by Jack Devine
Even lower-level officers were targeted and had to hire attorneys, an expense they never could have managed on Agency salaries. A fund was set up to help defray their legal expenses, and the hat was passed to raise money. Several lawyers offered their services for little or no payment. This is how I came to know Stanley Arkin, who was to become my friend and business partner. Stanley represented Alan Fiers, who had been chief of the Central America Task Force. When the scandal broke, Casey told Fiers he’d need a lawyer and called his friend J. Peter Grace, a multimillionaire industrialist, asking him to recommend the best criminal lawyer in New York. Grace recommended Arkin, and Stanley said he was happy to represent Fiers, whom he considered a loyal public servant who believed he had acted in the best interest of his country. Fiers pleaded guilty in the summer of 1991 to two misdemeanor charges of withholding information from Congress. In the plea, he admitted that North had told him in mid-1986 about using profits from the Iranian arm sales to fund the Contras. Fiers said that he ultimately told Clair George about this and in October 1986 George instructed him to conceal the information. Fiers’s decision to cooperate with prosecutors after his plea led directly to Walsh’s prosecution of George.
Testifying in open court was an ordeal for everyone. Walsh ended up indicting Fiers, George, Clarridge, and others. While the four of us had not always agreed on policy, these clearly were strong leaders and operators of substance. I was highly annoyed to have been put in the position of testifying against them and had trouble understanding what I might possibly know that would help the prosecution’s case. The prosecution lawyers never talked to me about their interest and left me in the dark about why I was relevant. Other officers who were subpoenaed had an even stronger reaction: some of them reportedly got physically ill at the thought of exposing Agency activities to the public.
When I was called to the witness stand on August 7, 1992, ground rules had been established to protect my identity, since I was still undercover at the time. I wrote my name down on a small piece of paper, which was circulated among all the members of the jury and returned to the judge. The prosecuting attorney then projected for the jury two indecipherable pages of notes I had kept during an inconsequential May 1986 meeting in Clair George’s office in which we discussed an upcoming trip Richard Secord would make to Iran. There was nothing relevant in my notes.6 He started asking questions about these notes, but his line of questioning was going nowhere. Then he changed subjects without warning and asked about my depositions. I responded, “Which one are you referring to, the one that’s accurate or the one that was badly flawed and had to be corrected?” He and the defense attorneys rushed to the bench and began whispering to the judge, within my earshot, that I should be impeached as a hostile witness. Judge Royce C. Lamberth turned and gently dismissed me from the stand, which was a great relief. The account in The Washington Post the next day described me as “the broad-shouldered” undercover officer. I could certainly have been described in less flattering terms.
Alan Fiers testified as part of the agreement that Stanley Arkin had worked out for him when he pleaded guilty to withholding information. There are those who have never forgiven Alan for his testimony. Clair George, who died in 2011, was chief among them, and gently chided me when I became partners with Arkin in a private intelligence business in New York City in 2000. Stanley defends the Fiers deal to this day. He says Fiers was reluctant, and did a lot of soul-searching before ultimately agreeing to the deal because he thought it was the only thing to do. In the end, Fiers was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush on Christmas Eve in 1992, as one of the president’s last acts in office, along with former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and four others involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, including George and Clarridge. Their careers were ruined, though, and the Agency suffered. As we now know, Clarridge allegedly would surface again two decades later, running agents for the Pentagon in Afghanistan from his home outside San Diego.
Were there at least lessons learned from this debacle? There were for me. It helped solidify the principles I believe must be adhered to in any covert action. First, covert action policy must be consistent with the officially stated goals of the United States and supported by the American people and Congress. This concept is a basic tenet of the democratic process. Any initiative that is at variance with publicly stated goals is bound to have lasting negative legal and political fallout when revealed, as occurred in the Iran-Contra affair.
The second consideration is to make sure that all covert action proposals go through the carefully constructed interagency coordination process. In the name of expediency, many covert action proponents prefer to bypass this process, but it almost always ends up a disaster when allowed to proceed in the back rooms of the NSC or anywhere else. The coordination process can be tedious, but through it you gain the invaluable benefit of the State, Defense, Justice, and other agencies’ information and insights, which often add greatly to the texture of the proposal. Leaks are an issue, but they can be contained by appropriate security management.
