Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (56 page)
Read Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA Online
Authors: John Rizzo
Like every former CIA officer turned author, I was required to submit my manuscript in advance to the Agency’s Publications Review Board (PRB) to ensure that it did not reveal any currently classified information. Based on my many years at CIA observing the process from the other side, I can attest to the difficult and at times thankless task the PRB has to perform. The PRB required me to make a number of deletions to my original manuscript. I disagreed with a few, but I understood the rationale for most of them and, of course, ultimately accepted them all.
Overall, the PRB was eminently fair with me and did its work in a conscientious and timely manner. For that, I thank PRB chairman Richard Puhl and his dedicated, and doubtless overworked, staff.
No list of acknowledgments would be complete without a salute to all of the people at CIA I met and worked with down through the years. It is not an exaggeration to say that there were thousands of them, spanning three generations. It was my privilege and joy to know them; a more consistently excellent, courageous, and selfless workforce does not exist anywhere. In particular, I was proud to be associated for so long with my colleagues in the CIA Office of General Counsel. The ones I worked with during my early years have largely departed now, but most of those who are there today are people I hired and was honored to lead during the turbulent post-9/11 decade. I have cited a few in this book, and I wish I had the space to acknowledge by name all of the other exemplary attorneys, paralegals, and support staff who were so extraordinarily dedicated to me and, far more important, to our country. I do, however, want to give a special, heartfelt thanks to James Archibald, Fred Manget, Valerie Patterson, Nancy Fortenberry, Melody Rosenberry, Donna Fischel, Petra Lewis, and Bruce Hunt. These folks spent time at my side, watching my back, during the last decade of my career spent in the OGC front office when the CIA—not to mention yours truly—was facing unprecedented crisis and controversy. I am indebted to them so much from both a professional and personal standpoint, and I will never forget them.
I have reserved my deepest expression of thanks for last. Some may note that I have not devoted a lot of space in this book to talking about my family. There are a couple of reasons for that. This memoir is first and foremost a chronicle of my CIA career, and I presume that’s what any reader is going to be interested in, rather than be burdened with having to slog through pages of details about my personal life before and while I was at the Agency. Second, I reckon that my personal life is, well, personal; I can’t imagine why anyone other than me and those closest to me would have the slightest interest in knowing more about it.
That said, my family means everything to me, and I love and owe them much more than anything else in my life. I have been blessed since the day I was born. My late parents, Arthur and Frances, were utterly devoted to me and my sisters, Nancy and Maria. They gave us everything we needed to succeed in life as we were growing up, but their greatest
gift was their unstinting love and loyalty. My sisters and I all achieved considerable success in our respective professional fields, though my career was marked by public controversy and some harsh outside criticism near its end. By the time I suddenly popped up in the public firing line post-9/11, my parents had been deceased for years. They had been avid news junkies their entire lives. I asked Maria a few years back how she thought they would have reacted to seeing and reading about their baby boy becoming such a divisive public figure. “They’d be thrilled and proud,” she replied without hesitation. I hope so.
My son, James, is my only offspring. He’s in his midthirties. He was born the year after I joined the CIA (I vividly remember changing his Pampers one night on a bench outside the headquarters front doors), so the arc of his life has virtually paralleled the arc of my Agency career. Much as I love the Agency, it is nothing—absolutely nothing—compared to the love I have for him. If this book does nothing else than to serve to give James a better sense of what his old man was up to at work all those years as he was growing up, then I will be a very satisfied guy.
Last, there is my beloved Sharon, my wife for the past two decades and the mother of my terrific stepdaughter Stephanie Breed. I have noted elsewhere in this book that applying to Brown University and later to the CIA were two of the best decisions I ever made in my life. But my best decision of all, hands down, was marrying Sharon. She has been my loyal and loving life partner ever since. Sharon is beautiful, smart, funny, and simply a joy to be with. I am an enormously lucky man to have her.
© JAY MALLIN PHOTOGRAPHY
JOHN RIZZO
had a thirty-four-year career as a lawyer at the CIA, culminating with seven years as the Agency’s chief legal officer. Since retiring from the CIA, he has served as senior counsel at a Washington, D.C., law firm and is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution. He is a graduate of Brown University and George Washington University Law School.
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