Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  This action by the French was particularly troubling because it had been directed against Holm, a distinguished professional who years earlier had been badly burned and scarred in an airplane crash in the Congo. The heroic story was well-known, and he was widely admired by his colleagues for his bravery.11 On this flight, his Cuban pilot lost his bearings in a thunderstorm and crash-landed in the jungle. As the right wing was sheared off the airplane, Holm was sprayed with gasoline and was terribly burned from head to foot. Rescued after ten days in the bush, he spent two years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was blind for a year, but when he recovered his sight he went back to the field, serving with high distinction in China and Hong Kong. The Paris incident sadly put an end to Holm’s career with the Agency, and he retired shortly after returning to the United States.

  No sooner had this crisis passed than another arose when Representative Robert G. Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat, said in a letter to President Clinton that the CIA had failed to disclose information that one of its paid informants, a Guatemalan military intelligence officer named Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, had allegedly witnessed the murders in 1990 of an American expatriate, Michael Devine (no relation), and Efrain Bamaca, a Guatemalan leftist married to the Harvard-educated American lawyer Jennifer Harbury. (Alpirez had denied that he was a CIA informant and that he had knowledge of the murders.) When the Agency formally notified the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of this lapse, I found myself involved in one of the single most difficult issues I had faced in managing relations on Capitol Hill.

  Part of the challenge came from our own insular nature. As a former seventh-floor colleague noted, the Directorate of Operations, unlike the Directorate of Intelligence, tended not to rotate many officers out to Congress or other parts of the government. This changed to a degree in subsequent years, but in those days our officers did not have much of a presence around town in Washington. As a result, even within the government there were few who really understood what we did. Without those sorts of social relationships, we did not always have a reservoir of trust and understanding with our counterparts on the Hill or elsewhere in the executive branch. This made misunderstandings more likely and meant that dealing with the aftermath of a flap or problem could be even harder.

  The Agency had reported the allegation involving Alpirez to the Department of Justice in 1991, but had not informed the congressional intelligence committees, which it was required to do under the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act. Agency officials determined that the information had been included in briefing notes in 1991, but for some reason this was never delivered to Congress. Both committees felt they had been deliberately deceived, which wasn’t the case, and the Senate committee went so far as to hold a highly unusual public meeting to express its displeasure over what it perceived as CIA stonewalling.

  As the committees investigated, Frederick Brugger, who had served as chief of station in Guatemala from 1991 to 1993, was under intense scrutiny. He apparently had not notified the U.S. ambassador that Alpirez was a paid CIA agent. Brugger was a solid citizen and a good operator, but he was rather rigid in his body language during his first presentation to the committee. As a consequence, when he was preparing to go down and testify again and came to my office, he brought along his lawyer, fearing legal vulnerability. The lawyer projected a sense of mild hostility and, in an off-putting way, wanted to know who from the DO would testify with Brugger.

  “I’m going down with him,” I said curtly, cutting him off. The lawyer backed off. I thought nothing of it at the time, but after the meeting ended I received a call from the General Counsel’s Office. “We really don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go down with Fred,” a very senior Agency attorney advised. “Some here think it might not be helpful for your career.”

  “Look. It doesn’t matter to me what they think,” I said. “There is no choice here. Even if I were disinclined to go down to the Hill with him, which I am not, I would have to go anyway, since no one in my chair can expect to lead this directorate and not support one of our officers in a crisis.”

  “That’s your choice, but it’s not well received down here,” the lawyer said.

  Equally important, I thought Brugger and his boss, Terry Ward, who had served as chief of the Latin America Division from 1990 to 1992, were innocent of deliberately deceiving Congress. Their failure to inform Congress about the 1991 intelligence report about Colonel Alpirez, I believed, had been inadvertent. But beyond the issue of guilt or innocence, I thought my presence could be helpful up on the Hill, given my experience there and in Latin America. In the end, Brugger handled himself quite well, and we survived the hearing intact.

  The Guatemala incident brought into sharp focus, in the context of congressional oversight, the issue of what sort of people the Agency could or should be involved with. Obviously, the world of espionage is full of all kinds of people, some more unsavory than others. During this time, a feeling was emerging within the Agency that some of those responsible for our oversight were pushing us to limit our dealings with undesirable individuals. According to Dick Calder, our chief of plans, “We felt that, if we were only going to be able to deal with choir boys, we were going to be put at a terrible disadvantage. This was not an attempt to pass over what had happened in Guatemala—actually, I believe this incident led to new rules and regulations about our activities—but we felt the pendulum was swinging too far. There was an implication that the people we were dealing with would have to pass a sainthood test before we could deal with them. But if you think about disrupting terrorist attacks or collecting intelligence on other sensitive activities, it would be impossible to operate that way. That is not to say we should accept every agent, and certainly not condone illegal activities, but the idea that people or whole organizations that failed to meet a certain standard could be off-limits would have presented a major problem.” This tension still exists today, particularly in the context of the type of people the Agency and others must deal with to penetrate terrorist organizations and foil their plots. It is a core challenge for any intelligence agency, particularly one working on behalf of a democratically elected government. The military and particularly our Special Forces also face this challenge with regard to whom they train and equip in the field. A couple of simple tests can form our best defense: Is there bipartisan support in Congress for what we are doing? Would the American people support it?

