February 8, 2005

Melissa Boyle Mahle Shares an Insider's View of the CIA and Why the Agency Failed on 9/11

This is Part 2 or a BuzzFlash interview with Melissa Boyle Mahle.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW | Part 1 | Part 2

Melissa Boyle Mahle was a CIA spy assigned to the Middle East. As author of Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA from Iran-Contra to 9/11, she chronicles the history and culture of the CIA and the turmoil at headquarters in Langley. She also tells what it was like to be a woman spy on the ground. As a former clandestine operative, she has a unique vantage point from which to view the political and operational culture of the agency in the post-Cold War climate, and to reveal how the CIA failed to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. The result is an intriguing tale of how the successive directors of the agency – five directors in six years before the confirmation of George Tenet in 1997 – managed the CIA amidst growing terrorism and extremism in the Middle East. Melissa Boyle Mahle was the top-ranked female Arabist in the CIA when she retired as a covert officer in 2002. She received a letter of appreciation from the President for her work on the Middle East peace process. Since leaving the government, Ms. Mahle has worked as a private consultant on Middle Eastern political and security affairs.

In the first part of our two-part interview with Melissa Boyle Mahle, we asked her why the CIA failed to anticipate the 9/11 attacks, how the CIA became risk averse in the 1990s, and what the impact of the Iraq war might be on the fight against terrorism. In this, the second part of our interview, Melissa Boyle Mahle describes having lunch next to a known terrorist, briefing the secret service while in labor, being a mom in a volatile region, and being in the boys club of the CIA’s clandestine division.

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BuzzFlash: I want to talk about your tenure as a CIA covert operative in the Middle East. One of the surprising stories you write about was an experience in a West Bank restaurant in the mid-1990s, and sitting right next to you at an adjacent table was a terrorist, Abu Abbas, who masterminded the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. How do you react in a situation like that? Do you immediately call headquarters and say, “You’re not going to believe this but today I had lunch next to a terrorist?” Is it part and parcel to the work, that you’re surrounded by unsavory characters in this dirty business of spying?

Melissa Boyle Mahle: This is one of those beautiful examples that shows what happened to the Agency. When I find myself seated across the way from a known terrorist – somebody who’s killed Americans – the only action that I can take is a bureaucratic action of starting a dialogue. Basically it means sending off a cable to Washington and starting a debate within the Washington establishment. That’s the only step I can take. And you have to ask yourself: how is it that we, the United States, have got into this situation where we do not have an empowered intelligence community?

CIA officers have no arrest powers. There’s a terrorist there. I know he’s there. I go back. I write a message and a debate starts. Can we go after this guy? Can we do a rendition? Do we want to do a rendition? Do we have a valid indictment? Could we bring him to the United States and try him in a U.S. criminal court? And could we win that case? So you get into this long legal argument and all of that. And six months later, finally a decision came out the other end. And that decision happened to be no, we’re not going to do anything about this. It just shows you the very good point and example of when the system’s broken down.

BuzzFlash: You were a language specialist, and a spy, and a woman stationed in the Middle East. You were also very much inside a boys club. Explain to us what that was like entering into the Agency? Did you feel like you were pioneering on some level or were you trying to fit in with the boys, as it were?

Melissa Boyle Mahle: I think the answer to that is both. First of all, when I joined the organization, it was what I called the good old bad days, and they actually didn’t tell you very much about it before you joined. I had no idea what I was doing. So you get into this culture of secrecy and have to find out some of the details of what you’re actually going to be doing for a living. And you become very much involved in learning your new trade.

One of the things that was very apparent to me was that I was an anomaly. And not that there weren’t other female case officers – operations officers, as they call them now. But there was nobody else like me – a woman that spoke Arabic, had a lot of knowledge of the Middle East before coming into the Agency, and that indeed wanted to work in the Middle East. And so when I went to management to say I want to use my Arabic, and I want to be assigned to the area’s geographical division – I went over and I talked to these people. I didn’t see any people who looked like me. They were all men. And so it was the beginning of seeing the mountain in front of me. But they also only hire certain kinds of people – people who can perform. And I met that category perfectly because when I see a challenge I’m going to meet that challenge and deliver. I could beat the bureaucratic mindset that women can’t work in the Middle East. And so that’s what I set out to do, and I did it. I was very successful, but I’ll tell you that the field was small. There are very few women that came before me or after me that did exactly what I did, and did it well.

BuzzFlash: And in addition to that, you didn’t put your life on hold for your career. You’re a mom and raised your daughter during this period. You got no maternity leave and worked right up to your delivery. In fact, you write about having to brief the secret service during labor about security measures for President Clinton’s scheduled visit to the Middle East.

Melissa Boyle Mahle: You’re right, the Agency doesn’t have maternity leave, and we look at it differently than how we would look at in the United States. I was assigned in the field at the time. For me to say that I wanted to take significant time off to have a baby would have meant that I would have lost my assignment. And I wasn’t willing to make that decision at that point in my life.

I think one of the things that I learned subsequently is that you have changing priorities after you have children – not just as a woman, but also families have changing priorities. But at that moment, I wasn’t willing to give up my plum assignment because it was very interesting and very challenging. So I stayed and I made the decision – I’ll have the baby in Jerusalem, and then continue working. And I did it. You know when you set your mind to do it, you do it. And when you’re a typical overachiever like most operations officers are, you manage to fit it all in.

