Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I felt torn. I’d spent capital standing up for my principles, and if I hadn’t, Congress might not have been forced to take the issue seriously. But I was seeing that my activist intensity could also unsettle an institution and its custodians, a valuable lesson in a place that runs on relationships. Ultimately, to shape events in the Senate, I had to find new ways to advance issues while staying true to my core.

  Not being stuck in the most junior position on the select committee did present an unexpected opportunity for an investigation of my own. Dan Inouye told me specifically that the Iran-Contra Select Committee would not dig into the rumors that the Contras were awash in illegal drug money. I could take on that issue and see where it led. Some charged that the CIA was purposefully bringing cocaine to the inner cities of the United States to fund the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua. I didn’t believe that. I believed that the United States was simply looking away from the obvious connections between the Contras and drugs. I had little tolerance for right-wing paramilitary groups dealing in drug trafficking and just as little patience for left-wing rebels, like the FARC in Colombia, doing the same.

  I built a team of staffers committed to uncovering the truth, whatever it looked like. They were a great band of idealists and truth-seekers, though there were a few times when I wondered if perhaps we were too zealous. My chief investigator was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal crusader named Jack Blum. Jack was idealistic. He saw the world in black and white. He tugged mightily at the end of the Senate leash. He was joined by David McKean, a brilliant young lawyer educated at Harvard, Duke and Fletcher, a gifted writer with a contagious sense of humor who became invaluable. Jonathan Winer was dogged. He was a whip-smart investigator I’d first met during my 1972 campaign, when he was the earnest seventeen-year-old editor of his high school newspaper and had grilled me. I joked that I hadn’t been able to shake him since. He was highly intelligent and capable. One day I spotted my receptionist nervously standing in the hallway talking to my executive assistant. I asked what was wrong. “Senator, um, why don’t you walk by the reception area? Someone’s, um . . . one of your investigators’ next meeting is there and it’s, uh, making the, uh, tour group from Leominster nervous.”

  I walked by the open office door and glanced inside. I could see why the Ladies Auxiliary was getting uncomfortable. On the couch next to the tour group sat a uniformed Bureau of Prisons official accompanying a manacled federal convict in an orange jumpsuit, apparently a potential witness with whom my staff was soon meeting. I made a mental note to tell the team to move some of these meetings to a different Senate building pronto.

  Despite such moments, our investigation was all too serious. The drug trail led to something eye-opening. I wasn’t surprised that the Contras were up to their eyeballs in drugs, but I was astonished by just how easily they laundered their illicit gains through supposedly legitimate financial institutions. We discovered a shady and unsavory bank with an innocuous acronym: BCCI. It stood for the Bank of Commerce and Credit International. BCCI was a dream for criminals and money launderers, and it was hiding in plain sight. We discovered that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, a longtime Cold War ally installed by the United States, was personally involved in drug trafficking, and he used BCCI to ship his ill-gotten money out of the country. The prosecutor in me was intrigued.

  The next months were almost a redux of the DA’s office: reviewing evidence, taking depositions, examining testimony. BCCI was a $20 billion banking empire. At the time of our investigation, it had branches in more than seventy countries and boasted nearly a million depositors. I sought subpoenas, but the Department of Justice delayed my requests. Someone was protecting something or someone.

  By the spring of 1989, it was apparent that my inquiry had rubbed more than just DOJ officials the wrong way. BCCI, I would find out, had friends in high places. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, my friend Claiborne Pell, was hearing that our investigation was cracking, if not breaking, considerable pottery along the way. He didn’t ask me to stop, but he encouraged me to bring it to completion. The message that became abundantly clear: people were uncomfortable.

