It Snowed in August When I Worked for the CIA and Got Investigated by the FBI
I am in the final stages of editing my memoir, Finding We. In anticipation of hopefully publishing before the end of this year, I am posting the draft preface below. If something here connects with you, please subscribe (it’s free) to my Substack so I can let you know when the book is out. In the meantime, I will periodically publish personal essays where I continue to explore the ideas the divide us in search of what might unite us.
Finding We
Preface
My name is Philip Verges, and this is my story. I am not sharing my story because it is unique or exceptional. While my graduation from West Point, service in the Army, work at the CIA, time on a UN agency board, and founding of a high tech company, let alone being the subject of an FBI investigation, might all together suggest the makings of an exceptional story, I don’t believe any of those things are what make my story important or interesting. Everyone who reads my story will, sooner or later, have at least one “me too” moment. Those moments are why I am sharing my story.
Not long after 9/11, the high tech business I had helped to found four years earlier almost went out of business. We were already suffering the fallout of the dot com bubble burst when the twin towers fell. I was a thirty-six year old CEO working on my first start-up and my two brothers, my sister and our father were also founding shareholders and working for the company. My wife, Heidi, gave birth to our fifth child two months after the attack. Our oldest was ten. VergeTech managed to close out 2001 with a total of $11 million in sales. By the first anniversary of 9/11 we had lost so many customers the company would be lucky to realize $2 million in sales when we closed the books on 2002. Fear, uncertainty and doubt were in the air and spending money on technology innovation was not a priority. The company’s cash flow was so bad, I quit taking a salary and was days away from facing foreclosure proceedings on my family’s home when I closed a last minute investment deal giving VergeTech a second chance.
I had talked two South Florida investors into visiting our company headquarters in Dallas. I had no entertainment budget at this point. Heidi prepared dinner and we invited the investors and their wives for an evening at our home while it was still ours.
To break the ice, I shared an embarrassing personal story. In the execution of my job as the CEO and top salesperson for an entrepreneurial company, I spent a good deal of time in my car driving from one prospective client’s office to another. Collaterally, I amassed my share of parking tickets. Heidi managed our family budget. Early one morning on my drive to the office, I was pulled over because I did not have a front license plate on my car. When the officer ran my driver’s license, to my surprise, he found a warrant for my arrest. The parking tickets I assumed Heidi was paying, she otherwise assumed I had the office manager at VergeTech paying. I talked the officer into allowing me to have my mobile phone back to call Heidi while he drove me in his cruiser to the county jail. Fortunately, my hands were handcuffed in front of me so that I could manage dialing my phone. Heidi was busy getting kids ready for school and had no sympathetic words for me. As she hung up and the officer reached for the phone, I asked if I could make one more call because I did not think Heidi would be coming to get me anytime soon. He begrudgingly agreed and I called my father to bail me out.
The investors and their wives were silent when I finished my story. I had that feeling a stand-up comedian must have when a joke doesn’t land. I panicked. In immediate hindsight, my brain was racing trying to think of how I would recover from over sharing. I needed the investors to have confidence in me, and I feared my story had the opposite effect.
After a silence that seemed like an eternity, one of the investors wives said, “that’s nothing,” and she began to tell her own story about being arrested when she attempted to intervene on behalf of an unhoused person she witnessed being questioned by a police officer. When she finished, the second investor and his wife competed with one another to eagerly tell their own arrest story.
The two investors and their wives commented later over dinner on how they had never before shared with anyone that they had been arrested. Me going first with my story made them feel comfortable telling their own stories. Our mutual disclosures brought everyone a sense of relief. We were bonded over a “me too” moment, and VergeTech was saved.
I am sharing my story in a search to find and rally the power of We – We the People. I grew up and came of age in the era surrounding America’s Bicentennial and somehow, as we enter the era of America’s Semiquincentennial, hope for the future of America has become forlorn. In the face of a great personal adversity closely connected to the clouds gathering over America’s future, I am resistant to the idea of surrender. So, I will go first and share my story.
Be warned, this is my first book. I hesitate to call myself an author. My writing experience is limited to papers required decades ago in school and various business correspondences over the years.
My professional life has crossed many different disciplines. I’ve been married for thirty-seven years to my high school sweetheart and we have five now young adult children. My story is unavoidably complex. I have done my best to give the reader a simple thread to follow that ties together all the chaos of an enthusiastically pursued life. Even that simple thread is divided into two separate timelines alternating by chapter. The first timeline begins in chapter one on September 26th, 2023, when the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission filed suit against me accusing me of fraud. The second starts in chapter two, in 1976, the year of the U.S. Bicentennial, when the foundation of the core values that would drive my life choices began to take shape.
Adding to the complexity of my story is the fact that litigation against me is ongoing and that litigation is connected to work I undertook on behalf of the CIA. While I am prepared to face personal adversity in telling my story, I will do my best to protect CIA operations, both past and possibly ongoing, in addition to protecting others currently or formerly employed by the CIA. In so doing, I have changed names of people with whom I worked and liberally altered details surrounding my involvement with the CIA.
Beyond my work with the CIA, as a sometimes well-deserved courtesy and other times, even when I might enjoy throwing someone under the bus, I have changed names to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
In an effort to enhance the story telling, I have sometimes told my story by conveying my recollection of past conversations. It is unlikely my memory is accurately recalling the exact words that I said, or others said years ago. All the dialogue represented in this book represents my memory of the meaning I took from similar words directed at me or that I overheard in the scenarios I have depicted on the following pages. It is unlikely that any of the dialogue herein would correlate word for word with a voice recording of the past conversations.
When Heidi and I recount experiences that we have shared over the past forty plus years of our relationship, we frequently find ourselves disagreeing on the details. Instead of arguing over the details, one of us will quickly curb the disagreement by paraphrasing a small segment of a quote from the late, great Joan Didion: It snowed in August.
Heidi and I discovered the author, Joan Didion, when we were in college. I am proud of the fact that Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem was required reading at West Point when I was a cadet. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays primarily surrounding Joan Didion’s experiences with California’s counterculture movement in the 1960’s. I think many people have the general impression that West Point’s required reading list does not extend far beyond Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Heidi attended Parson’s School of Design at the New School for Social Research in New York City. I am proud of being required to read Joan Didion at West Point and introducing Heidi to Joan Didion, because the New School did not require reading Joan Didion.
Heidi and I have become even bigger fans of Joan Didion since college. We have read and reread much of her work. The argument ending it-snowed-in-August paraphrase comes from her essay On Keeping a Notebook found in Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
“Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.”
My name is Philip Verges, and this is my story, and it snowed in August.
