Just a few minutes into lunch with Avril Haines, and the conversation lands on the subject of the third world war. Rather than dismiss my interrogation about whether we’re in a pre-world-war period, the former US director of national intelligence says she’s been thinking about this very question. Her new job is to head the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Washington think-tank that was created in 1910 on the premise that the era of major power conflict had ended, only to confront two world wars.
So are we heading to a third? A lawyer by training, she’s had an almost 20-year career in national security, culminating in her appointment as Joe Biden’s main intelligence adviser in 2021, delivering his daily briefings. She’s never been an “operative”, a spy in the field, though she does look the part.
Soft-spoken and understated, she lowers her gaze and stares at her hands when she speaks. She seems more comfortable in the shadows, shielded by her signature navy suits (even her ballerinas and earrings are shades of dark blue). Haines dissects the current geopolitical breakdown into its chilling components: the collapse of the rules-based international order, the rise in violence and state conflict, the weakness of institutions and the domestic political dysfunction that has turned democracy into a vehicle for the rise of strongmen.
War talk feels out of place in this sanctuary, where visitors often escape for peaceful study. Laptops are not allowed in the quiet, sprawling curve with floor-to-ceiling windows. Customers usually order food at the counter but we are treated as special guests and a waiter comes to our table.
We both opt for roasted salmon and dill, with a peach salad served with courgettes and mixed leaves. Haines has a sentimental attachment to books, having run a bookstore café with her husband David, a pilot, in Baltimore in the 1990s. The bookstore was not part of her life plan: she had enrolled on a master’s degree in physics and had learnt to fly.
The couple were fixing up a Cessna 310 and were determined to fly across the Atlantic. Then one day they came across a building that had been seized by the government in a drug bust. The bar had drinks that were half-full, there were cobwebs.” Helen’s Hollywood Show Bar (Helen, the owner, was in jail by then) also had a brothel upstairs, catering to sailors.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
