Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)
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“He was running a great risk”: Gates, From the Shadows, p. 315.
Chapter Forty-one
“It could be a breakthrough”: Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 501–502. Unless otherwise noted, the facts, figures, and quotations concerning the Iran-contra affair in this chapter are taken from the records of the joint congressional committee and the final report of the independent counsel team that investigated the fiasco.
“We received a draft secret executive order telling us to go knock off terrorists in pre-emptive strikes”: McMahon interview with author.
“North’s rationale”: Kelly oral history, FAOH.
“the CIA was corrupted”: Wilcox oral history, FAOH.
“get that plane the hell out of Costa Rica!”: CIA interview with Joseph Fernandez, CIA Office of the Inspector General, January 24, 1987.
“The intelligence we passed to them”: Oakley oral history, FAOH.
“The person who managed this whole affair was Casey”: Sofaer oral history in Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 500.
“The meeting was an unmitigated disaster”: James McCullough, “Personal Reflections on Bill Casey’s Last Month at CIA,” Studies in Intelligence, Summer 1995, commentary by David Gries, CIA/CSI.
“No scandal and a good many solid successes”: Casey’s remarkable talking points are cited in Douglas F. Garthoff, “Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946–2005,” 2006, CIA/CSI. These words are part of the strong body of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Casey’s brain tumor sparked otherwise inexplicable conduct during his last eighteen months as director of central intelligence. His divorce from reality in those days was exemplified by his romance with Renamo, the Mozambique National Resistance Movement. Renamo was a black guerrilla army created by the white racists of South Africa and Rhodesia and the most vicious rebel force afoot in the region. Trained, armed, and financed by BOSS, the South African intelligence service, Renamo used tactics including “the cutting off of ears, the severing of limbs and breasts, and general mutilation,” said Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., who oversaw African affairs under President Reagan. “This mutilation became the norm, and perhaps half a million people perished.” Renamo was “reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia,” said James Bishop, the principal State Department officer for African political and military affairs, “vicious and excessive in its use of terrorism.”
Casey told President Reagan that Renamo deserved the CIA’s support as freedom fighters in the global war on communism. His tactics included the “cooking of intelligence to magnify the impact of Renamo,” said Ambassador Freeman. Barred from direct support to the rebels, Casey took another tack. In 1986, after a ten-year ban, Congress took his word and revived covert military aid to the CIA’s favored armies in Angola, including Stinger missiles, antitank weapons, and tons of automatic weapons. The agency had been backing one Angolan faction or another off and on for thirty years. The renewal of the Angola program opened an arms pipeline from the agency that ran through South Africa and depended on the apartheid regime’s support. The most powerful American diplomats involved in the region strongly suspected that Casey opened up a back channel of lethal aid to the renegades of Renamo. “Casey, who was prone to follow his own foreign policy, indeed did become, to some extent, involved with Renamo, against the declared policy, and indeed the strongly held internal policy of the administration,” Ambassador Freeman said.
“Casey set out to destroy our diplomacy” in southern Africa, said Frank G. Wisner, Jr. “And he almost succeeded.” FAOH interviews.
“Bill Casey had a lot to answer for”: McCullough, “Personal Reflections.”
“a job no one else seemed to want”: Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 414. Gates had to go to Capitol Hill to answer for his nomination. “How do you like the job so far?” a newspaper photographer asked. Gates replied with the twangy title of a country-and-western hit: “Take This Job and Shove it.” An open microphone caught him. Everyone knew the next line of the song: “I ain’t working here no more.”
“It quickly became clear that he was too close”: Webster interview with author.
“The clandestine service is the heart and soul of the agency”: Gates interview with author.
Chapter Forty-two
“It took me months to get a clear understanding”: Webster interview with author.
“No one else can understand it”: Thompson interview with author.
“We probably could have overcome Webster’s ego”: Duane R. Clarridge with Digby Diehl, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 371.
“A point Dick Helms made”: Webster interview with author.
“Congress doesn’t believe you”: Webster interview with author.
Clarridge briefly considered fighting back: Clarridge, A Spy for All Seasons, pp. 381–386.
“American intelligence was generous with him,” Gorbachev remarked: Politburo minutes, September 28, 1986, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson Center.
“an exercise, nothing more”: Webster interview with author.
Florentino Aspillaga Lombard: It is hard to overstate how devastating was the realization that Castro’s intelligence service had outsmarted the CIA for twenty straight years. Nor was Aspillaga’s 1987 defection the end of it. On September 21, 2001, the FBI arrested Ana Belen Montes, the senior Cuba analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who confessed six months later that she had been spying for Cuba since 1985. Hundreds of spies from Cuba’s Direccion General de Inteligencia, the DGI, have lived and worked in the United States ever since the Bay of Pigs, according to former members of the Cuban service who have defected. They operate as diplomats and cab drivers, dealers of guns and drugs and information. The Cuban intelligence service, which reports to Defense Minister Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, has infiltrated Cuban exile groups and U.S. government agencies with notable success. Take the case of José Rafael Fernández Brenes, who jumped ship from a Cuban merchant vessel in 1988. Embraced by American intelligence, he helped set up and run TV Marti, the U.S. government–financed station that beamed anti-Castro information and propaganda at Cuba, from 1988 to 1991. The Cuban government jammed TV Marti’s signal the moment it went on the air in March 1990—thanks to the data supplied by Fernández Brenes. Then there was Francisco Avila Azcuy, who ran operations for Alpha 66, one of the most violent anti-Castro exile groups, all the while reporting secretly to the FBI—and Cuban intelligence. Avila planned a 1981 raid on Cuba, telling both the FBI and the DGI all about it. His information helped convict seven members of Alpha 66 for violating the Neutrality Act by planning an attack on a foreign nation from U.S. soil. Tim Weiner, “Castro’s Moles Dig Deep, Not Just into Exiles,” The New York Times, March 1, 1996.
