by Tim Weiner
“A BLINDERED FRATERNITY”
Bill Casey was as smart, as capable, and as inspirational a leader as any man who ever ran the CIA. He was also “a freelance buccaneer,” said Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who was the director of the National Security Agency when President Reagan ordered him to serve as Casey’s number-two in 1981.
“Casey told me very directly that he did not want to be the traditional Director of Central Intelligence,” Inman said. “He did want to be the President’s intelligence officer, and he was going to run the clandestine service of the CIA.”
Casey believed that the clandestine service had become “a blindered fraternity living on the legends and achievements of their forebears of the 1950s and 1960s,” said his first chief of staff, Bob Gates. It needed fresh blood. He did not give a damn for the CIA’s organizational chart; he would reach down into the bowels of the agency, or outside it, to find people who would do his bidding.
So he shoved John McMahon out as chief of the clandestine service. “He viewed me as a slow mover when it came to covert action—that I didn’t have that fire in the belly,” McMahon said. “He knew I was a cautionary influence on what he or the agency might want to do.”
Casey replaced the thirty-year CIA veteran with an old friend named Max Hugel, who had raised money and gotten out votes for Reagan. Hugel was a foul-mouthed business mogul who had started out in Japan after the war as a used-car salesman. He knew nothing about the CIA, which was instantly evident. A tiny man with a toupee, he once showed up for work at the agency wearing a lavender jumpsuit open to the navel, gold chains nestled in his graying chest hair. To a man, the CIA’s covert operators, serving and retired, rebelled against him. They dug up dirt on him, fed it to The Washington Post, and forced him out in less than two months. He was replaced by John Stein, who had helped Mobutu rise to power and had created the Cambodia station during the war in Vietnam. Stein, the fifth new chief of covert action in five years, soon also proved too cautious for Casey’s taste. He would be cast off for a truly bold covert operator, Clair George. Having tossed McMahon out of the clandestine service, Casey ordered him to reshape the directorate of intelligence and shake up its analysts. McMahon made a start on the first major reorganization of the directorate in thirty years.
But it was nothing compared to what Bob Gates did when he took over from McMahon at the start of 1982. At age thirty-eight, Gates had won the promotion with an attention-grabbing memo to Casey. “CIA is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture,” he wrote. The agency had “an advanced case of bureaucratic arteriosclerosis.” The halls were filled with plodding mediocrities counting the days until retirement—and they were the principal cause of “the decline in the quality of our intelligence collection and analysis over the last fifteen years.”
Gates told the CIA’s analysts they were “close-minded, smug, arrogant” people; their work was “irrelevant, uninteresting, too late to be of value, too narrow, too unimaginative, and too often just flat out wrong” their ranks were filled with amateurs “pretending to be experts.” They had missed almost every important development in the Soviet Union and its advances into the third world over the past decade. It was time to shape up or ship out.
Shape up meant get in line. When Casey disagreed with his analysts, as he often did, he rewrote their conclusions to reflect his views. When he told the president, “This is what the CIA thinks,” he meant, “This is what I think.” He chased independent-minded, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may analysts out of the CIA, and among the last to leave was Dick Lehman, the current-intelligence chief who had endured Allen Dulles when the old man judged his work by hefting its weight rather than reading it. “Working for Casey was a trial for everybody, partly because of his growing erraticism and partly because of his own right-wing tendencies,” Lehman said. “He was amenable to argument, but it took a hell of a lot of argument.”
Like a newspaper bent by its publisher’s prejudices, the analytical powers of the CIA became one man’s opinion. “The CIA’s intelligence was in many cases simply Bill Casey’s ideology,” Secretary of State Shultz said.
“I’LL TAKE CARE OF CENTRAL AMERICA”
After publicly denouncing everything Jimmy Carter represented, Reagan and Casey embraced seven major covert-action programs that he had started. Arms shipments to Afghanistan and political-warfare programs to support dissidents in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia would prove to be among the most important CIA operations of the cold war. But Casey was more interested in a real war in America’s backyard.
