88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  I had loved boarding school and was eager to return. It may sound strange, but within what some might perceive as a straitjacket of form and tradition, I had encountered far greater freedom of thought, and far more interesting people, than I ever encountered in the supposedly freewheeling intellectual ferment and drug-fueled hedonism of 1970s eastern academia. The economic downturn of the mid-1970s had hit many private secondary schools hard, however, and there were few jobs to be had. In response to the many letters of introduction I sent out, I received only one invitation for an interview.

  The position on offer at Concord Academy, outside Boston, was not at all what I had in mind. Concord had for years been a small, exclusive girls’ school, the tone set by the many socialites who sent their daughters there. Caroline Kennedy had graduated a year earlier, before going off to Harvard; the student body was dominated by old-money eastern establishment families, leavened with the offspring of film, television, and theater people. The school had only recently become coeducational, and was looking for a dorm parent for one of its few boys’ residences. It wasn’t a teaching job, but it was a foot in the door. Only slightly older than the charges I was to supervise, I was offered the position.

  The following year, which would otherwise have been my last in college, was idyllic. My dorm parent’s stipend was tiny, but came with free room and board. I supplemented my income by substitute teaching in the local public schools, and helped coach the cross-country and baseball teams. I made terrific friends on the Concord faculty, and spent off-hours in the bars and cafés of Boston and Cambridge. It would all have been a good first step toward realizing my goal of becoming a latter-day Mr. Chips, but there was just one hitch: barely out of adolescence myself, I found I had little patience for the emotional trials of younger adolescents. School would be a terrific place, I thought, if it weren’t for the damned students. I was going to have to come up with something else.

  That summer, a friend and I formed a house-painting company, and landed a couple of contracts to paint old colonial residences in Cambridge. Lounging in paint-spattered clothes, poring over the newspapers during meal breaks in seedy, working-class diners off Harvard Square, I found myself increasingly drawn to the international pages. I became fascinated by Middle East politics, the post-1973 emergence of the oil-rich sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, efforts to settle the Arab-Israeli dispute, and the Cold War struggle for post-colonial influence in Africa. I followed the maneuvers of Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, and Ian Smith in Rhodesia as though I were reading a weekly serial. I had always had an interest in international politics, but had never really taken the time to develop it. Now, my partner had trouble tearing me away from my reading to get me back on the job. On the basis of nothing more than that and a few romantic movies I’d seen about the Middle East, I decided to get a graduate degree in international relations.

  There was just one holdup to the pursuit of my latest enthusiasm. While at Dartmouth, I had fallen in love with a Boston College nursing student, one year my junior, from a large, extended Irish family. Paula and I wanted to get married as soon as possible, but it would be another year before she could graduate. Not wanting to assume in bad faith the responsibilities of a proper, entry-level position I had no intention of keeping for more than a few months, I took a cheap, walk-up garret apartment in Boston’s Back Bay area and embarked on a series of dead-end jobs while waiting to hear back from graduate schools. When it got too cold to paint, I sold household smoke detectors door-to-door. I later became manager of a twenty-four-hour gas station, employing minimum-wage roustabouts in a tough section of Dedham, Massachusetts, while working a sixty-hour week. That year provided an enormously valuable education. Among other things, it strongly reinforced the lessons I had gleaned during summers working for my father’s construction company, where I had developed an appreciation for the ennobling qualities of hard manual labor. It also taught me that I had a knack for developing close, empathetic relationships with people who did not begin to see the world as I did.

  In the spring of 1977, on a Sunday afternoon, Paula graduated summa cum laude from Boston College. We were married the following Friday, in a large Irish wedding attended by 200 people, most of whom I’d never met. Within weeks I was a kept man, studying at the University of Virginia while my wife supported me as a neonatal intensive care nurse at the University Hospital. I was twenty-two, and she twenty-one.

  All that led me, some ten months later, to Dotty’s door. After about an hour of amiable but seemingly undirected conversation, she asked: What did I think I was applying for? Somewhat taken aback, I replied that I guessed I’d be interested in working as an intelligence analyst. This was my first encounter with a CIA field operative, a “case officer” in agency parlance, and so it was also the first time that one would lie to me. “We don’t have any openings for analysts,” she said. “But have you ever thought about how the U.S. government goes about gathering secret intelligence overseas?” Without any reflection, I answered truthfully. “No ma’am,” I said. “I’ve never given it a moment’s thought.”

  Laughing, she told me about her own career. She, too, had married young, but to a considerably older man, a former ambassador who was one of the State Department’s original “China hands” from the 1950s. Eventually recruited and trained as a case officer by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (now called the National Clandestine Service), she had moved in her husband’s wake, able to take advantage of his contacts with senior foreign government officials and others with access to secrets of interest to the U.S. government. Her job had been to find such people, assess their motivations and their suitability to be spies, and convince them to cooperate, in secret, with the CIA.

