Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  You might wonder why I am relating this decades-old story of purloined bacon. It clearly has nothing to do with counterterrorism. But oddly, the incident set off a chain reaction of events that had a profound impact on the rest of my career.

  Once Kostiw withdrew, the outsiders Goss had brought in gathered to find another candidate to be ExDir. Once again they outsmarted themselves. Somehow they came up with the name of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, a not-too-senior Agency officer whose career was mostly spent in what had been called the CIA’s “Directorate of Administration.” (The name has changed several times over the years, but the role of providing support for the Agency’s worldwide operations has remained essentially the same.)

  The men and women of the DA (now known as the Directorate of Support) are miracle workers. It is hard enough providing logistical support to any government agency overseas. To be able to do it for a clandestine organization such as the CIA requires skill, imagination, and guts that are rarely seen elsewhere. They are the best in the world at what they do and I am indebted to them for the excellent support they provided to me and the organizations I led during my time in the Agency.

  Goss’s crowd had somehow gotten to know Dusty during trips to visit CIA activities in Europe. Apparently Foggo excelled at providing logistical support to the congressional delegation and they remembered his can-do attitude when they had an important hole to fill.

  I had run across Dusty a few times during my Agency career, mostly in Latin America. He had the reputation of someone who could get the job done, and I understand that he did superb work out of Europe supporting CIA’s post-9/11 logistical requirements. He was known as a wheeler-dealer, but that is one of the reasons he got stuff done. While he was good at being a “fixer” there was little in his record to suggest he was the right guy to become the third-ranking person at the CIA. But the Goss crowd thought he would be loyal to them and started the ball rolling to bring him back from overseas to fill that critical role.

  Once again, Agency security and counterintelligence officers reviewed the personnel file in preparation. And once again they found some disturbing things. Press accounts have subsequently reported that Dusty had a major anger management problem and was known to have associated with some people with less-than-sterling reputations. Apparently whatever it was, it was not sufficient to have him removed from the Agency. The chief of counterintelligence for the Agency briefed Goss’s chief of staff, Pat Murray, on her concerns and found him hostile to the news. Murray told her that if any of this derogatory information about Foggo leaked to the media, he would hold her personally responsible. Murray and friends apparently assumed that the information about Kostiw’s past had been leaked by current counterintelligence (CI) officials. What they didn’t understand was that even though personnel matters are handled discreetly within the Agency, there inevitably were scores of (mostly former) Agency officers who would have known about the reasons behind Kostiw’s 1981 departure from the CIA. Once the announcement appeared in the media about Goss’s picks, an announcement that Goss’s team issued themselves, it wouldn’t take long before someone would recall incidents involving the uniquely named former case officer and express their views on whether someone with his past was a good choice to hold the number-three position at the CIA in the future.

  The counterintelligence chief was somewhat taken aback by the vehemence of Murray’s views and recounted the discussion with her boss, Mike Sulick, the number-two person in the Directorate of Operations. Mike is a crusty, Bronx-born, seasoned intelligence hand who had served in some of the most challenging operational assignments the Agency could offer, particularly in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Sulick studied Russian language and literature at Fordham and eventually earned a Ph.D. from CCNY. He is a no-nonsense kind of guy and an excellent intelligence officer. Mike walked down the hall to tell Murray that he didn’t appreciate one of his officers being threatened like that.

  There are a couple of versions of how the conversation that followed went down. None of them suggest it went well. It ended with Murray and Sulick shouting at each other and Mike telling the chief of staff something along the lines of his not willing to be treated like some low-level “Hill puke.” Murray, a former high-level Hill puke, took offense. Shortly thereafter, Murray told some version of the story to Goss and convinced him that they needed to call in Sulick’s boss, Steve Kappes, the head of the clandestine service, the “DDO,” and tell him he must fire or reassign Sulick.

  Clearly they didn’t know Kappes well. A by-the-book, straitlaced former Marine, Steve had a strong sense of loyalty to the Agency and his subordinates. Being ordered to cashier his deputy by Murray, a lawyer whose CIA experience at that point totaled something short of five weeks, was clearly a nonstarter. All this was happening a few days after President Bush had narrowly won reelection, and the Gosslings appeared to feel empowered to clean house at the CIA. The collision between them and Kappes and Sulick seemed destined to end up with the worst possible result.

  While I heard the heavy thuds from the seventh floor while the elephants wrestled with each other, I didn’t think it was something that would affect me. One night in early November, after a typically arduous day in CTC, I had fallen into my bed exhausted and was just beginning to doze off around 10:30 p.m. when the phone rang. It was not unusual for me to get calls at all hours of the day and night from the duty officer in the Agency’s operations center, but this was something else. Dusty Foggo, the new executive director, was on the line insisting, without further explanation, that I meet him in his office right away. Wearily, I got dressed, jumped into my car, and drove to headquarters.

  When I got there, Foggo was waiting for me in his office across the hall from the DCI’s executive suite. He quickly got to the point. He explained to me that Kappes and Sulick would likely quit or be fired in the next few days. Goss and company wanted to be ready with a replacement as head of the clandestine service if that happened. Dusty said the leading contender for the job was me. It hadn’t dawned on me that that was what this was all about. In retrospect, I suppose it should have. But I was totally focused on my job in CTC.