Likewise, consistent with the regulations, Congress needs to be notified of an operation in a timely fashion—seventy-two hours. If you cannot get through the interagency process and develop consensus within the congressional intelligence committees, serious thought needs to be given to the likelihood of a plan’s long-term success. Also, within CIA and other participating government entities, the chain of command must be followed or you will end up with a collapse in professional discipline and with destructive operational confusion. One of the most troubling and unique experiences for me was to see fellow Agency officers during the Iran-Contra affair decide, for ideological reasons, to take it upon themselves to work outside the bureaucratic structure. This was an extraordinary breach in the rules of the game. If we are to run secret intelligence agencies in a democratic system, the letter of the law must be followed. Finally, as I noted earlier, working with exile groups is often a necessary precondition for running a covert action operation in certain parts of the world, but the intelligence and stated capabilities of these groups must always be taken with a large grain of salt. As Walsh’s prosecution ground on in what I thought was an increasingly desperate attempt to nail anyone in the CIA he could get for anything he could find, no matter how picayune, I always felt it worth underscoring that Iran-Contra was a White House–made scandal. I have no problem holding the CIA accountable for its misdeeds—I believe that it is essential to our democracy—but I have a problem with those who blame the CIA for the misdeeds of others.
It was with much relief in 1986 that I watched the agonizing Iran-Contra endgame play itself out in my rearview mirror.
FIVE
“Jack, This Changes It All, Doesn’t It?”
Washington/Afghanistan, 1986–87
In a conference room just off my office in New York City hangs a print of an official Central Intelligence Agency oil painting. The CIA is fastidious about its history and recording past glories. Not long ago its historical office began commissioning paintings of key moments in Agency history. The moment mujahideen fighters stood up, shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” and fired the Stinger for the first time at a Soviet helicopter gunship was second in the series—it was that big a deal.
By the spring of 1986, before the American people and most of us inside the CIA knew anything about the illegal diversion of funds from the Iran arms sales to the Contras, I had taken over the Afghan Task Force and become the official responsible for moving vast quantities of arms and matériel across the Pakistan border and into Afghanistan. By summer, the first Stingers were in theater, waiting to debut.
Given my belief in well-planned, muscular covert operations, I had favored introduction of the Stinger from the outset. If it performed in theater the way it had on practice ranges in the United States, the Soviets would quickly figure out where the weapon was coming from. They could choose to up the ante and retaliate against us, but I thought the odds were better that they’d begin ques
tioning the wisdom of their occupation of Afghanistan. None of this mattered, though, if the mujahideen couldn’t be trained to use the weapon.
That had been one of the arguments against the Stinger, and training the mujahideen proved arduous. We began by sending two soldiers who had just completed their army training on the system. They began to instruct mujahideen teams in the field. Later, the two soldiers trained Special Operations officers detailed to the CIA, who expanded the curriculum. The mujahideen, unlike the Taliban today, preferred fighting at a distance, especially against the Russians, recalled Dempsey, the former Marine captain who was my weapons specialist. They therefore required extensive experience not just with the new weapon system but in weaning themselves away from this “fire-and-run” approach.
In late August 1986, the mujahideen got off a lucky rocket shot and blew up forty tons of ammunition at the Soviets’ Kharga ammunition dump outside Kabul. As one bunker ignited another and then another, like dominos, the night sky filled with a giant fireball. I showed videotapes of the explosions to all the key players at Langley, the White House, and key agencies, but especially up on Capitol Hill, to make the point that all was not lost in Afghanistan. Casey even showed the video to the president. Within a few days, we had satellite imagery of the destruction flown out to Pakistan and shown to the mujahideen leaders.
The positive vibes from this attack paled in comparison to those of late September, in response to the attack we had all been waiting for: on September 25, mujahideen gunners a mile from the Soviet air base at Jalalabad popped out of their hiding places in the rocks and brush and aimed their new heat-seeking Stinger missiles at an approaching squadron of Mi-24D Hind helicopter gunships. Luckily, Bearden was ahead of his time and had armed some mujahideen fighters with video cameras. Later I saw what they had managed to capture on videotape. The mujahideen fighter stood defiantly, shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” and fired. The first shot bounced off the ground, but the next three scored direct hits and blew three Hinds out of the sky. At first there was no immediate proof of what had happened beyond a field report from Bearden that didn’t include the videotape. Confirming shootdowns with spy satellite imagery was often impossible—Afghanistan is a big country, with lots of mountains and hills. But because we had the general coordinates of the Soviets’ Jalalabad air base, the CIA’s imagery analysts were able to quickly produce eighteen-by-eighteen-inch pictures of the destroyed Hinds. “A picture tells a thousand words,” said Tom Sheridan, who was in charge of securing whatever imagery we needed on the task force. “The imagery was proof of the report.” As soon as I got the photos, the day after the attack, I called Near East chief Twetten and told him what I had.
“You better tell the director,” he said.
I called Casey’s office and went up to the seventh floor by myself with the imagery. I must have looked agitated, because his secretary showed me right in to see him.
“Mr. Director,” I said, “we had a tremendous breakthrough yesterday. We deployed the Stinger and we shot down three helicopters.”
I laid the photographs out on his desk.
“Jack, this changes it all, doesn’t it?” Casey said. It would be his last taste of victory. With the Iran-Contra scandal engulfing him and the Reagan White House, he would suffer a stroke at the end of the year and never regain consciousness. He died the following spring.
