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

by Rizzo, John

  Still, the Agency has always thrown a huge amount of resources and effort into its defector program, because every once in a while a defector can be an intelligence gold mine. And during the Cold War, probably the most highly sought-after prize was an active-duty officer from the Soviet KGB.

  All of which brings me to Yuri Nosenko, a complex, controversial, and irresistibly fascinating character I encountered in early 1977. A decade earlier, the CIA had given him a new name, a new “life history,” and a new life in a bucolic, Mayberry-like little town in the southeast United States—a seemingly unlikely, fish-out-of-water landing spot for a hulking KGB apparatchik with the gap-toothed mug of Ernest Borgnine and the gravelly Russian-soaked drawl of Akim Tamiroff.

  But this was not just any erstwhile KGB thug. In 1964, just months after the assassination of President Kennedy, Nosenko, a hard-drinking carouser already on the radar of CIA’s Moscow Station, came running in panic, claiming he was in hot water with his KGB bosses for gambling away some official funds. So this guy was clearly no saint. Still, Nosenko appeared to be a plugged-in KGB official, which would’ve been tantalizing enough at the height of the Cold War, but his sales pitch was even more explosive: He had firsthand knowledge of everything the KGB knew about Lee Harvey Oswald. Of course, the Agency instantly bit, and Nosenko was soon in the CIA’s care and custody in the States. Right away, he gave his handlers his take on the KGB-Oswald relationship: There was none. He was so seemingly confident and authoritative in what he said that many of Nosenko’s interlocutors concluded he was telling the truth. But James Angleton didn’t, and that made all the difference.

  Angleton was the longtime, legendary, paranoid, and in retrospect quite likely deranged head of the CIA’s counterintelligence office, and he was absolutely, irrevocably convinced (by another recent Soviet defector, ironically enough) that Nosenko was a plant—a double agent diabolically dispatched by the Soviets to throw the United States off track, to cover up the fact that the Soviets knew far more about Oswald—and the plan to kill Kennedy—than they could ever let ever come to light. The all-powerful Angleton decided that Nosenko had to be not only disbelieved, but broken.

  So for three years, Nosenko was imprisoned in a tiny room in one of the Agency’s facilities in downstate Virginia. Deprived of sleep, cut off from any outside contact, subjected to relentless and brutal interrogation. And yes, he recanted some of the things he claimed originally about his background and rank at KGB. But he never wavered about Oswald. Finally, mercifully, the CIA leadership called off the confinement in 1967. Nosenko was cleared of suspicion (although Angleton never would concede) and by 1977 was quietly resettled in the small southern hamlet where I was sent to meet with him.

  My legal mission was mundane—I was to meet privately with the local probate judge (a courtly old gentleman; picture Wilford Brimley in judicial robes) to explain to him why, for national security reasons, the sworn signature on Nosenko’s new will registered with the court was not Nosenko’s true name. That was the easiest part of the trip, yet I was nervous as hell on the plane down. At that point, not yet thirty years old, I still barely knew any CIA operatives, let alone some hardened KGB turncoat that my new compatriots at the Agency had imprisoned and tormented a decade before. When I got off that little commuter airplane in that little Southern airport, there he was at the gate. Grinning, with that husky Russian growl and a handshake that sent jolts of pain up to my shoulder.

  His being there as my welcoming party was not part of the plan. My boss’s instructions had been to grab a cab from the airport to the discount motel just outside town to spend the night, and then slip quietly into the courthouse in the morning to do my business with the judge. After that, I was told, I should pay a brief courtesy call on Nosenko, and then fly back home. My other order was even more simple: not, under any circumstances, to engage in any conversation with Nosenko about his years of confinement. I assumed, though no one told me this at the time, the CIA was extremely concerned that Nosenko could still sue for millions, and win. A lawsuit like that was the last thing the Agency wanted splashed all over the newspapers, less than two years removed from the Church hearings.

  So there I was, in this big Buick gas-eater, where I absolutely wasn’t supposed to be, with this voluble bear of a man behind the wheel insisting that the motel could wait, that I would be his guest for a homemade dinner at his house. The way he barked it out, it was the proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse.

  Nosenko’s home, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers, was actually a relatively modest bungalow tucked at the end of a dirt road. It was on a lake, and when we first arrived, Nosenko proudly took me down to his dock, where he showed off his little fishing boat. He lived with his relatively new American wife; like a number of defectors over the years, he had left behind not only his old life but his old family when he defected. His wife was a charming, homespun type who looked to be about Nosenko’s age—around sixty-five—and seemed to dote on him. She greeted me warmly and sat and chatted for a while. I was vastly relieved at her presence because I had just about run out of noncontroversial material to chat about with her husband. By then, however, Nosenko had retrieved from his basement a sample of what clearly was his most cherished possession—a bottle of his own personally distilled vodka (or “wotka,” as he growled with that gap-toothed grin).

  More than three decades later, I can still taste the stuff. In those days, I enjoyed an occasional vodka martini, but this was like nothing I ever consumed before or since. After one shot, my hands were tingling; after two, my feet went numb; after the third, I couldn’t feel my face. Meanwhile, Nosenko kept belting them down and started talking even more animatedly.

