Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Webster led by example. It soon became clear that much of what Casey stood for would not be tolerated at the CIA.

  When subordinates at the CIA insisted that Webster should not tell Congress about a particular problem, Webster told them, “You’re wrong. I do want to tell them that, and I am going to tell them that.”

  Webster did not want anyone prosecuted for his testimony to Congress, as had happened to Richard Helms. When asked by Sen. Stuart Symington on February 7, 1973, “Did you try in the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government of Chile?” Helms answered, “No, sir.” Helms also denied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the agency had passed any money to opponents of Salvador Al-lende, a self-declared Marxist who had been elected president of Chile.203

  In fact, at the direction of President Nixon, the CIA in September 1970 had tried to mount a military coup in Chile to prevent confirmation of Allende’s victory in the Chilean presidential election. The agency had spent $8 million to prevent his confirmation.

  Helms agreed to plead nolo contendere to two misdemeanor counts of violating a federal statue, which made it an offense not to testify “fully and completely” before Congress. He told U.S. District Court judge Barrington D. Parker on October 31, 1977, that he found himself in conflict between his oath to protect the CIA’s secrets and the need to tell the truth to Congress. Parker fined him $2,000 and sentenced him to a jail term of two years, which was suspended.204

  “I have thought about it many times, and I couldn’t figure out another way. If I had it to do over, I don’t think I would change it,” Helms said recently.205

  But Webster told the CIA there was another way.

  “You don’t be disingenuous or dance around the question,” Webster would say. “You try to understand what they want to know and not confine yourself to what they actually ask you. But if they ask something you don’t want to tell them, or are not authorized to tell them because it would expose sources or methods, you should say, ‘I am not authorized to say that.’ Then go back to headquarters [for further guidance].”206

  If underlings did not catch on quickly, they were out.

  One of the first casualties was Clair E. George, the deputy director for operations. Of all the jobs in the CIA, none is more sensitive than DDO. George had been Casey’s liaison with the Hill when Casey was limiting disclosure to Congress about events in Nicaragua. Moreover, George’s style was not compatible with Webster’s. He had a cocky, secretive air about him—exactly the opposite of the responsible attitude Webster wanted to project.

  “What was clear was he was not going to continue to be DDO for Webster,” a Webster aide said. “It first struck me then how important it was that the DDO’s philosophy and style fit with the DCI. He [George] is a professional and his troops thought he walked on water. But their styles did not match.”

  Webster told George he wanted him to resign.207 At the end of 1987, he did, convinced that Congress had made a deal with Webster that he would have to go if Webster was to be confirmed.

  In his place, Webster appointed Richard F. Stolz. At sixty-two, Stolz was one of the most respected operations officers in the agency, a man who had served thirty-one years in the Directorate of Operations. During that time, Stolz had been Moscow and London station chief and chief of the Soviet/East European Division.

  In 1981, Stolz retired after Casey appointed Max Hugel to head the directorate. Hugel was one of Casey’s political cronies who knew nothing about intelligence. Casey had called Stolz back from London and told him he wanted him to assist Hugel by running part of the directorate. Another assistant would run the rest. To Stolz, the plan was a throwback to the days of OSS, when human collection was split between the area divisions and the rest of the clandestine service. Stolz didn’t think that division of responsibility had worked well in the OSS, and he was stunned that Casey would appoint someone to the most sensitive job in the agency who knew nothing about intelligence. Stolz turned Casey down.

  Webster had known Stolz briefly when they were both at Amherst, and the two had kept in touch since then. When Reagan asked Webster to become DCI, Webster consulted with Stolz. Stolz had pointed out the need to keep his distance from the president, to avoid becoming a crony. Webster had said he would specifically decline to have cabinet status for that very reason.

  When Webster asked Stolz to rejoin the agency as the top spy, no one had any question about his ability, and there were no resignations over his appointment. A short man with a graying pompadour, he had a low-key style that served him well. When Stolz finally retired in 1990, Webster proudly pointed out during a ceremony in the director’s conference room that he had brought Stolz back to the CIA.

  “I did that. I did that,” he said, motioning toward Stolz.

  In contrast to dispatching Clair George, Webster wanted to keep Robert M. Gates as deputy director of Central Intelligence. After Casey’s death from cancer on May 6, 1987, Gates had served as acting director of Central Intelligence. When questions arose about his knowledge of the Iran-contra affair, Gates withdrew as President Reagan’s nominee to be DCI but continued as the deputy DCI.

  Gates was unusually well qualified for the job. Born on September 25, 1943, in Wichita, Kansas, Gates graduated from the College of William and Mary and obtained a master’s degree in history from Indiana University and a doctorate in Soviet studies from Georgetown University in 1974. His first experience with intelligence was as an Air Force intelligence officer with a Minuteman missile wing.208

  Gates started as an analyst at the CIA in 1969 and moved to the National Security Council under President Nixon. After continuing at the NSC under President Ford, he returned to the agency, then moved back to the NSC under President Carter. In 1979, Gates again returned to the CIA, becoming deputy director for intelligence in 1982. In that job, Gates developed the first system for holding analysts accountable for their record of forecasts and assessments.

