Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  The unpleasant irony in all this was that the mole was not in the CIA but, rather, in the FBI’s own counterintelligence office. Just as we had trouble coming to terms with Ames, it seemed the FBI had trouble accepting the possibility that it had a mole inside its camp. One of my great frustrations when I eventually left the Agency was leaving behind the unfinished business of the second mole, who was later found to be FBI agent Robert Hanssen.

  The Ames discovery and the mystery of the second mole seemed to haunt the place. I had lunch one day with senior officers of the KGB in a small, intimate dining area adjacent to the director’s office, where the top leaders of the world’s foreign intelligence services occasionally dined with the DCI and members of his staff. It was hard to grasp that, just ten years after our violent confrontation in Afghanistan, I was dining with top-level Russian intelligence officers at CIA headquarters. One of the less diplomatic KGB officers tried to needle me by asking about Ames. I tried to pass off Ames’s betrayal as just a part of the intelligence game, but he knew it hurt. I reciprocated when a helicopter passed within eyeshot of the director’s window and I noted in passing, ever so quickly, that I hadn’t felt the same about helicopters since the mid-1980s. The Russian officer got the allusion to the Stingers in Afghanistan: two can play “gotcha,” even in a diplomatic setting.

  The poisoned atmosphere post-Ames played a role in Woolsey’s decision to submit his letter of resignation the day after Christmas in 1994. While he had had nothing to do with our inability to stop Ames’s betrayal much sooner, he became a lightning rod for criticism, and his lawyerly reprimands had satisfied no one. For whatever reason, he never had the president’s ear, or confidence, and his estrangement only became more paralyzing after he made it clear in September 1993, just eight months into his term, that he agreed with the controversial assessment that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s exiled president, was mentally unstable. It was not what the White House wanted to hear. I was sorry to see Woolsey resign so soon after giving me the job as the DO’s number two. I got along very well with him. He was a decent and smart person with a good sense of humor. And he thought outside the box. His presence meant stability in my job as ADDO.

  Most CIA directors are remembered for a single accomplishment or failure. Woolsey ushered in what could be called the age of drones. His hallmark achievement was forcing the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program on the intelligence community and the military. Frustrated by the inability of spy satellites to give him the intelligence he needed on troop movements in the Balkans in 1993, he turned to an old friend, a legendary Israeli aircraft designer named Abe Karem, who was then in Southern California building prototypes for “long-dwell” drones—so called for their ability to linger over certain areas. By early 1994 the CIA was operating the GNAT 750, a Karem-designed drone built by General Atomics, over Bosnia. A bulked-up version of the GNAT, called Predator, first flew in July of that year. Both the CIA and the military had experimental and low-capability UAVs, but at the end of the day the air force wanted pilots to man its aircraft. After all, what would the air force be without pilots? For its part, the CIA did not want to get saddled with expensive aircraft, and the intelligence community in general could not see then drones’ broad application in the future war on terrorism. Notwithstanding this opposition, Woolsey pushed the system and had his way. His decisive leadership left a lasting impression on me. The UAV gradually became a critically important part of the Agency’s clandestine operations and paramilitary program abroad, and the air force began to rely more and more on drones’ reconnaissance capabilities. Their full impact on the future of war fighting still remains to be seen.

  “Credit must be given to Woolsey,” Studeman said. “He came in early on and, because of his Israeli connections and other technology interests and proclivities he had in airborne reconnaissance, pushed the Agency to go in the direction of the GNAT 750, the precursor to the Predator.”6

  Woolsey’s accomplishment was little appreciated at the time of his resignation. So many bad things had befallen the Agency on his watch that Washington seemed relieved that he was stepping aside. Having said that, I see that by then, especially after he became crosswise with the White House on Aristide, he had virtually no access to the Clinton administration. After a small propeller plane crash-landed on the White House lawn in September 1994, The Washington Post ran a hurtful Herblock cartoon that had Woolsey piloting the plane, with the caption reading that it was the only way he could get in. The clock started ticking after the dustup over Aristide, and it was only a matter of time before Woolsey had to pack it in.

  Changes at the top were part of the business. Woolsey’s departure was not a particularly emotional one for the workforce; it passed so quickly that it gave me little time to reflect on it, especially given how fast things were moving. In the weeks before and after his departure, we started tracking an Islamic terrorist whose ideology and penchant for high-profile attacks foreshadowed the rise of Osama bin Laden.

  On December 11, 1994, a bomb exploded in midair on Philippine Airlines Flight 434 bound for Tokyo. The passenger in the seat where the bomb had been hidden, a twenty-four-year-old Japanese business traveler named Haruki Ikegami, was killed by the blast, but his body absorbed most of the explosion’s force and prevented the plane’s outer skin from rupturing. The pilot and crew, helped by a U.S. military air traffic controller on the ground, were able to make a heroic emergency landing in Okinawa, saving all the aircraft’s other 272 passengers and 20 crew members. As soon as the plane was safely on the ground, the hunt for the bomber began.

