Joel Brenner Biography

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a child, but I've been inconsistent in my efforts. My mother just reminded me that when I was ten years old, I formed and named myself editor of Crestview Elementary School's grandly self-styled but short-lived "Fifth Grade Times." Mrs. Heinrich, my instructor, mimeographed it with purple ink on a roller stencil: this was 1957, two years before the Xerox copier emerged, and long before those copiers were affordable enough for public use. A long-buried scent of mimeograph ink, a sweetish, pungent, chemical fragrance recognizable to anybody of a certain age, comes to me when I recall my first, immature journey into journalism. Later, at Thomas Jefferson High School, I edited the bi-weekly paper, and then at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I edited The Daily Cardinal. I recall thinking to myself, decades later, as I sat in my pretty imposing office as the inspector general of the National Security Agency, that this is the most fun I've had since then. Working on the Cardinal during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s was a surreal experience. We were opposed to the war and a variety of other issues. If people would simply use their minds, progress would be on the horizon. Some of what I wrote as a pompous and callow adolescent makes me cringe, but that work was one of the most intense learning experiences of my life. The fellowship was also lacking. My desire to produce text was insatiable. I wrote almost every day, often late into the night, and was frequently involved in the late-night physical effort of generating a daily newspaper on our own offset presses. Our editorials were set on our own clattering linotype machine, in lead galleys, and we set headlines by hand on a "stick," sticky with printer's ink, and set headlines by hand on a "stick," oily with printer's ink. That entailed picking type from a California type drawer letter by letter, something I could do blindfolded. The rush of watching your work roll off the presses at 1 a.m. - the instant product of your labor – was difficult to match. It wasn't simple to get your writing out there back then. There were high-priced institutional presses and street-corner pamphlets, with little in between. And there I was, at the age of 19, in charge of an institutional press. I was employed as an intern at Time in New York one summer. One of the editors volunteered to take me to lunch downstairs in the Time-Life Building at a posh, long-defunct restaurant named the Costa del Sol on my first day on the job. A pitcher of margueritas was recommended by him. I got hooked and later realized, much to my dismay and chagrin, that I had poured my guts and learned nothing. I received a Marshall scholarship after graduating from college and spent three years in London, immersed in the arcana of eighteenth and nineteenth-century British legal and economic history. But I wasn't done with journalism yet. I persuaded Newsweek to send me to Africa for the summer after many months in London. Peter Webb, my Nairobi bureau chief, was away hunting a story in West Africa or Zambia, so I was left to hold down the fort. It was the month of July 1970. When I opened the new copy of the magazine and read that anti-war extremists had blown up the Army Math Research Center in Madison — killing a graduate student – I had my feet up on his desk. I asked one of my numerous leftist friends what he thought of the bombing five months later when I was back in Madison for a visit. With a shake of his head, he expressed his dissatisfaction with the situation. "It was a tactical error," he said. It seemed like a homicide to me. Following law school, I moved to Washington and pondered pursuing an academic career, but instead chose to work as a federal prosecutor for four years. A lot is missing, including the standard young man's (unpublished) autobiographical novel. When I concluded the novel wasn't really excellent and wouldn't free me from normal life in any event, I created a legal firm, toughened up, and began to love litigating cases. I preferred to win and despised losing. I was on my way up the ladder. However, in the quiet times between the narcotic, taxing pleasures of the courtroom, I wasn't sure whether it was the correct ladder. Then came September 11th, 2001. I recall exactly where I was when the Pentagon and the Twin Towers were attacked. There were rumors that the White House and the State Department had also been bombed and that another jet was heading this way from someplace. Nobody in Washington understood what was going on, so it was up to me to bring our staff home and make sure my family was secure. The roads were congested. As a result, I shut down the office, parked my car in the garage, and began the long walk home. Standing on a traffic island near Dupont Circle, I considered how I made a career by selling legal services to anyone who could pay my hefty hourly fees, while I should have been working for the authorities trying to apprehend the terrorists who were blowing us up. I found out a few months later that the National Security Agency's Director was seeking for an inspector general. Strange things happen. I won the position, and a few years later, I became the national counterintelligence executive, in charge of coordinating counterintelligence efforts of seventeen federal agencies, including the FBI and CIA. This scenario is told in the introduction of America the Vulnerable, which mirrors my experience dealing with national security threats that come over our networks at light speed.

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