But the operative couldnt just hail a taxi and head to the agencys Langley, Virginia, headquarters.
The deep-cover spy was slated to meet CIA chief Michael Hayden himself.
The owlish, eloquent Air Force general had assumed the directorship in May 2006.
President Bush secretly met Lagunas in the White House.Mark Wilson/Getty Images
By this time, Hayden was a top veteran of a bruised Americas bloodyWar on Terror.
It is rare for CIA directors to meet personally with lower-level agency officers.
But this deep-cover operative was anything but ordinary.
He was the CIAs equivalent of a jihadist Donnie Brasco.
Intelligence he gathered was repeatedly briefed to the CIA director and the White House.
And at one point, he would be sneaked into the White House to meet the president.
(Hayden declined to comment for this story.
Bush did not return a request for comment.)
But within some agency circles, this operatives feats were the stuff of hushed renown.
He was a freaking legend, says a former colleague.
A hero, says another.
Exceptionally ballsy and committed, says a third.
Its doubtful the deep-cover operative was thinking about bureaucratic knife fighting that day in Haydens office.
Indeed, its not clear what he was pondering at all.
Even after this operatives death, however, disputes about his legacy have not dissipated.
What he did at the time, we thought it was amazing, says a former CIA official.
But time and distance have revised this persons assessment.
Did he just give his life for nothing?
All the risk and danger, so what?
What really was accomplished?
What was really done?
asks the former agency official.
It is also the sort of story that, inevitably, contains gaps and blind spots and approximations.
But much about his life remains secret.
And many of those secrets are now sealed, permanently, in the irreversible silence of an early grave.
We have no higher obligation than to ensure the safety and well-being of our workforce.
The agency declined to provide further comment.
He looked out of central casting, recalls a former CIA official.
An Arabic-speaking Midwestern white boy with a killer beard turned jihadist.
THE DEEP-COVER OPERATIVE was known as Anthony Lagunas within the CIA, according to 13 former agency officials.
That isnt his real name.
The CIA employs these pseudos, as theyre called, as a security measure for undercover agency employees.
The CIA is not a normal workplace.
it’s possible for you to work closely with colleagues there for years and never know their true identities.
As a deep-cover operative, Lagunas was a member of a very small club.
Not so with Lagunas and his cadre.
They are known within the CIA as NOCs, because they work under non-official cover.
NOCs commonly pose as businesspeople think import-exporters, high-tech experts, or financial advisers.
Some work for established corporations, others as freelancers or consultants.
If their identities are blown, it can mean arrest or worse.
Its well known that 9/11 precipitated an epochal shift at the CIA.
But its easy, two decades on, to gloss over just how thoroughly it transformed the agency.
Elite paramilitaries like Mulroy had been trained for combat operations.
But for many CIA personnel, the agencys post-9/11 metamorphosis came as a major shock.
The urgency of the post-9/11 world shook the CIA into action.
After 9/11, CTC had the money; it had the staffing; it had the clout.
There wasnt merely a capacious appetite for risk, recalls a former CIA official.
In the early- to mid-aughts, it was Eat as much as you want, this person says.
There was no shortage of supersensitive, ethically dubious things going on at CTC at the time.
The War on Terror also convulsed the agencys NOC programs.
Not too many of Mr. Bin Ladens supporters and friends attend embassy cocktail parties, he quipped.
Congress would throw billions at the initiative.
The decision was far from universally popular within the CIA itself.
Some of the things they did were just absolutely fucking crazy.
If the agency was going to use NOCs to successfully infiltrate terrorist networks, it needed a different strategy.
Inspiration would spring from an unlikely place.
His name was John Walker Lindh.
But no one was laughing now.
This was some of the impetus for Lagunas, recalls the former official.
There was a logic to the idea.
After Sept. 11, such operatives become an increasingly valuable commodity.
This, went the thinking, was a gap the CIA could exploit.
So a tiny, elite band of deep-penetration CTC NOCs was born.
The convert NOC program, as it was informally known, essentially cribbed its methodology from the Lindh case.
CIA officers would go undercover as disaffected Westerners drawn to the study of Arabic or Islamic theology.
This was a radical proposition for the CIA, for several reasons.
One related to the fundamental profile of the undercover CIA officials and their targets.
What CTC did for the first time was the religious aspect of it, says a former CIA official.
It was We need to target people by their religious background.
Knotty legal issues were also inevitable.
