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

by Tim Weiner

  “I was in charge of human intelligence collection”: Holdridge oral history, FAOH.

  “he sought to overthrow their system”: Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 95.

  a long hard look: Brzezinski said, “Colonel Kuklinski volunteered to collaborate with the U.S., emphasizing that he would like to collaborate with the U.S. military as a Polish officer. He was very instrumental in providing the United States with a much better understanding than it theretofore had regarding the war plans of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet plans for a sudden massive onslaught against Western Europe—including, incidentally, a little-known plan to use nuclear weapons from day one of the attack on Western Europe. I’ll give you one specific example. On day two of the attack on Western Europe the Soviet war plans provided for the use of forty tactical nuclear weapons against Hamburg alone, in West Germany. So this was an extremely important contribution to filling major gaps in our understanding of Soviet war planning. And to the extent that the agency was the channel that provided the communication link with him, it was a success for the agency even though Colonel Kuklinski was himself never in a strict sense a CIA agent. He volunteered. He operated on his own. He didn’t actually receive instructions.” Brzezinski interview with author.

  “By God”: Smith interview with author. Drafted out of Dartmouth at the start of the Korean War and trained in the Russian language by the army, Smith had focused on the Soviet target in the CIA stations in Prague, Berlin, and Beirut throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s. He had personally recruited and run six Eastern Europeans and trained hundreds of young CIA officers on the basics of spying in cold-war capitals without getting caught. By 1975, when Angleton was forced into retirement, Smith and his colleagues started recruiting their first Soviets.

  His biggest recruitment was Sergei Federenko, a diplomat assigned to arms control issues at the United Nations secretariat in New York. An engineer by training and a member of the Soviet elite by birth, Federenko was young and ambitious. He liked to drink. He had a beautiful wife and a girlfriend on the side in the suburbs north of New York.

  “Now, I’m a con man,” Smith said. “That’s my nature and my training. You don’t ‘recruit’ a Soviet. The Soviet has to recruit himself. It’s like when you set your cap for a female. Each of you has to find something in the other that’s attractive. It is in many respects a seduction…. So I recruited the guy. And—guess what? He had been educated as a scientist and he had worked on Soviet rocketry.” Federenko provided a who’s who of the Soviet delegation at the United Nations in New York, including a rundown of the names and foibles of the KGB officers posing as diplomats. For his stellar work, Smith was promoted to chief of a CIA division focused on counterterrorism. But when it came to selecting a case officer to handle Federenko in New York, the CIA had very few to choose from. The ranks of fluent Russian speakers in the Soviet/Eastern European division of the clandestine service were very thin. Headquarters selected a thirty-four-year-old alcoholic who became a traitor to the CIA. In 1954, he had been a boy floating down the Irrawaddy River in Burma with his father when he found out that the old man worked for the agency. He had been a file clerk at the CIA for five years in the 1960s while he tried to finish a college degree. He had finally become a member of the clandestine service in 1967. He was married to a CIA officer and, in every sense, married to the CIA. His name was Aldrich Ames.

  “The possibilities are there to change this from a black-white conflict into a red-white conflict”: “Subject: South Africa and Rhodesia,” Special Coordination Committee Meeting, February 8, 1977, and National Security Council meeting minutes, March 3, 1977, JCL.

  “nobody wanted to pay attention to Africa”: Carlucci oral history, FAOH.

  Gerry Gossens, a station chief: Gossens interview with author. Born in Texas and reared in Beirut, Gossens joined the CIA in 1960 and worked through the Middle East under deep cover as an Evinrude outboard-motor salesman before joining the Africa division. Hundreds of young and ambitious CIA men—and a few women—scrambled for advantage against Soviet, Chinese, and East German spies in Africa throughout the ’60s and ’70s. “We were young people willing to go to hellholes,” Gossens said. “We were espionage-oriented well before the rest of the Agency came around. Our branch chief used to say: ‘Give me $25,000 and I can rent any African president.’ But that was not what we were in business to do. We were in business to conduct espionage. And Africa was still a place that was so fluid you were in on history being made. You could start an operation by accident. You go with the Ambassador to see the President. A member of the President’s staff says, ‘You know, I have a broken Pentax camera. I can’t get spare parts.’ You do him a favor. You wind up looking at the Presidential archives.”

