The morning light was just breaking over Washington, D.C. At the White House, the early cleaning shift was already on the job. As Avril Haines walked through the quiet, darkened halls, she smiled and waved to a worker pushing a polishing machine, buffing the marble floors. It was 5:30 a.m. in mid May and Haynes was leaving work. She would return by 7, after a shower and change of clothes at her Capitol Hill home—and after picking up her habitual iced grande whole milk latte at the local Starbucks, where the baristas are on a first-name basis with her.
The past few weeks had been a grueling run for Haines, the top lawyer for the National Security Council. On this morning, she was laboring over the “playbook,” President Obama’s massively complex and bureaucratically contentious effort to reform the administration’s lethal drone program. But the truth is, it was only a slight departure from Haines’s typically relentless work routine. Since becoming the National Security Council’s legal adviser in 2011, she had been working on a wide array of highly complicated and legally sensitive issues—generally until 1 or 2 in the morning, sometimes later—that go to the core of U.S. security interests. Among them were the legal requirements governing U.S. intervention in Syria and the range of highly classified options for thwarting Iran’s nuclear program. All the while, Haines was sometimes summoned in the middle of the night to weigh in on whether a suspected terrorist could be lawfully incinerated by a drone strike.
Earlier this month, Obama selected Haines to be deputy director of the CIA, where she will serve under the new CIA director, John Brennan. In some respects, picking Haines made a lot of sense, given her national-security credentials and her well-known work ethic. But in another respect, it was a surprising choice. Ask around about Haines, and colleagues will often describe some character traits not usually associated with the CIA—or, for that matter, with rapid ascent inside the Beltway: a sweet personality, humility bordering on shyness, a deep empathy for others. “She may quite literally be the nicest person any of us have ever met,” says Deputy National Security Adviser Benjamin Rhodes, who has worked closely with Haines.
Haines’s journey reflects a flair for adventure, an appetite for risk, and an ability to overcome adversity.
That personality plays out every day in Haines’s interactions with top national-security officials in some of the most charged, high-stakes settings in government. She is known for her deferential style—Attorney General Eric Holder has occasionally admonished her to call him “Eric” rather than “Mr. Attorney General”—and tends to eschew the Washington habit of self-aggrandizement.
Even under normal circumstances, these traits might seem an odd fit at an agency tasked with deception and death. But they are especially surprising at a moment when the White House is attempting a far-reaching, and controversial, plan to rein in the CIA’s role in the war on terror. Haines, in many ways the ultimate outsider, will be working to reform a proud and deeply insular culture. To be sure, not every top CIA official of recent vintage has come from within the agency. But none has been quite like Haines. She will be the first woman to hold the deputy job at an agency that is still dominated by men. And she will be a lawyer in a culture of forward-leaning operators who fret about their hands being tied by risk-averse attorneys. Moreover, she has spent most of her career in government working at the State Department, an agency that does not typically share the same outlook as the CIA. (Indeed, when Obama tapped Haines for the CIA position, her nomination to be State Department legal adviser was pending before the Senate. It has since been withdrawn.)
There are plenty of jaded intelligence hands who see nothing but trouble ahead for Haines. Even some of her colleagues advised against taking the job. And Haines herself raised questions—at first—about whether the post was a good fit, before Obama coaxed her into taking it.
Yet there is a lot more to Avril Haines than simply a capacity for hard work and a kind exterior. “She is as caring and decent a person as I’ve ever had the blessing to work with, full stop,” says Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. “But we’re not going to make the NSC’s legal adviser somebody’s pushover.”
Indeed, Langley does not yet know about Haines’s unusual, even exotic, path to the pinnacle of the U.S. spy world. It is a twisting journey that reflects a flair for adventure, an appetite for risk taking, and an ability to overcome adversity. Haines, who is intensely private, has not shared key aspects of her truly unconventional personal story with even her closest colleagues, let alone her possible adversaries. Haines declined to be quoted for this article, but confirmed details of her life story. Taken together, they form a set of character-building experiences that suggest she should not be taken lightly at the CIA.
THE SOUND of the bell still haunts her.
Avril Danica Haines, an only child, was born in 1969 into a household alive with scientific inquiry and artistic fire. Her mother, Adrian Rappin, was a brilliant scientist who became a painter. Her father, Thomas Haines, was a biochemist and academic. Their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was what you might expect of an artist and professor. Their shelves overflowed with books; paintings covered the walls and piled up wherever there was space. Adrian was an intense and vivacious woman who burned the candle at both ends, throwing lively parties and then working feverishly in her studio when seized with fits of creativity. She was also exacting in her standards, both for herself and for those she loved. Avril’s father was a self-effacing and deeply empathetic man, who would ask his daughter every day whether she had done something kind for someone.
When Avril was 4, her mother’s health began to falter. She had chronic emphysema and later contracted avian tuberculosis, a bacterial disease she likely caught from pigeons nesting in the outside air conditioner. The combined illnesses severely diminished her lung capacity and confined her to a wheelchair or a medical bed in the large, high-ceilinged living room.
