Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  With a quarter century’s hindsight, it’s hard now not to conclude that there was a better way to exit Afghanistan. America’s abandonment of the country is an often-cited mistake for which many believe we are still paying. For years after leaving the Afghan Task Force, I believed, along with Charlie Wilson, that we should have extended our covert presence, as well as provided substantial overt U.S. aid to help rebuild the country, despite all the advice to the contrary from the area experts inside and outside the Agency. With the passage of time and considerable reflection, however, I’m honestly not sure today that in the end it would have made a difference. One way or another, Afghanistan would have fallen into a chaos of tribal rivalry, and terrorists would have found their way there under one of the tribes’ protection. Because of this, I have little hope in the substantial U.S. efforts going on today to build a democratic Afghanistan.

  Our close alliance with Pakistan’s ISI throughout the covert war is also worth noting, in terms both of our ongoing relationship with Pakistani intelligence and of the ISI’s role in shaping Afghanistan’s future once we lost interest. As we draw down in Afghanistan, if we have any hope of having a stable outcome there, we will need Pakistan and the ISI’s support. Pakistan not only shares the most important border with Afghanistan, but a large segment of its population belongs to the same Pashtun tribes that reside in Afghanistan. While the relationship has rough edges today, we have a long history of cooperation, and I hope we will return to a strong partnership.

  Critics of our covert war also look at the CIA’s alliance with Saudi intelligence and its arms pipeline to rebel factions across the ethnic and ideological spectrum, which helped provide the underpinnings for the network of armed Arab jihadists that would spring up across the region. However, it is important to emphasize that there is no evidence that Osama bin Laden ever received weapons or other matériel support from the CIA. He was a minor blip on our screen and his support came directly from the Arab states. To connect the dots and conclude that the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan created al-Qaeda and led directly to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001—as some of the CIA’s most virulent critics have done—is wrong. The CIA’s network of tribal relationships established in the 1980s made it possible for the CIA and U.S. Special Forces, along with devastating American air power, to topple the Taliban within months of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

  As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal in July 2010, after 9/11 we should have concentrated on getting Bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda, not on nation building and counterinsurgency, as a block against the Taliban. The Taliban was an indigenous Islamic fundamentalist force that was not involved in the 9/11 attacks against the United States and did not have international ambitions. The real culprits were foreign Arab terrorists who trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and have now dispersed to Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, North Africa, and other parts of the Middle East. Invading Iraq in 2003 on a false premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction only made us lose sight of Afghanistan’s true significance yet again. And when President Obama finally shifted the nation’s focus back to Afghanistan in early 2009, after six years of war in Iraq, it was essentially too late. The Taliban had regrouped, and we were replicating the Russian and British mistakes of trying to maintain a long-term military presence in the “graveyard of empires.” Many of my colleagues on the Afghan Task Force would agree. Milt Bearden has said it is “crazy to bring a big army into Afghanistan. There is no such thing as a well-conducted long war there … the Afghans don’t get defeated.” Bob Williams, our military analyst, who had fought in Vietnam, said that the best part of the Agency’s support to the mujahideen was that there was no loss of American lives. The reason for our success of the Afghan operation in the 1980s—as compared to the situation today—was that we empowered the Afghan people to fight the war themselves. Tom Twetten agreed that the key ingredient was the Afghan fighters. He said it did not matter how much suffering they went through: they were absolutely united in their goal of expelling the foreign invader, which strikes an ominous chord today. Frank Anderson has also expressed skepticism about the manner in which we have conducted the current war in Afghanistan: “Military force is only useful when killing people and destroying property advances your interests. That certainly happens. One needs to be alert for the point at which it is no longer true, however.” As the Obama administration pulls our troops out of Afghanistan, we should maintain a CIA covert action component aimed at al-Qaeda and other terrorists as part of a robust U.S. mission that includes diplomatic, economic, and antinarcotics components. If we’ve learned nothing else from the way we ended our involvement in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, it must be this: we need to leave in place a covert action structure. We simply cannot withdraw our troops in a way that leaves a vacuum to be filled by our adversaries.

  SIX

  Do I Lie to the Pope, or Break Cover?

  Italy, 1988

  As a reward for running the Afghan Task Force, the deputy director of operations, Clair George, offered me the plum job of Rome station chief. But in the hunting preserve of the Agency barons—highly experienced senior officers who had run multiple overseas stations and operational divisions—Rome for me possessed a special allure. It also came with a hazard that I came to sense only vaguely: my colleague from my precareer training days, Aldrich Ames. When I arrived in Rome in the fall of 1988, Rick had been posted there for more than two years, working against the Soviets. He supposedly considered me a friend and was pleased when he found out I was coming in as station chief.1 My predecessor in Rome, Alan Wolfe, a hard-edged operator, had been critical of Ames’s performance. He’d reportedly been frustrated with Ames’s failure to file reports on his meetings with the one and only Soviet with whom he seemed to have contact at that time, Aleksey Khrenkov. Apparently, Wolfe had been pressing Ames on this, but Ames insisted there was little hope in recruiting Khrenkov. None of us knew at the time, of course, that Ames was working for the Soviets and that Khrenkov was his official go-between.

