by Nada Bakos
A few steps past the seal, the Agency’s Memorial Wall comes into view to my right. In 2000, seventy-nine stars had been chiseled into the gleaming white marble, each star representing a man or woman who had given their life in service to the Agency and our country. More than thirty more have been added in the years that followed, some for men and women who were colleagues—friends—of mine doing the same kinds of counterterrorism work I did. Above those stars are etched the words IN HONOR OF THOSE MEMBERS OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY.
Below the stars, the Book of Honor spreads out forty inches across a blue-gray marble ledge, encased in glass. The first time I saw the gold stars in that book—and so many of the blank lines that followed, indicating employees whose identities can’t be revealed, even in death—it nearly took my breath away.
The other new hires and I had flowed forward to the ID scanners up ahead and soon through the underground tunnel that winds from the Original Headquarters Building to the Agency’s igloo-shaped auditorium, a seven-thousand-square-foot relic of the 1950s everyone just called the Bubble. We took our seats; making small talk with those closest to me, I was impressed with the range of talent among those new employees: aerospace engineers; analysts; economists; translators; experts on everything from bridge building to bomb wiring.
From that moment on, I understood the Agency’s mission on a whole other level, even with its infuriating bureaucratic potholes.
I hadn’t been prepared for the way it would actually feel to leave.
I tossed SAIC’s offer letter back on the table. Which is when my phone rang. It was Jim, an analyst from another counterterrorism unit’s chemical and biological weapons group. I held Jim in high regard because he was one of the first analysts to begin mapping Zarqawi’s poisons network in the ’90s. He said his group chief, Scott, was familiar with my work and wanted me to come in and talk. I agreed to meet with them the following day.
In broad strokes, Scott told me about the ways in which the Agency was expanding to become a bigger part of the Global War on Terror and the new roles that were being created in the process. There were roles, he said, that needed to be filled by people with substantive experience. “Would you come lead a targeting team to go after Zarqawi?” he said. Scott effectively told me during our meeting that they wanted to retain my expertise and I would not have to continue answering the same backward-looking policy-maker questions on al Qaida’s connection to Iraq.
“You mean I can actually do something about him?” I said. “I don’t have to just answer questions about his past or his underwear anymore?”
I was sold.
CHAPTER 2
The Farm
Denton, Montana, is an approximately fifteen-square-block town in the center of the state, near the Upper Missouri River Breaks and two hours by car to the closest town most people have heard of, Great Falls. In many ways, not much has changed there since Lewis and Clark first explored those grasslands in 1805, and it is still one of my favorite places to roam.
Denton is a farming community where sixty-something families mostly live off the land, and mine was no different. My parents had a house in town, a stone-and-redwood home with big bay windows and a little yard where my older brother, Keith, and I made up SWAT team imagination games while wearing jean jackets my mom had embroidered with the words SWAT TEAM. But many of my childhood memories come from the summers at my grandparents’ ranch in nearby Everson, a collection of family farms that lined the Judith River breaks, with a view so vast the world seemed full of endless possibility.
I learned to ride horses at the age of two—first on a Shetland pony, then on a succession of larger horses with names like Socks, Britches, and Jet. Then, when I was twelve years old and a member of 4-H, my mom bought me the first horse that belonged entirely to me, a chestnut mare with white feet and an elegant stripe down her nose named Coy Lady. I loved riding her into the nearby pastures, disappearing for hours at a time, pretending I was on my very own Victorian foxhunt. My friend Valerie and I even purchased inexpensive English saddles and set up straw bales so we could practice jumping. I used to imagine that I was a character from an old British novel riding through the English countryside. My rides with Valerie also taught me to conquer my fears while riding across the knife ridges of the Judith River breaks, where one misstep on your horse’s part would have meant tumbling together three hundred feet down a sheer shale cliff. When I was twelve years old, it didn’t seem dangerous; it was the most fun I had ever had.
Self-reliance was less an ethos than an expectation in Denton. My appreciation for the law of the land was first branded into me at age nine, when I stood along the fence and watched my dad and a hired hand put a bullet into a steer’s head, then slit its throat to bleed it out before butchering the animal. I was hardly stoic about the slaughter, but the sight of blood didn’t shock me by then. Mostly it was a matter-of-fact lesson in the cycle of life and in respecting the stewardship of farming and ranching. At least, I decided, the steer had simply been going about his day in his pen, with no fear, stress, or sense of impending demise. A lot less stressful than commercial slaughterhouses.
The animals I grew attached to were the orphaned calves—the ones I’d wrap in an old quilt, the ones whose necks I would adorn with scarves or ribbons. I used to sit on the straw next to the calves, feeding them from a two-quart calf bottle, feeling sorry that their moms weren’t there to help them. When those calves grew large enough to be sold to the local market—when they were crammed into the back of a truck, which I knew delivered them to a stock lot where they’d be funneled into a factory chute, mooing in terror until the moment some guy ended their brief lives by slamming a bolt into their skulls—that’s when I’d bawl.
