I rewrote and re-sent the email—not to the head of the school now, but to his boss, the director of Field Service Group. Though he was higher up the totem pole than the head of the school, the D/FSG was pretty much equivalent in rank and seniority to a few of the personnel I’d dealt with at headquarters. Then I copied the email to his boss, who definitely was not.
A few days later, we were in a class on something like false subtraction as a form of field-expedient encryption, when a front-office secretary came in and declared that the old regime had fallen. Unpaid overtime would no longer be required, and, effective in two weeks, we were all being moved to a much nicer hotel. I remember the giddy pride with which she announced, “A Hampton Inn!”
I had only a day or so to revel in my glory before class was interrupted again. This time, the head of the school was at the door, summoning me back to his office. Spo immediately leaped from his seat, enveloped me in a hug, mimed wiping away a tear, and declared that he’d never forget me. The head of the school rolled his eyes.
There, waiting in the school head’s office was the director of the Field Service Group—the school head’s boss, the boss of nearly everyone on the TISO career track, the boss whose boss I’d emailed. He was exceptionally cordial, and didn’t project any of the school head’s clenched-jaw irritation. This unnerved me.
I tried to keep a calm exterior, but inside I was sweating. The head of the school began our chat by reiterating how the issues the class had brought to light were in the process of being resolved. His superior cut him off. “But why we’re here is not to talk about that. Why we’re here is to talk about insubordination and the chain of command.”
If he’d slapped me, I would’ve been less shocked.
I had no idea what the director meant by insubordination, but before I had the opportunity to ask, he continued. The CIA was quite different from the other civilian agencies, he said, even if, on paper, the regulations insisted it wasn’t. And in an agency that did such important work, there was nothing more important than the chain of command.
Raising a forefinger, automatically but politely, I pointed out that before I emailed above my station, I’d tried the chain of command and been failed by it. Which was precisely the last thing I should have been explaining to the chain of command itself, personified just across a desk from me.
The head of the school just stared at his shoes and occasionally glanced out the window.
“Listen,” his boss said. “Ed, I’m not here to file a ‘hurt feelings report.’ Relax. I recognize that you’re a talented guy, and we’ve gone around and talked to all of your instructors and they say you’re talented and sharp. Even volunteered for the war zone. That’s something we appreciate. We want you here, but we need to know that we can count on you. You’ve got to understand that there’s a system here. Sometimes we’ve all got to put up with things we don’t like, because the mission comes first, and we can’t complete that mission if every guy on the team is second-guessing.” He took a pause, swallowed, and said, “Nowhere is this more true than in the desert. A lot of things happen out in the desert, and I’m not sure that we’re at a stage yet where I’m comfortable you’ll know how to handle them.”
This was their gotcha, their retaliation. And though it was entirely self-defeating, the head of the school was now smiling at the parking lot. No one besides me—and I mean no one—had put down SRD, or any other active combat situation for that matter, as their first or second or even third choice on their dream sheets. Everyone else had prioritized all the stops on the European champagne circuit, all the neat sweet vacation-station burgs with windmills and bicycles, where you rarely hear explosions.
Almost perversely, they now gave me one of these assignments. They gave me Geneva. They punished me by giving me what I’d never asked for, but what everybody else had wanted.
As if he were reading my mind, the director said, “This isn’t a punishment, Ed. It’s an opportunity—really. Someone with your level of expertise would be wasted in the war zone. You need a bigger station, that pilots the newest projects, to really keep you busy and stretch your skills.”
Everybody in class who’d been congratulating me would later turn jealous and think that I’d been bought off with a luxury position to avoid further complaints. My reaction, in the moment, was the opposite: I thought that the head of the school must have had an informant in the class, who’d told him exactly the type of station I’d hoped to avoid.
The director got up with a smile, which signaled that the meeting was over. “All right, I think we’ve got a plan. Before I leave, I just want to make sure we’re clear here: I’m not going to have another Ed Snowden moment, am I?”
15
Geneva
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, is largely set in Geneva, the bustling, neat, clean, clockwork-organized Swiss city where I now made my home. Like many Americans, I’d grown up watching the various movie versions and TV cartoons, but I’d never actually read the book. In the days before I left the States, however, I’d been searching for what to read about Geneva, and in nearly all the lists I found online, Frankenstein stood out from among the tourist guides and histories. In fact, I think the only PDFs I downloaded for the flight over were Frankenstein and the Geneva Conventions, and I only finished the former. I did my reading at night over the long, lonely months I spent by myself before Lindsay moved over to join me, stretched out on a bare mattress in the living room of the comically fancy, comically vast, but still almost entirely unfurnished apartment that the embassy was paying for on the Quai du Seujet, in the Saint-Jean Falaises district, with the Rhône out one window and the Jura Mountains out the other.
Suffice it to say, the book wasn’t what I expected. Frankenstein is an epistolary novel that reads like a thread of overwritten emails, alternating scenes of madness and gory murder with a cautionary account of the way technological innovation tends to outpace all moral, ethical, and legal restraints. The result is the creation of an uncontrollable monster.
In the Intelligence Community, the “Frankenstein effect” is widely cited, though the more popular military term for it is “blowback”: situations in which policy decisions intended to advance American interests end up harming them irreparably. Prominent examples of the “Frankenstein effect” cited by after-the-fact civilian, governmental, military, and even IC assessments have included America’s funding and training of the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al-Qaeda, as well as the de-Baathification of the Saddam Hussein–era Iraqi military, which resulted in the rise of the Islamic state. Without a doubt, however, the major instance of the Frankenstein effect over the course of my brief career can be found in the US government’s clandestine drive to restructure the world’s communications. In Geneva, in the same landscape where Mary Shelley’s creature ran amok, America was busy creating a network that would eventually take on a life and mission of its own and wreak havoc on the lives of its creators—mine very much included.
The CIA station in the American embassy in Geneva was one of the prime European laboratories of this decades-long experiment. This city, the refined Old World capital of family banking and an immemorial tradition of financial secrecy, also lay at the intersection of EU and international fiber-optic networks, and happened to fall just within the shadow of key communications satellites circling overhead.