Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  An eclectic crusader in his life’s twilight, he bullied opponents and habitually evaded rule books. He was fixated on the Soviet Union. He believed that the epochal conflict between the United States and the Soviets would not be settled by a nuclear arms race or by war in Europe. Casey’s reading of Soviet doctrine and history convinced him that Andropov’s aging KGB-dominated Politburo intended to avoid an apocalyptic nuclear exchange with the West. Instead they would pursue the Brezhnev doctrine by waging a slow campaign—across generations if necessary—to surround and undermine America’s capitalist democracy by sponsoring Marxists in wars of “national liberation” waged in the Third World. Casey saw himself as about the only person in Reagan’s Cabinet who fully understood this tenacious Soviet strategy. He was prepared to confront the communists on their chosen ground.

  He was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, Maryknoll, on Long Island. He attended Mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone who asked his advice. Once settled at the CIA, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anticommunists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.6

  Casey shared with Reagan a particular emphasis on the role of Christian faith in the moral mission to defeat communism, yet he was a more obvious pragmatist than the president. He had run spies behind enemy lines during World War II and had built a business through crafty deals and cold-eyed lawsuits. He was surrounded at Langley by legions of Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik disciples. Casey was an excitable gunrunner and a profoundly devoted Catholic. He saw no conflict; he was bending rules for the greater good.

  If anything, Casey’s religiosity seemed to bind him closer to his proselytizing Islamic partners in the Afghan jihad. Many Muslims accounted for Christianity in the architecture of their faith and accepted some of its texts as God’s word. There were Catholic schools in Pakistan, and Zia grudgingly tolerated the country’s Christian minority. Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis were less relaxed. Once, while traveling secretly to Saudi Arabia to negotiate with Prince Turki, Casey asked his station chief to find a Catholic Mass for him to attend in Riyadh on Easter Sunday. The chief tried to talk him out of it; formal Christian worship in the kingdom was banned. But Casey insisted, and Prince Turki scrambled to arrange a private service.7 The Saudi ulama rejected religious pluralism, but many in the Saudi royal family, including Prince Turki, respected unbending religious faith even when it was Christian. Casey won the GID’s personal loyalty to the extent that Saudi intelligence, with permission from King Fahd, agreed to secretly fund Casey’s riskiest anticommunist adventures in Central America.

  More than any other American, it was Casey who welded the alliance among the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and Zia’s army. As his Muslim allies did, Casey saw the Afghan jihad not merely as statecraft, but as an important front in a worldwide struggle between communist atheism and God’s community of believers.

  CASEY’S CLASSMATES were the sons of New York City policemen and firemen. Almost 60 percent were Irish Catholic, and many others were Italian. Casey rode the bus to Fordham University in the Bronx from his family’s modest suburban home in Queens. In the early 1930s, the Depression’s shocking deprivations caused many young Americans in the lower middle classes to be drawn to radicals who preached socialist equity or even communist unity. Not William Joseph Casey. His father was a clerk in the city sanitation department, one of tens of thousands of Irishmen who owed their government jobs to the city’s Democratic patronage machine. But Casey would break early with his family’s liberal political inheritance. Fordham’s Jesuit teachers filled his mind with rigorous, rational arguments that Catholicism was truth. The Jesuits “let him know who he was,” his wife said later. He was no renunciant. At Fordham he guzzled bootleg beer and gin with his friends and bellowed Irish Republican Army songs as he staggered home.8

  On July 12, 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of the Coordinator of Information, America’s first independent civilian intelligence agency focused on overseas threats. He named as its first director William Joseph Donovan, a wealthy Irish Catholic corporate lawyer from New York. Donovan had run two private fact-finding missions for Roosevelt in Europe and had urged the president to create a spy service outside of the military or the FBI. A year after its founding Roosevelt renamed the agency the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.

