Ben Taub on ‘The Spy Who Came Home’
An interview with the New Yorker staff writer about his most recent piece for the magazine
On a bright day in late Autumn I sat down with New Yorker staff writer Ben Taub to discuss his latest feature for the magazine — the first he has reported from the United States. Taub was in Australia to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
The 27-year-old journalist is best known for his coverage of the war in Syria, a story he has told through young Belgian ISIS recruits; doctors trying to work despite Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s efforts to destroy the country’s medical system; and the survivors and victims of mass torture carried out by the Assad regime. Taub is a profoundly sensitive writer, who has also covered sex trafficking, retracing the route taken by women and girls from Nigeria to Europe, and the complex causes of of the humanitarian crisis in Chad.
Taub has won a National Magazine Award, the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Award for International Print Reporting, the Overseas Press Club Award for Investigative Reporting and a George Polk award. This year, he was named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Media.
‘The Spy Who Came Home’ is a profile of Patrick Skinner, a former CIA officer turned cop in Savannah, Georgia. For over a decade from the beginning of America’s war on terror, Skinner worked in Afghanistan, Jordan and Iraq. But, writes Taub, “Over the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fueling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.”
‘The Spy Who Came Home’ is filled with intriguing insights into CIA training and operations, as well as Skinner’s own work with the agency. Taub uses Skinner’s story as a way to untangle the reasons behind the failings of the US police force, from racial inequality and insufficient funding to what Skinner sees as militarised training lacking in de-escalation tactics and long-term strategy. “This is how situations go so, so badly — yet justifiably, legally,” says Skinner in the piece.
Or, as Taub explains below, “What this was really about was that good CIA officers can be really good cops, in ways that, well, many cops aren’t trained to be. And bad cops certainly will never be.”
How did you come to write ‘The Spy Who Came Home’?
Patrick Skinner was a CIA case officer for many years. He worked in counterterrorism, running assets in Iraq, Afghanistan and Jordan. He left the CIA about seven years ago and transitioned into private sector security consulting work at a firm called the Soufan Group, which hires a lot of former British and American security officials and spies. I knew of him in that capacity. I found him to be unusually focused, in that he was not fuelling hysteria when he spoke about terrorism in the aftermath of attacks. Instead, he would bring the larger perspective to things. I admired his wisdom and restraint, and was very surprised last December, when I noticed that he was tweeting about being a local cop. So I called him up, and said “Patrick, what are you doing?” And he replied by essentially saying, “The most important thing I’ve ever done.”
He invited me to come down to Savannah and do night shifts with him, to try to understand why he’d become a local cop. He saw local police work as the perfect exemplification of his beliefs and philosophy with respect to American security, at home and abroad. One of his main points was that, because of the sprawling nature of the global war on terror, as a case officer, he would be frequently rotated in and out of war zones, and rarely given the chance to gather local knowledge, or learn local languages to the level that he would have liked to. Sure, the CIA officers develop local contacts and pursue cases — often to track terrorist targets. They could be very, very effective at that small task, but that was a tactical question, not part of a larger, broader coherent strategy. For [Skinner] it was intensely frustrating. And I think for many CIA officers, it is intensely frustrating, because they’re all pretty smart people but operating in an environment where they always feel like tourists.
Skinner came to the conclusion that the only way, the most meaningful application of his skill set was to use the CIA training, which is primarily focused on using human interaction, to deescalate tense scenarios in an environment that he knows. As in, literally his neighborhood in Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up.
Tending his garden.
Tending his garden, yeah. As I said in the piece, he compared himself or his situation to that of Voltaire’s Candide, who endured an absurd litany of horrors in a society plagued by fanaticism and incompetence and came to the conclusion that the only truly worthwhile activity was tending his garden.
He saw local police work as the perfect exemplification of his beliefs and philosophy with respect to American security, at home and abroad.
You write about how the CIA won’t acknowledge that their training program exists, or that the Farm, one of the places where training takes place, exists, but you pieced it together from memoirs. Could you tell me about that process?
The CIA has a kind of absurd policy of not formally acknowledging that the Farm exists, even though you can find it on Google maps very easily, and look at its car tracks, its buildings, their rental cars in the parking lot — you can see all of this from satellite images. They also won’t confirm that it’s classified, because if they say that it’s classified, then they’re confirming that it exists. But obviously spies are trained before being sent overseas, and that training is detailed in a number of memoirs that have gone through the CIA’s publication review board, which ostensibly exists to remove classified information, but often seems to actually serve a role of preventing critical memoirs from including a lot of information that isn’t classified, and allowing glowing memoirs of the agency to print a lot of information that probably is classified. So whether or not they let it through pretty much depends on the tone of the book, as far as I can tell.
I figured that the publication review board would redact certain portions of each glowing memoir — so if you read all of them, then maybe they’ve missed parts in other books. And that’s how I pieced together the program.
When a memoir has been redacted by the CIA, what does that look like?
It depends on the book. There are two main categories of people who leave the redaction in: those who are incredibly lazy and don’t want to rewrite, and those who want to make a political point about their information being hidden. Then there’s another, third category of people, whose books were redacted but they’ve rewritten those parts.
