The Director: A Novel Read online

  Weber listened to what the young man said. It worried him. Despite his private battles with the government over the past few years, he wanted a strong intelligence agency.

  “How does it get fixed?” he asked.

  “Honestly? People could start by doing what you said today, trying to think about what a modern American intelligence agency would look like. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the CIA operates like a second-rate copy of MI6. We’re un-American.”

  Weber looked at his watch. This last comment made him nervous. He had let Morris get tipsy, and now he was going too far.

  “I should crash,” he said. “I have an early flight back to Seattle tomorrow. This was an eye-opener. I’m grateful to whoever made the arrangements.”

  “Thank my deputy, Dr. Ariel Weiss. She’s the person in my geek shop who gets things done.”

  “Well, tell Dr. Weiss that she’s a superstar.”

  Morris nodded, but he wasn’t quite ready to let Weber go.

  “You know what?” he said, leaning toward Weber, his eyes swimming behind those thick glasses. “I hate working for stupid people. It offends me. That’s why we need a new director.”

  Morris reached his hand into the pocket of his hoodie and then extended it and shook Weber’s hand. In his palm was the medallion of the Information Operations Center, with the center’s name along the lower circumference and “Central Intelligence Agency” around the top. On the face of the coin was a blue bald eagle atop a globe formed of zeroes and ones. Above the eagle’s head were the words “Stealth,” “Knowledge” and “Innovation,” above them a large silver key.

  Morris let the coin slip from his palm into Weber’s as they shook hands.

  Weber took the gift. He studied Morris, reticent and opaque as he withdrew his hand and retreated back behind his black-framed spectacles. Weber’s eyes fell to the coin, gleaming gold, silver and blue, topped by that big, mysterious key. It was the first moment in which he thought seriously about the possibility of running the CIA, and the idea grew to become a passion in the months ahead—until one October morning, fifteen months later, it became a fact.

  James Morris spent one more day in Las Vegas. He wanted to see an old friend from Stanford named Ramona Kyle. She was speaking at DEF CON, too, on civil liberties and the Internet. Morris sat in the audience for her talk. She spoke so fast, the other panelists had trouble keeping up with her. She was a wiry, intense woman, a passionate intelligence packed into a tiny frame. Her hair was tumbling red curls, like Orphan Annie.

  When it came time for questions, several attendees with neat haircuts asked about investments. She was something of a cult figure in the venture capital world. She had joined a fund out of Stanford, and discovered start-ups in Budapest, Mumbai, São Paolo, Santiago—all the places, she liked to say, that produced chess champions and didn’t have their own investment banks yet. Sometimes she created the companies on her own, bringing people together in a coffee shop in Rio or a bar in Dubai. Eventually she started her own venture fund, and the money flowed so fast she stopped counting it—and started thinking about more serious things.

  Kyle had a knack for making money, and people wanted to know her secrets even at this hacker’s conference. But she waved off business questions. They bored her. She wanted to talk about the surveillance state, the threat to liberties, the new information order of the world.

  A questioner asked her if it was true what was rumored in the chat rooms, that she was the biggest secret funder of WikiLeaks.

  “Are you a cop?” responded Kyle. “Next question.”

  When the panel was over, she handed out cards with the name of an organization she had recently founded, called Too Many Secrets. It took its name from the rearranged anagram of “Setec Astronomy,” which was a puzzle at the denouement of the classic hacker movie Sneakers. The organization didn’t have a phone number or email address, but if Kyle met someone interesting, she wrote down her contact information in a tiny, precise hand.

  Ramona Kyle didn’t go out of her way for most people, but Morris was an exception. For years after they graduated she had stayed in touch, mostly at meetings for high-tech eccentrics. She had messaged him a few weeks before the Las Vegas gathering, suggesting that they meet for drinks after her talk. She proposed a bar called Peppermill in the north strip of Las Vegas, a seedy cowboy-hooker part of town where nobody would recognize either of them.

  The place was nearly empty. In the center of the bar was a fire pit surrounded by unoccupied pink couches. Kyle was sitting in a dark corner in the back drinking pomegranate juice, no ice. She looked like a homeless girl: tiny body, rag-doll clothes, red hair still wet from a shower after the speech.

  Morris sat down next to her on the banquette. At Stanford, he had momentarily wanted to sleep with Ramona Kyle, back when she was anorexic and pure brain energy. Now that she was healthier, she wasn’t quite as sexy. As he moved closer to her, she disappeared deeper into the shadows of the booth.

  “Did you take precautions?” she asked.

  “Of course. I took two cabs and a bus.”

  “They are out of control,” she said. “You have to be careful.”

  “Stop worrying,” said Morris. “I’m here.”

  1

  WASHINGTON

  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.

  2

  WASHINGTON

  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:

  A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero

  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.