Even spies have a life after retirement
Retired intelligence chiefs are appointed to important positions in various sectors.
& intelligence coordinator” in the troubled Northern Ireland. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan was appointed as the chief of the Israel Port Authority. He was also linked with Gulliver Energy, which was mining uranium in the Dead Sea area. Ernst Uhrlau, once the Hamburg police chief and later chief of the German foreign intelligence (BND), was learnt to be working as a global risk analyst. While in service he was known to have been engaged in a quiet but successful diplomacy, mediating between Israel and Hezbollah. US admiral Mike McConnell was picked up for the highest intelligence job as director of National Intelligence (20072009) from a post retirement job with Booze Allen Hamilton (BAH), the largest defence-intelligence contractor. In 2009, he returned to BAH, which was criticised as contravening national security.
But stories of powerful intelligence officers taking up totally dissimilar occupations after retirement are not rare. Former MI-6 chief ( 19881994) Sir Colin McColl, who presided over this agency at a momentous period when it was officially recognised by passing the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, worked later as an academic at Oxford University. Similarly, Efrain Helevy, former Mossad chief and also Israel’s national security adviser (2002-2003) joined the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Sir David Omand, who was UK’s first security & intelligence coordinator, was a visiting professor in King’s College, London. Stella Rimington, who was the first woman MI-5 chief (1991-1996), had a long corporate career with BG Group after her retirement and before being appointed as the chair of the judges for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Later, she wrote six novels. She had an Indian connection. In 1967, when she was living in New Delhi as the wife of the first secretary (economic), she was recruited to the service in a dramatic fashion. The local MI-5 chief tapped her on the shoulder while she was walking around the high commission compound and asked: “Psst… Do you want to be a spy?” She wrote her memoirs Open Secret in 2001. When she was MI-5 chief she visited Moscow. To her surprise she was received by the same KGB officer who had tried to “recruit” her in New Delhi when she was living there as a “diplomatic wife”.
But the most dramatic transformation was of Thomas Twetten, former CIA deputy director of operations, who as in charge of the Afghan War, had famously clashed with Peter Tomsen, State Department’s special envoy to the Mujahideen. The quarrel was over the issue “political settlement versus continued fighting in Afghanistan”. On retirement, he is quietly managing an antique bookshop in Vermont!