Quotes of the Day

John Brennan works underground.

His basement office in the White House has low ceilings and no windows. It is an extra-secure enclave within one of the world's most secure buildings, with a keypad lock on its outer door, a gleaming steel safe in its anteroom and a prohibition on electronic devices, such as BlackBerrys and cameras, which could scoop up some of America's most sensitive secrets.

The location makes sense. President Obama's top adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism mostly works in the shadows. Brennan's is a world of spycraft and special operations, one requiring a delicate balance between protecting American lives and upholding American values.

The job involves some grim conversations with the President. Brennan is often the first to notify Obama when something terrible has happened — he delivered the news that Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in Tucson — or when word surfaces of a particularly alarming new threat. You can imagine that Obama clenches a little when he sees Brennan, with his broad shoulders, thick hands and stern face, appearing in the Oval Office doorway for an unscheduled meeting. "I will not disagree with that view," says Brennan, a career intelligence professional, a muted grin breaking through his poker face. Then he turns serious again: "The issues that I speak to [Obama] about are life-and-death."

Brennan's portfolio covers a hair-raising spectrum of horribles, including everything from cyberattacks to earthquakes and pandemics. But his top priority is the continuing threat of radical Islamists who have mounted a series of attacks on the U.S. during Obama's tenure that came close to killing countless innocents. "He has become the de facto head of the intelligence community, at least on terrorism issues," says Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and Brennan colleague. He has also become something of a folk hero among Obama aides, who lavish praise on his skills and work ethic. "He is the most effective person I've seen in the government," says Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough.

The political turmoil spreading across the Middle East may complicate Brennan's job. The autocratic regimes in Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are all crucial, if imperfect, U.S. partners in the fight against Islamic extremism. Brennan's role during this period, says a White House spokesman, is "to stay vigilant for the potential for a terrorist dimension to develop as the situation unfolds." Yet Brennan himself strikes a hopeful note. "There are certainly risks," he says. "But there are also opportunities."

Even on the quiet days, the ones in which the world seems safe and calm, Brennan speaks to Obama several times. "Anytime I need to see the President," he says, "I just run up the stairs." Sometimes the news is good. He might dash in to tell him that a terrorism suspect has been captured, a bomb defused. Sometimes he just e-mails. When Scandinavian authorities arrested suspected Islamist militants in late December, he notified the President by e-mail with a Shakespearean reference in the subject line: "Something is rotten in Denmark no more."

It takes a wry sense of humor to stay sane in the world of counterterrorism, where Brennan, 55, has spent much of his career. On a shelf above his office desk, the former CIA operative keeps two small figurines of the dueling secret agents from Mad magazine's classic Spy vs. Spy feature. Clad in black and white hats and trench coats, the cartoon pair endlessly battle away, always living to fight another day.

Brennan's world is not so benign. "It is intensely, 24 hours a day, dealing with death — preventing death, and causing it," says Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to three Presidents. So on any given day, Brennan might lead an exercise simulating a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city or help plan drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan or learn that several of his former colleagues were killed in a December suicide bombing at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan.

The alarms — real and false — never stop going off. Brennan constantly gets alerts about suspicious airline passengers. "We had a couple this morning," says Brennan, sitting in his office on a January afternoon. "Is this just an inebriated passenger? You're trying to make sure that you understand the nature of the threat."

The passenger is almost always a drunk. But the constant possibility of something worse means that Brennan might be the hardest worker in a White House of workaholics. "I don't know that John ever sleeps," says National Security Council staffer Ben Rhodes. A vacation means following the President to some sunny clime and working there, nonstop. As Obama golfed on Martha's Vineyard last August, for instance, Brennan was spotted in a suit and tie. On Christmas Day in 2009, Brennan was cooking dinner when he got a call reporting that a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane with explosives sewn into his underwear. Brennan worked through New Year's Day. "It's impossible to have downtime. It's just the nature of the work," he says. The hours take their toll: "He was dead tired the last time I saw him," says a friend.

In Brennan's line of work, the margin for error is almost zero. And he knows who will be the first one grilled if terrorists strike: "Next time something happens, I'm sure I'm going to be blamed by some of the folks in Congress [who will say] that, you know, we didn't do enough," he says.

