I would finish by telling them that I wanted them to be obsessed with quality. “Good enough is not a phrase we use at CIA,” I would tell them. “Pursue excellence in everything you do,” I would add. “The president, the taxpayers, and the stars on the wall deserve nothing less.”
Toward the end of my tenure at the Agency, not only did the new employees hear those words but so did their spouses and partners. When I became a member of the CIA leadership team, my wife, Mary Beth, became even more involved in the Agency and in its efforts to support the families of our officers. When I became deputy director, she had the idea that spouses and partners should be in the room when their loved ones take the oath of office. It was a brilliant idea—an important first step in binding an employee’s family to the Agency. When I retired, Director Brennan awarded Mary Beth the Agency Seal Medal, the highest CIA award a non-officer can receive, and her passion for including spouses and partners in the swearing-in ceremony was one of the reasons for the award. I am very proud of her.
Today the swearing-in ceremony, with spouses and partners in attendance, is regularly led by the director—which is relatively new for the Agency. When I was the number three at the Agency, from 2006 to 2008, I presided over the oath of office. When I became deputy director in 2010, I insisted on taking on the task again, although my duties at the White House would often preclude me from doing so. But when Dave Petraeus arrived at the Agency in September 2011, he insisted on doing the ceremony. He believed that there was no better day to start imprinting the values of the organization than hearing from the director on day one. John Brennan continues that practice to this day. While I was disappointed that the responsibility had been taken from me—a job I truly loved—I thought the idea of the director’s conducting the swearing-in ceremony was exactly right. On November 30, 1980, on my first day at the Agency, I was sworn in by a mid-level official, the director of personnel, in a classroom. I do not remember who that person was or even the room where the ceremony took place. But today’s new employees will always remember that they were sworn in by the director, standing in front of the most important wall in the Central Intelligence Agency.
* * *
The Wall was meaningful not only for new employees. It was also important to me personally. I found it a place to clear my mind. On days when things seemed to be at their worst, on days when nothing seemed to be going right, I would wander down to the Wall (I had a method of sneaking out of my office without my security detail seeing me and therefore following). After a few minutes everything would come back into perspective. No matter how bad my day, it paled in comparison to what the family and friends of our fallen officers had gone through and would continue to go through for the rest of their lives. I would always return to my office with a renewed sense of purpose. I would also go down to the Wall on the one day each year when the engraver came to the Agency to add the new stars. Standing and watching from afar as the chisel chips away marble and slowly creates a star is one of the most meaningful and moving experiences an Agency officer can have.
As of this writing there are 111 stars on the Wall, and certainly more will be added in the years ahead. They date back to the founding of the Agency in 1947. The stars are accompanied by the Book of Honor, a simple list of the names of the officers killed in the line of duty. Some of the entries are blank, as even in death the officers’ affiliation with the Agency cannot be revealed. Eighty of the stars were added between 1947 and September 11, 2001. And thirty-one stars have been added since 9/11—almost all represent officers who were in some way involved in the fight against al Qa‘ida.
Mike Spann was the first of the thirty-one. Mike was the first American to die in Afghanistan in our country’s response to the 9/11 attacks. On November 26, 2001, I arrived at work at one a.m. to prepare for my daily briefing of the president. I found on my desk, seemingly placed and centered there with care, a cable from our officers in Afghanistan. It reported the death of an Agency officer. I sat down and started to read, and I read every word of the cable. Mike and a teammate had been visiting a Northern Alliance prison near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, November 25. It was one of the places the Northern Alliance took Taliban and al Qa‘ida prisoners when they were captured on the battlefield.
It was a routine mission that went bad. Mike’s job was to gain from the prisoners any intelligence that might speed the Taliban and al Qa‘ida’s defeat, as well as any information about further terrorist plotting against the United States. One of the prisoners Mike talked to that day was an American citizen, John Walker Lindh, who had decided to fight for the Taliban. Late that morning a riot broke out among the prisoners and the Afghan guards lost control. The prisoners overran the prison and went right after the Americans. Mike fought with his AK-47 until it ran out of ammunition, drew his pistol and fought with that until it emptied, then resorted to hand-to-hand combat before being overwhelmed by the large numbers of prisoners. Mike’s body was recovered on the morning of November 27, after Northern Alliance troops and US and British Special Forces, backed by US air strikes, reestablished control at the prison.
I put the cable down, drew in a deep breath, and said to myself, “I’m showing this to the president; he will want to see this.” I highlighted sections of the text of the cable with a yellow highlighter. President Bush and I had an unspoken understanding that if he read only what I had highlighted, he would get the gist, the main points, of a piece. I tried to highlight as little as possible of the ten-page cable without losing the story. I placed it in the front of his PDB binder, before the analytic articles specifically written for the president to see that day and before two or three intelligence reports that I thought he needed to see.