  The investigation and international manhunt involved close cooperation among the CIA, the FBI, Japanese investigators, local Philippine law enforcement, and a host of others. First, forensics experts in Japan painstakingly collected the onboard wreckage and pieced together the bomb’s components. The device had consisted of a liquid nitroglycerin explosive hidden in a cotton-stuffed contact lens solution bottle, a timer made from a rewired Casio wristwatch, a camera flashbulb to provide the heat for the detonation, and for power, a pair of nine-volt batteries sold only in the Philippines. Their work led the investigation back to the flight’s point of origin, Manila.

  Even before the attack, Philippine law enforcement and intelligence agencies were already on high alert in the lead-up to a planned January 15, 1995, visit by Pope John Paul II to Manila to celebrate World Youth Day. (The Pope ended up delivering an outdoor Mass that day to somewhere between five and seven million people, which may be the largest single gathering in Christian history.) Longtime CIA assets in the Philippines informed us that the Philippine government was looking at a number of Islamists who had recently entered the country and rented apartments in Manila.7 On the evening of January 6, 1995, a fire broke out as terrorists mixed bomb-making chemicals in one of the apartments. After the blaze was under control, Philippine authorities used the opportunity to search the premises. The search turned up forged identity documents, bomb components of the kind that had been used on Flight 434, and a computer hard drive that, once it was decrypted with the help of FBI experts, yielded assassination plots against the Pope and the U.S. ambassador and plans for the bombing over a two-day period of a dozen or more planes bound for U.S. destinations. The Philippine authorities were able to make several arrests the night of the fire, but the apartment’s main resident had fled the scene and slipped away.

  That resident, the perpetrator of the Flight 434 bombing, was Ramzi Yousef, who was already on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for having set off a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in 1993. His attack on this plane had been a rehearsal to test the methods he intended to use in the larger plan found on his computer to blow up a dozen other planes. In Manila, Yousef had foiled airport security by putting the innocuous-seeming bomb components in his carry-on luggage and hiding the bomb’s wires in a secret compartment in the heel of his shoe, below the area swept by the airport metal detectors. Once on board and airborne, he asse
mbled the bomb in the airplane bathroom, set the timer for a few hours, stuffed the bomb in an under-seat life vest pouch, and then disembarked when the plane landed for a stopover in the Philippine resort town of Cebu. Now that we knew the methods used, the race was on to find Yousef before he could carry out his plans.

  The major break in the case came shortly thereafter, in Yousef’s home country of Pakistan. A man named Istaique Parker had come into the U.S. embassy in Islamabad off the street claiming he had been involved in a plot to blow up an airliner but had gotten cold feet before carrying it out.8 The intelligence provided by walk-ins to U.S. embassies around the world generally follows a 90/10 rule: 90 percent of it is worthless, but the remaining 10 percent can be extremely valuable. As a result, the Agency takes walk-ins very seriously, and has agents at every station assigned to process them and hear what they have to say. The cable that came back to us at Langley recounted Parker’s story: he had been recruited by Yousef, supplied with bomb components, and instructed to board a flight in Bangkok bound for the United States. At the last minute, though, he had balked, choosing instead to tell his story to the CIA and claim the $2 million reward the FBI was offering for Yousef’s capture. Information he provided led Pakistani intelligence and U.S. Diplomatic Security Service officials to arrest Yousef shortly thereafter, on February 7, 1995, in an Islamabad motel. The FBI flew him back to New York, where he stood trial for his crimes and was sentenced to 240 years plus a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He is now serving his time in the Florence, Colorado, supermax federal penitentiary.

  The incident was significant for a number of reasons. A terrorist was able to defeat airport security and smuggle a bomb onto an aircraft by concealing explosives in a container of seemingly harmless liquid and bomb materials in his shoe. The security measures put into place to foil these techniques have changed air travel for us all. Furthermore, the intelligence taken from the hard drives seized from his apartment included a plan devised by Yousef and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to hijack an airliner and fly it into CIA headquarters in Langley. This may have been the first known instance of a terrorist plan to use an airliner as a missile, an ambition that, sadly, al-Qaeda did not abandon. But the arrest of Yousef also showed that coordinated efforts by intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world could be an effective tool for bringing terrorists to justice and preventing them from carrying out attacks. Building and fostering these liaison relationships with other intelligence services was a big part of my job. The CIA’s collaboration with foreign intelligence services is one of its most important force multipliers in collecting intelligence and taking action against our enemies, especially in the age of transnational targets such as terrorism, drug trafficking, and nuclear proliferation.

  A good example of the importance of liaison was on public display in May 2012 with the thwarting of an al-Qaeda attempt to make an underwear bomb intended for detonation on a plane headed to the United States. As reported by the press at the time, the CIA was able to pull off an intelligence coup with liaison support. This reportedly was a result of our close collaboration with Saudi intelligence, which had been able to insert one of their sources into the inner circle of al-Qaeda in Yemen.

  I spent a great deal of time developing rapport with the senior leadership of foreign intelligence services when they paid official visits to the United States. We gave them tailored, in-depth briefings by top analysts, who provided high-level interpretations of fast-moving worldwide developments. This kind of personal attention enriches our ties with these important leaders and is a way for the CIA to show its appreciation for the substantial support and hospitality these foreign services extend to Agency personnel in their countries.

