Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  The answers to these questions are not easy. I recognize that there is an argument that taking out political leaders or terrorists outside a war zone may, in the mind of some, legitimize attacks on Western leaders. The counterargument, of course, is that our leaders are already targeted. I am not arguing for broad-based or promiscuous use of operations, but giving up the option without understanding what is at stake strikes me as exceedingly unwise.

  Chapter 6

  REGIME CHANGE

  As 2003 rolled into 2004, those of us in CTC continued to rack up successes. Building on the information we were obtaining from senior detainees in our custody, we were able to deliver some serious blows to al-Qa’ida. But the CIA itself was taking some hits as well.

  Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Agency came under heavy criticism when the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that virtually everyone believed Saddam had, and that some relied on to justify the war, failed to turn up. My personal involvement in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of what the Pentagon dubbed “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was slight. My entire focus was on terrorism. There were some in the administration, particularly on the staff of Vice President Cheney, who were hell-bent on connecting Saddam and his regime to al-Qa’ida. They repeatedly asked our analysts to dig through the data looking for threads that might connect the two. We found precious little. Although Saddam had supported other terrorist operations in the past, connections between Iraq and AQ were remarkably thin. I could have given you a list of a half-dozen countries that had more substantial ties to bin Ladin’s organization than did Iraq.

  Whether Iraq had connections to 9/11 was a legitimate question, and had we found any, the case for going to war with Baghdad would have been easy to make. But when we disappointed those who were seeking those connections, they moved on to rely on other things, such as WMD.

  The Agency was also taking heat from the 9/11 Commission and from other investigations trying to get to the bottom of the September 11 attacks. It is a natural human instinct to try to learn from disastrous events like that and sadly, it is natural for some people to look for others to blame. The relatively small group of officers within CTC who had been obsessed with Usama bin Ladin, years before almost anyone else in our government even knew his name, came under particularly close scrutiny. With the clarity of 20/20 hindsight, it was easy for critics who knew how events had unfolded to cherry-pick a few nuggets of information from the mountains of data that these officers were dealing with before 9/11 and years later say, “How could you have missed this?”

  One of my challenges was to keep these fine officers, unquestionably the world’s leading experts on al-Qa’ida, focused on the continuing struggle to stop the next attack and to get UBL while they were at the same time being grilled by commission staffers, IG office investigators, and others who had an outcome in mind and were simply working backward to fill in the blanks to justify their conclusions.

  If the importance of our mission had not been so great, and so obvious, it would have been impossible to get any human being to focus on the enemy abroad while being sniped at by others at home. But having lived through the horror of 9/11, these officers, many of them women, as it turned out, knew better than anyone the stakes at hand.

  The 9/11 Commission report did get some things right. Among them was the statement that “before 9/11, no agency did more to attack al-Qa’ida than the CIA.” The commission’s final report was widely praised in the media for how fully it told the story of how al-Qa’ida created and carried out the 9/11 plot. Two chapters of their report (Chapter 5, “Al Qaeda Aims at the American Homeland,” and Chapter 7, “The Attack Looms”) were heavily based on information gleaned by the CIA’s interrogation program. Those who claim nothing useful came out of the Agency’s debriefing of senior AQ operatives are almost always mute on this point.

  In early June, George Tenet announced that he would be stepping down a month later. He had held the job for seven years and was the second-longest-serving DCI in Agency history. Many of my junior officers had known no other DCI. George was tired. Tired of the grind and even more worn down by the beating he was taking from politicians, pundits, and armchair “terrorism experts.” I was sad to see him depart but understood why he felt it was time for him to go.

  Truth be told, I was very tired myself and was looking forward to a day not too far away when I too could lay my burden down. Some treat it as a joke when government officials announce their departure and say they want to spend more time with their family. But in high-pressure jobs, despite the best efforts to find some balance, families are short-changed too often. In my case, our two boys were reaching college age, and the thought of finding a job with smaller demands on my time and larger paychecks was a considerable attraction.

  Early in 2004, I was asked to consult with the organizers of that summer’s Olympic Games in Athens. That international gathering was a prime potential target for terrorists, and we were all relieved when, amid heavy security precautions, no terrorist incidents took place. The experience of advising the government of Greece convinced me that I might have a productive and lucrative second career ahead as a consultant. But while there were things pulling me toward the door, there was one factor that kept me in place: the sense of unfinished business. Having been in CTC since the hours immediately after 9/11, I wanted to be part of the team that would bring al-Qa’ida’s leaders to justice.

  George Tenet had been CTC’s biggest supporter. He fought to get us the tools we needed and the authorization to use them. He was a frequent visitor to CTC windowless spaces far below his airy seventh-floor office. He has a special gift of leadership, which allowed him to constantly ride us for more productive performance while always seeming to be our champion and never a nag. I will forever be grateful to him for having the confidence to make an unlikely candidate like me chief of CTC.