Lagunas chafed over these seemingly arbitrary regulations, recalls a former colleague.
recalls the former CIA official.
If thats what youre getting into 12 or 13 at this point, it doesnt matter.
And for deep-cover operatives like Lagunas, maintaining cover can be a life-or-death proposition.
A NOC outed while poking around a jihadist connection would likely face immediate execution.
Lagunas understood there was no mercy with that crew he was with, recalls a former CIA official.
When Lagunas joined the CIA, he couldnt have dreamed of undertaking such an assignment.
He was just a CIA trainee when the planes hit the towers.
He wasnt hired for this, recalls a former senior CIA officer.
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Lagunas and a few others disappeared from the CIAs normal training program.
It was Al Qaedas dream to recruit an American they could deploy, recalls a former CIA official.
This, went the thinking, was a gap the CIA could exploit.
But Lagunas hadnt been booted from the agency.
But there were other, highly specialized criteria that drove his recruitment into this new, ultra-secret NOC initiative.
It was likely Lagunas unusual psychological profile, above all, that led to his selection.
Not many of us can live another life a lie full time.
Even fewer can do so when discovery of the charade might lead to imprisonment, torture, or death.
But Lagunas could go even further than most.
He had the ability to detach from himself, recalls a former senior agency official.
And mentally, its a flaw.
I dont want to say its a split personality, or something like that.
Its a great thing if youre going to do what he was doing.
Lagunas ability to dissociate was extraordinary, says this former official.
But all that came later.
Lagunas had his assignment.
The cover was to learn Arabic, recalls a former CIA official.
The goal was to infiltrate.
AFTER UNDERTAKING SPECIALIZED training for deep-cover CIA officers, Lagunas made his way to the Middle East.
Where he attempted his initial beachhead into Islamist radicalism is unclear.
He also seemed to have spent time in Saudi Arabia.
Lagunas was not enthralled by what he was studying, says the former official.
The message was Screw it, dude, its just a prop.
Still, he managed to become increasingly embedded in the radical Islamist milieu.
Months undercover became years.
And his transformation was impressive.
And here is where Lagunas story gets tricky.
Tricky because theres a vast gulf in how knowledgeable officials perceived and still assess Lagunas work.
Tricky because Lagunas case helped fuel a proxy battle between the agencys pugilistic key in-A operations barons.
But other former CIA spooks are skeptical of Lagunas accomplishments.
Every great spy story is also a secret history of bureaucracy.
And these wildly different assessments were driven, at least in part, by divergent institutional prerogatives.
(In 2005, CTC was officially renamed the Counterterrorism Center.)
Lagunas ultimate home within the agency was GDC, which oversaw the agencys NOC programs.
Functionally, though, his program was run by CTC.
Bitter debate erupted between the two agency power centers.
In my life, Ive never seen anything where the two sides were so diametrically opposed.
CTC wanted information to put lead on the forehead of terror targets.
Everything else was a distraction.
They wanted him embedded closer to global jihadist leadership in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
He balked, according to a former senior CIA official.
Frustration and resentment mounted within CTC.
They really promoted the shit out of it.
Oh, weve got a guy in the Maldives?
I dont know, but weve got a guy in the Maldives.
Somebody, quick, get the president on the phone, says the former official.
Many within the CIA fundamentally misunderstood Lagunas import, according to this former senior spook.
Years spent inhabiting another persons existence will do that.
Theyre never going to say stop on your behalf, says William Negley, a former CIA operations officer.
(Negley is unfamiliar with the specifics of Lagunas case.)
They become the dog that catches the car.
The warning signs were there.
Take Lagunas secret White House meeting with Bush.
This would be the honor of a lifetime for most CIA officers.
Accounts differ on why the meeting materialized when it did.
But theres another way to view the get-together, says the former CIA official.
Lagunas so convincingly looked the part of an Islamist radical.
His bravery and perseverance were undeniable.
The CIA did a whole lot of ball washing with Bush, says the former official.
He could have killed the agency after 9/11.
And agency officials, entrusted with winning that secret war, wanted needed to maintain the presidents confidence.
But if the meeting was, even in part, designed to lift Lagunas spirits, it didnt work.
He downplayed its significance to colleagues.
Some had already begun to notice a certain drift in his bearing.
CIA officials knew that spending too much time so deep undercover could sometimes sever a person from himself.
And that, generally, was when it was time to bring a NOC in from the cold.
