Knocking on Osama's Cave Door

"Extremely well informed" is how Sandy Vogelgesang, former ambassador to Nepal, remembers Berntsen. "He's rock solid -- the kind of person who evokes total confidence."

From Berntsen's perspective, the CIA lost its way in the Clinton years, particularly under then-Director John Deutch and his deputy, George Tenet. On the paper covering the lunch table he draws a pie chart to illustrate how Tenet "shrank" the covert-ops mission of the agency. Much like the 2002 book "See No Evil" by Robert Baer, another former counterterrorism operative, Berntsen's memoir depicts a sclerotic spy service clogged by bureaucratic inertia after the Cold War, ill prepared to penetrate terrorist groups.

"In George Tenet's CIA the conduct of operations was less important than Beltway politics and networking on the seventh floor [at Langley]," Berntsen writes. "I watched in frustration as officers who sat in safe staff jobs were promoted faster than ops officers who risked their lives in the field."

No comment, said Bill Harlow, a former CIA spokesman helping Tenet write a memoir. "Director Tenet won't be offering any comments on anybody's books, good or bad."

(Perhaps he'll open up once he has a book to flog.)

'Gotta Break China'

There's a grand tradition among those who work in the trenches for any organization to fume about the boneheads and second-guessers at the top and in the rear echelons. The guys on the ground get labeled "difficult personalities." Hotheads, sometimes. Berntsen says any such criticism of him "may be valid," but makes a point: "Why is it that Gary Berntsen was always the guy who was sent?"

Black, who approved Berntsen's assignment to Afghanistan, answers: "When you go into battle, you don't go with your weak sisters. He is exactly the kind of guy you want to have."

Black and others point out that there was no modern playbook for intelligence officers waging war as they did in Afghanistan -- it hadn't been done since World War II. "He went into a battle whose outcome was highly uncertain," Black says, "and lived up to the highest tradition of dropping OSS agents into Nazi Germany."

"Gary did a helluva job," agrees Billy Waugh, a legendary Special Forces veteran who served with Berntsen and appears in the book. Waugh was 72 at the time he deployed to Afghanistan as a CIA contractor. He affords Berntsen a high honor: "I called him the old man. . . . He was the boss."

The very qualities that set Berntsen apart may ultimately have undermined his career. He wanted to stay months longer in Afghanistan but was posted back to Latin America (where he was on 9/11). "There were politics involved" is how he vaguely puts it now.

But he has no regrets: "There's a time to be diplomatic, but after they kill 3,000 people in your country, you just say, 'I'm doing this!' Somebody's gotta break china, and I'm out there breaking china."

He believes "additional catastrophic attacks" on America are coming and the last great hope lies in the CIA's clandestine service -- but it must cultivate a new generation of operatives like him. The ones whose psych profiles come back "risk-taker."