Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  From the perspective of operations, Cuba has always presented a challenge for the Agency. This is partly because it is an island without easy access or, since January 1961, an official U.S. embassy presence from which to operate. After the Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959, leftists throughout Latin America flocked to Cuba for training and ideological inspiration, making Cuba a hotbed of anti-American sentiment and, needless to say, a particularly hostile environment in which to operate and recruit sources. Roeber said, “Cuba is a miserable hard target. The Agency’s record [there] over the years was less than stellar.”4 From the outset, Castro invested heavily in intelligence and placed the responsibility for espionage in the hands of guerrilla fighter Manuel Piñeiro Lozada, the infamous “Barba Roja.” As early as 1961, Piñeiro set up the first professional intelligence organization in Cuba, known as the Directorate General of Intelligence (DGI), whose mission was to collect intelligence on political parties, international organizations, private businesses, exile groups, and foreign governments, especially the United States. Hundreds of Piñeiro’s officers received extensive and excellent operational training by the Soviets and East Germans, who provided them with deep insights into the CIA and our methods of operating. Piñeiro and I crossed paths in Chile, where he spent months in the early 1970s before Allende was ousted. Piñeiro provided support to the Chilean government’s security apparatus and pro-Cuba organizations there at the time—of course, to no avail. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, he went on to support revolutionary activities in Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

  The DGI quickly became one of the most effective smaller services, and over the years, one of the biggest threats Cuba posed to us was one of counterintelligence. In 1983, former DGI agent Jesus Mendez defected and reported that many of our agents in Cuba had been doubled against us. In 1987, Juan Antonio Rodriguez Menier, one of the founding and most senior members of the DGI, passed on a treasure trove of information that revealed the DGI’s very aggressive operations against the United States over the previous twenty years. It was also the DGI that played a major role in the 1970s in the defection of former CIA officer Philip Agee, who from exile in Cuba published the true identities of hundreds of undercover CIA officers. More recently, in 2002, the hand of the DGI was revealed with the conviction of Ana Belen Montes, a senior Cuban analyst with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), as a Cuban spy who had spent sixteen years working for the DGI.

  Despite the robust efforts of the Cuban intelligence service against us and the difficulties that the operating environment presented, Cuba was no longer considered a real threat to U.S. interests by the time I became Latin America Division chief. Nonetheless, we were always looking for ways to approach Cubans. As division chief, I would have off-site strategic sessions to discuss this topic. Jerry Komisar was the head of Cuban operations in the division at the time. I was glad to have him working this issue, since it was difficult to find top-notch people to work the discouraging Cuban account. As part of our efforts, we brought together people from across the intelligence community to look at the issues and think more strategically about Cuba and how to approach it. Komisar and I also traveled to Florida to talk with leaders of the Cuban-American community and strategize about ways to maintain the pressure on the Castro brothers. Meanwhile, Latell, who focused much of his career on assessing Castro and the situation in Cuba, was closely tracking this so-called special period in Cuba after Soviet subsidies had dried up in the early 1990s. Indeed, the economic situation on the island was bleak, with Cuba sorely lacking energy supplies and basic foodstuffs. The military did not have the resources to train troops, acquire new equipment, or even maintain what they had, including their planes, which were in dilapidated condition. In September 1993 two Cuban MiG fighter pilots attempted to defect, one landing in Key West, Florida, and another at our naval base in Guantánamo. One of the pilots said he was fleeing the country due to the economic situation there. We also learned from the two defectors that Cuban pilots hardly ever fly because of fuel shortages and their aircraft being in such poor condition. Aside from this information, there was little to gain from the pilots from an intelligence standpoint. Looking back, I see that there might have been an opening to do more on the island at that time, when the Cuban economy was so fragile, but ultimately, the policy-making community in Washington did not have the appetite to do much more than keep a close watch.

  Haiti was another story. Beginning in 1993, Congress put a lot of pressure on the Clinton administration to do something there. In September 1991, Haiti’s first freely elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced out of power by a military coup engineered by three Haitian generals less than a year after being elected with approximately two-thirds of the popular vote. First President Bush and then President Clinton pursued economic sanctions along with the OAS to force the military junta to the negotiating table. The Governors Island Accord was signed in July 1993, but from the outset the generals failed to adhere to the agreed-upon measures and time lines. In October 1993, the USS Harlan County, carrying a small implementation force of U.S. military engineers, turned around and came home when confronted by a gang of armed paramilitary thugs at the Port-au-Prince pier. President Clinton was assailed from the right for what they perceived as an erosion of the nation’s ability to project power, and he was criticized from the left for pursuing the Bush-era policy of picking up fleeing Haitians at sea and forcibly returning them to face a repressive regime. In April 1994, the head of the House Appropriations Committee, David R. Obey, called for an American-led invasion to oust the junta, and Randall Robinson, head of the TransAfrica Forum, was undertaking a highly publicized fast until the administration reversed its policy of indiscriminately returning refugees. Finally, the White House decided that it had to take action, and it turned to the CIA.

