The Director

2

It took Graham Weber most of the first week to get settled. He had to learn how to use the classified computer system, meet the staff, pay courtesy calls on members of Congress and generally ingratiate himself to a Washington that knew little about him. At the office that first week, Weber made a practice of not wearing a tie. That was how executives had dressed at his company and at most of the other successful communications and technology businesses he knew, but it shook up the CIA workforce, as Weber had intended. After a few days, other men started going tieless to ingratiate themselves to the boss. On Thursday Weber wore a tie, just to confuse them.

He bought an apartment at the Watergate because he liked the view of the Potomac. He hired an interior decorator, who gave it the lifeless perfection favored by the trade. It was much more space than he needed; he was divorced and didn’t like to entertain. His two children stayed overnight after his swearing-in ceremony, and they told him he had a cool view, but they went back to school in New Hampshire the next day. The Office of Security insisted on renting an apartment down the hall, to install the director’s secure communications and provide a place for his security detail to nap. What Weber liked best was the long balcony that wrapped the living and dining rooms and looked out over the river. But his security chief warned him against sitting there unless he had a guard with him, so he rarely used it. Late at night, he would put a chair by the window and watch the dark flow of the water.

On Friday of his first week, Weber wanted to see his new workplace in Langley at first light, before any of his minions and courtiers were assembled. He arrived at the office at five-thirty a.m. when it was dead empty, to see the sun rise over his new domain. The low-slung concrete of the Old Headquarters Building was a lowering gray in the predawn, a few lights visible on the bottom floors but the top of the building empty and waiting. What would Weber do, now that he was responsible for managing this lumpy pudding of secrecy and bureaucracy? He didn’t know.

Weber was accompanied that morning by the security detail that was an inescapable feature of his new life. The head of the detail was a Filipino-American named Jack Fong, built like a human refrigerator, a lifer from the Office of Security. Fong escorted him that morning to the director’s private elevator entrance in the garage. It was so quiet in the cab that Weber could hear the tick of his watch. He turned to Fong. Like everyone else in those first days, the security chief was solicitous.

“You want anything, sir?” Fong meant coffee, or pastries, or a bottle of water. But Weber, lost in a reverie, answered with what was really on his mind.

“Maybe I should just blow this place up. Turn it into a theme park and start somewhere else. What do you think of that, Chief?”

The security man, thick-necked and credulous, looked startled. Directors didn’t make jokes. There was a bare shadow of a smile on Weber’s face, but all the security man saw were the aqua-blue eyes.

“Theme park. Yes, sir. Definitely.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

Weber sat down at the big desk on the seventh floor and gazed out the shatterproof windows across the treetops to the east, where the first volt of morning was a trace on the horizon. He switched off the lights. The walls were bare and newly painted, stripped of any mark of Jankowski, who had resigned two months before. Now it was his office. The first light flickered across the wall like the lantern beam of an intruder.

Weber studied the desk. It was a massive pediment of oak that might have been requisitioned from Wild Bill’s law offices at Donovan, Leisure. There were a few stains on the top, where someone had placed mugs of hot coffee or tea. The side drawers were locked but the middle one was loose. With all the commotion of those first days, Weber hadn’t thought to open it. He pulled out the wooden drawer, expecting to find it as empty as the rest of the office.

At the very back of the drawer he found a sealed envelope with his name on the front. He tore open the sealing flap and removed a crisp sheet of paper. It was freshly typed. He read the words carefully:

Weber turned over the page, feeling a momentary chill, as if a draft of cold wind had just blown through the room. What was he supposed to make of this Roman admonition — and, more to the point, who had surreptitiously placed it in his desk drawer for him to find in his first days at work?

The place was truly haunted, he thought to himself: so many ghosts; so many myths and legends riddling the walls. Not a theme park, but a horror show.

Weber read the message one more time and put it back in the desk. His first wisp of anxiety had given way to curiosity, suffused with anger. Was this a real warning or a general proverb about loyalty? Was Weber meant to be the traitor? Or was it was some sort of practical joke, played on every newly minted director to rattle his nerves?

Weber had thought a good deal about traitors already. He’d had multiple security briefings that first week. This was the post-Snowden era. Finding potential leakers was the first order of business. The workforce was suspect. The decade of war had produced a reaction — an invisible army of whistleblowers and self-appointed do-gooders. The result, as any newspaper reader could see, was that America’s intelligence agencies could no longer keep secrets. Security briefers assured the new director it couldn’t happen again; CIA employees were watched and assessed, under surveillance every time they logged onto a computer or made a phone call or ordered a pizza.

Weber asked if all this internal surveillance was legal, and he was told, of course it was; employees signed away any right to privacy when they joined the agency.

