The Spy With No Name | CIA
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Greenlight.com slash Spotify. This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

I'm Rhiannon Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. If you're just thinking, we've got to kill all the terrorists, then you're not going to see the value in somebody who says, no, I see the trends, and I understand where the thinking is going and the schisms, and I can see where things are going to be six months or a year from now. The spy with no name. Fall 2016. Kuala Lumpur. In a hotel room tucked away from the bustling streets of Malaysia's capital...

lies a body. The circumstances surrounding his death are a little bit muddy. Some folks characterize it as a suicide and other folks characterize it as an accidental overdose. The corpse represents the end of one of modern spycraft's most secretive careers. There are some folks who are not convinced that he died of an overdose or a suicide. And this always happens when CIA officers die abroad.

The remains of this officer will be returned to the United States and interred without fanfare. His real name will go with him. Few ever knew it. Fewer still will speak it aloud today. But in life, this nameless spy was a legend. News of his work, deep undercover, echoed through the corridors of power.

And in this episode of True Spies, you'll begin to understand the true extent of the sacrifice he made during the War on Terror. His was a mission that tested the limits of the human psyche, and one, it's speculated, that could have ultimately cost him his life.

Even the people within the agency who did not believe that the intelligence stream he was providing was worth the effort and the danger, acknowledge the extraordinary difficulty of the mission that he undertook. I'm Zach Dorfman. I am a intelligence and national security reporter.

Even if they haven't come across his work in prestigious publications like Politico, Foreign Policy, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic, regular listeners to this podcast will still be familiar with Zach Dorfman.

In his last episode, codenamed Tinsel Tyrant, he drew on his network of government sources to piece together the story of an audacious Soviet spy in the heart of Silicon Valley. He's brought the same studious attention to this story. And it's been a long road.

Because of the degree of secrecy surrounding it, it took a very long time to get the sourcing to tell this story in a way that I felt comfortable. It took years. Like, it actually took years to get this story from the first kind of whispers about it to publication. Because it wasn't the kind of story that I felt comfortable running with just one or two sources. Because what happens in this secret world is you get these very partial views from people. Nobody has full 360-degree awareness.

It's Zach's job to find those filament cracks in the walls of secrecy and pry them open to reveal the stories within stories. I had had a conversation with some people about some mental health issues at CIA. And over time, I had heard a little bit about a

a deep cover CIA officer who had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances, but most people believed it was the result of a mental health crisis. And so it kind of traced backwards from that. Somebody dies in Southeast Asia in 2016. It may have been suicide. It may have been drugs. But either way, it was essentially because of the psychological burden that had accrued over time because of the very, very dangerous and intensive assignment this person was under.

We'll refer to this spy by the name that was assigned to him, his pseudo in agency slang, Antony Lagunas.

Lagunas joined the CIA around the turn of the millennium. At the time, it was an organization searching for a purpose. The Cold War had ended. There was this kind of triumphalism that the West had vested the Soviet Union and its proxy states in the Eastern Bloc. And there was a lot of talk in the U.S. at the time about shrinking the agency. In 2001, al-Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center forced a radical rethink.

In the immediate post 9/11 period, there was a sense that we missed 9/11. It was the most catastrophic attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. Every day is 9/10 now. And we have to assume that there's going to be threats from all directions and all actors. And we don't know where the next threat is coming from. So CTC, the Counterterrorist Center, the budget exploded and it became a kind of almost like CIA within the CIA.

It had massive amounts of money that are being pumped via Congress to it, a lot of it for covert action. So as part of this epochal shift at the agency, there was also a newfound thinking about the agency's deep cover, non-official cover, NOC program. And that's where Lagunas came in. Non-official cover, a dull phrase that belies the CIA's most dangerous opportunities.

So the majority of CIA officers abroad are under official cover. And what official cover just means is that while their identification as an intelligence officer, as a spy, is hidden, the fact that they're working for their government is not. So in the United States...

