Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Having started as a special assistant in 1988, Bellinger was the first one to work solely at the CIA. Because it took so long to master the intricacies of the CIA, Webster kept him three years rather than the usual two.

  Like the other assistants, Bellinger brought with him impressive credentials. He had graduated cum laude from Princeton University and become a Woodrow Wilson fellow at the University of Virginia. He had then graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of Harvard International Law Journal.

  Besides attending meetings with the director, Bellinger worked on such items as covert action proposals, significant intelligence operations, defectors, inspector general reports and recommendations, significant legal decisions, security disapprovals, and congressional testimony and letters. Each year, some twenty people, including contractors, were fired as possible security risks in the intelligence community and appealed their dismissals to the DCI. In addition, one or two CIA employees were dismissed for security reasons each year. Bellinger reviewed these cases before Webster signed off on them.

  Webster’s schedule was grueling, and he led an active social life as well. After the death of his first wife in 1984, Webster began dating Sally Tompkins, a National Park Service architectural historian. Tompkins had been to several FBI receptions, and Webster had noticed her. She was a family friend of Roger Young, who was then in charge of public and congressional affairs for the FBI.226 Young suggested her to Webster as a tennis partner. The two dated until Tompkins died of cancer at the age of fifty-five on November 27, 1989.227

  Lynda Jo Clugston played tennis but dressed more conservatively than some of Webster’s other dates. Webster first met her in December 1984, at a function for singles at the National Symphony Orchestra.228

  Clugston is blond and extremely attractive, with light blue eyes and a clear complexion. The daughter of a funeral home director, she had applied to the CIA but had been rejected because of a minor health problem. She entered the hotel sales business—“I wanted to go into undercover work, and that’s how I got into hotels,” she would say—and became director of sales at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Later, she was director of sales and marketing at the Watergate Hotel.

  A few weeks after they met, Webster called Clugston at her office at the Willard Hotel to ask her out.

  “They thought I was in some terrible trouble because the FBI was calling,” Clugston said. “I was in the bathroom and my secretary . . . was banging on the door saying, ‘The FBI is calling. What have you done?’”

  In late 1986, Webster invited her to a dinner given by Count Wilhelm Wachtmeister, the Swedish ambassador in Washington, and his wife, Ulla. After that, they began seeing each other off and on.

  Dating the DCI was difficult. When Clugston met Webster occasionally during out-of-town trips, she found the security detail consisted of three cars. Every time she entered his hotel room—even for something as innocent as meeting him for breakfast—alarms went off.

  “There was a guy sitting there and every time you went in and out it would beep, and people would come running,” she said.

  When they were in Boston, a cousin of Clugston’s dropped off some New England clam chowder at the doorstep of the house she was staying in. As she was about to drive off, CIA security guards pulled their car up behind her and questioned her about the package she had left. Before they gave it to Webster, the security guards X-rayed it.

  At times, the security came in handy. Babs, Webster’s basset hound, had a habit of running out the door of Webster’s Bethesda home whenever the door was opened. The CIA men caught Babs and brought him back inside. The fact that the CIA usually drove Webster was a blessing as well. When Webster drove his own BMW, it often wound up in a body shop for a week.

  By 1990, Clugston had moved to Boston to take a job with the Four Seasons Hotel. But the relationship continued as Webster visited Clugston in Boston. Webster asked her to come back to Washington, and they both realized that marriage was likely. Webster told his children—William, Drusilla, and Katherine. On October 20, 1990, they were married in the Eisenhower Chapel of the National Presbyterian Center.

  Roberta Peters, a friend of the bride’s, sang at the wedding. At the reception afterward in the Riverview Room of the Watergate Hotel overlooking the Potomac River, she sang “Always,” a cappella.

  The seventy guests were limited to those the couple considered to be close friends or family, including FBI director William S. Sessions and the two senators from Missouri, John C. Danforth and Christopher Bond. The only work-related guests were Richard Stolz, then deputy director for operations; Richard Kerr, the deputy director of Central Intelligence; William Baker, who had been director of public affairs; Roger Young, the former FBI public affairs director; Robert Gates, then in the White House; and Russell Bruemmer, the former Webster special assistant and CIA general counsel.

  Clugston, never married before, was thirty-four; Webster was sixty-six. Even after remarrying, Webster kept a photo of his late wife, Drusilla, in his office at the CIA.

  Ten days after the wedding, President Bush and his wife, Barbara, attended a dinner in honor of Webster’s marriage to Clugston. It was given in Georgetown by Betty Beale, a former gossip columnist, and her husband, George Graeber.

  The other guests at the dinner were Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor and her husband, John; Antony Ac-land, the British ambassador, and his wife, Jennifer; James W. Symington, a former Missouri congressman who was U.S. chief of protocol, and his wife, Sylvia; and William Cafritz, a Washington real estate developer, and his wife, Buffy.

  Beale had urged Webster to marry Lynda.

