by Tim Weiner
“Mathews considered himself to be the Robin Hood of the radical right,” the FBI’s William H. Matens wrote, “robbing the rich Jews and giving to the Aryans, linking all these radical groups together—Klansmen, skinheads, neo-Nazis, survivalists, tax protestors, militant farmers.” The FBI was astonished to learn that The Order claimed hundreds of hard-core adherents with “plans to sabotage dams and other infrastructure items such as communications and utilities in order to shut down American cities.”
Mathews sowed his own destruction when he left a handgun at the last of The Order’s hijackings. The FBI tracked him to a chalet on Whidbey Island, Washington, thirty miles north of Seattle in Puget Sound.
Revell sent the hostage rescue team to the island. On December 4, 1984, all hell broke loose. The team knocked heads with the FBI special agent in charge from Seattle. As they argued, Mathews opened fire. The FBI responded fiercely. Their tear gas canisters started a conflagration and the chalet burned to ashes. No rescue, much less an arrest, was possible. Mathews was incinerated. His death fed the angry fantasies of a generation of like-minded fanatics. One among them was Timothy McVeigh, the man who ignited the bomb that killed 168 Americans in Oklahoma City a decade later. The operation was considered a calamity.
But Revell and his counterterrorism cowboys won their spurs four months later by foiling a plot to kill Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India during a visit to the United States. The FBI had picked up word of an assassination plot by Sikhs in New York. (Gandhi’s mother, Indira, his predecessor as prime minister, had been killed by Sikh nationalists; six years later he met the same fate.) Revell sent Tom Norris, an undercover member of the hostage rescue team, to ensnare the conspirators. Norris posed as an assassin for hire. A veteran navy SEAL with a fearsome face, he had lost an eye in combat in Vietnam, and he looked like a killer. After Norris broke the case, he was invited to the Indian Embassy to accept Gandhi’s gratitude.
Webster was usually wary of undercover stings; when they went wrong, they made the Bureau look like the American secret police. “I did not want to turn the FBI into a Gestapo organization,” he said. “But there were times when the use of the undercover operation was the only way.”
Buck Revell officially became the number-two man in the FBI in June 1985. He now had day-to-day command and control of all major cases—intelligence, investigative, criminal, counterterrorism. He was the FBI’s official liaison to the White House and the CIA.
No one at the Bureau had held such a wide range of powers since the death of J. Edgar Hoover. And no one else had faced such a cavalcade of crises.
The counterterrorism capabilities of the United States were severely tested by a series of kidnappings in Lebanon. Americans were being taken hostage in the slums of Beirut. The disappearances had started fifteen months before; among the first to vanish was the CIA’s station chief. The captors called themselves Islamic Jihad. But that was a cover name for a coalition of forces the United States did not comprehend.
Congress passed new laws giving the FBI the power to go after the kidnappers. For the first time, the Bureau had the legal authority to investigate terrorism against Americans abroad. It also had orders from the White House: do something, do anything, to free the hostages. Revell had to work with the CIA to form a plan. But his relationship with the Agency suffered a serious wound in the fall of 1985.
On September 22, a renegade CIA officer named Edward Lee Howard disappeared from the United States. The Agency had selected him for a deep-cover assignment in Moscow. He had undergone two years of training, which included reading some of the Agency’s most sensitive files on American operations against the Soviets. Howard was preparing to depart for his posting when the CIA determined that he was not the right man for the job: he was a drunkard and a pathological liar. Dismissed for his derelictions, Howard was bitter. The CIA was well aware of the risks of his flight; it asked the FBI to keep him under surveillance. But the Bureau lost track of him. Howard caught a flight to Helsinki and defected to the KGB. The CIA and the FBI resumed their backstabbing traditions, blaming one another for the fiasco.