By the time she was 12, Avril took on the extraordinary responsibility of caring for her mother. Every day, Adrian had to be sealed for hours on end inside a head-to-shoulders respirator bag, a contraption with a vacuum pump to expand her lungs so that she could breathe. Later she had a tracheotomy, a surgical procedure that allowed her to breathe without using her mouth or nose. Sitting vigil every night, Avril learned to be hyperattentive to her mother’s needs. Medical emergencies at all hours were common; when they occurred, Adrian would ring a copper dinner bell and Avril would respond. (One night her mother’s tracheal tube came out and Avril had to insert it back through the hole in her neck, guided over the phone by a doctor. There was blood everywhere.) All the while, Avril was keeping up with her schoolwork and functioning on very little sleep.
Her mother died shortly before Avril’s 16th birthday. By then, with medical bills piling up, they had left their apartment and were moving around the city staying with different friends and relatives. Eventually, Avril moved in with a boyfriend.
Following high school, Avril—drained emotionally and physically—deferred college for a year and traveled to Japan. There, she enrolled in the Kodokan Institute, Tokyo’s elite judo school, and became a brown belt.
The next year, Haines started at the University of Chicago, where she studied theoretical physics. The male-dominated department was not welcoming to Haines. On her first day of class, a student questioned what she was doing there. “This is honors physics,” he said in a tone that insinuated she must have mistakenly entered the wrong classroom. Later during the semester, a professor took her aside to suggest that her mind might not be suited to physics. But she persevered and aced the class.
While in school, Haines took a job working for an auto mechanic in Hyde Park. She’d always been remarkably adept mechanically. As a kid in New York, she’d lugged home discarded TV sets and rewired their insides. In Chicago, she helped rebuild Subaru engines and restored old car parts retrieved from the auto graveyard.
During the summer between her sophomore and junior years, she was hit by a car while riding her bike. It was a serious accident, the effects of which cause her considerable pain to this day. While recuperating in the hospital and later during grueling traction sessions, she eased her pain by turning her mind to a dream she’d long harbored: buying an airplane and flying it to Europe.
The following summer, while back in New York, she enrolled in flying lessons in Princeton, New Jersey. She fell in love with her flight instructor, David Davighi, and not long after the course was over the couple traveled to Florida to hunt for a plane. They found a 1961 twin-engine Cessna 310 that needed work. Haines dove into rebuilding the plane’s aging avionics, and soon they were winging their way to Bangor, Maine, their launching point for Europe.
After outfitting the plane with extended-range fuel tanks, the couple took off late one summer afternoon, hoping to make it to England by the next day. But while flying over the North Atlantic, they began to take on ice. Soon they were losing altitude. The plane lost one engine, then the other. Gliding 1,000 feet over the ominous Labrador Sea, they considered the possibility of a daring water landing in between the waves. There was an eerie silence and a sense of being alone in the world.
Then, through the fog, they saw land. It was the edge of the Newfoundland coast, rocky and inhospitable. By now, one of the two engines had sputtered back to life. Miraculously, they spotted a small, isolated airport where they were able to land the plane. Socked in by bad weather, they were taken in for a week by the delighted residents of a remote town.
Though Haines and Davighi never made it to Europe, the harrowing experience had sealed their romance. Davighi followed Haines to Chicago for her last year in college, and in 1992 the two settled on moving to Baltimore, where he had found a job as a commercial aviator and she planned to pursue a doctorate in physics at Johns Hopkins. But fate and Haines’s flair for new challenges intervened once again. She and her husband learned about an old bar in the then-transitional neighborhood of Fells Point, which had been seized in a drug bust and was being auctioned off by the feds (the bar’s upstairs had been a whorehouse). The opportunity stoked another one of Haines’s dreams: ever since she befriended a curmudgeonly bookstore owner in her New York neighborhood, she had wanted to open her own independent bookstore and café.
They sold the plane, got a loan from the bank, and Haines threw herself into the project—down to doing the electrical work and plumbing herself. The store reflected her own deeply eclectic taste in books, including offbeat editions from small, independent presses. (For a period, the store hosted erotica and other literary readings.) Her hours—8 a.m. until 1 a.m., seven days a week—were grueling. But it was a labor of love.
The bookstore—which was called Adrian’s Book Café, after her mother—was in a rapidly gentrifying area, but one that was surrounded by tough neighborhoods and housing projects. (The police-drama Homicide: Life on the Streets was set there during the years that Haines owned the business.) Over time, Haines got more involved in the local community, working to build bridges between the upscale merchants and the residents of the projects. In the meantime, the business was winning awards and succeeding financially. The bank that made the original loan underwriting the bookstore urged Haynes to expand it into a chain.
But now her interests were rapidly shifting to community organizing. And she had begun to notice that the activists who knew best how to pull the levers of reform were lawyers. So she gave up the bookstore and applied to law school.
Haines began Georgetown Law School in 1998. Befitting the pattern of her peripatetic life, she soon moved in a new direction: she fell in love with international law and human rights. After law school, she clerked for a federal appellate judge and then in 2003 took a job as a lawyer in the State Department legal adviser’s office. (She and David also married that year.) Working in treaty affairs, Haines took an antiquarian’s interest in the history of agreements between nation-states and quickly demonstrated a facility for the intricacies of this area of international law.