“One hundred percent of the information in that document is open-source. My fictitious Internet identities were not created from actual Agency legends. Honestly, there is nothing I have access to on a daily basis that would have been any help to me in preparing my paper.”
“You have a strong opinion that the Brotherhood is nothing but a gang of terrorists.”
“No, sir. That is not the conclusion of my paper. The conclusion of my paper is that the rhetoric in the English-speaking world runs counter to the Masri rhetoric put out by the same organization. I think we should just keep track of some of these websites.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you think we should do this because there has been an official finding of some sort, or you think we should do this because … because you just think we should do this.”
She did not know how to answer.
“Young lady, the CIA is not a policy-making organization.”
Melanie knew this, and the paper was not intended to steer U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt in any direction, but instead to offer a dissenting view to conventional wisdom.
Petit continued, “Your job is to generate the intelligence product that you are asked to generate. You are not a Clandestine Services officer. You have stepped out of your lane, and you have done so in a way that looks very suspicious.”
“Suspicious?”
Petit shrugged. He was a politician, and politicians assumed everyone else thought only about politics as well. “Ryan is ahead in the polls. Melanie Kraft happens to — in her free time, no less — create her own covert operation, and thereby shoot off on a tangent that would serve the Ryan doctrine.”
“I … I don’t even know what the Ryan doctrine is. I am not interested in—”
“Thank you, Miss Kraft. That’s all.”
She’d walked back to her office humiliated but still too confused and angry to cry. But she cried that night back in her little apartment in Alexandria, and there she asked herself why she had done what she’d done.
She could see, even at her low level in the organization and with her limited view of the big picture, that the political appointees in the CIA were molding the intelligence product to suit the desires of the White House. Was her brief her own, small, bullheaded way to push back against that? In that moment of reflection the night of her fourth-floor meeting, she admitted that it probably was.
Melanie’s father had been an Army colonel who instilled in her a sense of duty as well as a sense of individuality. She grew up reading biographies of great men and women, mostly men and women in the military and government, and she recognized through her readings that no one rose to exceptional greatness exclusively by being “a good soldier.” No, those few men and women who went against the establishment from time to time, only when necessary, were what ultimately made America great.
Melanie Kraft had no great ambition other than to stand out from the pack as a winner.
Now she was learning another phenomenon about standing out. Nails that stuck out often were hammered back into place.
Now she sat in her cubicle, sipping an iced coffee and looking at her screen. She’d been told the day before by her supervisor that her brief had been squashed, destroyed by Petit and others on the seventh floor. Phyllis Stark had angrily told her the deputy director of the CIA, Charles Alden himself, had read a quarter of it before he tossed it in the trash and asked why the hell the woman who wrote it still had a job. Her friends there at the Office of Middle East and North Africa Analysis felt for her, but they didn’t want their own careers to be sidetracked by what they saw as an attempt by their colleague to leapfrog ahead of them by working on intelligence on her own time. So she became the office pariah.
Now she was, at twenty-five, thinking about leaving the Agency. Finding a job in sales somewhere that paid a bit more than her government salary, and getting the hell out of an organization that she loved but that clearly did not love her back at present.
Melanie’s desk phone rang, and she saw it was an outside number.
She put down the iced coffee and picked up the receiver. “Melanie Kraft.”
“Hi, Melanie. It’s Mary Pat Foley at NCTC. Am I catching you at a bad time?”
Melanie almost spit her last swallow of coffee across her keyboard. Mary Pat Foley was a legend in the U.S. intelligence community; it was impossible to exaggerate her reputation and the impact her career had had on foreign affairs or on women at CIA.
Melanie had never met Mrs. Foley, though she’d seen her speak a dozen times or more, going back to her undergrad days at American. Most recently, Melanie had sat in on a seminar Mary Pat had given to CIA analysts about the work of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Melanie stammered out a reply: “Yes, ma’am.”
“I am catching you at a bad time?”
“No, excuse me. You aren’t catching me at a bad time.” The young analyst kept her voice more professional than her emotions. “How can I help you today, Mrs. Foley?”
“I wanted to give you a call. I spent the morning reading your brief.”
“Oh.”
“Very interesting.”
“Thank y — … How so?”
“What kind of response are you getting from the graybeards on the seventh floor?”
“Well,” she said, as she frantically searched for the right words. “Honestly, I’d have to say there has been some pushback.”
Mary Pat repeated the word slowly. “Pushback.”
“Yes, ma’am. I did expect some reticence on the part of—”
“Can I take that to mean that you are getting your ass kicked over there?”
Melanie Kraft’s mouth hung open for a moment. She finally closed it self-consciously, as if Mrs. Foley were sitting in her cube with her. Finally she stammered an answer. “I … I would say I have been taken to the woodshed over my work.”
There was a brief pause. “Well done, Ms. Kraft, I think your initiative was brilliant.”
A return pause. Then, “Thank you.”
“I have a team going over your report, your conclusions, your citations, looking for information relevant to the work we do here. In fact, I’m planning on making it required reading among my staff. Beyond the Egypt angle, it shows how someone can hit a problem from a different slant to shed new light on it. I encourage that from my people over here, so any real-world examples I can find are very helpful to me.”
“I am very honored.”
“Phyllis Stark is lucky to have you working for her.”
“Thank you.” Melanie realized she was just saying “Thank you” over and over, but she was so focused on not saying anything she would regret, it was all that came out.
“If you ever are looking for a change of pace, just come and talk to me. We are always on the hunt for analysts who aren’t afraid to upset the apple cart by delivering the cold, hard truth.”
Suddenly Melanie Kraft came up with something to say. “Would you be available this week sometime?”
Mary Pat laughed. “Oh, God. Is it that bad over there?”
“It’s like I have leprosy, although I suppose if I had leprosy I’d at least receive get-well cards.”
“Damn. Kealty’s people over there are a disaster.”
Melanie Kraft did not respond. She could riff on Foley’s comment for an hour, but she held her tongue. That would not be professional, and she did actually consider herself to be apolitical.
Mary Pat said, “Okay. I’d love to meet you. You know where we are?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Call my secretary. I’m pretty tied up through the week, but come have lunch with me early next week.”
“Thank you,” she said again.
Melanie hung up the phone and, for the first time in a week, she wanted to neither cry nor smash her fist through a wall.