by Leon Panetta
In Colombia, that country’s long fight against the rebel group known as the FARC—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—had been waged in part with assistance from the United States. Originally the military arm of the Colombian Communist Party, the FARC fluctuated in size and influence throughout the 2000s, but its methods were a continuing source of regional instability. It secured funding by trafficking in drugs and kidnapping for ransom, and Colombia wanted help in thwarting the group’s efforts. The campaign against the FARC received a boost in 2008, when Colombian forces located and freed Íngrid Betancourt, the former presidential candidate, who had been taken hostage in 2002. Betancourt’s rescue, along with fourteen other hostages, including three Americans, was a powerful demonstration of the government’s growing capacity to take on the FARC and helped erode the organization’s fearsome image. By 2010, when I visited, peace talks were under way, and the FARC’s capacity to inflict violence was much diminished, though it still remained a fighting force of several thousand.
While in Colombia, I visited the Macarena region, where the FARC remained active. Military commanders there performed a demonstration of their methods for raiding FARC compounds, and we discussed the accelerating tempo of those raids. It was clear to me that under President Álvaro Uribe, with whom I met, the government was committed to keeping up the pressure and that progress was being made.
In Mexico, the issues were very different, and mostly connected to our extensive trading ties and long border. President Felipe Calderón hosted me during my time there, and he was anxious about growing violence near the border, particularly in Juárez and, on our side of the line, El Paso. He complained that U.S. gun laws allowed weapons to flow easily into Mexico, which in turn made Mexico’s job of controlling drugs more difficult. I sympathized and pledged to do all I could to improve the situation, but I had to admit that gun control was a powerfully difficult problem to confront in the United States, as I knew going back to my days in the Clinton White House, when our success at including modest gun control measures as part of the crime bill was believed to have contributed to the political wipeout we suffered in the 1994 midterm elections. Ever since, Democrats had been skittish about gun control, with the irrational consequence that our nation refuses to take steps that would help fight drugs and save lives. Calderón had extended himself at political risk to fight drug trafficking, and had worked closely with the United States to do so.
• • •
For decades, the then Soviet Union and the United States invested heavily in spying on each other, producing some of the most memorable moments of the Cold War. There was the downing of Gary Powers’s U-2 flight in 1960, which badly embarrassed the Eisenhower administration and contributed to the collapse of a summit conference in Paris. There was the turning of Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who sold the KGB the names of our assets inside the Soviet Union, betraying his country for nothing more exotic than money. There was the arrest and conviction of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who spent more than twenty years spying for the Soviets. That’s a lot of history to put behind us, but it was the past, after all; by 2009, the superpower conflict of the Cold War had been replaced by a wary sizing up of each other and a cautious search for common purpose.
The end of the Soviet empire also meant the end of the KGB. It split in two: The SVR handled the external spying, including its presence in the United States. The FSB handled internal security, including counterterrorism, fighting the Chechens, and running aggressive counterintelligence efforts against American officials in Russia.
My first meeting with my Russian counterpart, SVR director Mikhail Fradkov, took place at CIA headquarters in Langley, and reminders of the Cold War jumped out right from the beginning. When he arrived, Fradkov was escorted upstairs to the suite where my office was located. He spent a few minutes in the outer office while I wrapped up some business, and when I came out to greet him he was standing next to one of the many photographs that line the walls of the suite. It was an old black-and-white picture of Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency who supplied invaluable information to the CIA and British intelligence in the early 1960s, including secrets about Soviet missile systems that helped the Kennedy administration recognize the significance of construction activity in Cuba in 1962; that information helped Kennedy chart his course during the Cuban Missile Crisis and may have averted a nuclear war. Penkovsky is still considered one of the greatest assets the West ever acquired inside the Soviet Union. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed on May 16, 1963. Staring at his picture, Fradkov winced.
That night, I took Fradkov to dinner at Restaurant Nora, one of Washington’s finest eateries. Thank goodness the food was good, because the conversation wasn’t. Fradkov seemed determined to stay with his talking points rather than engage in any serious conversation, so the evening dragged on, dull and ponderous. My aides had warned me of this, but I thought, perhaps naively, that we could look for ways to cooperate in areas such as Chechen terrorism, where we had common enemies. I tried, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Fradkov said over and over that he wanted to cooperate with us, but he wouldn’t say how. It was tiresome, and I was wearing thin. Just when I was about to give up, Fradkov seemed to drop his guard. What, he asked me, did I think had been America’s worst intelligence or foreign policy mistake? I thought for a brief moment and told him I thought it had been the mismanagement of the Iraq war. I then asked him the same question about the Soviet Union. He paused for a long moment, and then answered simply, “Penkovsky.”
