Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (31 page)

And what if the Iranians had been involved in this in some sort of trilateral nuclear arrangement? After all, North Korea was already helping both Iran and Syria develop missiles, and Syria was Iran’s best (only) friend in the Arab world.

Like we said, it was weird. And there was still a lot of stuff we didn’t know.

We had managed to keep this secret long enough to enable somebody to act. But even then, there was a cost. We successfully compartmented access, but if the destruction of al-Kibar had provoked a war, there would have been hell to pay for it. Policy makers and members of Congress (and surely some intelligence analysts) around town who had been kept out of the loop would have been livid that their counsel had not been sought. We had described the Middle East as “very dry timber” in 2007, but despite that, I cleared more of my weapons experts (was this really a nuclear reactor?) than my regional experts (and then what happens?) to be let in on the secret. That was ill-advised and risky.

Still, many agency folks rightly felt good about this. Four months later President Bush was eating lunch in the CIA cafeteria as part of an agency visit. A young analyst approached him as he was chowing down on his hamburger and fries. She offered him the coin that the al-Kibar team had minted to memorialize its efforts. On one side was the CIA shield. On the other a map of Syria with the location of al-Kibar marked with a star. Below that the simple words “No core. No war.”

I took a coin, too, but was less comfortable pocketing a win. We had gotten it right, but it had been a near-run thing and we had been dependent on outside help (especially the late-arriving handheld photos). We
marshaled the evidence well enough, but hadn’t collected a lot ourselves. That’s why less than a decade later I was skeptical of claims that American espionage was well positioned to track what the Iranians were doing. Visions of Syria, Iraq, India, and Pakistan filled my mind. If we were now suddenly better, we had made a hell of a step forward in the intervening years.

I
n the middle of side three of Bob Dylan’s 1966 classic double album
Blonde on Blonde,
one hears his lament on disloyalty, “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” And in the middle of that song is his insightful lyric: “to live outside the law, you must be honest.”

CIA most assuredly does not live outside the law, or at least not outside American law, but its margin for legal or ethical misstep is often quite thin. CIA is asked to do things that no one else is asked to do, indeed things that no one else is allowed to do. I know of no other federal bureaucracy, for example, that has an office dedicated to disguises or another one called “flaps and seals” (the latter to access materials without leaving a trace).

The iconic image of CIA is the sweeping panorama of the marble entry concourse: CIA shield on the floor, stars of the anonymous fallen to the right, a quotation from St. John to the left: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

A modern management consultant would label that line of scripture the agency’s vision statement, a description of a desired end state. But if you walk through the concourse, ascend the marble stairs, and look to
the left toward the agency museum, you see another quotation atop a stylized mural of Lady Liberty: “We are the Nation’s first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go.” That, the same consultant would assure you, would be the agency’s mission statement—the defining uniqueness of the institution.

It creates a heavy moral burden. I reminded newly minted case officers of that in my graduation speeches to them at the Farm, CIA’s training facility. “You may be the only face of America that the people you recruit will ever see. And when you have recruited them, they are placing their fate and their family’s fate in your hands. Don’t ever forget that.”

Analysts have a similarly heavy burden, not just to be honest in their analysis but to be courageous in its presentation. Very often they are the bearers of unwelcome news.

And everyone has a burden of secrecy that often leaves unexplained to loved ones long hours, somber moods, cancelled vacations, sudden trips, and stranded soccer carpools. In 2008 Angelina Jolie was preparing for her role as a CIA case officer in the upcoming film
Salt
and was talking by videoconference to several CIA women. I joined late to thank her for trying to learn more about our folks, but in the short ensuing conversation I also talked about work burdens at the agency and, if the screenplay permitted it, how beneficial it would be if some agency character in the film, late in a workday, would proclaim willingness to work all night but needed ninety minutes right now to pick up the kids and their teammates.

They didn’t put that in, of course. Wrong genre. Too many chase and assassination scenes. But the soccer mom (or dad) would have been closer to reality.

I was at the agency for nearly three years. In all that time I never met Jack Bauer or even Jack Ryan, not even in the agency’s most forward and isolated bases. In fact, the men and women of the agency were so centerline American that I took to describing them to outside audiences as “like your friends and neighbors . . . and if you live in northern Virginia, they probably are.” CIA is composed of ordinary Americans. Ordinary
Americans placed in extraordinary circumstances and expected to do extraordinary things.