Why do you think that Skinner agreed to do the piece, or wanted to do the piece? In the story you write that few of his colleagues know about his life before he joined the force. So that might change.
Possibly. I don’t think that many of his colleagues read The New Yorker. In our very first phone call he said that he’s never going to write a memoir, because, like all CIA officers, he took a secrecy oath, and he actually wants to honor it. But he wanted to make these points about problems in the war on terror and neglect in American society. His calculation, which he articulated, was, “I have one chance to get this out properly, and hopefully you won’t screw it up. And at least the publication will allow it to run long enough that there might be some nuance.” And he said that in this case, he felt as if his message trumped his own preference for privacy, and so he was willing to do just get it out there.
The piece switches between his life as a CIA officer and as a cop. Was that something you had in mind from the start in terms of structure?
I struggled a lot with structuring when I was working on the draft. When I would set out to report it, I had no idea about the structure, so my process was just gather the material and then worry about writing it later. I talked with my editor about two different versions before I wrote it. One was straight chronological, but it was clear that would never work because we wouldn’t get to the policing part until 70% of the way in. What this was really about was that good CIA officers can be really good cops, in ways that, well, many cops aren’t trained to be. And bad cops certainly will never be. And then there are the points that [Skinner] was trying to make about how there are extraordinary similarities between the two jobs, with respect to interacting with people in spontaneous circumstances and the way that you shape interactions. In that respect it became clear, as I was going through the material, that it had to be structured in a way that compared and contrasted those two fields.
I thought it also brought up the comparisons in terms of the amount of funding the CIA receives, as opposed to the police force. In the very first paragraph, for example, Skinner’s going in to work early to fix his body camera with tape.
Yeah, that’s a really good point. One of the reasons American policing is so poorly done, is, well — it’d be great if a lot of former CIA officers could become cops, but none of them are gonna take this job. Skinner took a pay cut of more than $100,000 a year to do this, and it was the only way that he felt that he could get sort of ideological clarity in his life. He can do that because it’s just him and his wife, they don’t have any kids to send to college. They don’t have any sick relatives who need medical expenses covered, or anything like that. Whereas most officers, if they have families, they’re not going to become a cop. It’s just not structured that way. We’re not investing in fixing the United States, we’re investing in projects that, for the most part, are wrecking other parts of the world.
And why do you think that is?
I think a lot of the field of counterterrorism is both driven by and contributing to hysteria in the West, broadly speaking. And security is disproportionately prioritised to an extent that its endless pursuit actually results in less of it existing.
What was the toughest thing about reporting this piece?
Honestly, I know this is the wrong answer, but it was my first time ever reporting in United States and that was really easy. No language barriers. I had access to the main guy, I could call him whenever I wanted after I left. In many respects, you know, the points he was trying to make were complicated, and difficult to articulate. But the actual reporting process itself was logistically the simplest that I’ve ever done. Just riding in a cop car at night, that’s mostly it.
The moment that I start realising that my assumptions were wrong — and how they were wrong, based on what I’d read previously in preparation — that’s when I know that I’m starting to get to the story.
You often make a point about thanking fact checkers, who obviously do a difficult and very important job. Were there any great fact checking finds in this pieces that made it better?
This one was pretty clean. My favorite fact-checking story is that on my first ever piece, I was given a list by the fact checker, who wrote up every person whose name appears in the piece, and he asked me to get contact information for them. So I’m going through, filling it in with phone numbers, email addresses. And got to number 37 and it says Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of the Islamic State. I was like, okay. So I say to the fact checker, Nick, “I don’t think I can get Baghdadi’s contact info”, and he said “Well, you know ISIS has a spokesman, [Abu Muhammad al-] Adnani”, who also had a $10 million bounty on his head, or $5 million maybe. And so I spent the next several days desperately trying to get in touch with the leadership of the Islamic State for a fact-checking call. And failed, and then when I went back to Nick and I told him, “I’m so sorry, I’ve spent three days doing this and can’t succeed”. And he just went, “Oh well, we like to try”.
Your first New Yorker piece was in 2015. Is there anything in particular you feel that you’ve learned since then?
Each project still feels, and probably always will feel, like at the beginning I don’t know anything. There’s one pattern that has emerged. It’s that the moment that I start realising that my assumptions were wrong — and how they were wrong, based on what I’d read previously in preparation — that’s when I know that I’m starting to get to the story. A clear example with that would be last August, I was reporting in the Lake Chad region, and I’d gone there to write a piece about how the convergence of various crises, from climate change, violent extremism, food insecurity, population explosion, corrupt governance, cross-border aid difficulties, to cross-border military difficulties and terrible history, all of this one small area. But the idea was essentially that Boko Haram was, in many ways, the root cause of the humanitarian crisis there — that that was what had flipped it over the edge. And when I got there, it became clear over a couple of weeks that they were not at all the cause of most of the problems, but a symptom of all of the other ones. So that was a moment where I realised that I was actually starting to understand it, because everything I thought I knew was slightly off.
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