Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  When a new station chief arrived shortly before my departure, he asked me to write a memo about the situation in Chile. I produced a rather blunt document suggesting that the United States start using the very same covert action tactics on Pinochet that we had used against Allende, to bring about a return of a democratic government. I doubt the station chief agreed at the time or sent my memo to Washington—if for no other reason than to protect my career, since it surely would have seemed a brash assessment by a first-tour case officer. But Chile taught me a lesson about unintended consequences that has served me well. If the coup that toppled Allende was an episode that has plagued the CIA ever since, for all the wrong reasons, my next reminder to be careful what we wished for was even more disastrous. Like the coup in Chile, it was instigated by the White House, and as in Chile we were, to a great extent, left holding the bag.

  FOUR

  “We Need to Polygraph Him”

  Washington, 1985–86

  One morning in early 2011 a story on the front page of The New York Times brought back a rush of memories. My former colleague Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge was in the news again. Two decades after his indictment and pardon in Iran-Contra, he was running a private intelligence operation in Afghanistan under a multimillion-dollar Pentagon contract. I was astounded but not completely surprised, given Dewey’s energy and charisma. As I read the piece, I remembered the call.

  I was sitting in my Langley office in December of 1985 when Clarridge rang me out of the blue. By that point in our careers, we knew each other well, having worked together for a few years in Latin America, though we’d both moved on since then. Clarridge was chief of the Europe Division. I was head of the Near East Division’s Iran branch at headquarters. He was calling to tell me to expect to hear very soon from Director Casey. “It’s very urgent and extremely important,” he told me. He didn’t say the call would involve secret arms shipments to Iran.

  Clarridge was a swashbuckling officer whose gung-ho support of the Contras, the right-wing rebel groups opposing Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, made him a Casey favorite. The director had first taken a liking to Clarridge when he was serving as chief of station in Rome, then made him head of the Latin America Division, with authority for overseeing development of the Contra force, even though Clarridge couldn’t speak Spanish and had no background in the region.1 He had charisma and knew how to motivate people, and at the end of the day, running a division at the CIA was about leadership and driving the culture. We were a very top-down organization.

  From his time in Rome, Clarridge dressed with Italian-style flair. He favored light suits and often had a silk handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket, in red or blue to match his tie. Soon several of the station chiefs started sporting handkerchiefs as well. Once, when we were both back in Washington, during lunch in the Executive Dining Room, Clarridge pulled out a monocle to peer at the menu. I laughed profusely. “I might go for the handkerchief,” I said, “but I’ll be damned if I’m going to start using a monocle to emulate your style.” He got a little testy over my remark, but to the best of my knowledge, he never wore the monocle again. I’m convinced that if he’d worn it to the chiefs of station conference, many of the chiefs would soon have been running around with monocles.

  This tendency to emulate leaders can be a good thing, if it’s not taken to an extreme. If you want to lead the Agency and you are trying to live by the creed on the wall in the lobby—“And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free”—it’s a great trait. But if you’re motivated by a desire to please the president politically and the policy makers no matter what, it can lead to contaminated intelligence and unwise operational activity.

  My substantive disagreement with Clarridge, if I could call it that, came in 1981, when he invited all his station chiefs back to the Washington area to talk about the Contras. The Contras were already receiving substantial support from the Reagan administration, through the CIA, but Clarridge was considering arming the groups, and he went around the table and asked each of us what we thought about it. I was one of only two who voiced a strong objection. I was, and remain, constitutionally opposed to building up exile forces as part of covert action programs. Instead, my strong inclination is to build up internal forces. I felt the main fight should have been inside Nicaragua, and I said so. If you can’t move it inside, don’t move it. I also thought that using other Latin Americans to train the Contras in Honduras was foolhardy, given nationalist sensitivities in the region. After I spoke up, challenging him, Clarridge walked out of the room in a huff, but he apparently didn’t hold it against me.

