Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Indeed, of all the CIA’s offices, the Office of Security is the one most likely to be heavy-handed where sensitivity is called for, most likely to overlook proper legal procedure, and most apt to yearn for the days before the Church Committee hearings when the CIA was far less accountable to Congress.

  Nowhere is this attitude better illustrated than in a talk that Jerry G. Brown has given often to new CIA employees. Brown joined the Office of Security in 1956 and most recently headed its Clearance Division. Heaping ridicule on the efforts of the Church Committee and the presidentially appointed Rockefeller Commission that investigated the abuses, Brown said the CIA’s Operation Chaos—the effort to investigate domestic dissidents—was seen by our “unsophisticated detractors” as “a purposeful attempt by the agency and the Nixon administration to subvert the domestic political process by spying on American citizens.”

  This was not the case at all, Brown claimed. In fact, he said, Operation Chaos represented an effort to address “serious national security questions.” In saying this, he overlooked the fact that by spying on American citizens, the CIA had violated its own charter.

  “Those who would destroy us and our efforts were not the Soviets and our other worldwide enemies but our own elected legislative representatives,” Brown declared.

  While Brown acknowledged that some reforms were needed, the investigators did not want to hear the truth, he said.

  “The tragedy of the congressional and Rockefeller Commission inquiries into Operation Chaos was that none of the staff investigators bothered to find out how the operation began,” Brown said. If they had, they would have found that it began with what Brown called a serious problem—the leak in 1967 to Ramparts magazine of the fact that the CIA was secretly funding the National Student Association.

  According to Brown, this funding was essential so that the National Student Association could fight Soviet efforts to control international youth organizations. The tip to Ramparts, he said, was “one of the most flagrant leaks of classified information ever known to the agency.”

  And who leaked the information? According to Brown, it was the KGB, which obtained the information directly from the CIA and gave it “through individuals peripherally connected with the magazine” to Ramparts.

  “The exposure of the agency’s involvement with the National Student Association by Ramparts was totally inspired by the KGB,” Brown said.

  Brown claimed the CIA learned this information from a Soviet defector. The claim fit in neatly with his theme that the Church Committee investigations into CIA abuses were misdirected. The leak contributed to greater scrutiny of the agency, and that led to investigations that threatened CIA employees who had participated in the abuses. The only problem was, he was wrong.

  In order to fund the student organization, the CIA had had to tell hundreds of National Student Association officers over the years about the secret program. As the source of the story, the Ramparts article named Michael Wood, a National Student Association employee who had been told about the funding by one of these officers. The author of the piece, Sol Stern, and Cord Meyer, the CIA officer in charge of the CIA funding operation, both corroborated the fact that Wood was the source of the story.172

  “Having learned about the secret funding as the result of a conversation with an excessively loquacious NSA officer who did know the facts [about the CIA’s funding], this young man, Michael Wood, decided that it was his duty to expose the whole relationship,” Meyer wrote in his book Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA.173

  The CIA’s naïveté in thinking that it could inform successive generations of the association’s officers about the funding without its leaking to the press had led to the scandal in the first place. In suggesting that the leak to Ramparts was a sinister KGB plot rather than the inevitable result of spreading the word among hundreds of young students, Brown had overlooked the obvious. But far more troubling is the failure by a senior official of the Office of Security entrusted with training new employees to recognize that by subverting the law, the CIA subverts the very freedoms it is trying to preserve, while failing to achieve its objectives.174

  The same unfocused thinking led to one of the major screw-ups in the history of U.S. espionage investigations—another one where the Office of Security was involved. It was the case of Karl F. Koecher, a Czech Intelligence Service officer who managed to get a job at the CIA in 1973 as a translator. With his stunning wife, Hana, Koecher attended sex orgies and wife-swapping parties in Washington and New York. At the parties, Hana Koecher, also a Czech Intelligence Service officer, would take on four to five men at the same time. But it was all for the cause. Many of the partygoers were fellow CIA employees who swapped classified information as well as sex with the popular couple. Through his translation work, Koecher learned enough to compromise Aleksandr D. Ogorodnik, a high-ranking Soviet diplomat working as an agent for the CIA. When the KGB confronted him, Ogorodnik committed suicide by taking a poison pill concealed inside a fountain pen given to him by the CIA.175