  In 1983, Gates became chairman of the National Intelligence Council. In 1986, he became deputy director for Central Intelligence and during that time, acting director. Brent Scow-croft, President Bush’s national security adviser, brought him back to the White House in 1989 as his deputy for national security affairs.

  Gates clashed with Secretary of State James A. Baker III over Baker’s intention to give a speech in 1989 that was highly pessimistic about Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s chances of delivering on his reform promises. Baker shelved the speech, but events proved him to be largely correct.

  Gates was a brilliant analyst who never failed to come out forcefully on an issue. As DDI, he had moved to sharpen the estimates, never bowing to Casey’s pressure to exaggerate the prospects for the contra rebels in Nicaragua, for example.

  Webster respected Gates’s intellect and later pushed him as his successor. But Gates left the CIA in March 1989, to become deputy assistant to President Bush for national security affairs. In his place, Webster appointed Richard J. Kerr as deputy director of Central Intelligence. Like Gates, Kerr had spent most of his career on the analytical side of the house. Under Casey, he had become deputy director for intelligence. While he was not the brilliant scholar that Gates was, Kerr had a practical, common-sense approach to problems, as well as a practical joker’s mentality.

  When a topic in the Middle East was hot, Kerr showed up one morning at a meeting of Webster’s executive committee wearing Arab dress. At Christmas, he wore a tie that played “Jingle Bells.” Around Halloween, he wore a gorilla outfit.

  In sharp contrast to Webster, Kerr practically never wore a jacket. Even in winter, he wore short-sleeve shirts. When Webster wore a jacket at lunch in the director’s dining room, Kerr appeared in shirtsleeves. Some thought he was purposely trying to offset Webster’s formality.

  Besides establishing centers for counterintelligence and counternarcotics, one of Webster’s more enduring changes was to systematize approvals for undertaking covert action. In the past, a committee called the Covert Acti
on Review Group (CARG) had been used to examine and approve any covert action proposals. However, the committee functioned largely as a rubber stamp, informally signing off on proposals that were hand-carried from office to office. Webster did not want to emasculate covert action and could not do so if he had wanted to. Generally, the broad proposals originated with the National Security Council and the president. Since the CIA only implements policy, it needs to know what the policy is before it does anything. That includes the question of whether to undertake covert action and what form it should take. The White House and NSC gave the proposals to the CIA to fine-tune. But Webster did want to make sure every proposal was legal and made sense.

  Just as if he were determining if one of his proposed judicial decisions complied with established law and precedent, Webster wanted to make sure that every covert action proposal had been tested against a set of unvarying questions: Does it fall within U.S. law? What would happen if it became public? Will the public understand it?* Finally, will it work?

  Initially, Webster assigned two of his assistants, John Hotis and Nancy D. McGregor, to sit on the CARG committee as his representatives. Like Hotis, McGregor had moved over to the CIA from the FBI with Webster. After they left the agency, other aides sat on the committee, which met every two weeks in the office of the director of congressional affairs on the seventh floor of the original headquarters building.

  To some of Webster’s aides, it seemed the committee consisted of “old boys getting together.”

  “Once it got up to the CARG, they no longer questioned the program. They questioned how do we do this tiny part,” McGregor said. “In general, we tried to have a little more analysis done. We thought by the time it got to the CARG, it was a little too pat, with not enough discussion and critical thinking about the underlying purposes. The big questions were not asked. We wanted them asked. Webster wanted us to make sure they were asked. They were annoyed about that.”209

  As a result of the questioning by Webster’s assistants, some proposals were modified, either to limit their scope or to eliminate dubious aspects. Once they were approved by CARG, they went back for approval by the White House. Then, they were presented to the congressional oversight committees.

  “Webster wanted the covert action proposals to be reviewed to make sure they would make sense to the American people if they were to be revealed,” McGregor said. “It sounds simplistic, but if you think about it, this approach places good controls over the proposals. The people in the agency can’t be the sole watchdogs because of the natural tendency to get too close to the programs and lose perspective. Webster’s questions were: Would people understand why and how a particular program was being carried out or would they say this is crazy, ludicrous, how could our government be doing something like that?”210

  “I think the changes he made in covert action proposals were not to say, ‘We aren’t going to do it,’ but, ‘We are going to approach this according to different procedures.’ Or he would send things back for more work when he wasn’t satisfied with how they looked or felt,” Bruemmer said.211

  Webster’s assistants prepared a briefing book listing all the covert action programs with an analysis of their purposes. Enclosed in a black, three-ring binder, the material summarized each program—roughly twelve at any given time—with two or three pages of description. The idea was to give Webster a handy reference guide that he could keep in his office and refer to when questions arose, as they invariably did.

  The idea provoked outrage within the Directorate of Operations, which thought the existence of the book would somehow create a greater possibility of leaks. But once the book had been put together and placed on Webster’s desk, it seemed everyone wanted his own copy to validate his status. Only the deputy directors, the general counsel, and the inspector general received one.

