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

by Tim Weiner

  The agency’s unique “planning process” almost ended the careers of Senator Gary Hart and Senator William Cohen, the latter a future secretary of defense. They came close to being killed on a fact-finding mission in Nicaraguan when a CIA plane that had just unleashed two five-hundred-pound bombs crashed into the VIP lounge at Managua’s international airport. “This created a very negative attitude in those two senators about the quality of the covert operations of the CIA,” Ambassador Quainton aid.

  The secret war did not stay secret: The CIA could not have won that war, whether or not Congress had approved it. “We never had the ability to build back the paramilitary capability that we needed to conduct a war in Nicaragua,” said John McMahon. “The agency was not prepared—in personnel particularly—to fight a war or train others to fight a war.” McMahon interview with author.

  “yuppie spies”: Duane R. Clarridge with Digby Diehl, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997), pp. 303–318.

  Congress strongly supported a bigger, better, stronger, smarter CIA: The Senate had confirmed Casey 95–0 and the Congress gave him hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds at the end of 1981. “They wanted us to have a worldwide clandestine capability so we could provide intelligence on intentions and warning,” said John McMahon. “They wanted us to have a good covert-action infrastructure. Now the beauty of having a good clandestine operation is that often the individual that you have recruited to provide you intelligence of what’s going on in their government is also influential—and you can use him as a covert-action asset. If he’s the foreign minister, you can subtly influence that country to support a UN vote or to say good things about the United States. So our covert-action capability began to come back very strongly.” McMahon interview with author.

  “guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in”: Gates, From the Shadows, p. 213. 382 “I hope that will hold the bastards!”: Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the defeated Republican candidate for president in 1964, was the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee from 1981 to 1984. Casey was so stingy with the truth that Goldwater demanded chaperones from the State Department to accompany him to the witness table to serve as custodians of fact. One of those chaperones, Ambassador Dennis Kux, heard Casey muttering this line as he left the hearing room. Kux oral history, FAOH.

  “specifically evasive”: Fiers testimony, Joint Hearings, Iran-Contra Investigation, Washington, D.C., 1988.

  “‘I caught him lying to me’”: Inman interview in Stansfield Turner, Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence (New York: Hyperion, 2005), pp. 196–201.

  “If Congress would not finance the CIA’s operations in Central America”: In 1984, when Congress cut off funds for the CIA’s contras, the war stalled, and elections were held. The CIA provided money and propaganda for Arturo Cruz, Sr., a former ambassador to the United States and the legitimate leader of the political opposition to the Sandinistas. But the Sandinistas’ leader, Daniel Ortega, trounced him two-to-one. At this writing, Ortega has been re-elected and Nicaragua remains one of the poorest and most benighted nations in the Western Hemisphere. “The war was unnecessary, inhuman, and unwise,” Cruz said after Reagan and Casey were dead and departed. “We have to say that we all make tremendous mistakes.

  Despite Casey’s open disdain: Kux oral history, FAOH.

  “The CIA was deeply involved”: Norland oral history, FAOH.

  The official foreign policy of the United States: “We would like to see a peaceful resolution of Chadian factional fighting,” a November 17, 1981, State Department briefing paper said. It was hard to see how the CIA’s arming one faction to the teeth promoted that goal. “Libyan Threat to Sudan,” Department of State, declassified July 30, 2002.

  “‘Fuck the Congress’”: Blakemore oral history, FAOH.

  “What the hell did we give Stinger missiles to Chad for?”: Richard Bogosian oral history, FAOH. Bogosian, the American ambassador to Sudan during the 1991 Gulf War, witnessed Baker’s query. The answer, said James K. Bishop, the principal State Department officer for military and intelligence affairs in Africa, was that Habré was “the enemy of our enemy…. We didn’t know his full history until later.” Bishop oral history, FAOH. “Our intelligence on the parts of Africa which were of principal concern to us was not good” throughout the 1980s, Bishop said. “Intelligence from human sources was not particularly good throughout Africa. Intelligence assets were principally employed against the ‘main enemy’—the Soviets—in cat-and-mouse recruitment games of dubious national interest.”

  The CIA’s biggest gunrunning mission: A few Americans—very few—foresaw the Soviet invasion. “I remember writing reports for Brzezinski as early as August 1979 saying that the level of Soviet military advisory personnel in Afghanistan at the time portended some kind of major military involvement there,” said William Odom, then the senior White House military aide, in an interview with the author (Odom would later be a three-star general who ran the National Security Agency under President Reagan). “Now, as for the exact timing and the exact day that it happened, that’s another issue. It did come as a surprise to the world and to a lot of people in the Carter administration.” The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began during Christmas week of 1979, and the CIA gave the president of the United States next to no warning. Carter, helpless to free the Americans trapped in Iran, approved a plan to help the Afghans fighting against the brutal Soviet invasion. In January 1980 he ordered the CIA to ship Soviet-bloc weapons out of the arms stockpiles of American allies into Pakistan. The Pakistani intelligence service would transship them to a handful of Afghan rebel leaders. “Two days after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan I gave a memo to the President of the United States which, if I recall correctly, started with the words, ‘We now have the opportunity to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam,’” Brzezinski said in an interview with the author. “And it then went on to argue that this was an act of aggression that posed a threat to the stability of that region, and potentially to our position even in the Persian Gulf, and that we should do what we can to bog the Soviets down by aiding the mujahedin. And the President approved that. A quiet coalition was created involving us, the Pakistanis, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Egyptians, the British to provide support. And the purpose of that was essentially in keeping with the first words of that memo to the President.” Howard Hart’s remarks are from his speech at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, September 7, 2005.