  It was impossible, let alone wrong, to sweep what we’d discovered under the rug. The Department of Justice didn’t care, so we brought our evidence to New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau. Morgenthau shared our alarm and succeeded in convincing a grand jury to indict the bank on fraud and bribery charges. We learned that the CIA had prepared hundreds of reports outlining the criminal connections of BCCI. Thankfully, the Department of Justice soon had a new head of its criminal division: my St. Paul’s classmate, a Vietnam veteran and a diligent law enforcement professional named Bob Mueller. Our subcommittee’s two staffers had exposed the perfidy of BCCI, and I felt vindicated when Mueller assigned thirty-seven prosecutors to the case. By July 1991, regulators had seized the bank. BCCI was dead.

  There was a reason the law enforcement and intelligence communities had started to call BCCI the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals.” As one U.S. indictment put it, money laundering was the bank’s “corporate strategy.” If you needed to move money quietly, BCCI was the one who moved it for you. The BCCI client list was a who’s who of bad guys: Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Abu Nidal and even, as we’d find out, the early leadership of al-Qaeda, which was dealt a huge blow and had to abandon its base in Sudan when BCCI was shuttered.

  Why was it so important to me to pursue it? Because if you start backsliding and trimming on the rule of law, you contribute to the inexorable deterioration of democracy. Corruption is cumulative. I believed the rule of law has to mean something in the United States. If we knowingly turn a blind eye on the rich and powerful, enabling them to escape accountability while two-bit criminals go to jail for years, we create a tiered system of justice. That is no justice at all. Drug money leads to illicit arms sales, human trafficking and money laundering. Terrorists love banks that operate in the shade. For a long time, BCCI was successful in concealing its dirty work from the public in part because, as our investigation helped to uncover, an astonishing number of prominent people seemed to have ties of varying degrees to its operations. It was former defense secretary Clark Clifford whose connections to BCCI brought me the most awkward interactions. He was a legend who had walked the halls of power since the days of Harry Truman. More than one of my Democratic colleagues asked me why I was going after one of their friends. I even received calls from former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Pamela Harriman, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser and the widow of New York governor Averell Harriman, asking what I was doing to their good friend Clark Clifford.

  I tried my best to explain we weren’t targeting him or anyone else. We were surprised ourselves by what we were finding, but we couldn’t back off. Clark Clifford was pulling out all the stops to obstruct the inquiry, if not end it. Most of my colleagues knew not to push me, but I knew I was once again an outsider in an insider’s city.

  In the fall of 1991, Clark Clifford testified before our subcommittee. By that point eighty-four years old, frail and hard of hearing, Clifford claimed that he had never realized that the owners of his bank weren’t who they said they were. He had been fooled. When I questioned him on the details, he essentially repeated several versions of the same point: he couldn’t remember.

  My staff lit into me during a break at the hearing, telling me I was pulling too many punches. “He’s an old man,” I told them. “I’m not going to humiliate an old man.”

  I was looking for truth, not a trophy. We had gotten all the testimony we needed. Viewers would draw their own conclusions about Clifford, who candidly acknowledged at the hearing that the facts had left him with “the choice of seeming either venal or stupid.” At the same time, I was drawing a conclusion of my own about how I would operate in the Senate. I wasn’t going to let anyone—no matter how powerful—prevent me from doing what was right and seeking the truth. However, I resolved that never would I lose my own sense of decency. There’s
a right way and a wrong way to operate. I didn’t care if people called me a crusader, but never was I going to give anyone a reason to call me a bully.

  I had learned a great deal as an investigator, both in Iran-Contra and in BCCI. I’d been reminded that when you push hard for truth, people who are invested in lies or in convenient avoidance resist, and they retaliate. But truth is worth fighting for; truth is the American bottom line. On Iran-Contra, while President Reagan finished his term and George H. W. Bush became president in 1989 despite questions about what he had known, justice was carried out. People like Oliver North who had broken the law were convicted in the justice system. Pardons and commutations followed for many, but the courts had validated the truth. On BCCI, despite the enemies I had made, the bank was shut down, and a light shone on a network of illegal and illicit efforts that funded drugs, terror and murder. I was getting things done as a U.S. senator. I was paying a price, but this was why I had come to Washington.

