by Matt Apuzzo
Cohen saw those forces at their worst. He was there for one of the most tumultuous times in the agency’s history, a period that shaped his views on intelligence gathering.
On February 21, 1994, FBI agents arrested veteran CIA officer Aldrich Ames on espionage charges. In a decade of work for the Soviet Union, Ames compromised covert operations against the Russians and revealed the names of more than thirty spies. The betrayal caught the CIA by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. Time and again, there had been signs that Ames was trouble. He failed polygraphs. He slept on the job. He had money and drinking problems. Once, he left a briefcase full of classified information on a New York subway. He walked out of the CIA with shopping bags full of classified documents. Yet his behaviors were explained away and tolerated in the insular, protective club of the nation’s spies.
His arrest and guilty plea triggered a level of scrutiny of the CIA not seen since the 1970s. The case portrayed the agency as cliquish, secretive, and at times borderline incompetent. In December 1994, after enduring scathing reports about the Ames fiasco from Congress and the agency’s inspector general, CIA director R. James Woolsey resigned. President Bill Clinton replaced him with John Deutch, a senior Pentagon official and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology–educated expert in nuclear proliferation.
As if the Ames case weren’t enough of a headache for Deutch to inherit, shortly before he took office, New Jersey representative Robert Torricelli revealed that a paid CIA asset in Guatemala had been linked to the killings of one American citizen and the husband of another. Worse still, the CIA kept the informant on the payroll even after it learned about his involvement. Congress had been kept in the dark for years about exactly what the CIA was doing in Guatemala, where the agency had been fighting suspected Communists for years.
Right away, Deutch announced that most of the agency’s senior managers would be gone by the end of the year. He formed a committee to find a new deputy director for operations, the formal title for the nation’s top spy. It had to be someone without deep ties to the clandestine service and the culture that led to Ames and Guatemala. The agency needed someone who could handle the rigors of running covert operations but who also represented a break from the past.
David Cohen, a surprising choice to many, was announced as the new deputy director for operations, on July 31, 1995.
Cohen was taking one of the most prized jobs in the CIA: the person overseeing every clandestine officer. But while he’d risen through the ranks during the height of the Cold War, when the agency battled the Soviet KGB in the greatest spy war the world had ever known, Cohen had never been a spy. He’d never worked overseas. He’d never evaded hostile intelligence agents, or tried to turn the tide of a war, or worked to undermine the spread of Communism. He came from a very different CIA.
At its core, the CIA is made of up two groups: spies and analysts. And they jockey fiercely for recognition and influence.
The Directorate of Operations, or DO, is home to the spies. (The section is now formally called the National Clandestine Service but is still colloquially referred to internally as the DO.) Their careers are the stuff of novels. They are the ones who travel on fake passports, pass coded messages, evade and conduct surveillance, and dress up to attend embassy parties. They encouraged dissent inside the Soviet Union, tried to recruit spies behind the Iron Curtain, and were constantly suspicious that the Russians had turned one of their own against them.
Cohen came from a much more staid, academic section of the CIA known as the Directorate of Intelligence. The DI, as it’s known, is home to the analysts. They take all the information—from the spies, the satellites, the military, the wiretaps, and more—and stitch it together in hopes of making sense of the world. Erudite and patient, they toil quietly in secure rooms, reading what comes in and turning it into what’s called finished intelligence, the reports that land on the president’s desk. Unlike the CIA men of the movies, the analysts do not drive flashy sports cars. They wait in the long line of family sedans, minivans, and SUVs that forms each morning outside the gates of CIA headquarters in Langley. As per stereotype, the spies are the sharp dressers; the analysts less so. Once, one of Cohen’s aides told him that he couldn’t possibly go into an important meeting looking so unkempt. He wasn’t even wearing a belt. Cohen demanded one from a subordinate and marched into the conference.6
The analysts see the spies as cowboys, more interested in the thrill of the mission than the pursuit of facts. The spies deride the analysts as professors who always want more, better information and don’t appreciate how hard it is to operate in the field.
