From the Editors Desk: Introducing CIA operative Victor Motier

​I am privileged to work on dozens of fascinating manuscripts every year (check out my editing portfolio here!), but last year something particularly noteworthy and unusual came across my desk. A retired CIA agent and overseas operative named Victor Motier asked for help with a memoir. Victor is not a writer by trade, though that is one of the few professions that he has not undertaken in his more than twenty-year career inside the agency. He has served all over the world, including on the front lines of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). What he produced is absorbing, exciting, and harrowing in ways I did not expect.

​Victor and I deliberated earlier this year on the best way to publish his account. I have no doubt that a traditional publisher would be very interested, but there are lots of other considerations: given the subject matter, would a traditional publisher demand changes or alterations with which Victor was not comfortable, or would they demand that he reveal national security secrets outside the scope of his story? There is the matter of delay: first finding an agent, then shopping the manuscript, then production. It would be at least eighteen months, and more like two or three years, before his account ever saw a shelf. Hybrid or self-publishing is an option that I thought held promise, but there are uncertainties with that avenue as well, not to mention the cost and unpredictable marketing outcomes.
 
Victor feels that his story is particularly timely. Given the current state of world affairs, to say nothing of the state of our national politics, he is convinced that his story has something important to contribute to democratic debate about where we are, how we got here, and how we might move forward. I couldn’t agree more.
 
And so in a throwback to twentieth-century magazine serialization, he’s done something extraordinary, which is to release his book to the public, free, on Substack: How America Lost Her Way After the Cold War, an essay | Victor Motier | Substack. Every month he’ll be releasing a chapter. I’ve had the privilege to read the manuscript in draft form, and it is a compelling story.
 
Victor’s story is remarkable in a lot of ways, and not only that he served on the front lines and in all of the hotspots of the GWOT. Victor is European by birth, but lived in the States for many years. After 9/11, like many young people, he was motivated to serve. His account details his training with the CIA and his initial postings in West Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Afghanistan, among other places. Notably, he spends a lot of time assessing the leadership of the CIA, at both agency and operational levels. We’re able to see how political demands coming from the White House met the political, cultural, and ideological realities on the ground, where Victor stood. The resulting outcomes were rarely happy.
 
No spoilers, but Victor’s account bristles with insight. The tragedy is the way in which Victor’s front-line perspective was constantly demeaned, diminished, and undermined by superiors. The refusal to acknowledge the extent of a highly motivated and deeply financed Saudi ideological operation in West Africa, for example, strikes me as one of the central failures of the GWOT. Much of the GWOT was political theater for a misinformed American audience, run by an administration more interested in favorable press coverage and narratives that could be spun on Fox News than favorable results on the ground. These trade-offs had, and have, real world consequences. Rather than hold governing officials accountable for misinformation, lies, and inefficiency, it seems, many Americans have come to prefer the political theater.
 
I think many of us know that secret agencies like the CIA are dysfunctional in all sorts of ways, but it is still shocking to read just how dysfunctional the Bush-era CIA was, political hacks executing operational portfolios for which they were completely unqualified.
 
While there are many sources for our current political state, one important cause of Trump-style ungovernability is the loss of faith in political leadership who for years sold Americans on lies and distortions in pursuit of foreign policy outcomes that were always problematic, unattainable, or counter-productive. That is what happens when ideological commitments substitute for effective, thoughtful and democratically accountable policy. We are living in the morass of failure bequeathed by the GWOT. One hopes that we find a way out of this trap soon.
 
Victor’s book makes a captivating twin for another book I worked on late last year, Ross Berkoff’s haunting account of his time in Afghanistan on the front lines, Beyond the Outpost. Check them both out for deep insight into how the war on terror has produced a deeply troubled America. They are both reads you can’t put down.
 
—David J. Snyder