Martha Kesler was a long-serving Central Intelligence Agency Syria analyst and the author of Syria: Fragile Mosaic of Power, a book the agency distributed to newly hired Middle East analysts as the canonical example of how CIA analytical work should be done. “When you got hired, you got her book — and you had to read the book, because like, this is what we do. This is the perfect example of what we do.”[1][2]
The Brennan firing
Kesler was the first CIA supervisor of John Brennan. In approximately December 1993 or 1994, with Brennan having served years as her deputy at GS-15 rank, Brennan approached her and asked for her endorsement for promotion to the Senior Intelligence Service (SIS). Kesler’s response — recounted to John Kiriakou by her daughter:
Not only will you never be a member of the senior intelligence service — I don’t even want you working for me anymore. You’re fired.[2]
Because firings in the CIA take the form of a six-week internal-job-search window rather than immediate termination, Brennan was given six weeks to find another position or be escorted off the premises with his badge taken. The timing — the week before Christmas — was structurally unfavorable: normal CIA job turnover happens in the summer. Brennan eventually found the only available position: morning briefer on the President’s Daily Brief staff, where he was assigned the lowest-ranking person entitled to a PDB briefing — the National Security Council Director for Intelligence Programs, a man named George Tenet.[3][4][5]
Kesler’s own subsequent firing
When Tenet became Deputy Director of the CIA, he brought Brennan back with him and placed him as Deputy Director of the office in which Kesler worked — that is, as Kesler’s direct superior. Brennan then called Kesler in and reciprocated her earlier action verbatim: “Now you’re fired.” Kesler chose to retire rather than walk the corridors.[6] In a separate, more compressed retelling, Kiriakou puts it starkly: Brennan “assassinated a career” — Kesler’s — rather than a person.[7]
The boss who fired Brennan (American Conservative)
John Kiriakou describes Martha Kesler as one of the U.S. government’s leading experts on Syria — “brilliant” and “elegant.” When her deputy John Brennan asked her blessing for promotion into the senior intelligence service, she replied that not only would he never be promoted, “I don’t even want you working for me anymore. You’re fired.” Years later, when Brennan returned as her boss, his first act was to fire her.[8][9][10]
The 2019 telling, and a different date
Kiriakou told the same story six years earlier, and that version differs in two respects worth preserving rather than reconciling. He dates the firing to the week before Christmas 1996 — the later account, relayed through Kesler’s daughter, puts it at approximately December 1993 or 1994.[11] He also presents it as institutional memory rather than family testimony: “there’s kind of a famous story inside the CIA.”[12]
The earlier telling names the unit. Kesler was director of the Arab-Israeli Analysis Group and Brennan its deputy director; she “didn’t like John and John was imposed on her.”[12] It also states plainly why her book mattered: she was “legendary because she was a published author, which is unusual for a sitting CIA officer,” and Syria: Fragile Mosaic of Power was “the definitive work on Syria at the time” that “we all had to read.”[13]
How the job he found became the patronage
The 2019 account supplies the mechanism by which the reversal happened. Walking the halls in a month with no vacancies, Brennan went to the President’s Daily Brief staff and took the one opening: delivering the PDB each morning to “the lowest ranking official entitled to a PDB briefing” — who at that moment was the National Security Council’s director of intelligence programs, George Tenet.[14]
They took to each other immediately, in Kiriakou’s unflattering summary of both men.[15] When Tenet was promoted to deputy director of the CIA a few months later he brought Brennan back with him as deputy director of the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis — Kesler’s own boss. “The first thing he does is he calls her in and he says, now you’re fired.” She packed up her things and walked out: “none of us ever saw her again.”[15][16]
The patronage continued past that. Tenet made Brennan station chief in Riyadh, with direct access to the king, despite his never having served overseas, and then executive director of the CIA — the third-ranking post in the agency. Kiriakou’s assessment of the man who made that climb is that he was “in over his head intellectually, but he was a terrific political knife fighter.”[16][17]