Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  The dossier contained clues that the Soviets had cloned American software for airborne radar systems. It suggested the ambitions of Soviet military designers to pursue a new generation of military aircraft and the ever-elusive goal of a defense against ballistic missiles. It identified scores of Soviet intelligence officers assigned to steal American technology in the United States and Western Europe.

  America struck back. “It was a brilliant plan,” said Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser, whose staffers devised it. “We started in motion feeding the Soviets bad technology, bad computer technology, bad oil drilling technology. We fed them a whole lot, let them steal stuff that they were happy to get.” Posing as traitorous employees of the American military-industrial complex, FBI officers sent a procession of technological Trojan horses to Soviet spies. The time bombs included computer chips for weapons systems, a blueprint for a space shuttle, engineering designs for chemical plants, and state-of-the-art turbines.

  The Soviets were trying to build a natural-gas pipeline from Siberia into Eastern Europe. They needed computers to control its pressure gauges and valves. They sought the software on the open market in the United States. Washington rejected the request but subtly pointed to a certain Canadian company that might have what Moscow wanted. The Soviets sent a Line X officer to steal the software. The CIA and the Canadians conspired to let them have it. For a few months, the software ran swimmingly. Then it slowly sent the pressure in the pipeline soaring. The explosion in the wilds of Siberia cost Moscow millions it could ill afford to spare.

  The silent attack on Soviet military and state engineering programs went on for a year. Casey capped it by sending John McMahon to Western Europe to hand friendly foreign intelligence services the identities of some two hundred Soviet officers and agents identified in the Farewell dossier.

  The operation used almost every weapon at the CIA’s command—psychological warfare, sabotage, economic warfare, strategic deception, counterintelligence, cyberwarfare—all in collaboration with the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the FBI. It destroyed a vigorous Soviet espionage team, damaged the Soviet economy, and destabilized the Soviet state. It was a smashing success. Had the tables been turned, it could have been seen as an act of terror.

  39. “IN A DANGEROUS

  WAY”

  For more than a decade, terrorists had been hijacking airplanes, taking hostages, and killing American ambassadors. Neither the CIA nor any other branch of the American government had a clear idea of what to do about it.

  On the last Saturday of January 1981, Anthony Quainton, then still serving as the government’s counterterrorism coordinator, received an urgent phone call from Secretary of State Haig: on Monday at one o’clock, Quainton would brief the White House on his work. “I gave that briefing to the President, who was joined by the Vice President, the head of CIA, the head of the FBI, and a number of National Security Council members,” Ambassador Quainton said. “After a couple of jelly beans, the President dozed off. That in itself was quite unnerving.”

  That same week, Haig announced that international terrorism would replace human rights as the number-one issue for the United States. Soon thereafter, Haig proclaimed that the Soviets were secretly directing the dirty work of the world’s worst terrorists. He asked the CIA to prove this bold assertion. Casey privately agreed with Haig, but he had no facts to prove the case. The CIA’s analysts could not provide them, despite bitter tongue-lashings from the boss. Under pressure, the CIA produced a fraud—Casey’s conclusions placed precariously atop an analysis that could not support them. The attempt to place the blame on the Kremlin was a failure to understand the true nature of terror in the Middle East.

  The CIA once had possessed an exceptionally well-placed source: Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of intelligence for the Palestine Liberation Organization and henchman in the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The information he offered was an olive branch being extended to the United States by the PLO’s chairman, Yasser Arafat. His case officer was Bob Ames, who worked the streets of Beirut before rising to deputy chief of the Near East division at the clandestine service. Starting at the end of 1973, Salameh and Ames negotiated an understanding that the PLO would not attack Americans. For four years, they shared intelligence on their mutual enemies in the Arab world. During that time, the CIA’s reporting on terrorism in the Middle East was better than it ever had been, or ever would be again. It showed an understanding that terrorism transcended state sponsorship, that it was rooted in the rage of the dispossessed. An April 1976 CIA study concluded that “the wave of the future” was “the development of a complex support base for transnational terrorist activity that is largely independent of—and quite resistant to control by—the state-centered international system.”

