The Director: A Novel (3 page)

The president had announced that he was appointing Graham Weber because he wanted to rebuild the CIA. The previous director, Ted Jankowski, had been fired because of a scandal that appeared to involve kickbacks from agency contractors and foreign operations. People said “appeared to involve” because the Jankowski case was still before a grand jury then and nobody had been indicted yet. But even by CIA standards, it was a big mess. Congress was screaming for a new director who could root out the corruption, and they wanted an outsider. Over the past year, Weber had been making speeches about intelligence policy and showing up at the White House for briefings. When the president appointed a commission to study surveillance policy, Weber was on it. By the time Jankowski resigned, he had become the front-runner for the position.

The vetting process took a month of annoying forms and questions. Weber agreed to sell all his company stock; it looked like a market top to him, anyway, and he set up a “blind trust” for the proceeds, as dictated by the ethics police. It embarrassed him, to see how rich he was. The only thing that seemed to agitate the vetters was his divorce from his wife, nearly five years before. They wanted a guilty party, a “story” that would explain why a seemingly happy marriage to a beautiful woman had self-destructed. He referred the White House inquisitors to the court papers in Seattle, knowing that they didn’t answer the question, and he left blank their written request for additional information. It wasn’t their business, or anyone’s, to know that his wife left him for another man, whether to pull Weber’s attention away from devotion to his business or because of love, he never knew. The world had assumed that it was his fault; that was the only gift Weber could give his wife at the end of their shared failure, to take the blame. He had tried to date in the five years since, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Isn’t there anything more?” asked the personnel lawyer. He looked disappointed when Weber shook his head and said firmly: “No.”

“That place is like a haunted house,” the president told Weber in their last conversation before the appointment was announced. “Somebody needs to clean out the ghosts. Can you do that? Can you fix it?”

Weber was flushed by the challenge; it was provocation to a man like him to attempt the impossible. His children were grown and his house in Seattle was empty most of the time. He had time on his hands, and like many people who have succeeded in business, he wanted to be famous for something other than making money. So with the impulsive hunger and self-confidence of a businessman who had only known success, he agreed to take the job running what the president, in a final, sorrowful comment, described as the “ghost hotel.”

The old-timers warned Weber that the agency truly was in bad shape. The foreign wars of the previous decade in Iraq and Afghanistan had gone badly, demoralizing even the nominally successful covert-action side of the agency. The CIA had been asked to do things that previous generations of officers had been accused of but had only imagined, like torturing people for information or conducting systematic assassination campaigns. It would have been bad enough if this Murder, Inc., era had been successful; but aside from getting Osama bin Laden, the main accomplishment had been to create hundreds of millions of new enemies for the United States. The world was newly angry at America, and also contemptuous of its power, which was a bad combination.

Now, in retreat, the CIA needed permission for everything. That was what surprised Graham Weber most in his first days. He was used to the executive authority that comes with running a big company, the license to take risks that is part of creative management. But he was now in a very different place. The modern CIA worked more for Congress than for the president. Out of curiosity, Weber asked at his first covert-action briefing whether the agency had penetrated the networks of anonymous leakers who were stealing warehouses full of America’s most classified secrets and publishing them to the world. He was told no, it was too risky for the agency. If the CIA tried to penetrate WikiLeaks, that fact might . . . leak.

Defeated countries are sullen beasts, and America had suffered a kind of defeat. It was like after Vietnam—the country wanted to pull up the covers and watch television—but the CIA couldn’t do that, or, at least, it wasn’t supposed to. It had a network of officers around the world who were paid to steal secrets. Even the agency’s young guns knew this was a time to play it safe, find a lily pad where they could watch and wait. And then along came Graham Weber.

2

WASHINGTON

It took Graham Weber
most of the first week to get settled. He had to learn how to use the classified computer system, meet the staff, pay courtesy calls on members of Congress and generally ingratiate himself to a Washington that knew little about him. At the office that first week, Weber made a practice of not wearing a tie. That was how executives had dressed at his company and at most of the other successful communications and technology businesses he knew, but it shook up the CIA workforce, as Weber had intended. After a few days, other men started going tieless to ingratiate themselves to the boss. On Thursday Weber wore a tie, just to confuse them.

He bought an apartment at the Watergate because he liked the view of the Potomac. He hired an interior decorator, who gave it the lifeless perfection favored by the trade. It was much more space than he needed; he was divorced and didn’t like to entertain. His two children stayed overnight after his swearing-in ceremony, and they told him he had a cool view, but they went back to school in New Hampshire the next day. The Office of Security insisted on renting an apartment down the hall, to install the director’s secure communications and provide a place for his security detail to nap. What Weber liked best was the long balcony that wrapped the living and dining rooms and looked out over the river. But his security chief warned him against sitting there unless he had a guard with him, so he rarely used it. Late at night, he would put a chair by the window and watch the dark flow of the water.

On Friday of his first week, Weber wanted to see his new workplace in Langley at first light, before any of his minions and courtiers were assembled. He arrived at the office at five-thirty a.m. when it was dead empty, to see the sun rise over his new domain. The low-slung concrete of the Old Headquarters Building was a lowering gray in the predawn, a few lights visible on the bottom floors but the top of the building empty and waiting. What would Weber do, now that he was responsible for managing this lumpy pudding of secrecy and bureaucracy? He didn’t know.

Weber was accompanied that morning by the security detail that was an inescapable feature of his new life. The head of the detail was a Filipino-American named Jack Fong, built like a human refrigerator, a lifer from the Office of Security. Fong escorted him that morning to the director’s private elevator entrance in the garage. It was so quiet in the cab that Weber could hear the tick of his watch. He turned to Fong. Like everyone else in those first days, the security chief was solicitous.

