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

by Rizzo, John

  My most excruciating moment of all came one day in January 1994 when I had a chance encounter with Ames on an NHB elevator. As fate would have it, I had just come from a briefing in the OHB in which the latest developments in the investigation were being discussed. I learned that his arrest was finally near and the apparent jaw-dropping extent of his treachery: the millions he had gotten from the Russians, the thousands of secrets he had likely passed to them over the previous decade, the deaths of Russian sources—at least nine, maybe more. My head was still spinning as I walked back to my office, which was located on the top floor of the NHB. As I arrived at the first-floor elevator, I was still trying to absorb the enormity of his betrayal. Standing there at the elevator, all by himself, was Rick Ames.

  Still oblivious to everything, he grunted a perfunctory hello as we waited for the elevator to arrive. And waited—I didn’t think the damn thing would ever get there. As the seconds ticked by, he finally engaged me in some small talk. I have no recollection of what either of us said to each other; all I remember is that my heart was pounding so hard I thought my head was about to explode. Finally, mercifully, the elevator doors opened. The elevator was empty. Ames stepped in, but I didn’t. I couldn’t bear to spend another single second in his presence. I muttered something to him about forgetting something back in the OHB. As I turned away, and as the elevator doors closed, I stole one last glance at the most evil, destructive traitor in CIA history.

  Ames was arrested a couple of weeks later. The ensuing public firestorm was predictable and devastating. The CIA was justly excoriated by Congress and ridiculed in the media for letting such an amoral, drunken slacker as Rick Ames operate with impunity, and cause so much damage, for so long a period of time. The luckless Jim Woolsey, who had inherited a looming debacle he had nothing to do with, was attacked for allegedly not being tough enough in meting out punishment to those who had been in Ames’s chain of command during his decade of perfidy. True to form, Woolsey turned combative with his critics. His relations with Congress, already rancid, became toxic.

  Meanwhile, the FBI was enjoying itself immensely. It took bows, at the Agency’s expense, for finally uncovering Ames, while subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—putting out the word that a traitor such as Ames could never exist in its ranks. (The Bureau’s smugness was premature. At the very moment of the Ames arrest, one of its own trusted veterans, Robert Hanssen, was freely selling secrets to the Russians that were at least as extensive and deadly as those passed by Ames. Hanssen would not be caught for another seven years.)

  The Ames case was an unmitigated, humiliating disaster for the Agency’s reputation and standing. The fact that it deserved all of the opprobrium it got made the episode even more searing, and the damage more lasting.

  The ’90s were going from bad to worse. And things would continue to go downhill. The heady days of the early ’80s, when the Agency was flush with money and full of power and influence, seemed a distant memory. But then, in a way, the ’80s returned. Only not in a good way.

  In the aftermath of the Ames debacle, Jim Woolsey’s days at the CIA were numbered. That was apparent to everyone in the building, doubtless including Woolsey—a savvy realist. Perhaps he would have been more successful if he had served at a different time, under a different president. He relinquished his position as director at the end of 1994 in the same way he came to the job less than two years earlier—with little notice and no fanfare.

  Given the Agency’s lowly status and battered reputation at the time, it was not surprising that there were few takers eager to become Woolsey’s successor. As the Clinton administration spent weeks casting around for candidates, that became embarrassingly obvious. Finally, John Deutch, the deputy secretary of defense, was announced as the nominee. Deutch, a brilliant scientist formerly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was by all accounts—including his own—a very reluctant candidate. No one could blame him, I suppose, but for a demoralized organization, the last thing we needed to hear was that we had a new leader who had to be virtually shanghaied into the job.

  At the time and in the years since, the common perception advanced in the media and by CIA alumni was that Deutch was extraordinarily unpopular within the ranks of career Agency personnel. That is undoubtedly true, but I may be one of the only exceptions. I came to greatly like and respect John Deutch. I found him to be a sympathetic, fascinating figure. He could come off as being arrogant, dismissive, and out of touch in large settings or with people he didn’t know, but among those he felt comfortable with, he was caring, witty, and unpretentious. At six feet three, he had an imposing physical presence with a somewhat imperious air, but at the same time had an endearing tendency in small groups to reach out and touch a person—man or woman—he was talking to, up to and including dispensing awkward hugs if he wanted to convey his congratulations or happiness about something.

  Early on, Deutch made some remarkably tone-deaf public comments about the inferiority of CIA personnel vis-à-vis the U.S. military. That was not what the battered but proud Agency workforce needed to hear from its new leader. In particular, the closed society that makes up the Directorate of Operations collectively decided that he was not on their side, and Deutch was simply too stubborn—and perhaps too proud—to curry their favor. I spent my entire career working with succeeding generations of DO officers, and I yield to no one in my enduring admiration for them and for the difficult, thankless, and often dangerous work they do for our country. Deutch, I am convinced, came to feel the same way, except that he somehow was never able to outwardly convey it.

