Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  It took all my skills as a leader to lift the sense of gloom in the division. But slowly, I was starting to make progress. Officers in headquarters and out in the field started to put the past behind them and regain a spring in their step. We had important work to do and some very talented people with whom to work.

  Then one day in early 1997 I got a call from my superiors on the seventh floor regarding a new investigation that was being launched by the Inspector General’s Office. That is never a good sign. I wondered which one of my people, spread from Washington to the tip of South America, had run afoul of the IG. Turns out, it was me.

  My boss told me that someone had complained that I had inappropriately intervened on behalf of a drug dealer in a country in my region. It took a while after hearing the allegation to figure out what he was talking about. A year or so earlier, soon after I had taken my current job, I got a call from a friend of mine informing me that a mutual boyhood friend of ours had been arrested and imprisoned in a Caribbean nation on drug charges. The local police entered his now-empty home and helped themselves to the contents. They even stole his car. Of far greater concern, however, were reports that the police were brutally beating their prisoner. My friend asked me if I could do anything to stop the mistreatment of our buddy, whom I had not seen in a very long time. I told him that if our friend indeed had gotten himself mixed up in the drug trade, he deserved to be in prison. I spent much of my Agency career fighting drug traffickers, and the notion that someone I knew might be contributing to the drug epidemic was distressing to me.

  Still, the thought of officials beating him was disturbing. Many officers in my division had been punished in the recent past for not intervening when Latin American officials mistreated detainees. So I agreed to look into the matter.

  I called the senior CIA officer in the country in question. My friend was not unknown to him. He had provided some logistical support for our station there. I told the station chief: “Look, if Hector (not his real name) is in the drug trade, he deserves to get busted. But please check with the local intelligence service and ask them not to beat the man and not to steal from him. If he is guilty, bring him to trial. But don’t abuse him.”

  The station chief did just that and the local authorities listened. I was told the beatings stopped. Contacting local authorities and asking them to treat prisoners with basic decency is something that the CIA insists on.

  Far from being a drug trafficker, Hector turned out to be a recreational user of cocaine. Eventually he was released without charges. When he went home, many of his belongings, including his stolen car, had miraculously returned. I thought nothing more about it and to this day have never spoken with Hector, my former friend, again.

  Sometime after Hector’s incarceration, a CIA officer in our station with a less-than-stellar record found himself in trouble. His bosses discovered he had been condescending and abusive toward the local intelligence service.

  Our station chief sent an “eyes only” cable to me reporting on the performance problems of his subordinate and asking what should be done. Despite the title “eyes only,” such cables were automatically seen by several people, including my boss, the DDO, Dave Cohen. As soon as Cohen saw the report, he directed that the officer be immediately recalled to headquarters. That pretty much ended the officer’s career (which frankly was going nowhere anyway).

  The guy being recalled apparently assumed that I was the one who had ordered that his career be terminated. In fact, I had not. But feeling aggrieved, he proceeded to seek retribution. The troubled officer contacted the IG’s office and said that he was being singled out for retribution because, he claimed, he had told local authorities of intelligence that led to Hector’s arrest. This was nonsense. I had no idea then or now whether he had anything to do with Hector’s being singled out for investigation. In the world of the IG, however, a charge is as good as evidence, and an investigation was launched.

  I later learned that, just to make sure he got even with me, the officer also reported to the Drug Enforcement Agency that I had forced the station to intervene on behalf of a druggie. I knew the allegations were absurd, so I figured if I laid out the facts, the IG would do its thing and eventually the problem would go away. The IG did its thing all right, but it was I who would end up going away.

  After several months of investigation the IG staffer called and asked me to come to his office at the new headquarters building, adjacent to the “original” headquarters building where my staff and I worked. When I got there, he closed the door. “I want to share with you my draft report and get your reaction,” he said. I sat down and started to read the lengthy report. My jaw dropped. When I finished, I slowly pushed the report back across the desk and told him: “I don’t know who this guy is you are writing about. It isn’t me. It isn’t me!” He didn’t get what I was saying. I explained that he was dead wrong and that he had accepted almost every bit of bullshit given to him by the disgraced former employee of our station. He told me I could submit a written rebuttal. I went home and spent an entire weekend crafting a passionate defense of my honor. On Monday I gave my paper to the IG rep but later learned that it had been a waste of time. Despite my protestations, the IG report was forwarded, virtually unchanged, to my boss, the DDO. By this time the CIA had undergone yet another change of leadership. George Tenet had become the sixth DCI in the past decade. When he came aboard he brought Jack Downing, a highly respected former case officer, out of retirement to be DDO. Jack was an old cold warrior, who spoke both Russian and Chinese and had served with great distinction in Moscow and elsewhere.

