He Helped Stop Iran from Getting the Bomb

Newyorker-March30th,2026

ot long after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Kevin Chalker set out to become a spy. He was a thirty-year-old graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, D.C., and he and his wife, Young, had a newborn son. She thought that this idea was terrible. Having grown up in a left-leaning Jewish family in Chicago, she pictured killings and coups. She also worried that Chalker would turn out like his father—a gruff and taciturn man who had once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. He had ended up as a construction worker in Fort Worth, Texas, where he kept trying to interest his daughter-in-law in Jesus and guns. The last time the family got together, he’d offered to teach her how to use a knife to kill someone.

Chalker reminded her that his father had been an enlisted marine who joined a C.I.A. paramilitary force operating in Southeast Asia during the early years of the Vietnam War, a time when “the agency was doing wacky stuff all over the world.” Chalker promised her that he would do only “traditional espionage—no big deal,” adding, “Everything’s going to be cool.”

He queued up a few days later at the C.I.A. table at his school’s national-security job fair. Chalker had a more martial bearing than most graduate students. He had been a nationally ranked judo fighter and a Golden Gloves boxer in high school and college, and he had spent two years at the United States Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. (He dropped out because of an eye injury sustained in a bar fight, and eventually graduated from Texas Christian University.) He also had an aptitude for languages. He could read and speak basic Mandarin and fluent Japanese—he had lived and worked in Japan for several years after college. He had even picked up a little Farsi from an Iranian American girlfriend in college. A C.I.A. analyst at the job fair put Chalker on the phone with a native Japanese speaker at headquarters, to test his proficiency, and soon he was on the way to a Marriott in northern Virginia for the first of half a dozen interviews. In the fall of 2003, he entered the first class of C.I.A. trainees who had applied after 9/11. The training culminated in months at the Farm, the legendary C.I.A. base at Camp Peary, in Virginia. The agency assigned each new trainee a randomly generated alias for internal use. Chalker became Fred E. Snappleton.