  “My greatest single crisis”: Wisner oral history, FAOH.

  “I asked my station chief if it were true”: Eagleburger oral history, FAOH. 364 “one of their basic skills”: Stansfield Turner, Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence (New York: Hyperion, 2005), p. 187.

  “They’re a unique culture”: McMahon interview with author.

  “Talk about apoplexy—they went bonkers”: McMahon interview with author.

  “In spite of its current (and worsening) morale”: Memorandum for Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Subject: Covert Action Possibilities in Selected [Deleted] Areas,” February 5, 1979, NSC, JCL. There was, however, one other covert operation that started under Carter and bore fruit fifteen years later. Itwas aimed at uncovering the connections between cocaine traffickers and the government of Colombia. In 1977, “the CIA station chief came to me with a plan for CIA involvement in anti-narcotics work,” said Robert W. Drexler, then the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Bogota. “This was not to be made known to the DEA. So I approved it, and we started it. It was, in essence, a fine operation in which we used a very small number of trusted Colombian law enforcement officials, who we could monitor closely so as to ensure that they weren’t being turned against us or corrupted, or that we would see it when they were; and in which we collected intelligence on the contacts between the drug traffickers and high-level Colombian officials. The idea was to pass this on in Washington. The program worked very well. The intelligence it gathered was horrifying, because it detailed the rapid spread of corruption.” In 1994 and 1995, this operation climaxed with a CIA-backed takedown of one of the major Colombian cocaine rings, the Cali cartel, achieved in conjunction with the DEA.

  the CIA failed to warn the president of the United States: Though almost all the records of the failure to warn of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan remain classified, Douglas MacEachin, the deputy director of intelligence from 1993 to 1995, published an appraisal of the CIA’s performance in 2002, basing his work on the secret record as well as his own firsthand experience as one of the agency’s best Soviet analysts. Douglas MacEachin, “Predicting the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: The Intelligence Community’s Record,” Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2002, CIA/CSI. My account of the failure relies in large part on his work, as well as interviews with Brzezinski and Gates.

  “the deteriorating situation”: Gates, From the Shadows, p. 132. Though Gates does not say so, this passage evidently appeared in the president’s daily brief.

  “CIA does not see this as a crash buildup”: “Subject: Iran,” Special Coordination Committee, December 17, 1979, National Security Archive collection.

  “The pace of Soviet deployments”: The December 19, 1979, report to the president is cited in The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, a classified CIA history cited in MacEachin’s “Predicting the Soviet Invasion.”

  “a spectator sport”: MacEachin, “Predicting the Soviet Invasion.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  “a virtual dictatorship”: Nixon to Haig and Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, April 8, 1971, FRUS 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Document
s on Iran and Iraq, declassified September 12, 2006.

  “to confirm that the Shah was our puppet”: Precht oral history, FAOH. In September 1979 Precht was in a Washington hospital awaiting surgery: “Before going into the operating room, I looked over and there was another person lying there, waiting his turn. It was Loy Henderson, who had been Ambassador in 1953 when Mossadegh was overthrown. I thought, ‘present at the creation and present at the destruction.’ After I was able to walk around, I went to his room…. I asked him what [the Shah] was like in his time in Iran. He said, ‘He didn’t count. He was insignificant. He was a weak person. And yet, we had to deal with him.’ So, he confirmed what I had suspected—that the Shah had been inflated by the power that had come to Iran with the jump in oil income plus the adulation of Nixon and Kissinger and other foreign leaders.

