The Director

1

Graham Weber’s new colleagues thought that he was joking when he said at his first staff meeting that he wanted to remove the statue of William J. Donovan from the lobby. The old-timers, who weren’t really that old but were cynical bastards nonetheless, assumed that he wouldn’t actually do it. Donovan was the company founder, for heaven’s sake. The statue of him, square-legged with one hand resting on his belt, handsome as a bronze god, ready to win World War II all by himself, had been in the lobby since Allen Dulles built the damn building. You couldn’t just get rid of it.

But the new director was serious. He said the agency had to join the twenty-first century, and that change began with symbols. The senior staff who were assembled in the seventh-floor conference room rolled their eyes, but nobody said anything. They figured they would give the new man enough rope to hang himself. Somebody leaked the story to the Washington Post the next day, which seemed to amuse the director and also reinforced his judgment about how messed up the place was. To everyone’s amazement, he went ahead and removed the iconic figure of “Wild Bill” from its place by the left front door. An announcement said the statue was being removed temporarily for cleaning, but the days passed, and the spot where the pedestal had stood remained a discolored piece of empty floor.

The Central Intelligence Agency behaves in some ways like a prep school. Senior staff members made up nicknames for Weber behind his back that first week, as if he were a new teacher, such as Webfoot, Web-head and, for good measure, Moneybags. Men and women joined in the hazing; it was an equal-opportunity workplace when it came to malcontents. The director didn’t appear to care. His actual childhood nickname had been Rocky, but nobody had called him that in years. He thought about bringing it back. The more the old boys and girls tried to rough him up, the more confident he became about his mission to fix what he had called, at that first meeting with his staff, the most disoriented agency in the government. Nobody disagreed with that, by the way. How could they? It was true.

Weber was described in newspaper profiles as a “change agent,” which was what thoughtful people (meaning a half dozen leading newspaper columnists) thought the agency needed. The CIA was battered and bruised. It needed new blood, and Weber seemed like a man who might be able to turn things around. He had made his name in business by buying a mediocre communications company and leveraging it to purchase broadband spectrum that nobody else wanted. He had gotten rich, like so many thousands of others, but what made him different was that he had stood up to the government when it mattered. People in the intelligence community had trusted him, so when he said no about surveillance policy, it changed people’s minds.

He looked too healthy to be CIA director: He had that sandy blond hair, prominent chin and cheekbones and those ice-blue eyes. It was a boyish face, with strands of hair that flopped across the forehead, and cheeks that colored easily when he blushed or had too much to drink, but he didn’t do either very often. You might have taken him for a Scandinavian, maybe a Swede, who grew up in North Dakota: He had that solid, contained look of the northern plains that doesn’t give anything away. He was actually German-Irish, from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, originally. He had migrated from there into the borderless land of ambition and money and had lived mostly on airplanes. And now he worked in Langley, Virginia, though some of the corridor gossips predicted he wouldn’t last very long.

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.