Today, the Office of Public Affairs has twenty-eight employees, including secretaries. Besides two people who handle media inquiries and four others who clip papers and help in the media area, the staff includes members of the Publication Review Board, which reviews manuscripts, the director’s speechwriters, and an academic coordinator.
Some critics said that in emphasizing public relations, Webster was promoting himself at the expense of the agency. It was a shortsighted view. The truth is that one hand washed the other.
“That is like saying capitalists are mainly interested in making a profit,” Engelberg of the New York Times observed. “That’s true, but in doing that, they make the economy work better. I think Webster was terrified that something the agency does is going to end up on the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post. He would look like an idiot, the president would be angry at him, and his reputation would be ruined. That’s true. So?”
The other side was that by being more open with the press, Webster was taking a risk. What if his policy backfired? What if the agency helped a reporter who wrote a story that damaged an operation? What if the agency turned against him, and the president became displeased with him?
It was so much easier and safer to sit back, as in the old days, and say “no comment.” But to Webster, this was the only way an intelligence agency could function effectively in a democracy.
As a lawyer and former judge, Webster felt just as strongly about the need for an aggressive office of general counsel as he did about an active press office. He wanted a first-rate legal department, one whose advice would be actively sought by CIA executives. But to many, an office of general counsel seemed even more out of place at the CIA than an office of public affairs.
26
The Lawyers
FOR MUCH OF THE CIA’S EXISTENCE, THE OFFICE OF General Counsel occupied a tenuous position within the CIA, and with good reason. It was the CIA’s job to break laws, not to follow them. While the laws that the CIA broke were those of other countries, it was easy for the distinction between foreign laws and American laws to be lost. In establishing the agency, Congress seemed to lend support to the notion that the CIA was a law unto itself by outlining in only the skimpiest detail what it was supposed to do. Beyond centralizing the collection of intelligence, it was supposed to advise the National Security Council on intelligence matters, protect intelligence sources and methods, never exercise police or internal security functions, and “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC may from time to time direct.”289
By reviewing the legislative history of the 1947 act, one could divine that Congress also intended the CIA to collect intelligence by engaging in espionage overseas. But nowhere in the law was covert action mentioned, and no other restrictions were placed on the new agency’s activities.290
Lawrence R. Houston, the agency’s first general counsel, helped draft the law establishing the agency. According to him, the clause permitting the agency to engage in “such other functions” as the NSC directed referred only to intelligence collection, not to covert action. An avuncular graduate of Harvard College and the University of Virginia School of Law, Houston was the first to admit that, by later using the clause to justify covert action, the agency was probably stretching the original intent.
“All during this drafting of the act, all during the presentations to congressional committees and debates, and all during the consideration in Congress, there was no mention of covert action,” Houston said. “It was entirely intelligence. The CIA’s function was to do the best collection and coordination of intelligence information and to produce intelligence assessments and estimates. That was [to be] the sole product.”291
It was only after the law was passed, at the direction of Truman administration officials, that Houston wrote an opinion saying that covert action could be carried out by the CIA if the president gave it a directive and if Congress gave it the money to carry it out.
“I was not particularly happy about this, but you have to remember the great pressure to do something [about the communist menace],” Houston said.
With few other legal restrictions and little oversight, the CIA was soon plotting assassination attempts and even violating existing laws on the grounds the national security required it. Only rarely did the CIA consult the general counsel on activities later determined by the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission to be abuses. For example, the general counsel knew nothing of the CIA’s plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. In those few instances when the general counsel was informed, the lawyers objected, and the practices were stopped.
In an effort to identify narcotics traffickers, the CIA in the fall of 1973 began intercepting telephone calls made between the U.S. and Latin America. John S. Warner, then Houston’s deputy, pointed out that it was against the law to eavesdrop on American citizens, and the CIA stopped the practice. Earlier, Warner objected when he learned that Richard Helms had approved the imprisonment of Yuri I. Nosenko, the KGB major who had defected to the U.S. in 1964. Because of objections from Warner and others, Helms ordered a review of the case. Eventually, the CIA released Nosenko.292
In view of the general counsel’s status, it was not surprising that the office was considered a backwater. While it had lured some good lawyers from respected law firms because of the interesting work, others who were not as sharp far outnumbered them. Other government lawyers who dealt with the office found it to be sleepy, particularly before the Church Committee hearings. William Casey symbolically downgraded the office even further by banishing it from the CIA’s compound to rented buildings in McLean.
That began to change under William Webster. As a lawyer and former judge, Webster wanted a first-rate legal department. His entire approach to government emphasized adherence to the Constitution, and he was not going to tolerate any winking at the law. Webster began in September 1987 by appointing Russell J. Bruemmer, his thirty-five-year-old former special assistant at the FBI, as special counsel to investigate the agency’s involvement in the Iran-contra affair.
