces being prepared in Langley. More often than not, my chiefs would ask me to write such comments for them, and I was not shy about initiating field appraisals in response to major events.
But nothing attracted my interest like National Intelligence Estimates. Usually referred to as NIEs, these are the highest-level and most comprehensive pieces of analysis produced by the U.S. government, and are meant to represent the considered, bottom-line judgments of the entire intelligence community on the great analytic questions of the day. In the late 1980s, when I was dashing about the world in “non-official” cover, meeting with Iranian sources, the intelligence community prepared one of a series of major National Intelligence Estimates devoted to assessing the future of the Iranian revolution. The NIE’s drafters sought the help of my station, and I was assigned to assist them. I became fascinated by the process, and particularly by the role of the national intelligence officers, or NIOs. Each specializing in a distinct geographic or functional area of responsibility, they were organized in a communitywide organization called the National Intelligence Council, the NIC. They were the senior representatives of the intelligence community to the policymakers and to Congress, and they had the ability to place their individual stamp on the community’s views.
It was quite rare for a clandestine operator to become an NIO, but by no means unheard of, particularly for the Near East and South Asia. A number of legendary Near East case officers had become NIOs, and they were my role models from an early point. I became convinced that operators had a huge natural advantage over desk-bound, bookish analytic types, as there was simply no substitute for having a visceral, on-the-ground familiarity with the culture and the mind-set of a place. I felt that to be a first-rate operations officer, and to give Washington all it really needed, you had to be a skilled analyst as well. I didn’t accept the usual categories and boundaries that existed in my profession, and when I took over my own station, I made it a point to become a thorough expert on all the relevant issues and to weigh in actively in the Washington-based analytic process, at least as far as distance would allow.
In the summer of 1991, Paula and I returned to Washington, our toddler son and his Filipina nanny in tow. Right away I tried to land a job on the National Intelligence Council, and sought the help of my deputy division chief, who had himself been an NIO in the past. “Not so fast,” he said. “You’ve been out for eleven years, and you owe us time on the desk.”
With the end of the First Gulf War, the U.S. government was trying to contain Saddam Hussein, and if possible to engineer his ouster. Within months, regime change in Baghdad was the stated policy of the U.S. administration, and CIA was expected to produce it. I became the first deputy chief of a new and very large headquarters unit in the Near East Division, the Iraq Operations Group. This was my first serious introduction to “covert action.” The normal authorities of the CIA only permit it to gather intelligence around the world, not to try to influence or change the course of events. To do that requires specific authority from the president, contained in what is called a Presidential Finding.
The process of drafting such a finding, working it through the bureaucracy to the president for signature, briefing members of the Congressional Oversight committees, and gaining the necessary support from the Pentagon, the State Department, and others was new to me, and I threw myself into the task with great enthusiasm. I thought the George H. W. Bush administration had made a great mistake in allowing Saddam’s military to violently suppress the post–Gulf War insurrections in Shiite-dominated southern Iraq and in Kurdistan, in the far north, and I was eager to do my part to set things right. Within a short time, I was traveling back out to the region to consult with our chiefs of station and to hold initial meetings with a prominent Iraqi would-be revolutionary.
Naive as I was, this provided an education for me in the politics of covert action. The Near East Division chief at the time was convinced by past history that nothing good would come to the agency from an involvement, yet again, in trying to mount a foreign coup. It was a common sentiment in an organization that had been burned frequently and badly in the past, taking the fall for bad decisions by presidents who wanted the CIA to provide magic solutions to intractable foreign problems. The chief could not refuse the White House outright, but he did not want his fingerprints on our activities either, and he essentially ignored us. His passive opposition did not make a whit of practical difference to me, but I carefully noted it. In my view, CIA should not get to pick and choose its missions. We were a tool of statecraft; so long as what we were asked to do was legal, I felt, we owed the president our best efforts.
