In 1963, while stationed in Baghdad during the civil war, Kane remembers what he still thinks of as his closest call. During a truce, Kane went with a friend to buy bread and determine the situation outside the American Embassy. Kane heard a shrill police whistle and was convinced he was about to get shot. He turned to find a young child playing with a police whistle.
"You just had to be prudent," Kane says on his ability to remain safe. Richard S. Welch '51, Kane's friend and classmate, also recruited from Harvard for the CIA, was assassinated in Athens in 1975.
Kane was in Tripoli, Lybia in 1967 during the Six Days War.
"On the fifth of June, the Israeli attack started and we were evacuated to a U.S. Air for base," he says. On June 6th, Arab mobs rose throughout the Middle East, and in Tripoli they began knifing Americans in the streets. All non-essential personnel were required to evacuate. "On the seventh of June, my family got on a plane and boarded for Rome. My happiest moment was seeing them on this plane."
In Tripoli, his friendship with an Egyptian senior official in the Islam Brotherhood, a fundamentalist organization, came in handy. Kane's family had a "much beloved Irish setter dog," and when they were evacuated, entrusted the dog to the official. Kane says he left the safety of the base under the pretense of appraising the situation in the city. "I had another motive--I drove back in to see the dog."
During the early eighties, Kane determined "the learning curve had flattened out" and retired from the CIA at the age of 52. After a 13 week stint at the Harvard Business School, Kane returned to the site of his last CIA post in Lisbon, Portugal to begin consulting. Over the course of fifteen years, Kane advised the prime minister and president of the country--culminating in a knighthood by the president.
Now a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C., Kane still keeps at the top of his mind the loss he felt in not having the chance to serve his country in World War II.
"I still feel I owe the American people and American system service," he says.