  Indeed, testifying before the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence became one of my most important responsibilities, both to protect officers such as Brugger and Ward and to shield the CIA from the budget-cutting mentality pervasive in the post–Cold War atmosphere. I ended up using our strategic plan for the Directorate of Operations—which I had more or less laid out in my job interview with Woolsey and Studeman—as a tool to aid us in our relations with Congress. I had to be sure that the people who provided us with financial and political support understood what we were doing and where we were going. America’s sense of our role in the world was unclear during the mid-1990s. The Cold War was over, and the sea change after 9/11 was still to come. Some members of Congress and the public at large were asking questions about whether there was even a need for America to maintain robust intelligence capabilities. Having a strategic plan helped me to explain as clearly as possible—both to those who were supportive and those who were not—what we were trying to do, and how that fit into other government priorities.

  “The Agency always has a difficult time with the Hill because the Agency has a proclivity for not telling the whole story, under the notion that it is protecting sources and methods,” said Studeman, describing the structural challenges inherent in the Agency’s relationship with Congress. “This makes the Hill feel like it has to drag the information out of the Agency. Meanwhile, Congress can be difficult to deal with because of its tendency to go public and hold open hearings on sensitive subjects instead of discussing them behind closed doors. It used to be
possible to talk to the leadership about the most sensitive matters, on the basis of disclosing only to the Gang of Eight—the majority and minority chairs of the two Intelligence and two Armed Services Committees. As time passed, fewer of the Gang of Eight wanted the sole responsibility for knowing sensitive information, which led to the desire to expose more committee members as insurance against the possibility of information becoming public in the future.”12

  In this environment, leaks are not inevitable, but maintaining operational security gets even harder. Directorate of Operations officers hold sensitive information very closely, and many—even those who believe in and support the idea of Congress having an oversight role—have trouble really warming to what Congress views as our responsibility for putting everything on the table.

  Given the inherent challenges in the relationship, there is an art to dealing with Congress, but there are also skills to be learned. Stan Moscowitz, the Agency’s head of legislative affairs, took me aside after my first appearance on the Hill. I thought it had gone very well, but he clearly had misgivings. “When you go down there and they ask you a question,” he said, “you have to immediately answer yes or no, and then explain the issue in more detail if you wish. Otherwise they think you’re obfuscating, as they did today.” It was one of the single best pieces of advice I ever got in terms of dealing with Congress.

  In addition to communicating with Congress, those who work on the seventh floor are responsible for maintaining the CIA’s relationship with the president, our most important customer. In early 1995, to offset blowback from media rumblings that President Clinton was not paying enough attention to the CIA, national security adviser Tony Lake came out to CIA headquarters in Langley for a meeting with senior leaders. He made very positive comments about the importance of intelligence to the White House. Everything was going fine; it was a lovefest. But then a GS-13 note taker on the back bench asked, “Mr. Lake, is there anything we’re not doing right?”

  “Well,” Lake said, “I did run into former NSC director Brent Scowcroft the other day, and he asked, ‘Is the Agency still giving you that lousy reporting on Iran?’” Everybody in the room laughed nervously. Then Lake said, “And by the way, you’re not doing so hot on North Korea.” I was stunned. This was our top consumer, one step removed from the president of the United States, and he had just delivered a devastating critique of our performance on two of the most important targets we had.

  I found the exchange extremely disturbing and went back to my office to write a cable to all our field stations. My intention was to be as blunt as Lake had been in his comments. Some people still remember the cable, because it stunned the DO. It was a departure from the sort of staid cables we were all used to. In essence, I told our field officers that according to our biggest and most important customer, we were not cutting it and we needed to do better. The cable had a polarizing, even shocking effect. Though no one came back to me to challenge my observations directly, a number of senior officers did not like the message and let it be known by sending messages out on the underground bongo drums that eventually reached my ears. Their reaction said to me that, from their perspective, it was wrong to highlight shortcomings so starkly. Others took the message in stride as a call to improve. One senior officer, who had been preparing at the time to retire, said that this cable gave him renewed faith and convinced him to stay on.13 In short, my candor—and Lake’s—cut two ways.

  What I was getting at in my cable was this: we needed to raise the bar on performance on the tough targets, and the managers had to take the lead on this at every level. We needed to ask: Did we have the right people in the right jobs, and were we hiring and promoting the right mix of people? Did we have enough officers in the DO who were the equivalent of fighter pilots, male and female, using all the creativity and all the guile that the challenge required?

