88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (6 page)

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.

NOVEMBER 12, 1999

W
ITNESSES LATER SAID THAT
there had been something very peculiar about that vehicle. For some reason, its driver appeared to be having no end of trouble parking. First he would move forward a few feet, and then he would reverse slightly; after a pause, he would advance, and then reverse again. He must have repeated the process a dozen times, each time just barely changing the vehicle’s orientation. There appeared to be no reason for what he was doing. After all, he was in the middle of an empty lot, located 100 yards or so beyond the back perimeter wall of the American Embassy, several hundred yards distant from the official Chancery building, on whose top floor I sat at that moment. There were no vehicles or other obstacles around him. Why so fussy? Was he having problems with the transmission? Peculiar indeed.

I suddenly heard a dull
whump
, the sort of sound you feel in your gut. In a split second I was on the floor. Several colleagues who had been conducting a briefing just stared at me in wonder, unmoving. “Get
down
,” I barked.

The first instinct of most people in such circumstances is to rush to the windows to see what’s happening. That’s what people had done the year before, in August 1998, when they heard shooting outside the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Many had been cut to pieces in a hail of shattered glass when the subsequent explosion went off. I ordered that we low-crawl into the central hallway, where we would be buffered by the offices on either side of the brick embassy building. For
several long minutes the entire population of the embassy’s top floor waited, hunkered down; when at length I peered cautiously around the doorway and through a window, I could see a burning white truck in the middle distance.

The attackers had been quite clever. Three ordinary SUVs had been rigged to fire a pair of 109-millimeter Chinese-made rockets each, through rear windows whose glass had been replaced with semi-opaque plastic sheeting. In addition to the embassy in Islamabad, the plotters had simultaneously fired by remote control from a vehicle in another parking lot across town at the American Embassy’s Cultural Affairs building; the rear window of a third vehicle had been aimed at a tall downtown apartment building that housed several UN offices. Although the latter two buildings had been struck, no one was killed; a Pakistani guard at the U.S. Cultural Center was badly wounded by shrapnel. Subsequent forensic analysis would show that the two rockets fired at the Chancery had sailed in tandem over the building just above the second-story window where I’d been sitting, missing by a few feet. I and several of my colleagues had been saved by a slight miscalculation: although the rockets had been aimed at a proper degree of elevation to strike their target, the designers had failed to adjust for the vehicle’s suspension. The recoil had caused the front springs to depress, raising the rockets’ trajectory a few degrees. Had they been much closer, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was my fourth month in country: Welcome to Pakistan.

For a professional intelligence officer, trouble is good, and in Pakistan, then as now, there was more than enough trouble to go around. A turbulent country of over 160 million, Pakistan in 1999 had been independent for fifty-two years, a product of the Partition of former British India in 1947. Since then, it had fought four wars with its much larger South Asian neighbor, the last of which, the so-called “Kargil War,” ending just weeks before my arrival. Even to a foreigner living there, Pakistani hatred of India was palpable. Much, but by no means all of that animosity revolved around the status of the former princely state of Kashmir, in the far mountainous north. A majority Muslim region that Pakistan expected to receive at Partition, its princely ruler had
decided otherwise. Now, most of it lay in Indian hands following the first Indo-Pakistani War of 1947; it remained divided along a highly militarized cease-fire line, the so-called “Line of Control.” Lacking the conventional military means to seize the rest of Kashmir outright, Pakistan had long encouraged and supported violent subversion there against the occupying Indian Army, whose political repression and rampant abuses against the local population further exacerbated the situation, and provided yet more motivation for Pakistani skulduggery.