  A somewhat humorless former Marine, Downing walked into my office carrying a copy of the IG report. He said he wanted to hear my side of the story firsthand. I was delighted to tell it. Apparently I was more delighted than he was to hear it, because a few minutes into my animated self-defense I looked to him and noticed that Downing had fallen asleep. I did not take that as a good omen.

  When CIA officers are subject to adverse IG reports or otherwise get into trouble, the common solution is generally to hold an “accountability board.” A panel of senior officers is assembled to read the report and recommend some action. The deck is often stacked. The IG has a phalanx of investigators to build a case against you. I was not allowed to be present; they had only my written rebuttal to make my defense.

  The case officer who was my accuser had done a good job of sabotaging my career. Not only were the allegations serious, that a senior CIA official was protecting a drug dealer who was a personal friend, but the timing could not have been worse. The Agency had just been through a searing controversy in which a California newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, had reported that the CIA was behind the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles in the 1980s. The allegation was absurd and was debunked by numerous official and unofficial investigations. But it was accepted as fact by a number of harsh Agency critics, including Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who never met a conspiracy theory about the CIA that she wasn’t ready to believe.

  The stars were not aligned in my favor. The station chief whom I had asked to contact the local officials to request they stop beating their prisoner apparently later told the IG, “I thought Jose’s request was inappropriate.” He never said “boo” about it to me at the time.

  The accountability board didn’t have a lot of options, especially when confronted with an IG report that concluded that I had displayed “a remarkable lack of judgment.” I knew some of the folks on the accountability board. It must have been very difficult for them to sit in judgment of one of their colleagues.

  Jack Downing came down to my office on a late October morning to deliver the verdict. This time he stayed awake throughout our session. “You are being relieved of your duties as chief of the Latin America Division,” he said. The Agency would find some place to stash me, Downing explained, until they could figure out what other assignment I might be eligible for.

  As it turned out, on the calendar that morni
ng was a long-scheduled conference of all the chiefs of station under my division. A couple of dozen senior officers from throughout the division were in town for meetings. I might as well finish up those meetings, Jack said, before cleaning out my desk.

  One of the main events of any chiefs-of-station conference is for the visitors to be addressed by the DDO. It is a chance for them to hear about the status of the directorate from the top man in the clandestine service. Downing was on the agenda to speak to this group, and he figured it was necessary to break the news to them that their division chief, this Rodriguez guy, was on his way out.

  Before they could hear it elsewhere, I quickly informed my own headquarters staff about my firing. As far as I know, however, none of the station chiefs had any idea that I was even under investigation, let alone about to be fired, until Downing walked into their meeting.

  They were a happy group that morning gathered in the Latin America Division conference room down the hall from my office. Jack greeted them and, with me standing at his side, in a matter-of-fact tone went through the allegations contained in the IG report and concluded by saying that for those reasons I was no longer chief, LA. One of the officers present later told me that this was the most surreal meeting she had ever attended in her long Agency career. “I kept wondering,” she later told me, “does Downing not see Jose in the room?” Jack’s explanations did not go over well with those in the room, who were gratifyingly loyal to me. He got peppered by increasingly hostile questions. His answers did little to satisfy the crowd. Some wondered whether there was a curse hanging over LA Division. Its most senior officers kept getting shot out of the saddle. Downing’s briefing went over so badly, in fact, that later during the multiday meeting Jack came back to meet the group a second time to again try to explain the action.

  When Downing left, I walked to the front of the room and gave a very brief synopsis of what my actions truly were and why I had taken them. I explained that I had made a single call to protect someone who was being brutally beaten. “Knowing what I know now,” I said, “including the damage that my actions have caused to my career, I would do exactly the same thing again.” My remarks were much more warmly received than were Downing’s.

  I did not blame Downing for my firing from LA. In a way his hands were also tied by the IG’s recommendations and the decision of the accountability board. I later learned that in addressing a different chief-of-stations conference, he expressed regret at having to remove me from my position and described me as one of the best leaders in the directorate. Years later, when I had Jack’s job, I invited him back to headquarters for briefings on the state of the organization. I treated him with the respect that he had earned as a leader and legendary cold warrior.

  Eventually, George Tenet, the new DCI, came down to address the group. He had been briefed on how badly Downing’s earlier sessions had gone. “Don’t worry,” George said. “Jose will be all right.” Few in the room, including me, believed him, but as it turned out, he was right.

  We had previously scheduled a party at my home that evening for all the visiting officers. Patti and I were not going to let a little thing like my being fired stand in the way of a good party. It happened to be Halloween and Patti had the house decorated appropriately. She added one final touch—a cardboard tombstone placed with the inscription: “RIP Jose.” My (now former) officers got in the spirit, too, bringing with them a large pumpkin with the words “We love you, man” carved in it.

  I appreciated the sentiment and welcomed all the support I could get, because it appeared to me that my Agency career, which had been on a rapid, upward trajectory for the past twenty-two years, had just crashed and burned. Years later I would take note of the irony that in 1997 I was fired for trying to stop people from beating a petty criminal, and a decade later I came under criminal investigation for my involvement with the harsh, but legal and authorized, interrogation of some mass murderers.