  This line of thought disappeared from the CIA’s reporting after 1978, when Israeli intelligence assassinated Salameh in revenge for Munich. It did not reappear for a generation. When President Reagan took office, the CIA had next to no good sources on terrorism in the Middle East.

  “TOO LITTLE INTELLIGENCE FOR A LONG TIME”

  On Friday, July 16, 1982, the day he was sworn in as secretary of state, George Shultz confronted an international crisis in Lebanon. The second telephone call he placed from his new office that day was to Bob Ames, who had become the leading CIA analyst of the Arab world.

  Ames was the most influential CIA officer of his generation—a “uniquely talented” man, Bob Gates said. Tall, handsome, fond of hand-tooled cowboy boots, he dealt personally with Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan, and the leaders of Lebanon. Among his recruited agents was a political strongman in Beirut named Bashir Gemayel, a Christian of the Maronite sect and the CIA’s most highly placed source in Lebanon.

  The agency’s Maronite network was a controlling force in Beirut. The CIA’s reliance on it blinded the agency to how deeply the majority of Lebanese despised the power of the Maronite minority. That anger was a principal cause of the civil war that shattered the nation and opened the path for the Israeli invasion of June 1982.

  By August, the country was flying apart—Muslim against Christian, Muslim against Muslim. Gemayel, with the strong backing of the United States and Israel, was selected as president by Lebanon’s parliament. The CIA once again had a national leader on its payroll. Gemayel personally assured the agency that Americans would be safe in Lebanon, once the PLO’s armed forces were evacuated and Israel ended its brutal shelling of Beirut.

  On September 1, President Reagan announced a grand strategy to transform the Middle East. It had been put together in secret by a small team that included Bob Ames. Its success depended on a harmonic convergence in which Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the PLO cooperated at the command of the United States. It lasted all of two weeks.

  On September 14, President Gemayel was assassinated when a bomb destroyed his headquarters. In revenge, the CIA’s Maronite allies, abetted by Israel’s troops, slaughtered some seven hundred Palestinian refugees stranded in the slums of Beirut. Women and children were buried under rough stones. In the wake of the killings and the outrage they engendered, President Reagan sent a contingent of U.S. Marines to serve as peacekeepers. There was no peace to keep.

  As the marines landed, “the Agency people were busy trying to recreate some of their disrupted networks,” said Robert S. Dillon, the American ambassador in Lebanon. “They remained involved—probably in a dangerous way—with the Maronites.”

  As the CIA fought to rebuild in Beirut, it did not see a new force rising from the rubble. An assassin named Imad Mughniyah, a chieftain of the violent terrorist group called Hezbollah, the Party of God, was gathering money and explosives, training his thugs for a series of bombings and kidnappings that would paralyze the United States for years to come. He reported to Tehran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini was creating an Office of Liberation Movements to further his messianic vision of conquering Iraq, seizing the holy shrine o
f Karbala, and marching onward across the River Jordan to Jerusalem.

  Mughniyah’s name has been forgotten now, but he was the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s, the scowling face of terror. As of this writing, he remains at large.

  On Sunday, April 17, 1983, Bob Ames flew into Beirut, dropped by the American embassy on his way from the airport, and then sat down to supper with three fellow officers at the home of Jim Lewis, the deputy chief of station, who had survived a year at the Hanoi Hilton after being captured up-country in Laos fifteen years before.

  Ames had been away from Beirut for five years. “He was exhilarated to be back,” said the CIA’s Susan Morgan, who was at the table Sunday night. He had returned to try to resurrect what the agency had lost with Gemayel’s assassination.