Bruemmer had left the FBI to join Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. Webster admired Bruemmer’s sharp legal mind, his ability to absorb vast quantities of information and make sense of it, and his low-key approach. Six feet two inches tall, with blond hair and a mustache, Bruemmer had grown up in Iowa, where his father was a college financial administrator. He had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan’s law school and had been editor in chief of the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform.
Bruemmer became close to Webster when Webster first moved to Washington to become FBI director. Webster’s first wife, Drusilla, had stayed behind so their daughter could finish the school year at her high school. After Webster left the FBI, Bruemmer maintained a social relationship with Webster. Many thought the two had a father-son relationship.
At the CIA, it became Bruemmer’s job to find out what the role of agency employees had been in the Iran-contra affair and to recommend disciplinary action if warranted. The Iran-contra scandal broke in November 1986 with disclosures that the Reagan administration had secretly sold arms to Iran in exchange for help in obtaining the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon and at the same time, had used profits from the sales to pay for covert military assistance to the Nicaraguan contras.
Webster could have swept the CIA’s involvement under the rug by saying—as Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said of the beating of a black motorist by Los Angeles police officers—that the abuses that occurred during the Iran-contra affair were an aberration.
Every year, the CIA quietly terminated five to ten employees for embezzlement or security questions. But the concept of meting out punishment for misjudgment, failure to follow established procedure, or not being truthful with appropriate authorities was alien. Those CIA employees who administered LSD to unsuspecting Americans—an act considered by most CIA officers to be the most unforgivable offense i
n the CIA’s history of abuses—received only a letter of reprimand from Allen Dulles. The letters were not placed in their personnel files.293
Webster’s life at the CIA would have been far easier if he had forgotten about Iran-contra. But that was not Webster’s way. He chose his battles carefully. Allowing CIA mugs to be sold by the agency’s employee activity association was not an issue worth alienating employees over. Misusing the CIA in violation of the law was.
As a result of Bruemmer’s investigation, Webster dismissed two CIA employees who had not been candid with the inspector general. They had not lied, but they had not told the whole story. The CIA issued letters of reprimand to four others, and one employee was demoted.294
Bruemmer found that several other key officials—Thomas A. Twetten, then assistant deputy director for operations, and Robert Gates, then deputy director of Central Intelligence—had received bits and pieces of information about Iran-contra, but did not realize at the time what was happening. On the other hand, Twetten, who would later succeed Richard Stolz as deputy director for operations, had taken positive steps to protect the agency: he warned that Manucher Ghorbanifar, one of the middlemen in the shipment of arms to Iran, should not be trusted. He advised White House aide Oliver L. North that it was not a good idea to use nongovernment people in his clandestine operation. While Twetten became involved in overseeing the distribution of funds for some of the operation, he made sure that what he did was authorized and within the law. Moreover, every penny had been properly accounted for.
It was clear to Bruemmer that CIA officers had been influenced by Casey’s attitude. Casey didn’t like congressional oversight. He was selective himself in what he said, giving answers that were technically correct but factually misleading. It was not surprising to Bruemmer that officers under the director wound up emulating him.
As for Casey’s involvement, Bruemmer came away as mystified as everyone else. On the one hand, there was the testimony of Oliver North, who had directed the shipment of arms to Iran and the diversion of excess payments from some of the arms sales to the contra rebels fighting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in violation of a congressional prohibition known as the Boland Amendment. North said Casey had masterminded the operation. On the other hand, CIA officials whom Bruemmer trusted and who had some involvement in the matter insisted that North had exaggerated Casey’s role. What was clear was that Casey tried to insulate the CIA’s employees from his activities, a tip-off that Casey realized it would not be easy to involve the CIA in illegal activities.
In the end, only a handful of CIA employees were found to have detailed knowledge of aspects of the affair.295 One of them, Alan D. Fiers, Jr., who directed the CIA’s covert operations in Central America from 1984 to 1986, later pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. In doing so, he said in federal court in Washington that Clair E. George, then deputy director for operations, and other CIA superiors told him not to tell Congress about the CIA’s early knowledge of the diversion of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to support the Nicaraguan rebels.296
After Bruemmer finished his report on Iran-contra, Webster asked him in 1988 to become the agency’s general counsel. When he first came to the agency as special counsel in 1987, Bruemmer had laid down one condition: that his office would be in the main building, not in rented buildings in McLean. As a result, Bruemmer had an office on the seventh floor. A few doors from Webster’s office, it was on the same hallway as the offices of the deputy director for operations and the deputy director for intelligence.
When Webster asked him to become general counsel a year later, Bruemmer jokingly laid down a new condition: that he would have nothing to do with Freedom of Information Act requests. In fact, the function was handled by the Office of Information Technology within the Directorate of Administration. But when the requests generated lawsuits, the general counsel became involved. As far as Bruemmer was concerned, handling the requests was a thankless job, one that only earned the enmity of agency employees for giving out information and the enmity of requesters because the process always took so long, and so much of the information was blacked out.*
At the time, the general counsel’s office was still off campus. Bruemmer continued to work at headquarters until the rest of his staff moved to the new building in January 1989.
