Although I had spent most of my professional life on Capitol Hill, I increasingly found myself most comfortable on the other side of the world. Out in the desert, or in Jerusalem or Ramallah, Riyadh or Islamabad, I got along just fine. Maybe I’d gone native and didn’t realize it.
At least 90 percent of the trips I made overseas during my seven years as DCI were to the Middle East or to the border nations of Central and South Asia. I went often, and I kept going back, to build the personal relationships that might at some point yield a breakthrough.
You need to put capital in these countries’ banks—including, in my case, the capital of your own time—respect their sovereignty, and as a normal practice, refrain from sticking your finger in their chests. It is important to deal with them honestly and fairly and have them learn over a period of time that they can trust your word. A key piece of this is absolute patience. It takes time to develop a relationship as a trusted partner.
This wasn’t Henry Kissinger’s brand of highbrow shuttle diplomacy. This was some hybrid of intelligence work and diplomacy practiced by the son of Greek immigrants. The closer I am to my ancestral Mediterranean, the more at home I feel. For some reason, whether talking to crowned heads of state or streetwise security officials risen improbably to power in the cauldron of Middle East politics, my style seemed to work.
I’m reminded particularly of a trip in the spring of 2000 to Georgia. We flew into the capital about midday, did our business there, and then retreated to a dacha, or country house, where the Georgians had insisted on hosting a party for us. The dinner got under way promptly at seven that evening. There must have been at least fifty of us seated at a very long table, with the Georgians on one side, Americans on the other, and a contingent of Georgian singers clustered down at one end. The “singers,” in this case, were far more adept at drinking than song. One fireplug of a vocalist—maybe five feet five, with a barrel chest, like a sawed-off Rich Armitage—began the night with two fifths of Johnny Walker Black in front of him. Three hours later both were empty.
I had never been to a Georgian dinner before, but I had been briefed enough on the customs to know that the host is called the tamada, who is also the master of ceremonies and leads the toasts. Sure enough, we no sooner sat down than the tamada popped to his feet and toasted me with a glass of sweet Georgian wine. When he was through, I naturally rose and returned the favor, and with that, I figured we were done with the formalities and could get down to our meal. No way. A few minutes later the host popped up again, went to the wall behind him, and pulled down a big, hollowed-out antler. Then he picked up a bottle of wine, poured half of it into the antler, toasted me again, and chugged the antler dry. Well, there was an antler behind me, so I got up and did the same, and when I sat back down, it was 7:12 P.M. and I was officially pie-eyed. Let me stress that this was not typical of my condition before, after, or during work. But sometimes when you are trying to bond with foreign counterparts, you have to bend to local customs.
In any case, I had a long dinner ahead of me and many, many more toasts to come, a number of them led by the increasingly boisterous covey of professional drinker-singers at the end of the table.
It was maybe two hours into the party when I heard the Georgians across the table from us talking in derogatory terms about the Russians. By then, I was deeply into the spirit of the evening, so I leaned over to Dave Carey, CIA’s number three man at the time, who was sitting next to me, and whispered, “Ah, to hell with the Russians!” Unfortunately, what I meant to come out in a whisper instead came out at a hundred decibels, to the great delight of the Georgians, who jumped up and start applauding and toasting me still more.
Just about then, the Georgians decided to teach us how to do “the chair dance,” a local custom that goes like this: you turn your chair around; sit on it backward, and to the beat of music, you and your chair bounce around the table. By then, I’m certain, the CIA security detail that was watching all this through a window from an adjoining room was thinking, “We have got to get the DCI out of there. Nothing good is going to come of this.” In fact, of course, something good did come of it. That kind of bonding experience is worth its weight in gold in that part of the world.
The next morning, though, arriving back at the airport for our flight on to Uzbekistan, it was hard to think of anything more than my pounding head. That’s about all I was doing when a senior Georgian official came up to me and said, “We have bad news. The Russians have denied you flight clearance to get to your next stop.” We always wondered whether the Russians had had the Georgians’ dacha “wired” and taken offense at my impromptu remark from the night before.
The Georgians, at least, showed us a good time. Relations with Moscow were always strained at best or weird at worst. Maybe it’s the residue of the cold war or the incompleteness of Russia’s transformation to a democratic society, but the same lack of connection dogged the one visit I made to Moscow, to meet with the head of the FSB, the federal security service of the Russian Federation. We convened at FSB headquarters, atop the notorious Lubyanka prison, a portion of which has now been turned into a KGB museum. Substantive issues (which, for reasons of security, I can’t get into) were on the table, but we never got close to addressing them. First, our hosts offered us a tour of the American section of the prison museum, which includes, among other artifacts, the silencer-and poison needle–equipped pistol that Gary Powers carried when his U2 spy plane was shot down over the USSR in 1960. We declined—we weren’t there to play tourist—so our hosts hurried us off to a very elaborate restaurant for dinner, and that’s when things really got weird.
Waiting at the top of the stairs at the Praha Restaurant entrance was a very tall, voluptuous blond woman. At her side in attendance were two dwarfs, neither much more than three feet tall. As we reached the top of the steps, our hostess turned, the dwarfs turned with her, each taking one of her hands, and the three of them then paraded side by side down a long hall, leading us into the restaurant proper.
