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

by Tim Weiner

  The commission was led by Les Aspin, who had lost his job as secretary of defense nine months before, fired for his inability to make decisions. Clinton had named him chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Depressed and disorganized, Aspin asked big questions without clear answers: “What does it all mean now? What are the targets now? What are you trying to do?” When he died suddenly of a stroke at fifty-six a few months later, the commission’s staff was despondent and its work went adrift. The commissioners headed in a dozen different directions, unable to decide on a destination.

  The staff director, Britt Snider, proclaimed: “Our goal is to sell intelligence.” But many of the witnesses were warning that salesmanship was not the issue. It was the product.

  The commission finally convened and took testimony. Bob Gates, who had drawn up the long list of 176 threats and targets three years before, now said the agency was overwhelmed by the multiplicity of tasks. Case officers and station chiefs said the clandestine service was drowning under too many requests to do too many small-bore things too far afield. Why was the White House asking the CIA to report on the growth of the evangelical movement in Latin America? Was that really important to the national security of the United States? The agency was only capable of a few major missions. Tell us what you want us to do, the CIA’s officers begged.

  But nothing focused the commission. Not the March 1995 attack by a religious cult that poured sarin gas into the Tokyo subways, killing 12 people and injuring 3,769, an event that signified the transformation of terrorism from nation-states to the self-anointed. Not the April 1995 bombing of the federal headquarters in Oklahoma City, which killed 169 people, the deadliest attack on American territory since Pearl Harbor. Not the discovery of a plot by Islamic militants to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific and crash a hijacked jet into CIA headquarters. Not the warning from a CIA officer that someday the United States would face “aerial terrorism”—an airplane dive-bombing a target. Not the fact that a total of three people in the American intelligence community had the linguistic ability to understand excited Muslims talking to each other. Not the realization that the ability of the CIA to analyze information was being drowned by the explosion of e-mail, personal computers, cellular telephones, and publicly available encryption for private communications. Not the growing realization that the CIA was in a state of collapse.

  The report, seventeen months in the making, had no weight and no impact. “Counterterrorism received little attention,” said Loch Johnson, a member of the commission’s staff. “The limits of covert action were never defined; the weaknesses in accountability went largely unaddressed.” No one who read it bought the anodyne arguments that a little fine-tuning would fix the machine.

  As the commission completed its report, a total of twenty-five people were enrolled at the CIA’s career training center for young new recruits. The agency’s ability to attract talent was at an all-time low. So was its reputation. The Ames case had made the CIA’s future a casualty of its history.

  The clandestine service was “terribly concerned about what they feel are inadequate numbers of people on the front line,” Fred Hitz said at the time. “Getting the right people and getting them in the right place is already a different problem to solve. We’ve got good people but not enough of them, and not enough of them in the places where we need them. If the president of the United States and the Congress of the United States don’t help, then the one thing that will bring us around will bring us around too late. Some horrible event happening somewhere in the world, maybe in our own nation, that makes us all wake up as Pearl Harbor made us wake up and say—why in the world didn’t we know?”

  46. “WE’RE IN

  TROUBLE”

  At the end of 1994, Jim Woolsey recorded a farewell address to his troops at the CIA, sent a letter of resignation to the White House by courier, and left town in a hurry. Bill Clinton searched the government for someone willing and able to take the job.

  “The president asked me whether I was interested in being the director of central intelligence,” said his deputy secretary of defense, John Deutch. “I made it very clear to him that I was not. I saw my friend Jim Woolsey having tremendous difficulties as director. I didn’t think that there was any reason for me to think I could do better.”

  Fine, Clinton replied, find someone who can. Six weeks went by before Deutch managed to press-gang a retired air force general named Mike Carns for the job. Six more weeks passed before the nomination wobbled, plummeted, and crashed.

  “The president pressed on me the view that I really had to do it,” Deutch said. Thus began a short and bitter lesson in the political science of American intelligence. Deutch had good reason to dread the assignment. He had been in and around national-security circles for three decades, and he knew that no director of central intelligence ever had succeeded in fulfilling his charter—serving simultaneously as the chairman of American intelligence and the chief executive of the CIA. He requested and received cabinet rank, as Bill Casey had, to ensure himself some access to the president. He had hopes that he might become the secretary of defense if Clinton was re-elected in 1996. But he knew that the CIA was in a state of turmoil that could not be repaired in a year or two.

  “Plagued by poor leadership, the Agency is adrift,” a veteran CIA analyst, John Gentry, wrote during the days that Deutch first came to office. “It has a palpable malaise. The unhappiness level of employees well into management ranks is very high. Senior officers are floundering as well.” The agency was led by “a corps of senior officers so devoid of real leadership skills that it is largely incapable of independent creative action.” With Clinton apparently content to get his intelligence from CNN, Gentry wrote, the CIA had “no one left to pander to.”