  In September 1943, Casey, a Navy lieutenant, junior grade, was a landing craft production coordinator shuffling papers around a stifling Washington office. He had resolved not “to spend this war goosing ship builders,” and he had heard through his office grapevine about the outfit usually referred to as “Oh So Secret.” Casey knew a lawyer who knew Donovan, and he pushed himself forward. He was interviewed, lobbied as best he could, and within weeks was in the presence of Donovan himself, a paunchy, blue-eyed, white-haired teetotaler with red cheeks and an appetite for new ideas. Fearless in battle against rivals and relentless in the task of building his government empire, Donovan had won Roosevelt’s personal loyalty. He had recruited to his fledgling spy service du Ponts, Morgans, Mellons, and what a Washington newspaper columnist called “ex-polo players, millionaires, Russian princes, society gambol boys, and dilettante detectives.” With the war raging in North Africa and the Pacific, the OSS had swelled to fifteen thousand employees. Casey won a job in headquarters. It changed his life and his destiny.9

  “I was just a boy from Long Island,” Casey said later. “Never had I been in personal contact with a man of Donovan’s candlepower. He was bigger than life… . I watched the way he operated, and after a while, I understood. You didn’t wait six months for a feasibility study to prove that an idea could work. You gambled that it might work.”10

  Casey shipped out to London. Nineteen days after D-Day he rode an amphibious truck onto Normandy’s Omaha Beach. The British had forbidden the OSS from running its own spy operations in Europe. They especially regarded running spies on German soil a doomed mission, needlessly wasteful of agent lives. After the Normandy invasion the British relented. In September 1944, Casey wrote Donovan a classified cable titled “An OSS Program Against Germany.” He noted that hundreds of thousands of foreign-born guest workers in Germany—Russians, Poles, Belgians, and Dutch—moved freely in and out of the country with proper papers. Exiles from those countries could be equipped as agents and placed behind Nazi lines under cover as workers. In December, Donovan told Casey, “I’m giving you carte blanche… . Get us into Germany.”11

  As he recruited and trained agents, Casey reluctantly concluded that he needed to work with communists. They were the ones ardent enough in their beliefs to endure the enormous risks. Donovan had taught Casey that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good, Casey said later. In Hitler he was fighting a greater evil, and he would recruit unsavory allies if they were needed.

  Casey had parachuted fifty-eight two-man teams into Germany by the end of April 1945. He would see them off at night from unmarked airstrips in Surrey, England. Some died in plane crashes; one team was dropped by error in sight of an SS unit watching an outdoor film; but many others survived and flourished as Germany crumbled. Ultimately Casey judged in a classified assessment that about 60 percent of his missions succeeded. He had sent men to their deaths in a righteous cause. He did not make large claims about his agent penetrations, saying later, “We probably saved some lives.” Their greatest value may have been that “for the first time, we operated under our own steam.” He concluded that the OSS probably could have run agents in Germany successfully a year earlier. The British ban on such operations bothered him for years afterward. Who knew what lives they might have saved?12

  After the war Casey earned a fortune in New York by analyzing tax shelters and publishing research newsletters. He dabbled in Republica
n politics and accepted a tour under President Nixon as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. There he cut secret deals, obfuscated about his investments, and barely escaped Washington with his reputation. As he aged, he hankered again for high office and respectability. He was invited into Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign as its manager and helped pull out a famous 1980 primary victory over George H. W. Bush in New Hampshire. After the triumph over Jimmy Carter, he moved to Washington to join the Cabinet. His first choice was the State Department, but when the offer to run the CIA came through, Casey’s history with Donovan and the OSS made it impossible to resist. He would take on the Soviet empire in many of the same ways he had taken on Germany, and in the same spirit.

  Perched on a rise above the Potomac River, CIA headquarters sprawled across a wooded campus behind a chain-link fence laced with barbed wire. But for the satellite dishes and antennae sprouting from every rooftop, the compound would be indistinguishable from the headquarters of a pharmaceutical company. The director’s office, which was on the seventh floor of a bland concrete and glass building near the center of the campus, overlooked a bucolic wood. It was a large office but not ornate and had its own private elevator, dining room, and bathroom with shower. Casey moved in and began banging about the place as if he owned it. At 9 A.M. meetings three times a week he exhorted his fourteen top deputies to action.

