Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA

by Rizzo, John

  In that respect, I was probably typical of most Americans at that period in the nation’s history. In the decades before the Hersh articles and Church hearings blew the lid off in the mid-’70s, the CIA operated in a largely black vacuum, mostly ignored by the mainstream media and coddled by the very few senior members of Congress who were ever told anything the Agency was doing (and, by all accounts, CIA directors never told them very much). The CIA even stiffed the Warren Commission in its landmark 1964 investigation into the death of President Kennedy—and got away with it.

  At the time of the Church hearings, I was working at the U.S. Customs Service, part of the Treasury Department. It had a small office of about fifteen lawyers, and its portfolio included everything from narcotics enforcement to international trade issues. For a rookie lawyer, the job at Customs was fine. The work was reasonably interesting, I got to travel some, I liked the people I worked with, and the hours certainly weren’t backbreaking—everybody was in the office by 8:30 a.m., and everybody left at precisely 5:00 p.m. By 1975, however, I was quietly yearning for something different and more challenging. While playing hooky from work, I was glued to my TV, watching the Church Committee proceedings with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Was this what the CIA was really like?

  That was my first reaction. My second reaction was to wonder whether the CIA had any lawyers in its organization. I had no idea, but with Congress and the media demanding top-to-bottom reforms, I figured that if the CIA didn’t already have lawyers, it was going to need them. A lot of them.

  There was nothing in my background or previous life experience to suggest that I would ever work for the CIA. I was born on October 6, 1947, in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester, the product of a classic melting-pot marriage—an Irish American mother and an Italian American father. My dad’s immigrant father, a stonemason by trade, died when my father, Arthur, was sixteen, and that was when he became a man, taking on the role of a surrogate father to his two kid brothers. (He also had five older brothers.) My dad took on all sorts of part-time jobs to support the family, and at the same time attended classes at night at Bentley College in Boston, earning a business degree in 1932. Starting at the bottom, he then began what would be a very successful fifty-year career in the retail department-store business. Throughout his life, my dad was a quiet, somewhat shy, hardworking, thoroughly honest and decent man. Above all, he loved and cared for his family—his mother, his brothers, his wife, and his children.

  My mother, Frances, was the daughter of a pharmacist. She was the middle child of five, two of whom died of tuberculosis in their twenties. Despite these early tragedies, my mom lived her entire life with her inherited Irish sense of wit, indomitability, and fierce loyalty to her family. More outgoing and socially active than my dad (she joined a bowling league and exercise club in her fifties), she adored and supported him unstintingly for the more than half century they were married, up to the day my dad died in 1996. She passed away two years later.

  I can summarize my childhood and adolescence in five words: very happy and very uneventful. I was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. In a close-knit Italian-Irish American family, that meant I was pampered and indulged from the day I was born. My two older sisters, Maria and Nancy, accepted this with remarkable equanimity. In fact, they were unwaveringly protective of their kid brother as we were growing up (and continue to be to this day). When I was twelve, my dad got a big new job in Boston, so our family moved from Worcester to Wayland, a small town about twenty miles outside the Hub.

  I spent my junior high and high school years in the excellent Wayland public schools. I was a pretty good student and active in things like the yearbook and newspaper, but I had no career ideas, save for a vague notion about becoming a Boston sports reporter. My logic was airtight: I could not only go free to Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins games, but get paid to do so, to boot.

  Entering my senior year of high school in the fall of 1964, I was facing my first major life decision, which was where to go to college. With the help of Mr. Lewis Oxford, my kindly if somewhat bemused high school guidance counselor, I considered the Ivy League schools. Although my grades had been fairly good, and I had done well on the SATs, I knew my credentials were not exactly eye-popping. So I immediately ruled out Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Dartmouth or Cornell? Too rural. Columbia or Penn? Too smack dab in the middle of big cities.

