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

by Rizzo, John

  I would get an unexpected, big break right at the outset, though at first it didn’t seem like one. The leadership on the Senate side of the Iran-contra committee, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a Democrat, and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, a Republican, brought in outside lawyers as their lead counsels, Arthur Liman and Paul Barbadoro, respectively. Meanwhile, the House committee chairman, Lee Hamilton, also brought in two attorneys, John Nields and Neil Eggleston. I knew nothing about any of these guys, except that they had zilch experience in the shadowy world of intelligence. What’s more, three of them were Democrats, and the lone Republican, Barbadoro, was a young protégé of Rudman, a combative, independent sort who made no bones about being totally repelled by what went down in Iran-contra.

  I quickly found all of them—especially Barbadoro and Eggleston, my primary interlocutors—to be eminently fair-minded and sensitive to the necessity of protecting true secrets. They insisted only on getting to the bottom of Iran-contra.

  Liman, Nields, Barbadoro, and Eggleston agreed to one hugely important procedural arrangement a few weeks after they arrived on the scene. They would establish a small compartment of staffers to work with the Agency in obtaining interviews, testimony of CIA witnesses, and CIA documents. We wouldn’t have to entertain random, ad hoc, out-of-nowhere queries/demands from the legions of other staffers (most of whom were total strangers to me). It wasn’t just a theoretical concern; I was already starting to field them.

  I remember one in particular. Sometime in late January, I took a phone call from one of these unfamiliar staffers from the Senate side. Saying he was calling “on behalf of the committee,” he had a modest request: access to William Casey at Georgetown Hospital. At that point, I believe Casey either had just had surgery, or was about to have it. In any event, he clearly was in no shape to see anyone from the committee. Trying to stay calm, I responded as such.

  “No, you don’t understand,” he replied evenly. “The committee needs to be satisfied that he is truly incapacitated.”

  That did it. “You mean you think he’s faking?” I shouted into the phone, the memory of the comatose old man being strapped on the stretcher still fresh in my mind.

  “Do I understand this to be an Agency refusal?” the voice said, this time with an edge to it.

  “You’re goddamn right it is!” I yelled, and then I hung up on him.

  And then I stared at the phone. My emotions aside, did I just open the Agency up to a charge of obstructing a congressional investigation that was only now getting started? The Reagan administration had just trumpeted that it would give full cooperation to the committee, and here I was, on my own, preemptively stiffing it. Who did I think I was, anyway?

  Bob Gates, who had succeeded John McMahon as CIA deputy director the year before, was now acting director in Casey’s absence. There were increasing rumors that Casey was about to resign, and that the president would nominate Gates to succeed him. And Gates would surely have his own Iran-contra role to answer for. I decided I needed to get to Gates right away, to tell him about the call, and about what I did, before he got an irate phone call from Inouye or Rudman about a stonewalling, abusive functionary on his staff.

  At that point in my career, I didn’t know Gates well. He had spent his two decades in the CIA exclusively on the analytical side, and our paths seldom crossed. Only a few years older than I, he struck me as extremely smart but with a detached, almost chilly demeanor. With Casey gone and irreparably discredited, Gates was now minding the store. The Agency’s future, and his, were hanging in the balance. The last thing Gates needed now was a public flap with the brand-new Iran-contra committee.

  A few minutes later, I was ushered into his office. He was sitting behind his desk, looking impassively at me, as I nervously and hurriedly spilled out what had just happened. And then, for the first time I could remember, I saw Bob Gates smile. “I would welcome a call from the committee. I’ll give them the same answer you did, except I’ll be less diplomatic,” he said.

  Gates never got that call, and the issue of Casey’s availability was never again raised by anyone on the Iran-contra committee. William Casey never did recover. In his final days, he was allowed to return to his home on Long Island, where he died in a local hospital on May 6, 1987. It was the day after the Iran-contra hearings began. When the news arrived at the CIA, Clair George, who loved Casey and shared his profane disdain for Capitol Hill, called it “Bill Casey’s final fuck-you to Congress.”