  After a Czech working for the FBI turned Koecher in, the bureau, which has responsibility for investigating espionage by Americans, followed him for two years without developing enough evidence to prosecute him. In an attempt to get him to confess, the CIA’s Office of Security and the FBI devised a plan to approach him in the fall of 1984. As an officer of the Office of Security would later tell new CIA employees, the FBI and CIA had “absolutely no thought of prosecution. Rather, the idea was to find out how much damage Koecher—who had become a U.S. citizen—had done.

  This is a classic blunder. The agencies investigating espionage become so fixated on finding out what happened that they forget about an equally important goal: prosecuting suspects as a deterrent against future espionage. Often, there is another motive for avoiding this. Prosecution leads to publicity, which can be embarrassing to the agencies involved. A bank that has been defrauded would just as soon not see the case plastered all over the papers, but it has no choice. The CIA and other intelligence agencies can try to hide their mistakes by claiming that prosecutions would air secrets that would compromise the work of the agencies.

  For twenty years, the CIA had a secret agreement with the Justice Department that if criminal conduct occurred within the agency, and it involved classified information that would have to be disclosed outside the CIA, the agency would resolve it internally. That changed under Attorney General Griffin Bell, who decided that no individual in government should be immune from criminal prosecution.

  In 1978, the CIA strenuously objected to prosecuting William P. Kampiles, a former CIA watch officer assigned to analyze incoming traffic at the CIA’s Operations Center. Kampiles had sold portions of a “top secret” technical manual on how to use the KH-11 surveillance satellite to a Soviet agent in Athens for $3,000. What the manual showed was that the satellite transmitted its data up to another satellite instead of down to earth, as would be expected. Because of this ruse, the Soviets thought it was a “dead” satellite.

  Bell took the issue of prosecuting Kampiles to President Carter, who authorized it.

  In 1980, the CIA argued against prosecuting David H. Barnett, a former CIA officer who had been over CIA operations in Jakarta. Barnett got $92,600 for letting the Soviets know that the CIA—through Operation Habrink—had found out how to control the guidance systems for their SA-2 surface-to-air missiles. As a result, Habrink was compromised. Barnett also identified for the Soviets thirty CIA officers and many of their agents.

  The fact that the Soviets already knew that Barnett had given them the information did not deter CIA officials from insisting that Barnett should be let go. Somehow the CIA felt any public discussion of the case would damage the agency and its operations.

  Very often, according to John L. Martin, chief of the Justice Department’s internal security section, who supervised the case, the CIA simply wants to avoid the embarrassment that comes with publicity about its penetrations. Other CIA o
fficials sincerely believe that any information about their operations can only help the other side, a throwback to the days when no highway signs marked the location of CIA’s headquarters, even though airplanes used the building as a landmark when flying into National Airport.

  “The intelligence community had come to believe that every time you prosecuted a spy, you would lose the secret, and that it was better public policy—the best of two evils—to let the spy go and keep the secret,” Bell said. “But I had the idea that you could prosecute these cases without losing the secret.”

  In fact, with professional handling, investigators can prosecute suspects and find out what has been lost. The FBI, in investigating Ronald Pelton, a former National Security Agency employee, did just that. After conning Pelton into revealing what he gave away, the FBI turned the case over to Martin of the Justice Department for prosecution. Often, the Justice Department agrees to bring to the attention of the sentencing judge the fact that the suspect has cooperated, in return for a guilty plea and full disclosure of the spy’s activities. That happened in Pelton’s case, but he still got life in prison.

