Born in Rhode Island in 1951, Fred Manget grew up in Georgia and studied at the University of Georgia before going to Oxford to read PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). Returning to the US, he took his law degree at Vanderbilt and then began practising with a large firm before joining the CIA’s Office of General Counsel. In his 25-year career with the CIA, Manget specialised in the intersection between intelligence work and the criminal justice system, serving as Deputy General Counsel and as Acting Director of Congressional Affairs. In 1995, he was promoted into the Senior Intelligence Service, and his service has been recognised with a number of awards. Alongside his legal work for the CIA, Manget has taught as a visiting professor at both the Florida State University and University of Georgia law schools. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 22 September 2025.
Fred Manget
Georgia & Oriel 1973
‘My earliest memories are all army related’
I was born in a naval hospital at NAS Quonset Point, because my father was a naval aviator, but we left there very early in my life and never went back. We ended up moving to West Texas to live with my mother’s parents. Her father was a colonel at Fort Bliss and then, when my father was released from active duty he got a job as an assistant manager at the El Paso International Airport. My earliest memories are all army related – parades and marching bands and saluting and that sort of thing. When my father was offered a job in Georgia, right outside Atlanta, we moved there, and that’s where I grew up. My family have a long history of civil service and public service, and all university graduates. We go back a long way, and I am named for two Fred Mangets. One was my great-great-uncle who was a Methodist missionary doctor in China and who I actually knew growing up. The other was my father’s first cousin who was a glider pilot, and he was killed in Operation Varsity, the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945.
When I got to high school, I found I was not very good at numbers but I was good at words. I also played football for one of the big high school teams, and I was inordinately proud of that. When I went on to the University of Georgia, I applied for an ROTC scholarship with the Air Force and got it, and so, I spent four years going through the university as a political science major and was commissioned into the Air Force reserves in 1973. Long story short, I ended up staying in the Air Force for a few years as a reservist and then switched my commission over to the Army. I stayed in there for a long time, and it was one of the reasons that I actually applied to the Rhodes Scholarship.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
I wasn’t aiming towards the Scholarship until after I spent the summer of 1972 in a study abroad programme in France. I had an enormously good time there and then, when I got back to the US, it was the beginning of the great drawdown in the military at the end of the Vietnam War, so there was no real job waiting for me. It dawned on me that I should get some sort of graduate credential. I read about international scholarships and all of them seemed to be for academics who were aiming towards doctorates, except the Rhodes, which wanted well-rounded people who were not mere bookworms and for whom public service was a higher calling. We had also just had a former Secretary of State join the University of Georgia, Dean Rusk (North Carolina & St John’s 1931), and he had been a Rhodes Scholar. It was said of him, although perhaps it was apocryphal, that when asked, ‘What do you want on your tombstone?’ he said, ‘Rhodes Scholar.’ I took a chance and signed up and sent in my application and proceeded on from there.
‘I wish I had stayed on for a third year’
I had signed up for three economics papers as part of my degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), but when I came out of my first tutorial my tutorial partner and I both agreed we hadn’t understood a word. Luckily, the economics don at Oriel, Derek Morris – who ended up being Provost of Oriel years later – took us under his wing and taught us what we needed to get through. I had some very good tutors, and to be one or two students with just one tutor throughout the entire term was a wonderful thing. I wish I had stayed on for a third year, but like so many Rhodes Scholars, I was a young man in a hurry.
My fondest memories of Oxford are of the friendships I made there. It gave me the chance to be associated with people of the most astonishing subsequent accomplishments. I knew they were going to be partially responsible for what happens in the world, so I felt I had to step up to the plate and do a good job.
One of my very fondest memories is of the time my girlfriend – now my wife – and I were over in Oxford and we went down to Christ Church meadows. She is such an animal lover, and at that moment, two white swans swam up to her. So, I seized the moment and asked her to marry me, and she said ‘Yes.’ That particular moment sticks in my mind!
‘I was in the middle, explaining things to both sides’
I knew I didn’t want to go on and do a doctorate, and law school felt like pretty much the only alternative unless you wanted to go into medicine. Doing PPE had guided me towards the idea of government service and I thought a law degree would give me the chance to have more responsibility earlier in my career. After law school, I practised law in Atlanta for a few years, and then I realised that I needed a cause that was greater than self-interest. I’d imagined myself going up through the ranks in a large bureaucracy in the government, but it didn’t work out that way. We were married and had a one-year-old child and I said, ‘You know, I’ve got to do something different.’ And then, one Sunday morning in Atlanta, I got a call from an old friend of mine who I’d met in the Air Force ROTC. He flew in and I met him at the nearby air base and I watched him take off in his F18, and after that, I went home and put my resumé together and sent it round to all the national security places that had General Counsel’s offices. The CIA was very much the most interesting and they gave me an offer, so we moved up to Northern Virginia and stayed there for about 26 years.
What surprised me was how little intelligence law there was. In Anglo-American common law countries, law is what judges say it is. You have judges and cases, and when I began, there were very few judges doing any judging about issues that came up at the CIA. It seemed like we were having daily crises, and a lot of them I still can’t talk about. There was the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan administration. I was on the taskforce for that, and it was like pulling teeth, because you had the President wanting to do one thing and you had Congress in the opposite party wanting to do the other. And then, I was the lawyer for the Counter-Intelligence Centre when Aldrich Ames was caught. He was a long-time CIA employee who had volunteered to spy for the Russians, and more than one person died because of what he did. And, of course, the big one was 9/11. Until that point, we had started going after Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden in particular, but it had been law enforcement. Afterwards, it became war. All the legal rules involving warfare became, sort of, overriding, on top of intelligence and law-enforcement-related things, and, having been in the military, I was in the middle, explaining things to both sides.
One of the areas I worked on was the procedures for handling classified information in criminal prosecutions. Normally, what the CIA does is secret, and that is the exact opposite of the open way in which prosecutors and law enforcement agents work. The clash of how those two cultures carry out their mission led to a whole new law, the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) being passed. It was probably the major advance in how the whole system of law in the US handled classified information, but the nature of the separation of powers means that clash still continues, probably on a daily basis.
'Time and chance happeneth to them all'
I resist the temptation to pass any of my own words of wisdom along to today’s Rhodes Scholars. Instead, I think you can’t beat words from Ecclesiastes: ‘I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’