“Sometime in the dark of night,” said Clair George, Casey had reassured Ronald Reagan: “I’ll take care of Central America. Just leave it to me.”
In 1980, President Carter had approved three small covert-action programs in Central America. They took aim at the Sandinistas, the leftists who had taken power in Nicaragua, wresting it from what remained of the brutal forty-three-year-old right-wing dictatorship of the Somoza family. The Sandinistas’ mixture of nationalism, liberation theology, and Marxism was tilting ever closer to Cuba’s. Carter’s covert actions committed the CIA to support pro-American political parties, church groups, farmer’s co-ops, and unions against the spread of the Sandinistas’ socialism.
Casey turned the small-bore operations into a huge scattershot paramilitary program. In March 1981, President Reagan authorized the CIA to provide guns and money “to counter foreign-sponsored subversion and terrorism” in Central America. The White House and the agency told Congress that the goal was to defend El Salvador, run by right-wing politicians and their death squads, by cutting off Nicaraguan arms shipments to leftists. This was a calculated ruse. The real plan was to train and arm Nicaraguans in Honduras—the contras—and to use them to recapture their country from the Sandinistas.
Casey convinced the president that the CIA’s little army could take Nicaragua by storm. If they failed, he warned Reagan, an army of Latino leftists could roll northward from Central America to Texas. The CIA’s analysts tried to contradict him. The contras are not going to win, they said; they do not have popular support. Casey ensured that the naysayers’ reporting never reached the White House. To counteract them, he built a Central American Task Force with its own “war room,” where covert-action officers cooked the books, inflated the threats, exaggerated the prospects for success, and pumped up reports from the field. Gates says he “raised hell with Casey” about the war room for years, to no avail.
Casey gave his plans a kick-start by selecting Duane Clarridge as the Latin American division chief of the clandestine service. Just shy of fifty, hard-drinking and cigar-puffing despite an early heart attack, Clarridge never had worked in Latin America, spoke no Spanish, and knew next to nothing about the region. “Casey said, ‘Take off a month or two and basically figure out what to do about Central America,’” Clarridge said. “That was the sum total of his approach. And it didn’t take rocket science to understand what needed to be done.” Clarridge said he came up with a two-point plan: “Make war in Nicaragua and start killing Cubans. This was exactly what Casey wanted to hear and he said, ‘Okay, go ahead and do it.’”
Reagan’s ambassador to Nicaragua, Anthony Quainton, arrived to take up his post on the day of the opening shot. “The secret war began on March 15, 1982, when the CIA, using Nicaraguan agents, blew up the bridges that connected Nicaragua with Honduras,” he said. “I stepped off the plane with my wife in a blaze of klieg lights and microphones and was asked what I thought about the developments that morning, the blowing up of the bridges, and how that would affect bilateral relations between the United States and Nicaragua.
“I had not been told that this event was to take place on this day,” Ambassador Quainton said. “The CIA had a planning process of their own.”
The secret war did not stay secret for long. On December 21, 1982, Congress passed a law restricting the CIA to its stated mission of cutting off the flow of communist arms in Central America. The agency was pr
ohibited from using its funds to oust the Sandinistas. President Reagan stuck with the cover story, maintaining the fiction that the United States was not seeking to topple the Nicaraguan regime, giving his assurances to a joint session of Congress. That was the first time the well-loved president lied to Congress to protect the CIA’s covert operations, but not the last.
“FUCK THE CONGRESS”
Congress gave Casey hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds for the clandestine service during his first two years in power. Spending on American intelligence, buried inside the Pentagon’s accounts, shot past $30 billion as the agency’s own budget rose above $3 billion. The money supercharged the CIA’s ambitions and the scope of covert action.
Casey used part of his windfall to hire close to two thousand new officers for the clandestine service, reversing the cuts made under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. The new hires knew far less about the world than their predecessors. They were far less likely to have served in the military or lived overseas. They were “proof positive that the CIA was no longer attracting America’s brightest,” Clarridge said—“yuppie spies who cared more about their retirement plan and health insurance benefits than about protecting democracy.”