  As deputy secretary of defense, Deutch had been through a yearlong review of American intelligence with Woolsey, trying for a truce in the endless wars over money and power between the Pentagon and the CIA. They would pick an issue—say, the proliferation of nuclear weapons—and at the end of the day they would conclude that much more had to be done. Counterintelligence? After Ames, definitely more. Support to military operations? Hugely important. Human intelligence? More spies. Better analysis? Absolutely crucial. At the end of the review it was clear that there were an infinite number of needs and a finite amount of money and personnel available to meet them. American intelligence could not be reformed from within, and surely it was not being reformed from without.

  Deutch and Woolsey both had the well-known I’m-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room syndrome. The difference was that Deutch often was the smartest. He had been the dean of science and the provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; his field was physical chemistry, the science of the transformation of matter at the molecular, atomic, and subatomic levels. He could explain how a lump of coal becomes a diamond. He set out to transform the CIA under that type of pressure. At his confirmation hearings, he had vowed to change the culture of the CIA’s clandestine service, “down to the bare bones,” but he had no clear idea how. Like his predecessors, he went to learn at the feet of Richard Helms.

  Helms, now eighty-two, carried himself with the bearing of a British peer. Shortly after his skull session with the new director, I had lunch with him at a restaurant two blocks from the White House. Helms sipped a noontime beer, sitting beneath slowly revolving ceiling fans, and confided that Deutch was instinctively drawing away from the clandestine service—“seeing it as nothing but trouble. Nor is he the first to be distancing himself. He’s got to do a job convincing them he’s on the team.”

  In May 1995, a few days after Deutch showed up for work at CIA headquarters, the leaders of the clandestine service, always conscious of the need to recruit a new boss, presented him with a glossy brochure titled “A New Direction. A New Future.” It was the list of their top ten targets: loose nukes, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, support for military operations, macroeconomics, Iran, Ira
q, North Korea, Russia, China. The new director and his spies all knew that the White House wanted to use the CIA as a private Internet, a database on everything from tropical rain forests to compact-disc counterfeiters, and that its attention needed a far sharper focus. “The trouble is there’s too much to do,” Deutch said. “You get requests: What’s going to happen in Indonesia? What’s going to happen in Sudan? What’s going to happen in the Middle East?” The call for global coverage was impossible to fulfill. Let us concentrate on a few hard targets, the spies said. Deutch could not settle the argument.

  Instead, he worked for five months trying to get a handle on the clandestine service. He flew off to CIA stations around the world, listening, questioning, and weighing what he had to work with. He said he found “tremendously poor morale.” He was shocked by the inability of his spies to solve their own problems. He found them in a state approaching panic.

  He compared them to the American military after Vietnam. Back then, as Deutch put it in September 1995, a lot of smart lieutenants and colonels had looked at one another and said: “‘We’re in trouble. We’ve got to change. We’ve got to figure out a way to do this differently. We’re either leaving or we’re going to change the system.’ And the people who stayed did change the system.” Deutch wanted the clandestine service to solve its own problems. But he found his people incapable of change. “Compared to uniformed officers,” he said of his spies, “they certainly are not as competent, or as understanding of what their relative role is or what their responsibilities are.” The clandestine service “was not confident of carrying out its day-to-day activity.”

  This crisis of confidence took many forms. Some were made manifest in misguided operations that backfired. Others were continuing failures of collection and analysis. Some were breathtaking lapses in judgment.

  In Bosnia, on July 13, 1995, as the world’s press reported mass killings of Muslims by Serbs, a spy satellite sent back pictures of prisoners being guarded by gunmen in fields outside the town of Srebrenica. No one at the CIA looked at that picture for three weeks. No one had thought that the Serbs would conquer the town. No one anticipated a slaughter. No one paid heed to human-rights groups, the United Nations, or the press. The CIA had no officers and no agents in the field to corroborate what they were reporting. It had no information about any atrocities. It had been ordered to devote itself to supporting military operations in the region, and it had neither time nor talent to spare to check out reports from terrified refugees.

  Two weeks after the first press accounts of a slaughter, the CIA sent a U-2 over Srebrenica; the plane recorded images of freshly dug mass graves in the fields where the prisoners had stood. Those photos arrived at the CIA on a regular military courier flight three days later. And three days after that, a CIA photo analyst matched up the location of the first satellite image of the prisoners in the field with the second U-2 image of burial sites. The analysis landed at the White House on August 4, 1995.

  Thus did the CIA report, three weeks after the fact, the biggest mass murder of civilians in Europe since Hitler’s death camps fifty years before. Eight thousand people were dead, and the agency had missed it.

  On the other end of Europe, the CIA’s Paris station had run an elaborate operation trying to steal the French negotiating position on trade talks. Locked into the idea that free trade was the guiding force of American foreign policy, the White House had aggravated the CIA’s woes by demanding more and more economic intelligence. The Paris station was pursuing secrets of minimal importance to the national security of the United States—such as how many American movies would be shown on French screens. The French interior ministry ran a counterespionage operation that included the seduction of a CIA officer working under nonofficial cover as a businesswoman. There was pillow talk, and secrets were spilled. The government publicly expelled the Paris station chief—Dick Holm, a genuine hero at the clandestine service, who had run field operations in Laos and barely survived a fiery plane crash in the Congo thirty years before, and who was on his last tour before retirement. Four hapless and humiliated CIA officers were kicked out of France with him.