“You want anything, sir?” Fong meant coffee, or pastries, or a bottle of water. But Weber, lost in a reverie, answered with what was really on his mind.

“Maybe I should just blow this place up. Turn it into a theme park and start somewhere else. What do you think of that, Chief?”

The security man, thick-necked and credulous, looked startled. Directors didn’t make jokes. There was a bare shadow of a smile on Weber’s face, but all the security man saw were the aqua-blue eyes.

“Theme park. Yes, sir. Definitely.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

Weber sat down at the big desk on the seventh floor and gazed out the shatterproof windows across the treetops to the east, where the first volt of morning was a trace on the horizon. He switched off the lights. The walls were bare and newly painted, stripped of any mark of Jankowski, who had resigned two months before. Now it was his office. The first light flickered across the wall like the lantern beam of an intruder.

Weber studied the desk. It was a massive pediment of oak that might have been requisitioned from Wild Bill’s law offices at Donovan, Leisure. There were a few stains on the top, where someone had placed mugs of hot coffee or tea. The side drawers were locked but the middle one was loose. With all the commotion of those first days, Weber hadn’t thought to open it. He pulled out the wooden drawer, expecting to find it as empty as the rest of the office.

At the very back of the drawer he found a sealed envelope with his name on the front. He tore open the sealing flap and removed a crisp sheet of paper. It was freshly typed. He read the words carefully:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero

Weber turned over the page, feeling a momentary chill, as if a draft of cold wind had just blown through the room. What was he supposed to make of this Roman admonition—and, more to the point, who had surreptitiously placed it in his desk drawer for him to find in his first days at work?

The place was truly haunted, he thought to himself: so many ghosts; so many myths and legends riddling the walls. Not a theme park, but a horror show.

Weber read the message one more time and put it back in the desk. His first wisp of anxiety had given way to curiosity, suffused with anger. Was this a real warning or a general proverb about loyalty? Was Weber meant to be the traitor? Or was it was some sort of practical joke, played on every newly minted director to rattle his nerves?

Weber had thought a good deal about traitors already. He’d had multiple security briefings that first week. This was the post-Snowden era. Finding potential leakers was the first order of business. The workforce was suspect. The decade of war had produced a reaction—an invisible army of whistleblowers and self-appointed do-gooders. The result, as any newspaper reader could see, was that America’s intelligence agencies could no longer keep secrets. Security briefers assured the new director it couldn’t happen again; CIA employees were watched and assessed, under surveillance every time they logged onto a computer or made a phone call or ordered a pizza.

Weber asked if all this internal surveillance was legal, and he was told, of course it was; employees signed away any right to privacy when they joined the agency.

Weber mused about this “Wiki” enemy that fought with the zeroes and ones of computer code. They were (or could be) anywhere. The result inside government was a new Red Scare. Where people in the 1950s had whispered the name “Rosenberg,” now it was “Snowden,” or “Manning.” Somehow the intelligence community would have to learn how to live with fewer secrets; that was the new way of the world. But Weber was careful about expressing such skeptical views to his staff. These people had been traumatized. Their world had been turned upside down.

Weber tried to get to work, but the words echoed in his mind: “The traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys . . . in the very halls of government itself.” Somebody was messing with his head, trying to knock him off balance. It had to be that.

Graham Weber greeted the secretaries, Marie and Diana, when they arrived at 7:55. They looked mildly embarrassed that the boss was already at work. But they had been through multiple directors and they knew that nobody lasts forever in the big office on the seventh floor, no matter how early they get to work. The “girls,” as they had been known until not very long ago, were part of the CIA’s invisible army of support staff who typed the cables and hid the secrets and cleaned up after those more exalted on the organization chart.

Weber was in shirtsleeves, tieless, two buttons unstuck. He shook Marie’s hand, and then Diana’s, still feeling like a visitor a week in.

“Good morning, ladies,” he said. “I let myself in.”

“You can start whenever you like, Mr. Weber,” said Marie, the older of the two, who was now working for her fifth director. “We come in at eight.”

“Marie, a word,” he said, motioning for the senior woman.

“Yes, Director.”

Marie was a blonde in her late fifties, smart and tough enough to run the place herself, people imagined, except for the fact that she’d never gone beyond junior college. She was the CIA’s version of a senior noncommissioned officer. She had long ago dumped her first husband, an alcoholic case officer, and had given up on finding a second one. Diana, a much younger African-American woman, retreated to her desk. She was married to a senior officer in Support; they were planning to retire in another year and come back as contractors with green badges.

“In my office,” said Weber, nodding toward the big room.

Marie followed him in, switching on the fluorescent lights as she entered. He closed the door.

“I want to ask you something,” he said. “Privately, please.”

“Everything is private with me, Mr. Weber. I work for one director at a time.”

“Who has access to my office? Besides you and Diana, I mean.”

Marie thought a moment. He wouldn’t be asking if there wasn’t a problem.

“The Office of Security,” she said. “They swept it last week, one last time, to make sure.”

“And who conducted the sweep?”

She looked genuinely embarrassed not to know the answer.

“I’m not sure. We have to scoot when they make their rounds.”

“And remind me, Marie, who does the Office of Security report to?”

She looked at him quizzically, as if it were a trick question.

“They report to you, of course, as of last Monday.”

“Right. But before this week?”

“Well, technically, the top of the chain would have been the acting director, Mr. Pingray. But as I think you know, he recused himself on most management issues, owing to his close relationship to Mr. Jankowski. He’s trying to do the right thing, Mr. Pingray.”