You would think that a meal that started so, um, uniquely might at least have led to a little conviviality, but that wasn’t the case. Finally, out of other gambits, I did what I often do when the going gets rough at such gatherings: I asked John McLaughlin to perform his famous money trick. So John took out a thousand-ruble note, went through his extraordinary mumbo jumbo and fancy prestidigitation, and, presto, when he opened his hands again, it was a hundred-thousand-ruble note. “How do you think we get our money?” he said to the FSB director, Nikolai Kovalev, with an absolutely straight face. By then, the look on Kovalev’s face was priceless. I could just see him thinking, “Ronald Reagan said he was going to spend us into oblivion with the Strategic Defense Initiative, and now this man McLaughlin has just manufactured money for them. We’ll never beat them!”
John once performed the same trick for Carlos Menem, then president of a debt-strapped Argentina. A week later, we received word that upon reflection, Menem wanted to make John his finance minister.
Some places I almost didn’t get back from. In 1996, when I was still the deputy DCI, we were halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, returning from a trip to Croatia. Suddenly we heard a hissing sound from the front of the plane, and shortly thereafter a wide-eyed young military steward walked into the cabin. His name was Daniel, and previously he had proudly told us that this was his very first “VIP” flight. Now he came back tightly gripping an emergency manual, told us we had an “in-flight” emergency, and ordered us to don our life vests. “Why?” we asked. “What emergency?”
The plane’s exterior windshield had cracked, and the interior windshield was in danger of breaking, too, he explained, which would cause immediate depressurization of the cabin. That event, he said, would force the jet to “land on water.” Daniel went on to say that “when” that happened, we would have a minute and twenty seconds to exit the plane and get in the inflatable life raft.
“Don’t you mean if that happens?” I asked.
One of our traveling party, a division chief with nearly four decades of CIA service under his belt, looked at Daniel and said, “Son, I was born in the 1930s. I can’t do anything in a minute and twenty seconds.” He reached for a beer to fortify himself against the cold Atlantic waters.
As our plane was limping toward Gander, Newfoundland, Daniel came back to tell us that while the good news was the windshield was still holding, the bad news was that it appeared that our landing gear would not come down. Eventually the gear was lowered, and we made a safe landing, passing through a cordon of fire trucks and crash vehicles. Daniel and the crew of the air force plane performed magnificently, but I suspect he will never forget his first VIP flight. I know I won’t.
When you are the DCI, you never get away from the job. Either you travel with it or it travels with you. In my seven years as DCI, I made seventy-seven trips to thirty-three countries, about one trip a month on average. Saudi Arabia was one of my most frequent stops; I went there nine times, a clear indication of the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Domestically I traveled less often, although I visited our clandestine training facility regularly. But it’s the times I was supposed to be away from the job—the rare vacations—that I remember best.
In September 1997, I took Stephanie and John Michael to Bethany Beach, Delaware, for a quiet weekend. We were on the beach, pretending to be a normal American family, when I was summoned by my security detail to take a frantic incoming phone call from the head of the Jordanian intelligence service. He told me that the Jordanians had just captured a group of Israeli intelligence officials as they attempted to assassinate Khaled Mish’al, the head of the Damascus office of Hamas, by injecting a lethal poison in his ear. The attempt had been carried out in broad daylight in downtown Amman, the Jordanian capital. Two members of the Israeli hit team had been apprehended, and six others reportedly had taken refuge in the Israeli embassy. Mish’al was hovering on the brink of death. King Hussein, who had been enormously helpful in the Middle East peace process, was understandably furious. Meanwhile, Jordanian officials were screaming at the Israelis to get an antidote that might save Mish’al’s life.
I had had a lot of experiences by then, but nothing in my training or background had prepared me for what to do when someone comes up to you on the beach to tell you that some friends of yours have just botched an assassination attempt using a poison. That’s the way the job was, though—full of surprises, few of them pleasant.
I don’t want to imply that every day was stomach churning or worse than the one before it. There were triumphant moments, nights I would go home feeling on top of the world. One of the most memorable came in the aftermath of one of the worst days in the Agency’s history.
On January 25, 1993, Aimal Kasi, a lone Pakistani gunman armed with an AK-47, walked up to the main entrance to CIA headquarters and shot five people waiting to enter the compound. Dr. Lansing Bennett, a sixty-six-year-old Agency physician, and Frank Darling, twenty-eight, a communications specialist, were brutally murdered while doing the most mundane daily chore—driving to work. Darling’s wife, Judy Becker Darling, also an Agency employee at the time, was sitting beside her husband and watched in horror as Kasi coolly walked among the cars stacked up at a stoplight and randomly singled out a few occupants to die. Amazingly, Kasi simply walked away in the ensuing chaos. Recovering the car he had stashed, he drove to his apartment, where he left his weapon, and then headed to Dulles International Airport for a flight back to Pakistan.