  Shortly after we arrived in Rome, Ames and his second wife, Rosario, invited Pat and me over to dinner. The couple lived near the Forum, in a modest-size two-bedroom apartment, with one of the rooms converted into a study for Rosario. The walls were crowded mostly with bookcases. Whenever one of them filled up with books, Ames said, he would go out and buy another bookcase. The apartment had Danish-style furnishings, and on one wall hung a high-quality oil painting of which Ames was proud. Rosario, a Colombian, was friendly and sociable. A good deal younger than Rick, she had been taking courses for a master’s degree, and she was seven months pregnant. They were anxious about the arrival of the baby. Rosario had had a miscarriage the previous year, and Ames had asked to extend his tour of duty for a few months so that the baby could be born safely in Rome. The Agency was always sympathetic to such requests, and Ames was granted a six-month extension. Otherwise, he would have left shortly after I arrived.

  I couldn’t help noticing, as they greeted us that evening, that Ames had spruced up his appearance since we last saw each other. I attributed this to Rosario—she wore a stylish maternity dress—remembering his unfashionable look back in Washington. He was dressed in good-quality slacks and an oxford cloth shirt. I noticed that his teeth were in the process of being fixed. Before we sat down for dinner, Rick went to one of the bookshelves and pulled down the volume I had lent him twenty years earlier, when we first joined the Agency: Harold Lasswell’s pre–World War II work Psychopathology and Politics. The ideas in the book were influenced by the Freudian theory that early upbringing results in predetermined adult behavior. In essence, by extrapolation, if you are weaned on the left, you will be liberal, and if weaned on the right, a conservative. I would come to appreciate the irony, since, to my mind, Ames’s upbringing and his father’s rather uninspiring CIA career were major factors in his decision to become a Soviet mole. I mentioned that I had enjoyed the book he had lent me, A Coffin
for Dimitrios, the spy novel by Eric Ambler, whose writer-narrator descends into a netherworld of treachery and counterespionage and becomes indistinguishable from the characters in his books. More irony.

  Rosario had prepared a meat and vegetable dish. It was well presented but nothing fancy or memorable—and not Latin or Italian, which I would have found more interesting. They served a decent red wine to go with it. Because the spouses weren’t cleared, and we were taught that we should never discuss business at home, we didn’t that night. The discussion centered on life in Rome, Rosario’s background, and her pregnancy. Ames at the time was driving a used Jaguar, which he had smartly purchased on credit, but there wasn’t anything else conspicuously excessive about their lifestyle. Because we were still in temporary quarters without a washing machine, Pat, as a matter of course, would ask to bring our laundry along when we were invited out. And she did so this evening as well.

  The atmosphere was convivial, but our relationship had changed, and I’m sure Ames understood this, despite his nonchalance. As I had learned from my three previous station chief postings, it’s lonely at the top. It is difficult to be friends with staff and at the same time exercise leadership and command authority. I was Ames’s boss, and a professional relationship had to be maintained. There would be no hanging out and socializing. Pat and I would socialize mostly with senior officers in the embassy in Rome and with foreign liaisons. These relationships were professionally and personally rewarding, but those outside the Agency culture don’t completely understand the challenges, stresses, and issues you face because of the secrecy embedded in our business. The truth is I felt closer to station chiefs whom I would see at conferences and back in Washington, even though I had much less contact with them.

  Still, that evening at dinner with Ames, it was hard to get past the fact that I had risen to station chief and that Ames was still a mid-level officer. This hung over the room like a ghost, though he showed no outward signs of envy or discontent with the situation. It is conceivable that he saw it purely as a social evening and that he blocked out his other life for the night, but what he felt inside is impossible to say.

  * * *

  Compared to the other stations I had run, Rome was considerably larger, with more complexity and greater responsibility. Despite the job’s stature and prestige, there had been no formal selection process. Clair George had been looking to replace Wolfe, and someone I knew quite well in human resources suggested my name. George reportedly trusted me, given our history with Iran-Contra and Afghanistan, and liked the idea. He called me into his office one day and told me, “You’re going to Rome.” Wolfe supposedly wasn’t as enthusiastic, since he had served as a station chief and chief of the Europe Division before Rome and thought the Italians would find my relatively less senior status at the time off-putting, which did not turn out to be the case. Nonetheless, Wolfe was gracious to Pat and me during the transition.

  The main mission there focused on “hard targets,” including the Russians and all their Eastern Bloc allies, who had a huge presence in Rome. Thousands of Jewish refugees were coming out of Russia then, arriving in Rome before going to their ultimate destination of Israel or the United States. Many of these refugees were engineers, scientists, and others with highly technical backgrounds who possessed valuable intelligence, and they had to be debriefed as they arrived. Rome and the other European stations were still very large, given the importance of Europe and our shared history since World War II. More power has shifted back to Washington in recent years, given rapid advances in communications technology and more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But back when I arrived in Rome, the European chiefs truly were barons—a term you don’t hear much in the CIA anymore—and the stations they ran made them the equivalent of three- or four-star generals in the military.

