In this compulsive page-turner, six-time New York Times bestselling author John Weisman blows the lid off one of Washington's deepest real-world secrets. The CIA, currently incapable of performing its core mission of supplying critical and time-sensitive human-based intelligence for the global war on terror, must now outsource the work to private contractors. Drawing on real-world crises and actual CIA operations, Direct Action takes readers deep inside this new and unreported covert warfare that is being fought on a daily basis by anonymous shadow warriors all across the globe.
Racing against the clock and shuttling between Washington, Paris, and the Middle East, one of those shadow warriors, former CIA case officer Tom Stafford, must slip below the radar to uncover, target, and neutralize a deadly al-Qa'ida bombmaker before the assassin can launch simultaneous multiple attacks against America and the West. And as if that weren't enough, Stafford must simultaneously open a second front and mount a clandestine war against the CIA itself, because for mysterious and seemingly inexplicable reasons the people at the very top of the Central Intelligence Agency want him to fail.
The characters and operations in Direct Action are drawn from true-life CIA personnel and their real-world missions. With Direct Action, John Weisman confirms once again Joseph Wambaugh's claim that "nobody writes better about the dark and dirty world of the CIA and black ops."
On 21 September 1995, at 11:47 A.M., five senior officers from the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations -- the CIA's clandestine service -- quietly gathered in room 4D-627A, one of the sensitive compartmentalized information facilities colloquially known as bubble rooms, on the fourth floor of the headquarters building at Langley, Virginia. The Agency was still reeling from the February 1994 arrest of Aldrich Hazen Ames. Ames, an alcoholic, money-hungry wreck of a career case officer, had betrayed dozens of America's most valuable Russian agents to the KGB, resulting in their arrests and executions. He had also handed over many of CIA's technical tradecraft secrets and the identities of American undercover operatives.
Two of the clandestine officers at the meeting had been tasked with writing a Top Secret/Codeword damage assessment of the Ames debacle, a preliminary draft of which, at their peril, they were now sharing with three of their most trusted colleagues.
The assessment was grim. One had, it said, to assume that CIA had been completely penetrated because of Ames's treason. The Agency, therefore, was now transparent. Not only to the opposition, which still included Moscow, but to all of Moscow's current clients, including Libya, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, and -- equally if not more critical -- to the transnational terrorist organizations supported by those states. Transparency meant that the entire structure of the Directorate of Operations had to be considered as compromised; that every operation, every agent, every case officer was known to the opposition and its allies.
The only way to ensure that the clandestine service could survive in the coming years, the seniormost of the report writers suggested to his colleagues, would be to build a whole new and totally sterile spy organization inside CIA -- a covert clandestine service within the overt clandestine service. But such a utopian solution, all five knew, would be impossible to achieve. The current director of central intelligence, John M. Deutch, would never allow it. Deutch, a tall, bumbling, angular, bookish MIT professor of chemistry who had served as undersecretary of defense, had been sent over from the Pentagon the previous May to clean CIA's post-Ames house. Instead of selecting savvy advisers to help ease his way into Langley's unique culture, the new director -- himself a neophyte in matters of spycraft -- brought with him as his closest aides two individuals neither of whom had any operational intelligence experience.
Deutch's executive director was Nora Slatkin, a presidentialappointee assistant secretary of the Navy. His deputy and right arm was George John Tenet, an NSC staffer who'd toiled on Capitol Hill for Senator David Boren among others. Itdidn'tt ake more than a few weeks for the great majority of seasoned intelligence professionals of CIA's clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations or DO, to detest all three. The situation was made even worse when Deutch appointed David Cohen, a DI (Directorate of Intelligence) reports officer, to head the DO. Cohen, the corridor gossip went, absolutely detested spying and those who did it.
So no one was surprised that it took only a few months for Deutch and his associates to promulgate a series of orders that, in effect, prevented CIA's clandestine service from . . . spying. Under the new rules of engagement, every agent who had a criminal record, or was suspected of human rights violations, or who might be involved in any kind of criminal or terrorist activity, was to be jettisoned. Dumped. Ditched. Discarded. Their agent networks were to be disassembled.