  During a previous posting in the Caribbean, our household help, as in most of the community, had come from Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic but is far less prosperous. Once, after Pat let a recently hired housekeeper go for stealing our children’s clothes and throwing them over the wall to her friend in an adjoining apartment complex, she discovered what looked like a tiny altar in the maid’s bedroom. Upon closer inspection, the “altar” turned out to contain a letter from Pat’s mother, its edges burned, and a lock of hair surrounded by little rocks and chicken feathers. One of the things the housekeeper had told Pat prior to being fired was that her mother was a voodoo witch doctor, and it was hard to mistake the altar for anything other than an arrangement for a voodoo ceremony, probably overseen by her mother and directed against the evil spirits of our family. Of course, we didn’t believe in voodoo, but it was uncanny, the series of mishaps that immediately followed. My fourteen-year-old son, Joe, decided he would take the family station wagon for a spin. While he didn’t make it out of the driveway, he did manage to rip the front door off the car. That same day, Antonio, our industrious gardener, received a bad electrical shock from our metal gate, which apparently was wired somehow to hot circuitry. He survived, but the incident gave us all a fright. Finally, when I opened my bank statement, I was notified that I had overdrawn the account by several hundred dollars. Later, it turned out that “the bank record system had skipped a line” and hence, according to the bank, it was only a technical mistake. I still don’t put any credence in voodoo—most of my days are filled with commotion of one sort or another—but it was hard not to feel like I was experiencing the wrath of the witch doctor that day.

  This would not be my last brush with voodoo. In 1993, I played a part in the Clinton administration’s effort to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president of Haiti. I believed that if the White House wanted to pursue a policy to remove a military dictatorship in Haiti and reinstall a democratically elected president, it was worth considering seriously how this might be done effectively. So I threw myself into a seemingly endless round of meetings to accomplish
this policy. In the end, we had an approach that everyone got behind.

  Out of the starting gate, the Clinton White House wanted efforts coordinated with robust public diplomacy and possible military intervention. “There was a lot of interaction with the military in the lead-up to the intervention,” a colleague, John Kambourian, said. “We had a very good relationship with many military personnel working directly, and it worked very well.”5 Indeed, liaising with the military and sharing intelligence were both important parts of the mission. In Norfolk, Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson played a key role in charge of military contingency planning in Haiti (and in Cuba), and we met often in strategy sessions and planning meetings before the U.S. military intervention the following year. “That was just when the military was starting to get their arms around ‘jointness,’ so for the CIA and the military to have a cooperative relationship was a bit of a rarity coming into that time frame,” Wilson said.6 There was definitely a sense that Haiti needed to be a joint effort, and those of us involved were determined to make it work.

  I counted Senator John Warner, the distinguished Virginia Republican who served on the Senate Committees on Intelligence and Armed Services, as a strong supporter of the Agency. One afternoon he called me over to his office on the Hill to get an update on the situation in Haiti. At one point, he asked if there were any problems he could help with, and I made the mistake of telling him that Kambourian might be suffering from dengue fever. “I will call the navy and have a medical ship pick him up,” Warner said, moving toward the telephone. I backpedaled quickly, insisting that I was confident that Kambourian was on the mend. Warner looked at me quizzically, but returned to his seat. There was no doubt that he meant what he said and would have made the call, to our everlasting embarrassment. It was a good reminder to be careful what you wish for in the office of a powerful senator.

  Around this time, I was surprised to get a call from Sandy Grimes, a colleague with whom I had gone through a midcareer training program, and Jeanne Vertefeuille, a gray-haired woman straight out of a John le Carré novel. Jeanne was a counterintelligence officer and Sandy spent her career supporting our Soviet assets. Could we meet outside my office, so as not to attract attention? When we sat down together, the two women told me they were on the trail of a mole working for the KGB. It was the first I had heard of it. In the mid-1980s, we had lost at least ten of our best agents inside the Soviet government. The mole hunters, toiling for the past eight years, had started with nearly two hundred suspects, CIA officers who had had access to all the assets, and had narrowed the file down to one. According to Sandy, they’d done this by asking everyone on the special counterintelligence team, plus six experienced officers familiar with Soviet operations, to write down a short list of suspects. Rick Ames was on everyone’s short list, and the first person on Sandy’s.

  So it was that Grimes and Vertefeuille asked me about Aldrich Ames: Did I think he could be a spy for the Soviets? I immediately flashed back to my strange confrontation with him years earlier in Rome, over ignoring my instructions about readministering a polygraph test to the Eastern European walk-in code-named Motorboat once he had shown deception on the first test. The look of resentment and defiance I saw in Ames’s eyes when I challenged him about this had left a lasting impression.

  “Yes,” I said, “and he is the only employee I know I would say that about.”

