One OF THE FIRST tasks CTC/SO faced was to identify more people that could be brought into the effort. I immediately began to reach out to officers who would be good additions to the team. Those who were former military and spoke Farsi, Dari, or Pashto were obvious choices, but in truth, there weren’t many of them to be found. The less than a handful with this combination of skills and background whom I knew were already serving at overseas stations; it would require the agreement of their station chiefs and their divisions to release them for service with CTC/SO. Much to my dismay, obtaining their release turned out to be more problematic than I thought it would be. Despite the unique and critical skills these officers had and how badly we needed them for the mission we faced, a surprising—and in my opinion—disappointing number of supervisors resisted having their officers reassigned. Instead these managers chose to act as if it was still business as usual. Given the crisis we faced, I saw this as a failure of leadership, an area where CIA had a mixed record.
My training at the CIA to become a Directorate of Operations (D.O.) case officer in the early 1980’s did not include leadership training. It was the height of the Cold War, and CIA training was focused only on how to run intelligence operations, i.e. spotting, assessing, developing, recruiting, handling, and terminating human intelligence sources. It was great training for this skill set, and I fully understood how to do the job of a case officer once through with the training. But if the CIA training had been my only professional training or experience, I would have had little understanding of leadership principles, styles, and methods, and their importance to an organization and mission accomplishment.
The lack of training or emphasis on leadership as a subject or practice within the D.O. was a revelation and a disappointment for me when I first came to the Agency, particularly having just left the Army where emphasis on leadership was constant and expected to be exhibited at all times, no matter a soldier’s rank. But at the time I entered on duty with the Agency, there were only a couple of leadership courses, and they were only available for a select number of fairly senior-level officers. For some of them, in my opinion anyway, it came too late in their professional development to make a positive impact on them or the CIA. But for the broad swath of officers going through the early to mid-part of their careers, there was a huge void in their preparation to become leaders. For at least the first 15 years of my CIA career I don’t think I ever heard a significant conversation about leadership in the hallways or offices at Langley or overseas stations. It just wasn’t something that was considered important. The assumption seemed to be that if you had the skills to do your job, that was really all you needed. What this resulted in were too many people being placed in leadership or management positions who were unprepared to manage, motivate, and lead people in accomplishing the mission of the CIA. This is not to say, there were no good leaders. In fact, there were many excellent ones, but the percentage of bad leaders was too high, and it negatively impacted the morale of the work force and ultimately the mission.
Fortunately toward the end of my career, the Agency’s attitude about leadership began to change, and more training was developed and made available to employees at all levels. Some of it was very good training and addressed both leadership and teamwork, and my sense of things when I left was that it was beginning to make a positive difference for the organization, particularly in terms of employees’ morale. However, this change in organizational culture and the emphasis on leadership and teamwork would come largely after the 9/11 attacks.
In September 2001, however, even knowing the Agency’s culture toward leadership, it was still beyond my comprehension how any CIA officer could have the attitude I was witnessing, even as the daily news showed scenes of the devastation in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.
I had experienced a form of this attitude firsthand several days after the attacks while I was still trying to join CTC/SO. I had stopped by the office of a senior level NE Division officer that I knew and with whom I had served overseas. I told him that I was trying to get on one of the teams going to Afghanistan.
“I wouldn’t advise it,” he said. “Those teams are made up of paramilitary officers. You’re not a paramilitary officer, you’re a case officer. You won’t be doing traditional operations officer work that promotion panels will be looking for. Going to Afghanistan won’t do anything for your career.”
I was shocked by his comment, disgusted really. The truth was, I had not even thought about my career from the moment I had seen the World Trade Center towers collapse. The idea of “career” to be mentioned in this context struck me as repugnant.
Another officer I talked to also could not understand why I would want to go to Afghanistan, but his lack of understanding had nothing to do with career, but family.
“How could you do that to your family? You’ve got a wife and kids? What if something happens to you?”
It was a good question. There was nothing more important to me than my family. Throughout my career I had always weighed the pluses and minuses of potential assignments with my family in mind, striving for a rough balance that would allow me to do interesting work that contributed to my country’s security, yet one in which my family would be safe and able to have things like a reasonable place to live, good schools, and a good community. I had been lucky, as most of my assignments had met those requirements, but my very first overseas tour had proven to be exceptionally difficult, even disastrous, due to issues well beyond my control, and it negatively affected both me and my family.
After that first tour, hoping for a more “normal” overseas assignment I had accepted a job in the Middle East at a location well known to be a great family post with good schools and housing, and a stable political environment.
Just prior to our departure to the new post, however, the first Gulf war broke out. I was instructed to delay our departure and to stay in Washington. Having already moved out of our house, we began living out of suitcases in a temporary, furnished apartment in Arlington while my daughter started a new, temporary school. At the same time, my three-year-old son was having a difficult time adjusting to all the changes. Then to top things off, my wife suffered a debilitating injury. It was not the best of times, but at least I was there to help out. When the Gulf war ended, I was told I could report to post, but the assignment would be “unaccompanied,” meaning my family would have to stay behind. I knew I would be leaving them in a bad situation.
After much soul-searching, I requested to have my assignment curtailed. It was the hardest decision I think I ever made during my career, but it all boiled down to one thing—at that moment in time my family needed me more than the Agency did. I paid a price for the curtailment in terms of career advancement, and perhaps most painful to me, damage to my reputation from those who only knew part of the story. But it was a price I was ready to pay and I never regretted it.
But in the case of going to Afghanistan, the shoe was now on the other foot. My family’s situation was stable compared to many years before, but my country’s situation wasn’t. This time the Agency needed me more than my family did. Getting on a team going to Afghanistan was the right thing for me to do. In fact, as far as I was concerned, it was the only thing for me to do.
Unfortunately, while I worked to make that happen, I found the attitude that “this whole terrorism thing will pass if we just wait long enough,” was more prevalent than I would have believed. With the 9/11 attacks, the world had changed, and the mission of the CIA had to change as well. But somehow, a significant number of otherwise smart and dedicated officers just did not see it that way.
While this attitude was a disappointment for me, what made up for it were the many other officers from throughout the CIA who were doing whatever they could to support the effort to strike back hard. It soon became obvious to me that CTC/SO was comprised entirely of those kinds of officers.
For me, however, serving in CTC/SO at Headquarters was not what I wanted. Although it was an important job, I did not like deskwork and never thought of myself as being particularly good at it. I believed that with my temperament and the various skills and abilities I possessed, I would be of better use in the field. But the challenge I faced in getting on one of the teams bound for Afghanistan was pretty straightforward: I was a case officer and—as my NE colleague had pointed out—the teams were almost entirely made up of CIA paramilitary officers drawn from the Special Activities Division, or SAD.
In the case of paramilitary officers, there was no question about them joining the fight in Afghanistan. Carrying out this type of mission was their raison d’être. All were former military, often recruited into CIA from one of the military’s special operations units such as the Army’s Delta Force or the Navy’s SEALs. By any standard they were the crème-de-la-crème of the military prior to being recruited by the CIA. Most had also been cross-trained as CIA operations officers, meaning they not only had valuable military hard skills, they also knew how to recruit and handle agents and report intelligence, the bread and butter tasks of a field case officer. In short, they possessed the perfect hybrid of skills for service in Afghanistan.
As for my chance of deploying on a team, all I could do at this point was to keep my fingers crossed.