Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  DO officers did not like the way Roeber dispensed with diplomatic polish when critiquing performance. He was a stickler for accuracy and detail. He wasn’t reluctant to tell people, “You got it wrong.” The DO, for all its wonders, did not like being challenged on its facts. But the DO performs best when it is challenged. Roeber would hold the line on facts—and most DO officers, schooled in cultivating relationships, did not like this. Roeber demonstrated to me just how valuable the analytic role could be in managing the intelligence gathered by the DO. As a consequence, I began to bring more analysts into the directorate in the reporting area. Coming off my experience running the CNC—and being in the midst of the hunt for Pablo Escobar in Colombia—I was acutely aware of the value of having analysts and operators work together. Having said that, these analysts were influenced by being so close to operations and so were not involved in producing the finished intelligence read by the top-level consumers in Washington. For our purposes, the analysts needed insight into what was going on in the operations and the quality of the sourcing, but their objectivity was inevitably influenced when they were on the team and were expected to be “true believers” in the cause at hand. That’s why we tried to maintain a “cellophane wall” between the analysts and the people running operations, especially covert action programs, because it’s so important that the analysts stay independent and objective. Analysts cannot be “part of the program.” Even though Roeber took off his DI badge for this assignment, he still brought intellectual and analytical rigor to the DO, and unfairly took a number of hits for it. DO officers blamed him for being hard on their reporting and operations, but they did not have the perspective to understand that he was doing exactly what I wanted him to do. They simply had a hard time accepting that “one of them” might actually think this was a good thing.

  Latin America is one of the areas of the world where the CIA has a larger-than-life reputation. The Agency’s involvement in the region, both real and imagined, goes back many years and is centered on hard targeting of Soviets, Cubans, and Chinese, as well as covert operations designed to stave off Soviet penetration there. Robert Gelbard, who served as ambassador to Bolivia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, believes that an exaggerated fear of the Soviets by U.S. policy makers led to “dramatic mistakes” by the U.S. government in the region—the coup in Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, the shadow cast over the Agency by supporting the opposition to Allende, and aiding the Contras. “The whole game back in those days was part of the Cold War—everything has to be presented and understood in the context of this overarching conflict with the Russians,” Ambassador Jeffrey Davidow explained.1 Davidow and I served together in Chile in 1973 and remained friends throughout our careers. He would become assistant secretary of state for Latin America. From the policy side and the intelligence side, we both experienced this environment of hostility toward the Cubans and the Russians, and saw how it played out in Latin America—sometimes for the good and sometimes not.

  Brian Latell, who served as national intelligence officer for Latin America at the Agency and focused much of his career on Cuba, believes the Cuban intelligence service helped to perpetuate the David-and-Goliath imagery and portray the United States as the evil, imperialist hegemon to the north. “The role of Cuban intelligence in propagating these myths cannot be underestimated,” according to Latell, author of Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine.2 Propaganda against the CIA came straight from the Cuban playbook. Cuba was looking for a scapegoat to blame for the failings of its own economic system. The Cubans were not alone. Many other Latin American governments were more than happy to point the finger at the CIA if it meant giving themselves some cover and a bit of political space to maneuver. The Cubans played the spy game hard. Once, they actually tried to gain access to my house through our Chilean housekeeper, Bernarda, who had come to us in Santiago when she was only seventeen. She’d been trained in Old World–style service, with a uniform and gloves and very formal interactions. But because of her youth and our informal American manners, she loosened up considerably while keeping her impressive command of setting and serving meals at formal dinners and cocktail parties. Most important, she was a loving nanny to our young children. She became a member of the family, and when it came time for us to leave Chile, it was too hard for all of us to part with her. We brought her with us, and she spent half her time working for us and the balance completing her education.

  The Cubans clearly did not know how close and loyal she was to the family. A Cuban official who attended a holiday party at our residence tried to follow up with a call to Bernarda to see if she would meet with him privately. She turned him down without hesitation and alerted us to the approach. I suspect the Cuban was hoping to use her to gather classified documents in the house or to install an audio device in a strategically located room. These types of operations are commonplace abroad. Most intelligence professionals assume their phones are tapped, their residences bugged, and their staff on someone else’s payroll. Thus, no documents are ever brought home and no Agency meetings ever take place there. So even if Bernarda had been persuadable, very little could have been gained. I regarded the Cuban’s overture as ill-advised and ham-handed, but I knew I couldn’t be too smug.

  The CIA’s larger-than-life image in Latin America also worked to our advantage. The Agency came to be known as “the Company,” in Latin America, which is what CIA means in Spanish, and it was both revered and feared throughout the region. This image enabled us to develop strong liaison relationships with host governments and to recruit sources to our cause, which became essential to our counternarcotics efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we needed to train and coordinate with host country security services in the fight against organized crime elements and the drug trade. In some cases, a chief of station in Latin America had better access to information and government officials than the ambassador. For Latin Americans in the region during this time, Davidow said, “The image of the CIA was that they were so overwhelmingly powerful that everyone in the embassy must be spies.” This naturally caused friction between the CIA and the State Department, especially when an ambassador felt upstaged by a chief of station, but this was based on the belief in the region at the time that the CIA had eyes and ears everywhere.