  On Monday morning, Ames called Morgan and invited her to supper that night at the Mayflower Hotel. Then Morgan went off to a luncheon in Sidon, south of Beirut. As the plates were being cleared, her hostess told her that there had been a radio report about an explosion at the American embassy. Morgan drove back to Beirut in a daze, barely seeing the ruined villages around her, destroyed during the Israeli army’s assault. She had to walk past a police cordon on the Corniche to get to the embassy. It had been destroyed. Ames and his fellow officers had been killed instantly by the shock wave and buried in stone and steel and ash. It was two-thirty in the morning when they found him in the rubble. Morgan retrieved his passport, his wallet, and his wedding ring.

  Sixty-three people were dead, among them seventeen Americans, including the Beirut station chief, Ken Haas, a veteran of the Tehran station; his deputy, Jim Lewis; and a CIA secretary, Phyllis Filatchy, who had toughed it out through years in the provinces of South Vietnam. In all, seven CIA officers and support staff were killed, the deadliest day in the history of the agency. The blast was the work of Imad Mughniyah, supported by Iran.

  The obliteration of the Beirut station and the death of Robert Ames destroyed the agency’s capability for gathering information in Lebanon and in much of the Middle East, “leaving us with too little intelligence for a long time thereafter,” said Sam Lewis, the American ambassador to Israel at the time. “It made us very dependent on Israeli intelligence.” The CIA would see the Islamic threat in the Middle East through an Israeli prism for the rest of the cold war.

  Now Beirut was a battleground for the United States. But the CIA’s reports, bereft of sources, had no impact whatsoever. American marines were siding with the Christians, American jets were dropping bombs on Muslims, and American ships were lobbing one-ton shells into the hills of Lebanon without knowing what they were hitting. The White House had gone to war in the Middle East with no idea of what it was getting into.

  On October 23, 1983, Mughniyah’s terrorists drove a truck bomb into the American barracks at Beirut International Airport and killed 241 marines. The blast was estimated at the kiloton level, the metric used for tactical nuclear weapons.

  “OPERATING VIRTUALLY IN THE DARK”

  Thirty-six hours after the barracks bombing, with the dead and wounded still being counted in Beirut, the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA diverted America’s attention to a nasty little Marxist insurgency in Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean crawling with a Cuban brigade of military construction workers. The island’s leader, Maurice Bishop, had been killed in a power struggle, and that death provided “an excuse to go deal with that problem,” said Duane Clarridge, chief of the Latin America division and one of three principal planners of the Grenada invasion.

  “Our intelligence about Grenada was lousy,” Clarridge said. “We were operating virtually in the dark.” That contributed to the confusion of an operation in which nineteen Americans died and at least twenty-one patients at a mental hospital were killed by an American bombing raid.

  The CIA staged its part of the invasion out of a hotel in Barbados. Clarridge’s deputy handed the agency’s proposal for a new Grenadian government to his State Department counterpart, Tony Gillespie. “The CIA had a plan to form a government,” Gillespie recalled. “This was a top secret list, with all kinds of code words on it.” He ran it past the most experienced American diplomats in the region. “They looked at it and then just threw up their hands. They said: ‘These are some of the worst people in the Caribbean. You don’t want them anywhere near this island.’” The list included “the worst crumb-bums…narcotics traffickers and crooks.” These miscreants were the CIA’s paid sources. As Allen Dulles had judged the value of his analysts’ work by its weight, his successors assayed the value of secret information by virtue of what it cost. That was the rule in Beirut, in Barbados, and around the world.

  The good vibrations resounding from the liberation of Grenada had faded by the time the last of the American marines left Beirut on February 26, 1984, their failed deployment doomed by a near-total lack of accurate intelligence. The mission had left 260 American soldiers and spies dead and America’s enemies in control.

  Casey had looked long and hard to find a new station chief with the courage to restore the CIA’s eyes in Lebanon. The only candidate was an experienced but aging officer, Bill Buckley, who had served before in Beirut and whose cover had been blown. Casey decided it was worth the risk to send him back.

  Eighteen days after the last marine left Lebanon, Buckley was kidnapped on his way to work. He was in enemy hands.

  40. “HE WAS RUNNING

  A GREAT RISK”

  The agency had some experience with hostages. One of its officers had just been freed from forty days of harsh captivity.

