The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Read Free

eventually send you to grad school on our dime” (a promise on which the Agency would make good). I accepted an entry-level job paying fifteen thousand dollars a year and began my career as an intelligence analyst.
    As an analyst I was fortunate to be involved in some important work early on. For example, I led a small team that statistically demonstrated—using a combination of information provided by intelligence sources and the Philippine government’s publicly released election results—that President Ferdinand Marcos had stolen the presidential election in 1986 from Corazón Aquino. Marcos had used a new technique—the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of voters in areas expected to vote in large numbers for Aquino. Our analysis showed that Marcos’s 54–46 victory would have been a victory for Aquino by a wide margin in a fair election. CIA’s findings played a role in the Reagan administration’s decision to distance itself from Marcos after the election, which helped lead to his fall from power only weeks later in the peaceful “People Power Revolution.” It was exhilarating to be a young analyst and to see my work have such impact. I was hooked. And then, in the early 1990s, I was involved in a larger team effort thatuncovered the nascent North Korean nuclear weapons program, which remains a serious threat to this day. Our work included supporting the initial US diplomatic negotiations with the North Koreans on the issue—analysts providing real-time assistance to the US negotiating team.
    Most of my time, however, was spent on East Asian economic issues—significant matters but not the stuff of spy novels. In 1996, however, an unexpected part-time assignment changed the course of my career. At the time, CIA Director John Deutch and his deputy, George Tenet, were fielding complaints from the secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, and his deputy, Larry Summers, about the intelligence community’s collection of information on economic matters. (This followed the French declaring persona non grata a senior Agency official in Paris for allegedly stealing information on French trade policy.) Rubin and Summers believed that much of the effort the intelligence community was expending to obtain economic data on other countries, as well as other nations’ plans for economic policy, was unnecessary and could become counterproductive to our diplomatic relationships with those countries. Tenet, whom I had met briefly on several occasions, asked me to lead an interagency team to examine the question.
    The bottom line of my study was that Rubin and Summers were right. Much of what the intelligence community was collecting on economic issues was available through public means, or what is internally referred to as “open-source” information. Even though the study went against the status quo, it was well received, particularly by Tenet, who told me that he liked the rigor of the report and the clarity with which the results were conveyed. Not surprisingly, Rubin and Summers liked the answer as well, with Rubin writing a letter to Deutch complimenting the study.
    Just eighteen months later, Director Deutch stepped down asDCI and was succeeded by Tenet. On December 11, 1997, I was at Arlington Hospital in Virginia waiting for Mary Beth to deliver our third child, Peter. A phone rang—not in the waiting room and not at the nurses’ station but in the delivery room. Mary Beth, in the initial stages of labor, did not look pleased. Neither did the attending nurse who answered, then handed me the phone, saying with some sarcasm, “It’s for you.” On the other end of the line was a friend, Greg Tarbell, who at the time was the daily intelligence briefer for Director Tenet and who would later become my chief of staff when I served as deputy director and acting director. Being resourceful, Tarbell had tracked down the phone number in the delivery room.
    Tarbell said with some excitement, “I know you are busy,