  “What are you waiting for? You’re going to lose her,” she would say.229

  Despite the CIA’s success during the Gulf War and the support Webster received from Bush, press reports continued that Bush wanted the DCI out. Usually, the reports said the president wanted to replace Webster with James R. Lilley, who was about to leave his post as ambassador to the People’s Republic of China.

  Unlike Casey, Webster was not a foreign policy junkie. Nor did he want to be part of the policy-making team. He had taken the job on the specific condition that he would not have cabinet status. When he was with Bush, the two spoke in sentence fragments, as if in code, leading some to wonder if Webster could speak English. Yet Webster was a master at public speaking, and his assistants never failed to admire his crisp writing.

  While foreign affairs did not come easily to him, Webster worked hard at mastering its complexities. He asked the right questions and digested all the facts. But he was a lawyer, not a foreign affairs expert. There was no way he could ever approach the facility of a Robert Gates in analyzing and commenting on world affairs.

  The director of Central Intelligence did not have to be an expert in each of the disciplines under his command. No one could have the background in intelligence, science, political science, and the dozens of other specialties that the CIA makes use of. Webster’s style was to manage by eliciting the opinions of the experts and making sure those opinions got to the right people. But to many of those around Bush, that was not good enough. People such as Brent Scowcroft, the president’s assistant for national security affairs, wanted a foreign affairs guru like himself in the job.

  Eventually, since Webster could not remain in office forever, the stories of his departure would have to prove correct, and so they did—four years after he became DCI. Webster had always wanted to return to the practice of law. At the age of sixty-seven, time was running out to get a lucrative offer from a law firm. With the Gulf War over and increasing pressure from the oversight committees to alter the structure of the intelligence community, Webster felt it would be a good time to leave. Moreover, having just remarried, he wanted time for fun.

  “He hasn’t taken a two-week vacation in twenty years,” Lynda Webster said, more than four months before Webster announced that he was retiring. “My guess is Bill will at some point say, ‘Enough.�
� You get bored with a job. He’s been doing it four years. I’d get bored after four years. He wants to be able to take time off and play. We haven’t been able to have a honeymoon.”230

  “I think the point will come where he says, ‘I want to take a weekend off and go somewhere and not have nine [security] men trundling around,’” she said. “He’s not twenty-two. You calculate the number of years he has to play. He has earned it.”

  If anything, according to those close to him, the repeated reports that he would leave the agency had only strengthened his determination to stay.

  On May 8, 1991, Bush called a press conference to announce that Webster had decided to retire. Bush said the decision was Webster’s, and he said Webster had done a “superb job,” providing impartial intelligence rather than trying to shape policy. Calling U.S. intelligence during the Gulf War “outstanding,” the president said the intelligence community had performed “fantastically.”

  “I hate to see him go,” the president said.231

  “We had in the person of Judge Webster a former federal judge who was a strong and deep believer in the rule of law who, as director, complied not only with the letter of the law but with the spirit of the law as well,” said Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson, a Los Angeles Democrat who formerly was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “After our experience with Director Casey, he was just what the doctor ordered.”

  “Under Webster, I would say the biggest change was bringing the clandestine service, along with the rest of the agency, toward recognizing the reality of congressional oversight and [instilling] a positive attitude toward working with the congressional side, in terms of being forthcoming in answers and being cooperative,” Robert Gates said. “I think the rest of the agency was already there by 1987 [when Webster took over].

  “Casey’s attitude I think communicated itself to the clandestine service more. Virtually every dispute was in the clandestine service. I think Bill Webster has made the clandestine service catch up. He has also been forward-looking by responding to new threats with the counterintelligence center, the counternarcotics center, and some capabilities that reflect better ways of dealing with old issues,” Gates said.232

  In an outdoor ceremony on July 1, Kerr, his deputy, presented Webster with the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Motioning to several of Webster’s former assistants in the audience, Kerr said, “We don’t take very well to outsiders, but Judge Webster chose his assistants judiciously.”

  By then, employees had grown to like Webster; the rumors that he was not on top of things had vanished.

  President Bush nominated Robert Gates, the former deputy director of the agency under William Casey, to succeed Webster, touching off a major debate about Gates’s knowledge—or lack thereof—about the Iran-contra affair. Webster had planned to leave by the end of July, but as the debate about Gates’s qualifications intensified, Bush asked him to stay on until the end of August, giving the lie to press reports that Webster had been pushed out.

  On July 25, 1991, Bush invited Webster, his family, and a small coterie of intelligence community officials to a cocktail party at the White House. Referring to Webster as a “true patriot” who performed in an “outstanding” manner during the Gulf War, Bush presented him with the National Security Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil award given by the U.S. government. Bush had previously awarded the medal to Gen. Colin Powell, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Secretary of State James Baker, and Defense Secretary Richard Cheney in appreciation for their efforts during the Persian Gulf War.233

  By September 1991, Webster had become a partner with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in Washington. Webster had served four years, longer than all but three of the DCIs—Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and William Casey. During that time, he had restored to the CIA credibility, its most important asset.

