14 PREFACELater, President Obama’s government foolishly pulled the plug on an
extremely valuable collaboration with my company that might have helped
prevent the ISIS surprise takeover of Mosul in summer 2014.
But politics trumped intelligence. In 2011, the Obama administration
abandoned the Iraqi disaster that the Bush administration created, without
even trying to renegotiate the status of forces agreement. Only to redeploy
troops to Iraq, predictably, a few years later. The saga continues.
Yugoslavia. Iraq. ISIS. These were not intelligence failures. On the
contrary, these were, for the most part, intelligence successes. But intel-
ligence professionals and the CIA do not make foreign policy. Politicians
do. They have the power to ignore intelligence, ignore the best options pre-
sented, and recognize only a single, unified Yugoslavia rather than accept
reality and help the country break apart peacefully. They have the power
to invade Iraq, despite a lack of intelligence linking Iraq and 9/11. And
when things go badly because of their policies, they often blame the intel-
ligence community.
For better or worse, I can personally attest to this, at least regarding
Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. I’m not alone in believing that the ill-
advised invasion of Iraq was the single largest foreign policy miscalculation
in recent American history.
To date, that is. As we are witnessing once again, an American presi-
dent has almost unfettered power and cannot be stopped once he decides
(often impulsively) to do something in the arena of defense and foreign
policy. In fact, I believe there’s a very good chance President Trump may
outdo President George W. Bush in terms of intentionally committing
blunders of historic and catastrophic significance.
Equally ominous, there are serious indications that Trump is at the
very least a witting collaborator of the Russian intelligence service. As of
this writing, almost every foreign policy move made by Trump has directly
served Vladimir Putin’s strategic interests. Starting with Trump’s shattering
of alliances and withdrawal of America from its traditional global leader-
ship role. The list of Trump’s pro-Russian policies grows daily.
My hope is that these “street level” spy stories, in addition to providing
entertainment and immersing the reader in my world, will illuminate why
intelligence 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