  Around my fourth shot, I didn’t even notice anymore that he had an accent. And then, out of nowhere, he started talking about his years of confinement. Through my deepening alcoholic fog, I didn’t know what to say or do—this was the one subject my bosses had forbidden me to get into with him. His wife, looking at him fondly, glanced over to me and quietly said, “He never has the opportunity to talk to anybody these days about this.” So I listened, and no amount of Nosenko’s homemade “wotka” could have made me forget what he told me.

  Basically, Nosenko said he bore no grudges against anybody. Not James Angleton, not the other Soviet defector who had convinced Angleton that he was a Soviet plant, not his interrogators with all of their brutal deprivations, not the Agency leadership, which stood by and let him rot in that box for three years. “They had do it,” he shrugged. “That is the nature of our business and that’s what you do to a man like me. . . . I knew I was telling the truth, and I knew that if I didn’t break that someday they would believe me. . . . I knew what they wanted, they wanted me to say that I was sent here to lie about Oswald and what KGB knew about him, but I wouldn’t do that because if I did, your government would have sent me back to Russia, and KGB would do things far worse to me than what CIA was doing to me. . . . Your colleagues didn’t torture me. They don’t know what real torture is.”

  On and on he went, pouring shot after shot. I struggled to recall it all, since even in my increasingly inebriated state I knew I needed to remember all this. “So why,” I finally slurred, “are you telling me all this, some young guy you just met?”

  “Because,” he replied in what to my ringing ears now sounded like the King’s English, “you are their lawyer, and I know they never ask me about this because they fear I will sue them. Well, tell them I will never sue them. Never. But you also tell them, I will never forget what they did.”

  Somehow late that night, I got to my little motel. The most drunken night of my life was followed by the worst hangover of my life. Then Nosenko picked me up at the motel, looking fresh as a daisy, and once again made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—he would take me to the judge. And so we walked, me with considerable difficulty, through the picture-book town square to the old courthouse, with Nosenko buoyantly calling out greetings to all the locals we passed. “I don’t know tha
t you are supposed to be seen with me,” I suggested plaintively. “We look too conspicuous.”

  “The only one conspicuous is you,” he snorted. “You are the one wearing the fancy suit.”

  After I saw the judge, Nosenko drove me to the airport, but we said nothing to each other about what we had talked about the night before. The flight back to D.C., of course, was bumpy all the way, and I thought I might be about to die for my country, either in a crash or, more likely, from “wotka”-induced nausea.

  I did manage to scribble down notes quoting everything Nosenko told me the long night before. After that trip, I didn’t have any occasion to think about things like putting somebody in solitary confinement, or trying to get a prisoner to talk, or what is or isn’t torture. Not until a quarter-century later, after 9/11.

  Another astonishing thing I discovered in my first few years at the Agency was how extensively it interacted with some of the highest-level sectors of American society—the academic, media, and corporate communities in particular. It was not a case of the Agency spying on them; that was clearly verboten in the new post–Church Committee world we were living in. In fact, an outsider might reasonably assume that none of these institutions, in the post-Watergate era, would ever want to have anything to do with the big, bad CIA.

  But once I was on the inside, I quickly learned that that was not the case. Some of these folks, mindful of the professional and personal risks of doing so, continued to come forward to offer their services to the Agency—even in the late ’70s, when the CIA’s reputation and influence had just taken a sustained battering. This realization crystallized for me during yet another lucky assignment that came my way in late 1976. For the first time in its history (and, truth to tell, to forestall potential congressional initiatives in this area), the CIA set out to establish written policies governing the scope and intent of the relationships it would henceforth have with U.S. members of the media, the clergy, and the academic and corporate communities. And I was chosen to draft the proposed policies for the CIA leadership—and ultimately the director—to review and approve. Once again, it was a challenging and infinitely fascinating assignment for a young guy still new to the intelligence world. And, of course, it bore absolutely no relation to anything I ever studied in law school.

  I was given only a few basic marching orders: First, no U.S. journalist, clergyman, academic, or businessman was going to be manipulated or duped into any secret work for us. In the unique bureaucratese of the spy business, this was translated into the phrase “no operational use on an unwitting basis.” Second, the policies should not be written so as to prohibit any confidential relationships with members of these sectors. But third, the threshold criteria for establishing any relationship should be rigorous and subject to careful internal oversight. No one in the CIA was going to recruit, or accept an offer of services, from a U.S. journalist, academic, businessman, or clergyman on a whim or hunch—there had to be a strong reason to believe that they could provide a real benefit to the Agency’s intelligence mission. For use of a journalist or clergyman, the personal approval of the director would be required.

  What I found especially surprising was how much people in those professions were willing, and sometimes downright eager, to get into bed with us. Academics and journalists in particular were a strong-willed, independent lot. They had a lot to lose, after all. The universities and news organizations that employed them made it clear that any secret association with the CIA required senior management approval and that any individual who didn’t get it risked severe sanctions. In 1977, Harvard University established written policies along these lines for its faculty and staff, and its president, Derek Bok, wrote to Director Turner imploring that the CIA help enforce them by pledging it wouldn’t enter into any confidential relationship with a Harvard employee without making sure the employee first cleared it with his/her bosses. Since I was already working on putting together CIA policies in this area, I was told to draft the response.

