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

by Tim Weiner

  Corporate clones of the CIA started sprouting all over the suburbs of Washington and beyond. Patriotism for profit became a $50-billion-a-year business, by some estimates—a sum about the size of the American intelligence budget itself. This phenomenon traced back fifteen years. After the cold war, the agency began contracting out thousands of jobs to fill the perceived void created by the budget cuts that began in 1992. A CIA officer could file his retirement papers, turn in his blue identification badge, go to work for a much better salary at a military contractor such as Lockheed Martin or Booz Allen Hamilton, then return to the CIA the next day, wearing a green badge. After September 2001, the outsourcing went out of control. Green-badge bosses started openly recruiting in the CIA’s cafeteria.

  Great chunks of the clandestine service became wholly dependent on contractors who looked like they were in the CIA’s chain of command, but who worked for their corporate masters. In effect, the agency had two workforces—and the private one was paid far better. By 2006 something on the order of half the officers at the Baghdad station and the new National Counterterrorism Center were contract employees, and Lockheed Martin, the nation’s biggest military contractor, was posting help-wanted ads for “counterterrorism analysts” to interrogate suspected terrorists at the Guantánamo prison.

  Fortunes could be made in the intelligence industry. The money was a powerful attractor, and the result was an ever-accelerating brain drain—the last thing the CIA could afford—and the creation of companies like Total Intelligence Solutions. Founded in February 2007, Total Intel was run by Cofer Black—the chief of the CIA’s counterterrorist center on 9/11. His partners were Robert Richer, who had been the number-two man at the clandestine service, and Enrique Prado, Black’s chief of counterterror operations. All three had decamped from the Bush administration’s war on terror in 2005 to join Blackwater USA, the politically wired private security company that served, among many other things, as the Praetorian Guard for Americans in Baghdad. They learned the tricks of the government-contracting trade at Blackwater, and within little more than a year Black and company were running Total Intel. These were among the best of the CIA’s officers. But the spectacle of jumping ship in the middle of a war to make a killing was unremarkable in twenty-first-century Washington. Legions of CIA veterans quit their posts to sell their services to the agency by writing analyses, creating cover for overseas officers, setting up communications networks, and running clandestine operations. Following their example, new CIA hires adopted their own five-year plan: get in, get out, and get paid. A top secret security clearance and a green badge were golden tickets for a new breed of Beltway bandits. The outsourcing of intelligence was a clear sign that the CIA could not perform many of its basic missions unaided after 9/11.

  Above all, it could not help the army impose democracy at gunpoint in Iraq. Action without knowledge was a dangerous business, as Americans found to their sorrow.

  “TO ORGANIZE AND RUN AN ESPIONAGE SERVICE”

  In the cold war, the CIA was condemned by the American left for what it did. In the war on terror, the CIA was attacked by the American right for what it could not do. The charge was incompetence, leveled by such men as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Say what one may about their leadership, they knew from long experience what the reader now knows: the CIA was unable to fulfill its role as America’s intelligence service.

  The fictional CIA, the one that lives in novels and movies, is omnipotent. The myth of a golden age was of the CIA’s own making, the product of the publicity and the political propaganda Allen Dulles manufactured in the 1950s. It held that the agency could change the world, and it helps explain why the CIA is so impervious to change. The legend was perpetuated in the 1980s by Bill Casey, who tried to revive the devil-may-care spirits of Dulles and Wild Bill Donovan. Now the agency has revived the fable that it is America’s best defense. With orders to train and retain thousands of new officers, it needs to project an image of success to survive.

  In truth, there haven’t been many halcyon days. But there have been a few. When Richard Helms was in charge, the agency spoke the truth to Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara about the war in Vietnam, and they listened. There was another such fleeting moment when Bob Gates ran the CIA; he kept calm and carried on as the Soviet Union crumbled. But fifteen years have passed since then, and the glory is gone. The CIA found itself unable to see the way forward in a battle where information and ideas were the most powerful weapons.

  For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence—and that is the CIA’s deepest secret. Their mission is extraordinarily hard. But we Americans still do not understand the people and the political forces we seek to contain and control. The CIA has yet to become what its creators hoped it would be.

  “The only remaining superpower doesn’t have enough interest in what’s going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service,” Richard Helms said a decade ago. Perhaps a decade from now the agency will rise from the ashes, infused with many billions of dollars, inspired by new leadership, invigorated by a new generation. Analysts may see the world clearly. American spies may become capable of espionage against America’s enemies. The CIA someday may serve as its founders intended. We must depend on it. For the war in which we are now engaged may last as long as the cold war, and we will win or lose by virtue of our intelligence.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am fortunate to have spent part of the past twenty years talking with CIA directors and officers whose professional lives spanned the course of six decades. I am particularly grateful to Richard Helms, William Colby, Stansfield Turner, William Webster, Bob Gates, John Deutch, George Tenet, John McMahon, Tom Twetten, Milt Bearden, Tom Polgar, Peter Sichel, Frank Lindsay, Sam Halpern, Don Gregg, Jim Lilley, Steve Tanner, Gerry Gossens, Clyde McAvoy, Walter Pforzheimer, Haviland Smith, Fred Hitz, and Mark Lowenthal. A tip of the hat goes to the men and women of the CIA’s history staff, who do their part for the cause of openness in the face of fierce resistance from the clandestine service, and to present and former members of the agency’s public affairs staff.