  It is always difficult to predict how much of a CIA director’s contribution will remain with the agency. Certainly the counternarcotics and counterintelligence centers will remain, along with the more formal and stringent procedures for approving covert action proposals. Because it was so overdue, Webster’s change in policy toward dealing with the press can be expected to continue as well.

  25

  Selling the Agency

  FROM THE CIA’S EARLIEST DAYS, THE AGENCY HAD A PRESS spokesman whose job was to say “no comment” to virtually every question. The job was handled by an assistant to the director, who usually had other duties as well, such as coordinating training or arranging for the director’s congressional testimony or speeches.

  “It was pretty much a ‘no comment’ office,” Walter N. Elder, executive assistant to Allen Dulles, John McCone, and Adm. William Raborn, said. “People badgered the agency, and most of the time, the assistant had nothing to say.”234

  Walter Bedell Smith appointed the first person to the job in May 1951. He was Col. Chester B. Hansen, a former public relations aide to Gen. Omar Bradley. He was followed in October 1952 by Col. Stanley Grogan, an Army public affairs specialist. Then came Joseph A. Goodwin, a former operations officer and Associated Press editor; Angus Thuermer, a former intelligence officer and AP correspondent; and An drew T. Falkiewicz, a career U.S. Information Agency officer.235

  If these assistants had anything to say to the press, it was very specific, very circumscribed, and only on orders of the DCI. For example, when Francis Gary Powers was scheduled to testify before congressional committees about the U-2 incident, then CIA director John McCone directed Grogan to call a dozen members of the press—from Ben Bradlee of Newsweek to John Scali of ABC. Contrary to press reports, Grogan told them, McCone would not be appearing before congressional committees that week to testify on the incident himself.

  “He has notified the committees that are concerned,” Grogan told the press, “and they, with him, will set dates . . . when he will appear before Congress.”236

  In addition to conveying such messages, CIA directors such as John McCone and Richard Helms talked with particular reporters or columnists who tended to be favorably disposed to the agency.

  “Arthur Krock and Scotty Reston [the New York Times columnists] were friends of McCone,” Elder said. “He talked with them on a background basis.”

  But mostly, reporters who called the CIA for comment on allegations about the agency encountered silence on the other end of the line.

  “The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent,” George Washington said in a letter to one of his officers during the American Revolution, “and need not be further urged. All that remains for me to add is that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible.”237

  With that in mind, the CIA for most of its existence has treated the American press as an adversary—a target that was to be manipulated at times but never confided in or trusted. If the CIA thought it could use the press to its advantage, it did.

  Over the years, the agency put dozens of American journalists or foreign journalists working for American media on its payroll, tasking them to obtain secrets. The Church Committee and William Colby put an end to the practice, recognizing that to use the press for clandestine purposes impaired its credibility and hampered its effectiveness. When he became director, George Bush further tightened the restrictions. But as the Church Committee conducted its hearings and the media played up the abuses engaged in over the years by the CIA, the agency’s disdain for the press intensified.238

  The CIA had an Alice in Wonderland approach: If the agency were to deny a charge, the reasoning went, then the CIA’s decision not to comment on other charges would be interpreted as meaning those charges were true. If other intelligence services knew that the CIA talked to the press, they would never deal with the agency. Sources and methods must be protected, the CIA said, refusing to acknowledge that there were shadings of secrets, that the fact that the CIA has a headquarters building in Langley could be considered a method, and that everything about the CIA is classified. Yet it was
unrealistic and self-defeating for the agency to withdraw from American society.

  America was not like other countries, where secrecy was often considered a virtue. America had been founded by men who considered the press to be an essential partner to government. They had won their freedom from the British Crown in part because of the ability of an unfettered press to publish tracts questioning established authority. The experiment had worked well. A free press stimulated the country’s robust economy and competitive spirit. In the end, the CIA, like any other American institution, needed the support of the American people, who formed their views in part from what they read in the press.

  Other more established government agencies such as the FBI were more sophisticated at dealing with the press. They knew how to tell their stories, how to head off bad raps, and how to balance criticism without giving away all their secrets or appearing to sources to be untrustworthy. At any given moment, the FBI is pursuing thousands of criminal investigations, each one of which must be kept secret. The FBI, like the CIA, could pay someone to say “no comment” each time a question came in about its work. But the FBI realized there were ways to help the press around these sensitive areas, to deal with allegations without giving away everything the FBI does—ways the CIA had yet to understand.

  The CIA could be so good at influencing other governments, yet it seemed naive, almost obtuse, in dealing with the American press. It was one of the CIA’s greatest failings. Often, it was simply a disinclination to focus on the problem.

  “I don’t know if the CIA should explain itself better. I suppose it could, but I have to admit, I don’t know how it would go about that,” said Richard M. Bissell, Jr., deputy director for operations from 1958 to 1962.239