Congress strongly supported a bigger, better, stronger, smarter CIA. But it did not support a war in Central America. Neither did the American people. Reagan never took the trouble to explain why that war was a good idea. Nor would most Americans approve of some of the CIA’s allies—leaders of the dictatorial Nicaraguan national guard, shock troops from the Argentine military junta, murderous colonels from the Honduran army, and death-squad leaders from Guatemala.
The powers of Congress to oversee the CIA had slowly evolved into a workable system by 1981. Now two select intelligence committees, one in the Senate, one in the House, were supposed to receive and review presidential covert-action plans. These checkreins never slowed Casey. “Casey was guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in,” said Bob Gates. Called to testify, he would mumble and obfuscate and occasionally lie through his teeth. “I hope that will hold the bastards!” he said on emerging from one hearing. The deceit spread downward from the director’s office. Many of Casey’s senior officers learned the fine art of testifying in ways that were “specifically evasive,” in the words of his Central America Task Force chief, Allen Fiers. Others resisted. Admiral Inman resigned as Casey’s deputy director after fifteen months because “I caught him lying to me in a number of cases.”
Casey’s lies were designed to slip a tightening legal leash. If Congress would not finance the CIA’s operations in Central America, he would work around the law, looking for private financiers or a foreign potentate to give him the money.
Despite Casey’s open disdain, the congressional intelligence committees gave him great power under “global findings,” authorizations signed by President Reagan that covered covert-action campaigns against real and perceived threats anywhere in the world. Many of the CIA’s operations were conceived by Casey as grand designs to boost an American ally or bleed an American enemy. But they boiled down to running guns to warlords. One of the first got under way ten days after Casey took office. It lasted for ten years.
A January 1981 global finding ordered the CIA to do something about the Libyan dictator Muhammar Qaddafi, who was serving as a one-stop weapons depot for radical movements all over Europe and Africa. Seeking a base for operations against Libya, the CIA set out to control the government of its next-door neighbor, Chad, one of Africa’s poorest and most isolated nations. The agent for this mission was Hissan Habré, Chad’s defense minister, who had broken with his government and holed up with about two thousand fighters in western Sudan. “American aid started to flow, the result of a Casey decision,” said Ambassador Don Norland, the senior American diplomat accredited to Chad at the start of the Reagan era. “The CIA was deeply involved in the whole operation. Habré was getting assistance directly and indirectly.”
The official foreign policy of the United States was to promote a peaceful resolution of the factional fighting in Chad. Habré had committed countless atrocities against his own people; he could only rule by brute force. The CIA, knowing little about Habré and his history, helped him take over Chad in 1982. It supported him because he was Qaddafi’s enemy.
CIA supply planes flew the weapons into North Africa in shipments coordinated by the National Security Council. This was the first major covert operation in which a young lieutenant colonel on the NSC staff named Oliver North caught Bill Casey’s eye. David Blakemore, a military aide in the Chad operation, took an urgent call from North on a Friday night in late 1981. “He asked what the delay was in getting the equipment out to Chad. He wanted to see it move immediately.”
“I said, ‘Well, Colonel North, that is fine. We have notified the Congress and we have to wait so many days and then we will get it moving. We understand the urgency.’
“North’s reply was: ‘Fuck the Congress. Send the stuff now.’ Which we did.”
Thousands died as Habré and his forces fought for control of Chad. As the fighting intensified, the agency armed him with Stinger missiles, the world’s best shoulder-carried anti-aircraft weapon. Ambassador Norland said it cost the United States “perhaps a half-billion dollars to put him in power and keep him there for eight years.” American support for Chad—Casey’s policy—was “a misguided decision,” he said. But few Americans had ever heard of the country, much less cared about its fate. Fewer still knew that throughout the 1980s, the CIA’s ally Habré received direct support from Saddam Hussein.