For all those reasons, Brennan is watching events in the Middle East. The U.S. gets invaluable assistance from friendly Arab states. In Yemen, for example, a fragile government has turned its army against radical Islamists. Though pessimists warn of Iran-style revolutions that could leave Islamists in power in many countries, Brennan sees a bright side. "I think it's going to have profound implications across the region in terms of moving ahead with political reforms that are overdue," he says of the peaceful demonstrations. "In many respects, I think it's a refutation of bin Laden and al-Qaeda's agenda of violence."

Brennan has long thought that the U.S. must show a more benevolent face to the Muslim world. He emphasizes the ways in which the Obama Administration has broken with Bush-era policies like waterboarding and secret prisons — "a way to signal to the world that America is a country of values," as he puts it. Brennan has pressed to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. And he has toned down the rhetoric, abandoning phrases like "the war on terrorism" and the word jihad to describe the mission of Islamic terrorists. "Jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children," he explained in a May speech.

Such talk has not endeared him to hard-line conservatives. And Brennan doesn't take their criticism lightly. After an editorial in USA Today questioned whether Obama was tough enough on terrorists, Brennan wrote a combative response that accused Republicans of fearmongering that "serve[s] the goals of al-Qaeda." That led some GOP stalwarts — including House Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King, who dubbed Brennan an "egomaniac" — to call for his ouster. Then, when federal officials read Miranda rights to Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber — only after he stopped cooperating with interrogators — Republicans howled that terrorists should not be treated like ordinary criminals. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, for one, said Brennan "has lost my confidence."

Yet for every conservative who thinks Brennan is too soft, there's a liberal who sees him as Obama's Dick Cheney. Much of U.S. counterterrorism policy remains largely unchanged since the second Bush term. Obama is moving ahead with military trials for terrorism suspects, which civil libertarians call unconstitutional; he has multiplied the rate of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan; and Guantánamo is still open. Obama's Justice Department has fended off multiple lawsuits challenging its practices — including one from the American Civil Liberties Union contesting reported efforts to kill the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen based in Yemen, on the grounds that a President has no power to target a fellow American for assassination. Brennan says simply that any U.S. citizen plotting terrorist attacks abroad "will face the full brunt of a U.S. response."

The embattled CIA certainly loves him. "I can't tell you how important it is to have someone at the White House who understands what the hell we're doing," says CIA Director Leon Panetta. And he has fans in more surprising places. Last month, no less than former Vice President Cheney told the Today show he thinks Obama "has learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate."

Sunrise in the Desert

As the world watches the drama in Egypt unfold, Brennan has fond memories of Cairo's Tahrir Square. As a junior at Fordham University, he spent a year studying at the American University in Cairo, whose main campus was then just a few blocks from the square. "That's where I spent a lot of my time," he says, browsing through the neighborhood's stores. On New Year's Eve in 1976, Brennan climbed the pyramids and watched the sun rise over the desert.

A few years later, Brennan returned to the region. As a young CIA agent based in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, he loved camping in the desert with Saudi tribesmen. "It was sitting around the campfire, telling stories and jokes," Brennan recalls. Sometimes there were goat roasts. And sometimes Brennan would go off and explore the desert alone on camelback. "That's why I take very personally what al-Qaeda has done," he says. "They have besmirched the image of Arab hospitality."

Born in North Bergen, N.J., Brennan makes for an unlikely John of Arabia. But there may have been an element of destiny in his career choice: his birthday is the day the British hanged Nathan Hale, the first American spy. When, as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, Brennan spotted a CIA recruitment ad in the New York Times, he signed up. In 1980 the CIA sent Brennan to the Middle East, just as anti-Western religious fundamentalism was exploding from Iran to Saudi Arabia.

By 1996, Brennan was the CIA's station chief in Saudi Arabia, where he proved his mettle. Once, in the hope of enlisting a double agent, he walked up to the car of a senior Iranian intelligence operative and knocked on the window. "Hello. I'm from the U.S. embassy, and I've got something to tell you," he said. (Disappointingly, the Iranian stammered and sped away.)