We also had an obligation, I believed, to illuminate the potential downsides of what we were being asked to do, and to make the case for the overt policy enablers that would be necessary for a realistic possibility of success. The world had changed radically since 1953, when a CIA-sponsored coup in Tehran had restored the Shah of Iran to his throne with relative ease. At the very outset, I sent a memo to my seniors within the agency, providing a negative assessment of the chances for success in Iraq, stating that we would not simply walk into Baghdad and engineer Saddam’s overthrow “like some latter-day Kermit Roosevelt overthrowing Mossadegh.” With the support of CIA’s deputy director for operations (the “DDO,” now referred to as director of the National Clandestine Service, or D/NCS), and although still only a GS-14—the civilian equivalent of a lieutenant colonel—I paid individual calls on each of the members of the Deputies’ Committee, the second-highest foreign policy-making body in government, to seek their support for overt actions, such as setting up humanitarian “safe zones” along Iraq’s borders. In each instance, I was received politely, but left with expressions that said, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” The only member of the Deputies’ Committee at the time who seemed willing to entertain my ideas on Iraq was the then-under secretary of defense for policy. It was hard for me to gauge his seriousness as a thinker, but he was willing to explore unconventional ideas and seemed willing to take risks. I would come to know Paul Wolfowitz far better during the George W. Bush administration.
Less than a year after my return from overseas, an opening appeared at the National Intelligence Council for a deputy NIO for the Near East and South Asia. With the grudging acceptance of my division managers, I applied for it, and was selected. The following year opened up new worlds for me, as I was frequently the face of the intelligence community with senior administration officials and with Congress. The NIO, Ellen Laipson, and I made a good team, in part because our backgrounds were so different: I was the operator; she the scholar, from the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. We produced a series of National Intelligence Estimates, including yet another on Iran. Life could not have been more stimulating. On any given morning, I could look at the papers to see what would be on the minds of policymakers and Congress, and immediately convene the best analysts in the community to produce an instant, ad hoc assessment for them. This was the sort of access and impact I had dreamed of.
My time on the NIC was not to last long. Only a year into the assignment, I was asked by the deputy director for operations, Tom Twetten, to be a candidate to serve on the staff of Peter Tarnoff, the under secretary of state for political affairs. Tarnoff, the third-ranking official at State, a member of the Deputies’ Committee, and the day-to-day foreign policy manager for the department, was an old friend of Twetten’s and was interested in broadening representation on his staff beyond the State Department. Tarnoff selected me from among the available candidates, and made me his senior staff advisor for the Near East, South Asia, and counterterrorism.
My year of direct involvement in the policy-making process provided stunning insights into the hidden realities of Washington politics. It was an intensely disillusioning experience. In that first year of the Clinton administration, it was obvious that the president was not particularly interested in foreign policy, and seemed only to get engaged when a developing problem turned into a crisis. At that point, the various cabinet secretaries and other senior officials would learn what the president wanted and fall into line. But in the meantime, left to their own devices with little policy direction from the White House, they and their respective departments and agencies fought one another like children in a sandbox. They seemed primarily interested in protecting their bureaucratic turf and their departmental prerogatives. No agency head wanted to be seen by those in his or her organization as failing to defend its interests; that would be a sign of weakness. Bureaucratic strength, I learned, was the coin of the realm. The national interest seemed incidental.
Similarly, within the Department of State the bureaucratic infighting was vicious, as the various bureaus contended with one another to press their settled positions on whatever issue was at hand. No one, it seemed, was willing to take an independent view, or to consider the relative merits of another bureau’s argument. More often than not, even the most trivial issues would have to be taken to the secretary of state for decision.