  A few years after Deutch left the Agency (we remain friends to this day), we had lunch one day near his office at MIT, and he told me something that has stuck with me ever since. “You know,” he recalled, “when I took over the CIA job, Bob Gates warned me that the DO would try to make nice with me but would never tell me anything. What I discovered, once I got there, was that the DO didn’t like me and never would. But they always told me everything, no matter what.” In that one offhand comment, Deutch made the most perceptive observation I ever heard from a CIA director about the unique, inscrutable culture of the DO.

  Another overlooked, praiseworthy aspect of Deutch’s controversial tenure at the CIA is the quality of the people he brought with him to the Agency. Virtually all of them were both knowledgeable about the Agency and staunchly supportive of its people and mission. Jeff Smith (the new general counsel), Mike O’Neil, John Moseman, Gina Genton, Britt Snider, and John Nelson all became not just trusted colleagues, but good friends. Also, Deutch’s handpicked choice as deputy director was already well known and liked by many of us CIA lifers—a burly, gregarious Greek American and former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee named George Tenet.

  Nonetheless, even with all of that horsepower behind him, Deutch immediately ran into a withering barrage of criticism from inside and outside the Agency.

  Walking in the door, Deutch had to wrestle with what I consider to be the most enduring and vexing policy and legal conundrum the CIA has faced in its modern history: its use of “dirty assets.” In a 1996 report, the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board concisely framed the issue in just one deceptively simple sentence: “[A]lthough the conduct of clandestine intelligence collection at times requires dealing with unsavory individuals and organizations, the value of what we hope to gain in terms of our national interests must outweigh the costs of such unseemly relationships and be worth the risks always inherent in clandestine activity.” Dealing with a devil, in other words, lies in the details.

  In the ’80s the Agency had cultivated relationships with dictatorships in foreign countries that successive U.S. administrations deemed strategically important to America’s foreign policy and national security interests. Deutch was confronted with a species lower down in the pecking order of unsavory characters: functionaries in foreign governments or groups that have a track record of human rights abuses. As part of its portfolio, the CI
A needs to secretly recruit individual members of these governments and groups to find out what their superiors have done or plan to do, especially if Americans are imperiled. And that’s where it gets tricky. The best people to recruit are those who are closest to the “action,” which means they, too, have been complicit in human-rights abuses. At what point does the blood—particularly when the blood belongs to a U.S. citizen—get stuck to the Agency’s hands? In the morally ambiguous role that a spy agency plays in a democratic society dedicated to the preservation of human rights, where is the line to be drawn?

  These are questions that have always bedeviled the CIA, where the recruitment of well-placed “assets”—Agency vernacular for human sources of intelligence—is one of its most fundamental missions. Twice they have burst into public view. The second time was in the wake of 9/11, when the Agency was pummeled on Capitol Hill and in the media for its alleged reluctance—the term bandied about was risk averse—to recruit individual terrorist members of the Al Qaeda network during the years leading up the 9/11 attacks. The first time was in those early weeks of Deutch’s tenure, but the attacks from outside critics about the use of “dirty assets” was strikingly different: The Agency, they charged, had become too closely associated with, too protective of, too many unsavory thugs possibly with American blood on their hands. A New York Times editorial intoned, on the eve of Deutch’s confirmation, that he needed to “cleanse” the CIA.

  So that’s what Deutch set out to do. He inherited a roaring controversy over the Agency’s past relationships with right-wing military dictatorships in Central America, in large part a legacy of Bill Casey’s crusades against the Sandinistas in the 1980s. A particular focus was Guatemala, where the CIA was being charged with hiring as paid informants military officers suspected of political killings, kidnappings, and torture, most notably the murders in the early ’90s of a U.S. citizen living in Guatemala named Michael DeVine and a rebel insurgent named Efrain Bámaca. As it happened, a media-savvy American lawyer and human rights activist named Jennifer Harbury was married to Bámaca, and she successfully enlisted members of Congress and the media in spotlighting the Bámaca and DeVine cases—and to alleged CIA connections to the perpetrators of the murders inside the right-wing military regime. This soon metastasized into charges that the Agency had since the 1980s actively consorted with an organized ring of killers dispatched by the regime to eliminate its leftist internal opposition and its perceived sympathizers, a group the media dubbed “the Guatemalan death squads.” All of this spurred a two-year investigation by the CIA inspector general into the allegations, the final report of which hit Deutch’s desk shortly after his 1995 arrival. The report harshly criticized a number of Agency officers, many of them longtime, well-known DO figures.

  Deutch was in an impossible position. The IG did not conclude that our people were actually complicit in the human rights abuses—there was no evidence they were—but rather, that they lied to their superiors and, most damaging of all, to Congress about the nature of their association with the “death squads” and with their “dirty” Guatemalan assets. So Deutch, who came into office publicly vowing to be less “tolerant” of CIA misdeeds, felt compelled to act. He chose the ultimate sanction, firing two senior DO officers, Terry Ward and Fred Brugger. They previously had spotless records in decades of service, and they were both enormously popular figures inside the Agency. I had always been tremendously fond of both of them—I had known them for years and considered them honorable, self-effacing professionals. Suddenly, they were gone. The reaction inside the building was the most hostile I ever saw directed at a CIA director in my career. The workforce, almost as one, saw it as a craven surrender by Deutch to shifting political winds. In my heart, I felt the same way. In my head, I knew Deutch had no choice.

