(Editor’s Note: Understanding the life of a spy is often difficult, especially understanding the experiences of those who spend much of their careers working undercover. In this rare commencement address delivered to the Valley Forge graduating class of 2020, Former CIA Deputy Director for Counterintelligence Mark Kelton shares fascinating insight into what his career as a CIA Officer has been like. The address has been very slightly edited for length.)
Cipher Brief Expert Mark Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency executive who retired in 2015 with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations including serving as CIA’s Deputy Director for Counterintelligence. He is the Senior Vice President for National Security Solution at DynCorp International; and is Board Chair of Spookstock, a charity that benefits the CIA Memorial Foundation and the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.
Courage, Honor, Conquer – Those words became a part of me at Valley Forge; as they are now part of each of you. I trust you have heard them many times since you arrived at the Forge. But how much time have you spent considering what they mean? Only on reflection, 46 years after leaving Valley Forge - and nearly five years after retiring from the Central Intelligence Agency - do I understand the positive impact our school, and those words, had on my life.
COURAGE
Winston Churchill said, “is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others”. Over the course of the 34 years I served at CIA, I saw many instances of courage. As is the case at Valley Forge, CIA remembers its heroes. When you enter the main lobby at CIA HQs, your eye is immediately drawn to rows of stars – all too many of them - carved into one of the marble walls. Each of those stars commemorates a CIA officer who gave his or her life for their country. In front of that Memorial Wall is a book that, like the Book of Remembrance in the Valley Forge chapel, has a line for the name of each of those memorialized on the wall. The unique thing about CIA’s book is that some of those lines are blank. Their names remain secret even in death. I knew a number of those whose names are on that wall.
One of those stars commemorates Johnny Michael Spann, the first American killed in action in Afghanistan. It is not generally known, but two weeks after 9/11, a small team of CIA officers, codenamed “Jawbreaker”, were the first Americans into that country. Their mission was to lead the US response to the terror attacks and to hunt for those responsible for murdering thousands of their countrymen. After arriving on a Soviet-built helicopter – a helicopter that now sits on the CIA compound in Virginia as a memorial – the team began working with locals to wage war on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Mike Spann was charged with interrogating prisoners for information on Al Qaeda. They included an American fighting with the Taliban. Mike was killed while bravely battling Taliban fighters who overwhelmed him during a prison uprising. That kind of physical courage is rightly esteemed because it is so rare.
But there are other kinds of courage. One of them is the courage to lead; to take responsibility for others and for accomplishing a mission. I got my first leadership experience at Valley Forge. I can vividly recall how proud I was to become a first sergeant and, a year later, to become a cadet captain. I still have my stripes and shoulder boards at home. I came to learn, however, that leadership is about more than ranks and titles. “It is not,” as Machiavelli sagely observed, “titles that honor men, it is men that honor titles”. The title CIA gives to those who lead its CIA officers and direct its operations in any given country is Chief of Station; or as it is called for short in the Agency: ‘COS’. Being a COS is the best job in the world. It is a great privilege to lead CIA officers in the field. A mentor of mine was once asked to describe the difference between FBI officers and CIA officers. He responded that while FBI officers thinks like bank guards in that they can do only what is written down, CIA officers think like bank robbers because they can do whatever isn’t written down. Spying – stealing secrets – is a heck of a lot of fun.
The first of the four opportunities I had to serve as a COS was in the Balkans during the brutal conflict there. I got the job in 1993 when the Deputy Director for Operations, the officer who directs all CIA activities abroad, called me in Austria where I was then working and said ‘I am sending you down to Croatia to be COS. It is your war.”
Having learned the first rule of career success, that being never to turn down a leadership assignment, I jumped at the opportunity. What followed were three tough, but rewarding, years leading CIA men and women in supporting the US military, documenting war crimes and collecting intelligence that informed the decision-making of the President and his team on the Balkan crisis.