  I tried to get at these quality issues in the strategic plan I developed to reform the Directorate of Operations. When I had told Price earlier in my tenure as ADDO that I planned to undertake a new and comprehensive strategic plan, he agreed without hesitation. The feeling in the directorate was that, if reform was to happen, it would have to be led from within. We wanted to modify ourselves before somebody else did it. We were concerned that someone making changes from the outside might make it more difficult for us to do our jobs. I was aided in this work by our chief of plans, Dick Calder, a top-notch officer. My only self-criticism today is that I probably should have stepped out even further, although at the time I thought I was pushing the envelope as much as possible.

  It was surprising to me, in a global intelligence service, how little time and energy was actually spent on strategic issues. We hired very bright officers, but a large percentage of them wanted to do only tactical planning. Many would rather have worried about how to arrange a “chance” encounter with a Chinese or North Korean official than think strategically about how best to tackle the Chinese or North Korean regimes. We often spent all day putting out fires without leaving any time to ask the right strategic questions, which was imperative given the times in which we were living. In the mid-1990s we were post-Ames, in the midst of downsizing, and wondering who we were and how we needed to restructure ourselves to remain relevant. “It’s common to say that we were the world’s second-oldest profession and that profession doesn’t change, but things were changing, and we had to take a serious look at ourselves,” Calder said. “If we were going to be able to answer our customers’ new questions, we had to aggressively develop new resources and assets.”14

  The strategic reform plan we put together in 1995 had as a cornerstone the key judgment that the greatest national security threat facing America was “domestic terrorism.” It laid out specific reforms for the clandestine service: increasing focus on transnational issues such as terrorism and narcotics; leveraging the broadest capabilities of the Agency to make our work more relevant; creating multidisciplinary centers to pull together analytical, technical, and support capabilities; attracting and retaining the best talent for the future of the service; implementing new counterintelligence procedures, including policies for screening, clearance, and personnel; increasing technical skills within the service, which had previously focused primarily on source-running skills; and maximizing our “tooth-to-tail ratio,” which has to do with how many people are carrying out missions versus how many are required to support those missions.

  While we never completely executed all the parts of the strategic plan, we did make progress on multiple fronts, including bringing the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence closer together. With the construction of a new headquarters building at Langley, a major reorganization of office space took place. The DO officers all wanted to remain huddled together, totally separated from their analyst colleagues. Dave Cohen, my counterpart in the DI, and I decided to knock down the wall, literally, that separated the DDI’s suite of offices from the DDO’s. Somewhere in the archives there is a photo of both us in hard hats, hammers in hand. It was symbolic of the change that needed to come about.

  The integration was substantive as well as organizational. When we co-located the regional analytical and operational divisions, it put more analytical input into our intelligence collection and got DI officers involved in the direct assignment of priorities, collection targets, and analysis. Like anything bureaucratic, there were some pro forma steps to it, but it was a serious effort that had a positive impact.15 It was amazing how easy it was to dictate this change. I simply brought in the DO’s chief of support and told him to make it happen. God knows what chaos that produced, but I was determined to break down the walls.

  During this period, there were also several misguided reforms that I was able to redirect and prevent. Most stemmed from the need to draw down our budget as part of the post–Cold War “peace dividend.” One such reform was a proposal to combine the Africa and Latin America Divisions. The DO program managers at the time apparently wanted to merge the t
wo divisions to appease the budgeters. But that was a fool’s errand. At a joint meeting of senior officers from both divisions, I simply announced it was not going to happen, and that was the end of it. Area expertise is a highly valued commodity in the intelligence business and should not be tampered with lightly. Every division has its own unique culture and operating style, and we needed to have dedicated officers in each who knew they could make their careers there. Furthermore, it cannot be overlooked that the United States has vastly different national security interests in those regions. As many before me have noted, nobody in the U.S. government seems to be too concerned about Africa until a crisis strikes there. And one always does, as we can see from the unrest and growth of terrorism in the continent. For example, nobody cared about Somalia until Delta Force showed up there in 1993 looking for Mohammed Farah Aidid and desperately needed intelligence support. And today, Africa is a hotbed of Islamic terrorism.

  * * *

  President Clinton’s pick to replace Woolsey as CIA director at the beginning of 1995 was Michael P. C. Carns, a retired air force general. But on March 10, after withdrawing the nomination in light of alleged immigration violations by Carns involving a Filipino household employee, he tapped John M. Deutch, an MIT chemistry professor serving as deputy secretary of defense, to run the Agency. He selected George J. Tenet, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer then serving on Clinton’s National Security Council, to be deputy director. Almost no one at the CIA had a good feel for Deutch at the time, but it seemed that his nomination would be good for the Agency, given his close access to the White House and his prominent role at the Pentagon.