  CHAPTER 9

  Making Peace

  JOHN McCAIN AND I sat somewhat stiffly opposite each other on the Boeing 757 with “United States of America” emblazoned on its side. It was a late February evening in 1991, after a long day in the Senate. We were part of a fairly large delegation led by Senators Strom Thurmond and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, heading to Kuwait City immediately after its liberation in Operation Desert Storm. All senators were assigned seats on the basis of seniority, and so it was that two Vietnam veterans who had lived very different stories regarding the same war found themselves face-to-face on a long flight. We were part of a foursome at a table, John facing backward and me forward, and for a while we exchanged light pleasantries about the Senate and politics.

  As the night wore on, neither John nor I had fallen asleep. I began to ask John about flying, his experience in the Navy and at the Academy in Annapolis, his family’s long and distinguished military history, and then, finally, Vietnam itself and being a POW. John had his own questions. We listened to each other and shared honest observations about our different journeys.

  The importance and uniqueness of this conversation probably escaped both of us at the time. Though there had not been animosity between us, there was certainly suspicion and mistrust of the other in both of us. When John was suffering incomprehensible abuse and indignity at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors, I was first traversing the rivers of the Mekong Delta in the brown-water navy—an altogether different kind of hardship and danger—and later traveling America, speaking out against the war. John had parachuted out over Hanoi in October 1967. He wasn’t released until late 1973. For him, every impression of the war and the politics back home basically froze on the day he was captured. In contrast, October 1967 was the first March on the Pentagon. It was before Tet, before the moratorium, before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, before Nixon’s promise of a secret plan for peace. John would have seen Henry Kissinger as a diplomat who helped him, in John’s words, “keep his honor” by rebuffing North Vietnam’s offer to set Admiral McCain’s son free ahead of other POWs who had been captured earlier, whereas for the anti-war movement Kissinger became a symbol of the war’s continuation.

  For John to survive as a prisoner of war, I imagined it was essential to hold on to the core values that he had brought with him to the Hanoi Hilton—the fight for freedom, the stopping of communism, “keeping faith with our fathers.” I knew at the time that those of us opposing the war could not possibly be well received or understood by these patriots. I didn’t expect it. Being a target was part of the price we paid for choosing to speak out. It was a price I will pay every day of my life in some quarters.

  What John didn’t and couldn’t know then was how difficult the journey to being against the war was for so many of us. I joined the military for most of the same reasons he did—my father’s example, a heightened sense of duty to serve my country, the strong and embedded belief that “to those whom much is given, much is expected,” the awareness of the unacceptable inequity that far too many of those who were bearing the brunt of the draft were people of color and low income. I knew I was not ready to go to graduate school—and certainly would not have gone as a means of avoiding service—but I also knew that service in the military, with leadership responsibility, would be a graduate school of a quite different kind. There was much I had loved about the Navy. My journey from patriotic, young, newly minted ensign to equally patriotic veteran and anti-war protester was driven by a fury over what I had seen the war do to the young men who served, over the neglect and even rejection of returning warriors, over the deception, the outright lies that had been told for years by government officials and top military brass about the war itself, about the tactics and strategy—if they could be called that—which resulted in unnecessary dying and killing in Vietnam for more years than anyone anticipated—and for what?

  There was in all of us who went through this difficult transformation a profound sense of loss and betrayal. John and those who supported the war no doubt felt betrayed by us. We, on the other hand, felt betrayed by our leaders, a few military but mostly civilian.

  Here we were, eighteen years later, two U.S. senators, both of whom believed deeply in the strength of our Constitution and the importance and value of public service, both of whom shared hard, lived-out definitions of patriotism. We had both learned the importance of respecting other people’s views—no matter how intensely we may have disagreed—and we both had learned enough about life to understand that as senators, it didn’t pay to burn bridges. There was always another vote and another day, and even if you couldn’t support someone on one day, the next dawn might bring an issue of shared passion and importance.