  “you always have to think of the endgame”: McMahon interview with author.

  “the growing desperation of the men in the Kremlin”: Gates, From the Shadows, p. 258. What was really happening in Moscow? Casey wanted to deliver intelligence on the players at the Politburo, on the Soviet people, on Soviet minorities and dissidents, on day-to-day existence inside the evil empire. But when the CIA could not provide it through espionage, he clung to his preconceptions. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman was the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Moscow from 1981 to 1984, and for those four years Casey and the CIA junked his unvarnished reporting of a collapsing Soviet empire. When he arrived, Zimmerman recounted, the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, “was in his dotage, he was slurring his words, he was falling asleep, he was getting drunk.” When Brezhnev died, the nation was led briefly by Yuri Andropov, the chief of Soviet intelligence, who was dying, too, and then by Konstantin Chernenko, another leader at death’s door. The Politburo, the decision-making machine in Moscow, was “an absolutely paralyzed, ineffective political apparatus” led by “a bunch of 70-and 80-year-olds, some of whom had never been out of the Soviet Union,” Zimmerman said. “Their view of the United States was entirely stereotyped, based on what they read in their horrible newspapers and magazines.” They had “only the most rudimentary knowledge and understanding of the United States.” The American understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union was not much better. Geriatric generals and corrupt o
ld-guard Communist Party apparatchiks doddered through their last days, the Soviet economy crumbled under the costs of sustaining a world-class military, harvests rotted in the fields for want of fuel to truck the food from farms to markets—and few of these facts entered the collective consciousness of the CIA. Nor did the agency grasp the calculus of the balance of terror.Every single national intelligence estimate on Soviet strategic forces sent to the White House from 1974 to 1986 would overstate the rate at which Moscow was modernizing its nuclear firepower.

  The peak of the unseen nuclear crisis of 1982 and 1983 came when Reagan announced that the United States would build a missile defense system—“Star Wars”—that would strike and destroy Soviet nuclear weapons in midair. America did not have—and twenty-five years later still does not have—the technology that Reagan envisioned. The Reagan administration bolstered the Strategic Defense Initiative with a rigorous counterpropaganda campaign, to convince the Soviets that “Star Wars” was based on real science and to blunt world criticism of the visionary plan. The information-warfare program gave the Soviets shivers. “They were genuinely scared,” Zimmerman said. “They assumed, funnily enough, that we could build it. As it turned out, we faked our tests, and they believed it.” In turn, the Soviets faked their own strength—in political lies to their people, in the public pronouncements of the Politburo—and the CIA believed it. Zimmerman oral history, FAOH.

  The agency’s line on Soviet nuclear weaponry and weapons research was at the time enhanced by an operation run by Jim Olson, later the CIA’s counterintelligence chief. During the Carter administration, as Olson recounted, the new Keyhole photoreconnaissance satellites looked down as the Soviets dug a trench alongside a highway outside Moscow and laid telecommunications cables in it. The line ran to a nuclear-weapons research and development center outside Moscow. Manhole covers marked the line. Olson went to Moscow after elaborate training on an underground mock-up, shook off his KGB surveillance team, put on a disguise, opened a manhole, went underground, and tapped the line. The take ran for almost five years—and then the tapes went blank. James M. Olson, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2006), pp. 9–11.

  the Farewell dossier: Gus W. Weiss, “The Farewell Dossier,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 39, No. 5, 1996, CSA/CSI. Weiss was the National Security Council staffer who devised key elements of the plan of attack.

  “It was a brilliant plan”: Richard Allen, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Ronald Reagan Oral History Project, May 28, 2002.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  “After a couple of jelly beans, the President dozed off”: Quainton oral history, FAOH.

  “the Soviets were secretly directing the dirty work of the world’s worst terrorists”: After the cold war, evidence emerged of direct Soviet support for Wadi Had dad, a renegade Palestinian terrorist who died in 1978. Haig’s charge remains unproven.

  Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of intelligence for the Palestine Liberation Organization: On March 2, 1973—the day Bill Colby took over the CIA’s clandestine service—the PLO, which had burst into Americans’ consciousness six months before by murdering eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, kidnapped the American ambassador to the Sudan and his second-in-command. The Americans were seized at a reception at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The attack was a consequence of a coup against the prime minister of the Sudan, whose paid relationship with the CIA had just been exposed. “Putting the prime minister on our payroll was just an invitation for trouble and totally unnecessary,” said the State Department’s Robert Oakley, Reagan’s counterterrorism coordinator. “By putting him on the CIA payroll we corrupted him politically and made him extremely vulnerable.” The kidnappers in Khartoum demanded that the United States free the convicted murderer of Bobby Kennedy, a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. President Nixon, responding off the top of his head to a reporter’s question that day, said the United States would not negotiate with terrorists. The Palestinians, on orders from Yasser Arafat, murdered the two American diplomats in cold blood.