  We had spoken minutes before about the young French couple I had lived with as an exchange student in Toulouse, France. “What motivated the husband?” she asked. “What did he want in life? Was he happy with his career, with his marriage?” In truth, although I could speculate, I really wasn’t sure. Like anyone, I had lots of idle thoughts and insights into the character of friends and acquaintances, but had never really examined or tested them in any systematic way. As we spoke, I could see that the job she was describing would require me to look at the world from a very different perspective.

  “We’re looking for the sort of people who sit down between flights in a crowded airport with a good book, and then never open it,” she said, “because they’re too engrossed in studying the people around them.” A successful case officer, she said, has to have empathy for people and a restless curiosity about the world, a drive to understand how things work, to understand the causes behind events. He must be resourceful and flexible, to think well on his feet. He has to be able to write quickly, succinctly, and well. And he can’t be in it just for himself, because he has to know, going in, that he will never get external recognition for what he does.

  She went on to describe the various specializations in the Directorate of Operations, and a typical career progression, from street case officer or reports officer up through ascending layers of supervisory and then management responsibility. It was intriguing and intimidating. I had never particularly suffered from a lack of self-confidence, but I genuinely wasn’t sure I could do this. I kept my doubts to myself.

  “You have an impressive background,” she said. “Your academics, your language ability, your time abroad all count in your favor. We can determine whether you have the psychological makeup we’re looking for, and the writing and other skills we need. What you need to decide is whether you want to do this.” My answers were equivocal.

  “I’m going to suggest a book for you to read,” she said. “The Night Watch, by David Atlee Phillips. That will give you a better idea of what this is all about. If you’re interested, call me, and we’ll start the process.”

  That night I called Paula from my motel room. I mentioned the appointment with CIA. “Oh?” she replied warily.

  “You wouldn’t believe what they want me to do,�
�� I said. We agreed we could never do anything like that.

  “Just too weird,” she concluded.

  By the time I arrived home the next day, she had already retrieved The Night Watch from the library. Over the next two days, we both read it. Phillips had had an exciting career, encompassing both high achievement and abject disaster. Although heavily involved in the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, he rose eventually to be chief of the CIA’s Latin America Division. What most came through, though, was what a decent, humane fellow he was; he didn’t fit at all the popular image of the cold, calculating, flint-hearted spy. As his life story unfolded, it was easy for us to identify with him and his clever, independent-minded wife. On the morning of the third day we looked at each other. “It would be a job,” she said.

  I’ve never been much good at long-range career planning. But I did at least have a marginal talent for recognizing an opportunity when I’d stumbled over it. The application and vetting process was long, extending over seven months. As I went through the stages of submitting a lengthy, 36-page personal history questionnaire and various writing samples, taking a battery of psychological and vocational tests, speaking with a psychiatrist and a senior officer of the Near East Division and, finally, passing a polygraph examination and undergoing a background investigation, it began to dawn on me that I had somehow found precisely what I had been looking for all along. Not for the first time in my life, I discovered that it was much more important to be lucky than good.

  I entered on duty as a junior officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the Clandestine Service, on January 14, 1979, the day Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi fled Iran. Less than two years later, after a year of rigorous training and some months devoted to brushing up my French and preparing on the desk, I found myself a member of the Near East Division, on my first assignment in North Africa. Over the eleven years that followed, essentially the decade of the eighties, we moved from one foreign assignment to another, six in all, in locations in the Near East and Western Europe. In all of them, I dealt almost exclusively with Middle Eastern issues. For most of that time I was under “official” cover, posing as a bureaucrat of one stripe or another, typically for a couple of years at a time. What I ostensibly did often bore little resemblance to my actual job. For two particularly exciting years, I traveled almost constantly through Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East, posing in a variety of guises, using aliases and false documents. The personalities I assumed in those days were usually much more interesting than me. It was like acting. I got to a point during that time where I could no longer sign my name without pausing for a split second to make sure I knew who I was supposed to be at the moment.

  Wherever I was, my job in those years was to recruit foreigners as intelligence sources—“agents,” or “assets” in CIA parlance—and to “handle” or “run” them as spies. That meant to meet or otherwise to communicate with them in secret, to provide them with direction, and to debrief them for intelligence. The technology involved in the clandestine tradecraft we employed grew steadily in sophistication in those early years of the digital revolution, but ours remained, as it had been from time immemorial, a “people” business, just as Dotty had told me at the outset. People are complicated, and spies perhaps more so than most. Finding the motivational key to persuade someone to betray his or her country or organization, often at great risk, is difficult, exacting, and soul-searching work. Moral ambiguity is the spy’s constant companion. Once recruited, an asset must constantly be assessed and tested for changes in his motivation or his access to information. The price of failure can be high: agents can be discovered and “turned” to work against you, suborned by third parties to serve several masters or, in the case of a terrorist, lead you to your death. And yet, all the while navigating this mental and moral wilderness of mirrors, an officer must maintain a close and empathetic relationship with his or her source, lest the basis of the relationship be undermined. The case officer’s workspace is the palette of human character. In embracing the mix of high-minded and base motives that characterize most sources, you learn similar lessons about yourself.

