The Reluctant Spy Read online

  “Oh, nice meeting you,” he said, shaking hands. We chatted for a minute and went our separate ways.

  A month later, he was doing a walk around our office, trying to introduce himself to all the analysts.

  As he approached my desk, he registered recognition and said he remembered me. I wanted to make sure he remembered the name as well as the face.

  “Yes, sir, nice to see you again,” I said. “John Kiriakou, nice to see you.”

  He became director of central intelligence in July 1997. About eight months later, I was called in to brief him and his deputy, John McLaughlin, on Iraq. It was a Sunday, so I put on my good suit and met my office director at Langley before we went up to the DCI’s suite. Tenet’s secretary ushered us in. McLaughlin, a gem of a guy, was impeccably dressed in a suit that put my Sunday best to shame. Tenet, however, was treating the day as casual Sunday in the extreme; he was wearing jeans torn at one knee and a red-and-black plaid shirt, the kind lumberjacks wear. He’s a stocky guy so he looked a little like the picture-book image of Paul Bunyan.

  After the briefing, he took me aside and asked, “So where are your people from?” This is standard operating procedure when Greeks meet: As I said, we’re a clannish tribe, and everyone figures they must have people in common.

  “All four of my grandparents came from Rhodes.”

  “Ohhhh,” he said, drawing it out, “an islander. You islanders think you’re better than the mainlanders.”

  “Oh, no, sir, not at all.” This islander-versus-mainlander business is a long-standing competition among Greeks, signifying absolutely nothing. “Where are your people from?”

  “Mine are from Epirus,” he said. That’s in the northwestern corner of Greece, but the part where his family came from is now in Albania. We exchanged a few more words on the lands of our antecedents’ birth, then went home to separate Sunday dinners.

  A couple of months later, I was supposed to join a handful of other analysts in briefing the director on several issues. The minute he spotted me, Tenet was at it again. “Kiriakou, tell me one more time, where are your people from?”

  “We’re from Rhodes.”

  “Riiight,” he said, drawing out the word again. “You islanders, you all think you’re better than us mainlanders, don’t you?”

  “No, sir, we don’t think we’re better at all.” An inside joke with the DCI? I suppose there are worse things that could connect us. But maybe I should be careful. I’m not sure what’s happening here.

  After my temporary assignment in Europe, I was back at headquarters walking down the hall one day with Katherine, whom I had begun to date, and there he was, coming from the opposite direction. As usual, Tenet was chomping on the unlit cigar that usually occupied one or the other corner of his mouth all day long. Our eyes made contact and I said, “Hello, sir, how are you?”

  “How are you, islander? Still think you’re better than I am?”

  Here we go again. “No, sir, I’ve never thought that I’m better than you are.” And so it went for another two or three rounds of imagined Greek rivalry before he walked on.

  Katherine was mystified: “What was that all about?”

  “I don’t know. The first couple of times he said it, I thought he was kidding, that it was a joke between us, kind of funny. But now? I have no idea what he’s thinking.”

  In the spring of 2002, I briefed him again, this time after I’d captured Abu Zubaydah. Tenet has a gruff, in-your-face kind of style, very personal. I don’t know what I expected. I would have happily settled for an “attaboy” with an accompanying chuck to the shoulder. Instead, he turned to one of the other people in the room and said, “Islander. He thinks he’s better than I am.”

  I went through my ritual denials: Believe me, I didn’t think I was better than he was.

  “You islanders all think you’re better than the mainlanders,” he went on. “Why? Because you guys were fishing while we were up in the mountains?” Now it’s fishing versus mountain shepherds? What the hell does that mean?

  Afterward, as we walked out, Bob Grenier asked me whether I had some kind of beef with the director.

  “Bob, I swear to God, I don’t even know how this began, but he does it every time I see him.”

  During the Iraq war, he did it on a Saturday morning in front of two or three dozen people. And then, shortly before I left the agency, we met again. After we exchanged hellos and how-are-yous, he went at it:

  “Have you done anything to adjust that attitude of yours?” I threw up my hands and made my case for islander-mainlander equality one last time. I haven’t seen or talked to him since.