A massive international manhunt was mounted with a combination of investigative expertise, physical daring, and a generous application of reward money. Finally, four and a half years later, in 1998, Kasi—or a man who we suspected was Kasi—was lured to Dera Ghazi Khan, a dusty town in central Pakistan, with promises of being able to buy Russian goods in Afghanistan and sell them at a premium across the border in Pakistan. While he waited for the deal to go through, the suspect stayed in a three-dollar-a-night rooming house. That’s where we determined to run him down.
I remember as if it were yesterday standing in the Global Response Center (GRC) on the sixth floor of our headquarters building listening to the radio traffic coming back as a joint FBI-CIA team dressed in local garb entered the dingy hotel in the middle of the night, kicked down the door, and wrestled a startled bearded man to the floor. We waited anxiously while the team cuffed its prisoner and quickly forced his fingers onto an inkpad to obtain positive identification. Then one of the team members in Pakistan called out, “Red Zulu, Red Zulu!” and a guy standing near me shouted, “We got him! He’s our man!” As cheers went up in the GRC and the backslapping and high fives began, I allowed myself to light a rare victory cigar. Apparently, in the excitement, it fell on the floor. I know this because for years afterward a piece of burned carpet hung framed on the GRC wall.
A few days later, several of my top aides and I went out to Dulles to watch Kasi being brought to justice. From a building the FBI controlled at the end of a runway, we followed the aircraft bearing the shackled terrorist as it made its slow approach. I couldn’t help but wonder at that moment what must have been going through Kasi’s mind. Four and a half years earlier he’d flown out of this same airport thinking that he had gotten away with murder. He hadn’t. Standing side by side with our FBI colleagues in stony silence as Kasi disembarked, I felt I was representing the thousands of Agency men and women who had been praying and working for this moment to arrive.
The next day, I invited the FBI agents and CIA officers who had participated in arresting Kasi to come out to the Agency headquarters and bask in the applause and thanks of a grateful Agency workforce—an emotional moment that no one present that day will ever forget. You often hear about rivalry between the FBI and CIA. Some of those stories are true. But in this case there was an outpouring of respect, pride, and gratitude, not to mention hugs and tears. As the crowd filed out at the end of the ceremony, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” boomed out of the auditorium’s speaker system.
After his capture, Kasi said that he had conducted the shooting because he was upset with U.S. policy in the Middle East and Iraq. In a letter sent from his jail cell to a reporter, he said that his hope had been to kill the CIA director, at the time Jim Woolsey, or Woolsey’s predecessor, Bob Gates. In fact, just a few weeks before the attack outside CIA, a man with a rifle was spotted in the woods behind Gates’s home. That person was never captured, but the possibility of being personally targeted was something that all of us who succeeded Gates lived with constantly. As for Kasi, almost a decade would pass before he was finally executed in a Jarratt, Virginia, prison, on November 14, 2002.
There were many moments like Aimal Kasi’s capture, times when all the hours, all the risks, all the planning, would be rewarded. Some I can’t write about at all. Otherwise, sources would get compromised, channels closed down, and lives lost. Unfortunately, when you run a place like CIA, it’s the low lights that stand out in the media—the mistakes, the goofs, the gaffes—the things everyone can see and no one, it seems, can resist commenting on. For many of those, I would like to turn back the clock and erase them. Some, I can’t stop remembering.
On May 11, 1998, the Indian government conducted underground tests of three nuclear devices. It followed up a couple days later with tests of two more. Within two weeks, Pakistan responded with its own tests. We knew that both countries had nuclear desires, intent, and capabilities, and we knew the risks all too well. The India-Pakistan border is one of the most contentious in the world, maybe even more contentious than the border that divides Israel and the Palestinians, and the region is one of the world’s most populated. Unleashing nuclear weapons on the subcontinent could kill literally millions. That said, the timing of the tests caught us by surprise.
The morning that the world learned of the first Indian tests, I received a call from our Senate oversight chairman, Richard Shelby. Not surprisingly, he asked me what had happened. One of my habits is to be plai
nspoken, maybe too much. “Senator, we didn’t have a clue,” I told him. Within minutes, Shelby was on CNN, calling the miss a “colossal intelligence failure.” Was it a failure? No doubt. “Colossal” is in the eye of the beholder.
The very same day, I got a call from my boss, President Clinton. “George,” he said, “I want you to know I have full faith and trust in you. You’re doing a damn good job—don’t worry.” For a forty-five-year-old guy in the middle of his first major crisis as DCI to have the president of the United States pick up the phone and reassure him like that was a great morale booster. Afterward, I said to myself, okay, forget Shelby. The only guy that matters has just checked off. Let’s go find out what went wrong here and see what we can do to prevent a similar event in the future. And so I asked the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. David Jeremiah, to lead a team to examine how and why we had missed the boat so badly. A month later, the results were in.
Jeremiah’s team confirmed that the identification of the Indian nuclear test preparations was a difficult intelligence-collection and analytical problem. The Indian program was not derived from the U.S., Chinese, Russian, or French programs, but was indigenously developed and thus harder to detect. Three years earlier, in 1995, we had learned about similar test preparations and strongly urged the Indians to stop. They had, but in confronting them we had given them a road map for how to deceive us in the future. This time, only a limited number of senior Indian officials were aware of the planned tests.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 6