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

by Tim Weiner

  “The ultimate tragedy is spiritual,” he said. “Most of the younger officers I knew have resigned. These were the best and the brightest. Eighty or ninety percent of the people I knew, halfway through their careers, have packed it in. There was very little motivation left. The enthusiasm was gone. When I joined the agency, back in ’76, there was a tribalism. The esprit de corps that the agency had was created by this tribalism, and it served a good purpose.” And now it was gone, and most of the clandestine service was gone with it.

  As early as 1990, “this was rapidly evolving into a very bad situation,” said Arnold Donahue, an agency veteran in charge of national-security budgets under Bush. Whenever the White House wanted “ten or fifteen more clandestine people on the ground to find out what was happening” in Somalia or the Balkans—wherever the crisis of the moment arose—it asked the CIA: “Is there a cadre of people ready to go?” And the answer was always: “Absolutely not.”

  “ADJUST OR DIE”

  On May 8, 1991, President Bush called Bob Gates up to the front cabin aboard Air Force One and asked him to take the job of director of central intelligence. Gates was both thrilled and slightly terrified. His confirmation hearings became a bloodbath; the ordeal went on for six months. He was battered for Bill Casey’s sins and belittled by his own people. Gates had wanted to address the future of the CIA, but the hearings became a battle about its past. They gave voice to an angry crowd of analysts whom Gates and Casey had whipsawed for years. Their anger was professional and personal. They attacked a culture of deceit and self-deception at the CIA. Harold Ford, who had served with distinction over the course of forty years, said that Gates—and the CIA itself—had been “dead wrong” on the facts of life inside the Soviet Union. Those two words called into question the rationale for the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Badly shaken, Gates felt like a prizefighter barely able to answer the bell for the next round. But he managed to convince the senators that they would be his partner in “a not-to-be-missed opportunity to reassess the role, mission, priorities and structure of American intelligence.” He owed the votes he won in no small part to the staff director and stage manager of the Senate intelligence committee, the future director of central intelligence George J. Tenet. Thirty-seven years old, fantastically ambitious, ferociously gregarious, the son of Greek immigrants who ran a hamburger joint on the edge of Queens called the 20th Century Diner, Tenet was the quintessential staff man: hardworking, loyal to his bosses, eager to please. He marshaled the evidence for the senators who only wanted proof that Gates would cede them power to gain a measure of his own.

  While Gates agonized in Washington, the CIA experienced some dizzying moments overseas. In August 1991, as a coup against Gorbachev fizzled and the Soviet Union began to fall, the CIA was reporting live from Moscow, from the best seat in the house—Soviet intelligence headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square. One of the stars of the Soviet division, Michael Sulick, drove into Lithuania as it proclaimed its independence, becoming the first CIA officer to set foot in a former Soviet republic. He openly introduced himself to the fledgling nation’s new leaders and offered to help them create an intelligence service. He found himself invited to work in the offices of the new vice president, Karol Motieka. “Sitting alone in the vice president’s office was surrealistic for a CIA officer who had spent his entire career combating the Soviet Union,” Sulick wrote in the agency’s journal. “If I had been alone just months before in the office of the vice president of a Soviet republic, I would have thought I had struck an intelligence mother lode. As I sat behind Motieka’s desk, documents strewn about, my only purpose was to phone Warsaw.”

  The bits and pieces of intelligence so painstakingly smuggled out by spies had never come close to providing a big picture of the Soviet Union. Over the whole course of the cold war, the CIA had controlled precisely three agents who were able to provide secrets of lasting value on the Soviet military threat, and all of them had been arrested and executed. Spy satellites had counted tanks and missiles precisely but the numbers now seemed immaterial. Bugs and taps had picked up billions of words, and now they had lost their meaning.