  John had also studied and confronted enough history, talked to a full share of military experts, processed and analyzed what he’d seen and heard over the intervening years, and he had come to understand the mistakes, to detest the deception and to even become fast friends with people who had opposed the war. Although he had traveled to Massachusetts to campaign for my opponent in my first Senate race, he didn’t attack me personally. I would have preferred he hadn’t shown up at all, but I understood the game. We didn’t know each other yet and I could not have expected otherwise. But all of this backdrop swirled in my head as I sat three feet from him sharing our experiences.

  What became obvious to both of us in this meandering but wonderful—and memorable—conversation was a shared sense that the divisiveness of the war was still with us as it was with the country, and it needed to be purged. We agreed that America had for too long been at war with itself. The war at home was not and could not ever be over as long as the specter of prisoners being held or unaccounted for hung over the nation. While deep down John felt the issue was being cynically exploited by politicians fanning a conspiracy, we both understood that the nation could never move beyond the war and genuinely make peace with itself without resolving doubts and recognizing realities. We could never make real peace with the Vietnamese as long as people questioned their compliance with the agreement to return all prisoners, not while the image of Rambo saving American boys from tiger cages in Southeast Asia was drawing millions to the box office.

  For John, this notion that people might have been left behind alive was more than personal. Based on his own horrendous experience, which shockingly some zealots were willing to challenge and even dismiss, he was convinced the so-called evidence of live Americans was wrong, for he and his fellow prisoners had developed a code by which they communicated and memorized the names of every prisoner captured. He believed that those who perpetuated the POW myth exploited the families of the missing in a cruel way and did America a disservice.

  The plane droned on flying east. The cabin was darkened. Most senators were sleeping. We too needed to grab some shut-eye. When, finally, we had exhausted this time of honest talk, we also agreed not to let the moment be forgotten. We agreed right then and there to find ways to work together to bring peace to Viet
nam and America. It was the beginning of a new friendship and a new opportunity. It was one of the most significant and valued moments for me in my entire time as a U.S. senator.

  When I returned to my office and related to my staff that John and I were willing to tackle Vietnam, they thought we were crazy, especially me. To a person they saw the POW/MIA issue as the domain of zealots, charlatans and ideologues. Everyone thought it would be a gargantuan waste of time. But when a Newsweek magazine cover showed a picture of American POWs with the headline “Are They Still Alive?” it was clear to me America could never make peace, could never be at peace with itself, without resolving this issue. The families too deserved answers. The country had to live up to its code of never abandoning those who serve. How could any of us talk about honor and duty if we did not complete this mission?

  With the mounting pressure from the families of those missing and still unaccounted for and in the face of stories like the one in Newsweek, the issue was taking on a larger and larger life. No matter how improbable one thought the odds that POWs had been left behind, it would be impossible to ever have a conversation about Vietnam in the future without being confronted about the accusations of betrayal and abandonment. And in truth we had not yet turned over every stone, followed every lead, and we owed it to ourselves and future generations to do exactly that.

  After gathering the signatures of a number of Republican senators, Bob Smith of New Hampshire sent a letter to Majority Leader George Mitchell requesting a select committee to find the answers. I talked with John McCain to see if he would join me in trying to get those answers and begin a process (I hoped) of putting the Vietnam War behind us. He said yes, so I went to George and, against the unanimous advice of my staff, I took on the role of chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW and MIA Affairs. Thankfully, on the Democratic side, George assigned a terrific group of senators who gave the committee the gravitas it needed to deal with such a thorny issue: Vietnam veterans Bob Kerrey, Chuck Robb and Tom Daschle, along with Harry Reid and Herb Kohl. On the Republican side, Bob Dole picked Bob Smith as vice chair, a position that John McCain had turned down, but McCain joined the committee, together with Vietnam veteran Hank Brown, Nancy Kassebaum, Jesse Helms and Chuck Grassley. I hoped we had the credibility to work through the minefields that lay ahead, domestically and abroad.