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

by Tim Weiner

  The façade was falling. The CIA was tearing itself apart.

  “Here is one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have,” President Eisenhower had said fifty years before. “It probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it.” Nineteen men had served as director of central intelligence. Not one met the high standard Eisenhower had set. The agency’s founders had been defeated by their ignorance in Korea and Vietnam and undone by their arrogance in Washington. Their successors were set adrift when the Soviet Union died and caught unaware when terror struck at the heart of American power. Their attempts to make sense of the world had generated heat but little light. As it was in the beginning, the warriors of the Pentagon and the diplomats of State held them in disdain. For more than half a century, presidents had been frustrated or furious when they turned to the directors for insight and for knowledge.

  The job, having proved impossible to fill, now would be abolished.

  In December 2004, with the upheaval at the agency in full force, Congress passed and the president signed a new law establishing the director of national intelligence, as the 9/11 Commission had urged. Hastily drafted, hurriedly debated, the law did nothing to ease the chronic and congenital problems that had plagued the agency since birth. It was continuity masquerading as change.

  Goss thought the president would choose him. The call never came. On Feburary 17, 2005, Bush announced that he was nominating the American ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte. A diplomat of rigorously conservative stripe, suave, subtle, a skilled infighter, he had never worked a day in the world of intelligence, and he would not long serve in it.

  As in 1947, the new czar was given responsibility without commensurate authority. The Pentagon still controlled the great bulk of the na tional security budget, now approaching $500 billion a year, of which the CIA’s share was roughly 1 percent. The new order served only as a formal recognition that the old order had failed.

  “FAILURE CANNOT BE EXPLAINED”

  The CIA was gravely wounded. In accordance with the laws of the jungle and the ways of Washington, stronger beasts fed upon it. The president gave great power over espionage, covert action, eavesdropping, and reconnaissance to the Pentagon’s undersecretary for intelligence, and elevated that job to the number-three position at the Department of Defense. “That sent seismic shudders through the intelligence community,” said Joan Dempsey, who was a deputy director of central intelligence and executive director of the foreign intelligence advisory board under Bush. “That’s much more of a Kremlin approach.”

  The Pentagon moved stealthily and steadily into the fields of overseas covert operations, usurping the traditional roles, responsibilities, authorities, and missions of the clandestine service. It recruited the most promising young paramilitary officers and retained the most experienced ones. The militarization of intelligence accelerated as the nation’s civilian intelligence service eroded.

  Negroponte’s new chief analyst, Thomas Fingar, had run the State Department’s small but first-rate office of intelligence and research. He surveyed the state of the agency’s directorate of intelligence and quickly determined that “nobody had any idea of who was doing what where.” He moved to pull the functioning remains of the CIA’s analytic machinery under his aegis. The best and the brightest thinkers left at the agency signed on with him.

  The agency as constituted was vanishing. The building was still there, and there would always be an institution in it. But on March 30, 2005, a wrecking ball struck what remained of the spirit of the CIA. It came in the form of the six-hundred-page report of Judge Silberman’s presidential commission. The judge was as rigorous a thinker as could be found in the capital. His intellectual badge was as strong as his intensely conservative credentials. He had twice come close to being named director of central intelligence. In fifteen years as a federal appeals court judge in Washington, he had consistently supported the means and ends of national security, even when they encroached on the ideals of liberty. His staff, unlike the 9/11 Commission’s, was deeply experienced in intelligence operations and analysis.

  Their judgment was brutal and final. The realm of the director of central intelligence was “a closed world” with “an almost perfect record” of resisting change. The director had presided over a “fragmented, loosely managed, and poorly coordinated” patchwork of intelligence collection and analysis. The agency was “often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care the most about” and its analysts “do not always tell decision-makers just how limited their knowledge really is.” The CIA was “increasingly irrelevant to the new challenges presented by weapons of mass destruction.” Its overriding flaw was “poor human intelligence”—an inability to conduct espionage.

  “We recognize that espionage is always chancy at best; fifty years of pounding away at the Soviet Union resulted in only a handful of truly important human sources,” the commission said. “Still, we have no choice but to do better.” The CIA “needs fundamental change if it is to successfully confront the threats of the 21st century.” That was “a goal that would be difficult to meet even in the best of all possible worlds. And we do not live in the best of worlds.”