  In late 1987, Bob Woodward published Veil, an account of Casey’s tenure at the CIA. Like all of Woodward’s books, it became a huge best seller and is in fact a gripping and (mostly) authoritative read, containing reams of accurate depictions of events that were then, and in some cases remain to this day, classified. But one passage has nagged at me for more than a quarter of a century.

  The most sensational and controversial part of the book comes at the very end, when Woodward describes visiting Casey’s hospital room (apparently at the beginning of February 1987, although Woodward is fuzzy about the date) and getting the old, dying man to admit, for the first time, that he knew all along about the diversion of the Iranian arms proceeds to the contras. In Woodward’s telling, he then asked Casey why, and got a two-word, enigmatic response: “I believed.”

  The question of who in the administration knew about the diversion from the beginning was the biggest question of the Iran-contra affair. And next to the role of President Reagan, Casey’s knowledge, or lack thereof, was the issue most deeply explored by the Iran-contra committee. Casey didn’t live long enough to answer the question himself.

  The hospital-room story caused a huge stir when the book came out. According to Woodward, he was in the room alone with Casey. With Casey dead, it became a question of believing Woodward or not. Many accepted his account, especially given Woodward’s sterling reputation and unparalleled track record as an investigative reporter. Others did not—it was all too melodramatic, too pat a denouement to the book.

  At the time, I don’t believe anyone in the senior CIA ranks bought the Woodward story. I know I didn’t. I still don’t, and here’s why.

  First, however, a few caveats. I cannot prove—nobody can prove—the story is false. Also, there is no question that, over the last three years of his life, Casey had a number of offline, one-on-one conversations with Woodward as he was putting the book together. A number of us were aware at the time the conversations were taking place, and we were baffled about why Casey was having them. Finally, for many years I was convinced that “Deep Throat,” Woodward’s famous Watergate source, was not a single individual but rather a journalistic device Woodward had created, combining several different people who were providing him with inside information. But then, of course, a few years ago the former FBI official Mark Felt suddenly came forward and confirmed that he had in fact been Deep Throat.

  On Watergate, I was just another news junkie with no particular special insights. On the Casey hospital-room story, I do have some insider perspective.

  For starters, if Woodward is to be believed, he simply walked into Georgetown Hospital and marched unimpeded into Casey’s room. I cannot fathom how that would have been possible. Casey was surrounded by a twenty-four-hour CIA security detail for his entire stay there—indeed, Woodward conceded in his book that when he attempted to gain access to Casey’s room several days earlier, a CIA security officer stationed outside the door blocked him from entering. Security officers are required to report such incidents, and I remember word coming back to headquarters about Woodward’s attempt. Woodward says nothing about how he managed to elude security on his second try, either about gaining access to the room or about getting out of it undetected, after supposedly talking to the bedridden Casey for at least several minutes. If Woodward had been seen, I guarantee that security would have reported his visit up through channels.

  Is it possible that somebody in authority at the CIA somehow quietly permitted the second purported Woodward visit, without m
y knowing about it? Theoretically, yes, but I find it extremely unlikely under the circumstances in which we were operating. The only person with the power to do something extraordinary like that would have been Bob Gates. As acting director, he was the first senior official allowed to see Casey in the hospital. In his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, Gates recounted his first visit, which occurred very close to the time Woodward claimed he got in to talk to Casey. Also at about the same time, Gates was beginning regular meetings with his senior team, including me, in order to be kept apprised of developments in the then-blossoming investigations, including media inquiries. Nothing was ever said about another Woodward visit. This would have been just about the time I told Gates about the disturbing call I had gotten from the Iran-contra staffer inquiring about the committee gaining access to Casey in the hospital.

  Gates was an extremely cautious, careful man. I cannot believe that he would have countenanced allowing any reporter, but especially Woodward, access to Casey at a time when we were summarily rejecting access by the Iran-contra committee.

