A CIA Agent of Change?

When Evan McMullin was growing up just outside of Seattle, he wanted to be a filmmaker. He and his friends would film their own movies around the neighborhood and edit them on his VCR. “Some of them were pretty good," he says.

Moviemaking, it turns out, wasn't his calling, but the 40-year-old McMullin has already lived a cinematic life. He spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Brazil. He volunteered for the United Nations as a refugee resettlement officer in Jordan. He's worked as a deckhand on an Alaskan fishing boat and an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. And for more than a decade, McMullin was an undercover CIA agent in the Middle East and South Asia, running covert operations in war zones against terrorist groups like al Qaeda.

Now, the former Capitol Hill staffer (yes, McMullin did that, too) is adding this to his résumé: an underdog independent presidential bid. The odds are stacked against him. His major opponents are universally known—one a buffoon with mastery of the media, the other a ruthless power-seeker. The hurdles seem impossible to overcome, and nobody's giving him a break. A Hollywood screenwriter couldn't have come up with the script.

McMullin almost can't believe it himself. "This is not something I intended for myself," he tells me in an interview days after launching his bid in early August. "This is not what I expected or intended."

What McMullin intended, at first, was to help find a credible center-right candidate to run against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In his capacity as an active Republican policy adviser, he initiated discussions this summer with a group of anti-Trump operatives led by a Republican strategist named Joel Searby and concentrated in a super-PAC called Better for America. At some point during those talks, someone suggested McMullin himself run for president. Others in the group agreed, and McMullin said he would think about it. He took about 10 days to "wrestle" with the idea, talking it over with close friends, potential advisers, even members of Congress. (McMullin won't name names, but his campaign says it is "in talks" with members of the House and Senate who could publicly support him.)