The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS by Michael Morell

was in that much of a hurry. Once I was so tired that I missed my exit for McLean—the closest town to the Agency—and drove nearly all the way to D.C., some ten miles out of my way, before I realized what I had done. As I got back on course that morning, I thought that I was lucky to have survived driving around in such an exhausted state.
    No matter how drained I was, whenever I drove down the long entranceway to CIA, I would be revived by a sense of mission, the signs of which were all around me. Access to the headquarters compound had always been tight, but in the days immediately after 9/11, security was bristling. The normal security protective officers (known as “SPOs”) were even more vigilant than usual. Their numbers were augmented by officers in armored Humvees that were parked on the median strips and along the entrance road.
    Once my badge was carefully scrutinized I would slowly drive onto the 258-acre compound and past a marble sign that declared it the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Congress had bestowed the name in 1999 to honor the forty-first president and the eleventh director of CIA. There are two main buildings on the complex. I worked in what is called the “Original Headquarters Building” or OHB. President Eisenhower laid the cornerstone for the place in 1959, a year after I was born. Connected to the OHB are two six-story glass-encased towers known as the “New Headquarters Building.” The NHB opened in 1991. President Reagan had brokenground for the facility two years earlier. I was among those in the crowd who watched him do so.
    Friends and neighbors would often ask me how many people worked at Langley. The answer I would have to give was “A lot,” because the actual number is classified. But you only have to look at the traffic streaming in and out or view the overhead photos of the massive parking lots to know the Agency is a major presence. It was generally too confusing to try to explain that Langley doesn’t really exist—at least in the legal sense. The actual community where the headquarters is located is called McLean. But everyone calls it Langley anyway. They do not, however, call CIA “the Company”—which seems to be popular only in old movies and novels.
    In more peaceful times the headquarters compound would often be referred to as a “campus.” The barbed-wire fences surround a leafy property with jogging paths and symbolic artwork competing for space with satellite dishes and old spy planes mounted on pedestals. But this was no peaceful time. So I would quickly make my way to my seventh-floor office, where I would work through the night to gather the latest intelligence to bring to the president shortly after sunrise.
    I didn’t work alone. A terrific group of analysts supported me. They were young, talented, and eager to learn. They did everything from finding answers to my many questions—often by waking up the analyst who had written a piece—to making copies of the briefing package. They also bailed me out of fixes on many occasions. One day I showed up for work in the middle of the night as usual. Sometime before dawn I discovered that I was wearing two differently colored shoes—one brown and one black. I did not know what I was going to do until I spotted one of the PDB support analysts and demanded to know his shoe size. Turned out it was a match and I commandeered his shoes so that I could walk into the Oval Office without looking like a disheveled mess. Some of those young analystswho supported me during my year of briefing in 2001 are today making their way to the very top of CIA. I am very proud of them.
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    The PDB briefings, which before 9/11 had been about intelligence analysis and reporting, now took on an added dimension. Increasingly, operational decisions were made on the spot and orders given on priorities in the war against al Qa‘ida. I would provide the president with updates on exactly what was happening on the ground in