Most CIA officers go abroad undercover as State Department officers. Non-official cover officers are a much rarer breed. They generally go undercover as business people. They go abroad and they do not have the protections of the government that they actually work for, right? There is no overt relationship whatsoever. Because of that, they have more room for maneuver, but their work is far more dangerous because they can be based in countries where if their true identity is discovered, it can lead to

jail, torture, even deaths. After 9-11, these already perilous operations ramped up the risk factor. The U.S. needed to infiltrate these extremist groups themselves. And that's where this knock program came in. The kind of stereotypical or cliched idea of the CIA officer under official cover is the person who is, I don't know,

some kind of like suave diplomat who then walks up to the Russian diplomat at the soiree and, you know, in Vienna and charms him into spying for the United States, right? Like you're not going to meet the people you need to know to prevent the next 9-11 that way. So it wasn't just the official cover folks. It was also that like if you are a

tech consultant or a representative of a major Fortune 500 company, you can't just like step into the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and start asking questions. The business person cover does not work either. So there was this kind of revolution thinking that, you know what, we need to actually get people within these terrorist organizations themselves. We need to burrow into these terrorist organizations themselves. This is a very, very small program. This was the program that Lagunas was a part of.

Lagunas hadn't even begun his training at the farm, the agency's spy school, when the planes hit the towers. Nonetheless, he was handpicked to take the fight to Al-Qaeda, tasked with operating undercover to infiltrate the terrorist group. And from the very start, it was clear that this would be a solitary kind of life.

The CIA also practices internal deception, where they will create cover stories within their own organization, where they'll say, all right, you need to pretend like you hate it here and that you got another opportunity and that we're going to kick you out. And that's what happened with Lagunas. In the middle of his training, they decided that he was going to go under deep cover.

And so they pulled him out and people around him were like, wait, what's going on with this guy? I guess he was kicked out of the agency. We don't really know, right? And except the select few people that know where you're really going and what you're really doing, you become kind of a ghost, even to the folks that you trained with.

But why him? He had some facility in Arabic when he joined the agency, so that helped. But this is not for most people. And they run tests. They really try to sift through people to understand, okay, well, yeah, you're going to be a great intelligence officer, but you're going to need more guidance. You're really a creature of Washington, and you're going to be a great operations officer, but you're going to probably want to spend a lot of your time at Langley itself. And then there's the folks that they think, okay...

You are a self-starter. You don't need a lot of managerial direction. You have the ability to live multiple lives simultaneously. You have a high capacity to deal with dangerous situations without falling to pieces.

And over time, they will sift through people like that and then determine whether you are going to be a good fit to be a non-official cover officer. And folks I spoke with recalled that Lagunas had an extraordinary ability to do all of those things, to be a great knock. And so that was part of why he was chosen. When it comes to undercover work, looks matter too. The less you stand out, the better.

He was an indistinct American white dude in his late 20s and early 30s when this was going on. In a past life, he had loved surfing, and he had a kind of needled scar going down one arm from a barracuda bite that was probably from when he was surfing. If you're thinking that a Caucasian surfer might feel like an unusual choice to infiltrate a Middle Eastern terror group, you're missing some context. At the time, there'd been a very recent precedent.

In November of 2001, John Walker Lind, an American member of the Taliban, had been captured as an enemy combatant by US forces in Afghanistan. With his long beard and traditional dress, Lind proved to the world at large that extreme Islamist ideology could capture anyone, regardless of background.

The CIA believed that a knock in this mold could be formidable. In a way, it's what you want. Just a beardy white guy in his early 30s who looks like anybody else, but then can transform like that and really, really play the part of an extremist. And so, at the dawn of the long war on terror, the second life of Antony Lagunas began.

He does some specialized training in the U.S. And then, according to my reporting, he goes to Egypt. He goes to Cairo. And, of course, in Cairo, there's the Muslim Brotherhood. There's connections throughout this world between extremist groups. But Cairo was, like, partially open, right? Like, you could just get on a plane and go to Cairo. It's not like the Fatah. You're not in a lawless border region. You're in a giant city. And I think that was the way in for him.