Both Webster and Bruemmer wanted to upgrade the importance of the office. It was not an effective part of the decision-making process; lawyers were often consulted after the fact. In part, that was because of the slowness of the office. CIA officers became frustrated because it took so long for the general counsel’s office to get back to them when they did ask its opinion.
“The general attitude [of the general counsel’s office] was to say no and to take a long time in saying it,” a former operations officer said.
On the other hand, the lawyers sometimes were not consulted because of a disinclination to take their advice. It was not until John N. McMahon, then deputy director of Central Intelligence, learned about the CIA’s involvement in the effort to trade arms for hostages in Iran that Stanley Sporkin, the CIA’s general counsel under William Casey, was asked about the issue. Sporkin said that for the effort to continue, a presidential finding should be issued. But no one asked the general counsel’s office about diverting money from the arms sales to the effort to support the contras in Nicaragua: the answer almost certainly would have been that it would have been illegal.297
“What we set out to do was get the lawyers involved in the decision-making process early,” Bruemmer said. “Not to make the decisions but to point out the legal pitfalls and help structure proposals to address them. Over and over again we told my office—and Webster said this as well—that the job of a lawyer is not to say no, but to say yes if or no but and help people do what they want to do within the structure of the law.”298
Bruemmer began sitting in at the Tuesday breakfast that Webster had with eight of his senior staff. Then Bruemmer became a regular at Wednesday-morning meetings held by the deputy director of Central Intelligence with the agency’s deputy directors. He also sat in on Friday-morning meetings held by the deputy directors.
Bruemmer served on a task force that developed a new structure to improve the operations of the inspector general’s office, and on another task force that led to establishment of the counternarcotics center.
Later, Bruemmer became involved in the decision made by Webster to withhold from public disclosure by the courts classified information relating to Joseph F. Fernandez, a twenty-two-year veteran of the agency who was CIA station chief in Costa Rica from 1984 to 1986. In that role, Fernandez aided North in secretly resupplying the contras at a time when Congress had prohibited all U.S. military aid to the Nicaraguan rebels. In April 1989, Fernandez was indicted for making false statements about his involvement in the Iran-contra affair to the CIA inspector general and to the Presidential Review Board headed by the late Sen. John G. Tower.
Fernandez claimed the material withheld by the CIA would show that CIA officials knew of his activities and that therefore he had no need to lie about them. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh backed Webster’s decision to withhold the documents, saying use of the classified material in the trial would cause “serious damage to the national security.”
The Classified Information Procedures Act of 1980 provides ways for classified information to be handled by a court without making it public. For example, after classified information has been seen by the judge, the defense, and the prosecution, the information can be disclosed in a trial in summary form. Instead of naming a country, the summary might refer to it as a “Latin American country.”
None of the information Webster wanted to withhold from public disclosure was really new. Most of it had already appeared in the press. But Webster accepted the position of Stolz, then the deputy director for operations, and others, who said that for the CIA to confirm—even in a judge’s chambers—that a company was used as
a CIA front, or that a country helped the CIA, would breach the trust that others place in the agency and would embarrass the countries involved.
Both Bruemmer and Webster felt that the kind of information they withheld in the Fernandez case was similar to the information withheld by the CIA at Webster’s direction in the trial of Oliver North. In the North case, U.S. District Court judge Gerhard A. Gesell in Washington had allowed the trial to proceed. However, U.S. District Court judge Claude M. Hilton in Alexandria threw out the charges against Fernandez, saying the former CIA officer could not receive a fair trial without the ability to use the documents. Webster and Bruemmer believed that if Gesell had been the judge on the case, the trial would have been allowed to proceed.299
Bruemmer made it a point to drop in every day on Webster and the deputy directors. They were his clients, and he wanted them to feel he was accessible. He established a particularly close relationship with Stolz, who relied on him more and more for his advice. Even if an operation was taking place overseas, there were all kinds of tricky legal questions. For example, a proposed action might fall somewhere between a covert action and an intelligence operation. Should Congress be told under the law that requires notification of covert actions? Much of the agency’s day-to-day activity was governed by Executive Order 12333, which even the lawyers found confusing.
Meanwhile, in the fall of 1988, Bruemmer settled a lawsuit filed against the CIA by people who had unknowingly been subjected to mind-control drug testing by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University in Montreal. To try to alter human behavior, Cameron subjected patients who had come to him for help with psychiatric problems to LSD, electroshock treatment up to seventy-five times the normal level, and drug-induced sleep that lasted for weeks—all without their consent.
After learning of the experiments, the CIA had used a front organization to provide funding for Dr. Cameron in exchange for access to his results. While Bruemmer thought the government would have won the case, he decided the bad publicity from a trial would not be worth it. Under the settlement, the seven defendants received a total of about $750,000.300
Inside the CIA Page 33