  “an island of stability”: The phrase President Carter used had an Iranian provenance. Kissinger told Nixon in an October 1969 memo that the shah “is genuinely committed to the West and feels the good job he is doing in Iran—‘an island of stability,’ he calls it—is an important service to the Free World.” Kissinger to Nixon, October 21, 1968, FRUS,

  1969–1976, Vol. E-4, declassified September 12, 2006.

  Howard Hart’s view from the streets: Hart remarks, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, September 7, 2005.

  “very, very sensitive classified conversations”: Laingen oral history, FAOH.

  “We paid for t”: Laingen oral history, FAOH.

  “We were just plain asleep”: Turner, Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence (New York: Hyperion, 2005), p. 180.

  “We haven’t a clue as a nation”: Hart remarks, Miller Center, September 7, 2005. Greg Miller, “In from the Cold, to a Cold Shoulder,” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2005.

  “I knew little about Iran”: William J. Daugherty, “A First Tour Like No Other,” Studies in Intelligence, Spring 1998, CIA/CSI.

  “Don’t worry about another embassy attack”: William J. Daugherty, In the Shadow of the Ayatollah: A CIA Hostage in Iran (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), p. 3.

  “ Blank the Shah!”: Jimmy Carter interview, Jimmy Carter Oral History Project, Miller Center, November 29, 1982.

  “ignorant of the local culture and language”: Daugherty, “A First Tour Like No Other.”

  the brainchild of the CIA’s Tony Mendez: Mendez interview with author; Tim Weiner, “Master Creator of Ghosts Is Honored by C.I.A.,” The New York Times, September 19, 1997. See also Antonio J. Mendez, “A Classic Case of Deception,” Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1999–2000, CIA/CSI.

  “The effort relied very heavily on the CIA”: Quainton oral history, FAOH.

  “an unsmiling cadaver”: Daugherty, “A First Tour Like No Other.”

  “an act of vengeance”: Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 128–180.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “His view of how you fight a war”: Gates interview with author.

  “I don’t think he meant to say ‘scrap the Constitution’”: Webster interview with author.

  “not qualified to be the head of the CIA”: Ford oral history in Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 72.

  “Casey was an inappropriate choice”: Bush quoted in John Helgerson, “CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates,” May 1996, CIA/CSI. Two other views of the man and the job: Laurence Silberman—the federal judge who led the 2005 investigation of the CIA’s work on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—was co-chair of Reagan’s foreign policy group in 1980. “I truthfully would have agreed to be CIA director, which was being discussed,” Silberman said. “But Casey…had a greater claim, although I thought it unwise to put a campaign chairman in that job.” Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under President Bush in 1992, put it more directly: “Either you do away with the clandestine side of the CIA, which I would not like to see happen, or you simply have to be very, very careful about the kind of person you make CIA director, and that means you don’t appoint Bill Casey.” FAOH interviews.

  “Who was going to be in charge of foreign policy?”: Poindexter oral history in Strober and Strober, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency, p. 111.

  “It was a hare-brained idea”: George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993), pp. 294–297.

  “a hog on ice”: Ibid., p. 84.

  “a freelance buccaneer”: Inman interview with author.

  “he did not want to be the traditional Director of Central Intelligence”: Inman testimony, Nomination of Robert M. Gates to Be Director of Central Intelligence, U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, 102nd Congress, 1st Session, September 20, 1991, Vol. I, p. 926.

  “a blindered fraternity”: Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 209.

  “I didn’t have that fire in the belly”: McMahon interview with author. When McMahon was assigned to shake up the analysts at the directorate of intelligence, he found that the entire structure needed reshaping. “If I wanted to know what was going on in a country, I had to ask three different offices,” McMahon said. “There was an office for military intelligence, an office for economic intelligence, an office for political intelligence. So if I said, ‘What’s going on in Mexico?’ I had input from three different offices, and I had to do the integration and come up with the analysis.”

  “CIA is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture”: Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 223–224. 379 “close-minded, smug, arrogant”…“flat out wrong”…“pretending to be experts”: Nomination of Robert M. Gates, 1991, Vol. III, pp. 7–23.