“they actually did something right”: Lilley interview with author.
a brilliant plot against the Abu Nidal Organization: Tom Twetten interview with author. The best summary of the operation is Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York: Basic, 2005), pp. 196–198.
half-baked insurgency: John H. Kelly oral history, FAOH. Kelly became assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs in June 1989.
grudge match: In a May 1, 1987, letter to President Reagan, Son Sann, the president of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, the intended recipient of the CIA’s aid, warned against “improved US-Vietnam relations” and cautioned Reagan against “moderation” toward “the main Soviet proxy in Southeast Asia.” Son Sann’s letter and Powell’s memo to Reagan warning against a resurgent Khmer Rouge were both declassified May 28, 1999.
“One by one we killed them”: Howard Hart remarks, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of
Virginia, September 7, 2005.
“we don’t have any plan”: Twetten interview with author.
“drastically reduce our assistance to the real radicals”: Oakley oral history, FAOH.
Chapter Forty-three
“Casey saw him as a protégé”: Davis oral history, FAOH.
“The CIA, who had dealt with him for so long”: Pastorino oral history, FAOH.
“As a former deputy director of the CIA”: Dachi oral history, FAOH.
The CIA’s Don Winters testified: Trial transcripts of United States v. Manuel Noriega.
“Saddam Hussein was known to be a brutal dictator”: Wilcox oral history, FAOH.
“The arrested agents were tortured to death”: Giraldi interview, Balkananaly sis.com, July 30, 2006. The author interviewed Giraldi in 1994 and 1995. Leaving aside the human tragedy of the agents’ deaths, the CIA’s reporting and analysis on Iran was consistently off the mark during this period. In the summer of 1987, during the final agonies of the Iran-Iraq War, Iran was harassing Kuwaiti oil tankers at sea. The ships then were placed under the American flag and protected by navy warships. The CIA assessed the situation in the Persian Gulf and strongly advised an end to the reflagging operation. The question went to the national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, the former deputy director of central intelligence. “The Agency produced a report which essentially said no military confrontation with Iran would work,” Carlucci said. “The Iranians provoked us and we sank half their Navy in twenty-four hours. They went back and put their ships in the harbor, so we were able to sail with impunity in the Gulf. The CIA was wrong.” Carlucci oral history, FAOH.
“Is Iraq Bluffing?”: Richard L. Russell, “CIA’s Strategic Intelligence in Iraq,” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 2002. Russell served for seventeen years as a political-military analyst at CIA.
“I did sound the warning bell”: Charles Allen remarks, “Intelligence: Cult, Craft, or Business?” Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, April 6, 2000.
King Hussein of Jordan told the president: Memorandum of telephone conversation, with King Hussein, July 31, 1990, HWBL.
“there wasn’t much intelligence”: James A. Baker III with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: Putnam, 1995), p. 7.
“an unfortunately quite typical pattern”: Freeman oral history, FAOH. On January 10, 1991, the CIA warned the White House and the Pentagon that “Saddam Hussein almost certainly will unleash a major terrorist campaign against Western—particularly U.S.—interests. Multiple, simultaneous attacks are likely to occur in several geographic regions—possibly including the United States—in an effort to capture maximum publicity and sow widespread panic.” There was never any evidence that Iraqi intelligence cells had penetrated the United States, but the CIA and the FBI did track at least three groups of Iraqi military officers in the Middle East and Asia and captured them in the days immediately before the American attack on Iraq. CIA, “Terrorism Review,” January 10, 1991, CIA/FOIA.
“‘CIA hadn’t a clue’”: Clarke interview, Frontline, “The Dark Side,” January 23, 2006, edited transcript available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/clarke.html.
“a tidal wave of history”: 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. 449. Gates oversaw a National Security Council staff under Bush filled with experts who disdained the work of the analysts Gates had led at the CIA. Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill was the NSC staff man for Soviet and European affairs in 1989 and 1990. “The Agency was still putting out gobs of analytic products that I never read,” he said. “During the two years I did not read a single [National Intelligence] Estimate. Not one. And except for Gates, I do not know of anyone at the NSC who did.” Blackwill quoted in Jack Davis, “A Policymaker’s Perspective on Intelligence Analysis,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 38, No. 5, 1995, CIA/CSI.
“the basic elements of Soviet defense policy”: NIE 11–3/8–88, “Soviet Forces and Capabilities for Strategic Nuclear Conflict Through the Late 1990s,” December 1, 1988, CIA/CSI.
