A Hero Grows Up

St. John Joshua Kraft was born in the Capay Valley of California. His family owned a small almond orchard. His father worked the ranch, but the elder Kraft’s primary job was as a truck driver, making runs up and down the Capay, Sacramento, and Napa Valleys. St. John’s mother worked as a clerk for the Yolo County Health and Human Services Agency, helping farm workers navigate the bureaucracy with her command of Spanish.

St. John saw himself as a farm boy in his early years, learning to drive a tractor and operate the husking machines that processed the almonds. He also got good with a rifle, fending off the coyotes that threatened the family ‘s chickens, and taking out the gophers that routinely raided the almond trees.

St. John’s father instilled in him a sense of self-reliance, the value of hard work, and the importance of self-discipline. But because his father was frequently away for long periods, there was also an aching distance in their relationship. From his mother, St. John learned empathy and the importance of education. These dovetailed with his father’s values: The more a man knows and understands the world, the better he can navigate it—most importantly, navigating the souls of others.

 St. John’s mother also imbued him with aspirations of living in a larger world. She was fulfilled in her work, even if she felt resigned to the family’s small life. She loved and respected her husband (as he loved and respected her) and she loved her only child deeply. But there was an empty place in her that only a different life could have filled. And that was never to be.

Since the Capay is situated between the state capital of Sacramento and the world class wine region of the Napa Valley, St. John grew up with a sense of that wider world. And when the family would occasionally visit San Francisco ninety minutes away in his mother’s pursuit of art and high culture, he also had a sense of how big and diverse the world really is. St. John absorbed his mother’s longings on those trips, and they became his own.

St. John’s other escape was books. He read all the adventure novels of Alexandre Dumas, H. Rider Haggard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. He read Hemingway, not as great literature but as adventure. The larger world St. John grew to crave was filled with daring, physical risk, creative thinking and reasoned judgement, and moral gravity.

St; John’s father was a veteran of Vietnam. That period of his father’s life had touched on the qualities St. John admired from his reading. The war had affected his father, but not deformed him. At the same time, he did not revel in its memories. It had been the zenith of intensity and the nadir of humanity in his life’s experience.

A young St. John asked his father to recount adventures from the war. But his father refused to treat the war as entertainment or a means to impress the boy. St. John’s father might reference specific incidents as illustrations of larger points in the informal education every good father passes along. At the same time, St. John’s father communicated the inevitability and sometimes necessity of war generally. “Like shit,” his father once said. “It stinks and you want nothing to do with it. But when you have to do it, you have to do it.”

So it was not surprising that St. John determined to attend West Point. In addition to the promise of a world-class education, his tuition was fully paid. He progressed from graduating with honors to entering the Special Forces and becoming a Green Beret. He was deployed to Iraq and then Afghanistan. His experience with the people of those countries motivated him to specialize further in unconventional warfare, eventually being admitted to the ultra-elite Special Activities Center.

He trained on The Farm at Camp Peary in languages, weapons, politics, defensive driving, and more. He became everyone’s idea of a secret agent. He saw himself that way too, but not in a romanticized or idealized way. He understood in his bones the true nature of his job and of the world in which he would practice it. He saw his job as prestigious, massively significant, and ultimately necessary with all the responsibilities that go with those qualities. And, he never became jaded, cynical, or detached about the work; in his view, that would be a different kind of failure.

In this time, he also married and fathered a daughter. This would be his first wife. He had the same girlfriend all through high school. As a cadet at West Point, his social life was tightly proscribed. But, when he became eligible for weekend passes, he was recruited to join a small and particularly ambitious group on trips to Manhattan. He was instantly pegged as a desirable candidate for their circle because of his height and good looks. On one such foray, he met Jill, the woman who would become his first wife.

Jill was studying finance at Columbia, and saw in St. John the ideal partner. He was respectful — even chivalrous — self-assured, honest, and intentional. St. John saw the same qualities in her. As a couple of lovers, they each tacitly agreed to let the other be their own true self. This eased their time apart, and even nurtured their growth during those periods as they internalized the connection and carried it with them.

When it was time to deploy, St. John broached the subject of formalizing their relationship. Jill didn’t hesitate to accept; not in a giddy way, but as the best and most obvious next step in their lives. Jill drew her validation from her success at work, ascending the ranks of the investment banking world. It was she — not St. John — who romanticized his occupation, especially as his advancement paralleled her own. The all-consuming nature of their occupations obviated the idea of starting a family; they could be the exciting dream couple with secrets all their own.

Still, there was as much passion as prospect in their relationship, which added to its healthiness. And, so, Jill got pregnant. The arrival of their daughter, Christine, changed everything, as the arrival of children in a marriage always does. The depth of the change was not so obvious at first. But as the demands of motherhood imposed themselves on Jill, she came to regret and then resent St. John’s absences.

St. John was mindful of her burden and did what he could to ease it. But, in the end, he wasn’t there often enough to bridge the distance. And he wasn’t willing to change the trajectory of his life and career enough to eliminate the absences.

A large part of this was the way in which his work now paralleled Jill’s. As her job brought her into the company of some of the world’s most affluent and influential individuals, St. John’s intelligence and adaptive skills with language and culture took him further away from direct action and more into human intelligence. He found himself brushing up against some of the most elevated social circles in the countries where he served, as well as some of the most debased. And, while he always found a way to fulfill his mission, he came to accept that a life of material well-being was preferable to one of pure experience. In his view, Jill was a part of that.

But in her view, he was living an adjacent but separate life. The situation deteriorated as he could not leverage, or even reveal, his activities to Jill. They became accessories to one another, no longer partners. When Jill finally called an end to it, only then did St. John fully appreciate how important his wife and daughter were to his sense of himself. At the same time, he could not be someone else entirely for their sake.

The divorce was sad and civilized. St. John recognized how it — and all that led to it — had debilitated him. Then a ski trip to Lake Tahoe ignited the vision for the next act of his life… maybe the final one.

He determined to establish arguably the most exclusive private retreat in the world, to include hospitality and gaming. It would allow him to travel in the elevated circles to which he had become accustomed. Dealing with the unavoidably tawdry elements of the gaming industry and the full gamut of human nature would exercise his skills in the shadows and with all levels of society.

But he could not completely abandon the mystery and excitement of his career to-date. So he made two arrangements with his superiors: If he was successful in the endeavor, it would be available – with his permission and collaboration – for exploitation by the CIA. And, operatives would be encouraged to promote the place for its exclusivity.

While the project leveraged his talent and training, the project would be equally or even more challenging than anything he had ever done before. He would have to develop a different kind of endurance, always considering the long view. No victory would be final. And the only extraction point would be the same one in which all mortals are finally laid to rest.