  “No. I don’t want it,” I responded instantly and with passion. I had three reasons. First, I told him that I felt strongly that Kappes and Sulick were outstanding career officers who had risen to the top of the clandestine service on the basis of merit and achievement. Their sudden removal following a confrontation with a newly arrived, highly political staffer would be seen by the rank and file as a dangerous precedent. Such an action could undermine the professionalism and integrity of the clandestine service. There was still time, I told him, for Goss to fix the problem if he just dealt with Kappes and Sulick directly. Second, I had a job, a very important one, as head of CTC. I was needed in CTC and there were things I still hoped to accomplish, such as finding UBL and finishing off the remnants of the al-Qa’ida organization that had attacked us on 9/11.

  Beyond that, my third reason for not wanting the job was more practical. I had already decided that I was going to retire in the summer of 2005 (after, I hoped, cleaning up some of those remaining details, such as getting bin Ladin). Having already spent twenty-eight years in the clandestine service, I felt it would be soon time to start the next phase of my life. But Dusty wouldn’t take no for an answer. He kept telling me that the Agency needed me in this time of crisis (I restrained myself from reminding him it was a crisis of the Gosslings’ creation). Still, I wasn’t buying it.

  I held to my answer of “no thanks.” Dusty asked me to think about it and not to make any firm decisions. I wearily agreed to do so and headed home for the second time that day.

  The first thing the next morning I reached out to Steve Kappes and told him of my conversation with Dusty. “They offered me your job,” I told him, “but I said no.” I explained my rationale. Steve was still my boss. I felt that I owed it to him. Steve thanked me but didn’t say anything else.

  Tension on the seventh floor continu
ed to build for the rest of the week. The timing could not have been worse. On Friday, November 12, the Agency’s highly respected deputy director, John McLaughlin, announced his plan to retire, in what he called a “purely personal decision.” It was no secret inside the building, however, that John had little confidence in the team that Goss had brought with him. Few of us did.

  That same day, Kappes told Goss that he would not fire or reassign Sulick as Murray demanded. If the order stood, he told Goss, Kappes would quit and walk out the door with Mike. Goss refused to overrule Murray but asked Kappes to spend the weekend thinking over the situation in hopes that he would find a way to stay on.

  As I mentioned earlier, one of the complaints that the Gosslings had when they arrived, and one of the things they vowed to fix, was what they saw as an excessive amount of leaking to the press from inside the CIA. In many cases, the information that they blamed the Agency for leaking most likely came from other parts of government. But in some instances they were right. This was one of them.

  News of the impending departure of Kappes and Sulick rocketed around the CIA headquarters and to Agency field stations around the world. Before the day was out reporters had gotten wind of the exchange and we had the bizarre situation of news organizations over the weekend speculating about personnel moves going on inside America’s secret intelligence headquarters. “What will happen on Monday?” they asked. “Will they stay or will they go?”

  The dysfunction of CIA senior personnel politics played out in the nation’s media over the weekend. Suddenly everyone was analyzing the management turmoil at the CIA. It became a partisan issue as well. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) told reporters that Goss’s decision “to take with him several staff with reputations for partisanship was very troubling, and now he faces rumors of a partisan purge at the CIA.” Representative Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the HPSCI, appeared on CBS News’ Face the Nation and criticized the “highly partisan, inexperienced staff” that Goss had brought to Langley, saying, “Many of us worked with that staff in the House. Frankly, on both sides of the aisle in the committee, we were happy to see them go.”

  John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, took an opposite point of view, telling the New York Times that the upheaval at the Agency was “absolutely necessary.” He said, “One thing that has become abundantly clear, if it wasn’t already, is that this is a dysfunctional agency, and in some ways a rogue agency.”

  Goss supporters were active with the media, too, portraying Kappes and Sulick as part of a rebellious Agency staff unwilling to accept leadership from those above them and anxious to bury evidence of their own past malfeasance.

  Having the weekend to think matters over did nothing to change Kappes’s and Sulick’s minds. They announced to their employees on Monday morning that that day would indeed be their last at the CIA. The announcement, although anticipated for a few days, hit the headquarters like a bombshell. I went upstairs to their offices on the seventh floor but found a line of well-wishers stretched far down the hall. There must have been several hundred people there to extend heartfelt farewells. The line was so long I eventually gave up and went back to work in CTC.

  Waiting for me was a note to call Dusty right away. He pressed me for an answer to the question, would I accept the job that Kappes had just left? Dusty gave me the full sales treatment once again. I was torn. Signing on as the DDO probably meant committing to stay in government for another couple of years. Working with the Gosslings held little attraction, and I didn’t want to advance my career at the expense of the misfortune of two fine officers, Kappes and Sulick, who had gotten cross-threaded with them.