That was the beginning of a tentative, occasionally candid relationship that Fradkov and I developed in meetings and over dinners in Washington and Moscow, each time blending overtures of friendship and overtones of animosity. Fradkov wanted to create a joint SVR-CIA working group to share information and collaborate on some common operational activities. The old Cold Warriors in the CIA’s Clandestine Service—including Mike Sulick—told me I was wasting my time. The Russians would never share, and they’d use the whole thing as a ruse to get close to our officers and try to recruit them as spies, they said. Perhaps, I thought. But we would also look small if we rejected an offer to work together. Let’s say yes, I argued, and see where it takes us. If we got nothing out of it, so be it. We moved forward, tentatively.
Our next set of meetings was in Moscow in 2010. Fradkov hosted me for dinner at SVR headquarters in Yasenevo, a southwestern suburb of Moscow, and the next day at the famed Central House of Writers dining room in Moscow. The food was horrendous—I’m not much for boiled fish and vodka—but the conversation was slowly getting better. Fradkov launched into one monologue about Russian accession to the World Trade Organization, but otherwise stayed focused on how the United States and Russia could share intelligence on issues of common interest.
Still, the vestiges of the Cold War loomed. My meeting with my FSB counterpart, Alexander Vasilyevich Bortnikov, occurred at FSB headquarters in the infamous Lubyanka Building, the dark baroque edifice that once housed the KGB and its famous dungeon prisons. When we entered, the first thing that caught my eye was a bust of Lenin. We were escorted through the building’s historic lobby, and Jeremy whispered to me, “I think I can still hear the screams from the basement.”
As with our conversations in Washington, my talks with Fradkov on that visit produced only glimmers of possibility. Moreover, just weeks earlier I had received a private briefing from the FBI informing me of a ten-year investigation it had conducted regarding a ring of deep-cover SVR agents living inside the United States and awaiting activation.
The program was a classic piece of Cold War theater. Men and women were brought to the United States and encouraged to make their way through life as everyday Americans—taking classes, getting jobs, raising families. Some posed as immigrants from Canada, others stole identities from children who had died many decades earlier. For years, they were to live normal lives and try to develop co
ntacts that could someday be useful. Two were real estate agents, one worked for a travel agency, another for a telecommunications firm. One was a teacher, another wrote occasional columns for a Spanish-language newspaper, another gave tax advice. Their affiliation with the Russian government was so secret that even their children did not know their true identities. In this case, however, the FBI had been keeping tabs on these “illegals,” as they called them, for more than a decade, patiently waiting for the right moment to swoop in.
I first learned of the FBI’s operation to track the illegals—dubbed “Ghost Stories”—in early 2010, but at that point the issue was simmering fairly slowly. The surveillance had been under way for years, and there was no need to change anything. Then in the spring the FBI learned that one or more of the sleeper agents was preparing to leave the country. If that happened, they might not return, and we might lose our chance to capture them. The trouble was timing: It came just as President Obama was preparing to welcome Russian president Dmitry Medvedev on a state visit to Washington in late June. On June 18, we briefed the National Security Council and the president—the FBI played the lead role, but I attended because of the implications for the CIA and our intelligence operations generally.
The main point of that day’s discussion was whether the diplomatic fallout from busting up this ring was worth the security advantages of doing so. As far as the U.S. government could tell, no secrets had actually been passed back to Russia through these agents, and arresting them, especially on the eve of a Russian state visit, was sure to be provocative. But as I told the president that day, our officers believed it could be handled without much long-term consequence. I argued that the operation could proceed without impacting the broader relationship with Russia. The group generally agreed, and suggested that if the FBI successfully rounded up the agents, one way to minimize the fallout would be to quickly propose a swap, so the Russians would get their people back, we’d get some the United States wanted in return, and Russia would be spared the embarrassing spectacle of multiple criminal trials for their sleeper agents. Mueller and I argued for the arrests to go forward, with a swap as the ultimate goal, but the vice president and Tom Donilon asked the right questions: Would this operation undermine Medvedev, or would the overall relationship with Russia withstand this temporary setback? The meeting began to break up, but Donilon stayed. I could see he was struggling with this one.
I pressed the point that the relationship could sustain this hit. We also agreed that Congress, which we would be briefing about the operations, would strongly rebuke us if we failed to arrest the spies. Tom agreed, and we had consensus. Shortly thereafter, President Obama green-lighted the operation.
President Medvedev arrived in Washington on June 18, and the meetings were productive. There was of course no mention of the secret operation we were planning against the illegals. As soon as Medvedev boarded a plane to leave, however, the FBI carried out simultaneous raids and arrests, picking up ten sleeper agents and leaving their families and neighbors in a state of genuine shock. The first Russian reaction was predictable—they claimed there was no basis to the charges and denounced our efforts with the usual hyperbole.
The Justice Department moved to do its job. The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York charged the illegals in his jurisdiction with fraudulent immigration. He did not accuse them of espionage, but the indictment was intentionally exhaustive, so that the Russians would realize that we knew what was up.
Once we had the Russians, the question was what to do with them. Acting on the president’s behalf, as a diplomatic back channel, I agreed to reach out to Fradkov—not because of the intelligence relationship we were developing, but because this was now an issue between our countries, and I thought we had developed the trust to handle it together. The mission was to explore the possibility of a swap. It was certainly possible that Fradkov would simply disavow the illegals and make counteraccusations, standard operating procedure for Cold War relations. So when I dialed him to make my pitch, I did so with low expectations.
