Gina Haspel | Return to Ankara

CIA Director Gina Haspel on her way to Turkey to investigate the Kashoggi case.Haspel's travel is immediately connected with the "U.S. government’s investigation into the death of Khashoggi", a senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter told NBC news. Khashoggi was in self-imposed exile in the States where he had been living since September 2017 when he fled his country, Saudi Arabia. He was a fierce dissident of the Saudi government and a frequent critic of the royal family. His homeland authorities denied any knowledge linked to his death but had to "retreat" after two weeks of "silence", saying that he was killed inside the embassy in a fight. His body has not been recovered. Haspel's visit comes on the day Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to announce the initial findings of Ankara's investigation "and mounting skepticism over the Saudi explanation of what happened to the U.S. resident and Saudi Arabian national", Anadolu news agency reports.

After initially denying involvement with and knowledge of the circumstances of Khashoggi's disappearance, Saudi officials said for the first time this weekend that the 59-year-old Washington Post columnist was accidentally killed in a physical altercation at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2. The government fired five senior officials – including two advisers to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – and arrested 18 other citizens as part of its ongoing investigation. Saudi authorities have repeatedly denied that Mohammed was involved in the plot. 

Mavi Boncuk |



Haspel, who was born in Kentucky but spent her childhood living on military bases overseas, joined the CIA in 1985 as a trainee in the Directorate of Operations, the espionage branch that recruits and handles spies in foreign countries. She is not married and has no children, and friends say she has effectively dedicated her whole life to the CIA.

Two years after she joined the agency, she was given her first assignment in Ethi­o­pia, then a major beneficiary of Soviet aid.

“She started as a boots-on-the-ground field officer,” said a retired senior CIA officer who is a friend of Haspel’s. She met agents, collected intelligence. “She’s got grass stains because she played in the field.”

After two years in Ethiopia, Haspel enrolled in a year of Turkish language training. She had studied languages at college in Kentucky and majored in journalism, although her school newspaper has no records showing she ever wrote articles.

In 1990, she was assigned as a case officer in Ankara, Turkey, according to people familiar with her early career. She spent three years there, amid the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

The early work was not glamorous, but it raised Haspel’s stock. “If you study a hard language and go to a hard place, then your credibility among the ranks immediately goes up,” said Henry “Hank” Crumpton, who years later hired Haspel as his deputy when he ran the CIA’s national resources division, which gathers intelligence in the United States by talking to people who have traveled to countries the agency wants to know more about. 

Although the Soviet Union was no more, Haspel’s interest in Russia and the former Soviet republics intensified. So did her study of Russian tradecraft, said former CIA officers who know her. Haspel became a student of Moscow’s methods for recruiting agents and secretly communicating with them. One of her favorite TV shows is “The Americans,” Haspel’s friend said, because it accurately portrays Russian espionage in the 1980s. 

On Aug. 7, 1998, while she was serving as chief of the CIA’s station in Baku, Azerbaijan, Haspel’s career took a turn. Al-Qaeda launched simultaneous bombings against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans. A few days later, Haspel received a middle-of-the-night call summoning her to the office, where she learned that two senior al-Qaeda associates linked to the bombings were heading to the former Soviet republic, according to an administration official familiar with Haspel’s career. 

Working with Azerbaijan’s KGB-trained intelligence service, Haspel organized an operation to intercept the men. Although they never stood trial in the United States, the CIA credits the operation with retrieving valuable information from the men’s computers about a separate al-Qaeda plot. Haspel won a CIA award for her work. 

The embassy bombings were the clearest signal yet to the U.S. intelligence community that al-Qaeda intended to inflict massive damage on American targets. Haspel continued working for the next two years on operations against Russia, and then served for a year as a deputy chief of station in the CIA’s Europe division. In 2001, she requested a transfer to the agency’s Counterterrorism Center. Her first day on the job was Sept. 11. 

Suddenly, the CIA confronted a new enemy that organized itself into loosely connected networks, not along bureaucratic hierarchies like state adversaries. Intelligence officials worried that it would take years for the CIA to learn how to penetrate al-Qaeda. With the Soviets vanquished, the United States had slashed spending on intelligence and droves of CIA officers had retired.