Later, when I was a student at the Naval War College, I gave a presentation on CIA activities in the Balkans. During that talk, I was asked what sort of leadership training I had gotten to prepare me for being a first-time COS in such a difficult location. In fact, I had received no formal leadership training at CIA. I had been too busy absorbing the craft of espionage, much of that learning by doing. So, I answered that the only leadership training I had gotten prior to becoming a COS was at Valley Forge, and that the leadership lessons I had learned at the Forge had served me very well indeed. As you move forward in whatever field you choose, know that there will come a time when you too will again be called upon to be a leader, be it of a team, office, business or military command. When you get that call, I trust that the lessons you learned at the Forge will also serve you, and those you lead, well.
Being responsible for the actions and conduct of my fellow cadets and fellow CIA officers taught me some key lessons. First, leadership is theater. And I don’t mean Jason Bourne in the movies. As a leader you must understand that you are always on display and that every action or decision you take will be scrutinized by those who lead you and, most importantly, by those you lead. Nothing can undermine confidence in leadership more than hypocrisy. You must ensure that you hold yourself to the same rules and standards of conduct and performance that you apply to those in your charge.
A second leadership lesson I learned is that being nice is overrated. It is, of course, essential to be respectful and very good to be nice. But results are more important than approval. Holding everyone accountable for his or her actions is an essential prerequisite for success as a leader.
Third, as a leader you should work as if someone is looking over your shoulder, because they probably are. When I was posted as COS running operations against Russia in 1999, my boss - the then CIA Director of Operations - warned me that there would be 40 wanna-be COS’s back in CIA HQs scrutinizing every decision I made and action I took. And he was right. The Russians are the most professionally capable adversary CIA faces. Working against Russia as a CIA officer is like playing in the Yankee Stadium of espionage where the home team has every advantage. Every action a COS takes is scrupulously documented and is subject to being reviewed and second-guessed. In that sort of unforgiving environment, a mature leader learns to listen to such critiques and to evaluate them without letting ego get in the way.
Finally, as a leader you must have the courage to step into space - to make hard decisions - sometimes even at the risk of career and reputation. You must, of course, be prepared to deal with the implications of such a decision. But there are times when having the courage to live with those costs is preferable to existing with the consequences of doing nothing. “You will never do anything in this world,” Aristotle wrote, “without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.”
HONOR
It may surprise you that honor is of crucial import in the supposedly dishonorable profession of intelligence. It has been said that “espionage is the world’s second oldest profession with all of the attributes of the first.” That age-old of view of spying and those who practice it is aptly captured in a passage from Genesis: “We are honest men. We are not spies.” Spying as you read about it or see it in the movies is all lying, betrayal and deception. In short, a dirty business. Espionage can, indeed, be a very rough business. Consequently, the young men and women sent abroad by CIA - and most of them are not that much older than you –must bear burdens that test their character.
“The true test of a man’s character”, famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “is what he does when no one else is watching.” CIA, of course, prefers to do what it does when no one else is watching. So, it looks for people of well-developed character who are uniquely suited to bearing those burdens and to carrying out the Agency’s mission. There is a particular tension in the juxtaposition between the secret world in which they live and the values of the democracy they serve. Even Presidents have sometimes voiced discomfort with the nature of the CIA’s mission. President Truman judged that “secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix.” His successor, Dwight Eisenhower, pronounced intelligence “a distasteful but vital necessity”, while John Kennedy thought that “the very word secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” Those views are reflective of the uneasiness of the American people with the secret world and with actions seen or portrayed as less than honorable that are undertaken in their name. CIA Director Richard Helms addressed this inherent friction between secrecy and democracy when he wrote that “the nation must take it to a degree on faith that we, too, are honorable men dedicated to their service.”
Like Valley Forge, CIA values honor. CIA officers are called upon to approach their craft dispassionately, to set aside bias and self in reporting objectively on the good, bad and ugly of the activities in which they were involved even when it doesn’t reflect positively on them personally. They also commit themselves to do all in their power to live up to – to honor - the obligations they have incurred to their agents. A bit of explanation is necessary here. CIA does not call its officers who work with foreigners ‘agents’. They are called case officers. Case officers “handle” or run agents. The foreigners who spy for CIA are ‘agents’ who secretly work with CIA. Those agents’ risk all that is precious to them – sometimes their very lives – to defend the ideals of freedom.