  “New world out there. Adjust or die,” Gates wrote on a notepad before two days of meetings with the leaders of the clandestine service on November 7 and 8, 1991, immediately after he was sworn in as director of central intelligence. The next week, Bush sent a signed order to the members of his cabinet, labeled National Security Review 29. Gates had drafted it over the past five months. It called on every arm of the government to define what it wanted from American intelligence for the next fifteen years. “This effort,” Gates announced to an audience of hundreds of CIA employees, was “a monumental and historic undertaking.”

  The national security review carried Bush’s signature. But it was a plea from Gates to the rest of the government: just tell us what you want. He knew the agency had to be seen to change in order to survive. Richard Kerr, the deputy director of central intelligence for four years under Bush, wondered aloud whether there was going to be a CIA in days to come. The agency was “in as much of a revolution as the former Soviet Union,” he said. “We have lost the simplicity of purpose or cohesion that essentially has driven not only intelligence but has driven this country for forty-plus years.” The consensus on where American interests lay and how the CIA might serve them was gone.

  Gates put out a press release calling the national-security review “the most far-reaching directive to assess future intelligence needs and priorities since 1947.” But what were those needs? During the cold war, no president and no director of central intelligence ever had to ask. Should the CIA now focus on the wretched of the earth or the rise of global markets? What was more threatening, terrorism or technology? Over the winter, Gates compiled his to-do list for the new world, completed it in February, and presented it to Congress on April 2, 1992. The final draft included 176 threats, from climate change to cybercrime. At the top were nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Then came narcotics and terrorism—the two were twinned as “drugs and thugs” terrorism was still a second-tier issue—and after that, world trade and technological surprise. But they did not add up to the immensity of the Soviet Union.

  President Bush decided to reduce the size and refocus the scope of the agency. Gates agreed. It was a reasonable response to the end of the cold war. So the power of the CIA was diminished by design. Everyone thought the CIA would be smarter if it were smaller. The intelligence budget began going down in 1991, and it fell for the next six years. The cuts were taking a toll in 1992, at the moment when the CIA was instructed to dramatically increase its support for day-to-day military operations. More than twenty CIA outposts were shuttered, some large stations in major capitals downsized by more than 60 percent, and the number of clandestine service officers working overseas plummeted. The analysts were hit harder. Doug MacEachin, now their chief, said he found it hard to do serious analysis with “a bunch of 19-year-olds on two-year rotations.” That was something of an exaggeration, but not much.

  “Tensions rising as budget pinches,” Gates wrote in a private work diary not long after his swearing-in. The cuts kept coming, and in years to come, Bush and many others blamed them on knee-jerk liberals. The record shows they were equally his work. They were in the spirit of the times, captured in a television commercial Bill Colby taped for an advocacy group called the Coalition for Democratic Values as the 1992 election season started.

  “I’m William Colby, and I was head of the CIA,” he said. “The job of intelligence is to warn us of dangers to our military. Now the cold war is over, and the military threat is far less. Now it is time to cut our military spending by fifty percent and invest that money in our schools, health care and our economy.” This was the famous peace dividend.

  But this peace proved as fleeting as it had been after World War II, and this time there were no victory parades, and the cold war’s veterans had cause to mourn the vanquished enemy.

&nbs
p; “If you’re going to be involved with espionage you’ve got to be motivated,” Richard Helms once said to me, his eyes narrowed and his voice low and urgent. “It’s not fun and games. It’s dirty and dangerous. There’s always a chance you’re going to get burned. In World War Two, in the OSS, we knew what our motivation was: to beat the goddamn Nazis. In the cold war, we knew what our motivation was: to beat the goddamn Russians. Suddenly the cold war is over, and what is the motivation? What would compel someone to spend their lives doing this kind of thing?”

  Gates spent a year trying to answer those questions—days on end testifying on Capitol Hill, shoring up political support, making public speeches, leading task forces and roundtables, promising more intelligence for the military, less political pressure on analysts, an all-out attack on the top ten threats, a new CIA, a better CIA. He never had time to realize any of these visions. He had been in office for ten months when he had to set his work aside to fly to Little Rock and brief the man who would be the next president of the United States.