The things that would have normally frightened you before, no longer do.
Bureaucratic rewards that someone might want to give you no longer have the meaning they once would have had.
Bureaucratic rewards like, say, meeting the president.
But, for a NOC that far gone, its not going to matter.
Lagunas muted reaction to meeting the president was evidence of a deeper dysfunction, believes this former official.
Lagunas, CIA officials concluded, needed to come home.
Domestic CIA stations have produced important intelligence for the agency.
Some within the CIA have even derisively referred to NR as the Near Retirement division.
Postings there can serve as unofficial decompression or cooling-off periods, time-outs of sorts.
He got into some shit, and it was bad.
Such, it appears, was the case of Anthony Lagunas in Los Angeles.
By the early 2010s, he was working at the agencys large NR office there.
Its not clear what Lagunas actually accomplished in Tinseltown.
But the psychic hangover, the trauma of his time deep undercover as a jihadist was clear.
He was just not the same after he returned stateside, says a former CIA official.
His woes were compounded by a rough romantic breakup he was also navigating at the time.
At this point, it might have been best for Lagunas to leave the CIA altogether.
How many times can you invade Normandy before you have to do something else?
asks the former official.
He came in from the cold to no reception, says a former CIA official.
Oh, you did what?
Well, thats great.
see to it you get in at nine, buddy.
But some things are impossible to forget, even if your bosses do.
He had passed suddenly in a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
It was an utter shock.
My blood went cold, says a former agency officer.
He was the bang out of guy … that nothing could ever happen to him.
The precise circumstances surrounding Lagunas demise were and are hazy.
Drug or alcohol abuse likely contributed.
Extreme depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, too.
Theories often abound within the agency when CIA officers die unexpectedly abroad.
Is a heart attack really just a heart attack?
Do agency executives actually know the cause of death?
Would they tell the truth even if they did?
An organization adept at executing conspiracies is uniquely susceptible to thinking in terms of them.
He was fighting some demons, says a former senior official, and his death was tragic either way.
It was stress [that] translated to cause of death, says another former official.
The stress of life, what he went through.
An operation like Lagunas only works well in spy novels and screenplays, says a former senior CIA official.
Undercover spies like him all come out of it with some sort of PTSD.
Being a NOC is beyond the loneliest job ever, says a former CIA officer.
NOCs are, by necessity, alienated from the CIA at large.
They cannot just walk into Langley and pal around with colleagues there.
They cannot blow off steam with their co-workers inside the protective confines of a U.S. embassy abroad.
Even the barest communication back to their overseers within the CIA can be fraught with peril.
And that community is further removed.
NOCs have far fewer opportunities to partake in this communal institutional life.
And it just doesnt work.
The CIA bureaucracy simply wasnt equipped for his mission, and it wasnt equipped for the fallout.
He was middle-of-the-road for mental health and all that, says a former senior official.
Many agency operations officers view NOCs as second-tier spooks, ill-qualified for high-level positions within the organization.
The CIA faces deep challenges on the mental-health front, says Negley, the former officer.
The symptoms are written all over the wall.
NOCs are not the only CIA officers subject to acute psychic stressors, of course.
Deep scarring of the agencys War on Terror generation was inevitable.
(Kates is also unfamiliar with the specifics of Lagunas case.)
This is kind of a tidal wave coming at us, says Negley, the former CIA officer.
The symptoms of Hey, this community has a problem are written all over the wall.
Some former CIA officials believe the institution, whether by commission or omission, has abandoned its own.
Theres a lot of folks out there that are flapping in the wind, says one former CIA operative.
The agency provides zero psychological care to former spooks, according to Negley.
But these issues are beginning to burst into the open.
In 2022, the agency even announced the appointment of its first-ever chief well-being officer.
The agency has undergone a notable shift on the mental-health front since the early post-9/11 years, says Kates.
Will I say that they were perfect?
Oh, definitely not.
But I will say that there were also a lot of steps taken.
I think that there was an acknowledgment that people needed that support, she says.
But whatever help the deep-cover spy was receiving, it clearly wasnt enough.
Its tragic, but thats the mission.
But others cannot isolate themselves so cannily from their own lives.
Many of the names of these CIA employees are public; some are still classified.
Lagunas story may be an extreme one, but it isnt unique.
He wont get a star on the wall, says a former CIA officer, but he should have.
To others, youre a real person.
