We walked to the elevator in silence. I hit the down button, looked at Pat, and said, “I’ll see you around.” I assume he was as puzzled as I was, but that was that. I heard nothing more from Gottlieb.
The movie director Oliver Stone had been in the news at that time talking about wanting to do a film about the invasion of Panama, and I tossed my information into the lap of Esther Newberg, my irrepressible agent, whose advice I always followed.*2 The next step was a visit to Stone—I insisted on paying my own way—at his offices in Venice, California. I’d never met the guy, but was a fan of Platoon, his 1986 film that captured the intensity of the Vietnam War. (I had taken Daniel Ellsberg to see the movie, and Dan, who had repeatedly risked his life in Vietnam, wept throughout the combat scenes.) I began telling Stone what I knew about the invasion of Panama, and its disconnects. After a few moments Stone waved a hand dismissively and said he’d been contacted by dozens of agents after announcing that he was thinking about doing a film about Panama. “I’m not interested in talking to you about that,” he said. “What I want to know from you is whether you think the CIA is watching me.” I’d been around Hollywood long enough to know Oliver was considered by many to be a bit off the wall, but this was truly nuts. I said as much and walked out of his office; tennis with my brother beckoned. I got to the door and Stone said, “Tell your agent to give me a call and we’ll work out a deal.” That actually happened. David Obst and I then spent weeks on U.S. military bases and in Panama City researching a script. Stone, to his credit, liked much of what we did and worked hard with us to find the right ending, and he also began lining up a cast. He insisted I join him and whichever actor he was interviewing—Jimmy Smits and Raul Julia were among those very interested—even if it meant a one-day trip for me to Los Angeles. I cannot fault Oliver’s professionalism or his willingness to work. He flew into Washington one afternoon to have dinner at home with me and brood about how to get a stronger ending to the script. We did some work, but he was far more interested in expounding on his theory, which later became a movie, that President Kennedy’s murder was a CIA conspiracy. We had a game-ending row the next morning when I told him that his idea was off the wall and he said in response that he always knew I was a CIA agent. The Panama project ended at that point, and I ended up telling what I had learned about Noriega in a cover piece for Life magazine. (It felt odd writing for a publication that had twice rejected the My Lai story, but the editors there, two decades later, were very supportive.)
Life at The New Yorker was rejuvenating, and far less complicated than at the Times. One of my first stories for Tina dealt with what had been a major nuclear crisis in 1990 between two perennial enemies, India and Pakistan. I can write now what I could not at the time, which was that the CIA had impeccable intelligence—conversations on nuclear issues in real time—from deep inside the Pakistan nuclear establishment. My disinterest in exposing the amazing work done by the CIA was a factor, I believe, in convincing two senior American officials who were monitoring the crisis, Robert Gates and Dick Kerr, to speak on the record with me. Gates had every reason to avoid any limelight; he had been a far too loyal deputy to Bill Casey in the 1980s as the Iran-contra scandal unfolded and withdrew his nomination to be Casey’s replacement as CIA director after it became clear that the Senate would not confirm him. Once in office in 1989, President George H. W. Bush revived his career by naming him an assistant for national security affairs. (Gates was appointed CIA director two years later.) The low-key Kerr was a much-admired career CIA officer who was serving as deputy director of the Agency when the crisis arose.
The chronic hostility between India and Pakistan, abetted by inflammatory intelligence reporting on both sides, had risen once again in 1990 over disputed territory in Kashmir, and Pakistan feared that India was planning an invasion. There had been reports of nuclear tensions at the time, in London’s Sunday Times and the Los Angeles Times, but inaccurate official denials by the Bush administration were taken at face value. The fear at the time inside the Bush administration was that India would cross the border in force and attack in Sindh province and Pakistan would cut off the advance with a nuclear weapon. I quoted an unnamed CIA operative as saying that the Pakistani air force had F-16s “prepositioned and armed for delivery—on full alert, with pilots in the aircraft.”
Kerr would not talk about specifics on the record, but he did agree to be quoted as saying, “It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I’d been in the government. It may be as close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.” Gates, meanwhile, had won much-needed respect inside the American intelligence community for his quiet back-and-forth mediation between New Delhi and Islamabad that helped defuse the crisis. I had told Gates what I knew about the extent of CIA penetration inside Pakistan, and made it clear that I was not interested in writing anything that would interfere with that vital flow of information. But there was a story that needed to be told. I’m pretty sure the fact that I was so open made Gates decide that we had to talk face-to-face, and so he came to my dingy hideaway office in downtown Washington in the early evening—my building was deserted by then—to answer some questions and make sure I did not inadvertently go too far in print. He told me that he understood at the time that a holocaust was a risk. “The analogy we kept making was to the summer of 1914,” Gates said, when World War I broke out. “Pakistan and India seemed to be caught in a cycle that they couldn’t break out of. I was convinced that if a war started it would be nuclear.”
