258 AMERICAN SPYunmarked hallways in the headquarters basement to a ground-floor, Pen-
tagon-worthy smorgasbord of CIA souvenirs and memorabilia. CIA golf
balls, anyone?)
When they called our flight, I boarded and took my window seat. I
generally prefer the aisle seat, but it was a full flight and this was the last
seat available. Even though I was in the first-class cabin, I was not looking
forward to spending the next five hours stuck in a window seat.
Much to my very pleasant surprise, General McChrystal had the aisle
seat next to me.
As the general was stowing his bag in the overhead compartment,
the flight attendant asked me about my OSS hat, with its distinctive spear
insignia. It was clear she did not recognize McChrystal, or she would have
made conversation with him instead of me.
“Is that a Batman hat?” she queried, almost hopefully.
“Sadly, no,” I responded.
I then addressed the general, who had just sat down: “Sir, I’m guessing
you’re the only other person on this plane who knows what this hat
represents.”
With a smile, he said he did.
After takeoff, I introduced myself and (for once) was able to share with
someone the classified truth about my CIA career and past work with the
US military, from the Balkans to Iraq. I told him briefly about my work
with the special operators during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, before he
became JSOC commander. General McChrystal was especially pleased to
learn that I had recently provided the government with sensitive, action-
able intelligence.
Not surprisingly, it turned out we had a number of friends and col-
leagues in common, some of whom worked side by side with him in his
Joint Base Balad command center in Iraq. The genius of McChrystal’s
approach, and one of the reasons for his unprecedented success, was his
insistence on bringing together all key players (the CIA, FBI, NSA, and
JSOC, among others) in one room, where they were forced to share intelli-
gence and focus on the mission. Coincidentally, I ran our Babylon Inc. US
headquarters much the same way: all of us sat around one massive, Persian
stone conference table, and together we hashed out problems and came up
with decisions that took everyone’s input into account. No one at Babylon