Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  As luck would have it, we had arrived at the point where you selected, or were selected for, a specific line division or staff. I was a little uncertain how covert action programs were organized within the Clandestine Service, so I asked to join the Covert Action staff, a unit within the service that ran political, economic, and covert propaganda operations. Shortly thereafter, I had an interview with its chief, Hugh Tovar. Tovar was a legend. He’d served as station chief in Laos. He was also an accomplished parachutist; his office was strewn with jumping memorabilia.

  I walked through his door for the interview. He looked up and said, “Have you jumped yet? It’s the greatest thing a man can do.”

  Without missing a beat, I said, “No. But I’m really looking forward to it.”

  Off to jump training I went.

  * * *

  Once I had a better understanding of the difference between the Covert Action staff and the ongoing activities of the Agency’s primary operating units, I switched my interest to the Soviet Division. Near the end of the operation training course, I had a private chat at the base club with Rocky Stone, then chief of that division, during which he encouraged me to sign up with them. Stone was a legend, too. A very charismatic senior official, he suffered from profound hearing loss and relied on a hearing aid, which he supplemented with lipreading and focusing on facial expressions. He had been one of the key players in bringing the Shah of Iran to power in 1953.

  My career counselor, a man who had played an important role in the Bay of Pigs operation under the alias Tom Bender, was not encouraging. “You’re too tall for Soviet operations,” he said, chewing on his cigar.

  I failed to see the connection between spying and height. The trick was to do everything with sleight of hand in a natural setting, not hiding behind bushes. In any case, Bender was a Latin Americanist and he was recruiting for the Latin America Division. He took me to see William V. Broe, yet another legendary officer, who had joined the CIA in 1948 and served as chief of the Western Hemisphere Division (later renamed the Latin America Division) from 1965 to 1972. I remember Bender telling Broe, “This guy belongs in LA Division”—and hardly because of my height. Theirs was a division that was heavily invested in covert action and therefore just the right spot for me. Not long after, I’d get my first overseas assignment: Chile.

  By the time I had completed training as a clandestine officer and joined the Latin America Division in late 1969, the CIA was, by historical standards, still a fledgling agency—just twenty-two years old. We would go through middle age together: I wouldn’t retire until after its fiftieth anniversary in 1997. But at the time of my first posting, it had already matured greatly since its overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s government in Iran in 1953 and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. And by my time, it was already an established arm of the U.S. government—and a lightning rod for criticism, particularly from those on the left concerned about the “invisible government.” This was well understood within the upper reaches of the government and the intelligence community, where the pluses and minuses of espionage and covert action were being critically reviewed.

  As I prepared to enter clandestine training, a committee of academics and former intelligence professionals convened by CIA director Richard Helms and called the Covert Operations Study Group submitted its report on “Covert Operations of the United States Government.” It was December 1, 1968, and though they presented it to President-elect Richard M. Nixon,2 I wouldn’t be able to read the document until it became public decades later.

  Even then, the intelligence community’s thinking on covert action was nuanced. In a cover letter accompanying the report, Franklin A. Lindsay, an OSS operative and close associate of Frank Wisner, the man who founded the CIA’s Clandestine Service, stated that the “CIA has not been a political organization. Its people have served successive administrations with equal loyalty.” It’s a point worth repeating, because it is as true now as it was then, even as critics on the left and right demonize the Agency. The report made clear that the CIA had been, and should remain, squarely under the president’s control. “Covert operations are an instrument; their only legitimate objective is to serve the foreign policy of the president,” the document stated. “They are not an independent aspect of U.S. foreign policy, but simply one way of furthering that policy. The expertise of the clandestine service is secrecy. Covert operations should be called upon only when something should be done in a secret manner—and only when secrecy is possible. It is up to the President to determine what he wants done and whether it should be done secretly or openly. A covert capability is like a military capability. Its use is a presidential prerogative. As with the military service, the clandestine service should not be pursuing any projects, much less self-generated ones, except by presidential decision.”

  The Lindsay panel described covert action—appropriately, in my judgment—as a useful tool for the president, enabling him to engage in “forms of conflict” while avoiding open hostilities. Clandestine operations allow the CIA to maintain important relationships in foreign countries and support causes without the need to give all countries in a region “equal treatment.” And they “permit the Government to act quickly, bypassing domestic U.S. political, bureaucratic, and budgetary controls.” But the panel was also sanguine about the limitations of covert operations, which, they said, “rarely achieve an important objective alone” and often “cannot be kept secret … At best, a successful covert operation can win time, forestall a coup, or otherwise create favorable conditions which will make it possible to use covert means to finally achieve an important objective.” At the same time, there are grave risks involved with covert action, as the report spelled out clearly. “Our credibility and our effectiveness” as advocates for the rule of law around the globe, it stated, are “necessarily damaged” when our covert activities in foreign countries are revealed.