  That left Brown University, in sleepier Providence, Rhode Island. In the years to come, Brown would become among the most chic and selective of the Ivy schools, but in the mid-’60s it was widely viewed as a safe fallback school for an aspiring Ivy Leaguer. For me, it was my first and only realistic choice. And lo and behold, I got in, much to the evident relief and surprise of the patient Mr. Oxford.

  My parents were thrilled. Although my sisters had gone to Tufts, I was the first member of the extended Rizzo family to go to an Ivy League college.

  I arrived at Brown in September 1965 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science in June 1969. They were the most formative years of my life, and I loved every minute I spent there. Little of it had to do with academics, however. What Brown really taught me was how to go from being a naïve, immature kid to being a grown man. I joined a fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, where I met a group of guys that would become lifelong friends, and which gave me a lifelong taste for fine clothes and good cigars. Being at Brown, and especially being at Beta, also gave me a badly needed set of social skills. I like to think that, on balance, it was a worthwhile return on investment for my proud parents, who happily paid every cent of my tuition plus a generous allowance, which I spent with gusto.

  Looking back, the way I arrived at the decision to apply to Brown was markedly similar to the way I arrived at the decision, a decade later, to apply to the CIA. Essentially, both decisions were made on the basis of a leap-of-faith hunch. They were two of the best decisions I made in my life.

  There was one other thing that Brown gave me, the significance of which didn’t hit me until years later. Brown gave me my first contact—albeit fleeting—with a bona fide CIA legend.

  One course in the political-science department was far more popular than any of the others. It was a twice-weekly lecture taught by a professor named Lyman Kirkpatrick.

  He was the most impressive, and most intimidating, physical presence I had ever encountered.

  Kirkpatrick had recently arrived at Brown after a two-decade career at the CIA, in which he had held positions of increasing importance, according to his faculty bio, though it was notably sketchy on details. It would be years before I fully understood that Kirkpatrick had been among an elite group that later would be chronicled in Evan Thomas’s book The Very Best Men, and still later in the movie The Good Shepherd: the WASPy, idealistic, Ivy League–bred recruits who famously shaped and led the first generation of the Agency’s leadership in the post–World War II years and at the dawn of the Cold War.

  Kirkpatrick fit that image perfectly, beginning with his Princeton background and magisterial-sounding name. But it was his physical presence that was the most striking. It was only in doing the research for this book that I realized he was only fifty years old at the time I first saw him. In the eyes of a twenty-year-old kid, Kirkpatrick had an aura of someone older, wiser, immortal, even. He had thick, iron-gray hair, slicked back and crisply parted. He was a strikingly handsome man, with clear blue eyes and a smooth, preternaturally rosy complexion. His voice never wavered from its richly mellifluous, baritone purr. He always appeared in class impeccably groomed.

  Besides all that, there was one last thing about Kirkpatrick that added a unique, vaguely mysterious element to his unforgettable image: He was confined to a wheelchair. The word was that in the 1950s polio had left him paralyzed from the waist down. I don’t remember him ever acknowledging it or the wheelchair.

  Kirkpatrick’s lecture was such a hot ticket on campus that it had to be held in a cavernous, amphitheater-st
yle classroom that would be packed with what must have been close to two hundred mesmerized students. I don’t recall much in the way of give-and-take between Kirkpatrick and the rest of us—he would just wheel himself behind a desk at the front of the room, glance briefly at everybody arrayed above and around him, and start talking in that unmistakable voice. I don’t remember anything he ever said in the lectures that was really memorable, yet none of us seemed to mind. It was not until years later, after I was inside the CIA, that I learned he had been a central figure in some of the most sensitive and controversial Agency programs in the ’50s and early ’60s.

  I was always too cowed to approach him—until I screwed up my courage and approached him at the end of one of his last lectures. I have no idea what I was going to ask him. There was just something inside me that compelled me to interact, just once, with this imposing figure from a world of international intrigue about which I knew nothing.