  On April 21, 2005, the office of director of central intelligence disappeared into history. Goss called Negroponte’s swearing-in “the burial ceremony” for the agency of old. On that day, the new boss received an odd blessing: “I hope the spirit of Wild Bill Donovan guides and inspires his efforts,” said Senator John Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

  A bronze statue of Donovan stands guard at the entrance to CIA headquarters, where every living former director of central intelligence gathered at Goss’s invitation on August 21, 2005, to receive medallions commemorating their service and to mark the end of their long line. George H. W. Bush was there, at the center that bore his name. So were Jim Schlesinger and Stan Turner, so bitterly resented as outsiders; Bill Webster and Bob Gates, failed reformers and restorers; Jim Woolsey, John Deutch, and George Tenet, who had fought to right a ship that had lost its bearings. Some of these men cheerfully despised one another; others shared deep bonds of trust. It was a pleasant enough wake, with a touch of pomp. There was a luncheon and a lecture on the vanished office from the CIA’s chief historian, David S. Robarge. Goss sat in the front row, writhing inside. He had spent weeks agonizing over an inspector general’s report he himself had demanded while still chairman of the House intelligence committee. It was a scathing look at the flaws that contributed to the 9/11 attacks, a knife in the agency’s heart, a surgical examination of its inability to wage anything resembling a war against the nation’s enemies. In the tradition of Allen Dulles, Goss had decided to bury it. The agency would never account for its failure to protect the United States. But in truth the reckoning had come to pass.

  The CIA’s historian recalled President Eisenhower’s words when he came to lay the cornerstone for the agency’s headquarters on November 3, 1959:

  America’s fundamental aspiration is the preservation of peace. To this end we seek to develop policies and arrangements to make the peace both permanent and just. This can be done only on the basis of comprehensive and appropriate information.

  In war nothing is more important to a commander than the facts concerning the strength, dispositions, and intentions of his opponent, and the proper interpretation of those facts. In peacetime the necessary facts…and their correct interpretation are essential to the development of policy to further our long-term national security and best interests…. No task couldbe more important. Upon the quality of your work depends in large measure the success of our effort to further the nation’s position in the international scene…. This agency demands of its members the highest order of dedication, ability, trustworthiness, and selflessness—to say nothing of the finest type of courage, whenever needed. Success cannot be advertised: failure cannot be explained. In the work of intelligence, heroes are undecorated and unsung.

&nbs
p; “On this spot will rise a beautiful and useful structure,” the president had concluded. “May it long endure, to serve the cause of America and of peace.”

  As Americans died in battle for want of the facts, the directors of central intelligence arose, shook hands, walked out into the heat of the summer afternoon, and went on with their lives. As the old soldier feared long ago, they had left a legacy of ashes.

  “ADMIT NOTHING, DENY EVERYTHING”

  On May 5, 2006, President Bush fired Porter Goss after nineteen months of ceaseless backstabbing at the CIA. The fall of the last director of central intelligence was swift and inglorious, and the bequest he left was bitter.

  The next day, Goss got on a plane and delivered the commencement address at Tiffin University, ninety miles west of Cleveland, Ohio. “If this were a graduating class of CIA case officers, my advice would be short and to the point,” he said. “Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations.” With those words, he disappeared from view, leaving behind the weakest cadre of spies and analysts in the history of the CIA.

  One week after Goss resigned, a team of FBI agents raided CIA headquarters. They seized control of the office of Dusty Foggo, who had just stepped down as executive director, the third-highest job at the agency. This was the man whom Goss had inexplicably put in charge of running the CIA from day to day. In his previous post, Foggo had been quartermaster for the clandestine service. Based in Frankfurt, he kept CIA officers from Amman to Afghanistan supplied with everything from bottled water to body armor. Among his tasks was ensuring that his own accountants and cargo-kickers complied with the CIA’s rules and regulations. “Having been the ‘Ethic’s Guy,’” he wrote to a fellow officer, “I wish you the best with this annual exercise.” Foggo evidently had trouble with the word ethics.

  The indictment in United States of America v. Kyle Dustin Foggo was painfully specific in its particulars. Unsealed on February 13, 2007, it charged Foggo with fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. It said Foggo had fixed million-dollar contracts for a close friend who had wined and dined him in high style, treated him to extravagant trips to Scotland and Hawaii, and promised him a lucrative job—old-fashioned palm greasing. There had never been a case remotely like it in the history of the CIA. At this writing, Foggo has entered a plea of not guilty. He faces twenty years in prison if convicted.

  On the same day that Foggo was indicted, a federal judge in North Carolina sentenced a CIA contract worker named David Passaro to eight years and four months in prison for beating a man to death in Afghanistan. Passaro served with a CIA paramilitary team based in Asadabad, the capital of Kunar Province, a few miles west of the border with Pakistan. The agency had hired Passaro despite his history of criminal violence; he had been fired from the police force in Hartford, Connecticut, after he was arrested for beating a man in a brawl.

  The man who died at his hands was Abdul Wali, a well-known local farmer who had fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Wali had heard that he was wanted for questioning after a series of rocket attacks near the American base. He came to the Americans of his own free will, and he said he was innocent. Passaro doubted his word and threw him in a cell. He beat Wali so badly that the prisoner pleaded to be shot to end his pain; he died of his injuries two days later. Passaro was indicted and convicted under a provision of the Patriot Act allowing American citizens to be tried for crimes committed on territory claimed by the United States overseas. The judge noted that the absence of an autopsy had shielded him from a charge of murder.