  While the White House had been fully briefed on the top secret mole hunt, the president remained publicly preoccupied with the situation in Haiti. A mini-controversy erupted in October 1993 when one of the Agency’s top analysts described ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in highly critical terms in a closed-door, classified briefing before the House Intelligence Committee. This briefing was followed by others, including one in the Senate that had been requested by Senator Jesse Helms, the conservative North Carolina Republican who opposed intervention in Haiti. To some in the Clinton White House, this appeared to be a case of the CIA siding with the president’s conservative opponents and playing games with intelligence. But actually it was the opposite. The CIA was not against intervention in Haiti or reinstalling a democratically elected president, if that was what the White House desired. Rather, we wanted to make sure the president and members of Congress had the clearest picture possible. James Woolsey, the director at the time, agreed with the Agency assessment, which represented a consensus across the intelligence community. But his stance made it difficult in the beginning for us to gain the trust of the White House.

  At the time, I could not allow myself to get too caught up in the controversy du jour because there was always so much else going on. The Clinton administration’s human rights focus in Haiti remained a top political priority in Washington, but in Latin America our number one operational priority remained the hunt for Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín drug cartel. I made this abundantly clear to Jay Brant, a CIA officer who was in Bogotá at the time. Escobar had become more than just a drug trafficker. By then he was a real political problem, one that symbolized the drug war. Brant remembers my marching orders: “We have to get Pablo. We need to show real progress here. Put everything you have into it,” he said I told him.7 Brant knew that the relationship with the Colombian authorities was essential in the hunt for Escobar. He knew that a decision by them to put Escobar’s wife and children in protective custody would help as a lure. “We were constantly looking for ways to flush him out, and this strategy was what ultimately worked, because we were able to find a way to cause Escobar to reach out more frequently to his family, especially his son, who he adored,” Brant said.

  The hunt finally ended on December 2, 1993, when a special technical surveillance unit of the Colombian police known as Search Bloc, commanded by then colonel Hugo Martínez, intercepted a cell phone call Escobar made to his son, Juan Pablo. Escobar was hiding out at a safe house in the Los Olivos neighborhood of Medellín. Police units immediately surrounded the house. Escobar and his bodyguard attempted to escape over the rooftops, but both were shot and killed.

  However, that success was not long-lasting, since in the end the ever-present demand for cocaine resulted in a more decentralized network run by lower-level leaders who were able to keep the flow of drugs heading north. Jerry Komisar, as CNC director, noted that in many ways the Agency’s successes against drug kingpins such as Escobar seemed to only make the job more difficult. Komisar has said, “We would take down a dragon but be left with a lot of little snakes,” he said.8 Despite our best efforts, innovative developments in using intelligence for tactical purposes, and such big successes as bringing down Pablo Escobar and breaking up the Cali Cartel, many of us knew right from the start that we were never going to fully accomplish the objectives of the program as set out by the policy makers. As long as there is a highly profitable demand for drugs, there will always be some enterprising group around the world that will find a way to meet that demand. The CIA deputy director Dick Kerr wisely commented that the drug business is the type of crime that will always be with us; the best we can do is “to keep beating it with a stick” to make it painful for the traffickers to engage in the business and, to the degree possible, make it harder and more costly for them to deliver the drugs. There has been some decrease in drug use in the United States in recent years, but it remains a multibillion-dollar business. The ambassador and former assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs Bob Gelbard said that on the supply side of the problem, one of our biggest mistakes is in thinking it is within the U.S. government’s purview to interdict, convict, and eviscerate the scourge of drugs in the region, when really it is up to the foreign governments to take advantage of the tools and skills we share with them and develop the democratic institutions and system of justice necessary to deal with the illegal organizations profiting from the drug business.9 Echoing Kerr, Komisar said it is frustrating to look back and see that, despite the successes, we did not eliminate the drug problem.10 Indeed, many of us who wo
rked against the narcotics threat over the years would agree. But good liaison cooperation with host governments and assets we can trust, a linear strategy that coordinates agencies and capabilities across the U.S. government, and, most important, increased demand-reduction efforts at home is perhaps the best formula for countering or at least containing a serious transnational threat such as narcotics.

  Two months after Escobar was killed, the CIA’s mole hunt came to an end that was even more dramatic. On February 21, 1994, Aldrich Hazen Ames, the man I had first met and come to know well in our training days, was pulled over near his home in Arlington, Virginia, by FBI agents as he drove his 1992 Jaguar to CIA headquarters. They had been trailing him and listening to his calls for months. There was some suspicion earlier that Ames and his wife were spending far more money than Ames made as a case officer, but it was assumed that was because Rosario came from a wealthy Colombian family. The real break in the case came after Grimes matched the dates Ames had reported meeting with a Soviet diplomat he was supposedly trying to recruit with the dates on which large deposits were made into one of his domestic bank accounts. According to Grimes, in an April 20, 2013, talk she gave at the National Archives, in 1993 an additional piece of information became available that pointed in Ames’s direction, and lead the FBI to open a full-scale investigation on him. It is believed by many in intelligence circles that the information came from a source who said that the mole we were looking for had served in Rome. This narrowed down the list pretty quickly, and the FBI opened an investigation into Ames. I saw his arrest on television, and even though I’d had an inkling this was in the cards, it was a shocker. I found it particularly depressing because I knew him personally. His arrest led to one of the lowest morale moments in the history of the CIA.