  I am deeply in debt to the work of Charles Stuart Kennedy, a retired Foreign Service officer and the founder and director of the Foreign Affairs Oral History Program. The library he has created is a unique and invaluable resource. The State Department’s historians, who produce The Foreign Relations of the United States, the official record of American diplomacy, published since 1861, have done more in the past decade to unseal secret documents than any other arm of government. They, along with the staffs of the presidential libraries, deserve the thanks of a grateful nation.

  A reporter is lucky to have one great editor in a lifetime. I have had more than my share, and over the years they have given me time to think and freedom to write. Gene Roberts gave me my start at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, Andy Rosenthal, and Jon Landman help make The New York Times a daily miracle. They are keepers of a public trust.

  Three tireless researchers helped create this book. Matt Malinowski transcribed interview tapes, Zoe Chace dug into the diplomatic history and the National Security Council files, and Cora Currier did groundbreaking research at the National Archives. I am grateful to my high school chum Lavinia Currier for introducing me to her fiercely intelligent daughter. Zoe is the daughter of the late James Chace and the sister of Beka Chace, two friends whose spirits sustain me.

  I want to salute the journalists who have covered the CIA, the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the agonies of American national security since 9/11. Among them are John Burns, Dexter Filkins, Matt Purdy, Doug Jehl, Scott Shane, Carlotta Gall, John Kifner, and Steve Crowley of The New York Times; Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, and Pam Constable of The Washington Post; Vernon Loeb, Bob Drogin, and Megan Stack of the Los Angeles Times; and Andy Maykuth of The Philadelphia Inquirer. We remember our brothers and sisters who gave their lives to get th
e news, among them Elizabeth Neuffer, Mark Fineman, Michael Kelly, Harry Burton, Azizullah Haidari, Maria Grazia Cutuli, and Julio Fuentes.

  My gratitude goes to Phyllis Grann, who had the good grace to edit and publish this book, and to Kathy Robbins, the world’s most brilliant literary agent.

  Legacy of Ashes took shape at Yaddo, the retreat for artists and writers in Saratoga Springs, New York. For two months, the good people of Yaddo housed and fed me while thousands of words a day went pouring into my ThinkPad. I was honored to be the first recipient of the Nora Sayre Endowed Residency for Nonfiction, created in her memory to support her literary legacy. A thousand thanks to the poet Jean Valentine for introducing me to Yaddo; to Elaina Richardson, president of the Corporation of Yaddo; and to the trustees, supporters, and employees of this magnificent refuge.

  The book grew longer and stronger at the house of my in-laws, Susanna and Boker Doyle, who supported me with their great good nature.

  My will to write began when I first saw my mother, Professor Dora B. Weiner, working on a book in the basement of our home in the quiet before dawn. Forty-five years later, she is still writing and teaching and inspiring her students and her sons. All of us wish my father were here to hold this book in his hands.

  Legacy of Ashes ends as it began, with a dedication to the love of my life, Kate Doyle; to our daughters, Emma and Ruby; and to the rest of our lives together.

  NOTES

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  —Central Intelligence Agency records obtained from the CIA Records Search Technology at the National Archives and Records Administration (CIA/CREST)

  —CIA records released or reprinted by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence (CIA/CSI)

  —CIA records obtained from the Declassified Documents Records System (CIA/DDRS)

  —National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

  —The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). CIA records in the FRUS volume “Emergency of the Intelligence Establishment, 1945–1950,” are hereinafter “FRUS Intelligence.”

  —Foreign Affairs Oral History (FAOH)

  —Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY (FDRL)

  —Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO (HSTL)

  —Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS (DDEL)

  —John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA (JFKL)

  —Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Tx (LBJL)

  —Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library. Yorba Linda, CA (RMNL)

  —Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Grand Rapids, MI (GRFL)

  —Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, GA (JCL)

  —George H.W. Bush Library, College Station, TX (GHWBL)

  —Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  —The records of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (hereinafter “Church Committee”)

  CIA clandestine service histories were obtained through declassification and through unofficial sources. The CIA has reneged on pledges made by three consecutive directors of central intelligence—Gates, Woolsey, and Deutch—to declassify records on nine major covert actions: France and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s; North Korea in the 1950s; Iran in 1953; Indonesia in 1958; Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s; and the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Laos in the 1960s. The Guatemala documents were finally released in 2003, most of the Bay of Pigs documents are out, and the Iran history was leaked. The rest remain under official seal. While I was gathering and obtaining declassification authorizations for some of the CIA records used in this book at the National Archives, the agency was engaging in a secret effort to reclassify many of those same records, dating back to the 1940s, flouting the law and breaking its word. Nevertheless, the work of historians, archivists, and journalists has created a foundation of documents on which a book can be built.

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  “When I took over”: Truman to David M. Noyes, December 1, 1963, David M. Noyes papers, HSTL.

