Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (39 page)

In the spring of 2010, I was invited to the Sixth International Conference of the Paris Forum for Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. I was one of two keynote speakers, along with the former French foreign minister. I also participated in a sharp-edged panel discussion that touched on U.S. efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. I was satisfied with my performance, fielding, as diplomatically as possible, questions on potentially explosive issues, especially relating to Israel and the Palestinians.

As I exited the stage, I caught up to Pat, whom I rely on to give me my most constructive feedback. I asked how she thought I had done parrying the tough questions. With a mischievous grin, she responded, “You mean sitting up there with your big Irish legs showing above your socks!” Besides producing a pronounced laugh on my part, it brought me a more grounded view of the event. But she allowed that I had done pretty well carrying the American flag in the back-and-forth with the French and Middle Easterners.

About a month after we returned from that trip, in June 2010, President Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal as commander of the war in Afghanistan for comments he made in
Rolling Stone
magazine, and replaced him with General David H. Petraeus. Around the same time, I wrote a rather controversial op-ed for
The Wall Street Journal
saying the military effort in Afghanistan was flawed and should be replaced with CIA-led covert action. I had seen firsthand the Soviet military fail in Afghanistan, and we were making the same mistakes. Afghanistan is a collection of tribes, not a functioning state, and relationships need to be forged with tribal leaders, not the corrupt and ineffectual government of Hamid Karzai.

A smart covert action program should rest on worst-case scenarios. Afghanistan will likely enter a period of heightened instability leading up to and following our planned departure, so we should figure out now which tribal leaders—and, under specially negotiated arrangements, which Taliban factions—we could establish productive relationships with. We must also consider the possibility that our departure could precipitate the eventual collapse of the Karzai government. Thus we should cultivate relationships with leaders inside and outside the current regime who are most likely to fill the power vacuum.

WHERE IS OSAMA BIN LADEN?
was the headline on another op-ed I wrote for
The Washington Post
, in October 2010, in which I argued that finding Bin Laden must remain our number one priority, something that didn’t seem pressing at the time.

I also felt that the delicate matter of our relations with Pakistan seemed to underlie our unwillingness to find Bin Laden at all costs.

I had the opportunity to press Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan, on the issue when he spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations a month later. After listening to him talk for more than an hour, I raised my hand to ask a question. “Mr. President, do you believe Bin Laden is in the North-West Frontier?” I said. “And if so, after nine years, why is he still on the loose?”

“My guess will be as bad as your guess,” Musharraf responded on the record. “I don’t know, and that’s an honest fact … Intelligence is doing its best. And when I say intelligence, intelligence is human intelligence, which ISI has in abundance. It is technical intelligence, which you have in abundance there, in that area, in Pakistan. And then it is aerial surveillance, which is—only you have … The military, the CIA, all intelligence, is doing their best. And I don’t know whether he is dead or alive, and whether he is in Pakistan or in Afghanistan, or maybe he’s gone somewhere. I don’t know. I can’t say.” His answer was made up of equal parts “officialspeak” and double-talk.

The world learned six months later, shortly before midnight on May 1, 2011, where al-Qaeda’s leader had been hiding, after members of Navy SEAL Team 6 stormed a heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They opened fire on four occupants until they found Osama bin Laden, code-named Geronimo. The raid was conducted under Title 50 authority of the U.S Code, which allows the U.S. government to conduct covert actions, or “deniable” missions. The CIA director, Leon Panetta, headed the chain of command, which went from him to the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. Bin Laden was killed by shots to the chest and the forehead, above his left eye. The raid was the culmination of a CIA operation years in the making. It began with efforts to penetrate a network of couriers who serviced Bin Laden.

When I heard about the killing, I was delighted. I had been talking, and writing, about the importance of this takedown for ten years. In fact, I and a handful of former DDOs had had lunch with Panetta a year prior and I’d asked him why it was taking so long to get Bin Laden. I’m sure he and his subordinates were equally frustrated. Nevertheless, this is what I thought we should have been doing from the beginning—not nation-building but getting this terrorist.