When I was briefing the Secret Service while in labor, you don’t really stop and ask yourself, “Is this crazy or nuts? Why am I in labor and still taking phone calls?” At that moment in time, I had a job to do. Frankly, when you work at the CIA, the CIA always comes first. That’s a requirement. And if you don’t give that, you don’t survive in the culture of the organization. So for me, in that moment of time, of course I’m going to take those phone calls, and of course the President’s safety is very important and I’m going to put it in front of my own personal needs. I guess it all worked out fine because the President had a successful visit and I had a successful pregnancy. But it kind of gives you a glimpse into what we put our officers through.

BuzzFlash: We imagine or have our own perception of what it must be like to have meetings with high-ranking officials. And clearly there is a lot of necessary formality that exists. And yet at the same time, it’s also riddled with very human and day to day moments. One of the things that jumped out at me was when you had a meeting with the late Yasser Arafat, and because your nanny had a day off, you had to bring your baby, correct?

Melissa Boyle Mahle: Yes, and that wasn’t the only time that it happened. It happened to me multiple times, not necessarily with Yasser Arafat, but, with senior leadership. Any parent knows, when you don’t have day care, and when you have the baby, you’ve got to come up with an alternative solution. And my solution was, you know, put the baby in the car seat and off you go.

BuzzFlash: Any parent worries about his or her child’s safety, but being a parent and working as a CIA operative in the Middle East must have been overwhelming at times.

Melissa Boyle Mahle: Oh, definitely. I have some horror stories and I’ll share briefly one of them. We were in Jerusalem and it was after the intifada had started. And there was a lynching in Ramallah in which an Israeli soldier had wandered into a Palestinian town, and had been picked up and brought to a police headquarters. And then this mob of Palestinians merged onto the police headquarters and they took this poor Israeli and they lynched him. And it was early in the intifada and the tensions were very high. Jerusalem was still burning at this time with riots. We thought the whole situation was going to blow. As a security official, I have to be concerned about the safety of Americans. And so I was working from my office very closely with U.S. policymakers deciding what we were going to do. We started making plans for evacuation. And they said the first move was to move all official Americans out of the Arab areas in East Jerusalem. But I couldn’t leave my command post because I was our chief security person.

BuzzFlash: The Agency comes first, right?

Melissa Boyle Mahle: And work comes first. And I couldn’t go evacuate my family. And instead, I had to send my own security detail to do that job for me. And it was one of the worst experiences.

BuzzFlash: Later in your career, when you went back to Langley, you worked on recruiting agents. We have such a Hollywood version of the CIA and what it means to be a spy and an operative. What would you say it takes for a person to become a CIA operative?

Melissa Boyle Mahle: Besides the standard stuff, which is basically we look for smart people and individuals that are worldly and have some international experience. What kind of personality do you need to be a good field operations person? I mean, to be able to work the streets, to disappear, to be able to have the judgment and confidence to make decisions instantly in stressful environments, and to be able to stand by those decisions and have them be the right decisions? And so, what you end up looking for and hiring is people that have very good solid senses of who they are, of their values, and of their own integrity, people that are risk takers but not rule breakers. You want people who are extremely flexible in their outlook on life and the demands that are being made upon them. I’m not going to go into great detail about the kind of person we would look for, but basically people you can drop in anywhere and they’ll be self-sufficient and they’ll be self-motivated, and they’ll be aggressive to do the job.

BuzzFlash: You left the Agency when you made a mistake in the field and brought it to the attention of your superiors. Nonetheless, they asked you to leave. In your book, you said that you saw other agency employees who had made even more egregious mistakes who were men but didn’t face the same repercussions. Do you think that, since your time at the CIA, that much has changed in the culture, or that there’s at least a little bit more balance of how they treat female operatives and spies?

Melissa Boyle Mahle: In a fair assessment, you’d have to say there’s been tremendous change. But they were so backwards to begin with there was a lot of terrain that needed to be traveled. If you compare where they were in the 1980s to where they are in this millennium, you see two different organizational approaches to diversity. What you do see today is that women are making major inroads into the Agency. And within the clandestine operations, you’re also seeing that, but to a far lesser degree. The Agency still has a lot of work to do on this front. But I’m confident that the kinds of women they hire are going to continue to make progress. At the end, I think you have to keep on pushing because it’s not something that organizationally will happen all by itself.

BuzzFlash: I know this is a tricky question to ask to identify a type of thinking as either masculine or feminine, but do you think that the Agency suffers from this imbalance?

Melissa Boyle Mahle: Absolutely, why write off half the brainpower? And women can do different things than what men can do. And everything is about context when you’re in the field. I think that there’s an old school mentality there. There are still dinosaurs, as we like to call them, but the mindset is dying off. And I think there’s an understanding that women have a lot to contribute. But there’s still that glass ceiling that needs to be really broken.

BuzzFlash: Thank you for your time.

Melissa Boyle Mahle: Thank you.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW | Part 1 | Part 2

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Resources

Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA From Iran-Contra to 9/11, by Melissa Boyle Mahle
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560256494/...

BuzzFlash Interview with Michael Scheuer, ex-CIA bin Laden Unit Chief, on Why Insurgents Are Willing To Die Fighting American Soldiers, Jan. 5th, 2005
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/01/int05001.html

Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror by Senator Bob Graham, Jeff Nussbaum
http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/04/09/pre04045.html