  The Guatemala mess, and the attendant pressure from Congress, prompted Deutch to order a comprehensive internal review and assessment of the entire roster of CIA-recruited foreign operatives around the world. This “asset scrub,” as the project came to be called, was led by Jeff Smith, Deutch’s new, handpicked general counsel. Jeff was a longtime friend of mine dating back to the late ’70s, when I was the lawyer for the DO and he was an attorney at the State Department responsible for its intelligence account. Knowing of my long experience with the DO, Jeff asked me to assist him on the “asset scrub” effort. There were two objectives: 1) working with the DO and its files to identify any assets with any history of engaging in human rights abuses (murder, kidnapping, torture, and so on) and to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether the asset’s current value as an intelligence source was significant enough to outweigh his violent past; and 2) to create a formal procedure going forward to ensure that before any new asset could be recruited in the field, that individual’s background would be thoroughly explored and senior officials at CIA Headquarters would make the final call on the recruitment of any asset with human rights “baggage.”

  During its review of its existing stable of assets, the Counterterrorist Center pulled out the multivolume file it had compiled over the years on its most valuable and well-placed asset inside an international terrorist organization. Recruited in the late ’80s, the asset was so well placed because of his impeccable terrorist credentials: He personally had the blood of innocent victims on his hands. Including, the CTC belatedly discovered when it reviewed his file, the blood of innocent Americans.

  Within days, the case became a cause célèbre among a small, select pocket of people inside the Agency. Within weeks, it would play out on the front page of the country’s most prominent and influential newspaper in what I consider to this day to be the most egregious and unforgettable leak I witnessed in the course of my entire career. I say that because it is the only leak I can remember that indisputably caused the death of a CIA source.

  I don’t believe I ever knew the guy’s true name. The fact is, human assets are never identified by their true names in any documents generated by the CIA—not to anyone on the outside, and not even in internal communications, including the raw, highly classified cable traffic between headquarters and the field discussing the asset and reporting the intelligence the asset is providing. Instead, an assigned code name is always employed, not just in documents but in any conversations among CIA officers at headquarters about that person. I had long since grown accustomed to that practice, which is premised on one of the most bedrock principles in the intelligence business: The identity of a human asset is something to be protected like the crown jewels.

  Still, there was plenty of information available in the asset’s file to get a feel for him. He was relatively young, with European blood, sleek in appearance, and quiet in manner. Based on the physical description the CTC provided, I pictured Al Pacino in his signature movie role as Michael Corleone. In the early ’80s, full of youthful hate and fury at Western democratic values, he had joined a terrorist organization just in time to participate in that group’s wave of hijackings and bombings across Western Europe. But by the late ’80s, something in his psyche changed. He became ashamed and repelled by the chaos he had caused, the innocent people he had killed and injured. He wanted to make amends, and hence he began cooperating with the CIA. He would tell us all he knew, and he would stay on the inside of the terrorist network to do it. The information he provided was incalculable in value, and he asked for little or nothing in return. Agency experts had vetted him from all angles, and everyone agreed: This was a stone-cold killer who had somehow acquired a conscience. It was as simple and astonishing as that.

  When the CTC reviewed his extensive file as part of the “asset scrub” exercise, it found a piece of information he had told his CIA handlers at the beginning, back when he was laying bare all of his past sins, probably in part to establish his bona fides and in part as an act of expiation. One of his bombings, he volunteered, was at a location in Europe where he knew Americans would be. And Americans were indeed there when the blast went off. Several were wounded. His intent had been
to kill them.

  That piece of explosive information sat buried in the asset’s file for years, either overlooked or ignored, until the “scrub.” Should it have flatly disqualified him from ever being recruited? Not necessarily—the guy was a once-in-a-lifetime find, uniquely positioned to save more lives in the future than he had destroyed in the past. But Jeff Smith and I knew that wasn’t the point. The point was, the guy had freely admitted to taking part in an attempted mass murder of U.S. citizens abroad. That is a crime under U.S. law, and the Agency had a legal obligation to immediately report it to the Justice Department. Would he have been prosecuted? In the end, probably not—his extraordinary value as an intelligence source was simply too great. But, again, that wasn’t the point. By sitting on the information, and by then going ahead and establishing a secret relationship with him, the Agency had for all practical purposes immunized him from U.S. prosecution. In the sometimes ambiguous interplay between intelligence operations and the law, there are nonetheless certain absolutes. One of them is that the CIA has no authority—ever—to grant anyone immunity from U.S. prosecution. Only the Justice Department can do that.