  “He was apprehensive about another potentially volatile operation and was frank in expressing his reservations,” Clarridge wrote of me in his memoir, A Spy for All Seasons. “I appreciated his honesty,” he continued. “There were some, however, who were not so kind. They saw him as someone motivated largely by a desire to advance his career.”

  That’s nonsense. Challenging a new superior in a public forum is hardly the recommended path for career advancement. But it is quite true that speaking truth to power never hurt my career—and so it was with Clarridge. I could argue with him, and he wasn’t intimidated; he held his ground, and I never felt that I was being penalized for speaking frankly to him. He was aware that I’d been around a long time by then, and that I knew the area well. I had a voice. He indicated that I was entitled to be listened to but not necessarily agreed with.

  In 1982, during my tour in South America, Clarridge tried to convince me to take over the Central America Task Force, the operations group at headquarters responsible for organizing all matériel and personnel support for the Contras, despite my outspoken opposition to the Contra program. I had disagreed forcefully with those on the task force who wanted to shut down an opposition newspaper in Nicaragua, La Prensa, that was being menaced by the government. They thought this could be used to show how undemocratic the government was. But from my days working with the opposition media in Chile, I pressed the point that the paper could be an invaluable tool. Not to my surprise, the owners themselves wanted to keep up the fight and they stayed in business, to the chagrin of my colleagues.

  I told Clarridge I wasn’t the right choice for the job.

  “I really don’t want to do this one,” I told him. “You and I have a serious difference about how to tackle the task.”

  “It’s not a problem,” he said.

  “Dewey, this isn’t a problem for you,” I said, “but it’s a problem for me. I don’t agree with the Contra strategy, and if I take the job, I rightfully would be expected to carry out your plans.”

  Clearly, he was unhappy with my response. It took something off our relationship, which was fully understandable under the circumstances.

  The next time I saw him was in 1983. As we headed toward town, he announced that he had something extremely important he wanted to discuss. I expected him to try to change my mind about the Contras and started to push back, when he interrupted me to say he wasn’t there to talk about Nicaragua—“I’m here to work up an invasion of Suriname, from here,” he said. I don’t want to say I never get dumbfounded, but it was a stunner. Suriname, on the northeast coast of South America between Guyana to the west and French Guiana to the east, had been a Dutch colony until 1975. Both Dutch exiles and senior officials in the Reagan administration, including those in the CIA, did not want to see either the Soviet Union or Cuba expand their facilities in Suriname. The exiles, I understand, had asked the Agency for help overthrowing Suriname’s Communist-leaning government.

  Later that night we met at the Hilton with the commanding general of the U.S. Southern Command, Paul Gorman, and with Judge William P. Clark, Jr., the national security adviser under Reagan. I arrived late because my daughter Amy had been attacked at our front door by an armed robber who jumped out of a car and, with accomplices, tried not only to rip off her gold necklace but to force her into the car. Amy was a strong-willed and feisty teenager w
ho somehow managed to pull herself free, and the robbers fled the scene with only the necklace. Nevertheless, the security team arrived, and a report had to be prepared for the police. I relayed the story to Clarridge, Gorman, and Clark when I arrived for our meeting, anticipating some sympathy, and was surprised at how quickly they passed over it and got down to talking about Suriname. It was a good indicator of just how serious and driven they were about the task. That said, it was one of the craziest operations I’d ever heard proposed in my career. It defied all of my basic rules for covert action and had little chance of success.

  The next day, Clarridge and I had meetings with officials about developing an invasion team, with Clarridge talking about bringing in South Koreans and Gurkhas. They were incredulous, but they had a quintessential Latin response: Sure, sounds like a great idea; we’ll look into it. Afterward, one official came to me and said, off the record, “Jack, we haven’t tapped your phone, but we’re going to start to tomorrow, and the reason is this is too important and we want to make sure you’re playing it straight.” What a unique approach to running a telephone tap operation! Since I never used the phone for operational matters, it posed no security threat. We always assume our phones are tapped.

