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C h a p T e r 2 a return to lanGley IhaD nO job when I returned to washington after Christmas, and the flurry of activity the previous months had kept me largely insulated from the changes the agency had recently undergone. aside from working on transportation for the Dobbins team and speaking to a few of the people managing the CIa fight in afghanistan, I hadn’t stayed in any sort of contact with the building. The shift of focus, personnel, and resources to the counterterrorism mission was substantial, and the agency was already a different place, as I quickly found. I first heard of where I might be headed in the days after my return from the Karzai inauguration while staying at my brother’s house north of new York City and taking in the quiet after the mayhem of Kabul. From raw Kabul to freezing westchester County, enjoying life in a tiny village with a traditional Italian deli next door and an old Protestant church across the street. even after short trips, it was always good to get home to simple pleasures—Italian subs, breath freezing on early morning runs on dirt roads by old mansions, and the sense of freedom from fear and insecurity that goes from transitioning to america from a warzone. not to mention a regular sleep schedule and a large golden retriever to wake me up every morning. My old boss and mentor, winston wiley, knew me from days before 9/11 when we had both worked in what had been a much smaller Counterterrorist Center. he had risen quickly, becoming second-in-charge of analysis at the agency, where I served as his special assistant. he had then moved up to take 28 CHAPTER 2 command of the analytic wing, several thousand strong. The agency had a few organizational pillars from its inception. One core element, then called the Directorate of Operations (now the national Clandestine Service, or nCS), was responsible for the people in the overseas field who recruited and ran secret agents. Its counterpart component was the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), a mostly washington-based group of specialist analysts responsible for reviewing intelligence coming in from the field and writing reports that made sense of intelligence and world events for policymakers in washington. I had grown up in the DI, the component responsible for producing analyses for consumers around washington. we wrote “finished” intelligence— carefully researched, written, and edited analyses of global issues. Our mission was at the other end of the domain from that of field operators, who collected “raw” intelligence; that is, they talked to a source or a foreign security service, and drafted reports based on what the source said. analysts tended to be more introverted, interested in research and delving into the details of complex problems. Collectors were people-oriented, more focused on determining how to spot, assess, develop, recruit, and handle human sources. From the outside, it might appear that the core skills required of analysts are straightforward: develop expertise in a particular area, and write about that area to help a policymaker understand a complicated problem, such as a foreign nuclear weapons program or an insurgency halfway around the world. In retrospect, the skills that were drilled into me, and many other analysts, were more nuanced and more difficult to learn. The first and most basic was a relentless drive to write clearly, quickly, and succinctly. I thought I knew how to write when I received my master’s degree in english literature from the University of Virginia. looking back, I now believe it took close to a decade to build real writing skills. not just the clarity of a sentence—using verbs, that were precise, avoiding adjectives and adverbs, eliminating waste—but more subtle weaving through three pages of text, telling a story for a reader who needs detail but doesn’t have the time to read detail. along with briefing skills—how to speak to any audience, anytime, about anything you’re responsible for, possibly on short notice—learning to write professionally was an art among the agency’s analytic ranks. Managers were tough, always demanding cleaner drafts, more precise language, and, with many layers of review, asking the same questions from different angles. A RETURN TO LANGLEY 29 even harder, though, was the art of learning how to ask the right questions , especially on problems that had already been worked over dozens of times. newer analysts often believe they are...

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