  “In a global and totalitarian war”: Donovan to Joint Psychological Warfare Committee, October 24, 1942, NARA.

  “capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign nations”…“subversive operations abroad”: Donovan to Roosevelt, “Substantive Authority Necessary in Establishment of a Central Intelligence Service,” November 18, 1944, reprinted in Thomas F. Troy, CIA/CSI, republished as Donovan and the CIA (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981), pp. 445–447.

  “lay the keel”: Donovan to Roosevelt, OSS folder, President’s Secretary’s file, FDRL. Roosevelt once said, not without malice, that Donovan could have been president had he not been an Irishman, a Catholic, and a Republican.

  “His imagination was unlimited”: Bruce cited in Dulles speech, “William J. Donovan and the National Security,” undated but probably 1959, CIA/CSI.

  “an extremely dangerous thing in a democracy”: Bissell cited in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, p. 243. This was a widely held view. Yet the army had done worse during the war. The chief of army intelligence, Major General George Strong, had cast a gimlet eye at Donovan’s new and independent OSS and decided to set up his own intelligence shop. He instructed the chief of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Service, Brigadier General Hayes Kroner, to create this organization in October 1942. Kroner, in turn, plucked a renegade U.S. Army captain named John“Frenchy” Grombach out of Donovan’s organization and handed him some extraordinary marching orders: to focus on spying and subversion against the United States by its wartime allies, the British and the Soviets. Grombach called his intelligence outfit The Pond. It was uncontrolled by higher authority and undermined by the utter unreliability of its reporting. By Grombach’s own account, 80 percent of his work wound up in the trash. The Pond succeeded mainly at keeping itself secret. “Its existence was not known,” General Kroner said; only a handful of men, including “the President himself, who had to know by virtue of his approving certain operations, knew it existed.” Grombach’s ambitious orders were, however, a milestone: “He would not only institute a secret intelligence service, looking to the current war effort, but he would lay the foundation for a perpetual, a far-seeing, a far-distant, continuing secret intelligence service,” Kroner said. “That was the birth of high-level intelligence, secret intelligence operations in our government.” National Security Act of 1947, Hearing Before the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, June 27, 1947. See Mark Stout, “The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 48, No. 3, CIA/CSI, available online at https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no3/ article07.html.

  a short row of wooden filing cabinets at the State Department: In October 1941, Captain Dean Rusk, the future secretary of state, was ordered to organize a new army intelligence section covering a great swath of the world, from Afghanistan through India to Australia. “The need for information,” Rusk said, “cannot be exaggerated. We were running into this factor of ignorance.” He asked to see what files the United States had on hand: “I was shown one file drawer by an old lady named Mrs. North. In that file drawer was one copy of ‘Murphy’s Tourist Handbook’ to India and Ceylon which had been stamped Confidential because it was the only copy in town, and they wanted to keep track of it; one 1925 military attaché report from London on the British Army in India, and then a considerable number of clippings from The New York Times that this old lady, Mrs. North, had been clipping since World War One, and that was it.” In World War II, when American pilots crossed the Himalayas from India to China and back, they were flying blind, Rusk remembered: “I didn’t even have maps that would show us the scale of one to one million in the terrain in which we were operating.” When Rusk tried to organize a Burmese-language unit for the army, “we looked around the United States for a native Burman…. We finally found one and we looked him up and he was in an insane asylum. Well, we fis
hed him out of the insane asylum and made a Burmese language instructor out of him.” Rusk testimony, President’s Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), April 21, 1975, pp. 2191–2193, Top Secret, declassified 1995, GRFL.

  half the night: Troy, Donovan and the CIA, p. 265.

  “What do you think it means…?”: Casey cited in Joseph E. Persico, Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey: From the OSS to the CIA (New York: Viking), p. 81.

  “serious harm to the citizens”: Park report, Rose A. Conway files, OSS/ Donovan folder, HSTL.

  “The defects and the dangers”: Donovan to Truman, “Statement of Principles,” FRUS Intelligence, pp. 17–21.

  Chapter Two

  “What you have to remember”: Helms interview with author.

  “most inadvisable”: Stimson to Donovan, May 1, 1945, CIA Historical Intelligence Collection, CIA/CSI.

  “the continuing operations of OSS must be performed in order to preserve them”: McCloy to Magruder, September 26, 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 235–236. The records detailing the survival of Central Intelligence after Truman’s abolition of the OSS are in FRUS Intelligence, pp. 74–315; see especially Magruder’s essay on clandestine intelligence operations and the Lovett report.

  “the holy cause of central intelligence”: Magruder cited in Michael Warner, “Salvage and Liquidation: The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 39, No. 5, 1996, CIA/CSI.

  “it was very clear our primary target was going to be what the Russians were up to”: Polgar interview with author.

  “we were seeing the total takeover by the Russians of the East German system”: Sichel interview with author.

  a successful liaison: Wisner to Chief/SI, March 27, 1945, CIA/DDRS.

  “Clandestine intelligence operations”: Magruder to Lovett, “Intelligence Matters,” undated but likely late October 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 77–81.