President Obama addressed the nation on Afghanistan in early June. The Taliban’s momentum had been arrested, and our focus was squarely on al-Qaeda. It was time to start bringing the troops home—ten thousand by year’s end, and all thirty-three thousand surge forces the president had committed at the end of 2009 by the end of summer 2012. America’s mission would change from combat to support. I’d been arguing for years that a large U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would not be successful, as a large Soviet presence had not been. And now President Obama was in effect shifting strategies and turning the mission over to the CIA and U.S. Special Forces.

In August 2011, shortly before General Petraeus retired from the army and officially took over the reins of the CIA, Clair George died at the age of eighty-one. He was a spy’s spy, and one of the best of the generation of Cold War officers who joined the Agency in the mid-1950s. It’s bitterly ironic that he remains the first high-ranking CIA officer to be found guilty of felony charges committed during the conduct of his official duties. His pardon on Christmas Eve 1992 before his sentencing kept him from ever serving time, which was at least some measure of justice. He always maintained his innocence and never let his conviction diminish his joie de vivre or his loyalty to the CIA. As I told a
Washington Post
reporter writing George’s obituary, “If you wanted Paris, he’d send you to Somalia, and when you were done in Somalia, he’d send you to Paris … He wanted to know if you were a committed operator, or are you a dandy who wants to be pushing cookies around the diplomatic circuit? That’s how he sized people up.” I thought it was telling that, in his retirement, George worked as a volunteer suicide prevention counselor, helping man a hotline in his basement. A memorial in October 2012 for him at St. Alban’s Parish in Washington was a special moment for me, although bittersweet—the passing of an authentic warrior and leader who regrettably had to end his career when he got caught up in the political morass of Washington. Throughout it all, he kept his positive disposition, his allegiance to his subordinates, and an affection for helping young people.

George’s memorial service brought me together with many former bosses, men also now in their seventies and eighties. I couldn’t help but reflect on my own place on the actuary charts and think about my own mortality. I left the service that day feeling proud of the CIA and the men and women who had served. I felt fortunate to have been part of its history.

I went back to Langley again in the late summer of 2012 to attend a retirement ceremony for Justin Jackson, a senior officer who had my old job of associate deputy director of operations before he left the Agency.

The headquarters building at one time was almost elegant in the simplicity of its lobby. But now I see some new ornament on display almost every time I visit. To the left of the high-tech turnstile that slides open for cleared visitors, the hallway is adorned with formal portraits of all the directors. I’ve worked with more than half of them. To the right, toward the special room where they hold retirement ceremonies, hang paintings of auspicious moments in CIA history, including the first Stinger shootdown by the mujahideen in Afghanistan. I felt a twinge of pride that day as I walked past the painting and went inside the room for Jackson’s retirement.

In a forty-five-minute ceremony that was warm and rich with fraternity, Jackson received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Members of this good hunting club, past and present, don’t come together often, and I was in no hurry to leave. Eventually, though, it was time for a meeting with Petraeus, and a woman from protocol came to take me to the seventh floor. We rode up in the director’s private elevator, for which I once possessed a key. Petraeus sat at the head of a conference table in his office. We had kept in occasional contact since we had dinner the prior summer, right before he took over. We looked outside at the thick woods that surround the Agency’s vast complex and talked for about a half hour.

Three months later, I was stunned when Petraeus abruptly resigned and acknowledged having had an extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell, a West Point graduate and Reserve army officer who had written a book about Petraeus’s years in command of the war in Afghanistan. I’d developed a good relationship with him, so it was particularly painful to watch a man of his distinction lose his job and much of the stature he had gained during his career as a four-star general and theater commander over this incident. He had all the qualifications necessary to excel on the seventh floor at Langley, although it wasn’t clear to me how he had actually connected with the Agency’s senior leaders. I happened to attend a meeting with them a week following his resignation, and it was clear to me that they had already moved on. The CIA is a tough, resilient place after all it has weathered over the years. Obama had just been reelected, names of possible new directors were being floated around town, the Republicans and many others remained in high dudgeon over an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi earlier in the fall that had cost the life of the U.S. ambassador and three aides, as well as contractors, and the Agency needed to reexamine its priorities now that the wars of the past decade were ending.

