An Eye for Terror Sites

"Mike's politics on the Middle East are pure neo-con," said the University of Vermont's F. Gregory Gause III. "He believes democracy has to come to the region and America should play a major role. . . . He thinks Arab public expression for the Palestinians is really about anger at their own governments. I disagree."

Gause said he used to urge Doran to log off his computer and take his wife to dinner, in part because the Islamic Web sites represent a "very small slice of the debate. It's among the privileged -- the ones on the Internet." But, Gause added, "Mike wrote the best piece after 9/11."

Reports that Princeton had deferred tenure, in part because of an offer on another campus, sparked an outpouring on student blogs last March. "He leans to the . . . gasp . . . right? No tenure for you," one blogger wrote. "It's amazing he's lasted this long," another wrote.

Doran never expected to play the role of new thinker or iconoclast. "Water polo was my life until college," he said. An All-America in high school, he played for Stanford as a freshman. He had no interest in the Middle East -- and had never been abroad -- until a professor suggested the region might interest him.

Doran, an Irish Catholic from Middle America whose parents did not go to college, ended up in Israel for three years, learning Hebrew and enough Arabic to get by. "The Middle East was just a totally different universe," Doran recalled. He came away thinking he wanted to specialize in the 500-year Ottoman rule of the region -- until he translated a key concept incorrectly for a major paper.

"A good rule in the Middle East is that you should work on periods after the advent of the typewriter," he reflected. "Looking at Ottoman manuscripts, you have to be philologically talented."

The 1991 Persian Gulf War shifted Doran's focus to current Middle East events. He wrote his thesis on modern Egypt.

After graduate work at Princeton, Doran taught at the University of Central Florida, then returned to Princeton. "He was a brilliant teacher, which is an understatement," said Avrom Udovitch, who was Doran's professor and then a colleague. "He had a cult of followers." Udovitch was also impressed that between Doran's early morning obsession with Islamic Web sites and his heavy teaching schedule, he ironed his own shirts every day. "He has very traditional personal habits," Udovitch said.

Former student Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky said Doran made an impression on him at Princeton, when four or five male streakers ran into Doran's class as a prank. Doran coolly shut the door so the streakers couldn't leave without asking. "He took command of the situation," Ramos-Mrosovsky said.

His politics, Princeton affiliation and scholarship have led colleagues and students to call Doran a "young Bernard Lewis," a leading scholar whose work -- including "The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror" and "What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East" -- influenced the administration's response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It's flattering, although I'm not sure why," Lewis said, adding that Doran's scholarship on Islamic Web sites is "important and original." Lewis, who has emeritus status at Princeton, noted that Doran's lectures were so popular they had to be moved every year to larger lecture halls.

Doran now works out of a barren office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. He deals with topics including Iran's disputed nuclear program, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Syria's ties to terrorists and reform in the oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdoms.

Now that he's in government, Doran finds he no longer has the time to fully explore the intelligence that he longed for as an academic. In one recent 24-hour period, he had 2,714 items in his intelligence folder. He described himself as a kid in a candy shop -- who can't eat all the free candy.