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

by Tim Weiner

  Many of its leaders had been on the CIA’s payroll for years: Tim Weiner with Steve Engelberg and Howard French, “CIA Formed Haitian Unit Later Tied to Narcotics Trade,” The New York Times, November 14, 1993. A brief portrait of one of the CIA’s men in Haiti, taken from that article: Among the military officers who took the agency’s cash and led the Haitian intelligence service was Colonel Ernst Prudhomme, a member of the anti-Aristide junta that seized power in Haiti. On November 2, 1989, while he held the title of chief of national security and received the CIA’s largesse, he led a brutal interrogation of Evans Paul, the mayor of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. The interrogation left the mayor with five broken ribs and internal injuries. “Prudhomme himself never touched me,” Paul said. “He played the role of the intellectual, the man who searched carefully for contradictions in your account—the man who seemed to give direction to the whole enterprise. He wanted to present me to the world as a terrorist…. He seemed to have so much information about my life, all the way from my childhood. It was if he had been following me step by step.”

  “the Thomas Jefferson of Haiti”: Woolsey remarks, Council on Foreign Relations, May 12, 2004.

  a CIA study saying half a million people might die: Tim Weiner, “Critics Say U.S. Ignored C.I.A. Warnings of Genocide in Rwanda,” The New York Times, March 26, 1998. It was hard to see what the CIA could have done to prevent the slaughter even if the White House had the will, for it had no one stationed in Rwanda. “The CIA was not very helpful in terms of internal African politics. Never had been,” said Clinton’s ambassador in Rwanda, Robert E. Gribbin III, a professional diplomat with long service on the continent. “They weren’t particularly interested in it.”

  The president’s response to Rwanda: That response came in a major foreign policy order called Presidential Decision Directive 25. Dated May 3, 1994, and still largely classified, it aimed to make the United Nations take the lead in peacekeeping operations.

  “Frankenstein’s creature”: James Monnier Simon, Jr., “Managing Domestic, Military, and Foreign Policy Requirements: Correcting Frankenstein’s Blunder,” in Sims and Gerber, Transforming U.S. Intelligence, pp. 149–161.

  Chapter Forty-five

  “I know what the Soviet Union is really all about”: Ames interview with author.

  “Their names were given to the Soviet intelligence service”: Hitz interview with author.

  “You have to wonder whether the CIA has become no different from any other bureaucracy”: Glickman interview with author.

  “I would disembowel the CIA”: Odom interview with author.

  “The place just needs a total overhaul”: Specter interview with author.

  “What does it all mean now?”: Aspin interview with author.

  “Our goal is to sell intelligence”: Snider quoted in Loch K. Johnson, “The Aspin-Brown Intelligence Inquiry: Behind the Closed Doors of a Blue Ribbon Commission,” Studies in Intelligence, Fall 2004, CIA/CSI.

  “Counterterrorism received little attention”: Johnson, “The Aspin-Brown Intelligence Inquiry.”

  “inadequote numbers of people on the front line”: Hitz interview with the author.

  Chapter Forty-six

  “The president asked me whether I was interested in being the director of central intelligence”: Deutch interview with author.

  “Plagued by poor leadership, the Agency is adrift”: John A. Gentry, “A Framework for Reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” available online at http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/. Gentry had been a CIA analyst for twelve years.

  “seeing it as nothing but trouble”: Helms interview with author.

  Eight thousand people were dead, and the agency had missed it: Stephen Engelberg and Tim Weiner with Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez, “Srebrenica: The Days of Slaughter,” The New York Times, October 29, 1995.

  the CIA’s Paris station had run an elaborate operation: Tim Weiner, “C.I.A. Confirms Blunders During Economic Spying on France,” The New York Times, March 13, 1996.

  The division was a world apart at the CIA: Tim Weiner, “More Is Told About C.I.A. in Guatemala,” The New York Times, April 25, 1995.

  “The CIA station in Guatemala was about twice the size it needed to be”: Stroock interview with author.

