Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Meanwhile, the Soviets planted bugs in the new American embassy. They were so ingeniously designed that they were a part of the building structure and could not be removed. A primary purpose of the electronic penetrations was to find out what the CIA was doing so the Soviets could take action against the agency.

  Over the years, dozens of CIA officers have been expelled from Moscow for spying. In March 1983, the Soviets declared Richard W. Osborne, a first secretary of the embassy, persona non grata. The Soviets said at the time that they caught him with spy equipment, including radio equipment for “transmitting espionage information via the U.S. Marisat communication satellites.”36 Marisat is the Maritime Communications Satellite system, which is used for commercial and Navy transmissions. The Soviets said they also seized Osborne’s “own notes, which were written in a pad made of paper that quickly dissolved in water.”

  In June 1983, the Soviets expelled Lewis C. Thomas, an attaché and electronics expert, saying they caught him red-handed in a spying operation. In March 1985, they expelled Michael C. Sellers, a second secretary of the embassy. To buttress the case for the expulsion and to embarrass the CIA, Izvestia ran a photo of him disguised as a Ukrainian, wearing a false mustache and a wig.37

  Paul M. Stombaugh, a second secretary, was expelled in June 1985. The Soviets said he had been caught taking documents from Adolf G. Tolkachev, who was later executed by a firing squad.38 According to Tass, U.S. intelligence agencies had given Tolkachev miniature cameras for photographing secret documents, two-way radios, encoding devices, and special poisons.39 Tolkachev had been compromised by Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer who defected to Moscow after the CIA fired him over drug and alcohol use.

  The Soviets have few if any female KGB officers, and they always seem surprised when the Americans use them. So the CIA has tended to use many women in Moscow. One, Martha Peterson, was expelled in 1977 after she was caught acting as the operations officer for Ogorodnik.

  One CIA officer was expelled while testing the RT-804 transmitter, which sends ten thousand characters to satellites in coded bursts that last only a few seconds. The same model had been confiscated by Cuban intelligence several years earlier. The Soviets expelled another CIA officer after he paid off a man who had been sent to Moscow years earlier as a contract employee, then disappeared. The man resurfaced in the early 1980s. He claimed the Soviets had imprisoned him and had set him free after he had served time in prison. Now, he said, he wanted his back salary from the CIA. The CIA decided to make contact with the man, knowing it might be a provocation but feeling obligated to pay him since he had indeed been a CIA agent for many years. But the CIA’s loyalties had been misplaced. The man had apparently been working for the Soviets all along. When a CIA officer approached the meeting site with money in hand, the KGB was waiting for him.

  The CIA, with the help of NSA, intercepted a variety of civilian and military communications in Moscow. Besides equipment installed on the top floor of the American embassy in Moscow, the CIA used a device planted inside a tree stump outside of Moscow to pick up microwave transmissions and relay them to other receivers. Another device was installed in a sewer and tapped military telephone lines. The Soviets eventually discovered both devices.

  While the CIA has always applauded officers who successfully recruit agents overseas, it has tended to treat those who handle defectors as baby-sitters. As a rule, defectors simply walk into an embassy and volunteer themselves. No cunning is required to elicit their cooperation, so no plaudits are handed out to the officers who bring them in and handle them. Yet defectors can provide information just as valuable as agents who remain in place. Because they can be debriefed more leisurely, their information is usually far more comprehensive.

  It was these institutional attitudes that contributed to the redefection of Vitaly S. Yurchenko, who was easily the most important KGB officer to defect to the United States. After ninety-three days in the hands of the CIA, Yurchenko returned to the Soviet Union in 1985, claiming he had been kidnapped and drugged. In fact, the CIA had mishandled him, treating him coldly and assigning to him guards from the Office of Security who routinely treated him as a prisoner.40

  Under William Webster, defector handling was upgraded. In 1990, he appointed a respected intelligence officer from the Soviet/East European Division to head the resettlement center and coordinate debriefing of defectors. With strong backing from Webster, the officer took charge of defector-handling and doubled the size of the defector handling staff to sixty employees, including clerical personnel. The staff now includes a full-time psychiatrist and a full-time psychologist to help defectors adjust. A financial adviser has been added to help defectors with the management of their funds. Each defector is now given two weeks of instruction in American life. A senior officer keeps in touch with chief executive officers of major corporations in order to place defectors in jobs.

  Because of all the difficulties associated with recruiting agents in Moscow, some of the most fruitful operations directed against the Soviet Union have taken place in other countries. While these operations are carried out by local stations, they are coordinated by the Soviet/East Europe Division within the Directorate of Operations. SE Division is divided into four main groups: the CI Group, which is responsible for counterintelligence matters; the Internal Operations Group, which focuses on operations within the Soviet bloc; the External Operations Group, which focuses on Soviet-bloc activities elsewhere in the world; and the Reports Group, which processes intelligence reporting on the Soviet Union. In addition, a Support Branch oversees security, office furnishings, equipment, and personnel matters. A member of the staff of the chief of SE division is in charge of covert action—mainly publishing of books and other press material within the Soviet Union. The books are not traceable to the CIA.

