by Jack Devine
Setbacks, of course, are as much a part of the game as successes, and they serve a purpose. There was the time we imported a “locks-and-pick man” to gain entrance to the apartment of a high-value target who was on temporary duty. I don’t know how one becomes a specialist in picking locks, but this man was very good at it. In my office, he demonstrated his dexterity with a range of complicated door locks. There didn’t seem to be any kind of lock that could keep him out. But when we got to the actual door we needed unlocked, he was stymied. During his unsuccessful attempt, our surveillance had to keep in view the corridors and the target himself for over twenty minutes, which seemed like a lifetime, with the man exposed in the hallway, working to no avail. He was dejected by the experience, as was the entire team. Nevertheless, we gave it a go a few days later, and it worked like a charm. That operation proved very successful.
Recruiting Soviet agents was a primary focus for us in Buenos Aires, where there was a substantial Soviet Bloc delegation because of the agricultural trade between the two countries. One of the station’s senior case officers had met the East German chargé d’affaires at several parties, and I encouraged him to work on the relationship. The case officer was skeptical. The East Germans were among the best. Succeeding with an East German—well, it was tougher than succeeding with a Soviet. And this official was a typical hard-core operative.
Defection is a mysterious calculation, with a cost and a benefit to all involved. My best information on what it must be like for the defector comes from Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the CIA in 1964. Nosenko changed sides just as the CIA was trying to determine whether there was a Soviet connection to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a scenario that would have had grave political consequences. Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in Russia, and there were suspicions that Oswald had been recruited by the KGB. Nosenko, though, told his debriefers that he had handled Oswald in Russia and that Oswald had been surveilled by the KGB but never recruited because he wasn’t considered bright enough and was deemed mentally unstable.
I had the opportunity to have dinner with Nosenko when he visited Argentina during my tour there. During the dinner I asked him how he had been able to make the decision to leave behind his country and his family so suddenly. He said that he had been thinking about defecting to the West for years and that his own situation had become so desperate that he couldn’t stand it anymore. Once he made up his mind, he said, he realized that he would have to forget about his family for their sake and just walk away and never look back.
“I simply had to cut out my heart and go on living,” he said.
Nosenko’s case also shows what can happen when you become the poster child for the excesses of counterintelligence paranoia. Nosenko was locked in solitary confinement by the CIA for three years and interrogated by officers who were convinced he was lying and that he was actually a KGB plant meant to sow disinformation.1
Nosenko’s imprisonment is often blamed on the famously distrustful chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. Nosenko actually was held by the Agency’s Soviet Division, but the suspicions about his motives no doubt grew from Angleton’s convoluted and controversial theories about Soviet espionage strategy. Angleton had been heavily influenced by an earlier Russian defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had claimed that the KGB had infiltrated the CIA and that its agents were manipulating the Agency to get it to advance the KGB’s agenda unknowingly. He said in essence that all other defectors were part of this plot.
Angleton began to see these “moles” everywhere, in what he described—borrowing a phrase from T. S. Eliot—as “a wilderness of mirrors.” He hunted relentlessly for these double agents and destroyed careers along the way, the impact of which I saw in a small way early in my career. I had an instructor at the Farm who impressed me tremendously. I praised his skills to a number of seasoned officers and each time received in response a wince and an indication that something unspecified about the instructor wasn’t quite right. I assumed it might have been a drinking problem or other indiscretion, until I learned years later that Golitsyn had told Angleton that one of the Soviet plants in the CIA was a Slav whose name began with a K and ended in -sky. My instructor fit that description, as did a few other officers. At the suggestion of the CIA, these officers later sued the U.S. government because their careers had been derailed by Angleton’s suspicion that they were Soviet plants.
Angleton’s paranoia became extreme; he was forced to resign in 1975. But a certain amount of distrust is the fate of any spy. When you are acting covertly, it’s reasonable to assume that the people you are dealing with have motives as murky as your own. It is necessary to triple-think interactions and to keep your antenna up for signs of subterfuge. Why is this person cooperating? Is his information verifiable? Who stands to gain from it?
So it was with this Eastern European. Our case officer cultivated him slowly, aware that he might be working his own angle. Perhaps he thought he could get something out of our officer, even convert him. The officer received no indication he would ever drop his guard, but he kept working him, because you never know. Shortly after I left Buenos Aires for Washington, our persistence paid off. He came to us, asking for help to defect to West Germany.
By then we had repaired relations with the civilian Argentine government following the junta’s fall after the Falkland Islands war. We would have had great difficulty getting him out of the country quickly if the relationship had still been in the state it was in when I arrived.
This and a dozen other operations aimed over the years at Soviet Bloc officers came to mind with a surreal quality as Milt Bearden and I flew to Moscow in June 1991. Even more surreal was the fact that we visited KGB headquarters, toured the KGB museum, and met the head of the KGB. In the museum, black curtains were pulled down over a few exhibits. We were told these were photographs of Americans caught in flagrante delicto.