On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, the CIA realized that a dozen or so of the Stingers that it had sent to Chad were missing and unaccounted for—and possibly in Saddam’s hands. When Secretary of State James A. Baker III heard that, he was thunderstruck. Baker had been the White House chief of staff when the covert action began, but he had lost track of the operation. He wondered aloud: “What the hell did we give Stinger missiles to Chad for?”
“SOMEDAY THE UNITED STATES WILL NOT BE HERE”
The CIA’s biggest gunrunning mission was its global pipeline to the mujahideen, the holy warriors of Afghanistan, who were fighting the 110,000-man Soviet army of occupation. It began under Jimmy Carter in January 1980. Because it was Carter’s idea, Casey did not embrace it wholeheartedly—not at first. But soon he saw the opportunity at hand.
“I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with this wonderful order: ‘Go kill Soviet soldiers,’” said Howard Hart, who arrived as the chief in Pakistan in 1981. “Imagine! I loved it.” It was a noble goal. But the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan. No one believed that the Afghans could actually win.
From the start, the Saudis matched the CIA’s support for the rebels, dollar for dollar. The Chinese kicked in millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, as did the Egyptians and the British. The CIA coordinated the shipments. Hart handed them over to Pakistani intelligence. The Pakistanis skimmed off a large share before delivering them to the exiled political leaders of the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, east of the Khyber Pass, and the rebel leaders cached their own share before the weapons ever got to Afghanistan.
“We didn’t try to tell the Afghan rebels how to fight the war,” John McMahon said. “But when we saw some of the Soviet successes against the mujahideen, I became convinced that all the arms that we had provided were not ending up in Afghan shooters’ hands.” So he went to Pakistan and convened a meeting of the seven leaders of the Afghan rebel groups, who ranged from Parisian exiles wearing soft loafers to rough-hewn mountain men. “I told them I was concerned that they were siphoning off the arms and either caching them for a later day or, I said, ‘God forbid, you’re selling them.’ And they laughed. And they said, ‘You’re absolutely right! We’re caching some arms. Because someday the United States will not be here, and we’ll be left on our own to carry on our struggle.’”
The Pakistani intelligence chiefs who doled out th
e CIA’s guns and money favored the Afghan factions who proved themselves most capable in battle. Those factions also happened to be the most committed Islamists. No one dreamed that the holy warriors could ever turn their jihad against the United States.
“In covert action,” McMahon said, “you always have to think of the endgame before you start it. And we don’t always do that.”
“A BRILLIANT PLAN”
In May 1981, the Soviets weighed the rhetoric and the realities of the Reagan administration and began to fear a surprise attack by the United States. They went on a global nuclear alert that lasted for two years. The superpowers came too close for comfort to an accidental war without the CIA’s ever realizing it, Bob Gates concluded a decade later. “We did not then grasp the growing desperation of the men in the Kremlin…. howpedestrian, isolated, and self-absorbed they were; how paranoid, fearful they were,” said Gates, the agency’s foremost Soviet analyst and the strongest defender of its performance in his field.
If the Soviets had eavesdropped on a private conversation between President François Mitterrand of France and President Reagan that summer, they might have had good reason to fear.
In July 1981, Mitterrand pulled Reagan aside at an economic summit in Ottawa. Translators who doubled as spies passed the word: French intelligence was running a KGB defector, Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, and Mitterrand thought the United States should have a look at his work. His file, code-named the Farewell dossier, was handed on to Vice President Bush and Bill Casey. It took six months for the National Security Council staff and the CIA to absorb its meaning. By that time, Vetrov had gone mad and murdered a fellow KGB officer. He was arrested, interrogated, and executed.
The Farewell dossier held four thousand documents detailing a decade’s worth of work by a unit inside the KGB’s directorate for science and technology. The group was called Line X. It worked with every major intelligence service in Eastern Europe. It stole American know-how—especially software, a field where the United States then held a ten-year lead on the Soviets. The KGB’s efforts at technology theft extended from the dullest international trade fairs to the dramatic docking of the Apollo and the Soyuz spacecraft in 1975.