  Is there a point to this story of intra-Greek fencing? I think so. In the CIA’s earliest days, during the late forties, fifties, and early sixties, its personnel profile tended to be white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Ivy League or exclusive small college, and moneyed. That started to change in subsequent decades, as the agency began to compete against other government and private-sector employers and broaden its recruiting to include women, African Americans, and even white ethnics with strange names like Kiriakou.

  But the image of the CIA as a place for privileged types with impeccable pedigrees has lingered on. There’s a joke at the agency that one day we’re all going to wake up and the American people are going to be on to us, recognizing that we aren’t quite worthy compared with the people who preceded us.

  My hunch is that George Tenet went through the same emotional insecurity. Here was a guy who grew up in New York—Queens, not Manhattan—and whose father was an immigrant running a diner. You can achieve anything in America, we were told by our parents and grandparents from the old country, and Tenet certainly overachieved. He went to fine schools—Georgetown University for his undergraduate degree and Columbia University for his master’s—and he became the DCI at the relatively young age of forty-four. After a period of musical chairs at the top, with three directors in barely five years, Tenet did wonders for morale. He often had lunch in the cafeteria so people could see him, and he used those times to walk around and shake hands. He promoted a lot of people, many who deserved it, some who did not. He worked long and hard and, when he was kept on by President Bush, it looked like he had tenure, or at least as close to it as a political appointee can get.

  But I sensed that he thought of himself as an outsider and even a pretender, not quite up to the job—a feeling echoed by agency people who knew him far better than I did. Tenet did want to please his bosses. No surprise there: In that respect, he was like the rest of us. But I felt, and so did others at the CIA, that he may have taken it too far and become too reluctant to talk truth to power at the highest level—that is, to the president of the United States. The business with enhanced interrogation techniques was an example of what I mean. In the post-9/11 frenzy, it’s fairly clear that many in the White House, especially those in Vice President Cheney’s orbit, wanted to do whatever it took to extract information from our high-profile detainees. Tenet could have raised cautionary flags about the use of—let’s be charitable here—suspect techniques. Instead, he seemed to play cheerleader to an audience eager to embrace them.

  The islander-versus-mainlander banter seemed to be, and was, harmless on its face. But it was clearly something that tapped into Tenet’s sense of self, perhaps reflecting a perception that others looked down on him for reasons beyond his control. It wasn’t true, so far as I knew, but maybe there was no persuading the director’s subconscious mind of that.

  THE MEN AND women of the Central Intelligence Agency, at least during my fourteen-plus years in its employ, were typical of many organizations—a mixed bag, but with many more talented people than the agency’s fiercest critics would have Americans believe. On the key point, they coalesced as one. Rarely in my time at CIA did I encounter anyone who wasn’t dedicated to the mission of gathering information, analyzing it, and presenting it to policy makers, who use it to further the interests of U.S. national security. As best as I could tell
—no one took a poll—the agency included Republicans, Democrats, and independents in roughly equal numbers. But the “product,” the analysis presented to the executive and legislative branches of government, was strictly nonpartisan. And the quality of that analysis, for the most part, was quite high.

  Good analysts generally color their work because it’s almost impossible to make a case for a conclusion with 100 percent certainty. The world of intelligence gathering and analysis isn’t black-and-white. Still, the shades of gray can become disconcerting and obscure the central argument. Too often, senior people force caveats into analysis simply to protect the agency against being wrong. That, in turn, can make it a lot easier for people elsewhere—say, in the White House—to cherry-pick analysis and extract from it what they want to support a specific policy decision.

  Risk aversion, in fact, is an occupational hazard at the CIA. Part of the problem can be traced to oversight, particularly congressional oversight of agency operations. The history of the CIA, at least over the past four decades, reflects a tendency to overcorrect—hitting the brakes when its congressional overseers believe the agency has become too aggressive, hitting the accelerator when more active measures are wanted. In the mid-1970s, after the Vietnam War and Watergate, it was all brakes. After 9/11, they wanted us to hit the gas and go after the bad guys.