  I found that being a CIA case officer was not a job at all: it was a way of life. There was not a part of my existence it didn’t touch. Excursions with friends or school outings were engineered or manipulated to provide opportunities to meet and develop potential sources. A picnic in the countryside or a day at the beach provided cover to case a site for a subsequent clandestine meeting. I would excuse myself from a seemingly casual restaurant dinner with friends to walk out the back and make an untraceable call to a contact. Nothing in life was simple; everything had a dual purpose.

  Although never directly affiliated with CIA in any way, Paula had in effect signed up for this with me, and she and our young family became an integral part of my dual life. I found she often had better, more instinctive insights into people’s character than I did, and I learned to pay attention to them. Many nights she lay awake into the wee hours with instructions as to whom she should call if I failed to return from some late-night assignation.

  On one occasion, disaster struck: A “principal agent” I was running, a known enemy of a rogue, terrorist-supporting state, whose job was to manage a network of subagents, was betrayed by one of them, a childhood friend, and slain by a hit team. Fearing I might be next, my superiors in Langley demanded first that we take a “vacation” in the mountains, and then that we leave the country, permanently. We had to say good-bye to our home and to our friends, on very short notice.

  It was passionate, all-encompassing work. In the words of a female colleague, in CIA your job becomes your mistress. As such, it inevitably takes a toll over time on marriages and families, and at various points ours was not excepted. But life in those years was hardly grim; it was intoxicating. For every night Paula spent worrying as I stalked through some seaside slum, there were others spent at chic dinner parties or elegant receptions. She was able to find nursing work whenever she liked, in embassies, in private schools, for oil companies, for the Peace Corps. We made wonderful friends, of many nationalities and from many walks of life. Life in poor developing countries had a colonial feel, with large houses, servants, and leafy tennis clubs. Vacations took us from exotic medieval towns in Yemen, to Roman ruins in North Africa, to the teeming markets of Hong Kong, to the topless beaches of Antibes.

  Among my relatives and friends, only my parents knew that I was working for CIA. My in-laws went to their graves not knowing what their son-in-law did for a living. My father, in particular, was skeptical of my chosen profession; for the first decade or so, he thought of it as a phase that I would eventually outgrow. My mother, though, was more curious. On one of her visits, we spoke alone in the garden, away from possible microphones. She asked me pointedly whether I liked what I was doing. “Mom,” I said truthfully, “I love this so much it scares me.”

  As the years passed, my skills as an officer and my devotion to the organization developed easily, and in tandem. The autonomy, clarity, and personal discretion offered by fieldwork, I would learn, had no equivalent in the pestilence of Washington’s bureaucratic politics, even for the most senior officials. My progress was recognized in steady promotions, and I was given two field commands of my own, first as a “base chief,” subordinate to a chief of station located elsewhere in the same country, and then as a station chief in my own right.

  To outsiders, however, my success was not apparent. Advancement in my “cover jobs” kept pace for a time with hidden reality, but then necessarily plateaued. Although no one said it, it soon appeared to friends and family that my career must have stalled. This was an inevitable part of the clandestine life, just as Dotty had warned. But I also recognized that the near-total reliance on the good opinion of those inside CIA had the effect of reinforcing a potentially dangerous arrogance and a suffocating insularity in an organization whose work already inclined it toward both. I enthusiastically shared that culture, but was wary of it.
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  For many of my colleagues, collecting human intelligence was an end in itself: for them, how others used the intelligence we gathered may have been a subject of interest, but it was someone else’s worry. That was never the case for me. Our basic training in the Directorate of Operations (DO) had included a couple of weeks of familiarization in all-source analysis provided by the Directorate of Intelligence (the DI), the analytic wing of the CIA. My DI instructors offered me the opportunity to leave the DO for the analytic ranks. I didn’t take them up on it—the lure of overseas adventure was too compelling—but I retained a strong interest in what they did.

  Having worked hard and taken risks to gather human intelligence, I was keen to ensure that it was accurately reflected in the finished product that went to policymakers. In my intelligence reports, I frequently included comments to provide context and perspective. And when I felt the analysts were getting something wrong, I would sometimes write to complain. On occasion, field stations overseas were asked to comment, and to provide an on-the-ground perspective on major analytic pieces being prepared in Langley. More often than not, my chiefs would ask me to write such comments for them, and I was not shy about initiating field appraisals in response to major events.

  But nothing attracted my interest like National Intelligence Estimates. Usually referred to as NIEs, these are the highest-level and most comprehensive pieces of analysis produced by the U.S. government, and are meant to represent the considered, bottom-line judgments of the entire intelligence community on the great analytic questions of the day. In the late 1980s, when I was dashing about the world in “non-official” cover, meeting with Iranian sources, the intelligence community prepared one of a series of major National Intelligence Estimates devoted to assessing the future of the Iranian revolution. The NIE’s drafters sought the help of my station, and I was assigned to assist them. I became fascinated by the process, and particularly by the role of the national intelligence officers, or NIOs. Each specializing in a distinct geographic or functional area of responsibility, they were organized in a communitywide organization called the National Intelligence Council, the NIC. They were the senior representatives of the intelligence community to the policymakers and to Congress, and they had the ability to place their individual stamp on the community’s views.