  John McLaughlin, George’s deputy, is probably as unlike Tenet as it is possible to be in terms of personality. Yet the two of them made a superb team. While Tenet is garrulous and voluble, McLaughlin is soft-spoken and professorial. They complemented each other better than any other one-two team at CIA I had ever witnessed.

  So we were delighted to see McLaughlin placed in charge as acting director when Tenet stepped down. In the post-9/11 environment there has never been a quiet time at the CIA, and it certainly wasn’t calm during the period when McLaughlin was in charge. His tenure at the top coincided with one of the periods when the Department of Justice started to moonwalk away from us on the authorities they had previously provided regarding interrogation. As it happened, we had just captured a fairly senior al-Qa’ida operative when DOJ started to waver on the legality of the program. John courageously said that we would shut it down to protect our officers if we didn’t have clear guidance from our political masters. That stance did not go down well with senior officials at the White House. But John said he was not going to have our officers undertake any actions knowing that their government might later claim they were illegal. Eventually the DOJ came through with the renewed authorities and the interrogation and debriefing resumed.

  The summer of 2004 was a difficult time. The country was in the middle of a presidential campaign, and the conduct of intelligence had become a political football. The comparative unity Americans had achieved in the days following 9/11 was a thing of the past. Many of our elected leaders were positioning themselves and posturing to make political hay out of the traumatic experience of the past couple of years.

  The 9/11 Commission report, released on July 22, 2004, was harshly critical of the structure and performance of the American intelligence community and, among other things, recommended the creation of a “national intelligence director” to supervise the work of the sixteen agencies that made up the intelligence community (IC).

  We had already undergone some wrenching reorganization, which seems to be a bureaucracy’s way of giving the impression (often false) of progress. In 2003, with little prior discussion o
r study, the Bush administration announced the creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), which was designed to facilitate the sharing of terrorist information (by brute force if necessary) across the many elements of the IC that collected and analyzed that information.

  The TTIC later evolved into the National Counter Terrorist Center (NCTC), which should not be confused with the CIA’s CTC. The creation of such an organization was probably a good thing, but the way it was accomplished was not. In order to help man the new organization, a decision was made to rip most, if not all, of the top CT analysts out of CTC. I was strongly against such a move. Why take the one part of the U.S. government’s counterterrorist structure that was working best and weaken it to create some new, untried entity? In our briefings to the 9/11 Commission our warning to them was that whatever changes were subsequently implemented, the most important thing was to do no harm. I lost that argument regarding TTIC, and a healthy chunk of CTC’s best analysts were shipped to the new organization, which was created under the leadership of John Brennan, who at the time was the CIA’s deputy executive director. Now, having painfully survived that reorganization, there was talk about a larger restructuring of the IC. I couldn’t afford to let my people be distracted by all the talk of rewiring the Rube Goldberg–like structure of the intelligence community. We had a war to fight.

  On August 2, President Bush invited Acting-DCI John McLaughlin, Secretary of State Powell, and others to the White House, where (much to the surprise of many present) he announced that his administration was backing the creation of a director of national intelligence (DNI). While the idea of such an organization had been kicked around for many years, this announcement had the air about it of something done for political expediency. Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, had endorsed the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations in their entirety and the administration appeared to be rushing to get to the head of the parade. Some inside the intelligence community, such as John McLaughlin, had previously warned that the DNI structure was unnecessary. Others worried that it would be unwieldy, although White House and NSC staffers assured them that the DNI staff would be supervisory, in charge of coordinating and empowering the existing intelligence community. It would be small and nimble, they said, numbering seven hundred people or fewer. (According to press accounts, within five years the staff had grown to over two thousand, more than the total of people in CTC during my tenure.)

  Shortly after announcing his plan to create the DNI, President Bush nominated Congressman Porter Goss, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), to become the last DCI. The plan was that once the DNI position was established, Goss would lead the CIA but someone else would come in to take the overarching DNI slot.

  If the president wanted to bring in new leadership for the CIA, Goss was an obvious choice. He had been a CIA case officer during the 1960s. After leaving the Agency and becoming successful in business, Goss got into politics, eventually being elected to Congress representing the Fourteenth Congressional District in southwest Florida.

  Goss had been chair of the oversight committee that closely monitored the CIA for about seven years. Few Americans outside the Agency knew as much about its inner workings as did he.

  My interaction with Goss when he was chairman of HPSCI was always good. In hearings and briefings he always asked tough, penetrating questions but did so in a respectful fashion, making clear that he was looking for answers, not opportunities to score political points. So I was fairly optimistic that Goss would only build on the positive experience we in CTC had under the leadership of George Tenet and John McLaughlin.

