Thomas Twetten was a Central Intelligence Agency

Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

 case officer. From 1991 to 1993 he was Deputy Director of Operations (DDO).

He was posted to Benghazi

Benghazi

Benghazi is the second largest city in Libya, the main city of the Cyrenaica region , and the former provisional capital of the National Transitional Council. The wider metropolitan area is also a district of Libya...

, Libya

Libya

Libya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....

 during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. There he developed a friendship with Richard Calder

Richard Calder

Richard Calder is a senior official at the United States Central Intelligence Agency .Calder holds a Bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Connecticut and a Master's degree in information systems from George Washington University. He started his career with the CIA as a...

, who went on to become Deputy Director of Administration (DDA) in 2001.

In 1988 he was head of the Near East Division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. He had a significant impact on the events in Afghanistan

Afghanistan

Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...

 immediately before the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

's withdrawal. He later described former president Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

 as "personally afraid of any connection with the CIA".

After his retirement from the CIA, Twetten became an antique-book seller in Vermont

Vermont

Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England...

.