  Fair enough: The CIA may not be a democracy, but it is the creature of one and it serves at the pleasure, and sometimes the whim, of those elected to their jobs as the people’s representatives. But risk aversion can become a cultural trait, too, an inbred cover-your-ass instinct where even a reasonable venture risks getting rolled because someone up the line has a mindless twitch. Tenet’s predecessor as DCI, John Deutch, for example, even implemented a new regulation establishing strict procedures for the recruitment and retention of any agent with known or suspected involvement in human rights violations or criminal activity. Each such case would require approval either by the agency’s lawyers or by the director himself. Deutch was responding to a 1995 miniscandal in which the Guatemalan husband of an American citizen was murdered by a man with ties to the CIA. But the impact on the morale of case officers abroad was devastating, for obvious reasons.

  Once, when I was in Athens, I wanted to enlist a guy who was a bona fide terrorist. We’d been in fairly regular contact, and I believed he had come around to trust me, at least to the point where he thought we could work together. I hadn’t made the pitch yet, but since he was ready, I asked headquarters for permission to formally recruit him. If he agreed, we’d have an official relationship and, presumably, the agency would learn a great deal about the operations of his group.

  Weeks passed, then a few months. When I asked what was up, I was told they were working on it. Finally, I got a message saying they were going to deny the request because agency attorneys were worried about us getting in bed with terrorists. The gist of the message was “If he’s as bad as you say, we don’t want to be working with him, or be seen working with him.” The entire point was that he was a bad guy—someone who could help get us inside a terrorist group and perhaps save American lives.

  It’s strange how things sometimes turn out. In December 1999, Tenet hosted the annual Christmas party in the lobby of the original headquarters building; it was an opportunity to meet and greet, to shake the director’s hand, and hear “good job” from him. One of my colleagues on Greek terrorism back at headquarters introduced himself to the boss and told him what he did at the agency. “Oh, Greek terrorism,” Tenet said. “That’s an issue that cuts very close to home. If there’s anything I can do for you guys, let me know.”

  “As a matter of fact, sir …” After hearing my colleague’s lament, Tenet summoned an assistant and told him to handle the problem. The next day, I got approval to recruit my agent. But should a clandestine operative have to count on dumb luck—a chance encounter at a Christmas party—to get an okay for a bold proactive step that could save American lives? I don’t think so. Tenet, to his credit, didn’t think so either. After 9/11, he effectively scrapped the regulation.

  Fortunately, bureaucrats who seem to thrive on inhibiting innovation rather than encouraging it fill cubbyholes here and there at Langley, but they tend not to lead the place. Those at the top include some of the best of the best in our government. I want to mention just four of them.

  STEVE KAPPES IS the CIA officer everyone wanted to be: a brilliant man, unfailingly gracious to colleagues, junior and senior, and with the highest ethnical standards to boot. I first met him overseas, when I was a junior analyst on loan to our ambassador to a Middle Eastern country because I knew a lot about the local personalities; Kappes didn’t and needed to be briefed during his visit. I conducted my briefing for him and a few others and invited questions. The others were quiet, but Kappes was like a great investigative reporter, politely probing here, eliciting further information there, getting me to provide a more complete briefing. By the time we were done, I had learned two things: how to be a better briefer and a bit about how the mind of a truly impressive agency officer worked.

  Kappes got caught up in a contretemps during the Bush years that showed what he was made of. After Tenet resigned, Bush named Porter Goss as his new CIA director. Goss, a congressman from Florida, had been a clandestine operative for the agency during the 1960s and, more recently, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. When he came to the CIA, he brought along some of his own people, including his chief of staff, Patrick Murray. One day, Murray reamed out Mike Sulick, who was associate deputy director for operations at the time, about another top employee’s alleged leaking of classified information. Sulick was having none of it, and he and Murray got into a heated argument in Kappes’s office. Sulick stormed out; Murray apparently told Kappes, then the deputy director for operations, that Sulick needed to be fired or transferred. Sulick, a stalwart at the CIA, had done nothing wrong, and Kappes knew it. Instead of firing or transferring him, Kappes resigned. So did Sulick. Then John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA, did the same.