The other thing that Bearden wanted to do was visit the Silk Road. So we flew to Samarkand, to the land of Genghis Khan. With the Russians, we stayed in the dacha once inhabited by Stalin’s infamous security chief, Lavrentiy Beria. I’m sure it was adequately wired to pick up any indiscreet conversations among our team.
We were traveling with our chief from Moscow and the KGB’s head of counterintelligence—the general who had been responsible for overseeing Aldrich Ames, we would later learn. On their side, there was a Ukrainian colonel plus a couple of midlevel Russian colonels. A senior staff member from the CNC rounded out our delegation. Everywhere we went, there was ritual toasting. The Russians would toast President Bush, so there were Milt and I, toasting Gorbachev. I’m sure if anyone on our counterintelligence staff had gotten word of this they would have concluded we were nothing but spies all along for the Russians.
As part of the trip, our Russian guests arranged a private boat ride on what appeared to be a desolate lake. At midday, the boat anchored close to the beach for an impromptu picnic. Communications among us were less than ideal, because we were speaking in many tongues, including French, German, Spanish, and Russian, depending on where we had served abroad previously. At one point, for an inexplicable reason, our German-speaking CIA officer asked our Russian hosts if one could swim in the “nude” (nackt). The German-speaking KGB officer thought he’d asked if one could swim at “night” (nacht), to which he casually responded, “Of course.” With that, our officer dropped his swimsuit and ran to the water’s edge stark naked. With a look of horror, and shouting “women and children!” the KGB officer leapt up and ran after the CIA officer. It turned out to be a public beach, and a family was strolling toward us about a hundred yards away. We had a good laugh, and the Russians must have been shaking their heads in disbelief later that night, but we were all reminded how easily miscommunications can happen when working in a foreign language, even by experienced officers. After the lake excursion, we boarded a helicopter to fly over the poppy fields and the Friendship Bridge. The Russian pilo
t flying along the river explained that we were going to have to fly a little farther west, because the people on the other side, in Afghanistan, had these very dangerous missiles. At that, the KGB general got on the radio and calmly said, “Captain, you don’t need to explain that to these men.”
There was no miscommunication there. Everyone laughed nervously, but the context was clear: the Russians understood that by introducing the Stinger missile to Afghanistan, we had been doing our job and trying to win the war. And they were doing their job, and afterward, life had gone on in a civilized manner. That certainly isn’t the case now, with al-Qaeda, with whom there can be no dialogue or operational understanding. The task is simply to destroy them.
There was another incident that occurred before we went to the Friendship Bridge, this time in Moscow, that was incredibly illuminating. The Russians took us to a historic museum just after five o’clock in the afternoon. There was a corporal guarding the museum gate. The KGB colonel told him we wanted to go inside.
“It’s after five; you can’t come in,” the guard said.
“I’m here with the KGB general!” the colonel said, whipping out his KGB credentials. In the past, this would have terrorized anybody.
“Well, it’s after five, and I don’t care who you are. You can’t come in,” the guard said.
We all walked away sheepishly, which was an extremely humiliating experience for the head of KGB counterintelligence and the colonel. The next day, the colonel called our local chief and told him that the museum guard had been replaced. But I wasn’t sure they even had the power to get rid of him. When I went back to my office at the CNC in Washington, I wrote a trip report and told many people that story. At that point, I knew the Soviet game was over, because they had lost the intestinal fortitude to clamp down and instill the fear in their people that is necessary to hold a dictatorship in place. That was in June 1991, and the government fell in August.
NINE
A New Boss, a Bad Penny, and a Principled Heroin Dissent
Washington, 1990–92
Shortly after my return from Russia, at the end of August 1991, Webster stepped down as DCI and was replaced by Richard J. Kerr, who held the position as interim director while Congress considered President Bush’s nomination of Robert M. Gates, who had been forced to withdraw his nomination four years earlier because of concerns that he knew more about Iran-Contra than he’d acknowledged. As we now know, with the perspective of more than twenty years, Gates served with great distinction as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, who brought him in to smooth out the situation left behind by Donald Rumsfeld, as well as under Barack Obama, who kept him on at the Pentagon as a gesture of bipartisanship. At Defense, Gates engendered support from the troops, who genuinely liked and respected him. In fact, he mastered serving the needs of soldiers and of the White House. At the time he was nominated to run the CIA, I thought he was a very smart analyst, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union. Above all, I thought he knew how to work the bureaucracy better than anyone else I had ever met in government. He was finally confirmed by the Senate in early November, in what was a personal vindication, with both Republicans and Democrats saying they did not believe Gates had ever tried to cover up the Iran-Contra scandal.
