“Hitting a baseball is very hard. Gaining foreign adversaries’ trust so that they betray their country for the benefit of ours is also highly complex and difficult. Hitting .300 will keep you on the top of both professions. That is the magic number. But the key to achieving that magic number is coming to terms with the reality that you must experience and understand failure.”
Unlike some leadership books, Marc Polymeropoulos’s first outing is not a love letter to his own reflection. On the contrary, one of Clarity in Crisis‘s greatest strengths is its clarity about a harder element of the human experience: the reality that we are all flawed.
A career CIA operations officer who retired in 2019 after a distinguished career, Polymeropoulos has much wisdom to offer. A relatively short book, Clarity in Crisis is nonetheless rich in content. Polymeropoulos outlines nine principles to guide better leadership in the private and public sectors. Reflecting an obvious baseball obsession, Polymeropoulos cleverly begins each chapter with an example from that sport’s history and lore. Then offering vignettes from his time at the CIA, the author blends spy stories with hard-hitting leadership lessons.
Befitting the CIA’s work (just this week, another four stars were added to the agency’s famous Memorial Wall, for a total of 137),” hard-hitting” is a truly apt choice of words here.
Describing the need to accept failure and loss, Polymeropoulos explains how he once pushed an Iraqi agent (a CIA source) too hard and lost him to Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus. “I learned a damn hard lesson. The pressure to collect intelligence was such that I did not rein him in. And a man lost his life. I pushed too hard, the agent wanted to please, and, in the end, he was caught, tortured, and killed. This tragedy remains ingrained in my psyche and weighs heavily on my heart. I had failed. I alone owned this mistake.”
This intersection of loss and leadership sustains throughout the book. Imploring leaders to innovate and take risks, the author holds a mirror to his own failings. The key is to accept them head-on and learn from them. A chapter on the importance of “processes” bears particular note here. Pointing out why well-developed and consistently refined processes are crucial to any successful CIA endeavor, such as always completing a surveillance detection run before meeting an agent, for example, Polymeropoulos notes that leaders must set the contours for action. This allows their subordinates to innovate within an understood framework.
Among the eight other lessons, we understand why and how leaders must empower those below them. Polymeropoulos offers an amusing anecdote of how he had a young, first-tour operations officer close an agreement with a new agent. To much ribbing on his return to the CIA’s embassy base or “station,” the new officer repeatedly asked the new agent whether he was agreeing to spy. Even, that is, after the champagne was out and it was clear that said agent had agreed. It’s a funny story to read, but the excessive questions might have jeopardized the deal. However, as leadership necessitates, “Setting the table. Passing the torch. Developing your people.”
Just as important, leaders must be equally ready to enforce consequences for failure, reward successes, and offer second chances. In what will surely earn nods from readers at CIA headquarters and at stations around the world, Polymeropoulos pushes back against the idea that seniority or time served should be the determining factors for promotion. He outlines why promoting exceptional officers in the field is good for both morale and the mission. Government, including the CIA, surely could use more of this approach.
Yes, this is a leadership book. Yet, it is laden with spy stories. We learn the special utility that female CIA officers bring to operations in the Arab world. They tend to avoid suspicion more easily and are culturally predisposed to handle younger male agent sources. We learn how the CIA avenged the loss of one of their own in Afghanistan. We learn how surveillance detection runs can, when stuck in traffic jams in soaring Middle Eastern temperatures, be quite tedious! We learn about Charlie, the CIA leader who cared for his people always and everywhere. We learn why leaders must look out for and sustain “glue guys/gals” who, even though they operate behind the scenes, are instrumental to the success of the mission. We learn that true leadership cannot and should not come easily.
We also learn something else — that leaders must have values.
He may have been born in Greece, but Polymeropoulos’s blood runs red, white, and blue. His values are patriotism, family, honor, responsibility, baseball, family, and the Vienna Inn (for which this CIA man offers a great deal of free publicity). And Polymeropoulos’s exigent leadership lesson is a special one: the relentless pursuit of noble service alongside brothers and sisters. This is a life lived to shine a light for policymakers in the shadows. A life risked, and friends’ lives lost, so that the rest of us can pursue happiness with our families.
Forged in the most trying of personal and professional circumstances, Clarity in Crisis offers an accessible and truly inspiring read. And it offers leaders and the rest of us tangible, proven ways to do better.
Published by Harper Collins, Clarity in Crisis is available on June 8.