  “The chief of station came into my office”: McAfee interview with author.

  “Let me explain life to you”: Tenet interview with author.

  “Dick Clarke came to me and said, ‘They’re going to blow you up’”: Lake interview with author.

  the agency conspired with an Iraqi exile named Ayad Alawi: In May 2004, a year into the American occupation of Iraq, the United States propelled Alawi into the post of prime minister. Despite his articulateness and ambition, he was not a political success. The near-universal knowledge of his long-standing ties to the CIA was not counted in his favor.

  an old and troubled romance: In the summer of 1972, the agency delivered a $5.38 million package of aid and arms personally approved by Nixon and Kissinger “to assist…the Iraqi Kurds in their resistance against the Ba’athi Iraqi regime,” in Kissinger’s words. Kissinger then sold the Kurds down the river two years later, abandoning American support for their cause in order to pacify the shah of Iran, who had grown fearful of an independent Kurdish state. Kissinger memo, undated but on or about July 31, 1971, in FRUS, 1969–1972. Vol. E-4, document 322, declassified September 2006.

  “The Saddam case was an interesting case”: Lowenthal interview with author.

  “It would have been a great challenge”: Lake interview with author.

  “a dancing bear in a political circus”: Lake interview with author.

  “It is impossible to overstate the turbulence”: Hitz interview with author.

  Its ability to collect and analyze secrets was falling apart: A strong encryption program called PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy, had been available for free on the World Wide Web since the end of the cold war. On March 20, 1997, the deputy director of the National Security Agency, William Crowell, told Congress: “If all the personal computers in the world—260 million computers—were put to work on a single PGP-encrypted message, it would still take an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a single message.” How was American intelligence going to unscramble that? Crowell testimony, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, March 20, 1997.

  “great successes are rare and failure is routine”: “IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century,” Staff Study, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 1996.

  The careers of three years’ worth of CIA trainees were blighted: Completion of the CIA’s training course was no guarantee of success when stationed overseas. Jim Olson, who served as chief of station in Moscow, Vienna, and Mexico City, told the story of a bright young couple who reported to him as newly minted case officers. She was a lawyer, he was an engineer. “I had high hopes for them,” he recounted. But after less than a week, they told him that they had ethical qualms about recruiting agents “under false pretenses. They said they simply could not bring themselves to mislead and manipulate innocent people that way.” Of course, that is what CIA officers overseas do for a living. The couple could not be salvaged. They quit, and wound up driving a long-haul tractor trailer in tandem. Olson was “very curious why their moral reservations had not turned up in training.” It turned out that they had indeed expressed their fears, but their instructors told them not to worry—that “everything would be fine once they got to their first assignment.” Everything was not fine. Olson, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2006), pp. 251–252. A 2003 graduate of the CIA’s training school., T. J. Waters, has reported similar misfeasance by his instructors. There seems to be a problem down on the Farm. T. J. Waters, Class 11: Inside the Largest Spy Class in CIA History (New York: Dutton, 2006).

  “depth, breadth, and expertise”: Report of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep
resentative Porter J. Goss, Chairman, June 18, 1997.

  “From the vantage point of 2001…intelligence failure is inevitable”: Russ Travers, “The Coming Intelligence Failure,” Studies in Intelligence, 1997, CIA/CSI. Travers wrote: “Failure may be of the traditional variety: we fail to predict the fall of a friendly government; we do not provide sufficient warning of a surprise attack against one of our allies or interests; we are completely surprised by a state-sponsored terrorist attack; or we fail to detect an unexpected country acquiring a weapon of mass destruction. Or it may take a more nontraditional form: we overstate numerous threats leading to tens of billions of dollars of unnecessary expenditures; database errors lead to a politically unacceptable number of casualties in a peaceenforcement operation; or an operation does not go well…. In the end, we may not suffer a Pearl Harbor, but simply succumb to a series of mistakes that raises questions about an intelligence budget that dwarfs the entire defense budget of most countries. The Community will try to explain the failure(s) away, and it will legitimately point to extenuating circumstances. But we are going to begin making more and bigger mistakes more often. It is only a matter of time before the results rise to the level of acknowledged intelligence failure…. The reasons will be simple: we have gotten away from basics—the collection and unbiased analysis of facts.”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  “We were nearly bankrupt”: Tenet testimony, 9/11 Commission, April 14, 2004; Tenet remarks, Kutztown University, April 27, 2005. Tenet testified that he inherited a CIA “whose dollars were declining and whose expertise was ebbing…. The infrastructure to recruit, train, and sustain officers for our clandestine service—the nation’s human intelligence capability—was in disarray…. Our information systems were becoming obsolescent during the greatest information technology change in our lifetimes.”