  On a personal level, these duties also enabled me to rekindle old acquaintances and friendships. During my time on the seventh floor, I hosted separate visits from the heads of the British and Australian intelligence services, both of whom happened to have served in Chile as the Santiago station’s liaison contacts during my time there in the 1970s. Reminiscing with them was great fun, but it was also somewhat problematic. They were accompanied by staff who held them in high esteem and were not accustomed to thinking of them as the mere mortals they were earlier in their careers. While dining with the chief of Australian liaison and his staff in the private room of a quality Washington restaurant, I recalled the folklore of a rather formal dinner a long time ago in Santiago at which my Australian colleague was able to awe his dinner companions by showing them an old outback trick. This young intelligence officer asked the host to bring him one of her finest wineglasses. To her horror, he then proceeded to chew the goblet, grinding it up bite by bite. To us, the story brought back memories of a less formal and more adventurous time, and the Australian officer smiled and did not deny the feat. Nonetheless, his staff’s laughter seemed rather nervous and restrained.

  I had a similar experience with Sir David Spedding, a secretive Englishman who had been a junior officer in Santiago in 1972 and was now chief of operations for MI6. Prior to the coup that toppled Chilean president Salvador Allende, the CIA had been very concerned that we would not be able to handle our assets. Spedding, the British representative at the time, was so security conscious that he would not speak on the secure communication system we had provided him. In a move that we felt was playing the game too close to the vest even for us, he was willing to communicate only by clicking with his radio send, once for yes and twice for no.

  When I reminded him of his clicking procedures in Santiago, we all had a good laugh. Defending himself, he insisted that he was only concerned that our system would knock out the electronics in the adjoining office, which it didn’t. But some old adages apply in the intelligence business as much as they do in life: “He who laughs last, laughs longest”—as I would experience later.

  Unfortunately, maintaining those close and healthy partnerships with other intelligence services around the world is not always easy, especially when we are also responsible for spying on them. At the same time that we were dealing with the manhunt for Yousef, an intense dispute with French intelligence rocked our operations there and soured our relationship with the French service for several years.

  It started out with an early morning call to our French desk by Rollie Flynn and David Shedd, the executive officers for the seventh floor, who inquired about an “Immediate” cable received early that morning notifying us of the compromise of our Paris operations. Right away we recognized that we had a major problem in front of us, one with extraordinary political and foreign policy implications. There had been a low-burning feud for some time with the French security services because of their aggressive targeting of U.S. businessmen, especially in the aerospace sector. The long-standing feud first became public in 1993 when a document surfaced showing that the French had specifically targeted twenty-one U.S. companies.9 This did not come as a surprise to us, since for years we were well aware that the French were running black bag operations, breaking into the hotel rooms of American business executives in Paris and copying sensitive business data and strategies.

  In response to this, Woolsey made a rare public statement that year to a group of Chicago businessmen, advising them that the United States would be countering the aggressive French behavior of bugging rooms and stealing documents. He went on to memorably comment that there would be “no more Mr. Nice Guy” as far as the French were concerned. True to his word, we aggressively pursued the recruitment of French government sources willing to part with French trade secrets in entertainment rights and telecommunications.10 It is relatively uncommon for allies to target each other’s internal political or economic interests. The vast majority of the intelligence work in allied countries is focused on common enemies residing in the host country—Russians, Cubans, Iranians, terrorists, North Koreans, narcotraffickers. But this ceased to be the case in France, where Woolsey had the field operators endeavoring to recruit French government officials for trade secrets.


  By 1995, the French security service was monitoring a few of our officers who were working on developing government sources in the French economic area. In February of that year, they decided to spring their trap. The timing was suspiciously political: it was in the middle of a hotly contested French presidential election, and it looked like an attempt to direct attention away from a French government scandal involving domestic wiretapping of local political figures. The French were also upset because several months earlier we had quietly declared a former senior French official “persona non grata” for operating in the United States against U.S. targets and had had him kicked out of the country, a process known as being PNG’d.

  With this as a backdrop, the French minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua, summoned the U.S. ambassador, Pamela Churchill Harriman, that same month. The minister unceremoniously confronted the prominent British-born socialite with evidence of CIA operations directed against French government officials, including photos of clandestine meetings, copies of false identity documents, credit card imprints, and hotel registrations. Harriman reportedly tried to defuse the situation, to no avail. In the end, the French government officially asked that the chief, Dick Holm, and four of his subordinates depart the country. To make matters worse, the French immediately leaked this development to the press. This was quite shocking. Normally a tête-à-tête like this occurred out of public view, allowing liaison cooperation to continue unimpeded.

  Once the incident became public, there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle. The U.S. officers in Paris went into an immediate lockdown operationally, and a few top officers had to be called home. There also was concern about the case officers’ dependents, especially the possible need for children to be pulled out of school on short notice. We were able to push back the departures for six weeks, which gave some of the families an opportunity to make a relatively orderly exit from Paris. It still was a very heavy task for the officers and their families.