In what would be a fateful tenure at the agency's top levels, Brennan became CIA Director George Tenet's chief of staff in 1999, and then the CIA's deputy executive director. In 2003 he left to set up the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a clearinghouse of intelligence data. After exiting government in 2005, Brennan was earning a high-six-figure salary at a security consulting firm when he was approached by Obama's campaign. Brennan says he is "neither Democrat nor Republican," but he was frustrated by a belief that the Iraq war and other Bush-era counterterrorism policies were making America less safe, and he admired Obama's promise of a fresh start in the fight against radical Islam. Obama, meanwhile, lacked a seasoned intelligence pro in his inner circle. The candidate quickly grew to appreciate Brennan's vast knowledge of dark secrets and concise, no-nonsense briefing style.

Obama liked him enough to consider making Brennan his CIA director. But when that word leaked in November 2008, liberal bloggers who scoured Brennan's public record turned up quotes suggesting sympathy for aggressive interrogation techniques. In one 2006 interview, Brennan agreed that the U.S. had to "take off the gloves in some areas" with terrorists. In another, he called the definition of torture debatable: "I think it's torture when I have to ride in the car with my kids and they have loud rap music on."

Brennan insists he was not responsible for crafting interrogation and detention policies during the Bush Administration and that he opposed extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding. He claims the Bush White House resented him enough to block him from two different high-level job appointments for which he was being considered. But the incoming Obama team was not interested in a fight involving the CIA's past, and Brennan took himself out of consideration.

Brennan "was disappointed" not to get the CIA post, says one friend. And yet by most accounts he is more powerful today, in the White House, than he would have been at CIA headquarters in Virginia. "It's very ironic that a guy who they thought could not get confirmed as CIA director and who they stuck in a windowless room in the White House basement has all the power," says a senior member of Congress who deals with intelligence issues. "He's the President's guy."

The Point Person

Some critics complain that's true to a fault. One former government official with counterterrorism experience in more than one Administration calls Brennan a micromanager who calls intelligence analysts outside the official chain of command. "He is involved in the tactical details of every current threat," says the former official. Others say Brennan hoards power, overshadowing the Director of National Intelligence position that Congress created in 2005 to oversee the entire intelligence community.

Obama officials sharply bat down such talk. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper calls Brennan "assiduous in not overstepping bounds." But it's no secret that Brennan clashed with Clapper's predecessor, Dennis Blair, who was forced out after friction with the White House. Some members of Congress want to know more about this dynamic but can't call Brennan to testify because, as a White House staffer, he is not subject to congressional oversight under the Constitution. "It does concern me that Mr. Brennan is clearly the point person and yet is not accountable to Congress," says Senator Susan Collins, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

For Brennan, such critiques are overshadowed by his overriding priority: preventing another catastrophe. For now, the most important thing to him is that al-Qaeda hasn't successfully struck the U.S. under his watch. Several terrorist attacks have come close. The embittered Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad managed to light the fuse on his explosives-laden SUV in Times Square last spring, but his improvised bomb didn't detonate. Neither did Abdulmutallab's underwear. The al-Qaeda-trained Najibullah Zazi was apprehended on the George Washington Bridge last Sept. 10, days before he planned to detonate bombs in the New York City subway.

To some critics, these near misses are evidence that America's defenses are not strong enough. "We cannot depend on dumb luck, incompetent terrorists and alert citizens to keep our families safe," then-Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, complained last May. But nothing shakes Brennan from his calm quite like the word luck. The U.S. has severely weakened al-Qaeda's ability to recruit and train, he argues. "And so what comes out of that pipeline, I think, is a much less capable, much less expert terrorist. If their underwear doesn't explode the way it's supposed to, it's not just because the guy was incompetent. It's because the training he got, the person who provided him the IED, the materials that went into it — all were less efficient, less suitable to the challenge. I take strong issue with somebody saying, 'They're just lucky,'" Brennan says. "That's bulls___. And I rarely ever curse."

And with that, he excuses himself. He is due for a meeting on Pakistan in the White House Situation Room, just steps down the hall from the underground office he didn't want but where he now seems quite comfortable.

This article originally appeared in the Feb. 21, 2010, print and iPad editions of TIME magazine.

• MICHAEL CROWLEY