Chitra Ragavan

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https://media.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/content.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/When_it_Mattered_1_RD3.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS 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. Transcript Download the PDF 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