He gets off the plane in Cairo and he enrolls at a madrasa and, you know, he's sleeping on the floor and he's learning intensive Arabic and he's getting Quranic instruction and he's there for quite some time.

The work was slow. But the idea was that this was a process that would take years. You have to build your cover over time. So you don't just like get on a plane, walk out into the market and say, hey, where are the extremists? It took him years, right? And he did it by pretending to be a kind of disaffected American man who was interested in learning more about Arabic and Islam.

But little by little, Lagounas was able to work his way into the kind of circles that Knox of pre-911 generations could only dream of entering. He did it in a way that it was targeted that he would end up on the outer concentric circle. So he could go to the mosque or the madrasa that had, you know, extremist inclinations and then over time slowly gain the confidence of folks and get just one layer in, one layer in, one layer in. And it took years.

*Splash*

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Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next?

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. From what we know from Zach's sources, Lagunas' undercover mission began in 2003, ending in roughly 2010.

Details are scarce, but during that time, he makes some serious progress. He's deep undercover for over half a decade. There's a lot that's unknown about his story still, and truly that I don't know. He was based in Cairo, but did he travel elsewhere in the Middle East? Yes, absolutely. And by about the five-year mark, apparently, on the one hand, he's...

Getting closer and closer to the target. But the work is beginning to take its toll. The effects of the assignment are starting to weigh on him. And that's when the kind of mental health picture aspect of the story becomes more prominent.

Even for someone as naturally adept as Lagunas, the stress that this kind of job entails is immense. You have to live your cover in a way that requires you to do two jobs. Like you literally have to do the job that you are supposed to do as the business person or as a jihadist, as an extremist. And then you have to spend another day's work as an intelligence officer. And by the way, you don't get to keep your salary from your day job.

The exhausting workload was one thing, but imagine the ethical strain, the gulf between what you know to be right, the things you must do in the service of your cover, and the lines you must never cross.

As a government bureaucracy, the CIA does what it can to ameliorate this moral tug of war. You get something called material support waivers. That's in terrorism-related cases. You get a waiver that says, OK, well, yeah, you are materially supporting a terrorist organization, so we're going to waive that.

that allows you to do your job without breaking American law, because otherwise you are clearly breaking U.S. law. But there are hard limits in place. There's no case in which I was told, you know, you're allowed to participate in a scheme where violence is the end result. You can see how

In such cases, things would get very, very morally complicated very quickly because it's a matter of like, well, OK, I can rent this safe house for members of the terrorist organization that I'm supposed to be a part of, but I can't purchase the guns that they need.

Lagunas was one of a very small number of CIA NOCs, and no, we don't know exactly how many, who would have had to navigate these issues. The threat of exposure would have been a constant woodpecker's drill on the inside of his skull.

Lagunas, as far as I was able to report, he never infiltrated like core Al-Qaeda, right? But he was at the margins of these extremist groups. And by the end of his time, he was edging closer and closer. And the paradox is the closer you get to the center of the action, the harder it is for you to do your cover job because you're

You've now succeeded so much that you have to prove your bona fides to the organization in which you're supposed to be a part. At some point, they might ask you to kill somebody. And maybe you can beg off the first time and the second time. But what happens the third time? You keep making excuses. You can only make so many excuses after you're asked to do something over and over and over again before they start thinking otherwise.

Something may not be right with this person. So I think in terms of the stress and strain that Lagunas was under, you know, it's a good bet that this kind of thing is contributing to that all the time, where you need to be a very authentic extremist, but you can't be too authentic. Over time, Lagunas' CTC handlers began to worry about the state of their man on the ground in Cairo. Aspects of his behavior when he was off the clock were incompatible with his cover.

a sign that his much vaunted ability to compartmentalize was fraying.

He was a Midwestern American guy who had to pretend to be an austere extremist. So yeah, I mean, at one point he kind of tosses a Quran on a bed and says, you know, this stuff doesn't do anything for me. He's trying to separate himself. And some folks think this is a little harsh of a description, but some people called him kind of like a womanizer and somebody who liked to go out and party. So there was that. There was also the fact that he just...

