How CIA lawyer John Rizzo and I found common ground in our shared love of ?Sweet Smell of Success.?

The elegant, wryly soft-spoken Rizzo — who favored natty pinstripe fits, silk pocket squares and French cuffs — wasn’t precisely a cookie stuffed with arsenic. However he did search “authorized cowl” (his phrases) for a few of the CIA’s most poisonous insurance policies and procedures. He appropriately predicted that his obituary would lead with the position he performed, not simply within the post-9/11 interrogation program on the CIA’s abroad “black sites,” however the drone strikes that got here later and killed thousands of civilians. Throughout his 30-year profession on the company, he additionally supplied a framework for operatives partaking in covert wars in Latin America — which means that in 2013, as I exchanged “Sweet Scent” quips with the dapper gentleman throughout from me, I used to be breaking bread with somebody I’d marched in opposition to as a scholar activist within the Eighties.