282 AMERICAN SPYmy retirement fund hostage until I paid “ransom” for a problem I did not
create.
Just as I would do years later when our employee Omar was kidnapped
by AQI in Mosul, I caved in to the demands of these merciless bean coun-
ters. I had no choice if I wanted my retirement money. I was not pleased.
On my final drive home from the CIA, I got my head back together by
listening to “The Cowboy Rides Away.” Repeatedly.We’ve now established that as much as I’ve loved working with and for the
CIA, a spy’s life has its downsides. For starters, there’s a never-ending string
of Bohica moments, from the day you join until the day you resign or retire.
They really do get you coming and going, but the CIA is a bureaucracy,
and so that’s to be expected. Having hard-earned intelligence ignored or
politicized is a tougher pill to swallow. In fact, it’s downright demoralizing,
whether you’re on the inside or the outside. Despite these downsides to
a life of espionage, which I have experienced firsthand for decades, I’ll
never turn down a request or an opportunity to support the US govern-
ment national security mission.
Because of my seemingly irrational tendency to never give up on the
government mission, even when others have, my former CIA colleagues
now refer to me as “the Last of the Bohicans.”“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”^2 This
biblical verse is carved into the wall at CIA headquarters and stands as the
agency’s motto. I joined the CIA in part because of my own deeply held
convictions about truth, fairness, and justice. The title of this chapter, aside
from being a playful twist on John le Carré’s Cold War classic, is a meta-
phor for my own growing disillusionment with the system after many years
of service.
Inte lligence is essential to our national security and to our very survival
as a nation. American spies sacrifice in the shadows to report the truth to
power. If US presidents and policy makers continue to ignore or politicize