Life in the CIA: Once clandestine, now read all about it

Schroen, for his part, says he wrote his book because he had been directed to tell most of his story already to two Washington Post reporters who were writing books about the war on terror. First, he and the head of the CIA's public-affairs office were interviewed by Bob Woodward in his Georgetown home for "Bush at War." Later, he and the public-affairs official talked with Steve Coll for his book, "Ghost Wars." "We were told by the 7th floor [director's office] that Woodward was going to do a book, and we were authorized to talk to him," Schroen says. "Coll got the same open-door treatment."

Schroen's book, according to the CIA's Publications Review Board, is the most detailed account of a covert operation ever told by a clandestine officer. Judging by the amount of press attention lavished upon it - his son tells him he's now on TV more than Seinfeld - the new nonfiction spy tales may be replacing John LeCarré.

It does convey an element of James Bond romanticism - missions carried out with $3 million packed in cardboard boxes. But it also depicts unglamorous moments - like how the operatives disposed of human waste in the rugged mountains of northern Afghanistan.

The book also tries to set the record straight on a number of issues surrounding the CIA's Afghan adventure. For example:

• When Schroen put his team together, the US military did not send anyone in with him because they thought the operation was too dangerous.

• US military personnel - Special Operations teams - did not arrive in Afghanistan until some three weeks after Schroen's team set up camp.

• It was a CIA-led operation that captured Mir Amal Kasi - the man who killed two CIA employees and wounded three others outside the agency's entrance in Pakistan in 1993. Previously, many had believed the FBI led the raid. The FBI was involved, Schroen says, but didn't lead it.

In addition to relating the unglamorous, Schroen exposes the infighting and occasional ineptitude of US officials. For example, two members of his team were nearly killed by a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone.

Fortunately, Schroen says, he received a call from the Predator's mission manager in Washington. The man told Schroen they had a Predator loitering above an airstrip and could see two men, obviously not Afghans, walking along it. One, he said, was tall and lean and could be bin Laden himself.

Schroen checked the coordinates with his aide and got back on the line: "I ... told the young man that he was to stand down on the attack, that the two men were CIA officers, part of our team, and they were walking on a CIA-constructed airstrip."

It's clear that Schroen liked his work and those whom he worked with - both those on his team and his Afghan counterparts - and he left the agency at a natural retirement age.

Mr. MacGaffin, for his part, is concerned about the exodus of operatives from the CIA, including the young spies-turned-authors. But he also sees a new opportunity here. He says that all the commissions that studied the 9/11 failures pointed out the same problems with leadership that he has enumerated.

"My hope now is that we got one last chance to fix it - the lack of leadership," MacGaffin says. "[Recently appointed director of national intelligence] John Negroponte is there to fix it - that's the end of the thread or the end of us."

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