  Much has changed since the panel made its report. Indeed, some of its recommendations seem almost quaint with the perspective of more than forty years. But the panel was dead-on in concluding that covert action was an indispensable foreign policy tool because there will always be times when the president has to make things happen in secret. And secrecy is the CIA’s “expertise.” I do not deny that secrecy can be corrosive, but it can also be a powerful enabler. In Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, published in 2006, John Prados concludes that for sixty years presidents have “continually harnessed” CIA covert action to meet foreign policy goals, and in the end concludes that covert operations have been a “negative factor” in the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy objectives. This is where Prados and I part company. I believe such operations have worked far more often than Prados or anyone on the outside will ever fully understand. Like it or not, covert action is a very powerful arrow in the quiver of a robust intelligence service, an imperative of modern statecraft.

  That said, I agree that there have been good covert operations and bad covert operations, and I spent my career examining the difference between the two. In the course of this book, I will describe both. Perhaps because of what is going on in the world right now, at the top of my list of some basic lessons we have learned over the years is this: in order to best utilize the CIA and its assets, the White House must avoid dangerous “dabbling” based on the myth that “all it takes is a spark.” I can’t count the number of times over the years I have been approached to support a regime change because the local circumstances were considered so propitious that all it would take was “a little spark.” Those who say this usually have greatly inflated views of the opposition strength and no idea how much real thought, hard work, and generous resources have to go into any program to bring about significant political change abroad. They generally don’t want to do what is needed themselves and hope that the United States gets involved. I usually showed such people the door.

  Additionally, covert action is bound to fail when the following criteria are not present:

  • Vi
able partners in place. The United States must have partners within a host nation who truly share U.S. goals and objectives and are willing to fight and die for their cause. Relying on exiles is a recipe for miscommunication, blunders, and often disaster. A base of operations contiguous to your target is often critical.

  • Real-time, accurate information. Foreign agents directed by CIA officers must be capable of collecting real-time information. When we rely solely on spy satellites, communications intercepts, and other technical means of collecting intelligence, we run the risk of missing key contextual details that could make or break an operation.

  • Adequate resources. “Dabbling” with small sums of money and limited capability is at best ineffective and at worst dangerous. When policy makers direct the CIA to conduct covert action, they must equip the Agency to succeed, in terms both of money and of personnel.

  • Bipartisan political support. Covert action, like war, should reflect, in general terms, the wishes of the American people, even if they don’t know it’s happening. If your planned action has significant detractors on either side of the aisle in Congress, you’re probably planning on doing something unwise.

  • A direct threat to U.S. security. To garner support domestically and internationally, the White House must demonstrate that its adversary poses a real threat and needs to be eliminated.

  • Proportionality. The desired outcome must be relatively commensurate with the cost and the collateral damage, particularly with regard to civilian casualties. The CIA or the Pentagon can’t kill thirty thousand people to save five thousand or it will never have the political support or moral high ground required to succeed.

  • A reasonable prospect for success. Before an operation is launched, policy makers have to possess a clear objective and believe—based on fact, not desire—that accomplishing the operation is possible.

  It is the responsibility of policy makers in the White House to make sure these conditions are met before directing the CIA to initiate a covert action campaign. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, they did just that. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Afghanistan has loomed large in the nation’s global war against Islamist terrorism. But the antecedents to 9/11 lead back to Afghanistan, “graveyard of empires,” to when the Soviets occupied the country and Islamic fighters from across the Middle East flocked to the Afghan border to fight against the Soviets alongside the Afghan mujahideen. One of those was Osama bin Laden.

  TWO

  Mules, Pickup Trucks, and Stinger Missiles

  Afghanistan, 1986

  After he gave me the model truck that I keep on my windowsill, Charlie Wilson told me I wasn’t going to like the movie Charlie Wilson’s War. He was right. I prefer the real story.

  That story began for me in early 1986, after five tours overseas, three as chief of station. Everybody knew there was an office at CIA headquarters supporting the mujahideen fighters struggling against the Russians in Afghanistan. But exactly what went on behind a locked door on the sixth floor at headquarters remained largely a mystery. The CIA had been funneling hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to these Afghan “holy warriors” since President Carter first authorized the covert war in late 1979 after the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, concerned about the loyalty of the United States’ client regime in Kabul. President Reagan reauthorized the covert war in 1981, as the first .303-caliber Lee-Enfield rifles purchased with U.S. tax dollars gave way to AK-47s, rockets, and mortars. Secret congressional appropriations grew from $30 million in 1981 to $200 million in 1984, and thanks to an agreement secured by the Agency, the Saudis were matching American appropriations dollar for dollar.

