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There were a lot of reasons that John Reese was recruited into the CIA. He was an excellent marksman, he was a loyal soldier, he loved his country, but most importantly, he enjoyed his job.
It was a small thing, that he enjoyed his job. It wasn't necessary for an operative to do so. Nobody in Washington who sat behind a desk and strategized to destabilize a Central American drug cartel thought about the working conditions of the Joe Nobody that did the dirty work. Those types were the worst, but they were a hazard of the job. Their plans were usually useless. This guy has to go, but it can't be seen by that other lady, and it had to look like this other group did it. The fact that So-and-so drug king's operation was compromised and progress could be reported without them being blamed was enough for those guys. They would shake hands with the CIA contact who had arranged things, and still have time to make their 7:00 pm reservations at Cintronelle, never mind that some guy had to hide in tree in the Central American jungle for three weeks so he could shoot some guy in the head on the way to his daughter's wedding.
That was what those Washington types were like though, and good CIA handlers knew it. A good CIA handler would know how to get it done. How to take the germ of a convoluted Washington Plan and condense it into a simple shot in the head. A great CIA handler, like Mark Snow, knew how to get it done, and still have the same operatives to use for the next one. Mark Snow had learned early on that your standard black-ops recruit didn't have a long shelf life, because they required a very specific, and volatile combinations of personality traits.
You needed someone who was trained to take orders, didn't mind killing indiscriminately in the name of a larger objective, and had creative problem solving skills.
Now, since there are many people who were trained to take orders and also had creative problem solving skills, but not quite so many that would kill indiscriminately, you sort of had to take what you could get when you got someone who has all three. In the end, it all boiled down to about two types of people after that, and both of them will cause you problems at the end of the day.
The first, more common type, was a high functioning sociopathic sort of person, who craved structure, or had recognized their own sociopathic desires and wanted to explore them legally. The thinking sociopath, if you will. These kind of people would practically search out the military and CIA, and as such, were easy to spot. They were the kind of people that would take out a training target, or a real one, and turn and smile at their commanding officer, or whatever monitoring device was around.
It wouldn't be the smile of a man or woman who was simply happy to have aimed correctly, or the mad grin of someone who was ecstatic to take out an enemy combatant who has probably taken out a friend or two of the theirs. It was the slight, sly grin of someone who has finally found the right context for fulfilling all their fantasies. It was the grin of a person who has finally found a way to get away with it again and again and again, and get paid for it.
Experienced CIA recruiters find this to be one of the first give always of a potential recruit, and as such are often planted in training facilities, always looking for that tip-off. It's how they found John Reese.
Now, the problem with working with sociopaths as a CIA handler, and generally speaking, is that eventually, given enough time, they will follow their own desires instead of what you, the handler, want them to do. A good CIA handler can manage this as long as possible. They can give their operatives jobs that are appealing, but not so much that they go berserk. For example, a poor, or first time CIA handler might look at a standard new operative, see that they come from a background with strong female family connections, and assume that they will work well combatting sexual slavery in Eastern Europe.
A good CIA handler will tell you why that is a mistake. Actually, they wouldn't tell you. They'd hope it blew up in your face. Less competition for the really good recruits that way. But still, it would be a mistake, and here is why. Although your instincts were good in assigning your sociopathic, potentially murderous agent to an area where they would feel a connection with the victims, and thus work harder to complete mission objectives, the odds are also high that they would go full on vigilante.
It is true that your operative is more likely to work harder, but the results will be mixed at best. Either your operative will work too hard, and you'll have to explain to your boss why your operative is requesting visas for 30 teenage prostitutes via the media, or you'll have to explain why there is now a power vacuum forming because your operative took out seven of the industry bosses, when all you really wanted was to take out a select one or two.
The first time handler might blame the operative, say they were a loose canon, that they couldn't be blamed for them going off script, but the truth is that training an operative is like training a dog. If you don't want them to get trash everywhere, you shouldn't leave it in a place where they could get it.
A good handler could take the same operative, and send them to eliminate the head of an unfriendly militia group. And if the operative happens to "discover" that the militia is also trafficking women around the operative's sister's age, so be it. The good handler knows that in the worst case scenario, the trafficking is undiscovered, and the operative completes the job. In a better case scenario, the operative will uncover the trafficking, feel personally invested, and take down the militia leader with great personal satisfaction.
It's win-win for the good handler. In both cases the main objective is accomplished. The militia leader is dead. If the operative has found and shut down the trafficking, all the better.
In that case, the operative believed they were on a simple mission, and, as far as they knew, discovered and stopped something they hadn't expected to encounter. In this case, they will take it as an isolated incident, and go home flush with the feeling of accomplishment. They'll feel their work was worthwhile, and thus, increase their loyalty to the job, even if they didn't realize it on a conscious level. This higher level thinking is what made a good CIA handler.
