The new head of the National Clandestine Service is a former Marine who gained fame for being former Afghanistan President’s Hamid Karzai’s “security blanket,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
His name and age? Unknown. After all, he’s a spy who has spent his career undercover, most notably as station chief in Kabul.
Here’s what we do know about him, thanks to a 2010 Journal profile …
• Some of his colleagues nicknamed him Spider. It is unclear why.
• At the time of the 2010 profile, he was thought to be in his 50s.
• In the 1970s, he went from the Marines to the CIA’s paramilitary unit.
• By the 1980s, he was helping to train Afghans fighting the Soviets.
• He’s a veteran of the war on terrorism. Right after 9/11, he was assigned to work with Karzai, a tribal leader. In December 2001, he was in a meeting with Karzai when friendly fire hit the site. Legend has it that he immediately threw himself over Karzai and saved the life of the future president. A few months later, he took part in Operation Anaconda against al-Qaida, earning a CIA medal for heroism.
• In 2004, he becomes the CIA station chief in Kabul, a position he held at least twice, assuming the role again in 2009.
• He was close to Gen. Stanley McCrystal, the onetime top military officer in Afghanistan who was fired by President Obama after a controversial Rolling Stone article was published.
• It was then that Spider became a “pivotal behind-the-scenes power broker in Kabul” because of his good rapport with the mercurial Karzai. “Karzai needs constant reassurance,” a former colleague of the station chief told the Journal, and the chief is his “security blanket.”