  Even more dramatic than these CIA–State Department tensions was the sea change brought about by the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights. The Agency was placed in the difficult position of trying to balance Carter’s ambitious human rights imperatives against the pragmatic need to recruit assets and collect intelligence. “They were difficult times, when sources or liaisons had to be cut off if they were even suspected of human rights violations,” said Ed Boring, a retired CIA officer with long experience in Latin America.3 Boring believes human rights concerns were even greater under Clinton than they had been during Carter’s presidency. Someone on the ground would propose using a colonel as an asset, Roeber similarly noted, and “the decision would come down to figuring out how dirty he was.” Many assets would take polygraphs, but others would not. It was a real issue at the time: “There’s no way to get it exactly right. You make the best judgments you can,” Roeber said.

  Roeber was very helpful in managing our response to the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, which started investigating human rights abuses. Its three international commissioners were appointed by the secretary-general of the United Nations. Having grown up in the Directorate of Operations, my initial reaction was that we could not talk to these commission outsiders. But Roeber was convinced that if we showed a little ankle and goodwill to the commission members, they would likely throttle back. Roeber felt the commission members were not as hostile as depicted. Together, we worked with them, and the potential problem went away. I learned an important lesson from this experience: you don’t always have to say no to the outside world. To everyone’s benefit, it pays to talk to potential critics, provided you have your act together and have pr
epared well for the exchange. Roeber had it right. Engagement can be a successful strategy under certain circumstances.

  Another big challenge within the Latin America Division involved streamlining our mission and cutting budgets. Money continued to flow for counternarcotics, which remained Washington’s top priority in the region. But it was the exception that proved the rule: personnel accounts and budgets were coming down, and in an organization where our tradecraft depended upon the steady recruitment of assets and training, this was not going to be an easy adjustment. Every time this has occurred in the life cycle of the Agency, as it has too often in the CIA’s history, there has been a monumental disruption. A similar cut during the Carter administration led to personnel disruptions many years later. The hiring freezes in those years led to a bubble in staffing and a missing generation of A-plus officers. We need to be very careful today that we do not repeat this mistake as we wind down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

  “It’s never a happy camp when you’re downsizing,” Roeber noted. “We spent a lot of time closing down counternarcotics programs, based on the philosophy that if it’s not contributing to the linear strategy, let’s not do it.”

  Not all the cuts were ill-advised. Some of the stations we were downsizing had grown out of all proportion during the Cold War and had far larger staffs than their new missions required. Inevitably, the most troubled stations, with the biggest personnel, fiduciary, and morale problems—and the biggest problems getting along with their embassy counterparts—were the ones being downsized. It is in that transition that things fall apart. For this reason, the most problematic station in 1994 was a country in Central America that, because of our efforts during the 1980s, was one of the largest stations in the world. We could not bring it down fast enough to match the new reality.

  I sent Roeber down there to size up the situation. The station chief was a Latin America veteran who had a good record up until then and was generally well liked. He was close friends with Terry Ward, my predecessor, and a number of other Latin America hands, and though I had not known him before, I found him to be operationally savvy and personable. But while he was aggressive in his operations, he was not effective at managing personnel tensions in this downsizing environment, which would have been challenging for anyone. In the mode we were in, his style was becoming a problem, and we were getting a steady stream of complaints, official and unofficial. After Roeber did an initial review, and several delicate issues came to the fore, I decided I had better pay a visit to see if the situation was salvageable. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, cliques had already formed at the station, pro and con, with regard to the management, which almost always results from a major personnel shift. It was clear that in order for things to start healing, the station chief would have to move on. Likewise, for morale purposes, we also tried to switch out most of the staff as quickly as possible.

  To deal with problems as they arose at this and other stations in similar straits, I set up accountability boards to help chiefs talk through their management issues and figure out how to fix problems with reporting, personnel, and operations without the sometimes heavy hand of the inspector general’s office. Accountability reviews were also designed to help stations examine their force structures, cover arrangements, and platforms for collecting intelligence, and their relationships with their embassies and the rest of the intelligence community. The accountability boards helped us to assume responsibility for our own stations and personnel within the Latin America Division. Roeber believes these reviews actually helped to boost the “can-do” attitude of our officers. Creating them ended up being a deft bureaucratic move that often succeeded in sparing us most of the pain of review by the inspector general.