  Clarridge and his team went off to Brazil to sell the invasion plan. Brazil wanted numerous questions answered before considering it. Ultimately, the Americans were waved off, thanks to opposition in Latin America and on Capitol Hill, where people had come to their senses. One congressman went so far as to say publicly that it was the dumbest operation he had ever heard of. I continue to find it amusing for the absurdity of it and the bizarreness of that period. At that point in my career, I still had the view that you could humor bad policies because they would surely die under their own weight.

  Iran-Contra changed all that. By now, Congress had passed the Boland Amendment, effectively stopping the CIA from providing support to the Contras. But officials in the executive branch were continuing to find ways to aid the cause on a covert basis.

  Clarridge was circumspect when he phoned in 1985, saying only that Casey would be calling momentarily. The White House had already decided that shipping arms to Iran could gain the release of seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by Iranian-backed terrorists. Clarridge had, unwittingly, already helped facilitate a shipment of arms from Tel Aviv, through Lisbon, to Tehran, using the Israelis as middlemen. He would be indicted years later for his testimony about this, although he pleaded not guilty and consistently said he believed the flight contained parts for oil drilling. He was ultimately pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, in 1992.

  As he predicted, that day in December 1985, I was summoned to the seventh floor within five minutes. Casey welcomed me into his office. He told me there was someone who had useful information about Iran, and he wanted me to meet him. His name was Manucher Ghorbanifar, a disreputable Iranian arms dealer.

  I didn’t even have to leave the building to check him out. We already had a thick file on him dating back to January 1980, showing a history of false leads and bad information peddled with an eye toward padding his own finances. He’d failed two polygraphs, and we’d issued what’s popularly called a “burn notice” on him. These are fairly rare official statements that the subject is known to be untrustworthy. Ghorbanifar, according to his file, was to be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance. He hadn’t come to the Agency directly but, rather, through a foreign policy activist who was at the time a consultant to the NSC.

  I met with the NSC consultant at his Georgetown home later that month. I used an alias because I had grave concerns about being exposed to Ghorbanifar. The consultant talked with enthusiasm about the arms dealer. He was proud of the work they were doing: they were going to free U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, he told me, by arranging a sale of U.S. arms to the Iranians. I was shocked. I had never heard of such an operation, and given what I had just read about Ghorbanifar, I could hardly believe he was the middleman in such an undertaking. The NSC consultant assured me the whole thing had White House approval. Not only that, it was already under way. The release of a hostage, the Reverend Benjamin Weir, in September of that year, had been the result, he believed, of their help in shipping 96 TOW antitank missiles to Tehran. Weir, a Presbyterian missionary and teacher for almost thirty years in Lebanon, had been kidnapped sixteen months earlier from a street in Beirut by Islamic Jihad Organization, a terrorist group backed by Iran. The Iranians had then reneged on a promise to release six other hostages in exchange for another 408 TOWs in September, and they failed to release any hostages after another 18 Hawk antiaircraft missiles had been sent in November. The early arms shipments to Iran were made through the Israelis, so that the Reagan administration would not be accused of contravening its own arms embargo against Iran. Reagan approved the shipments out of concern for the hostages. But now the U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, from the NSC, was proposing that the United States itself sell arms to the Iranians. What wasn’t clear to me or anyone else at the Agency, with the possible exception of Casey, was that proceeds from steep markups on the weapons would go to supporting the Nicaraguan Contras, in contravention of the Boland Amendment, which prohibited such assistance.

  I listened patiently to the NSC consultant and agreed to meet the following day with him, Ghorbanifar, and North. Then I made a beeline for the home of Bert Dunn, who was chief of the Near East Division. A West Virginia lawyer who was also a smart, seasoned, and highly respected officer, Dunn had spent a great deal of time on the ground in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and knew it like the back of his hand. He had run into the likes of Ghorbanifar in his travels. He arranged a meeting for us with Casey and Clair George, head of the Directorate of Operations (DO), for the next day, before my rendezvous with Ghorbanifar, the NSC consultant, and North. At the appointed hour, we went to the director’s office and I related what I’d been told. Clair George let out a moan and bent over like he’d been punched, his head in his hands. It appeared to me that he was hearing this for the first time. By contrast, Casey sat quietly listening and asked me to keep my appointment.