  A key goal of the Soviet/East Europe Division has been acquisition of Soviet military equipment, which may be uncovered in the most unlikely places. For example, when the Soviets left Ghana in 1966, they abandoned equipment that the CIA obtained. For a decade, the agency also procured some of the latest Soviet weaponry through the family of the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.41

  The Defense Department publishes a classified list of Soviet equipment and parts it would like to obtain, including whole airplanes. Next to each listing is the price the department would be willing to pay. In tasking agents, the CIA can then quote the price tags for each item. Because of this program, the CIA was able to obtain Soviet missiles during the Vietnam War and design ways to beam false signals to disrupt their guidance systems.

  By knowing what the other side was doing, the CIA was able to provide successive administrations with information that enabled the U.S. to initiate defensive measures and also dispelled fears that might have led to preemptive strikes.

  “The success was there was no war. That was the biggest success, that deterrence actually worked,” Edward W. Proctor, who was deputy director for intelligence from 1971 to 1976, said.42

  As the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union and the U.S. inched toward being friends rather than foes, the CIA began to shift its resources from the Soviet/East Europe Division into other areas. To coordinate these new priorities, the CIA established special centers to focus the efforts of all the directorates on the latest international problems—terrorism and narcotics.

  7

  New Targets

  WHEN FBI AGENTS ARRESTED FAWAZ YOUNIS, A LEBANESE terrorist who had hijacked a plane at Beirut International Airport, it looked like another coup for the bureau. Younis, a used-car dealer who reported directly to the leadership of the Shiite Amal militia, had commandeered a Royal Jordanian jet on June 11, 1985. He brutalized its armed guards and demanded that the plane fly him and his henchmen to Tunis so he could deliver a message to a meeting of the Arab League. When the plane was denied landing privileges, Younis had the pilots fly him back to Beirut. After allowing the passengers to leave, Younis had his fellow terrorists blow the plane up as h
e read a ringing statement on the need to expel Palestinians from Lebanon, his embattled homeland. Three Americans were among the passengers who were released unharmed.

  Two years later, the FBI arrested Younis after he had been lured to an eighty-one-foot yacht off the coast of Cyprus. Not revealed at the time was the fact that the CIA had enticed Younis onto the boat in the first place.

  The CIA’s involvement was made possible by a classified intelligence directive, known as a “finding,” signed by President Reagan in January 1986. It authorized the CIA to identify terrorists who had committed crimes against Americans abroad and help bring them to the U.S. for trial. The action resulted from a recommendation by a task force under the direction of then vice president George Bush. A few months later, Congress passed legislation giving the FBI authority to investigate all terrorist acts against Americans and to go after those responsible, no matter where.

  That same year, CIA Director William Casey established a counterterrorism center. Its purpose was to bring together each of the agency’s directorates to deal with terrorism and to coordinate the CIA’s efforts with other federal agencies. Since then, three other centers have been established: one to combat narcotics, one to direct counterintelligence, and a third nonproliferation center to coordinate intelligence on the spread of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. While the centers are housed within the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence or, in the case of the counterintelligence center, in the Directorate of Operations, they are considered to be intelligence community activities that coordinate with the dozen other intelligence agencies in the government. Under the U.S. intelligence system, the director of Central Intelligence coordinates the work and submits the budgets of each agency within the intelligence community.

  The first director of the counterterrorism center was Dewey Clarridge, a flamboyant CIA operations officer given to smoking large cigars and working sixteen-hour days. It was the Counterterrorism Center, under Clarridge’s direction, that lured Younis into the trap. The instrument for that scheme was Jamal Hamdan. Originally a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, Hamdan knew Younis, and in March 1987, the CIA began paying him to renew their friendship.

  Over the next seven months, the two men had nearly sixty phone conversations and meetings—most of them recorded by the CIA. Obligingly, Younis detailed his complicity in the hijacking for his friend. In one such encounter in Hamdan’s high-rise apartment in Cyprus, Younis confided, “I got inside, and I locked the plane’s captain in the cockpit. The people were on the floor, their hands on their heads—everyone, no exceptions. I got a stewardess and asked her about the security men. There were eight. I took their neckties and tied their hands behind their backs. . . . We started beating them. We took four machine guns and eight pistols from [them]. We kept them tied up forty-eight hours.”43

  Under CIA direction, Hamdan conned Younis into thinking he could make him rich. At one point, he lent him $4,000. Finally, he told him he would introduce him to a drug dealer named “Joseph.” Younis, who was then unemployed, had two young sons to support. He could not wait.

  Hamdan arranged for Younis to meet him in Cyprus on September 11 at the Sheraton Hotel in Limassol, Cyprus. On the morning of September 13, they took a speedboat from the hotel marina. After ninety minutes, they were in international waters. It was then that they boarded a yacht called Skunk Kilo, supplied by the Pentagon. Two attractive women—both FBI agents—were lounging on the deck. But instead of introducing Younis to “Joseph,” two other FBI agents kicked Younis’s feet from under him and slammed him to the deck. Younis landed on both his wrists, breaking them. FBI special agent Dimitry Droujinsky, who spoke Arabic fluently, informed Younis that he was being arrested for a terrorist act against American citizens and would be taken to the United States for trial.