As the youngest child, I was tasked with my least favorite job on the farm: replacing the duckfoot shovels on my grandparents’ plow after they fell off or wore down after churning through more than two thousand acres of wheat fields. During seeding season, a broken plow was one step shy of a crisis that could set the entire operation back days. That and unexpected weather delays could affect my grandparents’ livelihood.
So as soon as my grandpa called me from the barn, I’d drop what I was doing and reluctantly make my way over to the shop. My grandfather would hand me an air wrench, and I’d shimmy under the duckfoot, between the rear wheels. There was less than two feet of ground clearance under the plow, and I invariably whacked my head on the hard steel. Then I’d fumble for the bolts that secured the shovel, zap them loose with the wrench, and switch out the shovel for a new one. Then I’d tighten the bolts down again as the chattering of the wrench vibrated my whole body.
The dedication paid off, in a way. At ten years old, I got promoted to the role of temporary combine driver during harvest while my grandpa or brother took a break, which meant an air-conditioned cab and longer days. I loved being in the center of the action, and it meant I didn’t have the labor-intensive job of driving the truck to load and unload the grain. To sidestep my allergies, Grandpa found me a mask that made me sound like Darth Vader, which I thought was an added benefit. Before long, I was spending those late summer mornings piloting Grandpa’s half-million-dollar combine back and forth, in seemingly endless straight lines, at five miles per hour. I loved the responsibility, and it was a meditative activity—right up until the moment I accidentally harvested a skunk.
The TV picked up CBS and ABC; NBC didn’t arrive until I was close to junior high. On Sunday evenings, I watched whatever Disney show ran for half an hour, then stuck around as the family all gathered in the living room for 60 Minutes.
When I wasn’t working on the farm, my natural curiosity kept me occupied. Once, at the age of ten, I decided I wanted to learn a foreign language—which one didn’t matter at all. So I began flipping through the Encyclopaedia Britannica set my grandparents kept on the bookshelf in the hallway. This was before the age of the Internet; there was no Google or Rosetta
Stone online. The entry entitled “French” included a handful of mundane words—such as oui and monsieur—and the entry entitled “Spanish” did the same. But under “Sign language,” I found the entire alphabet. I spent the next three nights sitting in the hall, memorizing all twenty-six letters.
I especially loved when my maternal aunt Harriette came to visit the farm, bringing my cousins Brian and Lori. I was completely fascinated by their stories of life outside Montana, brushing my aunt’s long, dark hair until late in the evening, asking endless questions about their adventures in far-off Illinois.
My fascination with the wider world took root in 1976, when I had taken my first trip out of state to attend the wedding of my other maternal aunt, Henrietta, in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn. The energy of New York was new and exciting and I’d found friendly faces everywhere I turned—most notably in the person of one of Henrietta’s new in-laws. Days before the wedding, we went to a horse race at Belmont Park, on Long Island, feeding my love of horses. One of my prized possessions from the trip was a 1970s-era polyester shirt with variously colored racehorses that I instantly loved and held on to until college.
For the rest of our time in New York, we bounced from the Empire State Building to the Statue of Liberty, then to the newest tourist attraction at the time: the Top of the World observation deck atop the World Trade Center’s South Tower. For years after that trip, my grandparents kept a photo on their refrigerator of a six-year-old me in a blue dress, with big white socks and sandals, sporting awesome ’70s bangs. In the photo, I’m standing next to Keith, my grandpa, and our mom. The clouds had parted moments before my grandmother took the picture; the moment after the shutter clicked, I’d turned back to rest my chin again on the white guardrail, gazing out at the vastness of upper Manhattan and New Jersey beyond it.
My mom eventually had to pull me away from that railing to get dressed for the wedding. The city offered a view as enormous as those back on the farm. A few hours later, my aunt Henrietta introduced Keith and me in front of three hundred people at the start of her wedding reception to perform our practiced routine, the hustle.
From my perspective as a child, my parents were largely estranged during most of their marriage. After their divorce, when I was eleven, my father wasn’t around much of the time; the anger between my parents was evidently too much for him to be interested in attending any of my school activities, my graduation, my wedding, or any other milestone event in my life. Particularly when I was a child, that sense of abandonment was a hard one to shake. Especially in a town like Denton, where he lived literally a block and a half away. To his credit, he reconnected with me many years later of his own accord. I know now that divorce makes people do strange things and that the marriage wasn’t easy for either of them.
Without admitting it, or perhaps fully understanding it, my mother, Eloise, spent the majority of my early years feeling shackled to Denton, caught in the grips of a depression that only let up once she finally escaped that small town years later. In fact, she raced out of town to finish her bachelor’s degree at the same time I did, then went on to earn a master’s degree in social work and built a career at a point in her life when many people are thinking of slowing down. My mom was born with cerebral palsy, which manifested as tremors in her arms. She was frustrated at not being able to do everything for herself, and at the same time accepted it as just another challenge that added to her determination to succeed.
When I was growing up, my maternal grandmother, also named Henrietta, had a big impact on my love of learning. She turned everything into a lesson—and usually a fun one. She not only worked on the farm; she was also the business manager of the place, and she taught me about grain and livestock markets and keeping a ledger. She used to encourage my knack for memorizing numbers, quizzing me on details she’d just shown me.