  The equilibrium of an overseas station could be upset in all sorts of strange ways, often completely unexpected. In a South American country, a popular math teacher at my children’s elementary school was very active in the community, including serving as the assistant Boy Scout leader, and was reputed to be so patriotic that one of our officers suggested we use his apartment as a safe house. But Pat thought the man was “suspiciously strange,” and I felt very uncomfortable about such an arrangement. Months later, my daughter Jennifer walked one of her timid sixth-grade male classmates to the principal’s office, where he reported inappropriate behavior by the teacher. Sometime later, the teacher was arrested in one of the barrios surrounding the capital. He turned out to be a pedophile living in alias and on the country’s Most Wanted list, using his apartment to seduce children from the school. His arrest was not only a local cause célèbre, but his face and story were flashed around the world, and all I kept thinking was what an operational disaster it would have been if we had used the man’s apartment. I could picture the headline: CIA SAFE HOUSE USED AS SEX DEN BY PEDOPHILE. A slipup like that would almost certainly have been career ending for me. You just couldn’t explain something like that away. Luckily, Roeber’s reviews turned up nothing so salacious when I was running the division.

  * * *

  From our time together in the Counter Narcotics Center, Roeber and I had begun to appreciate the value of analyzing management data. This was largely alien to the Directorate of Operations culture. If you talked to most DO officers, they would stress at some point that espionage is “an art, not a science.” That attitude tended to excuse everything—“We’re artists.” It sounds good, and I subscribed to this view for years, and a number of times used the same expression myself. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed nonsensical. It is true that espionage had a human dimension to it that wasn’t easy to quantify. For example, how and when to pitch a target. But that didn’t mean that analyzing management data wasn’t helpful, even essential, or that we should have been immune to accountability for the sake of this “artistry.” The DO, in many ways, was almost mythic in the way it viewed itself and hated to be evaluated, resisting basic questions such as “How many people do we have here?” and “What are they doing in comparison to other offices?”

  At one point, after Ted Price had replaced Twetten as the deputy director of operations, I arrived at a meeting of division chiefs with an analysis that Roeber had done of staffing levels across the directorate. We also looked at how many agents each division had and how much reporting they were doing. We were meeting off-site to discuss the budget and personnel downsizing problems, and I was there to insist that Latin America needed more people and that these new slots should be reallocated from other regions. I was clearly the skunk at the party, since we all were expected to say how much of a hit we were prepared to take, not to ask for more manpower. But I wanted to see the hits taken from the bloated, overstaffed locations. When it came time for me to speak, I handed out color analytical packages to everybody and said I would like to open this part of the session with a discussion about rationalizing how the directorate was organized.

  My colleagues took their packages, turned them facedown, and decided it was time “to take a break.” When everyone returned, we moved on to the next point on the agenda. My colleagues simply refused to discuss a rational analysis of manpower and resources. This was a distinguishing and annoying characteristic of the DO with which I never made peace. There we were, resisting rigorous analysis and replacing it with “gut instincts,” believing that we were artists even in the management arena. It had been risky to challenge this perception, but I genuinely believed it was the right thing to do and did not mind raising the issue. My colleagues did not enjoy it as much and would probably still disagree with me today.

  There had also been a long-standing tendency in the directorate to resist technology, although things have improved substantially in this area in recent years. When the Agency’s IT people first offered e-mail to the DO, nobody in the directorate would take it, but having relied on it more heavily in the CNC, I volunteered Latin America to be the guinea pig, and we were the first division to have e-mail. I don’t need to explain that, since today it is so much a part of U.S.
government and private-sector communication. The debate over e-mail mirrored a fight that took place earlier in my career, over satellite phones, specifically STU-IIIs. John McMahon, when he was deputy director of operations from 1978 to 1981, not only threw most of the lawyers out of the DO but would not accept the STU-IIIs despite our obvious need for fast international communications. If station chiefs were talking on the phone, he reasoned, they would not be making a record of what they were doing. They would not be writing cables, which would inevitably lead to a breakdown in the chain of command. So the DO was nearly the last place in the CIA to have the satellite phones. His motive for this way of thinking was good, inasmuch as there has to be good command and control, but you can’t hold off technology in the intelligence business. New policies on the technology were soon drafted, however, and STU-IIIs became ubiquitous at the DO. Even the most technology-averse officers eventually had to yield to modernity.

  * * *

  Working as chief of Latin America necessarily meant dealing with Cuba and Haiti, two troublesome countries I had managed to avoid up until that point. By virtue of their proximity to the United States and their history, Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Haiti have long been a preoccupation for the White House and the seventh floor of the Agency. For those of us who have spent our lives studying and working international relations focused on U.S. national security objectives and intelligence collection abroad, we found that working Cuba and Haiti was about not just foreign policy but also domestic policy. Both countries have significant diaspora communities in the United States—with both adversaries and advocates in the U.S. Congress. Their proximity to Florida, the growing significance of their exile communities in American politics, and the specter of mass migration made Cuba and Haiti priorities within the Latin America Division in the early 1990s. No one in the Bush or the Clinton administrations wanted to see poor immigrants taking to the seas as Cubans had in the Mariel Boatlift of the 1980s and as Haitians had in 1991 following the coup d’état that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Whether economic migrants or political exiles in fear of persecution, they were seen as an unwelcome problem in Washington by both political parties.