  By this point in my career, I had learned to avoid the debilitating syndrome known in the Agency as “clientitis”—falling in love with the host country and overestimating its importance and the challenges it faces. Rome was incredibly dynamic, and the Italians certainly had their charms, so it was good that I had developed the experience to accurately determine Italy’s priority in the context of the overall U.S. national interest.

  The CIA and Italy go back a long way in the covert action field. The Agency’s earliest and most important “influence operation” took place during the 1948 parliamentary elections. At that time, the Americans and Russians were just starting to face off in the Cold War international power struggle for the “hearts and minds” of free men. President Truman had already put down a marker that we would not let Russia spread its Communist system to Western Europe. There was already great concern about the Soviet Union gobbling up Eastern Europe. Truman knew that, on the heels of World War II, a military confrontation with the Russians would be disastrous for everyone. So he moved his fight below the radar and to the back alleys. He put the CIA at the forefront of this fight, and Italy was the first of the political battlegrounds. To counter the very strong Communist Party influence in Italy, Truman authorized the CIA to pour money into the elections there, through newspapers and magazines, radio broadcasts, posters, leaflets, and political organizations. According to Ambassador Hugh Montgomery, who spent three decades working in Western European postings for the Agency from 1952 to 1981, including a stint as station chief in Rome, the CIA was critical to preventing a Communist takeover in the Italian elections of 1948. “Without the CIA, the Communist Party, in which the Soviets had huge interests, would definitely have won,” he said.2 In the end, the conservative Christian Democracy Party defeated the leftist pro-Soviet Popular Alliance by a margin of 48 percent to 31 percent. This election set the standard for future fights, and the pro-West coalition prevailed in Italian parliamentary elections for the next fifty years. As time passed, the democratic parties were strong enough to stand on their own two feet and no longer needed to rely on clandestine Agency funding and support. Our effort in Italy was so successful that it endured for years as a model for effective political covert operations. In fact, much of the doctrine was still in vogue when I arrived in Allende’s Chile in 1971. We all took a few pages from the Italy playbook.

  * * *

  When I arrived in Rome, I was amazed at how thoroughly the CIA’s political influence remained ingrained in the Italian psyche, for good and bad. There was an inflated sense of the power of the CIA. I was able to take advantage of this mind-set with many of my contacts, one of whom, the chief of police, would go out of his way to be seen seemingly conspiring with me at the U.S. embassy’s annual National Day party. As a matter of routine, he would take me by the arm and walk me very slowly around the perimeter of the embassy’s garden, in plain view of hundreds of top dignitaries. Using the most secretive body language, while everybody looked on, he would whisper, “Aren’t these gardens attractive?” and go on at length about the foliage. In this way, he accomplished his objective of being seen with the CIA station chief and ensuring that everybody knew he and the Agency were very close. He wasn’t quite convinced, despite his position in the government, that we weren’t still involved in calling the shots. It was to our advantage that I be complicit in this deception, and I gladly participated in the farce on the Fourth of July.

  The chief’s assiduous attention continued until I left Rome. As a farewell gesture of respect for the CIA representative, he invited Pat and me to dinner at an upscale restaurant. When we walked in, he and his wife were already seated at a table, the piano player was tapping away, and the waitstaff was lined up at the door. Everyone was exceptionally attentive. After fifteen minutes, I realized that no one else had entered the premises. When I asked him why, he said, “I closed the restaurant down for the night so we could have a special farewell.” The unmistakable message was that he had great power, which I frankly had never doubted.

  Our interactions with locals were enhanced by our ability to speak their language. While many Italians in the business and technical world speak Englis
h, a surprisingly small percentage of Italians in politics, law enforcement, and intelligence do. The Agency prepares people very well for postings abroad by providing rigorous predeployment language training for both agents and spouses. The language classes were arduous—and very small, so there was no place to hide. Our class consisted of Pat, me, and my soon-to-be-deputy, Doug Hokenson. Neither Pat nor I thought much about it ahead of time, but we quickly realized that married couples studying together present unique challenges that would test just about any relationship. We eventually felt sorry for Doug, who was the better linguist yet tried not to outshine his future boss while at the same time studiously ignoring the occasional tension between Pat and me. Like most things, Doug handled this with ease.

  One of my most vivid memories of discord during training occurred when Pat and I were practicing our Italian lessons in the car while driving to the Jersey Shore. I made the terrible mistake of correcting Pat about a subjunctive verb ending. I don’t know who was correct, but Pat found it so irritating that she rolled down the window and threw our textbook out of the car and onto the congested Route 95. Neither of us shone in class the following Monday, and we never practiced Italian again in a speeding vehicle. When we finished the training, we could converse in Italian across a broad spectrum of subjects. Our teacher even went so far as to spend a day on Italian hand gestures, some of which I still use.