At some point, he no longer seemed to be able to really figure out kind of what he was anymore. It wasn't that he ever like actually became an extremist or lost sight of the fact that he was a CIA officer undercover. It's just that the walls that you set up between your two lives start to collapse in ways that's like difficult for you to go about your day.

In Langley, Lagunas was becoming a hot-button issue. And there are discussions at the agency, way to the top of the agency, about, is this person okay? Should we pull them out? And you don't want to lose, you know, the shining example of, like, what the best thing the CIA can be. You don't want to pull them out. On the other hand, you have to

be very cognizant of their mental health and the danger that they're in. And then there was also another side, by the way, within the agency that thought that the intelligence he provided was not, like, the juice was not worth the squeeze. When it came to the fate of Lagunas, there were two interested parties within the CIA, the Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, and the GDC.

So GDC, the Global Deployment Center, is the part of the agency that handles the kind of administrative side of the NOC program. It's almost like a recruitment program that then gets seeded out to what used to be the area divisions and the centers within the agency itself. You can almost imagine like GDC kind of handing off

Lagunas to CTC and saying, okay, you know what? This person is going to go undercover as an extremist. Over time, what happened was GDC underwent a

parallel massive expansion in the post-911 era. And they really wanted to show their wins. And for them, Lagunas was a big win. It was a guy who successfully infiltrated extremist groups, who looked the part, who played the part, who was there for years. While in CTC, there was a lot more controversy over...

the actual quality of the intelligence that he was providing. Now, remember that he's based in Cairo. And at the time, CTC's predominant concern was killing Al-Qaeda folks all over the world, but particularly in the Afghan-Pakistan border region. You want the tactical intelligence that provides you the ability to kill Al-Qaeda members and Taliban folks.

Put simply, the kind of intelligence Lagunas was gathering would be considered strategic as opposed to tactical. The kind of reports that inform long-term thinking about and deep insights into an enemy target. A good example is the Russian "Illegals" program, in which spies were embedded in the hope of gathering intel and connections that might prove useful over decades, not days.

Put simply, this kind of spycraft was out of vogue. And so there was some controversy within CTC, which was like, you know what? This guy is expensive. He's not in the action. He's in Cairo. But like the war on terror is not being fought in Cairo. You know, it's being fought in Peshawar and it's not worth it.

So it became a bureaucratic battle within CIA itself, right? Like where you had some folks who were really pushing his case, pushing his intelligence because there was this idea they like needed this proof of concept. All the money that was being pumped to them, to GDC post 9/11 was worth it. And so the stuff about his mental health also was swirling while you had this bureaucratic battle between these two very important parts of the agency that were going head to head.

over Lagunas himself. Whatever interdepartmental maneuverings were happening at the CIA, enough of the top brass believed that the work Lagunas was doing was significant. Significant enough to allow Lagunas access to the highest echelons of political power in the USA, in person. Which begs the question, how does a visit home work for an American jihadi?

one whose loyalties will always be more likely to fall into question than his Middle Eastern counterparts. I mean, I think sometimes workaday excuses are the best excuses. And these are not folks who are going to put somebody on him and follow him once he gets off the plane in Northern Virginia. Nonetheless, the agency had to be extraordinarily careful when he came back to the States. Like when he came back,

They would run surveillance detection routes. He couldn't just fly directly from Dulles and just hail a cab and, like, go to Langley, right? So they had to do this thing where you got to go for days and you got to maybe go to a safe house and then you switch cars a couple times. And then when he actually got into Langley, for instance, there was an underground garage and he would go in the garage and there were blacked out windows and

Even if Al-Qaeda weren't keeping tabs, there were plenty of other organizations for whom a deep cover CIA officer would be a tantalizing prize. There's foreign spy services in D.C. looking out for this kind of stuff. I mean, there's terror groups, too, but there's also foreign spy services. Those foreign spy services talk and information is the coin of the realm. And so you can trade information. So if you're an adversarial intelligence service, I mean, you can say, well, you know what the Egyptians are going to be fascinated by? This. Right.