  In the case of Czech Intelligence Service officer Karl Koecher, none of this was done. The Office of Security and the FBI in effect promised Koecher that he would not be prosecuted if he talked—that he could become a double agent for the CIA, pretending to work for Czech Intelligence while reporting to the CIA—and that he could return to Czechoslovakia if he wished. In fact, neither the FBI nor the CIA had any intention of making Koecher a double agent, thus making the offer improper. Koecher served time in prison waiting for his trial. But in the end, because of the false promise of immunity from prosecution, the Justice Department had to settle for trading Koecher rather than incarcerating him. As part of the deal, Koecher pleaded guilty to espionage.

  When the CIA’s Office of Security later examined how Koecher had been hired by the CIA in the first place, it discovered that his polygraph exam had been poorly conducted. When asked if he was under the control of a hostile intelligence service, Koecher showed some signs of deception. However, Koecher explained away his nervousness by claiming he had briefly tried to serve as a double agent for the FBI. Instead of asking more questions and administering a second test, the polygraph examiner moved on to the next question.

  The same lack of care occurred when the Office of Security polygraphed Larry Wu-Tai Chin, who was hired as a CIA translator even though he was then working for the People’s Republic of China. In a subsequent confession to the FBI, Chin said he had managed to avoid showing deception because the CIA asked all the questions in English instead of in Chinese, his native tongue. It was easier to lie in a foreign language, he said.

  At least in part, the Office of Security was also responsible for the fact that nearly all of the Cuban agents recruited by the CIA over the years have been double agents. Of the thirty-eight Cuban agents working for the CIA at the time they were first exposed in 1987, nearly all had taken polygraph tests, and most had passed. The test results of many of the other agents were deemed inconclusive.

  Polygraph tests are not infallible. The hoary aphorism that the machines are only as good as their operators is true. In this case, the operators had a major deficiency: they did not speak Spanish. In contrast, the FBI was able to avoid accepting many Cuban double agents because it generally administered polygraph tests to them in Spanish.

  Only one CIA operations officer has ever been prosecuted for espionage. Laxness by the Office of Security contributed to the damage he did. Operations officer David H. Barnett began telling the Soviets about CIA operations in Indonesia in 1976, after he had left the agency to start his own business. Faced with mounting debts, he reapplied to the CIA and was hired. At that point, the Office of Security should have polygraphed him, just as all new hires are polygraphed. If he had been polygraphed, his earlier spy activity would presumably have come out. Instead, he was allowed to teach tradecraft to CIA officers who were about to go overseas. In this position, he had extremely valuable information to offer the KGB, which he offered to sell at a meeting with them in Vienna in April 1980.

  When American government agents spotted him in Vienna, the FBI entered the case. However, when the agents first asked about Barnett at the Office of Security in February 1980, they were told he no longer worked for the agency. Later, it turned out that either the Office of Security or the Directorate of Operations had failed to record the fact that he was again working for the CIA. From February until March 1980, the FBI watched Barnett twenty-four hours a day. During that time, the CIA removed him from his sensitive job without letting him know why.

  Barnett pleaded guilty in 1981 and was sentenced to eighteen years in prison.

  Two other espionage cases—that of Christopher J. Boyce and his friend Andrew Daulton Lee, the protagonists in The Falcon and the Snowman, and William P. Kampiles, who sold the manual to the KH-11 spy satellite to the Soviets in Greece—also stemmed in part from laxity by the Office of Security.

  Boyce held a relatively low-level, low-paid position with TRW Inc., which was a CIA contractor on the spy satellite program. He gave classified code material used to transmit photos from the RHYOLITE surveillance satellite to Lee, a drug addict. Lee sold it to the Soviets in Mexico City and shared the proceeds with Boyce.176

  In congressional testimony, Boyce would later describe security at TRW as being so loose that he and his coworkers “regularly partied and boozed it up during working hours within the ‘black vault,’” the supersecret room housing information on the CIA satellite project. “Bacardi rum was usually stored behind the crypto machines,” he said, while a code-destruction machine similar to a blender “was used for making banana daiquiris and Mai Tais.”