Following his reelection that fall, Obama named a man I had come to know well, John O. Brennan, to lead the CIA during the president’s second term in office. I had worked with Brennan back at Langley when he served as George Tenet’s executive officer; he later became a chief of station in the Middle East. I had always considered him to be a smart, serious-minded, dedicated officer who loved the business. Even in an institution that has a culture of putting in very long hours, Brennan stood out as a workhorse. He was one of the few career professionals who rose to the top of the Agency, joining the ranks of Helms, Colby, and Gates. He’d spent twenty-five years at the CIA, serving in both the Intelligence and Operations Directorates. His last post was chief of the National Counterterrorism Center (which is separate from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center) during the administration of George W. Bush. He has stated publicly that he had no role in overseeing the administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques—waterboarding and other forms of torture—and commented at the time that he did not agree with such methods. An Arabic-speaking analyst by training, he is an expert in the Near East.

My relationship with Brennan was passing in nature, until he left the government and we worked closely together as board members of a publicly traded defense contractor. We worked together again during Obama’s campaign for president in 2008. Brennan served as chairman of Obama’s intelligence committee, and I was a committee member. The press referred to us as “spies for Obama,” which was hardly the case. Nevertheless, he developed a close relationship with Obama’s key campaign staff. In fact, Obama offered Brennan the CIA directorship, but Brennan withdrew his name from consideration because a number of human rights groups opposed him as a result of his role as former head of the National Counterterrorism Center.

I had drinks with Brennan in a Washington area hotel shortly after he withdrew. He was hugely disappointed, but he remained determined to return to the government and serve the Obama administration. We talked about his fallback offer to serve as an assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism. He recognized the heavy burden of such a task for him and his family but decided to accept it nonetheless. For different reasons, I also thought it was a smart move; I had seen the ball bounce before and felt that the job very likely would put him in contention for the DCI spot the next time around. I also had seen how much Bob Gates grew as a result of his time working in the White House as a national security adviser and how effectively he was able to parlay that experience when he became CIA director and, later, secretary of defense. I shared this view with Brennan at the time, and I now feel that history has played out very well for him.

I congratulated Brennan after his confirmation as CIA director in March 2013 and told him that the “fun” would begin immediately. He responded that no one had yet suggested that the top CIA job would be fun. Having served on the seventh floor with a number of DCIs, I understand how gut-wrenching the job can be at times, but there are few places where you can have a significant impact on world events and better serve your country. For me, that is fun. And I’m sure that, in time, Brennan will agree. These are trying times for the CIA, and Brennan’s broad experience at the CIA and the White House will serve him, the Agency, and the country very well indeed.

One critical attribute that Brennan and all other CIA leaders possess is the right temperament for intelligence. A spymaster’s life is not for everybody. It requires a special psychological makeup that allows him or her to work in the dark world of betrayal and to engage in actions, sometimes lethal, that often irrevocably alter lives, governments, and history. By necessity, it demands a highly compartmentalized mind that can box off multiple conflicting ideas, emotions, and behaviors. On the one hand, the spymaster must hunt for and manipulate potential agents into betraying their country while maintaining a fierce loyalty to his own country and value system. Similarly, the spymaster must undertake foreign-policy-directed covert action operations against our enemies in the uncomfortable gray area of morality and principle while maintaining all the while a rigid black-and-white standard of legal rectitude within the CIA culture. As a result of a mixture of DNA and life experience, I felt that I fit this profile snugly and survived and thrived as a spymaster and covert action operative for many years.