  Particularly after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, Webster decided that the Directorate of Operations, battered by both the Church Committee hearings and the Iran-contra affair, had become so cautious that it passed up chances it should have taken to recruit agents. The best example was in Iraq, where the CIA had practically no agents of value reporting on Saddam Hussein.

  There is no scientific way to evaluate how well an intelligence agency is doing in recruiting agents. In the case of Saddam Hussein, the CIA was hampered by the fact that Saddam Hussein allowed only family members or those who had been loyal to the Iraqi leader since childhood into his inner circle. Webster did not want CIA officers to take needless risks in penetrating such a country. But Webster believed there was a middle ground, one that would allow the agency’s spies to be more aggressive while not becoming cowboys. In talks with Directorate of Operations officials, he noted that he had never disapproved a covert action proposal or a major intelligence operation.

  “I want people in the DO who are risk takers, not risk seekers,” Webster said at Richard Stolz’s retirement party at the end of 1990.

  Particularly after Kuwait, Webster—like directors before him—pushed for more foreign-language training. To upgrade training generally, he tried to promote officers who did a stint as CIA teachers. And he emphasized more reporting on economic issues.

  Webster wanted more accountability in the agency and more clarity in its reports. He hated acronyms and he hated the word feel. People could believe or state or conclude, but they could never feel.

  “We are not paid to feel,” Webster wrote in a memo to CIA employees. “We are paid to think.”

  Webster could not stand it when CIA officials submitted papers to him without attributing where they had gotten the information. In answer to some questions, he was handed background papers that did not say who had written them or who had submitted them. He demanded that each paper he received carry the name of the author, the author’s office, and his or her telephone extension.

  Webster was used to having personable FBI agents as his security guards. At the CIA, the guards were from the Office of Security, and they were anything but personable. Indeed, the young men assigned to guard Webster seemed to think they were the gestapo. Ramrod stiff, they bristled if anyone asked them their names. At receptions attended by Webster, they clung to the walls, looking like rent-a-cops in a grade B movie.

  One weekend, William Baker’s wife, Robin, decided to surprise Baker when her husband and Webster were due in New Jersey to attend a party given by Malcolm Forbes. Originally from New Jersey, Robin Baker drove from her parents’ home to the airport, her Labrador retriever on a leash. There, she saw Webster’s security detail with squiggly wires sprouting from their ears. The plane had not yet arrived. When she approached her husband and Webster, she did not want to alarm the guards, so she introduced herself.

  “Hello, I’m Mrs. Baker. I’m married to Bill Baker, who is flying in with the director,” she said as the dog wagged his tail. “I just wanted you to know I’m here to greet my husband so you know who I am.”212

  The guard did not respond.

  “I guess I’ll go and find somebody else to talk to,” she said.

  The man ignored her.

  Several minutes later, two guards came over to her and brusquely asked her for identification. Then they demanded proof that she was married to Baker. Having just gotten married, she had trouble finding a credit card in her handbag with her husband’s name on it. The guards acted as if they had just caught her breaking into a bank, and she was livid.

  Baker never told Webster of the incident, but Webster himself had become unhappy with the guards’ style. With Webster’s approval, Baker met with the head of the security detail.

  “We need to go to charm school together,” Baker said. He then met with all the guards.

  “Look, this is what the director expects,” he said. “In addition to the professionalism which you have, he expects a little more than that.”

  Baker said he did not want them to be so tight. He gave them a supply of his business cards.

  “If you’re at a function or party with hi
m, and someone asks if you’re CIA, and you can’t quite tell them that, hand them my card,” Baker said. “Say, ‘If you have any questions, call this gentleman.’”213

  Webster found one of the CIA’s biggest problems was the fact that each directorate is a separate fiefdom, with the Directorate of Operations usually the most dominant. The DO tended to be suspicious of the Directorate of Intelligence, which in turn resented not being fully trusted. There were constant complaints from both sides. Meanwhile, the CIA’s other two directorates resented being looked down upon.214

  Webster wanted more cross-pollination, and he began to rotate people so that they worked for two or three of the directorates during their careers.

  “At the CIA, they are kings of their own dominion,” a former Webster assistant said. “It is set up so loyalties are within directorate. You make your career within that division. You make or break your career based on loyalty to a specific boss, not the head of an agency or the head of a different division.”

  Turner had encountered the same problem.

  “I think the biggest problem is coordination among the various branches,” he said.215

  The attitude was entirely different from that of the FBI, where the FBI director and the special agent in charge of each field office were the unquestioned bosses. Like the FBI, the CIA was a semimilitary organization that obeyed orders. But the boss at the CIA was the head of one’s own division, not the head of the agency.

  The result was that the directorates were not eager to share information with each other. While some secrecy was necessary, Webster and his assistants found it was often used to enhance people’s own importance, hampering everyone’s work. Despite the fact that they had clearances for virtually every program, the assistants were sometimes prevented from knowing what they felt they needed to know.

  “Very few people [at the CIA] know the complete picture because very few are allowed to know it,” McGregor said. “That is what makes it so difficult to get at the whole truth. This is exacerbated by the fact that so very few feel any loyalty to the head of the agency. Rather, their loyalties are to the heads of their divisions or their directorates.”216