  Finally, there is another passage in From the Shadows where Gates addressed the issue of whether or not Casey knew about the diversion all along. He was not only Casey’s deputy, he was his closest confidant in Casey’s last two years. Curiously, Gates made no reference to Woodward’s claim of the bedside confession by Casey, which had attained mythic status by the time Gates was writing his memoir. What Gates did do, at considerable length, was to set out, in his dispassionately analytical way, all the reasons why he was “convinced” Casey did not know about the diversion of funds to the contras. How is one to interpret that, other than as an unmistakable, if implicit, repudiation of Woodward’s story?

  I believe Bob Gates, who would go on to become one of the most trusted and respected public servants in recent history. I don’t believe Bob Woodward’s breathless account of a Casey confession, made only to him and no one else. I didn’t believe it in 1987, and I don’t believe it now.

  I was consumed during the first four months of 1987 with leading the Agency’s efforts to respond to the Iran-contra committee’s demands for documents and for interviews with CIA officers. The committee publicly promised that it would start its hearings in early May, so the pressure was on. The committee staff was working sixteen-hour days, and my small staff was swamped but displaying tremendous grace under pressure.

  I attended the interviews and depositions of senior CIA officials whom the committee seemed to view with the most suspicion—Clarridge, George, and Fiers. In retrospect, it is surprising to me that the committee had no problem with our sitting in. After all, we made it clear both to the committee staff and our witnesses that we were there representing the CIA as an institution, not the individual officers. In subsequent years, when an all-too-frequent controversy about the CIA would erupt, the congressional committee investigating the flap almost always barred CIA lawyers from attending its interviews with our employees.

  It was at this juncture during Iran-contra that I confronted for the first time a question that would bedevil me for years to come: When, if ever, is it appropriate to recommend to an Agency employee that he retain outside, private counsel? Until Iran-contra broke, never in my career had it ever risen as even a potential issue, because never before in my career did CIA personnel come under public, high-intensity scrutiny, not just by Congress, but by an outside special prosecutor.

  And so when Clarridge, George, Fiers, and others asked me whether they should hire counsel, I tried to tread carefully through another new minefield. Privately, it seemed to me a prudent step for these guys to take; Iran-contra was going nuclear, and who knew where this thing was heading? At the same time, I recognized that they were reluctant to take that step, both because of the perceived stigma—“Why do I need a lawyer? I haven’t done anything wrong”—and fears about how much it would cost them out of their relatively modest government salaries.

  I agonized over what to tell them, but ultimately decided to offer the following calibrated (and somewhat self-serving) guidance. Look, I told them, I can’t tell you what to do one way or the other. You have to decide if you want or need private counsel. I can’t play that role. But I will tell you this: Regardless of what you decide, whenever you talk to government investigators, for God’s sake, tell the truth.

  Only Fiers eventually decided he should get a lawyer, and when he asked for a suggestion I put him in touch with Tony Lapham, the first CIA GC I worked for in the mid-’70s. Tony was the guy I would have hired if I ever thought I needed to hire private counsel. The others chose not to get their own lawyers, at least not until it was way too late. In his 1996 memoir, A Spy for All Seasons, Dewey Clarridge was defiant and unapologetic about many things, but he allowed that his major regret about Iran-contra was the fact that he did not hire a lawyer much sooner than he did. Dewey was right about that.

  While all of this was happening in early 1987, another CIA drama was playing out publicly on Capitol Hill. As expected, President Reagan in early February nominated Bob Gates to succeed Casey as CIA director. Initially, the word from Congress and the media pundits was that Gates was a shoo-in—after all, in contrast to the freewheeling Casey, Gates was a nonpartisan intelligence professional. But soon the cresting wave of Iran-contra swept over him. As Casey’s second in command, what did he know and when did he know it? The Gates nomination was doomed, and he eventually, reluctantly, recognized that. At Gates’s request, the White House withdrew his nomination.