Weber mused about this “Wiki” enemy that fought with the zeroes and ones of computer code. They were (or could be) anywhere. The result inside government was a new Red Scare. Where people in the 1950s had whispered the name “Rosenberg,” now it was “Snowden,” or “Manning.” Somehow the intelligence community would have to learn how to live with fewer secrets; that was the new way of the world. But Weber was careful about expressing such skeptical views to his staff. These people had been traumatized. Their world had been turned upside down.

Weber tried to get to work, but the words echoed in his mind: “The traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys… in the very halls of government itself.” Somebody was messing with his head, trying to knock him off balance. It had to be that.

Graham Weber greeted the secretaries, Marie and Diana, when they arrived at 7:55. They looked mildly embarrassed that the boss was already at work. But they had been through multiple directors and they knew that nobody lasts forever in the big office on the seventh floor, no matter how early they get to work. The “girls,” as they had been known until not very long ago, were part of the CIA’s invisible army of support staff who typed the cables and hid the secrets and cleaned up after those more exalted on the organization chart.

Weber was in shirtsleeves, tieless, two buttons unstuck. He shook Marie’s hand, and then Diana’s, still feeling like a visitor a week in.

“Good morning, ladies,” he said. “I let myself in.”

“You can start whenever you like, Mr. Weber,” said Marie, the older of the two, who was now working for her fifth director. “We come in at eight.”

“Marie, a word,” he said, motioning for the senior woman.

“Yes, Director.”

Marie was a blonde in her late fifties, smart and tough enough to run the place herself, people imagined, except for the fact that she’d never gone beyond junior college. She was the CIA’s version of a senior noncommissioned officer. She had long ago dumped her first husband, an alcoholic case officer, and had given up on finding a second one. Diana, a much younger African-American woman, retreated to her desk. She was married to a senior officer in Support; they were planning to retire in another year and come back as contractors with green badges.

“In my office,” said Weber, nodding toward the big room.

Marie followed him in, switching on the fluorescent lights as she entered. He closed the door.

“I want to ask you something,” he said. “Privately, please.”

“Everything is private with me, Mr. Weber. I work for one director at a time.”

“Who has access to my office? Besides you and Diana, I mean.”

Marie thought a moment. He wouldn’t be asking if there wasn’t a problem.

“The Office of Security,” she said. “They swept it last week, one last time, to make sure.”

“And who conducted the sweep?”

She looked genuinely embarrassed not to know the answer.

“I’m not sure. We have to scoot when they make their rounds.”

“And remind me, Marie, who does the Office of Security report to?”

She looked at him quizzically, as if it were a trick question.

“They report to you, of course, as of last Monday.”

“Right. But before this week?”

“Well, technically, the top of the chain would have been the acting director, Mr. Pingray. But as I think you know, he recused himself on most management issues, owing to his close relationship to Mr. Jankowski. He’s trying to do the right thing, Mr. Pingray.”

“Got it. So who did the Office of Security really report to, then, before Monday morning, if not Mr. Pingray?”

Her mouth wrinkled at the edges while she thought about that one.

“I suppose they reported to the director of National Intelligence, Mr. Hoffman. He’s your boss, on paper, so he must be everyone’s, ultimately.”

Weber thought a moment. Could he ask Cyril Hoffman, the man who was responsible for oversight of sixteen intelligence agencies, whether he had been sending secret messages? No, of course he couldn’t. He thought of asking the bright young computer maven he had met a year before in Las Vegas, James Morris, but that wasn’t appropriate.

“Thank you, Marie,” he said.

She headed for the door and then stopped and turned back toward him.

“Mr. Director,” she said. “I just want to say, we’re all very glad that you’re here. People want you to succeed. They think you can fix things.”

Weber laughed, not happily.

“That’s what the president said. He also told me this place was like a haunted house. Do you think that’s true, Marie?”

She nodded, with what Weber thought was a look of institutional pride.

Weber went to the window and looked at the cars of the early arrivals beginning to fill the parking spaces in the agency’s Candy Land collection of color-coded lots. It was interesting how many agency officers drove foreign cars. You wouldn’t find that at an Air Force base, or a Navy yard. The CIA didn’t know whether it wanted to be a blue state or a red state. That was part of its problem.

Weber returned to the desk, which was a toasty brown in the spreading light. How was he going to get this place working again, really? Atop his desk was a notepad crowned with the agency seal and its pugnacious eagle. He took out a pen and wrote down phrases that came to him, and then crumpled the sheet: A week at the CIA and he was thinking in Power-Point. He was about to throw the note in the burn bag when it occurred to him that someone might find it and read it, so he put in his pocket.