  Younis was convicted of conspiracy, hostage taking, and air piracy. He is serving a term of thirty years at Leavenworth federal penitentiary in Kansas.44

  Well before the CIA established a counterterrorism center in 1986, the agency had been involved in combating the problem. For example, seven South Moluccan terrorists, armed with explosives, a carbine, pistol, and knives, took over the Indonesian consulate in Amsterdam on December 4, 1976. Demanding that the Dutch government recognize the nonexistent Republic of South Molucca in Indonesia, they took hostage twenty-one children who were attending school that day in the building, along with fifteen others. The terrorists lined a room with explosives. They threatened to blow up the hostages. The Amsterdam police decided they would only storm the embassy if any hostages were shot.

  Meanwhile, with the consent of the Dutch government, the CIA dispatched a technician who crawled through a sewer pipe and into the embassy’s basement. There, he planted a listening device in a wall so the CIA could eavesdrop on the terrorists. Several days later, a gun went off inside the embassy. The police were about to storm the building, which would have meant many of the hostages would have been killed. But the listening device picked up the fact that one of the terrorists had accidentally dropped his gun, and it had gone off. The police waited out the terrorists. After fifteen days, they finally gave up. Each was sentenced to six years in jail. Because the CIA had known what was going on inside the embassy, no lives were lost.

  Operating from the sixth floor of the old CIA building in McLean, the counterterrorism center today has some two hundred CIA employees. In addition, ten people are detailed from other agencies, including the FBI, NSA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Defense Department. Among other things, the center lists terrorist organizations and threats on a computer system available to other government agencies. Known as Desist, the system is manned twenty-four hours a day.

  The counterterrorism center coordinated the government’s investigation of the destruction of Pan Am 103, the plane that exploded four days before Christmas, 1988, over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 passengers and crew members on board. With the help of other agencies and countries, the CIA determined that high-ranking Libyan officials, including the brother-in-law of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, ordered the bombing of that plane and a French jumbo jet that exploded in midair in 1989. The bombings were believed to be in retaliation for the 1986 bombing of Tripoli by U.S. warplanes.45

  In preventing terrorism, the counterterrorism center operates behind the scenes. If a known terrorist is traveling, the CIA passes the word to each country on his itinerary. The countries either refuse to allow the terrorist to enter or if he is a fugitive, have him arrested. The CIA’s role rarely comes out.

  Several years ago, the CIA proposed to the State Department that it threaten to expose the fact that countries such as Hungary were helping to subsidize the operations of Abu Nidal’s terrorist organization by allowing it to set up companies that traded with Hungary. It later turned out that Hungary had also given refuge to an international terrorist known as Carlos in 1979. The State Department agreed to the plan, which entailed drawing up a “white paper” detailing Hungary’s complicity. The plan worked.

  “We discovered we had a new weapon—the threat of publicity,” a former State Department official said. “In every case, it worked. . . . We got cooperation.”

  “We’ve taken terrorism from the late 1970s, when there were more than one hundred incidents a year, with several casualties and deaths, to the point where it is de minimis domestically, including foreign groups operating in the U.S.,” Oliver (Buck) Reveil, a former associate deputy director of the FBI, said.46 This is due, in part, to the counterterrorism center.

  The coordinated approach has been so successful that William Webster set up two additional centers, one to combat narcotics and one to coordinate counterintelligence. A third center to combat proliferation began in September 1991, under Acting CIA Director Richard J. Kerr. Headed originally by Howard Hart, a ruddy-faced former operations officer, the counternarcotics center consists of several hundred CIA employees who work in windowless offices in the basement of the new CIA headquarters
building. The staff includes photo interpreters, political analysts, operations officers, and technicians. In addition, representatives of each intelligence organization and federal law enforcement agency in the government are detailed to the center for two-year terms.

  The center collects information about narcotics trafficking so it can be used by law enforcement agencies to help obtain arrests and convictions. With the aid of satellites, the center tracks drug shipments on the high seas and pinpoints laboratories and fields where the coca and other drug-related plants are grown. It then passes the information to local law enforcement agencies so they can take action. Until the Gulf War, the counternarcotics center was one of the largest users of satellite time in the CIA.

  Like the other two centers, the CIA’s counterintelligence center is a community-wide function. Originally headed by Gardner R. (Gus) Hathaway, a former chief of the Soviet/East Europe Division and a former Moscow station chief, it concentrates on countering efforts by hostile intelligence services to thwart and penetrate the CIA within the U.S. and particularly overseas. Its function overlaps to some degree with the Office of Security, which is charged with protecting the agency and its secrets.

  Within the modern CIA, the approach that James Angleton brought to counterintelligence is a bad memory. There is a misconception that counterintelligence officers need to be a different breed—suspicious to the point of being paranoid. Often, this outlook is referred to as a “counterintelligence mentality.” This is pure malarkey. People who catch spies need to be no more and no less suspicious than people who catch murderers, bank robbers, or white-collar criminals. To be effective, any professional investigator must bring a balanced approach to his job.