So when Cohen, a career analyst, was tapped to run the world’s premier spying service, the longtime officers were stunned. Like any large office, CIA headquarters was prone to backstabbing and political maneuvering. Unlike your typical company, however, office politics at the CIA were played by people trained to lie, cheat, and manipulate. The best covert actions, officers said sardonically, were run inside the building.
The closest that Cohen had ever come to being a spy was in the late 1980s, when he was tapped to run the National Collection Division, the arm of the agency responsible for overt collection of intelligence inside the United States. Much like the NYPD Intelligence Division that he would inherit decades later, National Collection was seen as something of a backwater posting. Officers stationed in major US cities would identify and interview American professors or businessmen whose overseas travels regularly took them to hostile countries.
At the same time, there was another CIA division operating inside the United States. The Foreign Resources Division was considered the A team of domestic operations. These officers were in America as part of their normal rotation, meaning that they arrived from overseas postings, often in trouble spots. They knew how to spy, and they looked down on National Collection. In the United States, the Foreign Resources officers recruited foreigners to become paid informants, or assets. They excelled at a trade known as “spotting and assessing.” They’d identify graduate students from, say, China or the Soviet Union, figure out if they were likely candidates to work for the agency, and then slowly develop them as assets. Eventually they’d return home, and the CIA stations overseas would pick up where Foreign Resources left off, managing the assets and giving them assignments to spy for America.
Cohen looked at these two CIA teams and came to the conclusion that the organization needed to be changed. Why were his officers politely asking for information or waiting for a helpful walk-in to show up while the Foreign Resources officers were out recruiting real spies? As an analyst, he understood the value of what the agency was learning from these professors and experts, but he believed there shouldn’t be a wall between their work and that of Foreign Resources. The CIA could save money and streamline operations if the two divisions were consolidated. Cohen, with a bit of charm and often by force of will, began to merge and take charge of both divisions.
It helped that his deputy was Gustav Avrakotos, the legendary CIA case officer whose exploits arming Afghan Muslims in the fight against occupying Russian forces formed the basis of the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War. Avrakotos had run his generation’s most successful covert operation; Cohen had never been part of one. His first operation of any kind came on Veterans Day 1987, when an officer took Cohen along for an informant meeting in a Washington-area hotel room. As an unexpected storm dumped a foot of snow on the region, the CIA men turned up the television to prevent anyone from eavesdropping or taping their conversation. Cohen was hooked.7
But as far as the career spies were concerned, Cohen’s stint at National Collection hardly qualified him to take the top job in American spy craft. CIA veterans swiftly delivered their verdict—anonymously—in the pages of America’s newspapers and magazines. One retired officer told U.S. News & World Report in 1995 that Cohen had a “management by fear” philosophy. Another described him as “a company man from the word go” who will “find out which way the wind i
s blowing and then go with it.” In the Washington Times, a former officer said Cohen was a hard-nosed outsider who wasn’t very well liked.
It didn’t help that Cohen had a reputation for an acerbic leadership style and an abrasive personality. He liked to swear, and, in the words of one longtime colleague, “If he thought you were an idiot, he’d say so.” That was one of his favorite words. For subordinates, it wasn’t clear what was worse, being called an idiot in the middle of a meeting or wondering whether Cohen was calling them an idiot after they’d left the room.