They're going to be really interested in this and they have information that we want on something else. And so there's a lot of danger to this person and not necessarily just from Al Qaeda. So they took extreme precautionary measures when he was back stateside to ensure that he was not blown, that his cover was intact. So be careful, but also don't overthink it.

As far as I understand it, I mean, the guy just got on a commercial flight, right? He just got on a plane, right? He told his buddies in Cairo, you know, I got to go back and, you know, do whatever. And I'll be back in two weeks or a month or whatever. And got on a plane and flew back. Like it wasn't like some ultra secret exfiltration mission because you don't want it to be that way. You have to live your cover. And if you are just a guy, a middle class guy who is now very interested in Islam and is converted to Islam,

But your family's in the US and you might have a good reason to go back. I don't know, for whatever familial reason or professional reason, that's what you gotta do. These trips home didn't happen often. And when they did, well, you remember we said highest echelons. We weren't kidding. He was considered so important that he was snuck into the White House to meet George W. Bush.

He was snuck into the White House. That is extraordinarily rare. The president's interaction with just workaday CIA officers is extraordinarily limited. And the idea that they were like, you know what, this person's important. You need to meet them face to face. So, you know, he has a rare trip back to the States and he gets snuck in and meets George W. Bush. This should have been a vindication of Lagunas' hard work, a reward for his years of isolation.

It should have felt good. Some people spend their entire careers at CIA and the best memory they have is that a single piece of intelligence that they procured ended up in the PDB, in the president's daily brief. They can say, you know what? I provided a piece of information that was so important that the president needed to know it. And that is like a highlight of your career. This person was literally brought in for a one-on-one meeting with the president.

And according to folks who were aware of his case, they said it just didn't affect him. It was almost like he was too far gone at this point to care. And, you know, that's a sign that like somebody isn't doing great. If the presidential audience had been intended as a morale boost, it had failed. But when it comes to the CIA, there's rarely just one intention at work.

He met with Bush more than once. So there was one that was closer, probably 2006, 2007. I think there was one later too. So there's different ways to look at it, but I think surely part of it was wanting to reward Lagunas for doing this extraordinarily difficult thing. But...

My sense is that it was also for the agency to stay in the good graces of George W. Bush, who nonetheless, I mean, after the agency failed terribly, placed great faith in it and was a renowned consumer, voracious consumer of intelligence. Concerns about Lagunas' mental state persisted. At the same time, his operation was becoming more dangerous as he drew closer to the dark heart of Al-Qaeda. A decision had to be made.

Around 2010, there was a sense that, OK, guy's been in long enough. No one assignment should last forever. In the U.S., in contradistinction to the Russians, we don't have a history of executing multi-decade long deep cover programs. And so there was going to be a sell by date on his posting regardless. But between the debates within the agency about the value of the intelligence stream and the concerns about his mental health, the decision was made around 2010 to pull him out.

For almost a decade, Antony Lagunas had lived and breathed his cover. To the detriment of his own mental health, he'd fully inhabited the role of a disillusioned American jihadi. It's the kind of job that changes a person, permanently. And when his mission was over, adjusting to life in the USA was never going to be easy. Luckily, the CIA has places for men like Lagunas.

We have important lines, legal lines, about what the CIA can do in its operations in the United States. So, the FBI is primarily responsible for counterintelligence in the United States. But the CIA does have bases in the U.S., in most major American cities, where they work on foreigners coming in and out, students. They interface with returning business people. And that division is called the National Resources Division.

National Resources, or NR, was to be Lagunas' new home. And NR historically, although it's produced some very important intelligence, has sometimes been viewed as a backwater in the agency. In the agency, case officers often rank themselves by the perceived importance of their posting. Moscow, Tehran, top draw. Macedonia, less so. You get the picture.

If you subscribe to that kind of thinking, a job at National Resources doesn't even put you on the leaderboard. Among CIA insiders, it's attracted a typically pithy nickname, Near Retirement.