  The CIA could not respond because the U.S. government had no policy to guide it. The PLO had been in action for nine years, financed chiefly by the government of Saudi Arabia and the emirs of Kuwait. The fixation at the CIA and throughout the U.S. government with the idea of state-sponsored terrorism continued after the cold war. It made it much harder, twenty years later, for Americans to understand the rise of a rich Saudi who had lived in the Sudan, a self-anointed prince named Osama bin Laden—not a state-sponsored terrorist, but a terrorist who sponsored a state.

  The first stirrings of a Middle East peace process after the 1973 Yom Kippur war led the CIA into a new and uncharted territory. In secret, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Vernon Walters flew to Morocco to meet Ali Hassan Salameh. The meeting was initiated by Yasser Arafat; he was sending a signal that he wanted to be treated as a national leader, not a stateless terrorist. He wanted the PLO to negotiate for the West Bank after the Yom Kippur war. He wanted to establish a Palestinian National Authority. He was trying to establish himself as the moderate voice of Palestinian aspirations. Walters remembered: “Kissinger said, ‘I can’t send anyone else, because that would be negotiation, and the American Jewish community would go crazy. But you are an intelligence contact.’ I said, ‘Dr. Kissinger, I’m deputy director of the CIA. I’m probably number six or seven on their hit list.’ He replied: ‘I’m number one. That’s why you’re going.’” The meeting bore fruit. The CIA opened up a channel of high-level communications with the PLO. After Salameh returned from Morocco to his base in Lebanon and made contact with the CIA station in Beirut, the PLO intelligence chief began to meet on a regular basis with the CIA’s Bob Ames. Walters oral history, FAOH.

  Not everybody believed the information that the CIA was buying in Beirut. “They were prisoners of their lousy reports,” said Talcott Seelye, who arrived as the American ambassador in Lebanon after his predecessor, Francis Meloy, was murdered while attempting to present his diplomatic credentials in 1976. The Salameh channel lasted for five years, until he was assassinated by Israeli intelligence in 1978. It represented a high-water mark in the CIA’s understanding of the roots of rage in the Arab world, a glimmer of insight into who the Palestinians were and what they wanted—the sole and signal triumph of Bill Colby’s time as director of central intelligence. Seelye oral history; FAOH; Colby interview with author.

  His case officer was Bob Ames: Ames was “uniquely talented,” Bob Gates said in an interview with the author. “I always considered my greatest recruit in my whole life at the agency was recruiting Bob Ames out of the clandestine service to be the head of the CIA analytical office working on the Middle East. And ironically after all of his years in the agency, working in the Middle East in dangerous operations, putting his life on the line, he was in Beirut as chief of the analytical office, visiting the embassy, when he was killed. So he was working for me when he was killed, not the clandestine service. I have often thought that if Bob Ames had lived, the United States might not have intervened in Lebanon and the course of history there might have been changed somewhat.”

  “the wave of the future”: Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York: Basic, 2005), p. 85.

  “the Agency people were busy”: Dillon oral history, FAOH.

  “He was exhilarated to be back”: Susan M. Morgan, “Beirut Diary,” Studies in Intelligence, Summer 1983, CIA/CSI. Morgan’s recently declassified firsthand account conclusively contradicts several published versions of the Beirut embassy bombing, notably that of the CIA’s Bob Baer, who describes Ames’s hand being recovered hundreds of yards out in the harbor of Beirut.

  “leaving us with too little intelligence”: Lewis oral history, FAOH.

  “Our intelligence about Grenada was lousy”: Clarridge interview for the CNN Cold War Series, 1998, National Security Archive transcript available online at htt
p://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-18/ clarridge1.html.

  “The CIA had a plan to form a government”: Gillespie oral history, FAOH.

  Chapter Forty

  “There was a presidential finding signed by Ronald Reagan”: Wells interview with author.

  “To save his own ass”: O’Neill oral history, FAOH.

  “The Reagan Administration took a covert operation”: Korn interview with author and oral history, FAOH.

  “Casey’s recommendation to kidnap Mughniyah”: Oakley oral history, FAOH.

  “Reagan was preoccupied with the fate of the hostages and could not understand why CIA could not locate and rescue them”: Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows : The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the ColdWar (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 397.

  “the Agency had to reach outside itself”: McMahon interview with author.

  “the mines has got to be the solution!”: 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 late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, described the CIA’s defamation of Senator Goldwater in an interview with the author. In 1984, while cutting off funds for the contras, Congress approved a CIA covert operation to spend more than $2 million to ensure the election of the Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte as president of El Salvador, while blunting the candidacy of the death-squad leader Roberto d’Aubuisson.