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A place to call home

Well-trained and traveled, a renowned political professional plants his roots

Graham Fuller remembers the first time he drove through Squamish. It was 1996, and he was working as a senior political analyst at Washington state-based RAND Corporation, a think tank that valued him in part because of his 20 years in the CIA. With the weighty fare of geopolitics demanding much of his attention, Fuller and his wife, Prue, would relish their trips to Vancouver and the city’s environs, where they would hike the mountains and wander the woods.

“I remember smelling the paper mill and at the same time seeing the Chief loom up ahead of us — and reading in the guidebook that it was a mill town,” he says. “But we were impressed with the scenery, and then came back several times more, and just thought it was terrific.”

He lives there now, this man who’s made his home in far away lands like Lebanon, Turkey, Afghanistan and other exotic corners of the world. Each place was a fascination in and of itself, the languages, food and people coming together to offer the sort of experience a studied mind learns to crave. And yet, he chose to settle in Squamish.

He lives with Prue in Garibaldi Highlands, has a house on a quiet cul-de-sac amid the neighbourhood’s rambling roads and pitched driveways. Their living room is foliaged with books, magazines and artwork, and Fuller, an author himself, moves through the thicket like a mellow cat through a shaded garden.

He doesn’t want to focus too much on his past with the CIA. It could be fodder for sensationalists, and it ended years ago, anyway. Seeing him after yoga practice, dressed in light green pants and a button-up flannel shirt, hair a little disheveled thanks to his sometimes-roving fingers, he seems far removed from the man-in-black cliché the intelligence industry calls to mind.

But, before he was here, he was definitely there.

“I expected probably to have an academic career,” says the Harvard educated expert in Russian and Middle Eastern studies. “But I got drafted. And, because I had studied a lot of Russian and some Turkish at university, I was put into military intelligence.”

He was later offered a position in the CIA. The job promised travel and immersion in cultures he had long been interested in, and so he took it, eventually rising to vice chair of the National Intelligence Council during the 1980s war between Iraq and Iran.

That life is not entirely behind him. While he no longer works for the CIA, Fuller is still very immersed in the world’s political machinations. He’s hoping Barack Obama defeats Hillary Clinton to become president. He thinks the Stephen Harper Conservatives are guilty of parroting American political philosophy. No fan of George Bush, the fallout from the 9/11 attacks influenced the couple’s decision to move to Canada. Further to that, he’d like to see the world stage gain a few more power players, a dynamic he views as beneficial to all nations.

He’s a regular contributor to publications like Foreign Affairs and The Washington Post . He’s published a litany of books on world events and the Middle East, with his most recent effort, The Future of Turkey in the Middle East , on shelves since January. He’s an adjunct professor at SFU, and he sometimes finds himself negotiating airport crowds as he makes his way to conferences on global dramas.

That’s half of his day. The other half has him learning guitar, working on fiction and finding a publisher for a memoir he wrote about his 21-year-old adopted son, who was lost after a fatal drug overdose. He’s a member of the Squamish Writers Group, and he’s heavily involved with the Squamish Environmental Conservation Society. He also sits on the district’s social planning council, a forum through which he and others propose solutions for homelessness and other issues.

“I feel schizophrenic because they’re two different worlds,” he says. “Also, I get very angry these days watching the Middle East and the way the Bush administration is making everything worse. I’ve spent my life working on the Middle East, and to watch the situation towards the end of my career is a bit depressing.”

And so his attention goes local, where change is easier to effect. Just a couple days after he and his wife moved to Squamish, they found themselves engaged in the town’s various movements. Thanks to his training and research, Fuller brings a special set of tools to these efforts. Recognizing a culture’s levers and pulleys is practically a brain stem function for the man — like breathing, it’s something he does automatically. And so his thoughts on Squamish carry special import.

“It’s painful to see Squamish as just sort of a place to gas up and grab a burger on the way between Vancouver and Whistler,” he says. “It’s worth far more than that. So I think as Squamish struggles to reinvent itself, the professional communities in Whistler and here — and Britannia for that matter — can help integrate Squamish more fully into this new vision of B.C., whatever that is. But all change is painful.”

Whistler and Squamish, Fuller believes, have work to do when it comes to inter-communal relations. People from Squamish tend to view Whistlerites as elitist yuppies, while Squamish is sometimes seen by its northerly neighbour as a redneck bar brawl.

“But I think the two are going to be much more involved together. I’ll never forget the time downtown when I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup truck that said ‘Fuck you, I’m from Squamish.’ Which says a lot about traditional attitudes towards the outside.”

The way Fuller sees it, the two communities will find a nexus as Squamish develops its professional industry. Quest University could be a launch pad for that. And, as regional policy efforts surrounding growth and the environment continue along, the gulf between the two towns will shrink ever more.

“I’m very optimistic about the way things are going.”

Fuller and Prue plan to stick around for that shrinkage. Content in their digs, happy with their hobbies and engaged in their causes, Squamish still holds much of its original appeal, be it the sprawling land or the different cultures existing upon it.

“I think there’s just a spiritual power to it,” he says. “Maybe not everybody feels it, but I felt I did. Big mountains and wild animals do that, I think.”