“Opening the pen as if to begin writing, he bit down on the barrel and expired instantly in front of his KGB (that is, Soviet intelligence) interrogators. The KGB was so intent on his confession that they never suspected he had poison…TRIGON died his own way, a hero”. CIA officer Marti Petersen's description of the decision by her agent, TRIGON, then the CIA’s best agent inside the Soviet Union, to use the “L-pill” (L for lethal; in this case cyanide) that was concealed in his pen rather than face harsh interrogation and execution following his arrest by the KGB underscores the extreme hazards of agent operations.
Honoring the obligations made to such heroes; particularly the promise to do everything they can to protect them; is something Agency officers take very seriously.
In one operation I know of, our agent was under suspicion. He was being followed – surveilled in CIA parlance – by the secret police of the very repressive country in which he lived. The agent, who had provided us with crucial information, was rightly very afraid of being caught as he almost certainly would be executed. Committed to doing all it could to help its agent, CIA dispatched a case officer to snatch him from under surveillance and get him out of the country to safety. It was a nerve-wracking, yet thrilling, operation; almost like a movie. Think of the movie “Argo” if you have seen it. And it worked. When that agent had reach safety, he looked at the CIA case officer and said: “God Bless the United States of America and my case officers”. I know this is true, because I was that case officer. CIA officers do these things not principally because they face censure or punishment – an Honor Council if you will - if they fail to do them. They do these things because of an innate sense of honor to the oath they have taken and to the people in whose name they serve compels them to do so.
Honor is a very precious thing. Be true to it. As the Romans said, “Honor is the only thing in life that cannot be taken from you…only you can give it away”. Don’t.
CONQUER
When we think of conquering or conquest we usually think of victory in sports or war. But there are other forms of conquest. As Plato said, “For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories”. Constantly striving for excellence, to make yourself better – and conquering the self-imposed limits that prevent you from doing so - is one of the most important determinants of success in any field of endeavor.
“All wisdom is not new wisdom.” That quip from Churchill reminds us of the value to the present of the lessons of the past. At CIA, there is premium placed on learning those lessons by studying the Agency’s past successes and errors, as well as those of its adversaries. Working to conquer self-imposed barriers to success and to improve oneself by developing the subject matter and language expertise that are the necessary prerequisites to victory in the unforgiving arena of espionage.
Similarly, the academic excellence you strove for here at Valley Forge must only be the beginning of your quest for knowledge. “It must”, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character said, “be my business to know things. That is my trade.” Like that famed fictional detective, to succeed at any craft you choose, it must be your business to know things. You must become and remain a master of whatever you choose to do in life. Learning must never stop.
Espionage is a team sport. I never saw a success or failure at CIA that was solely attributable to the actions of any one person. But it is also a contact sport. “Secret intelligence,” as Richard Helms wrote, “is not for the faint-hearted”. The hard reality is that life in the secret world exacts a cost. To endure its trials, one has to be able to cope with both its emotional and physical demands. CIA has effectively been at war since the Al Qaeda attacks on the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. CIA personnel have been deployed to combat zones continuously since 9/11. Working in such an environment is physically taxing. It entails brutally long hours of work, and all too little sleep, in sometimes very Spartan circumstances. I know from personal experience that such demands that can push the limits of endurance. Conquering those limits by developing both mind and body are necessary to functioning effectively not only at CIA, but in any endeavor to which you decide to commit yourself.
Success will not come easy. Personal Motivation is crucial to achievement in life. Long hours and sacrifice are required for career success. It requires a deep grounding of professional knowledge and experience in any field that can only be achieved through hard work. Innate talent is, of course, important. However, as the great painter Winslow Homer once said, “talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work the right way”. Repetition of method, attention to detail and development of routine are crucial to learning any craft. In CIA parlance, there is no substitute for shoe leather - that is pursuing every lead and opportunity, and then digging up some more.
Whether you succeed or fail at anything you choose to do is up to you. No one is going to motivate you to conquer the hurdles you will confront. And often no one will be there to lavish praise and rewards on you get over them.