  Timothy Wells, a thirty-four-year-old combat-wounded Vietnam veteran, had been sent to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in 1983. The nation was controlled by the Marxist dictator Haile Mengistu, whose palace guard, provided by Moscow, was led by East German intelligence officers. Wells was on his second tour of duty with the CIA. His orders were to create a political uprising. “There was a presidential finding signed by Ronald Reagan,” Wells said. “It was a mandate. I was there to help overthrow the goddamn government.”

  Ten years before, Wells had been a marine guard at the American embassy in Khartoum when Palestinian gunmen took the American ambassador and the departing chargé d’affaires hostage at a reception. President Nixon made a no-concessions statement off the top of his head. The PLO chairman Yasser Arafat answered with a go-ahead to kill the Americans. The harrowing experience made Wells change his life. He returned to the United States, went back to college, and joined the CIA. He underwent eighteen months of training for the clandestine service and arrived in Ethiopia after a two-year tour in Uganda. He was posted under State Department cover as a commercial officer. The United States had little commerce with Ethiopia at the time. Mengistu had made the White House’s most-wanted list.

  Under President Carter, the CIA had a minuscule covert-action project of financial support for an exile group called the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Alliance. Under President Reagan, the program became a no-holds-barred multimillion-dollar affair. Wells inherited a network of Ethiopian intellectuals, professors, and businesspeople that he suspected had been penetrated by Mengistu’s security forces. His mission was to keep them supplied with money and propaganda written by an exiled former Ethiopian minister of defense who worked with the agency. Posters, pamphlets, and bumper stickers arrived in diplomatic pouches at the embassy, where CIA personnel outnumbered State Department officials two to one.

  Wells knew that he was being tailed. Yet he persisted. “I’m surprised it took them as long as they did to get me,” he said.

  On December 20, 1983, Mengistu’s thugs burst in on a meeting Wells was holding in an upper-middle-class neighborhood and arrested three leaders of the opposition—a seventy-eight-year-old aide to the late emperor Haile Selassie; a fifty-year-old businessman; and his niece, a biologist. Wells hid for two days and two nights in a closet where the propaganda was kept. Then Mengistu’s palace guard found him. They hogtied Wells, brought the three dissidents back to
the house, and began to torture them. Wells heard their screams and confessed that he was a CIA officer. His captors blindfolded him, tossed him in a car, and drove him away. On Christmas Eve, they took him to a safe house south of the city, in a place called Nazaret. He spent the next five weeks being interrogated and beaten. His skull was fractured and his shoulders dislocated.

  “To save his own ass, this American rolls up the rest of the organization, gives it away,” said Joseph P. O’Neill, the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy. Scores of Ethiopians were jailed, tortured, or killed as a consequence.

  At the end of the five weeks of torture, the Ethiopians sent word through the Israeli embassy in Nairobi that they had imprisoned a CIA officer. Within a day, President Reagan dispatched his ambassador-at-large, General Vernon Walters, who was in Africa at the time, to free Wells.

  On February 3, 1984, the former deputy director of central intelligence, sixty-seven years old and riddled with gout, came lumbering off a plane in Addis Ababa, flopped into a car, and rode up to the embassy, gasping in the thin air at 8,300 feet. “What are you going to say to Mengistu?” O’Neill asked. Walters replied: “The President of the United States wishes to have back Mr. Timothy Wells.” He had no intention of negotiating.

  Walters went up to the presidential palace in Asmara, where Mengistu gave him a three-hour lecture on Ethiopian history. Wells was set free the next day. His hair had turned gray. He had told his captors the identities of the four other members of the CIA station. “COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ELEMENTS CAUGHT RED-HANDED,” said the morning headline in the Ethiopian Herald, the English-language newspaper in the capital. It ran alongside a front-page picture of eighteen terrified Ethiopians standing in front of a table littered with weapons, pamphlets, and cassettes. Most if not all of the people in the picture later died in confinement.