And that was when things worked well. Just as frequently, department seniors behaved like schoolyard bullies. If someone seemed to have senior-level backing on an issue, regardless of its merits, others would be reluctant to offer a contrary view unless they, too, had the support of a department senior, and preferably someone who had the ear of the secretary, to back them up. If not, it was better to capitulate early and act as though you supported the prevailing idea all along: the last thing you would want was to appear to have been “rolled”—forced to back down. As a State Department friend pointed out, the natural posture of the Foreign Service officer was to have a finger in the air to determine which way the political wind was blowing. I often found myself at a disadvantage in this sort of infighting, as my “principal,” the under secretary, generally did not engage on Middle East issues and would defer to others, such as Dennis Ross, the Special Middle East Coordinator in charge of the Arab-Israeli peace process, instead. In a typical exchange, I’d send Peter a carefully reasoned memo advising him to take a certain position on an issue. “Sounds good,” he would scrawl in the margin. “Take it up with Dennis.” That was a non-starter for someone inclined toward contrarian views. No one was going to be interested in what I thought unless I had the backing of someone who was feared.
The consensus view of me in the department, conveyed to me by a friend, was telling: “Smart guy, articulate, knows the issues; but strangely oblivious to political considerations.” They had it partly right. I wasn’t oblivious; just headstrong, and a tad self-righteous. If anything, though, a year in their building actually increased my respect for State Department officers, who were almost uniformly smart and dedicated; but I pitied them the corrosive, soul-destroying environment in which they worked, and wondered how they tolerated it.
It was with considerable relief that I recrossed the Potomac to return to Langley. For all that CIA could be arrogant, insular, and parochial, I found life among those whose profession demanded lying, cheating, and manipulation an oasis of decency compared with what I’d found in the policy community. That said, my year at State was invaluable, and I would not soon forget its lessons.
Back at CIA, I was given a management job that again threw me into controversy. The Counter-Proliferation Branch was the largest in the Near East and South Asia Division, and no wonder. With the exception of North Korea, all the primary countries of nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile weapons concern were in those two regions: Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Although we had clear direction from the White House to aggressively confront a growing problem of global proliferation, my immediate superior was no more inclined toward risky operations against proliferators than he was against Saddam Hussein. My predecessor as chief of the Counter-Proliferation Branch had catered to the division chief. Not wanting to be in the position of having to provide a report to the president as the last screw was being placed in some rogue state’s nuclear device, I set out to encourage field stations to launch new reporting initiatives, and to assure them of technical and financial support when they did. My chief made his contrary views known to me but did nothing to stop me.
I quickly found that headquarters’ support to counterproliferation operations in the field outside the Near East and South Asia was a disorganized mess. Because it was a global problem, with technology transferred across continents, several of the geographic divisions in addition to the Near East had set up branches to deal with their parts of the problem. Coordinating my branch’s actions with those of other divisions across multiple lines of independent bureaucratic authority was a nightmare. I showed up one day at the office of the deputy director for operations to brief a routine operation with nine other people, representing seven other offices, in tow. The DDO was predictably appalled.
Asked to come up with a way to fix the problem, I and my people drew up plans to create a new division, which would combine the various DO proliferation shops in one coherent organization capable of coordinating activities on a global basis. To my amazement, the plan was approved. As I was deemed too junior to receive a divisional command, Jim Pavitt, who would become a good friend and mentor, was named chief of the new Counter-Proliferation Division; I was its first chief of operations.
Not everyone was happy with this arrangement. The Near East Division, whose loyal officer I still remained, had just lost its largest unit, and its leaders did not fail to notice that I was the culprit. No sooner had I been assigned to the new division than I received a call from Near East’s deputy chief, who summoned me to his office for a little avuncular advice. “Keep in mind,” he said, “that if this new division fails—as it might—you will still need a place to come back to.”
By this time, I had spent five years in Washington, and was more than eager to return to the field. Although in a bit of a doghouse with the Near East Division, I managed in the next few months to line up a chief of station assignment with help from elsewhere in the Directorate. Paula was at least as eager as I was to return to overseas living. In fact, our plans were already quite advanced when I got an unexpected call.