  “Working for Casey was a trial for everybody”: Lehman oral history interview, “Mr. Current Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

  “The CIA’s intelligence”: Shultz interview with author. In the summer of 1982, Secretary of State Shultz set up a weekly lunch with Bill Casey. After the better part of a year, Casey and Shultz, who had been friendly for a decade, discovered that they could not stand one another. “He had too much of an agenda,” Shultz said. “It’s a mistake for the CIA to have an agenda. They’re supposed to produce intelligence. If they have an agenda, the intelligence can get slanted.” From 1985 to 1987, Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead and the CIA’s Bob Gates carried on these meetings. Whitehead was appalled at “how little help I got from the CIA in knowing what was going on in countries where we had interests and where there were problems…. The analyses were shallow, contained very little of what I would call hard information, and often were incorrect…. I thought that the organization itself somehow had deteriorated, so that the information that it was receiving and the system of gathering information was not very productive anymore.” Whitehead oral history, FAOH. Gaping holes were growing in the agency’s map of the globe. “The principal worry I have at this point has to do with the adequacy of our intelligence effort…all over the world,” Admiral Inman said, presciently, just before joining Casey at CIA headquarters in 1981. “We lack a data base on the areas of the world which were overlooked in the 1960’s, when we were focused totally on Southeast Asia. There wasn’t a lot of worry about countries in Central America, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa. I believe the odds are very high that in this decade we will face a lot of challenges in those areas.” Bobby R. Inman, “Managing Intelligence for Effective Use,” Center for Information Policy Research, Harvard University, December 1980.

  “Sometime in the dark of night”: Clair George testimony, Nomination of Robert M. Gates, 1991, Vol. II, p. 96.

  a calculated ruse: The American ambassador to Nicaragua from 1982 to 1984, Anthony Quainton, knew the operation was a sham. “The White House had given up on the prospe
cts of any dialogue. Egged on by Bill Casey of the CIA, it believed that the only way to solve the problem was to get the Sandinistas out. The means for doing that was an elaborate covert action program. At first, it was presented to the Congress in an extremely disingenuous way. The administration argued that harassment would make life uncomfortable for the Sandinistas, would keep them from consolidating their power, and would bring them to the negotiating table. They would see that there were unacceptable costs to their economy if they did not negotiate. The CIA argued that this was the only way to persuade them to change their policies. As with other covert operations elsewhere in the world, it didn’t seem to have the promised immediate effect.” Quainton oral history, FAOH.

  “raised hell with Casey”: Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 242–248.

  “‘figure out what to do about Central America’”: Clarridge interview for the CNN Cold War series, 1998. National Security Archive transcript available online at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode 18/clarridge1.html. “The Latin American division had always been an isolated division within the Agency; it was almost like a little barony,” Clarridge said in another oral history. “So the main thing was to carry the division within me. After a couple of weeks I went back up and told Casey, ‘This is what we ought to do: Why don’t we take the war to Nicaragua…?’ This was exactly what Casey wanted to hear.” Strober and Strober, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency, p. 165.

  “The secret war began” and “The CIA had a planning process of their own”: Quainton oral history, FAOH. In the Reagan years, ambassadors very rarely spoke up in public when the CIA created foreign-policy snafus. In one of many examples of the public-relations disasters of the war in Central America, the CIA quietly offered the State Department a public-relations bonanza. The agency had debriefed a nineteen-year-old Nicaraguan captured in El Salvador. He said he had been trained in insurrection by Cuban soldiers in Ethiopia. He had a great story to tell. Was State interested in presenting him to the public in Washington? At the CIA’s behest, the State Department organized a private briefing for four trusted reporters. A press spokesman escorted the reporters into a little room and then brought in the captured Nicaraguan, who said, in so many words: “I’ve been tortured by the CIA. They tried to force me to say that I was sent into El Salvador. I’m a patriotic Nicaraguan. I’ve never been to Ethiopia.” The CIA had been stung by a slick teenager.