Company Man by John Rizzo

Author:John Rizzo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

I voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. It was consistent with a simple—and probably overly simplistic—pattern I had followed up to then and would continue to follow throughout my CIA career. Every four years, I would vote for the incumbent president, or his successor from the same party. Thus, I voted for Ford in ’76, Carter in ’80, Reagan in ’84, Bush in ’88, Bush in ’92, Clinton in ’96, Gore in 2000, and Bush in ’04. (It was only in 2008—in the waning months of my career—that I deviated from this pattern. What I had heard and personally observed about John McCain gave me serious pause about his temperament.)

I always thought it was best, both for the CIA as an institution and for me personally, to have continuity in the Agency’s leadership and in the White House people it was dealing with. Every time a new administration from a different political party arrived, there inevitably was a “learning curve” involved for the Agency’s career workforce—we had a different set of players in the top ranks of the Executive Branch to educate and work with, and they in turn had to become familiar and comfortable with us and the shadowy, somewhat intimidating organization of which we were a part. It was always a time-consuming, and often disruptive and frustrating, process to have to go through.

In particular, by 2000 I was mindful of the fact that over my career up to that time every incoming president from a party different from that of his predecessor—Carter, Reagan, and Clinton—had replaced the sitting CIA director. It thus seemed certain that if George W. Bush won, then George Tenet would be gone, too. And I didn’t want that to happen. I thought Tenet was a great fit for the Agency, and, just as important, I knew he wanted to stay. Unlike Clinton, Al Gore had always seemed to be a sophisticated, engaged, and supportive patron of the CIA. Plus, I had met him a few times by then, and while the encounters were brief, he struck me as a very capable and likable guy. George W. Bush, on the other hand, was a governor with zero experience in intelligence matters.

But I had a more parochial reason for wanting George Tenet to stay in place. A new CIA director almost certainly would mean there would be a new general counsel. As a deputy, I had broken in four new GCs—Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, Jeff Smith, Mike O’Neil, and Bob McNamara—in the space of the previous ten years, and the prospect of having to show someone the ropes yet again was distinctly unappealing to me. I was firmly rooted in the second-in-command position in the office, and I had no expectation of going any higher—no career CIA lawyer had been tapped for the top job since I joined the CIA nearly a quarter century before. In short, I had nothing left to prove, and nothing left to shoot for, in the OGC. I had

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