I met Director Tenet, as usual, in his office in the Old Executive Office Building to prepare for the briefing of the president. The director’s briefer had already shown him what I planned to use with the president. Tenet took one look at me and said, “You’re not showing the Mike Spann cable to the president. He does not need to know that.” I pushed back, saying I was certain that he would want to know about our loss of Mike, the first American killed in combat on his watch as commander in chief, and certain that he would also want to read about the details. One of the many great things about Tenet was that he listened and was open to changing his mind. He relented by simply saying, “I hope you are right.”
Tenet and I walked into the Oval Office and greeted the president. He was already sitting in his chair next to the vice president. I handed him his book and distributed books to Dick Cheney, Andy Card, and Condi Rice. As I was handing out the books, Tenet told the president that we had lost an officer in Afghanistan overnight. Tenet told the president that I had put the reporting cable in his briefing book but that “it simply boiled down to a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The president did not say anything in response. He just started to read. It quickly became clear to me that he was not just reading the highlighted text; he was reading the entire cable. And he was not skimming; he was reading every word carefully. It took him almost twenty minutes to finish the cable. The president closed his briefing book without reading anything else in it and asked if Mike had a family. Tenet said, “Yes, Mike has a wife named Shannon, who is also an Agency officer, and three children.” The president looked at Card and said, “I want to call Shannon.” I was fighting back tears.
* * *
The prison near Mazar-e-Sharif was the location of CIA’s first post-9/11 casualty, but the CIA base near Khost, Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, was the site of our heaviest post-9/11 casualties. There, on December 30, 2009, a suicide bomber—who had pretended to be a CIA source and who had said he might be able to pinpoint the location of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two of al Qa‘ida—detonated his vest filled with explosives, killing seven CIA officers and severely wounding several others. It was the first time in the history of the Agency that someone who was a source—or at least pretending to be a source—had
killed his CIA case officers.
At the time I was serving as the director for intelligence, the Agency’s chief analyst. My family and I had spent the Christmas holiday in Florida, returning to Washington late on Wednesday, December 30. On the morning of the thirty-first, an official government holiday, I came to work to catch up. As I often did, I stopped in Deputy Director Steve Kappes’s office on the way to my own. When I walked into his office, he and several senior officers from the operations directorate were sitting together. I immediately sensed that something was terribly wrong, as the mood in the room was deeply somber. I sat down and they told me what had happened. I was stunned—not only because of the size of the loss and the nature of the tragedy but because I knew one of the victims, base chief Jennifer Matthews, very well. We had served together for three years earlier in our careers.
Just a few days later Panetta asked the Agency’s senior leadership team to attend with him the dignified transfer of the remains at Dover Air Force Base. We were met there by the commanding officer of mortuary services. He briefed us on what would transpire. He explained that the families of the seven fallen officers were in a large room not far from where we were, adding that we would meet with them first. He said that there were nearly one hundred people in total—mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, spouses, and children. He told Panetta to say a few words to the entire room; then we should all mingle and talk to the families. He added, “Many people in your shoes worry about what you should say in a situation like this. Don’t. Realize that they are still in shock and will not remember what you say. What they will remember is that you were here.” He finished by explaining that after about an hour with the families, we would move to the tarmac for the transfer.
While perhaps the families do not remember what he said, Panetta was masterful. To the large group and then in the small groups, he told the families about the work of the Agency at Khost and about its importance. He told them about the potential of this particular operation, going into detail about why we’d been so interested in the person who had turned out to be a suicide bomber.
In similar circumstances since then, I have learned that the families of fallen officers want desperately to know three things. They want to know that the work of their loved one was important to the security of the nation. They want to know that their loved one was good at that work, that he or she made a difference. And they want to know that their coworkers respected and loved him or her. When I became deputy and then acting director, I would pore over the personnel files of the fallen, so I could give the families specific examples of these three simple, yet powerful, points.
The dignified transfer involved the CIA leadership team standing on the flight line as seven metal caskets were carried, one at a time, from the back of a C-17 to vehicles that would transport the caskets to the base mortuary. A single transfer would begin with a prayer by a chaplain over the casket in the back of the C-17 and the saluting of the flag-draped casket by the white-gloved eight-man transfer team. As the transfer team lifted the casket and started down the ramp of the C-17, the commanding officer would call, “Present arms.” This was the order to render honors—military officers going to the salute position, civilians putting their right hand over their heart. The transfer team would then carry the casket the hundred feet or so to the transfer vehicle. Each transfer took about ten minutes; the entire event took well over an hour. It was bitterly cold—with a temperature just below freezing and the winter wind gusting.