Shortly after Gates moved into the director’s spacious office on the seventh floor, Roeber and I met with him at around seven o’clock one evening. Unlike the more modest approach I had taken with Casey in setting up the Afghan Task Force, I told Gates that we were expanding operations and needed more resources; Roeber had developed a solid visual presentation to support the requested increase. Gates had just returned from downtown looking frazzled but had squeezed us in to hear our pitch. When we entered, he motioned for us to sit down on his sofa. The office was dark except for a small light on his desk. He sat directly across from us and looked us in the eye. He listened to us motionless for about twenty minutes, without any questions or body language. At the end of our presentation, he returned to his desk without a word, and we exited the room. When Roeber and I were outside his office, we looked at each other and agreed that we clearly had bombed. We returned to our office dejected, thinking of how we would adjust our plan to press ahead. However, Gates’s assistant called the next day and, to our amazement, reported that the DCI had authorized the increase. As good as his word, he had the money and staff reprogrammed shortly thereafter.
As director of the CNC and then director for Latin America, I made a couple of trips to Colombia to better understand the operations against Escobar, the Medellín Cartel, and the Cali Cartel. It was by far the most dangerous place we were working at the time. On one of the trips there and to Bolivia, I accompanied Senators Dennis DeConcini (Arizona) and Bob Graham (Florida) and Representative Henry Hyde (Illinois) on their chartered aircraft. CIA officials in the region opened the door wide for us, granting broad access to the highest levels of government and our joint intelligence programs. We visited the liaison facilities and made helicopter trips into the interior to check out cocaine labs that had been set up in the jungle.
All of us benefited from the firsthand experience. Everyone on the ground extended themselves and provided us with an excellent opportunity to “kick the tires,” whether it was the helicopter trip into the jungles of Bolivia where we looked at a recently raided drug production site, or our sit-down with the special police team in Bogotá that later had a direct role in the takedown of Escobar.
Travel as a CNC director came with many lessons—and not all of them were related to the drug war. On a trip to Asia, I stopped in Japan en route to Thailand to meet with the Japanese minister of justice to talk counternarcotics. Feeling a bit groggy from the long flight but seeking to break the ice with the taciturn minister, I commented on his elegant fish tank, asking if it was difficult to feed so many diverse fish in one tank. He replied that it was no problem at all, and we went on to have a productive discussion about our efforts to fight the opium trade in the region. I was pleased with myself for being able to open him up with the question about his fish—until the next day, when a carefully wrapped miniature fish tank from the minister arrived at my hotel. It was full of mechanical fish—exactly like those in the minister’s office—which naturally did not require any feeding whatsoever. I smiled, thinking about the laugh the Japanese must have had at my expense, and made a note to be more aware of my surroundings even when jet-lagged.
On a visit to Colombia, I stayed at a colleague’s residence in Bogotá. He was an old friend, and we had served together in Chile. He may have regretted my stay. When I got up around six o’clock one morning, I used his guest bathroom to freshen up, but somehow I grabbed the sink faucet so hard that I ripped it off the wall and water began spurting all over the apartment. I snapped him out of his deep sleep with a shout that startled him so much that, as I recall, he reached for his weapon and ran in to join me. He thought that we had been raided by the traffickers. We couldn’t find the turn-off valve, and the water kept flooding the room. Finally he was able to rouse the building’s superintendent, who managed to turn off the water. What a way to start the morning. We packed up quickly and joined the ambassador in a heavily armored convoy to visit Colombian president César Gaviria. He probably thought he was safer there than in the flooded apartment with me.
As I was approaching the end of my time in the center, Rick Ames ended up on my doorstep again, like a bad penny. This time a friend delivered him—Milt Bearden, my colleague from the Afghan Task Force days. Bearden was chief of the Russia Division, which had a billet in the CNC, and he implored me to take Ames off his hands. He seemed to be concerned about Rick’s reliability in handling sensitive Russian data, given his history with alcohol. At the same time, Bearden touted Ames’s Russian-language skills, though these were not in high demand at the CNC at that time.
There was something in Milt’s voice that suggested this was more than just a favor. My first question was “Is he drinking?” The CNC was a large operation, and
it would be hard to track Rick and keep an eye on his intake. Milt assured me he wasn’t.
In the end, I agreed to it. We put Ames on a Turkey project, which he seemed to take genuine pride in, even though by then he was a long-term agent of the KGB. I had little interaction with Rick and no social encounters with him.
Unbeknownst to me, Ames by now had become a suspect in a great mole hunt being conducted by our colleagues in another part of the CIA. His name had first surfaced on a list of almost two hundred CIA employees who had had access to the identities of all the agents we’d lost in the Soviet Union. Several days before Bearden called me, Ames had been interviewed by the mole hunters. By the time he reported for duty at the CNC, one of them was convinced he was a spy.
Equally problematic—and more directly related to the drug war—was my responsibility as CNC chief for producing national intelligence estimates on drug production. Every year there were battles royal over our findings. These estimates impact policy makers’ decisions about how to spend counternarcotics funds and how to allocate personnel. Every agency had a vested interest in the outcome, and it was the CNC’s job to serve as an honest broker and to produce the most objective product possible.