  The CIA “had been permitted to run down and get too thin in top-level people and capabilities,” he wrote Reagan early on. As Casey’s executive assistant Robert Gates put it, telling the new director what he wanted to hear, “The CIA is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture.” Casey wanted more human agents working outside of embassies, using what the agency called “nonofficial cover” as businessmen or academics, and he wanted to draw more heavily on American immigrant communities to find agents who could penetrate foreign societies. He came across as a whirlwind. Gates recalled of their first encounter: “The old man, nearly bald, tall but slightly hunched, yanked open his office door and called out to no one in particular, ‘Two vodka martinis!’ ” There was “panic in the outer office” because the director’s suite had been dry under Stansfield Turner. This was Casey, Gates reflected. “He would demand something be done immediately which the agency no longer had the capability to do. He would fire instructions at the closest person regardless of whether that person had anything to do with the matter at hand. And he would not wait around even for confirmation that anyone heard him.”13

  Perhaps that was because he was so difficult to hear. Casey mumbled. In business his secretaries refused to take dictation because they couldn’t understand what he was saying. He had taken a blow to the throat while boxing as a boy and he had a thick palate; between these two impediments the words refused to flow. Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s chief of staff, called him “the Mumbling Guy.” Attempting to translate during meetings with Crown Prince Fahd, Badeeb could only shrug. Even President Reagan couldn’t understand him. During an early briefing Casey delivered to the national security cabinet, Reagan slipped Vice President Bush a note: “Did you understand a word he said?” Reagan later told William F. Buckley, “My problem with Bill was that I didn’t understand him at meetings. Now, you can ask a person to repeat himself once. You can ask him twice. But you can’t ask him a third time. You start to sound rude. So I’d just nod my head, but I didn’t know what he was actually saying.” Such was the dialogue for six years between the president and his intelligence chief in a nuclear-armed nation running secret wars on four continents. Casey was sensitive about the problem. “I can tell you that mumbling is more in the mind of the listener than in the mouth of the speaker,” he said. “There are people who just don’t want to hear what the Director of Central Intelligence sees in a complex and dangerous world.”14

  Casey believed that his mentor, Donovan, had left the CIA to the United States “as a legacy to ensure there will never be another Pearl Harbor.” Since Casey could envision only the Soviets as the authors of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor’s scale, he focused almost entirely on Moscow’s intentions. Spy satellites and signals collection had made it likely that the United States would have advanced warning of a Soviet military strike, Casey conceded; in that sense, Donovan’s goal had been achieved. But Casey thought the CIA had to do much more than just watch the Soviets or try to steal their secrets. “The primary battlefield” in America’s confrontation with Marxism-Leninism, Casey said, “is not on the missile test range or at the arms control negotiating table but in the countryside of the Third World.” The Soviets were pursuing a strategy of “creeping imperialism,” and they had two specific targets: “the isthmus between North and South America” and “the oil fields of the Middle East, which are the lifeline of the Western alliance.” The latter target explained the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Casey believed.15

  In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev had laid out Soviet plans to gain ground worldwide by aiding leftists in wars of national liberation, and the next generations of Soviet leaders had reaffirmed his doctrine. Just as European leaders had failed to understand that Hitler meant exactly what he said when he announced in Mein Kampf that he planned to conquer his neighbors, so the United States had placed itself at risk by failing to grasp and respond to the Soviet Union’s announced ambitions. The CIA’s role now, Casey said, was to demonstrate “that two can play the same game. Just as there is a classic formula for communist subversion and takeover, there also is a proven method of overthrowing repressive government that can be applied successfully in the Third World.” It was in Afghanistan that he was beginning to make this “proven method” of anticommunist guerrilla war work. As his classified briefings to Reagan proved, “Far fewer people and weapons are needed to put a government on the defensive than are needed to protect it,” Casey said. He boasted on another occasion: “Afghan freedom fighters have made it as dangerous for a Russian soldier or a Soviet convoy to stray off a main road as it was for the Germans in France in 1944.”16