  If there is one constant about negative IG reports, it is that they always seem to leak. This one was no different. A few weeks after I got the ax, someone dropped the details of my removal from LA Division on the Los Angeles Times. The leaker provided the reporter considerable detail on the allegations, including my full name. With some difficulty the Agency’s press office convinced the newspaper not to disclose my identity, pointing out that doing so might be a violation of federal law. They also stressed that the Agency did not believe I had intervened to save a drug dealer, only that I was trying to make sure a former friend was not mistreated. These details got lost ten years later when I was in the news again, this time over the destruction of videotapes of the interrogation of some senior al-Qa’ida members. By then any nuance had disappeared, and some media outlets reported that I had once been severely sanctioned for protecting a “drug kingpin.”

  Despite the damage to my career and ego from having been fired, I managed to survive. I spent the next eight months working on a project with the office of security, trying to resolve the cases of Agency officers who were in professional limbo due to overly cautious polygraphers and overly aggressive FBI investigators. In the aftermath of the scandal over Aldrich Ames (a CIA case officer who reportedly passed a polygraph but turned out to have been working for the Russians), the default position at the CIA was to place many innocent people under suspicion of wrongdoing. Scores of loyal case officers had a black cloud of suspicion over their heads. They were not allowed to perform significant duties, were deemed unassignable to new positions, and lived with the knowledge that at any moment they might be fired in disgrace or arrested.

  During my time working with security, we were able to come up with steps that forced the FBI to make decisions and either act on people they thought were security risks or lift the cloud and let them go back to work. CIA security personnel worked diligently with me to help fix an untenable situation. The number of people in limbo, called “hall walkers” at the Agency because they couldn’t perform any of the Agency’s real jobs, diminished sharply. I had more than a little sympathy for those who were falsely accused and felt good about being able to help many in those circumstances resolve their cases. By no means was the nightmare of false accusation ended, however.

  Brian Kelley was the most extreme example of security run amok. A retired air force officer who had become an outstanding counterintelligence officer at the CIA, Brian came under suspicion of being a Russian mole in the late 1990s. The FBI confronted him and refused to believe his denials. They harassed him mercilessly. The Bureau interviewed his elderly mother, his children, and other family members and told them that without question he was a spy. After being suspended from work for almost two years, during which time his phones were tapped and he was routinely followed, the Bureau discovered they had the wrong man. The real Russian mole was Brian’s Vienna, Virginia, neighbor, FBI agent Robert Hanssen.

  In my next job, in Mexico, I had a few run-ins with headquarters-based counterintelligence officers whose zealousness in dismissing potential hard-target recruits based on old assumptions and a risk-averse mind-set cost the CIA opportunities to recruit foreign agents who wanted to volunteer information to us. Despite those incidents, I believe counterintelligence must play a critical role in the operation of an intelligence agency. Any organization that acts as if it cannot be penetrated by its enemies or that thinks its information is invulnerable is setting itself up for a huge fall.

  All the investigations I was party to during my first twenty-five years at the CIA would pale in comparison to what would come next.

  It is fair to say that in the days immediately after 9/11, when I first reported to CTC, the Agency’s counterterrorism efforts were frenzied and chaotic. We were flooded with added people, empowered with new authorities, and, almost overnight, swamped with a boatload of cash to enable us to carry out our critical mission.

  While no one wanted to stand in our way in our efforts to smash al-Qa’ida, it was perfectly logical that Agency leadership wanted to make sure that
we were using our vastly expanded resources wisely. Almost simultaneously with the arrival of our new assets came a platoon of auditors from the Inspector General’s Office. That was understandable. Give an outfit a billion dollars or so and you have a right to want to make sure they are spending it well.

  The IG Office has three main activities: audits, to make sure you are using your dollars correctly; inspections, periodic efforts to verify that rules and regulations are being followed; and investigations, when there have been allegations of wrongdoing and the IG wants to dig into the charges.

  For the IG in the post-9/11 period, the auditors were the advance landing party in CTC. Once they were aboard, their colleagues followed and, rather than being visitors, they took up permanent residence.

  An outsider might say, “So what’s the problem? As long as you and your colleagues are not doing anything wrong, what does it matter that the IG staff is embedded with you?” Imagine you are playing football. But the referees are focused only on your team, and not only do they watch you during the plays, but they are also in your huddle, in the locker room, and on the practice field just itching to throw a flag. Or it is like taking a motorcycle out on the road and knowing that the cops are salivating to give you a ticket. But the traffic cop is not up the road hiding behind a billboard, he is in a sidecar attached to your bike. Sure, you are smart enough to keep it under the speed limit, but every time you swerve to avoid a pothole you risk being cited for reckless driving.