  What I didn’t count on was that Goss would bring in with him a handful of senior aides, mostly former congressional staffers, who had an agenda of their own. Some of these people had had brief assignments at the CIA in the past, but many knew us only from their perspective as congressional staffers. Many of the people around Goss came in with a collective chip on their shoulders, many pledging openly to fix what they perceived to be the badly broken organization that was the CIA. They had the arrogance of armchair quarterbacks who had never played the game but were ready to tell battle-scarred veterans that they were all screwed up. Just months before he was tapped to lead the CIA, Goss’s staff had drafted a signing statement to accompany the FY 2005 Intelligence Authorization Bill, which flatly stated that things were so bad at the CIA that we were on the verge of being incapable of “the slightest bit of success.” To the people who had routed al-Qa’ida from Afghanistan, captured Abu Zubaydah and KSM, brought down the A. Q. Khan network (which proliferated nuclear technology to rogue nations), and convinced Libya to turn over its WMD without firing a shot, the claim was bitterly received.

  In addition to thinking we were incompetent, many on Goss’s team, who were collectively awarded the derisive nickname of “the Gosslings,” also thought the CIA was actively working to undermine the reelection chances of President Bush. They cited leaks to the press of gloomy intelligence estimates about progress in Iraq or anonymous comments in the media attributed to current and former intelligence officials to bolster their case. My experience was that CIA was not a very political place at all. People there knew a lot about the governments of foreign nations but weren’t particularly focused on the politics of their own.

  Goss’s leadership style, of not getting down in the weeds and letting your people have wide-ranging flexibility, works well when you have good people. Although there were a few exceptions, unfortunately, many of the men Goss brought into the CIA with him let him down badly and quickly. It was a shame. I always thought that Goss gave his heart and soul to the Agency and cared about its mission and people deeply. He deserved much better.

  Most of the jobs to be filled by the team Goss brought in with him were important but publicly invisible positions within the Agency. One exception was the executive director’s job, which, in Agency hierarchy, was considered the third-ranking position at the CIA. The “ExDir,” as the holder of the position was known, was the person in charge of day-to-day operations of the Agency. He was someone who kept the trains running on time and served as sort of the COO of the CIA. In that role this person was responsible for many of the management functions, including enforcing rules and regulations and applying discipline to those Agency officers who transgressed. Goss elected to replace Buzzy Krongard, the hyperefficient, tough-as-nails former business executive whom Tenet had installed in the position, with Michael Kostiw. Kostiw had worked as a CIA case officer for about ten years in the 1970s, had later worked on Capitol Hill, and had been a vice president for ChevronTexaco.

  As is the case in all appointments, Agency security officials review the files of nominees to make sure there are no reasons why that person might not be suitable for a particular job. There were some things of concern in Kostiw’s past, and Goss’s incoming chief of staff (one of the people brought in from the Hill), Pat Murray, was so informed. Murray reportedly was not troubled by the information and on September 30, six days after Goss was sworn in, an announcement went out to the Agency workforce about Goss’s plan to install various people in new slots starting the next week. The announcement included Murray’s own appointment and those of Goss’s personal secretary and two other senior officials, plus Kostiw’s assignment as ExDir. Much of the same information was reported in the Washington Post the following day.

  The next afternoon, Friday, October 2, Agency officials sent out a copy of the announcement in an email to thousands of retired CIA officers around the country who routinely receive administrative notes from their old employer.

  The very next day, there was a story in the Washington Post by longtime intelligence writer Walter Pincus, reporting that Kostiw had resigned from the Agency in 1981 following allegations that he had been caught shoplifting. Subsequent press stories said that the item in question was a pound of bacon from a local Safeway store.

  The palace guard around Goss were furious. They
were mad not about having mistakenly put someone in charge of good order and discipline at the CIA who had left the Agency under an ethical cloud but because someone had shared the rumors of Kostiw’s past with the media. They were convinced this was another example of currently serving Agency officers defying their will.

  Goss’s team put up a brief but vigorous fight for their man, but after a couple of days of bad press it was clear that it was a losing battle. On October 4 the Agency released a statement from Kostiw saying: “As a result of recent press articles and attendant speculation, I have decided that I cannot accept an appointment as CIA’s Executive Director.” Instead, he took a much lower-profile position as a senior advisor to Goss. Ironically, of all the people Goss brought with him to CIA, Kostiw turned out to be one of the most competent, hardworking, humble, and well liked. It is a shame that circumstances prevented him from serving in the ExDir role. I personally enjoyed a very good relationship with Mike and respected his counsel. If the other men Goss brought in had been more like him, Goss’s stay at the CIA would have been longer and happier.