Following the end of the Cold War, the CIA seemed to have lost its original purpose. But the unprecedented nature of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, propelled the agency into action during the “war on terror”. The 21st century saw it transform into a covert outfit that ran secret prisons and brutal interrogations, launched deadly drone attacks, and abandoned everything that made espionage and counterespionage a human enterprise.
The following excerpts are from the book, published by William Collins and priced at ₹699.
The thought that a humanity lay at the heart of espionage clashed with the tenet that American intelligence was at best amoral and at worst immoral to the core. Yet the idea was essential to the enlistment of foreign agents, the endeavor at the heart of the CIA’s mission. The CIA had been fortunate that the United States, for all its flaws, had held a higher moral ground than its worst enemies. For many years, it had claimed to stand for democracy and human rights, against tyranny and oppression. Today this stance might seem like a myth.
But throughout the twenty-first century, “when authoritarian leaders in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran used coercion and lethal force to bend their citizens and other countries to their will, they invariably inspired otherwise patriotic subjects to protest and get thrown in jail or be killed, conform but secretly seethe, or get up the courage to clandestinely work behind the scenes with Washington and our closest allies,” said Paula Doyle, an architect of the beautiful operation to stop rogue nations from gaining nuclear weapons. “Some of the latter came to CIA seeking revenge. Some sought the power to change their systems. Some wanted money in order to achieve a lifestyle or retirement that would have otherwise been impossible. Some did just about anything to be in a position to bring their families to the West to live in freedom. They were the reason we had a CIA. They brought us war plans and intentions. They brought us nuclear plans and intentions. They brought us physical access in dangerous places and cultural details that made covert action possible and—in some cases—wildly successful.”
The alliance between a CIA case officer and a foreign recruit was an alloy of trust and betrayal, founded in the agent’s faith in the United States and his choice to commit treason. “Like war, spying is a dirty business,” observed William Hood, a charter member of the CIA who spent twenty-eight years running missions against the Soviets. “Shed of its alleged glory, a soldier’s job is to kill. Peel away the claptrap of espionage, and the spy’s job is to betray trust.” And yet the relationship between officer and agent was built on their trust in one another. It was “a covenant, not unlike marriage . . . a bond forged in hardships and risks, for a greater good,” said Juan Cruz, chief of the Latin American division in the Obama years.
“The business is schizophrenic,” said Luis Rueda, the author of the covert-action plan Tom Sylvester had executed with the Kurds to subvert Saddam. “At the tactical level, it deals with humans. We find out what the prospective agent needs, whether money, validation, or something else, and help him or her achieve it. We devote great effort to protecting them. We stand by them. However, at the strategic level, it is all about protecting and advancing U.S. national interests. Are we helping the Ukrainians? Yes. But we are doing it because it weakens Russia and strengthens our position, not out of some sense of morality or humanitarian impetus. We help and use people at the same time. We have sacrificed people at the end of that human relationship to advance U.S. interests.”
The litany of those sacrifices was long. The eldest Kurdish fighters still remembered how they had been betrayed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had cut off the CIA’s covert support for their armed struggle against Saddam and left them to face his pitiless wrath. The Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani had appealed to Kissinger in a letter: “Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people.” He received no answer. Kissinger had been cold-blooded about it. “Covert action,” he had said in 1975, “should not be confused with missionary work.”
The Rev. William Sloan Coffin Jr. would agree. A fiercely committed opponent of the Vietnam War in his years as the chaplain of Yale University, Coffin had been an equally intense anticommunist as a CIA officer in Munich in the early 1950s. The Pentagon had ordered the clandestine service to obtain the Kremlin’s plans for World War Three, a mission at the time akin to asking it to plant spies on Mars. Coffin had recruited and trained Russian exiles who formed four-man parachute teams and flew over the Iron Curtain into the Soviet Union, as far east as the outskirts of Moscow. None survived. Coffin knew these were suicide missions. He had no qualms about it.
“The ends don’t always justify the means,” he said in 2005. “But they are the only things that can.”
In the twenty years between the end of the war in Korea and the end of the war in Vietnam, legions of young officers had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and by choice or chance entered the clandestine service not long thereafter. During those decades, they were schooled by the CIA’s director of training, Hugh Cunningham, who was like Bill Coffin and his friend George H. W. Bush, a Yale man and a member of its most secret society, Skull and Bones. The West Point honor code was clear: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Indoctrinating his students into their own secret society, Cunningham had taught them another ethos.
“We must have the greatest immorality, and we must have the greatest morality,” he had told them. These words could serve as a credo for the CIA. To hold both those ideas to be true required an abiding faith in the righteousness of the mission.
“I spent my entire CIA career lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, deceiving,” said James Olson, the cold war leader of Russia House and the chief of counterintelligence during his three-decade career. He was a devout Catholic who used the just-war theory of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas as a moral compass: if it were morally sound for a soldier to kill in a just war, then lying, cheating, and stealing were justified to subvert the Russians and the rest of America’s enemies. They were requisite when recruiting agents to commit treason and betray their leaders on the behalf of the United States. “If we’re going to defend our country against the evils that are out there, we can’t go out there with our hands tied behind our back,” Olson said in 2021. “We’ve got to fight tough. And that’s the issue. How tough is too tough? When do we cross the line? When do we betray those values that we’re fighting so hard to defend? When do we become them?”
The CIA had crossed the line in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, serving a tool for torture and an instrument of death, running cruel prisons and executing innocent people, though the moral responsibility lay with the presidents who gave the marching orders, not with the officers who executed them. It had targeted and assassinated an American citizen, albeit a terrorist, at Obama’s command. “The precedent of an American president being able to kill an American citizen under any circumstances, on just his signature, is dangerous,” Bob Gates had warned. The CIA’s analysts had provided the abysmal intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq, though the bloodshed of the war forever stained the hands of the man who had started it. On September 11, which now seemed like the first day of the new millennium, Americans had seen to their sorrow that when intelligence fails, people die.
A quarter of a century later, they were still learning that when intelligence succeeds, it can save lives.
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The next book that the Blueprint will feature: The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II by Gautam Hazarika
 "The greatest (im)morality")