Dave Cohen had recently been elevated to DDO. As a career analyst, he was an unusual selection, and in the insular and chauvinistic Directorate of Operations, an unpopular one. A brash, outspoken Bostonian from the tough Dorchester neighborhood, Cohen was not one to be intimidated, and seemed determined to leave his mark on the Clandestine Service.
This was a time of considerable ferment in the DO. The arrest of Aldrich Ames for treason two years before, the first known instance of a currently serving case officer being “doubled,” had been an unprecedented shock. Many of us felt a deep sense of shame. The shame was compounded when it was revealed that Ames had clearly been a troubled and grossly inadequate performer for some time before his recruitment by the Soviets, but that his managers had consistently failed to address his shortcomings. There was much soul-searching over this, and it led to a number of reforms, including a new emphasis on training in leadership and management that the directorate had long lacked.
There were other changes afoot. Huge advances in technical collection and information technology were making it possible to provide much better guidance and support to operations. The support ranks were no longer solely the province of secretaries, clerks, and logisticians. Highly skilled technical and analytical professionals were gaining a place in the directorate, and case officers like me could feel their relative dominance in the organization starting to slip away. New categories of DO professionals, such as so-called “targeters,” were being created. Case officers felt threatened by these changes and many lobbied against them, claiming that this was evidence that the Clandestine Service was becoming distracted from its core mission. Cohen organized a number of discussion groups, typically of mid-ranking officers, to talk through these issues and build consensus for reforms.
I had first come to Dave’s attention through my work in counterproliferation, and he included me as a participant in these groups. I was quite vocal in these forums, telling my fellow case officer colleagues, in effect, that they should “get over it.” As case officers who recruited and ran agents, they were going to remain the “jet jockeys” of the CIA. But if the Clandestine Service was to remain relevant and continue to improve, we were going to have to encourage more involvement by highly skilled technicians and analysts. That was going to mean providing both them and the often-overlooked reports officers, the substantive intelligence experts of the directorate, a far greater share of the credit for success, greater organizational prominence, and a share of management positions that had traditionally been the exclusive domain of the spymasters.
Dave was impressed by my progressive views, and he wanted me to help institutionalize them. He asked if I would take over as chief of training at the DO’s famous school of espionage, “the Farm.” This was completely unexpected, and a huge departure from normal practice. Typically, chiefs of training were very senior officers, for whom the appointment was a final “retirement tour,” a mark of respect and a reward for years of service. In giving the position to a young up-and-comer, and one who had not yet even entered the “super-grade” ranks, Cohen was signaling change. Complaints were not long in coming; Dave ignored them. To one senior officer who pointed out that I was still several promotions shy of the requisite grade level, he replied: “Well, that’s easy to fix.”
Dave gave me the option of declining the position, but it was an easy decision for me to make. This was a huge honor, and a tremendous opportunity to effect change in the directorate. Not incidentally, it also carried the promise of promotion. Keeping our son, who had some special educational needs, in the United States for a bit longer would not be a bad idea either. Rather than the Middle East, we made plans to move to southern Virginia.
With typical good fortune, I was arriving at just the right time. The personnel cutbacks of the post–Cold War “peace dividend” years had largely run their course, and recruitment of new officers was again on the upswing. Blessed with a strong staff, many of whom had just returned from overseas, I was able to turn them loose to reform the training curriculum and make it reflect the current state of the art as cutting-edge espionage was being practiced in the field.
At what we affectionately called “Camp Swampy,” I worked to make the training of the next generation of spies conform not to where our directorate was, but to where I thought it should be going. More and more I found that the key to implementing what I wanted at the Farm lay in changing what was being done with newly arriving officers elsewhere, both before they arrived in my charge, and after they left. I found myself spending an increasing amount of my time up north, in Washington. Some criticized me for it, but I had great people working for me, and I delegated freely.
