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Ep. 1 - A Family Illness Shapes an Intelligence Officer’s Career / Michael Hurley, President, Team 3i and 25-year CIA operations officer
In this episode, Michael Hurley describes how his mother’s battle with the autoimmune disease Lupus, which began when he was 11, shaped his 25-year service in the United States Government as a CIA operations officer. Hurley traces those early life experiences in coping with his mother’s long and ultimately fatal illness to his spur-of-the-moment decision to volunteer to go to Afghanistan to combat al Qaeda after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
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Chitra: Hello, and welcome to When it Mattered. I'm your host, Chitra Ragavan. I'm also the founder and CEO of Goodstory Consulting, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. On this weekly podcast we invite leaders from around the world to share one personal story that changed the course of their life and work, and how they lead, and deal with adversity. Through these stories, we take you behind the scenes to get an inside perspective of some of the most eventful moments of our time.
Chitra: On this episode we will be talking with Michael Hurley. He's president of Team 3i, an international consulting company. Mike served 25 years in the US Government as a CIA operations officer.
Chitra: Mike, welcome to the show.
Michael: Thank you, Chitra.
Chitra: Tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Michael: Well, so I come from Minneapolis, and I started my career as an attorney in Minneapolis, but then I decided to go to work for the United States Government, and I applied to the State Department, and the FBI, and the CIA, and they all offered me jobs.
Michael: Then I spent a number of years in different parts of the world for CIA, but beginning in the mid '90s I started getting sent to countries where the United States had interventions going on, to troubled parts of the world. So, I went to Haiti, then I went to Bosnia during the Balkans Wars, and then to Kosovo. Later on I went to Afghanistan in the months, in the weeks immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
Michael: But I also did a couple of stints on the National Security Council staff at the White House as director for Balkans policy, and later on, after my time in Afghanistan, I served on the 9/11 Commission. I was a senior counsel, and also a team leader, and headed the counterterrorism policy investigation of the 9/11 commission, was co-author of its final report. Then I did a stint at the State Department in its office of counterterrorism as an advisor to the secretary of state.
Michael: And so, that's kind of my government service.
Chitra: You've had such a distinguished career, and a very eventful life, as you said, traveling all over the world, and being posted to all these places. Is there a story or event that happened in your life that kind of helped define and shape it?
Michael: Yes. So, I grew up in Edina, Minnesota, which is a suburb of Minneapolis, and in a really large family. I was one of 10. I had seven brothers and two sisters, and I was the second oldest, so one of the ones my parents sort of always looked to to exercise some responsibility over my younger siblings.
Michael: But, when I was in fifth grade, so, 11 years old, I got some really bad news, and all of did in my family, which was my mother was diagnosed with a very serious disease. She had lupus erythematosus, it's known as lupus. But, it's a very serious disease, and back then it wasn't all that well known, actually, and she had a very good specialist in internal medicine, but it was a disease that really debilitated her for a lot of years with, it's a disease that sort of ravages your autoimmune system, and so it makes you vulnerable to other diseases. And so, it was just going through that process of seeing your parent having to deal with a really difficult health issue, and my father, you know, how he dealt with it as well.
Chitra: And being the second oldest in the group, how was it? You must have had a lot of the responsibility given to you to help manage the situation, and how did it all work out?
Michael: Well, it was difficult. The hardest thing was seeing your mom go into the hospital kind of regularly, it seemed like, once a year, once every two years, and she always came out after her various treatments. But, you just had to sort of step up, and help out around the home, and make sure your siblings weren't messing up too much, and just sort of being aware of what was going on.
Chitra: When your mother passed away you were an adult, right? You were what, 25?
Michael: Yeah. So, her life was prolonged because she had such great medical care, and I was 25 years old, and I remember, at her funeral, there were a couple of interesting things that happened. One of them was that my aunt, her older sister, my mom's older sister, came up to me after the funeral mass, and she said to me something I'd never known. She said, "Mike, you'll never know how many times I was prepared to tell you, and your brothers and sisters, when you came home from school, when you were in grade school, that your mother had died."
Michael: So, it was a blessing that she actually lived as long as she did, but it was a pretty shocking thing to me, and sort of drove home the fact that how much she actually had to deal with. And the remarkable thing for me, and one of, I think, the main lessons of it, was just to see how she handled it, was she never complained, and she never, she tried to let it interfere as least as possible with being a mom and all the other things that she did socially. She really was the center of our family in so many ways, and a terrific example.
Michael: I said that this disease, lupus, wasn't so well known back in those years, but my mom became kind of a ... I don't know, like a reference point for so many, especially women, around the country who learned about her, and when they were diagnosed with the disease, sort of the word first spread in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and to other places, and they would call her up to ask her about handling the disease, and going through it. And she, you know, with tremendous concern and empathy for complete strangers, would assist them in their ordeal. So, it was an incredible exercise.
Michael: And I learned from all my parents just this dealing with adversity, I think, and I learned it at a young age, and I think some of those lessons stuck with me as time went by.
Chitra: You said that what you went through with your mother's illness really helped shape your life in a big way. What were some examples of challenges and situations you had to deal with when you were a child, having to make big decisions?
Michael: Well, I remember one thing specifically, and it was a real specific set of circumstances that just came up, and I had to make a pretty quick decision. So, I was 15 years old, and I was just beginning to go through my driver's training to get a learner's permit, you know, then eventually, when you turned 16 you could get your driver's license.
Michael: But, I was very early in that process, and I came home from school kind of late. I was participating in sports, and one of my younger brothers was playing little league football, and he got dropped off at home, this, I think, was in the fall, by his coach, because he was in really, really serious pain, really serious pain, and it wasn't an injury from football. He was clutching his abdomen, the side of his abdomen, and he was literally screaming.
Michael: And my mom, I think, may have been in the hospital then. My dad was unreachable, didn't have cell phones in those days, and our immediate neighbors weren't around either. So, I knew I had to take him to the hospital. And so, we had a car outside.
Michael: So, I grabbed my brother, lifted him up, dumped in the backseat of our station wagon, and got in this car, and just sped like 90 miles an hour to the hospital going down the interstate. It was maybe a 10, 15 minute drive from our house.
Michael: And I remember arriving at the hospital and jumping the curb, kind of going right up to the emergency room door, carrying him out of the car, and screaming for the emergency personnel to come and take care of him, which they did. It turned out he had an emergency appendix problem, appendicitis, and it was minutes away from bursting.
Michael: And so, we got him there. I was sort of worried for a time that, you know, look, I mean, if the police had stopped me or something like that, I didn't have a license, but I just sort of realized that there are certain things that sort of supersede rules occasionally, and you have to take action. And I thought at the time, well, if they weren't going to give me my license for 25 years because of that, that would be okay.
Chitra: It's a really important lesson to learn, that there are rules, but how you, when you circumvent those rules is also important, and that's very hard for young people to learn.
Michael: You have to, and it just, my brother was, he came close to dying, really. He would have had serious, serious problems if his appendix had burst. I didn't really know that was the issue, but I did know I'd never seen anybody in that kind of pain before in my life, and he had to be in the hands of doctors right away, and you just do what you need to do.
Chitra: What did your parents say when you told them what you had done?
Michael: They kind of applauded, I think. They said I made the right decision. But, it's something that I'll never forget.
Chitra: You went on to serve 25 years in the CIA as an operations officer. You traveled all over the world, and you served 18 months in Afghanistan, as you said, in 2001, and after that after the September 11th attacks. You were the first CIA operations officer to volunteer to go
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