David Petraeus wrote sexy e-mails as CIA chief — but the agency’s new No. 2 hosted readings of steamy works at her bookstore on “Erotic Nights.”
Avril Haines, 43 — President Obama’s choice to become deputy director of the spy agency — will be the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in the CIA.
Her past as co-owner of Adrian’s Book Cafe in Baltimore came into focus yesterday as Washington tried to learn more about one of the country’s new top spies.
Haines was 24 and had dropped out of a graduate program in physics at Johns Hopkins in 1994 when she and her 29-year-old pilot boyfriend renovated a boarded-up strip club and turned it into the regular meeting place for fans of erotica.
Once a month, aficionados would pay for a night of red-candle-lit dinner — $30 for couples, $17 for singles — and readings of erotic works.
“Erotica has become more prevalent because people are trying to have sex without having sex,” Haines told the Baltimore Sun at the time. “Others are trying to find new fantasies to make their monogamous relationships more satisfying.”
“What the erotic offers is spontaneity, twists and turns. And it affects everyone,” she added.
At one soirée, Haines began by reading aloud the racy opening pages of “The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty,” by bestselling author Anne Rice (using the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure), the Daily Beast reported yesterday.
Haines told a reporter that at first “we were terrified who might show up. We thought it would be a bunch of dirty old men.”