Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA by John Rizzo Page A

tuition plus a generous allowance, which I spent with gusto.
    Looking back, the way I arrived at the decision to apply to Brown was markedly similar to the way I arrived at the decision, a decade later, to apply to the CIA. Essentially, both decisions were made on the basis of a leap-of-faith hunch. They were two of the best decisions I made in my life.
    There was one other thing that Brown gave me, the significance of which didn’t hit me until years later. Brown gave me my first contact—albeit fleeting—with a bona fide CIA legend.

    One course in the political-science department was far more popular than any of the others. It was a twice-weekly lecture taught by a professor named Lyman Kirkpatrick.
    He was the most impressive, and most intimidating, physical presence I had ever encountered.
    Kirkpatrick had recently arrived at Brown after a two-decade career at the CIA, in which he had held positions of increasing importance, according to his faculty bio, though it was notably sketchy on details. It would be years before I fully understood that Kirkpatrick had been among an elite group that later would be chronicled in Evan Thomas’s book The Very Best Men , and still later in the movie The Good Shepherd : the WASPy, idealistic, Ivy League–bred recruits who famously shaped and led the first generation of the Agency’s leadership in the post–World War II years and at the dawn of the Cold War.
    Kirkpatrick fit that image perfectly, beginning with his Princeton background and magisterial-sounding name. But it was his physical presence that was the most striking. It was only in doing the research for this book that I realized he was only fifty years old at the time I first saw him. In the eyes of a twenty-year-old kid, Kirkpatrick had an aura of someone older, wiser, immortal, even. He had thick, iron-gray hair, slicked back and crisply parted. He was a strikingly handsome man, with clear blue eyes and a smooth, preternaturally rosy complexion. His voice never wavered from its richly mellifluous, baritone purr. He always appeared in class impeccably groomed.
    Besides all that, there was one last thing about Kirkpatrick that added a unique, vaguely mysterious element to his unforgettable image: He was confined to a wheelchair. The word was that in the 1950s polio had left him paralyzed from the waist down. I don’t remember him ever acknowledging it or the wheelchair.
    Kirkpatrick’s lecture was such a hot ticket on campus that it had to be held in a cavernous, amphitheater-style classroom that would be packed with what must have been close to two hundred mesmerized students. I don’t recall much in the way of give-and-take between Kirkpatrick and the rest of us—he would just wheel himself behind a desk at the front of the room, glance briefly at everybody arrayed above and around him, and start talking in that unmistakable voice. I don’t remember anything he ever said in the lectures that was really memorable, yet none of usseemed to mind. It was not until years later, after I was inside the CIA, that I learned he had been a central figure in some of the most sensitive and controversial Agency programs in the ’50s and early ’60s.
    I was always too cowed to approach him—until I screwed up my courage and approached him at the end of one of his last lectures. I have no idea what I was going to ask him. There was just something inside me that compelled me to interact, just once, with this imposing figure from a world of international intrigue about which I knew nothing.
    I sidled up near his wheelchair, anxiously waiting my turn as other students surrounded him. When the moment finally came, and he looked at me with a surprisingly benign gaze, I opened my mouth . . . and nothing came out. I was frozen in fear. After an agonizing moment, I managed to croak, in a quavering voice, something about enjoying his lectures. Kirkpatrick responded briefly and politely, but by then I was too mortified to hear him. I