  Casey saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the “realistic counter-strategy” of covert action he was forging at the CIA to thwart Soviet imperialism. Robert Ames, one of the CIA’s leading Middle East analysts, influenced Casey’s thinking about the role of religion in this campaign. Ames told Casey in 1983 about cases such as South Yemen where the Soviets manipulated the education of young people to suppress religious values in order to soften the ground for communist expansion. The Soviets were pursuing their aims in the Islamic world by recruiting “young revolutionaries” who would change their nation’s education systems in order to “uproot and ultimately change the traditional elements of society,” Ames said, as Casey recalled it. “This meant undermining the influence of religion and taking the young away from their parents for education by the state.” Religious education such as Casey himself had enjoyed could counter this Soviet tactic—whether the education was in Islamic or Christian beliefs. Because the Soviets saw all religious faith as an obstacle, they suppressed churches and mosques alike. To fight back, militant Islam and militant Christianity should cooperate in a common cause.17

  MUCH OF A CIA DIRECTOR’S travel involved schmoozing with counterparts. Casey’s manners were rough. He was poor at small talk, and as a colleague put it, he always “ate like he was hungry,” sometimes dripping food onto his chest. But he worked his accounts tirelessly. For global tours his black Starlifter transport came outfitted with a windowless VIP compartment secured in the vast cargo bay. Inside were couches, a bed, worktables, and a liquor cabinet. For security he would depart and arrive at night when possible, and he pushed himself on a schedule that would exhaust younger men.

  Casey’s Afghanistan-focused trips usually brought him first to Saudi Arabia. He met regularly with Prince Turki, sometimes with Interior Minister Naif, and usually with the crown prince or the king. Saudi ministers often worked at night, when the temperatures in the desert cooled, and by aristocratic habit they kept even important visi
tors waiting for long stretches in the gilded, overstuffed waiting rooms of their palaces and offices. Casey grumbled and mumbled impatiently. King Khalid once summoned him to see his dairy herd, managed by an Irish family, and then sent him in a jeep to view herds of royal camels. Casey barely tolerated these sorts of tours, and he blanched when the king thrust a glass of warm camel’s milk at him.

  Casey knew that the Soviet economy depended on hard currency revenue from oil exports. He urged the Saudis to use their power in the oil markets to moderate prices and deprive the Soviets of any OPEC-generated windfalls. Of course, lower oil prices would aid the American economy, too. The Saudis understood their leverage over both the Soviets and the Americans, and they traded oil favors with a merchant’s cold eye.18

  In Pakistan, Casey’s Starlifter touched down in darkness at the Islamabad civil-military airport. Akhtar and the station chief would be on the tarmac to meet him. There were formal liaison meetings at ISI headquarters where the two intelligence teams would review details about shipments to the mujahedin. The ISI generals saw Casey as a forgiving ally, always focused on the big picture, content to let ISI make the detailed decisions on the ground, even when working-level CIA case officers disagreed. Casey explained that Akhtar “is completely involved in this war and certainly knows better than anyone else about his requirements. We simply have to support him.” On one trip Akhtar presented Casey with a $7,000 carpet.19

  “Here’s the beauty of the Afghan operation,” Casey told his colleagues. “Usually it looks like the big bad Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys. We don’t make it our war. The mujahedin have all the motivation they need. All we have to do is give them help, only more of it.”20

  Casey’s visits usually included dinner with Zia at Army House in Rawalpindi, where to Casey’s dismay servants filled the wineglasses with Coke and 7-UP. Casey seemed genuinely surprised by Zia’s politeness and by the general’s easy warmth. They talked about golf and Zia’s short iron game, but it was geopolitics that animated them most.