The agency is an organization that is primarily empowered to operate abroad. So therefore, why would you want to be in the US? Unless, of course, you're in Northern Virginia and you're overseeing and managing the agency's operations abroad or you're doing the analytic work, which is so important. But if you're an operations officer and you're at an NR station or base,

It's historically, it's like an end of career thing, or they'll sometimes assign folks who have gone a little bit squirrely too. And Anthony Lagunas was assigned to the large NR station in Los Angeles, roughly around 2010. And like Cairo before it, LA swallowed him whole.

Precisely what he did there is obscure to me, but he was undercover in some capacity that had to do with the entertainment industry, which is not shocking because it's Los Angeles, but boy, is that tantalizing just in terms of what he was doing with covering the entertainment industry. He's still very much a deep cover officer, but his new cover is not as a jihadist. So shaves the beard and goes and works in media of some sort. You might think that this posting sounds like a much-needed respite,

Showbiz can be a brutal business, but in most cases, you're unlikely to be decapitated. But Lagunas was never at ease.

And the folks who were aware of him in LA, you know, recalled that he was really just not the same person, right? Like the person they knew in the early days of his undercover assignment in the Middle East and the person who was there in Los Angeles in the early 2010s just did not seem right to them. There was clear psychic hangover. Like there was somebody who was suffering and who had been changed, as you might imagine, from such an extraordinary and potentially traumatic experience.

Again, we just don't know specifics about Lagunas' experiences in the Middle East, but we can use our imaginations. In all likelihood, Lagunas had said and done things that would wear on a person's soul.

It's like in the military where people do really shocking things. They go through near-death experiences over and over again, and they come back and they're not okay, and you're like, I never would have suspected that person because the amount of stuff that we had been through together, you know, I thought this person was bulletproof. But they're human, right? He was human. Throughout the war on terror, the CIA's approach to mental health was evolving. We'll never know exactly how much help was offered to Lagunas over the course of his operation in Cairo.

I think depending on who you speak to, that effort has been good, incomplete, but improving. Or, you know, some folks think Lagunas certainly had somebody assigned to his case. When he would come back to Langley, there were folks who would speak with him, mental health professionals who would speak with him. So it wasn't like they weren't aware of this, right? It wasn't like they weren't aware that this could be quite damaging. Like, think about it this way. If you are...

extraordinary at disassociating. If you are literally living a lie and then you do that for six months or a year and then you have two hours with a staff psychologist, I mean, you could fake it. And for an officer whose whole sense of purpose is tied up in their work, there are reasons to do so. It's not a normal organization. Your mental health

Fitness reports are not private between you and the staff psychologist that you speak with.

Like, your bosses can read them and they can adversely affect your promotions, you know? And so there are incentives to dissemble or deceive there too. I'm not saying that's what Lagunas did. I'm just saying you have to think through the incentive structure at CIA for this stuff. It's like, let's say you're thinking, okay, you know, I'm feeling a little squirrely, but I want to stay in. I'm good enough to stay in. It's tough. It's a hard job to spot somebody who might be coming off the rails.

The last thing we know about Antony Lagounas is the saddest. In 2016, his body was discovered in a hotel room in Malaysia. Was it suicide? An accidental overdose? Nobody knows for sure. Everyone seems to agree though that it was the result of the accrual of this kind of psychic damage that was done by this multi-year long assignment.

So in a way, it doesn't matter, like, oh, did he overdose on drugs or did he take his own life? Because the idea is that the root cause of it was the same. Naturally, the question of foul play arose. Malaysia is home to its fair share of internationally connected Islamists after all. This always happens when CIA officers die abroad. People think that's not really a heart attack. You know, the agency brass is lying to us. Like, it happens.