Over the next several weeks, I attended with Panetta the funerals and memorial services of our officers. Each was special but two have been seared in my memory. The first, a funeral for Harold Brown, was in a small town outside Boston. The funeral mass was beautiful, but what occurred after the mass was extraordinary. As we left the church for the cemetery, I saw a family of five—a mother, a father, and three children—standing on their front porch, at attention, with their hands over their hearts. A few blocks more brought additional people standing in honor—in driveways, at intersections, and along the road. Families, scout troops, civic groups, and lone individuals. The crowds grew as we got closer to the cemetery. In the thirty-minute ride, there were hundreds—perhaps a thousand—Americans standing to honor our officer. They stood in fifteen-degree weather, holding American flags of differing sizes, many with hands on their hearts, some with signs that simply read “Thank you for keeping us safe.” Panetta said, “I wish every member of Congress could see this.” I was thinking, “I wish every American could see this.”
The same day, a few hours later, I attended a memorial service in my hometown of Akron, Ohio, for another of our fallen colleagues. This officer, Scott Roberson, had left behind a wife and an unborn daughter, whom Scott and his wife had already decided to name Piper. One of the eulogies was given by one of Scott’s close friends, a military officer. At the end of this eulogy, this military officer said that he had a vision of the future. He said that he saw a young woman, her husband, and her children standing in front of the Memorial Wall in our lobby at CIA. He said that this young woman had her hand on one of the black stars on our Memorial Wall as she told her family about Scott, about his life, and about his service to his country—his contribution to freedom. He said that in his vision, this young woman—named Piper by her parents—was as proud as she could be of the father she had never met.
* * *
One of my first overseas trips as deputy director was to Afghanistan, where the Agency had many officers deployed. I insisted on visiting the site of the attack at Khost. I saw the scars that were still visible from that awful day. In particular I saw small holes in the corrugated roof over a patio—and even one in a steal I beam—made by the ball bearings that had burst with extreme force from the suicide vest. And I saw the plaque that Director Panetta had dedicated a few months before. The plaque contains a few verses from Isaiah chapter eight: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’ ”
* * *
I met the vast majority of the families of the thirty-one officers who have perished in the line of duty post-9/11. And, through the emotion and the tears, I would always tell them the same thing—that the Agency would forever be there for them and that if they had a problem, they needed only to pick up the phone and call me. A few days after I decided to retire, I awoke in the middle of the night with the thought “Who is going to take care of these families going forward, who is going to live up to the commitment that I made, who is going to be on the other end of the phone?” I reached for the pen and pad of paper on my nightstand and simply jotted down, “Transfer responsibility for the families to the new leadership team.” This note became two actions for me as my days at the Agency wound down. First, I wrote letters to the families to whom I had made the commitment and I told them that my departure would have no impact on my commitment to them. “The Agency will always be here for you,” I wrote.
At the very end of the speech I gave at my retirement ceremony on the evening of my last day on the job, I challenged the senior leadership team. I told it about the meetings that I’d had with the families of many of the fallen, about the commitment that I had made to them, and about the letter I had just sent. I explained that I was passing on to the members of that team the responsibility to keep that commitment. I concluded by reading aloud the names of the officers and the locations where they’d fallen in the line of duty. You could have heard a pin drop. I have no doubt that my colleagues are meeting the challenge.
* * *
The CIA Officers Memorial Foundation is an organization that assists the families of Agency officers who die while on active duty. The Foundation was created in the immediate aftermath of the death of Mike Spann. Its primary mission is to fund the educational expenses of the children and some of the spouses of such officers. In addition it provides financial assistance to families immediately after a tragic loss. Nearly eighty students have benefited from scholarshi
p grants amounting to more than $3.1 million since the program’s inception. The Foundation has identified over one hundred people who, over the next seventeen years or so, will be eligible to apply for scholarships and related assistance. Among those who have already benefited from the Foundation’s generosity is Alison Spann, Mike Spann’s oldest daughter, who received her bachelor’s degree from Pepperdine University in 2014.
A share of my proceeds from this book will be donated to the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation. For more information visit http://www.ciamemorialfoundation.org/.
* * *
I would like to close by telling the story of how I came up with the title for this book. When I retired, many different offices in CIA gave me gifts—small, medium, and large plaques and other mementos. For the last month or so of my service as deputy director, I was taking home three or four such gifts every night. I placed them in a closet in our attic, vowing to appreciate them fully at some point. One such plaque came from the Counterterrorism Center, the organization within CIA that I had worked most closely with during my time as deputy director and acting director, and a group of people I deeply admired and respected. No one was more committed to their mission than the women and men of CTC. But even that plaque went into the closet.
Two years earlier, during the daily meeting with my personal staff, one of my executive assistants had said that a nine-year-old boy with a complex genetic disease had a dream of becoming a CIA officer. Some of the people in our Office of Security had heard about it and wanted to make his dream come true—at least for a day. They had invited him—along with his parents—to visit the Agency and were hoping I would spend a few minutes with him. “Absolutely,” I told the EA. I did not know it at the time, but this young boy and his family would become close friends of my family and me.
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 34