  I sidled up near his wheelchair, anxiously waiting my turn as other students surrounded him. When the moment finally came, and he looked at me with a surprisingly benign gaze, I opened my mouth . . . and nothing came out. I was frozen in fear. After an agonizing moment, I managed to croak, in a quavering voice, something about enjoying his lectures. Kirkpatrick responded briefly and politely, but by then I was too mortified to hear him. I slunk away in embarrassment, and that was the last time I ever saw him. I tried my best to forget the entire painful incident.

  Yet when the notion of applying to the CIA first entered my mind almost a decade later, the first person I thought about was Lyman Kirkpatrick. Perhaps he had stayed somewhere in my subconscious all along. If so, I wasn’t the only Brown student of that era whom Kirkpatrick affected. Many years later, in the mid-’90s, I stepped into an elevator at CIA headquarters and saw a guy standing there who looked vaguely familiar. I was a relatively well-known figure inside the Agency by that time, and the guy introduced himself. Turned out he had been a year or two ahead of me at Brown, and right after graduation he began a long career as an undercover CIA operative, serving mostly overseas. Intrigued, I asked him what caused him to join up at such an early age. “Two words,” he replied. “Lyman Kirkpatrick.”

  At the beginning of 1969, the year I was to graduate, I had to start—grudgingly—thinking about what to do after Brown. I settled on law school, but first, like every other twenty-one-year-old guy at that time—the height of the Vietnam War—I faced the possibility of being drafted into the military.

  Like most everyone else at Brown, I was opposed to our government’s involvement in Vietnam, but I was never a part of any of the protest groups or demonstrations. My fraternity brothers and I were far more focused, if that is the word for it, in putting together parties at the house and organizing road trips to all the women’s colleges scattered all over New England. All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to go into the military, at least while the war was ongoing.

  A few months before graduation, I dutifully reported for my physical at the South Boston naval station. To my utter amazement, I flunked the physical. The summer before, I had suffered a kidney stone attack (doubtless due to the sun and the copious amounts of beer I had consumed in college), the first of what would be a series of attacks stretching over several years. My family’s urologist put me on a strict low-calcium regime, which I blithely ignored when my parents were not around, and wrote a letter outlining my medical condition—not so much to get me a deferment (which he said it would not) but to give the doctors a complete picture of my physical health. Letter in hand, I arrived at the naval station and passed all the physical tests with flying colors. However, when one of the military physicians finally scanned the letter, which was only a couple of paragraphs long, he said, with a trace of annoyance, “Why didn’t you show us this when you first got here? You can’t serve in the military when you have to be on a diet like this.” I was then summarily dismissed, having gone from 1A to 4F status in a matter of thirty seconds.

  I take no pride in saying this, but that was probably the happiest day of my life up to that time.

  Of course, it wasn’t right that I felt so happy about escaping service. The entire selective-service process in the Vietnam era was so capricious and unjust. Almost all of my friends from college—and later from law school—managed to avoid military service, and the handful that did serve were never sent to Vietnam. At the same time, tens of thousands of young guys from less privileged backgrounds had no choice but to go, fight, and die there.

  Free of the draft, I decided to visit Washington, D.C., for the first time in my life that spring, to check out the law schools of Georgetown and George Washington University. GW became my first choice. I was accepted there, and in the fall of 1969 I was off to the capital.

  The summer between leaving Brown and entering GW, I had an epiphany of sorts. After my narrow escape from the draft, it dawned on me that I needed to stop casually coasting through life and start taking my future seriously. I wanted to become a grown-up. I began to apply myself to my academics, getting up early every day, attending all my classes in a coat and tie as if I were going to work in an office, and studying in the library before, between, and after classes. I was selected for the law review at the end of my first year and graduated with honors in June 1972. Arriving to attend my graduation, my parents and sisters had an inadvertent brush with history—they stayed at the Watergate Hotel just a couple of days before the infamous break-in by the Cuban henchmen dispatched by Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt (another distinguished Brown alum, by the way).