But most insiders believe that the death of Antony Lagunas was nothing more than the tragic unraveling of one of the agency's most dedicated and valuable assets. Even the people within the agency who...

did not believe that the intelligence stream he was providing was worth the effort and the danger. Acknowledge the extraordinary difficulty of the mission that he undertook, right? So there is a sense that this was pretty heroic stuff. Everybody acknowledges that what he did was rare in the extreme. That acknowledgement only goes so far. In the CIA's original headquarters in Langley, Virginia,

there is a white marble wall. On the wall, there are 140 black stars. 106 are engraved with the names of fallen CIA officers. 34 are blank, memorials to those whose names can never be revealed, even in death. But according to Zack, you won't find Anthony Lagunas, the alias, or the man behind it there.

There was a case not too long ago of a CIA officer who committed suicide and was given a star. And so there's a question of what precipitates a star? I mean, for the CIA officer who killed herself, there was a sense that she killed herself because she did this really tough counterterrorism work. And it was like related to the stress and strain of that. And, you know, as far as I understand from what my sources told me, that was not the case of Lagunas. And I am curious about what the difference is.

And I have never really had a satisfactory answer. For Zach, the life and death of the spy known as Antony Lagunas poses questions about the nature of intelligence work in the 21st century. What do we value? What should we? What is the purpose...

of an intelligence agency. Was the purpose of the CIA post 9/11 to become a paramilitary organization that was primarily responsible for identifying and then locating and then killing

terrorists or should its primary responsibility have been traditional, difficult intelligence work that deals with finding human targets, finding sources, working those sources, recruiting those sources. These debates in the agency are still around. I mean, we all know who won because very rapidly the agency transformed into this kind of drone led killing machine.

But the people who defend Lagunas' worth most strongly are the ones who talk about the need to have people in these organizations to deeply understand

the context in which these jihadist organizations operate. And I think that what Lagunas' story does is that it refocuses the lens a little bit on an alternative path where you can imagine a world in which even if CIA ran the drone war, maybe it did it. Maybe that was given to the military where those more traditional forms of intelligence gathering were given a little bit more attention.

And my understanding is that Lagunas himself was kind of like, we're not going to bomb our way out of this conflict. That's not how this is going to work. Because this guy was deeply embedded in this culture after a certain point. And that kind of understanding is extraordinarily valuable. Whether that translates into the sort of intelligence that Langley thinks is valuable is a different question.

Because if you're just thinking, we got to kill all the terrorists and we're responsible for killing the terrorists and that's it, that's all that matters. Then you're not going to see the value in somebody who says, no, I see the trends. You know, I see the trends in this community and it's transnational community. And I understand where the tendrils are and I understand where the thinking is going and the schisms. And I can see where things are going to be six months or a year from now in terms of like,

the discussions that are occurring within these cultures, at these subcultures about what's appropriate and what's not appropriate and where we should go with jihad after this. So I would say that it's very hard to judge the worth of his intelligence stream without thinking about these kind of deeper questions about the role and purpose of intelligence in the first place. At the time of writing, Zach Dorfman is working on a book on the history of deep cover.

I hope in the book to be able to talk about that a little bit more because I think, again, that it's really important because the picture of the CIA and the war on terror is one of essentially death from above. I mean, it's just death from above. And it doesn't mean that that wasn't difficult to find those people. But I think it took the focus away from what had been the core mission of the agency for many, many decades. So Laguna's story provides a kind of alternative timeline or history of the war on terror.

I'm Rhianna Needs. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to listen back to Zach Dorfman's first appearance on True Spies. Codename, Tinsel Tyrant. Spyscape Plus members can find another discussion with Zach, exploring the historical and contemporary role of supply chain attacks by intelligence agencies. Go to plus.spyscape.com now to subscribe. And join us next week for another rendezvous with True Spies.

the encryption button off the drive.

It's almost, it's impossible to know sometimes, right? Unless you actually really dissect their upbringing, everything they went through, what they were feeling. You know, if you got siblings, you know, one of your siblings is going to be different than you, may have perceived their upbringing different than the way you perceived it. So in one case, you have a guy, well, father, he's got two sons. One joins Al-Qaeda, the other joins the counterterrorism police.

I mean, same father, same upbringing. Why does one go this way and the other one go that way? True Spies, The Debrief from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.