Viewing the secret spy satellites in his office, though, he could immediately sense the implications. For the past two years, the issue had been how to get arms across the border. Everything was bottlenecked and wasn’t moving through the mountain passes because of the Hinds. Within two weeks of the successful shootdown, though, the Soviet military started flying the Hinds above the fifteen-thousand-foot range of the Stinger. Once they did that, their gunships could not hit anything on the ground. It’s rare that a single weapon changes the course of a war. I would like to say I knew when we sent the weapon out that summer that the Stinger would force the Soviets to change their rules of engagement, but I didn’t. Even after the first three Hinds were shot down, I still thought we were looking at a long, protracted campaign. Within weeks, however, Bearden and I realized that the Soviets had indeed changed tactics and were no longer willing to fly low and risk losing their gunships. The Khyber Pass became a superhighway, with guns, ammunition, and matériel pouring through, and the Soviets were suddenly powerless to stop them.
While I was showing the video of the helicopter shootdown to various congressmen, the analysts back at Langley were squaring off in a predictable debate. The Soviet experts from SOVA demanded additional photographic proof before they would accept reports from the mujahideen that they were shooting down Hinds at the rate of about one per day, even with the Soviets’ change in tactics. With such convincing evidence of the Stingers’ ongoing success, I thought the SOVA analysts were wasting their time and missing the forest for the trees. The Stingers had forced the Hinds to fly higher, which meant they couldn’t hit anything moving through the mountain passes. Twetten, who notes he had been slow to accept the idea of using the Stingers, came around in the end. “I thought covert operations should remain covert and that we could find another weapon somewhere else,” he said. “But the Russians knew we were involved. By then, the size of the program was already very large. They weren’t stupid.”
Bob Williams, the task force military analyst, remembers that the Pakistanis had reservations of their own, even though they clearly saw pushing the Russians out of Afghanistan to be in their national security interest. “The Pakistanis didn’t want the American hand seen, and they were reluctant at first to let the Stingers into the fray because of that,” he said. “But they agreed because the Russians were inflicting very serious casualties.” Like Twetten, Williams agreed in the end that using the Stingers was the right course. “It made a tremendous difference,” he said. “When the mujahideen started knocking down the helos, the Soviet pilots had to fly beyond the reach of the Stinger and therefore were not able to provide low air-to-ground support to the Soviet troops. In essence, the gunships were taken out of the combat equation. Without the support of the people, the Soviet troops were very limited in their ability to move about the countryside.” Frank Anderson, a veteran Middle East operations officer who replaced me months later as head of the task force, considered the Stingers a game changer. On top of a tenfold increase in assistance, Anderson said, the Stingers produced “a hundredfold increase in our efforts—which made the difference.”
Indeed, by late 1986 and early 1987, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan was clear. From the field, Milt Bearden and a case officer were reporting the Soviet retreat. “The reality was that we never looked back after August 1986, and by 1987, I figured, I knew the Russians weren’t going to prevail and would withdraw,” Bearden said.1
With the Russians on the ropes and our success ever more likely, a steady flow of government officials from Washington wanted to go out and have a look for themselves. “You have to remember this was the hottest thing the U.S. government was doing—we were the only ones actually fighting the Soviets and were authorized by the president to do so,” the case officer said.2 “Everyone wanted to get a piece of the action.” One of the first to travel from Washington was Bob Gates, when he was Casey’s deputy. Gates, a Russia expert and experienced analyst who would later serve as director of central intelligence and secretary of defense, was among those who were beginning to realize the Soviets were in deep trouble. Bearden and I took him to a mujahideen camp along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which was a fascinating experience for him. This place was so remote that they had to haul water up a steep hill to the camp by hand from the stream below the outpost.
The night before we left Peshawar, Gates told Bearden he was concerned about food contamination in the bush, and asked that box lunches be brought along instead. When we arrived, one of the mujahideen leaders stepped out of his tent overhang and motioned us under it for a local feast.
“Where are the bo
x lunches?” Gates asked Bearden.
“Where the hell are the box lunches?” Bearden barked at one of the drivers. “I told you to put them on the truck. Where are they?”
He turned back to Gates. “The Pakistani drivers forgot to bring them,” he told him.
Of course, there never were any box lunches. Bearden was simply acting to keep everyone happy. I’m afraid Gates went without lunch that day as he moved his mujahideen food artfully around his plate so it looked as though he had partaken in their feast.
When we headed back to the airport after the Gates visit, Bearden glibly noted that the deputy director of central intelligence and his security team would have been horrified if they’d known that the safe house where we had spent the evening was located on top of a weapons warehouse. I’m sure he was right, and I wasn’t exactly delighted to learn about it, either, since one misfire would have brought down the entire building. From there on in, I was extra careful in getting the lay of the land of any place I went with Bearden. He was not an inordinate risk taker, but when you reside in a war zone, your sensitivities wear down and you become used to a higher risk standard.