The agency holds a family day every September, when its forested and secluded campus takes on the air of a county fair for most of a Saturday, as more than twenty thousand officers and family members descend on the headquarters. Kids crawl over the armored SUVs or visit with the canine officers and their charges. The disguise shop is standing room only for the youngest visitors, while parents drag teenagers to the polygraph booths for free “samples.” Jeanine and I, after a brief welcoming ceremony, would plant ourselves outside the cafeteria (which takes on the air of a
very
large church picnic) to say hi. An impromptu receiving line invariably formed, and we got to talk to folks for hours.

Two distinct groups stood out. The first was composed of the twenty-something agency officers with Mom and Dad in tow. Mom and Dad just flew in from Albany or Phoenix or drove up from Raleigh, and, bursting with pride for their child, were obviously having an out-of-body experience.

The second group was smaller. These were the forty-somethings, accompanied by a teenager or two. On more than one occasion, the officer would introduce “Junior” to me and Jeanine and announce that today was the day Junior had learned where Mom or Dad (or both) worked—just a family outing through northern Virginia that took an unscheduled hard turn off the George Washington Parkway and brought the
whole
family for the first time into a new world. Jeanine asked one teenage girl how the day’s discovery made her feel. “My mom’s a spy,” she replied. “That’s really cool.”

We have been fortunate that such people from across America want to serve. The agency has had the luxury of choice. My last full year as director (2008) there were 160,000 applicants. Not hits on the Web site, mind you—full-up, lengthy, privacy-invading applications. We could accept only about 1 percent or so. The average entering age for that new cohort was twenty-nine, and their most distinguishing characteristics were prior
life experience (about a quarter had been GIs) and second language (the more exotic the better).

Jeanine and I tried to meet new folks in a series of new-hire socials that we initiated. We held one every quarter until we had worked through the backlog of the previous few years and then did it as necessary to meet fresh cohorts.

We invited the new hires and their significant others, and I directed senior agency leadership to attend as well. The event was scheduled to run from six until eight in the evening, but it was rare that Jeanine and I got out before nine-thirty.

A typical group of new hires ranged in age from about twenty to sixty. They were engineers, scientists, finance officers, HR administrators, security officers, special assistants, open source officers, linguists, analysts, core collectors, and more. Many spoke Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Korean, or Russian.

It was a special evening. We would talk to small groups and ask questions about their impressions of the agency. We especially asked the covert officers about the question of cover. Who knows you work here? How did you decide whom to tell?

One young woman said she told her mom and her dad, but was a little regretful that she told her father. He was so proud of her, she said, that he really had trouble keeping the secret.

Cover is such an important consideration for the agency that we had to decide whether or not we would “integrate” new-hire socials, that is, whether or not we would include covered and uncovered officers and their significant others at the same time.

In the end, we decided to mix it up and invite both groups to the same event. That allowed me, in my prepared remarks, to emphasize that our ability to protect the American people depended upon our family members in some very important ways.

“Even tonight’s event presents opportunities
and
responsibilities,” I said. “There are officers here whose affiliation with CIA is not acknowledged outside this building. As part of our family, we ask you to protect
that information and we hope everyone can enjoy this unique chance to socialize with colleagues from every part of the organization.” The unspoken but clear message was, “Welcome to the CIA (we really mean it).”

There were other opportunities to connect. I often ate lunch in the cafeteria, and I made a point to run in the annual OMS (Office of Medical Services) 5K. I liked to run—it reinforced a message for folks to take care of themselves, and you can learn a lot dripping sweat, sitting on the steps of OHB (the Original Headquarters Building—the one with the shield on the lobby floor) with fellow runners on a hot summer day.

As a GI, I considered PT (physical training) an accepted (almost required) part of any workday. At the Pentagon, not being at your desk because you were at the POAC (the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club) was about as solid an excuse as being at a family funeral. Not for folks at CIA. I had been there a year when my executive assistant told me that one office had finally screwed up enough courage to ask her the meaning of the PT entry on my daily calendar. I couldn’t direct a bunch of civilians to exercise, but I did tell their supervisors that they could count up to three hours a week of PT as work time. I also limited the number of annual leave hours that could be carried forward into the next fiscal year. I wasn’t trying to deprive people of leave. I was trying to force them to use it.

Five years after 9/11, this was a tired crew. It needed to take better care of itself.