“people would have been calling for my head”: MacEachin cited in Kirsten Lundberg, “CIA and the Fall of the Soviet Empire: The Politics of ‘Getting It Right,’” Case Study C16-94-1251.0, Harvard University, 1994, pp. 30–31.
“He’d never once been there”: Palmer oral history, FAOH.
“They talked about the Soviet Union”: Crowe oral history, FAOH.
“What are we going to do when the Wall comes down?”: Walters quoted in David Fischer oral history, FAOH.
“there were no Soviet spies”: If there was ever a time for the CIA to press hard to understand why those spies had died, it was during the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1990 and 1991. “When I was [first] nominated to be director in 1987 I had lunch with Dick Helms,” Bob Gates told me. “And I remember Helms wagging his finger at me at the lunch in the Director’s dining room, it was just the two of us, we were all by ourselves, and him telling me, never go home at night without wondering where the mole is.” In 1992, in the last months of Bob Gates’s short turn as director of central intelligence, the case began to be resolved. Aldrich Ames was arrested in February 1994. Gates interview with author.
“It was easy, once upon a time, for the CIA to be unique”: Bearden interview with author.
“The ultimate tragedy is spiritual”: Giraldi interview with author.
“this was rapidly evolving into a very bad situation”: Arnold Donahue, “Perspectives on U.S. Intelligence,” Program on Information Resources, Harvard University, April 1998.
“Sitting alone in the vice president’s office was surrealistic”: Michael J. Sulick, “As the USSR Collapsed: A CIA Officer in Lithuania,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2006, CIA/CSI.
“Adjust or die”: Gates note and announcement to CIA employees cited in Douglas F. Garthoff, “Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946–2005,” 2006, CIA/CSI. Garthoff worked at CIA from 1972 to 1999, serving many years as an analyst of Soviet affairs under Gates.
“We have lost”: Richard Kerr, “The Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence System in the Post-Soviet Era,” Program on Information Resources, Harvard University, Spring 1992.
“19-year-olds on two-year rotations”: MacEachin cited in Robert Steele, “Private Enterprise Intelligence: Its Potential Contribution to National Security,” paper delivered at conference on Intelligence Analysis and Assessment, Ottawa, Canada, October 22–29, 1994. Steele is a CIA veteran who champions open-source analysis.
“Tensions rising as budget pinches”: Gates note cited in Garthoff, “Directors of Central Intelligence.”
Chapter Forty-four
“immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity”: Anthony Lake, “From Containment to Enlargment,” Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, September 21, 1993.
he would be the next director of central intelligence: Bill Clinton charmed most of the CIA briefers, who came to Little Rock, holed up in $38.50-a-night motel rooms at the Comfort Inn by the airport, and drove out to the governor’s mansion to school him. But they were never quite sure how much he was really taking in. John L. Helgerson. Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992, CIA/CSI.
“Admiral, I didn’t know” and “I didn’t have a bad relationship”: Woolsey remarks, Council on Foreign Relations, May 12, 2004; Woolsey interview with author.
“nobody’s seen the president”: Twetten interview with author.
dozens of covert-action proposals during his first two years in office: While the precise number remains classified, “the Clinton administration requested a remarkable number of covert action proposals to deal with the increasingly troublesome array of problems it faced in the early 1990s, only to conclude that covert a
ction could not save the United States from overt military intervention,” in the words of John MacGaffin, the number-two man in the clandestine service under Clinton and the author’s downstairs neighbor after he left the CIA. By the way, MacGaffin never leaked. See his “Spies, Counterspies, and Covert Action,” in Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber (eds.) Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), pp. 79–95.
“No harsher test was there than Somalia”: Wisner oral history, FAOH.
“the intelligence failure in Somalia”: Crowe oral history, FAOH. Before the admiral took over the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, he had to tell President Clinton what it was: “Early in the Administration, the President and I talked about what I would like to do,” Crowe recalled. “I said, ‘PFIAB,’ and he said, ‘What’s PFIAB?’ So I had to tell him what it was.”
Not long after dawn on January 25: The events of January 25, 1993, are reconstructed from a report that Nick Starr filed for the CIA’s in-house newsletter and from court records. Four and a half years later, the killer, Mir Amal Kansi, was arrested in Pakistan in a rendition operation coordinated by the CIA and backed by a $2 million reward. He said the murders were an act of vengeance for American foreign policy in the Middle East. The state of Virginia convicted him of murder and put him to death by lethal injection.
“a member of the Central Intelligence Agency in Khartoum”: O’Neill oral history, FAOH.
“But the CIA eventually concluded”: Intelligence memorandum, “Iraq: Baghdad Attempts to Assassinate Former President Bush,” CIA Counterterrorist Center, July 12, 1993, CIA/FOIA.
“proportionate to the attack on President Bush”: Tim Weiner, “Attack Is Aimed at the Heart of Iraq’s Spy Network,” The New York Times, June 27, 1993.
“Saddam tries to assassinate”: Woolsey remarks, Restoration Weekend, Palm Beach, Florida, November 16, 2002.