  The court received a letter from the former governor of Kunar, who said that Wali’s death had done grievous damage to the American cause in Afghanistan and served as powerful propaganda for the resurgent forces of al Qaeda and the Taliban. “The distrust of the Americans increased, the security and reconstruction efforts of Afghanistan were dealt a blow, and the only people to gain from Dave Passaro’s actions were al Qaeda and their partners,” the governor wrote.

  Three days after Passaro was sentenced, a judge in Italy ordered the indictment of the CIA’s Rome station chief, the Milan base chief, and two dozen more officers in the abduction of a radical cleric who spent years under brutal interrogation in Egypt. A court in Germany charged thirteen CIA officers for the wrongful kidnapping and imprisonment of a Lebanese-born German citizen. The government of Canada formally apologized and paid a $10 million settlement to one of its citizens, Maher Arar, who had been seized by the CIA while changing planes in New York after a family vacation, transported to Syria, and subjected to the cruelest interrogation for ten months.

  By then, the CIA’s prison system had been condemned. It could not long survive when it was no longer secret. Americans were asked to take it on faith that the kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture of innocent people had been part of a program essential to preventing another attack on the United States. It may be so, but the evidence is scant. It is unlikely that we will ever know.

  Porter Goss was succeeded at the CIA by General Michael Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, the former chief of the National Security Agency, the executor of President Bush’s orders to train electronic eavesdropping on American targets, the first man to hold the diminished title of director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the first active-duty military officer to run the CIA since Walter Bedell Smith left in 1953. General Hayden declared at his Senate confirmation that “amateur hour” was over at the CIA. But it was not.

  By the CIA’s own standards, roughly half its work force were still trainees. Few were ready and able to produce results. But there was nothing to be done about it; the CIA had no choice but to promote them beyond their levels of ability. As youngsters in their twenties replaced people in their forties and fifties, the result was an abridgment of intelligence. The clandestine service began to abandon the techniques of the past—political warfare, propaganda, and covert action—because it lacked the skills to conduct them. The agency remained a place where few people spoke Arabic or Persian, Korean or Chinese. It still denied employment to patriotic Arab Americans on security grounds if they had relatives living in the Middle East—as most did. The information revolution had left officers and analysts no more capable of comprehending the terrorist threat than they had understood the Soviet Union. And as the agency’s reporting was overtaken by catastrophe in Iraq, the fifth Baghdad station chief in less than four years packed his bags for the closed world of the Green Zone.

  The CIA was at a nadir. It no longer had the president’s ear, and American leaders were looking elsewhere for intelligence—to the Pentagon and private industry.

  “THE DISASTROUS RISE OF MISPLACED POWER”

  Bob Gates took over the Pentagon on December 18, 2006—the only entry-level analyst ever to run the CIA and the only director ever to become secretary of defense. Two weeks later, John Negroponte, the new national intelligence czar, resigned after nineteen months to become the number-two man at the State Department. He was replaced by a retired admiral, Mike McConnell, who had run the National Security Agency during its first great collapse at the dawn of the digital age and who had spent the past decade making money as a military contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton.

  When Gates settled in at the Pentagon, he looked around at the American intelligence establishment and he saw stars: a general was running the CIA, a general was the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, a general was in charge of State Department’s counterterrorism programs, a lieutenant general was the Pentagon’s deputy undersecretary for intelligence, and a major general was running spies at the CIA. Every one of these jobs had been held by civilians, going back many years. Gates saw a world in which the Pentagon had crushed the CIA, just as it had vowed to do sixty years before. He wanted to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, bring the suspected terrorists from Cuba to the United States, and either convict them or recruit them. He wanted to contain the Defense Department’s dominance over intelligence. He longed to reverse the decline in the CIA’s centra
l role in American government. But there was very little he could do.

  The decline was part of a slow rot undermining the pillars of American national security. After four years of war in Iraq, the military was exhausted, bled by leaders who had invested far more in futuristic weapons than in uniformed soldiers. After five years of defending a foreign policy based on born-again faith, the State Department was adrift, unable to give voice to the values of democracy. And after six years of willful ignorance imposed by know-nothing politicians, congressional oversight of the agency had collapsed. The 9/11 Commission had said that of all the tasks facing American intelligence, strengthening congressional oversight might be the most difficult, and the most important. In 2005 and 2006, Congress responded by failing to pass the annual authorization bill for the CIA, the basic law governing the agency, its policies, and its spending. The roadblock was a single Republican senator who obstructed the bill because it ordered the White House to file a classified report on the CIA’s secret prisons.

  The failure of authority made the congressional intelligence committees irrelevant. Not since the 1960s had there been so little congressional control over the agency. Now a far different force gained great influence over intelligence: corporate America.

  At the end of Dwight Eisenhower’s years as president, a few days after he lamented the legacy of intelligence failures he would pass on to his successors, he gave his farewell address to the nation and famously warned: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Little more than half a century later, the surge of secret spending on national security after 9/11 had created a booming intelligence-industrial complex.