  Now, Stansfield Turner was no hard-core zealot on behalf of the Agency’s clandestine side; in fact, he was by nature suspicious of the spy world’s mystique. But on this matter he pushed back hard at Harvard: He told me to draft a response stating that he had no intention of forswearing any future secret relationships with Harvard personnel and would certainly not make any of them get approval from their bosses before agreeing to help the Agency in a given instance. He took the same stance the next year when news organizations sought the same kind of commitment. To Turner, and to every CIA director from every administration in the next three decades, the issue was pretty simple: If a U.S. citizen is willing to enter into a confidential relationship with the CIA because he/she wants to help the country, that is between the Agency and the individual, and no one else. And in most cases I would come across over the years, the individual in question would be adamant about keeping the relationship secret, partly because of fears of retribution, not just by U.S. adversaries abroad but also by their own employers, but also partly because they felt strongly—more strongly than the CIA did, actually—that if they wanted to help the CIA, it was their right and no one else’s damn business. The policies I helped establish for the Agency in this always-sensitive area remain in effect to this day.

  I also was surprised and gratified to discover how much the U.S. corporate sector was (and continues to be) willing to provide secret support to the CIA and its national security mission. American companies—especially those with significant international interests—have far more to lose than to gain in having associations with the CIA. Unlike its counterparts in many other governments in the world, including our European allies, the CIA has never adopted a policy of giving U.S. companies a “leg up” in pursuing overseas business. If they help, therefore, it is simply a matter of their doing so out of a sense of patriotic duty. And if the association is somehow exposed, they are left wide open to charges of being CIA “dupes” or “fronts” and face the real risk of seeing their international business interests dry up or even expropriated.

  For the CIA, an internationally connected U.S. company or businessman can be a uniquely valuable resource. They go places and make foreign contacts that U.S. government representatives—whether diplomats or intelligence personnel operating undercover—cannot. And they offer a wide range of intelligence services, from serving as the CIA’s “eyes and ears” to letting one of our clandestine officers pose as a company employee while stationed abroad—a so-called nonofficial cover officer (NOC).

  In 1978, I was dispatched to meet with the CEO of one of those huge businesses. His company was on the brink of closing a lucrative deal to open a facility in a strategically important foreign country in which the U.S. government had virtually no way of operating effectively. My mission was to explain to him the assistance the CIA wanted him to provide us. The assistance was critical, but highly risky for the company if it ever came to light. Just as important, I was to spell out exactly what we thought those risks were so that he knew exactly what he was in for.

  It was my maiden high-stakes venture into the lair of such a big-time corporate mogul, and I was nervous. He had agreed to meet alone with a CIA representative, but he didn’t know what we wanted to talk about. For all I knew, he would throw me out, or laugh at me, or both, once he heard the hairy things we wanted him to agree to. I vividly recall walking, as purposefully as my shaking legs would permit, into his top-floor office at the corporate headquarters and having to traverse a carpet about the size of Connecticut to sit in front of his massive desk. And there he was, staring quizzically at me.

  Trying not to gape, I dutifully launched headlong into what the Agency wanted his company to do for us, and then pivoted into a laundry list of the risks we thought he could potentially face if things somehow went wrong. He let me ramble on, and then he just raised his hand and spoke for the first time.

  “Son,” he drawled laconically, “you folks may think you know me, but you have no idea what a rich sumbitch I am. I
can figure out the risks. I’ll do whatever y’all want.”

  And the deal was sealed, just like that.

  Among businesses in general, the CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, and big-name actors. There are officers assigned to this account full-time, which is not exactly a dangerous assignment but one that occasionally produces its own bizarre moments.

  In my early years at the Agency, a veteran CIA liaison with Hollywood first explained it to me this way: These are people who have made a lot of money basically creating make-believe stuff. A lot of them, at least the smarter and more self-aware ones, realize what they do makes them ridiculously rich but is also ephemeral and meaningless in the larger scheme of things. So they’re receptive to helping the CIA in any way they can, probably in equal parts because they are sincerely patriotic and because it gives them a taste of real-life intrigue and excitement. And their power and international celebrity can be valuable—it gives them entrée to people and places abroad. Heads of state want to meet and get cozy with them. Their film crews are given free rein everywhere, even in places where the U.S. government doesn’t normally have it. And they can be the voice of a U.S. message that will have impact with foreign audiences so long as the audience doesn’t know it is coming from the U.S. government.

  But things can get complicated, as I discovered a few years later when the head of the Agency’s Hollywood account came to me with news about his newest potential recruit, a major film star at the time (the CIA won’t let me reveal his name). The way our guy explained it, the actor somehow knew that another big star’s production company had an association with the CIA’s clandestine service over the years (something I didn’t know until our guy told me). Now this actor was offering his own name and services to us. Free of charge. Anything he could do. Just out of his patriotic duty.