I loved afternoons in her kitchen, leaning over the flour-covered table, assembling her infamous raspberry-rhubarb pie or Czech kolaches. In the 1930s, my grandmother had played violin in a band, so sometimes she’d belt out “I Double Dare You” or other standards from that era as I measured the next ingredient or watched the horses move around the pasture while grazing.
Other things my grandmother taught me shaped my entire world-view. She had grown up on her parents’ homestead farm, an hour from Lewistown, Montana, back when her last name was still Van Haur and her family had nicknamed her Hanke. She’d become one of the first women, along with her sisters, in the area to attend college, in nearby Billings; then she raised my mother and her two sisters on the farm in Everson with her husband, Floyd Ellis. My grandmother’s tenacity and grit demonstrated to me the extraordinary things of which women were capable. The life she lived was a driving force that compelled my own passion for women’s rights—in part because of my grandmother’s accomplishments.
My grandparents were hard workers, and life on the farm left little time for fun. My grandpa Floyd was nicknamed Bus because he’d won the local Buster Brown baby contest.
Harvest was stressful for everyone, the endless days and late nights racing to cut the grain before rain, hail, or wind knocked it down. In my younger years, to avoid the stress I’d run outside to hide in the barn with my dog and Coy Lady when I wasn’t needed.
As a child, I was an eager student at Denton public school—and disciplined, too. I used to rush home to finish my homework right after school before a playdate, or, at the farm, a ride on Coy Lady. I loved puzzles and the fundamental logic of a good equation.
However, by the time I entered my freshman year in high school—in the same building as the elementary school and middle school, because Denton’s population didn’t exactly support multiple schoolhouses—I had lost the confidence I had in my younger years. Some of that may have been a result of my rocky home life. Partly it was apathy, and maybe it was a little boredom, because I never particularly struggled. Mostly, I think, a fear of failure cast a pall of mediocrity over my scholastic career. I couldn’t underperform at what I never tried to achieve.
At one point during my freshman year, my mom asked the principal to arrange an IQ test for me so we could pinpoint where I fit in academically. Mom hoped it would boost my confidence—and to my surprise, I was told that I’d tested roughly two to three years ahead of my grade level. I don’t know if it was a perception-changing moment in my life, but it did give my fourteen-year-old self more confidence, which I harnessed in various ways.
Small-town high schools can collect an odd array of teachers, and one dictatorial algebra teacher used to become so enraged over tiny things—such as students talking while he scribbled equations on the chalkboard—that he regularly berated my classmates and even threw desks. I couldn’t believe his outbursts, and one day, after a galactic tantrum left one of my classmates in tears, and after he made inappropriate comments to one of my girlfriends, I finally went up to him after class and looked him in the eye—because by then, I was as tall as many of the adult men at the school. “Knock it off,” I said. I think the teacher was so shocked that he never did figure out the right way to punish me. Soon the mutual resentment between us became its own sort of drama, and he subsequently asked my mom to stop me from enrolling in his math class the following year. It wasn’t a huge loss.
I had some great teachers, too. My favorite English teacher, Mrs. Hassinger, wouldn’t let me off the hook if I showed low self- esteem. She insisted we could all achieve great things if we applied ourselves—which included reading Shakespeare every year and performing on the school’s tiny stage every spring, whether we wanted to or not.
I was a typical teenager. I once shaved the right side of my head, because it was the 1980s. And my high school friend Lynn Donaldson and I would spend our weekends walking around Lewistown, the nearest “city,” in our parachute pants and the blue-and-pink faux fur coats her mom, June, made, drawing double takes from old-time ranchers, and other teenagers, who couldn’t appreciate our “eclectic” sense of style. We weren’t lo
oking for attention: we just loved the idea of wearing something that made us feel different and creative.
My high school graduating class—all nine of us—mostly consisted of the same people I’d gone to kindergarten with. Before kindergarten, I beelined across the street one summer morning with my mom in tow the moment I noticed two boys in our neighbor’s yard. Those boys were twins—Kurt and Kyle. Today, Kurt and I call each other our first friend.
In a place like Denton, it’s an occasion whenever new kids move into town. One day the Coltons arrived from nearby Lewistown. With a population of roughly six thousand, Lewistown seemed like a big city to us. Shane had a mop of blond hair, a wide smile, and, even more important, a truly fantastic collection of T-shirts. There was a rebelliousness to him that I found amusing. Shane never apologized for anything. I seemed to apologize for everything.
Soon after moving into town, Shane asked me to accompany him to one of the high school plays. Sitting there in those uncomfortable wooden auditorium seats, he held my hand for the entire play—only occasionally letting go so we could wipe the sweat onto our pants.
It took a few years for that relationship to fully blossom, but we officially became a couple during our last few months of high school. Teenage hormones played a part in that, of course, but it turned out that his family life didn’t necessarily match the Norman Rockwell imagery on the walls, either, and that brought us together. I knew I could call him, crying, when the adults in the house were screaming and he would be there to distract me for a while.