  PART

  SIX

  The Reckoning

  The CIA Under Clinton and George W. Bush

  1993 to 2007

  44. “WE HAD NO

  FACTS”

  No commander in chief since Calvin Coolidge had come to the White House thinking less about the wider world than Bill Clinton. When he spun the globe, it always came back to rest on the United States.

  Born in 1946, no older than the CIA, Clinton was shaped by the national resistance to Vietnam and the military draft, perfected as a politician by the local and state affairs of Arkansas, and elected on a promise to revive the American economy. No aspect of foreign policy made the top five items on his agenda. He had no deep thoughts about American strategic interests after the cold war. He saw his time in office as “a moment of immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity,” in the words of his national security adviser, Tony Lake. The administration was eight months old before Lake pronounced the new foreign policy of the United States: increasing the number of the world’s free markets. This was more of a business plan than a policy. Clinton equated free trade and freedom, as if selling American goods would spread American values abroad.

  Clinton’s national-security team was second-string. He selected the high-minded but scatterbrained congressman Les Aspin for secretary of defense; Aspin lasted less than a year. He chose the high-collared attorney Warren Christopher for secretary of state; Christopher was formal and distant, handling great global issues as if they were case law. And, at the last minute, Clinton picked a high-strung veteran of Richard Nixon’s National Security Council staff for director of central intelligence.

  R. James Woolsey, Jr., was a fifty-one-year-old lawyer and an experienced arms-control negotiator who had served as undersecretary of the navy under President Carter. His bulging temples and biting wit gave the impression of a highly intelligent hammerhead shark. A month after Clinton’s election, Woolsey gave a well-noticed speech saying the United States had fought a dragon for forty-five years, and finally had slain it, only to find itself in a jungle filled with poisonous snakes. No one had articulated a more vivid vision for American intelligence after the cold war. He got the call a few days later, flew to Little Rock, and met Clinton after midnight on December 22. The laid-back president-elect chatted about his youth in Arkansas and asked about Woolsey’s boyhood next door in Oklahoma, taking him on a short trip down a 1950s memory lane. At dawn Woolsey learned he would be the next director of central intelligence.

  Fifteen minutes before the formal announcement that morning, Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s press secretary, glanced at her notes and said: “Admiral, I didn’t know you served in the Bush administration as well.”

  “Dee Dee, I’m not an admiral,” Woolsey said. “I never got above captain in the army.”

  “Whoops,” she said. “We’d better change the press release.”

  He fled as fast as he could. With the airport fogged in, Woolsey shanghaied a CIA officer to drive him to Dallas so he could fly to California for Christmas. It would be his last act of free will for a long time. He was about to become a prisoner of war at the CIA.

  He met precisely twice with the president of the United States in the course of the next two years—an all-time low in the agency’s annals. “I didn’t have a bad relationship with the president,” he said years later. “I just didn’t have one at all.”

  The CIA’s top officers served a director who they knew had no clout and a president who they thought had no clue. “We had a fabulous relationship with the White House under Bush—Christmas parties at Camp David, that sort of thing,” said Tom Twetten, chief of the clandestine service from the start of 1991 through the end of 1993. “And we went from that to nothing. After about six months under Clinton, it dawns on us that nobody’s seen the president or the National Security Council.” The CIA was powerless without direction from the president. It was a ship in irons, adrift.

  Though Clinton came to office in a state of willful ignorance about the CIA, he quickly turned to the clandestine service to solve his problems overseas, and ordered up dozens of covert-action proposals during his first two years in office. When they failed to produce quick fixes, he was forced to turn to his military commanders, who almost to a man scorned him as a draft dodger. The results were dreadful.

  “THERE WAS NO INTELLIGENCE NETWORK”

  “No harsher test was there than Somalia,” said Frank G. Wisner, Jr., the son of the founder of the CIA’s clandestine service.