  I was the first to arrive at the NSC consultant’s house. North and Ghorbanifar came in shortly after me, grinning and in high spirits. I took an instant dislike to Ghorbanifar. His first gesture was to reach into his bag and take out three large cans of very expensive Iranian caviar, one for each of us. I handed mine right back to him. “I can’t take that,” I said. “It’s against the rules.” Clearly chagrined, he attempted to turn on the charm to try to win me over. I suspect he knew he wasn’t making progress, but he is the type of hustler who believes that somehow, in the end, he will prevail.

  The next day, I briefed Casey, Bert Dunn, and Clair George on the details of the meeting about the NSC-sponsored arms-for-hostages operation. I told them I was even more convinced that Ghorbanifar could not be trusted. To my surprise, Casey told me to keep dealing with him. I said, “If we’re going to go forward with this, we need to polygraph him.” I was confident of the results and thought for sure they would torpedo Ghorbanifar.

  In addition to the grave policy issues, I was beginning to have career concerns. From what I was hearing, I was afraid there might be no recourse but to vote with my feet. I went home that night and in a state of agitation told my wife, “I might have to resign. I just can’t do this one.” Pat, not surprisingly, didn’t flinch, simply saying, “Do what you have to do. We will survive.”

  We administered the polygraph to Ghorbanifar at a hotel in Georgetown a few days later. The polygrapher asked him about a dozen questions. The test results indicated that Ghorbanifar had lied on virtually all the relevant questions. The only things he answered truthfully, as I recall, were his name and nationality. I went straight to Bert Dunn and shared the results.

  Ghorbanifar, meanwhile, apparently went straight to the NSC consultant, complaining that the polygraph test had been more expansive than he expected and that he had been physically
injured by the examination techniques—a laughable claim. Nonetheless, the consultant called the CIA twenty-four-hour watch center, which handles after-duty communications. He demanded to talk to me, and reportedly threatened that he would have me fired if I didn’t call him back immediately. Of course, when referring to me he used the alias I’d given him, so it took the watch officer some time to figure out whom he was talking about.

  Clair called to ask about the results of the polygraph. When I told him about Ghorbanifar’s rather spectacular failure, he said, “The hell with him.” We were supposed to meet with Casey the next morning to brief him, but the meeting was called off for an unexplained reason. Clair told me that Ghorbanifar’s lies had led everyone to the same conclusion: we wanted no part of any operation he was involved with. “The DO is out of it,” he said. I was to have no more contact with Ghorbanifar or the NSC consultant.

  I was satisfied. Not only did I not have to make a career-ending move, but I figured I had helped the U.S. government back off from a policy disaster. Shortly after meeting Ghorbanifar for the first time, I had written a note to senior management calling the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran “inimical to U.S. interests” and calling Ghorbanifar “a fabricator who has deliberately deceived the U.S. government concerning his information and activities.” But mine was a short-lived feeling of satisfaction. What I did not count on was that Casey would simply transfer the arms-for-hostages operation to an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. He told Charlie Allen, our senior antiterrorism analyst and head of the Hostage Location Task Force, to meet with Ghorbanifar to take another look at him and figure out what he might be able to tell us.

  Two days after Ghorbanifar failed the polygraph, and a day after Clair George declared that the Directorate of Operations would have nothing to do with him, Allen said he had spent five hours with Ghorbanifar at the NSC consultant’s home.2 Allen has said that he made pretty much the same appraisal I did: Ghorbanifar could not be trusted and was looking mostly to line his own pockets. But Allen, like Casey, held out hope that the arms dealer, whatever his motives and whatever false leads he might generate, might also provide information that would help get the American hostages back home.