Life Undercover

He pulls an assessment paper out of his back pocket. There are a dozen or so categories students are to be judged on. Beside each, there is a box to check: Satisfactory, Less Than Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory. There is no Good. In this business, it’s survive or not. Thrive is not an option.

UNEVENTFUL AFTERNOON. APPEARS THREAT DEFERRED OR NEW TARGET ACQUIRED. KUDOS. I think of the dusty room and the wheezing baby, with her nostrils flared wide. I think of her dad, making choices to protect her—from pollution and air strikes and drones. I think about how everybody believes that they are the good guy. And how the trick of the thing is s

At their best, Agency officers are charged with a different kind of defense: the act of listening, learning, building relationships, cultivating trust. It’s soulful work, investing in a relationship with the adversary.

Something as simple as a car pickup site—the spot where an asset knows to stand so we can swoop in and scoop them up—must be shielded from passersby, have a separate entrance and exit, be free of cameras and security personnel, sit sufficiently far from hot spots like police stations or schools, remain accessible twenty-four hours a day, and offer

After he leaves, I fold the document into pleats, like the geisha fans we used to make in elementary school. Then I set the accordion on its end atop the toilet bowl water and light it on fire. It’s an old Russia House trick to keep the smoke to a minimum and contain the ash. When our agreement is converted to floating black flakes, I flush and set

The last time we’re in Washington before my due date, I suggest that we update our E&E plan. Every CIA operative has one—an “escape and evasion plan” covering how to get out of the country if everything goes to hell. The current plan we have on file involves an extremely long swim, along with some overnights under piles of leaves and a few othe

I find that building trust simply works better than exerting force. Detention simply works better than assassination. They are pragmatic decisions, the fastest, cheapest, most reliable way to save lives and prevent attacks. But Dean hears them as a condemnation of the moonless nights he spent in Afghanistan, firing at moving shapes to prevent them

To spice things up, surveillants work in teams of seven or eight, switching off with one another each time we turn left or right, so that no single surveillant is exposed more than a handful of times over the entire route. It’s a cat-and-mouse labyrinth chase through city streets, and the only way to win is to design a route with enough changes of

He’s referring to Operation Merlin, a botched effort from a few years back that’s just been leaked to the press. In a bid to entrap the Iranians into building a nuclear weapon in contravention of the ban, we apparently arranged for an asset to pass them plans for a contraband firing mechanism, sneakily—or so we thought—adapted to render the system