“Mikhail,” I began, using a speakerphone and surrounded by some of the government’s top officials and Russia experts, “we have arrested a number of people, as you saw in the press. Those people are yours.” Our interpreter gave it to Fradkov in Russian.
There was a long pause, reminiscent of our first dinner when he contemplated my question about the Soviet Union’s worst intelligence failure. Then, at last, he spoke. The translation: “Yes, they are my people.”
The men and women around me had to stifle themselves to keep from cheering out loud. Instead, a silent round of raised eyebrows and high fives ran through our room as we realized that we were already past denial and into negotiations. So I offered our bid: “We’re going to prosecute them. If we have to go through trials, it is going to be very embarrassing for you.”
Another long pause. “What do you have in mind?” he asked.
“You have three or four people who we want. I propose a trade.”
He didn’t agree on the spot. He said he first needed to check with Russian leaders, including—I’m sure—Putin, who had worked the illegals program during his KGB years. After we exchanged some draft agreements, a deal was struck. The United States would return their ten agents, and they would give up four Russians who were in prison for allegedly working with the United States or Britain. He agreed, and we had a deal.
There still were details to resolve. Among other things, a number of the children of the sleeper agents had no desire to go to Russia. They’d grown up in the United States believing that their parents were teachers or writers or real estate agents, and now they were bound for Moscow, a city that meant nothing to them. Understandably, they weren’t thrilled. But America wasn’t going to take custody of the kids, so the sullen youngsters were reunited with their parents and the whole lot of them were put on a plane for Vienna. And there, in perfect Cold War fashion, the prisoners from both sides crossed on the tarmac, trading planes. A few minutes later, everyone was headed for their new homes.
The Cold War was over, but the scene in Vienna was proof that the old games were alive and well. All that was missing was the sound of the zither playing the theme from the movie The Third Man.
• • •
After the exhaustive debate that President Obama’s advisers, including me, conducted during 2009 over the Afghan surge, monitoring the progress of that war was obviously of central importance—we needed to know whether the surge was working, how long to let it play out, and when to begin to draw back down. All of those were mostly questions for the military, but they were shaped by diplomatic imperatives and informed by intelligence, most of which came from the CIA. I credit Tom Donilon for ensuring that every meeting began with an intelligence estimate. And he included not only Denny Blair, the director of national intelligence, who provided the intelligence community’s view, but also me, for the CIA’s analysis and operational vantage point on the war.
Just after noon on March 10, 2010, the National Security Council Principals gathered in the White House Situation Room for the first in a series of sweeping reviews that would examine our Afghan efforts from every angle. As was usually the case, the report was mixed. On one hand, I could confidently tell my colleagues that efforts against the Al Qaeda leadership along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border were producing results. One report I shared at that session, for instance, concluded that the “deaths of numerous Al Qaeda personnel in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency (NWA) since November 2009 are reducing the viability of the NWA safe haven.” Al Qaeda, I told the group, was suffering from low morale and recoiling from disarray in its leadership. At the same time, Karzai continued to demonstrate the qualities that made him so frustrating to the United States—he had not yet completed filling out his cabinet, which still had eleven vacancies among the twenty-five positions—and insurgent attacks were on the rise, nearly doubling from February 2009 to February 20
10.
The State Department, meanwhile, was looking for a way to separate the Taliban from Al Qaeda, an ambition that I had endorsed in principle during the Afghan debates in 2009. It was time, State recommended, to encourage the Afghan government to engage with the Taliban on certain conditions: that the Taliban leadership renounce Al Qaeda, recognize the Afghan constitution (including its provisions protecting the rights of women and minorities), and abandon its armed struggle against the Afghan government. If it would agree to those conditions, it would create the possibility of a peace agreement that would sideline Al Qaeda, our real enemy. I was skeptical of this so-called Taliban reconciliation. I thought we had to hit them harder on the battlefield and coerce negotiations. At times I feared that the U.S. embassy in Kabul was too eager to cut a deal with the Taliban. But despite my reservations, the decision was made to begin to open discussions with certain Taliban leaders to see if they were serious.
Through the summer and fall, we continued to make headway in Afghanistan, while also encountering obstacles and setbacks. The military, under the leadership of General Petraeus and with the help of the CIA, was battering the Haqqani network. Devastating floods in Pakistan were occupying that government, but also provided us with a welcome opportunity to provide relief and thus bolster our case that we could be regarded as a friend. At the same time, corruption continued to undermine Karzai’s government, to the point that Attorney General Eric Holder proposed having the Justice Department put together a brief on the evidence of corruption in order to get Karzai’s attention.
Those sessions culminated with a pair of meetings, both attended by the president. The first took place on December 14, almost exactly a year from the day that he had approved the surge and announced it at West Point. The second occurred the following month, on January 24, 2011. Both were largely positive, though again not without caveat or qualification.