  Two summer clerkships in law firms, one in D.C. and one in Massachusetts, convinced me that I had neither the taste nor the temperament for private practice. Instead, I was drawn to government service. I cast the net broadly over a variety of federal agencies, getting some rejections and some bites. Eventually, in August 1972, I started working in Customs as an entry-level attorney, at the princely annual salary of $13,309. It seemed like a fortune.

  After nearly three years on the job, the bureaucracy at Customs, and at Treasury, had become increasingly stultifying. It was manifested in any number of small things, like not being permitted to sign any letters or memos I wrote that would go outside of Customs. I was in my midtwenties, restless and frustrated. One day I simply looked in the Martindale-Hubbell legal directory and discovered that, yes, the CIA did in fact have an Office of General Counsel, and that its address was “Washington, D.C., 20505.” That was all the listing said. I thought, what the hell, I’ll send off my résumé and see what happens.

  It was a total shot in the dark. Weeks went by—it was now the summer of 1975—and I heard nothing. No acknowledgment of the letter, no rejection of my interest, no nothing. Well, I assumed, that was that—this was the CIA after all, and it didn’t have to acknowledge or explain anything to anybody. And then the phone call came.

  It was a quiet, friendly female voice, inviting me out to CIA Headquarters for an interview. The call lasted for less than a minute. A day or two later, a thin letter containing a single page of directions arrived in the mail.

  Several days later, on a raw, rainy afternoon in the fall of 1975, for the first of what would be thousands of times, I drove from my apartment in Georgetown over the Chain Bridge into Virginia, and then up Route 123 for a couple of miles until I took an unmarked exit to a road that led, about a couple of hundred yards down, to a gate, where I showed my ID to a security guard, who waved me through. The CIA’s “campus” (as its inhabitants called it, I came to learn) looked then much like it does today—a cross between a bucolic, tree-lined state wildlife refuge and a suburban industrial park. I later was to learn that construction on the sprawling complex, inside a barbed-wire-protected expanse of 250 wooded acres, began in 1959. The first employees, who had been scattered in various facilities in downtown Washington, moved in in 1961 (shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion) and the rest arrived when the complex was completed in 1963 (shortly before President Kennedy’s assassination). The new Langl
ey headquarters was the brainchild of, and a monument to, the storied CIA director Allen Dulles, still the longest-tenured CIA chief in history (1953–1961). Legend has it that Dulles had not only handpicked the site, but trudged around the grounds himself, tying ribbons around the trees that were to be spared from the construction bulldozers.

  The security guard had directed me to a small parking lot nestled in front and to the left of the main entrance to a looming, antiseptic-looking seven-story concrete building. I walked slowly through the rain and entered through the heavy glass doors into the large marble lobby. It was quiet and empty, save for a security guard sitting at a desk. I saw nowhere to sit, so I just stood there, nervously.

  As I waited for my escort from the general counsel’s office, I took in the scene around me. Looking down at the lobby floor, I discovered I was standing on the top end of a large, circular, gray-and-black CIA logo. Instinctively, I edged away from it.

  Turning to my right, I saw in the distance, carved into the wall, what looked to be about three dozen stars, each about four inches in size, laid out in rows of seven or eight. The stars were flanked by two flags, one the U.S. flag and the other a dark blue one. Above the stars, also carved into the wall, was an inscription: “In Honor of Those Members of the Central Intelligence Agency Who Gave Their Lives in the Service of Their Country.”

  It was very quiet. I felt like I had just wandered into a huge museum, or maybe a modernistic, mysterious church—which, in a way, I had.

  I was led to a small suite of offices tucked into a corner of the top floor of the headquarters building, not knowing at the time that this was where the CIA director and the rest of the Agency’s top leadership were located. My escort was the general counsel’s secretary, a petite, cheerful young woman named Sue Nolen. It had been her voice on the phone inviting me out for the interview.