Crow edited, the fact-checkers did their job, and Tina let the story, titled “On the Nuclear Edge,” run seventeen pages in the magazine. The story got attention, especially in South Asia, but there was little response from the mainstream media in America. I had hoped that the quotes from Gates and Kerr would spark follow-ups from my colleagues, but I also knew from my years at the Times those few journalists who had the knowledge and sources to report effectively on national security issues were uninterested in following stories written by others; they had stories of their own to pursue. I understood the process because when I was on the Times, there was no way I would deign to add to a story someone else had written.
I learned that reality anew in late November, when I challenged the facts and reasoning behind Bill Clinton’s most applauded action in his first months as President—a Tomahawk missile attack he authorized on central Baghdad in June 1993 in response to an alleged plot, led by Iraq, to assassinate former president George H. W. Bush during an April visit to Kuwait. Clinton was the first American president since World War II to bomb a major Middle Eastern city, and three of the twenty-three missiles fired had gone off course and crashed into apartment buildings in central Baghdad, killing eight civilians, one of whom was a celebrated artist. Despite the deaths, it was the best day of Clinton’s presidency; he was celebrated as a leader who was not afraid to use force in support of American values.
I was in the process then of researching what would become a searing report about Bush’s April visit. The former president was seen by many Kuwaitis as a hero who had rescued Kuwait from imminent attack by authorizing the First Gulf War in August 1990 and vanquishing the regime of Saddam Hussein. The victory also was seen as America’s most successful foreign war since Vietnam. Bush was invited to do a victory lap and flew to Kuwait in April on a special flight, paid for by Kuwait, that was crammed full of former aides, family members, and hangers-on, each of whom was greeted with a gold Rolex watch. There were bigger targets of sleaze: Kuwait’s oil industry had been torn apart in the war, and James Baker, Bush’s secretary of state, was on the hunt for rebuilding contracts potentially worth billions on behalf of the Enron Corporation, one of his consulting clients. Marvin Bush, the President’s son, was lobbying on behalf of two Texas oil equipment firms that had been using the Bush name in prior bidding efforts. “I was embarrassed,” an American banking official told me when I visited Ku
wait after the President’s visit. “Kuwaitis were snickering after dinner. We take such a self-righteous view in international business: ‘We don’t do family deals, and we don’t take tips.’ And then to have the President’s children and the secretary of state come to Kuwait to get handouts…”
Clinton’s lack of judgment in authorizing the bombing of Baghdad was offset by continuing mainstream press reporting on the assassination plot that allegedly had been ginned up by a revenge-driven Saddam Hussein. I learned while in Kuwait that there were many problems with the supposed plot, and followed up after my return. Tina Brown continued to be totally supportive. She called me one morning while I was chasing the story to say that at a dinner in New York the night before she had been told by army general Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that I was a dishonest, lying reporter who invented stories. I laughed and told her that those were the nicest words an investigative reporter could hear—a badge of honor for someone who had never been invited to the White House or on a press junket, and never wanted to be. I was sure Powell said what Tina reported, and I was sure she did not like hearing it. But it did not give her pause. I, as all investigative reporters should be, was free to run.
The White House’s public case against Saddam had been sanctified as rock solid by a major leak in early May to The Washington Post, which splashed a story on its front page accompanied by a banner headline declaring that the administration had much evidence of the Iraqi conspiracy to kill Bush. There were three unassailable elements in the White House’s case, so the paper reported: the suspicious ease with which the hit team and its bomb gear had managed to cross the border from Iraq into Kuwait; the detonator of the bomb that was to be targeted on the limousine carrying Bush was of such sophistication that a state actor had to be involved; and the explosives to be used were capable of being “traced to the source.” All three elements, as I was quickly able to learn from officials inside the Clinton administration—not in the White House—turned out to be false. A later leaker to the Times maintained that components of a car bomb that were to be used against Bush were “almost exactly the same,” as the Times put it, as those found in Iraqi car bombs that had been recovered during the 1991 Iraqi war. That also turned out to be incorrect. The leaks to both papers made it easy for the administration, and the Washington press corps, to dismiss an inconvenient story published later by a Boston Globe reporter who had been given access to a classified CIA analysis that was skeptical of the Iraqi assassination attempt story. The study suggested that Kuwait might have “cooked the books” on the alleged plot in an effort to play up the continuing threat from Iraq. It did not fit the official version, and was essentially ignored.
