Attending soirees and rubbing elbows with international VIPs wasn’t how you tracked down terrorists, who hid in hillsides and remote compounds in hostile territory. What the classic Cold War spycraft officers had painstakingly learned didn’t help in this new mission. The new threat demanded a new way of spying. To call these “intelligence failures” was unfair, in my opinion, but the critique stuck, and the agency quietly went about reorganizing itself. The agency was publicly blamed for not stopping the attacks then it was blamed for supporting the misconception that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The aftermath of September 11 was a tumultuous time for the CIA. And the global war on terror would be the defining conflict of our generation. The Cold War had been formative for the officers who preceded us.
His answer: In 20 years, when CIA officers looked back, serving in the War Zone in the early 2000s would be like having served in Europe in the 1980s. Over there, he would be separated from his family for a year, living in a shipping container on a compound surrounded by fortified walls and barbed wire, the target of mortar-shooting terrorists. In Europe, we were free to walk the streets while still contributing to fighting the war on terror. We were four years out from the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden was still out there somewhere, and stopping the next terrorist strike was paramount in our minds.īut why, I asked him, was he so eager to go in person? My colleague had no military background. He was eagerly volunteering to go to what we referred to as the War Zone, a group of countries that formed the nexus of the global war on terror.
I was chatting with a supervisor working to set up his next assignment. Follow her on Twitter was in a CIA station in Europe in 2005 that I realized how much was changing about American spycraft. Alex Finley is the pen name of a former CIA officer and author of Victor in the Rubble, a satire of the CIA and the war on terror.
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