  the fifty greatest: The list of the CIA’s “Trailblazers” included Robert Ames, lost in the Beirut embassy bombing of 1983; Dick Bissell, progenitor of the U-2 and the Bay of Pigs; Jamie Critchfield, who had run the Gehlen organization; Allen Dulles, the Great White Case Officer; Richard Lehman, whose briefings Dulles had judged by their heft; Art Lundahl, the photo interpreter in the Cuban missile crisis; Tony Mendez, the master of disguise; and, of course, Frank Wisner, the avatar of covert action.

  “The only remaining superpower”: Helms interview with author.

  “The trust that was reposed in the CIA has faded”: Schlesinger interview with author.

  “Intelligence isn’t just something for the cold war”: Goss interview with author.

  “a very disturbing event”: Charles Allen remarks, “Intelligence: Cult, Craft, or Business?” Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, April 6, 2000.

  “The likelihood of a cataclysmic warning failure is growing”: Mary O. McCarthy, “The Mission to Warn: Disaster Looms,” Defense Intelligence Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998.

  Tenet decided to cancel the operation: The blow-by-blow is in the 9/11 Commission report.

  “We will need much better intelligence on this facility”: McCarthy quoted in 9/11 Commission report.

  “It was a mistake”: Petterson oral history, FAOH.

  “The decision to target al Shifa”: Carney interview with author. I covered the Nairobi bombings and the al Shifa aftermath for The New York Times; interviews for the latter story included senior CIA, NSC, State, and Defense officials. They were conducted on background and sadly must re-main there, but two were with members of the “Small Group,” the highest national-security circle, whose six members included the national security adviser and the director of central intelligence. Clinton’s sexual dalliances with an intern had just become public, and the officials I interviewed were not quite sure what they believed anymore. But they put up a good show.

  “a catastrophic systemic intelligence failure”: Cited in “Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to 9/11,” House intelligence committee hearing, September 5, 2002. The sense that something terrible was about to happen was unbearable for some members of the intelligence community. Three weeks after that September 11, 1998, warning, John Millis, a veteran clandestine service officer who was the staff director for chairman Porter Goss at the House intelligence committee, gave a speech to CIA retirees. Millis said the agency was drowning in meaningless data, short on brainpower, approaching collapse. “People used to come to us and brag that CIA is the 911 of the government,” he mused. “Well, if you’re dialing 911, intelligence has already lost.” Millis blew his head off with a shotgun in a seedy motel outside Washington on June 4, 2000.

  “in ten years we won’t be relevant”: Tenet interview with author.

  “to use deception, to use manipulation, to use, frankly, dishonesty”: Smith interview with author.

  “people that are a little different”: Gates interview with author.

  gung-ho became go slow: Gary Schroen’s accounts of the misfires against bin Laden are in his 9/11 Commission testimony. He summed it up years later: “We didn’t do enough. We didn’t penetrate bin Laden’s inner circle; we still haven’t. So, yeah, there was a failure.” Schroen interview, Frontline, “The Dark Side,” January 20, 2006, edited transcript available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/ interviews/schroen.html.

