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

but I thought you’d want to know—Tenet told me this morning that he remembered the good work you did on that economic intelligence study and that he is considering asking you to be his new EA.” Being tapped to serve as the director’s executive assistant would be a significant career opportunity, but with my mind understandably elsewhere, I ended the call by simply saying, “That’s interesting.” Mary Beth asked, “Who was that?” I gave her the standard answer that an Agency officer provides to a questioning spouse, “Oh, it was nothing,” and I went back to my primary job of delivering ice chips on demand.
    A few days after Peter’s birth, I was back at work. Tenet called me to his office to offer me the job. As I crossed the threshold of his long, rectangular office, he handed me a cigar from his private stash to offer congratulations on Peter’s arrival. Excited, I accepted the position on the spot.
    Exciting , however, is not the word I would use to describe the first few weeks on the job. Overwhelming was more like it. I had never had a job anything like it before. It was 24/7 and totally consuming. I was the director’s only executive assistant at the time; nowthere are two or three, depending on the director. I was reluctant to get up from my desk to walk down to the cafeteria for lunch, or even to visit the men’s room, for fear that the stack of new e-mails in my inbox would double during even a brief absence. On top of this, I had, at first, no earthly clue what people were talking about. Tenet and his senior subordinates from across the agency often spoke or wrote in the kind of shorthand that only people who have worked an issue for a long time can understand. And there were so many cryptonyms (code words) to learn that my head was swimming. Furthermore, the breadth and scope of the issues coming at me were unlike anything I could have imagined.
    After I had been on the job for a few weeks, Tenet said as I handed him a report, “Are you OK?” I fibbed and told him everything was fine. But as time went on I caught up to the pace of the work and also learned the lingo. I kept my head well above water, and I settled into one of the best jobs of my life.
    One of the things that made the job special was the chance to work with Tenet, the most down-to-earth, approachable senior government official I have ever met. The son of Greek immigrants, who learned hard work busing tables in his father’s diner in Queens, Tenet has an everyman quality about him that makes him impossible to dislike. He is brilliant in an unthreatening way, and kings and cafeteria workers thought he was their best friend. And they were right. Ranging from slightly to very rumpled in appearance, Tenet set an informal mood in the office, where he would frequently burst out in Motown hits like Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” do spot-on imitations of foreign leaders (he did an incredible Yasser Arafat), or dribble a basketball in the hallways of the Agency. Tenet never took himself too seriously, a vital trait in a place where the work, which he attacked vigorously, was often a matter of life and death (literally).
    I loved working for him. There were four main parts to thejob—any one of which might have kept me fully occupied. First I was to review every piece of information coming into the director’s office—whether in a letter, memo, e-mail, cable, phone call, or personal visit—and make a snap decision on whether Tenet needed to know it or not and, if so, whether he needed to know it immediately or it could wait for that evening’s nightly “Read Book.” Information was flooding in every minute from many different sources. If I passed too much of it to the boss, he would be overwhelmed and unable to focus on the most critical matters. If I kept some critical bit of intelligence from the director, something could go badly wrong.
    The second duty was to review and organize decisions that he needed to make—in the