  Somalia was a casualty of the cold war. The wholesale provision of weapons to its competing factions by the United States and the Soviet Union left enormous arsenals for warring clans. The day before Thanksgiving 1992, President Bush had authorized an American military intervention for humanitarian purposes. Half a million people had died from starvation in Somalia; ten thousand a day were dying as the Bush administration came to a close. Now the clans were stealing food aid and killing one another. The mission of feeding dying people quickly mutated into a military operation against the strongest Somali warlord, General Mohamed Farah Aideed. On inauguration day 1993, after serving for a moment as the acting secretary of state, Wisner moved to the Pentagon as the undersecretary of defense for policy. He looked to Somalia and he found a blank. The Bush administration had closed down the American embassy and the CIA station two years earlier.

  “We had no facts,” Wisner said. “There was no intelligence network. There was no way of knowing the dynamics.” This was Wisner’s problem to solve, with the help of the CIA. He set up a Somalia Task Force, which deployed American special-forces commandos, and turned to the agency to serve as its eyes and ears on the ground. That job fell to Garrett Jones, the newly appointed station chief in Somalia. Once a Miami police detective, Jones was dropped into the middle of nowhere, with seven officers beneath him and the task of overthrowing an army of warriors before him. His headquarters was a ransacked room of the ambassador’s abandoned residence in Mogadishu. Within days, his best Somali agent shot himself in the head, another was killed by a rocket fired from an American helicopter, his deputy chief of station was shot in the neck by a sniper and nearly died, and Jones found himself leading the manhunt for Aideed and his lieutenants down a series of blind alleys. That path led to the death of 18 American soldiers in a clash that killed 1,200 Somalis.

  A postmortem on Somalia came from Admiral William Crowe, who had retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to become the leader of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the council of elders created by Eisenhower. The board investigated and concluded that “the intelligence failure in Somalia was right in the National Security Council,” Admiral Crowe said. “They expected intelligence to make their decisions for them, not just give them information about what was going on there. They couldn’t understand why intelligence didn’t advise them correctly on what to do.

  “It made for considerable confusion right at the top as to wh
at was going out to Somalia,” Crowe said. “The President himself wasn’t very interested in the intelligence, which was most unfortunate.”

  The result was an ever-deepening distrust between the White House and the CIA.

  “RETALIATING QUITE EFFECTIVELY AGAINST IRAQI CLEANING WOMEN”

  At the start of 1993, terrorism was not an issue at the forefront of most minds at the agency. The United States had undertaken no meaningful action against the sources of terror since it had been caught selling missiles to Iran. The American hostages taken during the Reagan years had all come home from Beirut by 1991, though Bill Buckley came home in a box. In 1992, there was serious talk about shutting down the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Things had been quiet. People thought perhaps the problem had solved itself.

  Not long after dawn on January 25, 1993, the fifth day of the Clinton administration, Nicholas Starr, a sixty-year-old career CIA officer, was first in line at the stoplight outside the main entrance to the agency’s headquarters. The light takes forever to turn green, and cars back up to the horizon on Route 123, waiting to enter the tranquil woods of the CIA’s headquarters. At 7:50 a.m., a young Pakistani stepped out of his car and began firing an AK-47 assault rifle. First he shot Frank Darling, twenty-eight, who worked as a covert-operations communicator, hitting him in the right shoulder, as Darling’s wife screamed in horror. The gunman wheeled, shot, and killed Dr. Lansing Bennett, sixty-six, a CIA physician. He turned and hit Nick Starr in the left arm and shoulder, then shot Calvin Morgan, sixty-one, a CIA engineer, and Stephen Williams, forty-eight, later identified in court records as a CIA employee. The killer turned again and blew Darling’s head off. And then he drove away. It was all over in half a minute. Grievously wounded, Nick Starr somehow reached the guardhouse at the CIA’s gates and raised the alarm.