He’d call subordinates at any hour to talk through whatever had popped up in his head. It kept people constantly wondering what issue they would be pulled onto next. But while Cohen could be intimidating and aggressive, he was also prescient. He had been one of the first people in the agency, well before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, to talk seriously about globalization. Cohen envisioned a world where economies became intertwined, where multinational corporations blurred the political boundaries between nations, and where terrorists and criminals operated across borders.8
Colleagues called him a fast talker, a reference both to the speed with which he spoke and to the fact that some saw him as a confidence man, always playing the angles. Melvin Goodman, an expert on the Soviet Union who worked with Cohen in the 1980s, regarded him as a quick study and a hard worker but believed he was cooking the intelligence to curry favor with his hard-line anti-Communist bosses. “He’s the kind of guy who, after you deal with him, you feel like you should wash your hands,” Goodman would remark years later.9
John Deutch and Cohen got along well, however. Deutch, a native of Brussels, Belgium, who, like Cohen, was educated in Massachusetts, saw his new deputy as direct and plainspoken. As far as he was concerned, the fact that Cohen had never run a covert operation overseas and had spent most of his career as an analyst in no way disqualified him from overseeing the agency’s worldwide spying efforts.
“Who the fuck cares” where someone comes from as long as he’s qualified? Deutch said. “I think that’s silly.”10
Still, longtime operatives looked for any reason to dislike Cohen. Early in his tenure, he held a meeting with the senior leaders overseeing Middle East operations. As he talked, he referred to the citizens of Jordan—the Jordanians—as “the Jordans.” The room was filled with the agency’s foremost experts on the Middle East, who looked at one another with blank stares that reflected a shared thought: “What is this guy doing running operations?”11
Cohen’s tenure could have been an opportunity to remake the clandestine service for a post–Cold War world. Ames and Guatemala forced an unusual level of introspection onto an agency that was institutionally averse to it. And Cohen was undoubtedly capable of anticipating the next big thing. But any interest that Cohen had in long-term planning was overrun by Congress and the White House.
• • •
Bill Clinton had come to office in 1993 promising to cut the roughly $30 billion annual intelligence budget. On Capitol Hill, the mood was even worse. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dennis DeConcini, thought the CIA’s reports were too unreliable to justify such a hefty price tag. New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced a bill to abolish the CIA. The Guatemala scandal had revealed that the agency was doing business with people who had awful human rights records. Congress demanded a reckoning.
In response, Deutch fired two longtime and well-liked agency veterans and ordered a top-to-bottom review of the CIA’s books. Cohen and his team began examining the backgrounds of every asset on the CIA’s payroll. Those with too much baggage, whose unsavory histories outweighed their value to the United States, were cut loose. The “asset scrub,” as it was known, was tantamount to heresy. CIA officers made their reputations by recruiting informants. Now headquarters was opening the books on their careers’ work and dismissing their accomplishments. The fact that Cohen, an analyst, was running it made it even worse.
Deutch, Cohen, and the agency’s lawyers came up with new rules for recruiting. If you wanted to recruit someone with blood on his hands, you needed approval from headquarters. It was never intended to be an outright prohibition; it was supposed to provide some review before the CIA put a torturer or a terrorist on the payroll. But in the field, coming on the heels of Guatemala, the message was clear: Don’t bother recruiting anyone with a distasteful history.
The asset scrub made Cohen’s workforce risk averse. At the CIA, those words are the ultimate insult, a shorthand way of saying that the agency doesn’t have the stomach for difficult operations. Cohen saw it as the result of a broken system. As soon as an operation went bad, Congress and the White House were quick with recriminations. Fear of being second-guessed led to stifling deliberations. The way Cohen saw it, by subjecting covert operations to review by a battery of lawyers, the government was signaling a clear disapproval for such missions.12
As budgets were cut and agency recruits slowed to a trickle, Cohen earned a new name that would stick with him long after he left the CIA. To his employees, he was often known as Fucking David Cohen or, in the alternative, David Fucking Cohen. He knew that carrying out Deutch’s directives made him unpopular. He didn’t care. A good leader was decisive; someone who made tough calls even when they were unpopular. But he came to believe that Deutch had made things harder by speaking so publicly about his intentions to overhaul the agency. The lesson Cohen took away was that if you want to make changes, do it. Strong leaders don’t make changes by talking about them in the newspaper ahead of time.13
It would prove to be a disastrous time to make budget cuts and stop taking risks. The roots of Islamic terrorism were taking hold. The 1993 truck bombing, carried out by Muslim terrorists with the same grievances that would later inspire al-Qaeda, proved that terrorists could strike inside America. As the United States focused more on spy satellites and less on old-fashioned spy craft, Osama bin Laden was gaining power and influence.