  Another blown operation, another public embarrassment for the clandestine service, and “another public example of a situation where its ability to carry out its function as its own standards required came into question,” Deutch said. He asked his officers time and again: “What are the professional standards of carrying out your very difficult mission? And are you doing it well all over the world?” His answer to that last question was a resounding no.

  “IT WAS CLEARLY MALICE”

  The problems at the Paris station were a passing annoyance compared to what went on in the Latin American division of the clandestine service. The division was a world apart at the CIA, dominated by veterans of the war against Fidel Castro, men who had their own set of rules and disciplines. Since 1987, station chiefs in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Peru, Venezuela, and Jamaica had been accused of lying to superiors, sexually harassing coworkers, stealing money, threatening underlings at gunpoint, running a counternarcotics operation in which a ton of cocaine wound up on the streets of Florida, and keeping sloppy accounts involving $1 million in government funds. It was the only division in the clandestine service in which station chiefs were removed from their posts for misconduct on a regular basis. The division’s isolation flowed in part from the internal politics of the countries it covered. Throughout the cold war, the CIA had worked with military regimes against left-wing insurgencies in Latin America. The old bonds were hard to break.

  In Guatemala, 200,000 civilians had died during forty years of struggle following the agency’s 1954 coup against an elected president. Between 90 and 96 percent of those deaths came at the hands of the Guatemalan military. In 1994, the CIA’s officers in Guatemala still went to great lengths to conceal the nature of their close relations to the military and to suppress reports that Guatemalan officers on its payroll were murderers, torturers, and thieves. This concealment violated a balancing test that Woolsey had started in 1994. The test, called “agent validation,” was supposed to weigh the quality of an agent’s information against the perfidiousness of his conduct.

  “You don’t want to be in a position of dealing with military officials or officials in that government who are known by everyone to have blood on their hands unless there is a legitimate intelligence goal to be served,” said Inspector General Fred Hitz. “Unless that person knows that there’s a cache in southern Guatemala where biological weapons are being put together and they’re going to be sold on the open market and he’s your only source for it. If a person is notorious for butchering people, breaking the law, then the fact that the CIA is in contact with that individual has to be balanced against the information that individual is likely to provide. If the information is the keys to the holy mystery, we’ll take the chance. But let’s do it with our eyes open and not because of inertia or momentum.”

  This problem boiled over when a Guatemalan colonel on the CIA’s payroll was implicated in the cover-up of the murders of an American innkeeper and a Guatemalan guerrilla married to an American lawyer. The outcry over the innkeeper’s murder had led the Bush administration to cut off millions of dollars in military aid to Guatemala, though the agency continued its financial support for Guatemalan military intelligence. “The CIA station in Guatemala was about twice the size it needed to be,” said Thomas Stroock, the American ambassador to Guatemala from 1989 to 1992, but it could not seem to bring itself to report accurately on the case. The station chief, Fred Brugger, failed to tell Ambassador Stroock that the colonel, a prime suspect, was a CIA agent. “Not only did they not tell me,” Ambassador Stroock said, “they did not tell my boss, the secretary of state, or the Congress. That was stupid.”

  Folly turned to malevolence in 1994, when Dan Donahue became the station chief. While the new American ambassador, Marilyn McAfee, was preaching human rights and justice, the CIA stayed loyal to the murderous Guatemalan in
telligence service.

  The embassy split in two. “The chief of station came into my office and showed me a piece of intelligence, which came from a Guatemalan source, suggesting that I was having an affair with my secretary, whose name was Carol Murphy,” Ambassador McAfee remembered. The Guatemalan military had bugged the ambassador’s bedroom and recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy. They spread the word that the ambassador was a lesbian. The CIA station transmitted this piece of intelligence—later known as “the Murphy memo”—to Washington, where it was widely distributed. “The CIA sent this report to the Hill,” ambassador McAfee said. “It was clearly malice. The CIA had defamed an ambassador by back channels.”

  The ambassador was a conservative person from a conservative family, she was married, and she was not sleeping with her secretary. “Murphy” was the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog.

  The CIA station had shown a stronger affinity for its friends in the Guatemalan military than for the American ambassador. “There was a division between intelligence and policy,” Ambassador McAfee said. “That’s what scares me.”

  It scared Deutch too. On September 29, 1995, toward the end of his fifth month in office, Deutch went to the Bubble—the once-futuristic six-hundred-seat amphitheater near the entrance to CIA headquarters—to deliver some bad news to the clandestine service. An internal-review board at the CIA had weighed the evidence in Guatemala and told Deutch that he should dismiss Terry Ward, the Latin American division chief of the clandestine service from 1990 to 1993, then serving as the chief of station in Switzerland. It said he should dismiss the former Guatemala station chief Fred Brugger too, and discipline his successor Dan Donahue severely, making sure he never served as a station chief again.