  It was the CIA’s Office of Security that was responsible for making sure security procedures were followed by CIA contractors. The Office of Security was also responsible for keeping tight control over classified documents.

  To be sure, the Office of Security has helped to apprehend spies. But unfathomable screwups sometimes mar even those success stories. The best example is the case of Sharon M. Scranage, who was a thirty-year-old operations support assistant for the CIA in Ghana. She gave classified information to her Ghanian boyfriend, Michael Soussoudis, a first cousin of Jerry Rawlings, prime minister of Ghana.

  The case began in Ghana in 1983 when Scranage invited an Office of Security officer to dinner at her home. On the way to the bathroom, he noticed a photo of a man taped to the vanity in her bedroom. The man turned out to be Soussoudis. The photo showed Soussoudis sitting in Scranage’s bed, the covers drawn up to his naked chest.

  The security officer returned to dinner and warned Scranage of the dangers of romances with local nationals, particularly one with a connection to the government. At the time, Ghana was pursuing a staunchly capitalist economic policy but a leftleaning foreign policy, cozying up to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega.

  The security officer and a colleague told the CIA station chief about the romance, and the station chief warned Scranage to break off with Soussoudis. Scranage promised she would. Soussoudis subsequently stayed in the United States for almost a year. But when Soussoudis returned to Ghana, their affair resumed. It was not until Scranage returned to the U.S. for a new posting in the summer of 1985 that the Office of Security gave her a polygraph test

  When the test began to show signs of deception, Scranage at first denied any wrongdoing. Eventually, she admitted she had given her boyfriend extensive secret information. If she did not go along, he made it clear he would break up with her. In fact, she handed Soussoudis virtually everything there was to know about the CIA’s activities in Ghana. She even gave him top-secret cables that she copied in shorthand, then recopied for her lover in longhand.

  Her spying led to the compromise of eight CIA agents in Ghana, who were arrested and imprisoned. In addition, the pro-Marxist head of Ghanian intelligence is believed to have passed on information obtained t
hrough Scranage to the KGB and Cuban intelligence.

  Scranage agreed to cooperate with the FBI and Jerry Brown of the Office of Security to catch Soussoudis, who was an agent of the Ghanian government. The FBI arrested him at a Holiday Inn in Springfield, Virginia.

  After pleading guilty in 1985, Scranage was sentenced to five years in prison. Later, the sentence was reduced to two. Soussoudis was returned to Ghana in exchange for the release from prison of the CIA’s eight agents. The CIA has resettled in the U.S. nearly two dozen Ghanians, including families, who were compromised as a result of the fiasco. The agency has since tightened its regulations on reporting relationships with foreign nationals.

  While the Office of Security had helped apprehend Scranage, its delay in polygraphing her after it became clear she had been dating a relative of the prime minister was inexcusable. Unlike a failure to forecast a political event, this was an avoidable mistake. Indeed, of the six Justice Department espionage prosecutions of CIA employees or employees of contractors to date, only one—that of Edwin G. Moore II, who threw a package of CIA documents over the fence at a Soviet apartment house in Washington—did not involve any mistakes by the Office of Security.177

  More recently, the Office of Security botched one of the biggest spy cases in history by insisting on treating KGB spy Vitaly Yurchenko as a prisoner. This contributed to his decision to redefect three months after he left the Soviet Union in 1985. As the most important KGB officer ever to defect to the U.S., Yurchenko had in his head information about dozens of cases of interest to the Office of Security and the FBI. While he gave away two major cases—that of Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA officer who defected to Moscow, and Ronald Pelton, the former NSA employee who spied for the Soviets—Yurchenko had clues to many more. The CIA and FBI had meant to debrief him for years. If they had, he would almost certainly have led them to a number of other spies.