That was how you dealt with the regular sociopath.
A great CIA handler, on the other hand, know all those tricks, and a little bit more. A handler such as Mark Snow has been around long enough to separate your garden variety sociopath (Kara Stanton), and a sociopath whose edges bleed, just a little bit (John Reese).
Kara Stanton was like most long term CIA assets. Lethal, remorseless, and in absolute control of all the tools she had at her disposal to break men and women.
John Reese had all those tools, and one thing more. While people, in general, mattered very little to him, John was the rare type of sociopath capable of forming genuine human bonds, and understanding that bond in others. So while John was the kind of guy who could just as easily kill a target or take them out to dinner, he could also (unlike Kara Stanton) flip a switch and see the target as a real person.
It wasn't that Kara Stanton didn't recognize that people were people. In her own way, she loved her family, but Kara Stanton's first priority was always Kara Stanton. If it came down to it, she'd cut out her own mother's heart to live. Like most sociopaths, Kara thought she was the center of the universe, and everyone else was lucky to be in her orbit.
John Reese was the kind of sociopath that if it came down to it, would cut out his own heart first. Not for everyone, not for no reason, but for someone he loved. He had a rare self awareness that Mark Snow didn't often see, a knowledge of his own instability, his difference from the world. This was the trait that a truly great CIA handler would come to recognize as priceless.
Now that's not to say that Kara Stanton wasn't valuable. She was. Sociopaths who had sought out government work didn't grow on trees. You couldn't just get a new one if the old one broke, or died in a shoot out. But still, they had a shelf life. Eventually, the law of averages would get them. They'd turn the wrong way, the comm would go down at the wrong time, same old story. That was to be expected.
And when you worked with sociopaths for as long as Mark Snow had, you knew you'd lose them eventually, but you also knew that they usually thought they were invincible. With someone like Kara Stanton, she hadn't ever considered that she might not make it out alive. Oh sure, she'd talk a good game about the possibility, had a flip dry humor about it, but Mark could tell that the thought never really sunk in, that it could be her at the wrong end of a bullet.
It meant other, less convenient things too. Because sometimes, those guys in Washington didn't want you to take out a drug cartel or a human trafficking operation, they wanted you to get someone out of it.
It was usually some son or daughter of one of those very same Washington types, or the son or daughter of one of their influential friends. These were the hardest sort of mission for someone like Mark Snow, because if you only had a Kara Stanton, and didn't have a John Reese, your odds were not so good.
Kara Stanton could coerce a confession in ten minutes flat, she could chase down a suspected terrorist cell member through forty miles of unknown countryside, but what she couldn't do was conceive of laying down her own life to get some over indulged rich kid out of trouble.
Mark Snow didn't blame her. He wouldn't have done it either. Those kids deserved what they got, and even if they didn't, it was hardly his problem. People died everyday, all the time. Bad things always happened, had always happened, would always happen. Mark wasn't the sort of guy to throw his life on the line every time someone made a bad decision, which is why John Reese was so important.
Because John did have that switch, that knowledge that he loved someone, and others had people had the same love, and were loved just like John did, and had been. When you told John Reese that there was a mother, father, lover, friend out there, missing someone, someone only John had the skills to save, you had him. If you could get him to picture it, that love, you could get him to do anything. He'd do it because he'd want someone else to do it for those he loved. He did it because he knew he was going to die anyway, and it would go down easier if it was heroic. So far, John had been 100% on the fetch and retrieve.
If you sent Kara Stanton on one of these missions, she might come home with the goods, 40-50% of the time and not lose any sleep at night. Normally, Mark wouldn't either, but since he was the guy who had to tell that Washington type that little Timmy or little Suzy wasn't coming home, and then watch them cry and threaten and get angry, well, it was a mess. It put him in a bad spot, professionally, and Mark hadn't gotten where he was by not delivering what he said he would.
Of course, John had his problems too. No operative was perfect, but if you could find a couple of them that wouldn't kill each other, then you had something you could work with. A Kara Stanton for the dirty work, and a John Reese for the sanitized stuff. Mark Snow kept that formula close to the vest, obviously. Poachers were everywhere, and Mark didn't give away anything for free.
In fact, he'd almost been relieved when he'd been told to eliminate them both. He was mad, too, obviously, but it was almost poetic. He wished he could be there. They had to go sometime, and at least this way they'd be together. He wasn't sure if John could actually pull the trigger on Kara, but he was sure Kara could pull the trigger on John. It didn't matter, really, they'd both be dead anyway by the end of it. Mark would start over, just like he always had. He had a few prospects he was keeping an eye on. Evans had potential, and Mark thought he might try a hand on polishing him up.
In a strange way, he'd miss them both, John and Kara. They'd been an effective pair, but Mark Snow had learned a long time ago not to get attached. It was one of the things that made him a great CIA handler. It's what he'd been recruited to do.