This is certainly true at CIA, where the nature of the work means that expressions of appreciation for what one does is rare and public praise rarer still. When I joined CIA in 1981 after completing graduate school, the Agency was a much more secretive organization. Even the HQs building was not easy to find. There was no sign on the road outside the front gate pointing the way to the George H.W. Bush Center for Intelligence as there is today. Now CIA has much more public exposure. It is the subject of books, movies and TV shows - I myself participated in panel with the cast of the TV show “The Americans” that you can still see on YouTube. CIA even has a twitter handle.
The more public profile of CIA notwithstanding, the nature of secret work dictates that CIA’s purported failures, be they true, half-true or bald-faced lie, dominate the headlines. “Obviously”, CIA Director Allen Dulles said in his retirement speech, “you cannot tell of the things that go along well; those that go badly speak for themselves.” American discomfort with secrecy and the reality that it is CIA’s purported failings that garner public attention means that it is always under scrutiny. Appreciation for what CIA does is be rare, and public acclimation rarer still.
The only occasion I can think of when I saw that sort of public appreciation for CIA was the crowd that formed outside the White House after the Bin Laden operation. They were chanting “CIA, CIA”. I was COS on the ground overseeing that operation. I cannot describe to you the feeling we got watching our fellow countrymen recognize what we had been privileged to be a part of. CIA had worked for years to find and deliver justice to the murderer of so many innocents. The response of the American people to that moment will stay with me forever.
“It can be done!” Those watchwords from General Colin Powell remind us that optimism is a force multiplier in conquering even the most challenging hurdles in life. But success will not come easy and I would offer a few more thoughts drawn from my own experience that might help you get over them.
“Once in a while,” former CIA officer William Hood wrote in his book on the first CIA agent inside Soviet intelligence, “just often enough to give intelligence officers a false sense of confidence, a secret operation goes almost according to plan.” I never saw a CIA operation that went wholly according to plan. It is not like Mission Impossible. In Clausewitzian terms, friction always intrudes. The unexpected happens and Murphy intrudes. Preparation and planning are often all you can control. They also maximize the prospects for success. As regards plans themselves, in such matters, it is rarely wise to be too cleaver. Simplicity is the ultimate virtue.
Things in life will not always go according to your plan. You will make mistakes and the people you lead will make mistakes – hopefully not too often or at crucial moments. Good leadership understands this and will, within bounds, give you the latitude to make those mistakes because it is from failure that the most important lessons are learned. But you should expect of your leadership, and demand of yourself, that a differentiation be made between errors of commission and errors of omission. The former, where you have done all you reasonably could to prepare yourself and those in your charge to deal with and anticipate the many circumstances known and unknown that might be encountered are forgivable. The latter, wherein you failed to take account of, anticipate or plan for possibilities and exigencies that might reasonably have been foreseen, are much less so.
Whatever profession you choose in life, understand that work-life balance will be situational. There will be times when personal needs and desires must take a back seat to the demands of mission. Duty will, all too often and often at the most inopportune moments, take precedence over other things. But fulfillment of that duty will come at some potential personal cost. You must, consequently, set aside time to step back and pay attention to those other things that matter in your life; health, family, friends; sometimes even at the cost of career aspirations. Should you not do this, there will come a time when accounts come due, damaging you and those who care about you as well as hindering your effectiveness in your chosen field.
Do not fear the dreaded “e” word. Somehow the word elite has become a pejorative in our society. In my experience at CIA, young people who join do so because they want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to serve their country. But they also want to be challenged and tested to see whether they have what it takes to become part of an elite; the world’s best intelligence service. Whatever course you pursue, do not be afraid to test yourself; to strive to be one of the very best at it. There is much pride to be had in accomplishment and no shame in trying.
There wasn’t a day in my 34 years at CIA that I didn’t want to go to work. Even on the worst of days, when things were not going well, I opened my office door (usually a safe-like vault door) eager to see what was going on. If you want to succeed in life, find something you find rewarding, something you enjoy doing and stick with it. You will be much happier if you do so.
You depart Valley Forge at a time of great challenge. This too shall pass. But other challenges will come. Challenge in life is inevitable. Defeat, however, is optional. Courage, Honor, Conquer. Abide by those words and you will surely know more victory than defeat. Congratulations again and welcome to the long line of Valley Forge alumni. God Speed and good hunting.
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