Instead of devising a grand plan to address this changing world, Cohen was forced to spend much of his time fending off cuts or at least directing the ax to lower-priority programs. He fought efforts to close overseas stations and defeated attempts to absorb Alec Station’s money into the general counterterrorism budget, where it would undoubtedly disappear. Cohen recognized that the CIA had little coherent counterterrorism strategy, but that hardly mattered. With limited Arabic language skills, few new recruits, and a reluctance to hire spies, the agency was ill equipped to carry out a strategy even if it had one.
For its part, Alec Station made progress despite the cuts. The team quickly learned that bin Laden was running his own terrorist group and was linked to several attacks against US citizens, including the 1992 bombing of a hotel where US military personnel were staying in Yemen and the 1993 shootdown of Black Hawk helicopters on a peacekeeping mission in Somalia. By the fall of 1998, two years after the team was formed, the CIA had bin Laden in its sights and was rehearsing a covert operation to swoop into Afghanistan and capture him.14
Cohen would not be around to see those drills—or to see Washington put the brakes on the plan. Deutch was forced to resign as Clinton prepared for his second term. In May 1997, with George Tenet ready to become the fifth CIA director in about as many years, the New York Times editorial board called on Tenet to make the agency more accountable and to rein in the clandestine service. In an unusual move, the newspaper called for Cohen’s head.
“He needs a deputy director for operations able to make change stick,” the paper wrote. “David Cohen, the incumbent, is wobbly and should be replaced.”
Tenet sent Cohen packing for New York, a plum preretirement assignment that made him the CIA’s primary liaison with Wall Street titans and captains of industry. After three decades in Washington, he had become one of the most unpopular and divisive figures in modern CIA history. He left feeling that the agency was hamstrung by the people overseeing it. The White House micromanaged operations, slowing down everything. And
Congress used its oversight authority to score political points. The CIA was stuck in the middle, an impossible position.
Now Kelly was offering a chance to start something new in the New York Police Department, without any of the bureaucratic hand-wringing or political meddling. The World Trade Center attacks had changed the world. Cohen was being given an opportunity to change policing in response.
He didn’t need a couple days to think about it. He called Kelly back two hours later and took the job.
Bloomberg and Kelly introduced Cohen as the deputy commissioner for intelligence at a city hall press conference on January 24, 2002. Cohen spoke for just two minutes, mostly to praise the NYPD. He had been raised in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood, and though he’d been gone for decades, he still spoke with a heavy accent.
“We need to understand what these threats are, what form they take, where they’re coming from, and who’s responsible,” Cohen said.
He did not make the same mistake that Deutch had made. The new deputy commissioner offered no specifics about what he had planned. Weeks before his sixtieth birthday, he even declined to give his age, telling reporters only that he was between twenty-eight and seventy. The brief remarks from behind the lectern would amount to one of Cohen’s longest media appearances ever.
“I look forward to just getting on with the job,” he said.
Cohen’s appointment was not front-page news. The New York Times put the story on page B3. The Daily News ran a 165-word brief on page 34. It was four months after 9/11, and the country was focused on doing whatever it took to prevent another attack. Nobody questioned the wisdom of taking someone trained to break the laws of foreign nations and putting him in a department responsible for upholding the rule of law. Nobody even checked out Cohen’s hand-prepared résumé, which said he had a master’s degree in international relations from Boston University. In fact, his degree was in government.15 The misstatement itself was inconsequential. That it went entirely unquestioned was indicative of the lack of media scrutiny Cohen could expect in his new job.