  Support for the mujahideen was stoked on Capitol Hill by U.S. representative Charlie Wilson, a Texas Democrat who had come to passionately support the anticommunist crusade.1

  By late 1984, the return on investment was enormous. Our initial goal had simply been harassment and costly damage to the Soviet military: we wanted to make the Soviets pay as high a price as possible for their occupying Afghanistan. But when it became clear that the mujahideen could fight and that the Soviets were mortal—the mujahideen, by now well armed, had killed thousands of Soviet soldiers and controlled much of the country—Director William Casey ordered a review and reevaluation of the effort. And with Charlie Wilson adding even more funding to the mix, Casey started to believe that the Soviets might actually be defeated. In league with him were other hard-liners at the National Security Council and Defense Department, and the result was National Security Decision Directive 166, a plan for ramping up the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan. Signed by President Reagan in March 1985, it authorized the CIA to prosecute the war.

  The planning was well under way when Tom Twetten, deputy chief of the Near East Division, called me to his office on the sixth floor and said he wanted me to lead what was now likely to become a full-blown task force on Afghanistan. I had a very good relationship with Twetten and his boss, Near East Division chief Bert Dunn, both of whom knew that I had been an outspoken critic of arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar before the Iran-Contra scandal erupted. I didn’t need much convincing that running the Afghan Task Force was something I wanted to do. This is why I had joined the Agency in the first place. I had had my first big taste of covert action in Chile in 1973, and now I was being given an opportunity to run a major covert operation.

  The compartmented program that I would be taking over had for two years been the personal domain of Gust Avrakotos, chief of the South Asia Operations Group. His close relationship with Wilson became the basis for George Crile’s 2003 book, Charlie Wilson’s War, and the movie Wilson would come to warn me about years later.2 After the president signed NSDD 166 and the decision was made to up the ante in Afghanistan, Casey and his deputies on the seventh floor thought Avrakotos too combative and difficult to manage the escalation, and transferred him to a job in the Africa Division. His counterpart in the field, a Russian specialist serving as chief in Islamabad, who was seen as too cautious and pessimistic about the prospects for success in Afghanistan, was also reassigned.

  As I took over the reins for the Afghanistan issue, I was stunned to learn just how large this “little” program was, and realized only much later that Twetten had put me in charge of running the last, and largest, CIA covert operation of the Cold War. One day early on, I found myself sitting on the sofa in Director Casey’s seventh-floor office, explaining how I planned to turn Avrakotos’s crew of about a dozen operations officers and analysts into an organization capable of acquiring enough Soviet Bloc weaponry to arm 120,000 insurgents and move millions of tons of ammunition and matériel a month through Afghanistan’s treacherous mountain passes.

  I had, by then, dealt with Casey on several occasions. As a station chief in Latin America, I brought the head of my host country’s intelligence service to see him at CIA headquarters. I hadn’t gotten off on a very good foot with this foreign official. He was a talented intelligence operator but somewhat arrogant and hard to deal with. I inherited a grudge he had against the Agency, through no fault of my own, but then I unintentionally made it worse. A few years before my arrival, his political party had been voted out of office and he had called the station to ask for help in obtaining a U.S. visa, which he should have been given as a matter of professional courtesy. Instead, he was told with a flash of petulance to take his place “in line outside the embassy just like everyone else.” I’m sure a fed-up case officer thought he was bringing the official down a peg by denying him the favor, but the satisfaction the case officer would have felt from such an action is almost always ephemeral and sets up a disastrous second act should your target ever return to power—as he did a few years later. By that time the case officer was gone and I was just arriving. Almost immediately, I paid a call on the foreign official. He told me he wanted to conduct a joint mail-interception operation. I told him that with new rules and regulations flowing from the Church Committee investigation—a congressional committe
e that had looked into illegal intelligence gathering by the Agency, the NSA, and the FBI—I wasn’t sure how much help we could be, but that I would check. This was my mistake. “Just tell me whom I need to talk to, who has the authority to do it, and I will deal with them,” the official said. I clearly should have given him a more deft, Latin answer, something like, “Sure, sounds like a good idea; I’ll look into it,” then moved on to another subject and let the topic die a slow death from neglect. Lack of follow-through would have been a more sophisticated response, which he would have understood without losing face or being given an opportunity to challenge my authority.

  Shortly thereafter, we made the liaison visit together to Langley, which gave me the chance to start mending our relationship. I am used to large egos; his was huge. By the time he told me he was the equivalent of the CIA director, I had learned my lesson and let that claim sit unchallenged.

  When I brought him in to see Casey after lunch, I ended up translating, even though my guest spoke fairly good English, because of Casey’s tendency to mumble. This official liked to pontificate—and Casey fell asleep. I started interpreting louder and louder. Eventually, Casey woke up. I was never quite sure whether it was fatigue or a strategic ploy by Casey to take the air out of his visitor’s puffery. I had heard from others that they had had similar experiences in meetings with the director. Nevertheless, when our meeting was over and the official and I walked out of Casey’s office, neither of us said anything, but we both knew that the foreign spy chief had just been insulted. It gave me some psychological leverage over him, given our unspoken agreement that we were going to keep this between us. We never discussed it again, but our relationship improved after Casey fell asleep on him.