  I watched as it unfolded, feeling profoundly sorry for Gates. I had come to know him a lot better in those months after Casey’s exit, and I saw that beneath his formal exterior was a man of warmth and a whimsical sense of humor. I remember him standing in his office, as the drumbeat of criticism was getting ever louder and he was confronting the inevitable, quietly talking about the toll the whole ordeal of his nomination was taking on his wife and two young children.

  Gee, I recall thinking, it’s a hell of a wringer for a career CIA guy to go through, getting caught in such a political firestorm. I couldn’t imagine ever going through something like that, and I was relieved that I would never have to.

  It was exactly twenty years before my own confirmation meltdown.

  The Iran-contra hearings began on May 6, 1987. By that time, the media hype had reached a fever pitch, and both PBS and CNN (this was in the nascent years of cable TV) televised the proceedings live, gavel to gavel. I believe it was the first time this had been done since the Senate Watergate hearings fourteen years earlier. This time, I was the man in the middle, between the CIA and the Iran-contra committee. Nonetheless, I decided that the best approach was to watch the proceedings on TV. So that’s what I did, for every minute of all forty days of the hearings. Not merely as a spectator, but as an interactive participant of sorts, long before that term entered into the popular lexicon.

  This approach was unorthodox, but it proved to be effective and efficient. At the same time, it was an extraordinarily stressful experience.

  The committee, created from scratch only a few months before, had established a very ambitious timeline for the completion of its work. In addition, the media kept the pressure on the committee to start the public hearings—parts of the entire tangled story were dribbling out piecemeal, but the key protagonists, such as Poindexter and especially North, had yet to be heard from. As a result, the hearings began before the committee had done a lot of its homework. The staffers were still slogging through massive amounts of highly classified documents, not sure which they wanted declassified so they could be waved around on television. The list of witnesses, and in which order they would appear, were in a constant state of flux. From the first day the TV cameras were turned on, the committee was pretty much winging it. Nonetheless, the committee was determined that the show must go on. And so, back at the Agency, I had to wing it as well.

  For forty days, stretching over a period of three months, I was holed up in my office, staring at the TV for anywhere fro
m four to ten hours a day as witness after witness, from the famous to the obscure, was interrogated by the twenty-six committee members and, more frequently, the chief lawyers, Nields and Liman. Their questions were frequently ad hoc, sometimes off-the-wall, and always unpredictable. Chain-smoking cigars, I turned my cramped office into something akin to a smoky fight club.

  One of my primary tasks was simply to keep track in real time of everything every witness was saying about the Agency, and to provide comprehensive, daily feedback to senior CIA management. To that end, I prepared memos at the end of every day’s testimony, consisting of bullet points recounting each instance the witness referred to CIA activities or personnel. Every night, I would forward the memos to Gates and others in key management positions, including George, Clarridge, and Fiers, the three Agency officials whose names seemed to come up regularly. If any of them had already left for home, or if they were out of town, I would have a courier deliver the memo to them. I thought it was important for these guys to see this stuff right away, rather than seeing it for the first time in the next morning’s newspapers. The memos would run anywhere from two to five pages, and I produced forty of them—one for each day of the televised hearings. At the end of each day’s installment, I would append a paragraph or two of commentary (which I archly headed with the title “Analysis”) in which I would sum up what I considered new and significant that had come up that day, as well as my two cents on how the witness, or Nields and Liman, or some committee member generally, came off in front of the cameras.

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that my daily reports on the hearings would later complicate the parallel criminal investigations being pursued by Lawrence Walsh. The testimony of some of the key witnesses, including North, was obtained under a grant of immunity that basically meant it could not be used in any later prosecutions of North and others. And here I was, spoon-feeding it to many of the people who would later become prosecution witnesses. Maybe I should have taken that possibility into account, but it honestly did not occur to me. If it had occurred to me, however, I doubt it would have made any difference. I saw it as my responsibility to keep everyone in the building up to date, on a real-time basis, on what was transpiring at the hearings. It was not to make the prosecutors’ jobs easier.