John Brennan was at his suburban Virginia home on an early November Sunday in 2012 when he heard a knock on the door. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, Brennan, then White House director of counter terrorism, answered to find a middle-aged couple he did not know. The woman explained she had come to talk to him about a recent trip she’d taken. “A trip to where?” Brennan asked. “Pakistan,” she replied. “Ohhh,” he said, with dawning realization.

Brennan’s Sunday visitors were activists from the left wing anti-war group Code Pink. The group holds Brennan responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians in President Obama’s counter-terror drone campaign — a campaign Brennan designed and has long overseen — and the activists had come to tell him stories of tragedy from their travels. Brennan had more immediate concerns. In an online account later posted by Medea Benjamin, one of the visitors, Brennan squinted his eyes as he sized up his unwelcome visitors. “How did you know where I live?” he asked.


Three years later, Brennan is CIA director, and the chief target of civil libertarians and anti-war activists. To them he is a nefarious architect of President Barack Obama’s counter-terror campaign, the voice of the “dark side” that Dick Cheney famously once invoked, and the closest thing in Obama’s ranks to a Cheneyesque figure.

In January the anti-war group Code Pink, of which Benjamin is a co-director, staged a “torturers tour” that began outside Brennan’s house, moved on to Cheney’s home, and finished with a vigil outside the CIA. “A TORTURER LIVES HERE,” shrieked a banner held outside Brennan’s home that day, according to a photo gallery subsequently posted online. Someone also stuck a hot pink WANTED poster with Brennan’s face on it onto the door of the modest two-story house, which shows no outward signs of special security, not even a fence.

This week, his privacy suffered another jarring invasion. One or more hackers, whose identities remain unknown, gained access to Brennan’s personal AOL email account. On Wednesday, Wikileaks posted several documents from Brennan’s account online. Several more followed on Thursday, along with Brennan’s email contact list. The fruits of the hack have thus far been far from sensational. They include such snore-inducing fare as a 2008 policy memo for a Senate committee on America's strategic interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the hack is bound to cause headaches for Brennan, thanks to nuggets of personal information. Among the released documents, for instance, was Brennan's SF-86 application for a federal background check before he joined the Obama administration in 2009. That document included phone numbers and and addresses of friends and family — including his wife’s Social Security number.

A person who discussed the email hack with Brennan in recent days described him as angry over the incident. Friends and associates say Brennan has taken the door knocks and protests in stride, understanding that any prominent government official can expect a certain amount of unwelcome attention.

But the email hack, they insist, is different. "Senior leaders in government expect to be in the public eye and to be held accountable for the work they do,” said one official familiar with the hacking episode. "That comes with the territory and they readily accept the scrutiny. We understand there people who are not fans of the CIA and there is nothing wrong with speaking out against CIA or the U.S. government writ large.”

"But illegally accessing a family email account and distributing to the world the private information of family members and other private citizens is outrageous,” the official continued. "That’s not a lawful protest, but criminal activity that impacts a great many people with no affiliation with CIA. Our country needs the best and brightest in public service, yet this episode may strike some as evidence that the price of government service is too high."

So far there’s no sign that Brennan’s AOL account contained any any classified information. Befitting the longtime CIA hand that he is, Brennan appears to have practiced good cyber hygiene. The most his email contacts include are the gmail addresses of some senior U.S. officials — along with plenty of mundane fare, like customer service contacts for companies like toy maker Mattel and 1-800-FLOWERS.

Even so, senior Obama officials are outraged — including at the White House, where top aides like chief of staff Denis McDonough consider Brennan a close friend and a heroic public servant who has defended the U.S. against terrorist attacks.

Anti-war and civil liberties activists see it differently, and have singled out Brennan for particular scorn. Online protests from liberals, angry that Brennan worked at the CIA in the Bush administration at a time when terror suspects were tortured, quashed Obama's initial plan to make Brennan his first CIA director in 2009. (Brennan has said he opposed torture when he was at the Bush CIA.)

During his years in the White House, Brennan oversaw Obama's increasingly aggressive use of drones campaign in such places as Pakistan and Yemen, drawing scorn from critics who saw him as Obama's assassin. Since taking over the CIA in March of 2013 — after a confirmation hearing repeatedly interrupted by angry protesters — Brennan has maintained Obama's ban on torture. But when the Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a scathing report on Bush-era CIA torture practices, Brennan was publicly critical of the report and rejected its conclusions. Without endorsing torture, Brennan insisted that some prisoners subjected to what he called "enhanced interrogation techniques" had yielded useful intelligence, although he said there's no telling whether that information might have been procured by other means.

Brennan allies find the harassment he attracts maddening, arguing that — far from being the Cheney-esque figure of his detractors' imagining — he has consistently argued for more restraint in the use of drone strikes on suspected terrorists.

"The past harassments of Brennan have come from the very people whose views he is usually championing," says Nick Shapiro, a former top aide to Brennan. "He makes sure when we must go after those who are trying to attack us, we do so in a way that will not hurt civilians."

Brennan did lead an Obama White House effort to come up with new rules governing drone strikes in 2013, although some critics complain that little has changed since then. During his 2013 confirmation hearing for the top CIA job, Brennan cheered some critics when he told the Senate he supported plans to shift drone strikes from the CIA to the Pentagon — but little progress has been made on that front during his tenure.

Benjamin never explained how she found Brennan’s house the day she visited. But it's not much of a secret anymore. His exact address is included in the security clearance application posted online by Wikileaks, which means John Brennan may not have received his last unwelcome visitor.