It was passionate work. The basic operations course in CIA is a full-immersion, twenty-four-hour-a-day, life-changing experience. When I had completed my own training years before, I had sworn I’d never be back. But now, in preparing a new generation of spies, I felt tied to the organization and to its history as never before. Having a chance to step back and analyze what we did, I was taken anew with the uniqueness and the romance of our profession, and did all I could to convey that sense to our young officers. With characteristic immodesty, I sincerely felt I understood the essence of what we were about better than anyone else. Finding that we were teaching professional ethics without any central doctrine to work from, I wrote a formal professional code of ethics for the Clandestine Service, the first ever. Years later, it was formally adopted, not just as a training aide but as the code of professional conduct for the service. It was probably the most lasting contribution of my career, and in some ways the one of which I’m most proud.
Life among the forests, streams, and meadows of the sprawling compound was like a throwback to a simpler era. Socially dominated by residents of prime child-rearing age, the Farm away from the classrooms and firing ranges was very family-centered. Our son Doug learned to fish, to ride a bicycle, and to camp in the woods. Living among trusted colleagues behind high fences and security patrols, not only did we not lock our houses; most of us didn’t know where the keys were. Grade school children would ride their bikes to the bus stop, leave them unlocked, and find them unmolested. The only reminder that we were not living in Mayberry circa 1955 was the distant sound of gunfire wafting from the ranges in the afternoon, and the occasional thumping of special-ops helicopters as they whooshed overhead at treetop level during the night.
In those years I developed a relationship with our new director. George Tenet took an active interest in training, and insisted on regular briefings. He never missed a graduation exercise. While being driven back to the airstrip one night after listening to one of my graduation speeches, he asked of the DDO where I would be assigned next. Told it would be Islamabad, Pakistan, he demurred. “I think we need him in the Levant,” he said. The CIA was being actively drawn in as an intermediary between the Israeli and the Palestinian intelligence and security forces, as the Clinton administration pressed for a comprehensive peace agreement between them. George was personally engaged in the effort, and wanted someone he knew and could trust to manage it.
Once again, the benign forces of fate intervened. Shortly thereafter, Tenet went on a long trip to the Middle East in the company of the new chief of the Near East and South Asia Division. It was rumored the division chief wanted the peace process job for himself. Whatever his motivation, he convinced George that I should be sent to the Punjab, after all. It was a close call. Rather than facing three years of growing frustration and helplessness as the Arab-Israeli peace process foundered on the shoals of the second intifada, Paula, Doug, and I boarded a plane for South Asia.
We are all the products of our experiences. In my case, as I look back, I can see now that nature and events had conspired to produce, by the age of forty-four, an individual with a highly idiosyncratic, perhaps even contradictory, set of attributes. While still at the Farm in the late 1990s, and influenced by the organizational fads of the time, I began to meet with a so-called “executive coach.” My coach would not have been confused with Stephen Covey: she had the looks and manner of a Jewish grandmother. I loved her. “You know,” she said to me one afternoon, “there is no one more loyal to this organization than you. And yet your relationship to it is essentially subversive.”
I found the observation jarring at the time. But as I look back, she may have been right. Here was a highly idealistic and loyal member of an organization who never saw it quite for what it was, but rather for what he wanted it to be. His attitude toward authority was ambivalent. If he judged his leaders harshly, he could still empathize with their challenges and their foibles, and his judgments seldom carried over to the organization that recognized and empowered them. To him, organizations were not important in and of themselves—missions were. So long as the justifying mission was there, the organization existed to be reformed. It was no surprise that he had been subtly at war with every bureaucracy he had ever been a part of. Though understanding his place in the closed, insular world he occupied, he nonetheless was forever looking outside his own area of responsibility, and was constitutionally incapable of staying in his own lane.
Whether all that made me a subversive, as my coach alleged, I still don’t know. An iconoclast? Perhaps. A contrarian? Definitely. For better or worse, this was the person whom the CIA assigned as its chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the summer of 1999.