  The loss of these three valuable men, for no good reason, was the beginning of the end for Porter Goss; he was gone early in 2006, replaced at CIA by air force general Michael Hayden. Hayden and his boss, John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, were wise enough to bring back both Kappes and Sulick, this time with Kappes as deputy CIA director and Sulick as deputy director for operations.

  During Goss’s troubled tenure, Bob Grenier, a top operations officer I have mentioned often, was also removed from his job as head of the Counterterrorist Center. With that, the CIA lost one of its finest and most effective leaders. Bob’s true love was analysis, and he had originally sought positions in the Directorate of Intelligence when the agency first hired him. He would have excelled there, too, because he is whip smart, unflappable, utterly honest, and nobody’s yes-man. But he spent most of his career overseas, in operations I cannot discuss here. It wasn’t just his colleagues in the clandestine service who counted on his intelligence and judgment. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan once told me that she overruled her own State Department on more than one occasion based solely on Bob’s wise counsel during his time there as senior officer in country.

  His deep understanding of Afghanistan and its tribal culture paid off after the attacks of September 11, 2001. He was one of the chief planners who conceived the U.S. intelligence and military strategy of winning over Pashtun tribes in the south and working with the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban. His work impressed President Bush. Enough so, said Bob Woodward in his book Bush at War, that the president asked Tenet to assign Bob to the agency’s Iraq-related efforts. That’s how he became the CIA’s Iraq mission manager.

  Another giant at the agency was Cofer Black, whom I’ve mentioned before. I don’t want to give a false impression: Cofer and I were never close friends. He was my boss three levels up, and I respected him enormously. He was a legend at the agency for many reasons: his
leadership skills, his ability to talk straight and colorfully, his capacity for clear thinking, and his instinct to act when others were reticent. He was also a legend because of his role in the capture of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal. In the 1970s, Carlos was one of the world’s most notorious terrorists, working on behalf of various Palestinian groups and state sponsors of terrorism. If he wasn’t the most wanted man on the planet, he certainly was on the short list. In the early 1990s, having moved around the Middle East and North Africa seeking safe haven, Carlos showed up in Khartoum, which turned out to be his undoing.

  In 1994, Cofer Black was chief of the CIA’s office in the Sudanese capital. At the same time, a longtime agency contract officer, Billy Waugh, was in country on business I cannot discuss here. Billy is a legendary figure in his own right, a former Army Special Forces noncommissioned officer who was awarded a Silver Star, four Bronze Stars, and eight Purple Hearts, mainly for his service in Vietnam.

  One day, Billy happened to be walking through a Khartoum vegetable market when he spotted a guy he thought was Carlos himself; the man, a Caucasian, stood out in the sea of Sudanese faces. He rushed back to the office and found Cofer getting some exercise on a treadmill. As Billy tells the story:

  “Cofer, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I just saw Carlos the Jackal in the vegetable market.” Cofer laughed so hard he almost fell off the treadmill.

  “Billy, give me a break. What do you want me to do, call in an air strike or something just because you think you saw Carlos?”

  “I’m serious, it’s Carlos the Jackal. I’m sure of it.”

  “All right,” Cofer said, “get a team together and get me a photo.”

  Billy put a team together and they visited the vegetable market every day for a month. No Carlos. Everyone was thinking, well, maybe old Billy—he was then in his mid-sixties—is having trouble with his eyesight; it happens. Finally, just when they were about to give up, Carlos went vegetable shopping again. On the spot, the team devised a plan. Two of Billy’s guys pretended to have a fight, pushing and shoving and maybe even landing a few blows. Naturally, they drew a crowd, which formed a big circle around Billy’s two actors pretending to duke it out in the middle of Khartoum. Carlos dashed over to take a look; as he was craning his neck in an effort to glimpse the action, Billy was able to snap off a roll of film. Even Cofer thought the guy was the real deal: If it wasn’t Carlos, it was the doppelgänger who retired the trophy.