  I asked Dusty what his plan B was. Nobody goes into a situation like this without an alternative course of action if your initial one won’t work. He admitted they did have a fallback plan, which was to bring back to the Agency a former senior operations officer who had retired some years before. Dusty gave me the name. It was someone who had been a fine officer back during the Cold War but a person totally unfamiliar with the environment we were operating in now. “This could be another personnel disaster,” I thought to myself. I told him that I needed to call my wife and discuss it with her. I went back to my office and placed the call. Patti was supportive, as always. We talked about the pros and cons but eventually I told her that I thought I owed it to the rank-and-file members of the clandestine service, particularly those who at that very moment were serving in war zones, to take the job. I couldn’t, in good faith, leave them without an experienced hand at the helm. Patti said she would support my decision no matter what.

  I hung up and called Dusty to tell him I would take the job. “Great,” he said. “Now we just need to get you cleared.”

  The approval process for being assigned the most senior jobs at the Agency involved a six-point check with different offices in the CIA, including the Office of Security and the Office of the Inspector General. The IG’s office reminded the seventh floor of my troubles eight years earlier, which had resulted in my being fired from the Latin America Division. For the next eight to ten hours it looked as if I was about to be told that I was not suitable for the position I had very reluctantly agreed to accept. Late that evening I got a call at home telling me that Goss, after having been briefed on my earlier dust-up with the IG, had nonetheless signed off on my assignment.

  If you had told me a quarter of a century earlier, when I was just entering on duty with the Agency, that someday I, a Puerto Rican–born kid who had spent most of his life outside the United States, would be head of America’s premier clandestine service, I would have thought you were kidding. And if you had predicted that I wouldn’t be particularly happy about how I got there, I would have known you were nuts.

  With more than a little trepidation, late in the day on that Monday I began to move my things from my dark, windowless, ground-floor CTC office to a spacious, light-filled DDO suite on the CIA’s seventh floor.

  Suddenly I found myself at the top of the Agency, both figuratively and literally very, very far from where I had begun. The atmosphere throughout the building was incredibly tense. President Bush had only recently squeaked through a narrow reelection victory and the partisans around Goss made it clear that they felt they had a mandate to shake the Agency up.

  I never found Goss, himself, to be captured by this score-settling mood. He remained often unaware of the actions being taken in his name.

  The Gosslings had managed to recruit a few midlevel career Agency officers who felt empowered to kick ass and take names on behalf of their new masters. One such officer let it be known that anyone who was too closely associated with the past regime (meaning Tenet, McLaughlin, and Kappes, apparently) would be singled out for retribution. Unfortunately, there are more than a few jerks like that guy in any organization. I used to refer to them as pendejos, a Spanish slang word for which the politically correct translation is roughly “incompetent dumbass.” This particular pendejo went so far as to say that he was keeping a list of individuals who needed to be reassigned from their senior jobs. A few months later, one of the Gosslings came to me and told me that they wanted this same list-keeper to be promoted well ahead of his peers to Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) rank. Making SIS is the equivalent of becoming a flag or general officer in the military. “It is not going to happen,” I said. “To promote this guy, I would have to take SIS rank away from someone who had earned it.” The decision to promote people within the Operations Directorate followed a very methodical process and I was not going to let some newcomer interfere and dictate to me how to run my organization.

  In an odd way, I felt somewhat bulletproof. Given the ugly way the Gosslings had forced my predecessor to resign, they couldn’t really afford to have another senior officer bail out as well. I had decided to take a stand on those things I believed were important to the directorate and not go to battle stations on issues of lesser importance. Because I was prepared to leave rather than cave on important stuff, I was bl
essed with being able to stand on principle.

  One of my first decisions after becoming DDO was to pick a deputy. After all, Kappes and his deputy, Mike Sulick, departed as a duo. I selected Rob Richer, a crafty former Marine with extensive experience in the Middle East. Most recently Rob had been chief of the Near East Division and had worked closely with me in CTC. He had been heavily involved in Agency operations in Iraq, something that I had not had to pay much attention to when I had the counterterrorism account. The continuing mess in Iraq would be one of my major headaches as DDO, and Rob’s depth of understanding of what we were up against nicely complemented my expertise elsewhere. I knew Rob to be the kind of officer who got things done and the kind of guy you wanted by your side in a foxhole, whether a real one or the bureaucratic kind that you find in Washington. I purposely selected someone who was hard-nosed and would not shy away from a confrontation if one was necessary.

  Given the turmoil created by the sudden departure of Kappes and Sulick, the pounding the Agency was taking from various panels and commissions, and the considerable damage done almost daily by leaks of sensitive information, the feeling in the Directorate of Operations was that we were under siege and fighting for our lives.

  When you are under attack it is easy to become totally consumed by the crisis du jour. But I felt it was essential that we worry not only about the wolves nearest our sled, but also about those just over the horizon. We set about building a five-year strategic plan that would put us in a position to deal effectively not only with the threats of terrorism or the security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan but also with challenges posed by Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and others.

  The so-called peace dividend of the early nineties, followed by the intense focus on counterterrorism post-9/11, had left the clandestine service badly weakened. I felt it was critical that we become a truly global intelligence service once again. We needed a plan to reopen stations that had been closed in the past decade, pay attention to emerging threats, and come up with a strategic plan that would make us a strong, vibrant, and relevant organization.