We also hacked our way through a federal bureaucratic thicket to get some chaplains cleared for the headquarters. Again, second nature for the US military. Not so much for CIA.

Jeanine did tireless work helping families. She supported a proposal to make it easier for a “trailing” agency spouse to find agency work at an overseas station. She was instrumental in setting up a Saturday morning class in “Living and Managing Cover” for spouses. She often attended the beginning of the class in order to welcome the spouses. And at case officer graduations at the Farm she got up and told our officers that although this was likely the first graduation in their lives where their parents were
not
present, she was there to stand in their stead and say how proud they were.

She went above and beyond. She traveled well outside Washington alone (so as not to attract attention) and in alias to meet with a group of spouses of officers so deeply covered that the session could not be held at Langley. The point of the meeting for the agency was to coach the spouses on what to do in extremis (hard to just call the mother ship), let them share some experiences, and also let them know that the agency cared, even if it could never call or write. Of course, the spouses could never even acknowledge one another if by chance their paths ever crossed again. To this day, Jeanine has difficulty describing the meeting without tearing up.

There was more. She willingly sat on a rocking chair on the porch of a central Virginia farmhouse helping me grieve with the parents of a young officer killed the day before in a traffic accident in Central Asia.

As a military family, we were accustomed to a pretty robust support structure during deployments. That kind of support didn’t exist at CIA even though since 9/11 we had become almost as expeditionary as America’s armed forces.

There were special challenges. Our people lived in civilian communities, not on a base, and in many instances neighbors didn’t even know their true affiliation, although many were probably the subject of “spot the spook” speculation, a common pastime in northern Virginia.

Jeanine worked with agency offices to build as much support as we could for the families of the many officers we had at austere locations in the middle of war zones.

When we left Langley, the agency gave her the Agency Seal Medal for her strong contributions to CIA, “its employees and their families.”

 • • • 

L
IKE THE REST
of the federal bureaucracy, CIA has a legal requirement to look like America. But the agency has an operational requirement to look like the world, including America’s adversaries. Tough challenge, but made easier by our still being a nation of immigrants.

CIA aggressively recruits from what it euphemistically calls heritage
communities: first- and second-generation Americans. Aggressively recruits, but carefully. Any foreign intelligence service with resources and wit could see what we are doing and work to exploit it. Indeed, while I was director, there was evidence that some were. The very things that would make a recruit attractive to us—extensive travel, study or work abroad, near-native language proficiency nurtured by still close ties to a region—all these opened up counterintelligence challenges.

In the summer of 2010 a young Michigan man, Glenn Shriver, was arrested and charged with making false statements to the US government and conspiring to pass intelligence to China. He had lived, studied, and worked in China off and on for several years, spoke Mandarin exceptionally well, and had been paid by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) to enter the CIA recruiting pipeline in 2007.

Shriver was detected by traditional counterintelligence means rather than by any guaranteed fail-safe point in our application process. And it was no surprise that the Chinese would be among those making a run at us. Then and now I stand in awe (as a professional) at the depth, breadth, and persistence of MSS’s efforts against the United States. China’s cyber espionage has gotten well-deserved headlines, but its efforts are not limited to the digital domain.

And, of course, China is not the only counterintelligence challenge.

That’s why we poured as much effort into our Counterintelligence Center (CIC) as we did into recruiting and other activities. The CIC was paid to be distrustful, and they were very good at it. They didn’t care that we were emphasizing heritage recruiting. They were suspicious of everyone without regard to race, creed, or place of origin.

The center had traditionally attracted high-end talent; my deputy, Steve Kappes, had once been its chief. My time at the agency was no exception, and top-notch CIA people were joined by high-quality FBI detailees.

A CIA director ignores counterintelligence at great peril. One counterintelligence head (James Jesus Angleton) had become so powerful and so destructively paranoid that he threatened the agency’s very survival until
summarily dismissed by William Colby in 1974. Jim Woolsey’s tenure (1993–1995) was forever darkened by the Aldrich Ames case, even though that Russian spy was actually uncovered on his watch.

Bob Gates is fond of relating a conversation he had with former DCI Richard Helms in 1991. The revered Helms, the story goes, was invited to lunch in the director’s dining room. As they were finishing, Helms turned to Gates and offered only one piece of advice: “Never go home at night without asking yourself, ‘Where is the mole?’”