Any hope I had, as a lifelong Democrat, that the Clinton White House would be more open to a different truth ended when I did an end-of-my-reporting interview in the White House with Sandy Berger, the deputy national security adviser. Berger was testy as I made my case, which I expected. My goal was to get him to authorize an on-the-record briefing for me by some of the analysts who had concluded that Iraq had to have been responsible. Sandy was not interested in doing so and at one point asked me why I had spent so much time on such a peripheral story. I replied that it wasn’t peripheral to the eight people who were killed in the bombing. Sandy said, to my dismay, “C’mon, Sy. It was only eight.” There was an intense exchange, and Sandy ended it by demanding I leave the White House…immediately. I did not include our exchange in the story that was published a month or so later.*3
I broke off my reporting for The New Yorker, enjoyable as it had been, in late 1994 because James Silberman, the editor who whispered Kissinger to me, was now whispering Kennedy. There was still a story to be had, so Jim thought. I, too, was convinced there was much more to say about John F. Kennedy and the CIA—a hidden history. I began my research by focusing on Frank Church and the Senate committee he led—the one that had been set up after my 1974 article on domestic spying—that had investigated the CIA’s activities in the 1960s and 1970s. The politician who cared the most about getting control of the U.S. intelligence community was Mike Mansfield of Montana, the quiet Senate majority leader who, as few appreciated at the time, had been brooding for decades about Congress’s inability, and unwillingness, to provide effective oversight of the intelligence community. Mansfield had been elected to the Senate in 1952 after spending ten years in the House, and introduced legislation within a year to establish a permanent joint congressional committee to oversee the budget and activities of the CIA. It went nowhere, as did subsequent attempts to derail the quiet chats and whispering between a few Senate seniors and the CIA director that passed for congressional oversight since the Agency was created after World War II.
The domestic spying story had come at the right time for real change. America had slowly, but emphatically, turned against the Vietnam War, with its fifty-eight thousand combat deaths, horrific brutalities, and, most important, resounding defeat at the hands of an outgunned guerrilla force. The Watergate scandals had forced Nixon from office and put investigative reporting, albeit briefly, on a pedestal. Stories about illegal wiretapping of Washington officials, official lying as codified in the Pentagon Papers, and the CIA’s covert activities in Chile and Africa had raised obvious questions about the integrity and competence of those who ran Washington. Even Congress had roused itself, once it was clear that the war was lost, and a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans had approved legislation in 1973 to end the war, and agreed on a joint resolution in an unsuccessful attempt to limit the President’s powers to unilaterally declare a future war. Their efforts were unsuccessful.
Mansfield initially turned to Senator Philip Hart, a liberal Democrat from Michigan and World War II veteran who was highly respected by his peers in Congress, to be chairman of the Senate committee that would investigate CIA abuse. Hart demurred, explaining privately to Mansfield that he was being treated for cancer and would not have the stamina to serve as chairman, although he agreed to serve on the committee. Mansfield was being lobbied hard by Church, who had chaired a series of penetrating hearings on foreign bribery and corruption by American multinational corporations. Church’s public persona was glowing, but he lacked Hart’s standing among his peers. He was especially viewed with ambivalence by the senior staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had been dominated for decades by Democrat William Fulbright of Arkansas, whose skeptical hearings on the Vietnam War set a standard that Congress would not match in subsequent years. Church was seen as pompous and overly ambitious—even among senators famously known to be pompous and ambitious—and far too willing, despite his firm voice in public, to compromise in private on key legislative issues.
I wanted to get close to Church because he was chairman of a foreign relations subcommittee investigating the business practices of multinational corporations in the early 1970s. His staff quickly began unraveling illegal overseas payoffs by American firms seeking foreign contracts. The extent of the corruption, the subcommittee learned, was known to the Central Intelligence Agency. Jerry Levinson, the staff director of the subcommittee, would share inside information with me, with Church’s approval, in the hope that I could verify it and get it published in the Times, with credit to Church and his subcommittee. One of Church’s hearings stumbled into the CIA’s covert operation to undermine the Allende government in Chile, and there was intense peer pressure on the senator to back off. Levinson, who became a good friend, urged me at one crucial point to telephone Church and tell him how important his work was and how I and the Times were totally behind him. I did so without hesitation; Church’s subcommittee was going where Congress had not, in terms of oversight of the CIA. My role in all of this was unique, but I had information and access to information that the committee did not, and it was important that they know it. I made sure my editors understood what I was doing. What I did not comprehend at the time was the extent of Church’s desperate desire to
be President—an ambition that had perhaps led him to take the risks he did in exposing American political and financial corruption overseas.
Mansfield knew his man, however. Sometime in late January 1975—the committee was formally approved on January 27—Mansfield summoned Church for an interview about the chairmanship with a small leadership group that included Fulbright and Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican senator from Arizona whose party would be in the minority on the committee. A senior Democratic staff aide was also in attendance, and decades later, with the involved senators deceased, he felt free to tell me over dinner about an extraordinary request Mansfield made. “If you take this job,” the aide recalled Mansfield telling Church, “you must understand that you cannot run for President.” Church immediately agreed and told Mansfield that he had discussed that possibility with his wife, Bethine—the two were known to make decisions together—and the Senate leaders understood that his presidential ambition would be put off.
Church got the job and was immediately invited on Face the Nation, a CBS television Sunday morning interview show. I was one of the interrogators, along with Daniel Schorr of CBS. Asked by me if he might run for the presidency, Church was categorical in his denial. “Let’s scotch that right now,” he said, explaining that he had told all who volunteered to work on a primary campaign that there would be no political activity on his behalf during the life of the committee. “I’m not going to mix presidential politics with anything so important.”
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