  “the United States had the capability to remove Osama bin Laden”: MacGaffin, “Spies, Counterspies, and Covert Action,” in Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber (eds.), Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005).

  The Afghans kept tracking bin Laden’s travels: The pursuit of bin Laden and the hesitation of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House are detailed in the 9/11 Commission report.

  “The bombing of the Chinese embassy”: Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, Harvard Seminar on Intelligence, Command, and Control, Program on Information Resources Policy, November 2001.

  “You Americans are crazy”: 9/11 Commission report, “Intelligence Policy,” Staff Statement No. 7.

  “The threat could not be more real”: Tenet cited in 9/11 Commission report.

  “a lot of money”: Clarke testimony in 9/11 Commission report.

  Al Qaeda was the obvious suspect: The pre-and post-election briefings of George Bush by the CIA and Bill Clinton are in the 9/11 Commission report. The bombing of the USS Cole brought an unusually vehement attack from John Lehman, the secretary of the navy during the Reagan administration. He raged at “the obscene failure of intelligence” in the attack in an opinion article published in the Washington Post three days afterward. “But of course, no one could be surprised by intelligence failure. In 14 years of government service in three administrations I observed many historic crises, and in every one the consolidated product of the intelligence bureaucracy either failed to provide warning, as in Kuwait, or was grossly wrong in its assessment…. But nothing is ever done. Cole is the latest victim of a $30 billion jobs program that takes the most wondrous products of space and electronic technology and turns them into useless mush.”

  Chapter Forty-eight

  “why a foreseeable disaster went unforeseen”: James Monnier Simon, Jr., Seminar on Intelligence, Command, and Control, Program of Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, July 2001.

  “cut off from the realities of the outside world by their antiquated information technologies”: I had heard tales of how bad the CIA’s work stations and information technologies were, but I never fully understood them until Bruce Berkowitz, a former CIA officer and a highly respected consultant to the agency, published the hard facts in Studies in Intelligence in 2003. “Analysts know far less about new information technology and services than do their counterparts in the private sector and other government organizations,” he wrote after spending a year at the agency as a CIA scholar in residence. “On average, they seem about five years or more behind. Many analysts seem unaware of data that are available on the Internet and from other non-CIA sources.” He said the mess
age from CIA managers was: “that technology is a threat, not a benefit; that the CIA does not put a high priority on analysts using IT easily or creatively; and, worst of all, that data outside the CIA’s own network are secondary to the intelligence mission.” Bruce Berkowitz, “Failing to Keep Up with the Information Revolution,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2003, CIA/CSI.

  “When these attacks occur, as they likely will”: Clarke e-mail cited in 9/11 Commission report.

  “Either al Qaeda is a threat worth acting against or it is not”: Clark cited in 9/11 Commission report.

  “One hopes they won’t be fatal”: Garrett Jones, “Working with the CIA,” Parameters (U.S. Army War College Quarterly), Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter 2001–2002. Among the fatal consequences of 9/11, little noticed in the civilian world, was this: by blind chance, the plane that struck the Pentagon killed most if not all of the naval intelligence staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  “the dark side”: Speaking from Camp David on Meet the Press on Sunday, September 16, 2001, Cheney said, “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.”

  President Bush issued a fourteen-page top secret directive to Tenet and the CIA: On January 10, 2007, the existence of the directive was acknowledged in a court filing by the CIA. The secret order authorized the CIA “to detain terrorists” and “to set up detention facilities outside the United States.” Declaration of Marilyn A. Dorn, ACLU v. Department of Defense.

  “What would it have? Well, a thumbprint”: James M. Simon, Jr., “Analysis, Analysts, and Their Role in Government and Intelligence,” Harvard seminar, Program on Information Resources Policy, July 2003.

  “I could not not do this”: Hayden testimony, Senate intelligence committee, May 18, 2006. At this writing, Hayden is running the CIA. He has been articulate about how close to the edge of the law he is willing to go. “We’re going to live on the edge,” he has said. “My spikes will have chalk on them.”