The Howard affair was only one among a dozen major espionage cases that year. Two weeks later, on October 9, 1985, Robert Hanssen secretly resumed his career as a Communist spy inside the FBI. He had been made a supervisor in the Soviet counterintelligence division in New York. He promptly wrote to the most senior KGB officer in Washington that he would soon deliver documents containing “certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
Hanssen was true to his word. He sent the Soviets a complete compendium of double-agent operations being run by the FBI, a warning that the FBI was tunneling into the basement of the new Soviet Embassy, a rundown of the Bureau’s new efforts to recruit Soviet intelligence officers, a description of the National Security Agency’s decoding of Moscow’s communications satellite transmissions, the details of the CIA’s budget requests for the next five years, and much more. It was the biggest breach of American secrets in the history of the Cold War—with one exception.
Aldrich Ames, the chief of the Soviet counterintelligence branch of the CIA’s clandestine service, had become a spy for Moscow that spring. Like Hanssen, Ames was an assiduous collector of intelligence on behalf of the Soviet Union. Along with the names of hundreds of his fellow intelligence officers, and the details of their operations, Ames sold the KGB the names of every one of the Soviets who spied for the United States.
Within weeks, Revell and the FBI’s top counterintelligence officers knew something terrible had happened: two of the FBI’s most valued double agents were recalled from the Soviet delegation in Washington and returned to Moscow. Soon, almost every Soviet intelligence officer who spied in secret for the United States was either behind bars or in the grave.
The KGB clearly had acquired inside knowledge of the Bureau’s most valuable intelligence missions. How Moscow had done it was another question. The FBI wanted to believe the deaths and the disappearances and the blown operations could be blamed on the defection of Edward Lee Howard. But Howard knew nothing about the FBI’s double agents. Nor did he know about the Bureau’s efforts to recruit officers from the ranks of the Soviet delegations in Washington and New York—and nearly every one of those operations started going sour at the end of 1985.
The hunt for the source of the leaks began with great energy and intensity. In two years’ time, it sputtered, stalled, and stopped. The FBI remained mystified. The CIA seemed indifferent. Their counterintelligence chiefs were furious at one another. They would not work together. They could not imagine what had gone wrong. Their investigation concluded that the problem had to be a bug, or a wiretap, or a computer. It could not conceivably be an American spy.
Traitors like Hanssen and Ames could work undetected for years on end because American counterintelligence had become a shambles. The FBI and the CIA had not been on speaking terms for most of the past forty years. The sniping and the silences between them did more harm to American national security than the Soviets.
Revell had an even bigger problem on his hands. On October 4, 1985, he had been handed the responsibility for a joint operation with the CIA to free the American hostages in Lebanon.
Nothing mattered more to Ronald Reagan. The president was aghast when he learned that the FBI and the rest of the American intelligence establishment had no idea where the captives were held or who was holding them. “Reagan was preoccupied with the fate of the hostages,” remembered Bob Gates, then chief of the CIA’s intelligence directorate. “No loud words or harsh indictments—none of the style of Johnson or Nixon. Just a quizzical look, a suggestion of pain, and then the request—‘We just have to get those people out’—repeated nearly daily, week after week, month after month. Implicit was the accusation: What the hell kind of intelligence service are you running if you can’t find and rescue these Americans?”
Peter Kilburn, a librarian at the American University in
Beirut, had been held captive for ten months in Lebanon. Colonel North told Revell that the United States was going to pay $2 million for his freedom, with the funds provided by the politically hyperactive Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot. Middle Eastern informants would serve as go-betweens; the FBI would hand off the cash. Revell balked at ransom. He said he would not be party to a payoff. Colonel North soon came up with another concept. The FBI would remove $2 million in cash from the Federal Reserve, treat it with a chemical solution, and deliver it over to the kidnappers in Lebanon. The ransom would self-destruct in two hours.
Revell marveled at the Mission: Impossible concept. But he did not buy it. And Peter Kilburn was murdered on the orders of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi before the plan could be carried out.
Qaddafi’s intelligence officers had placed a bomb in a West Berlin disco patronized by United States soldiers on April 5, 1986. It killed two American sergeants and a Turkish woman, and injured at least 230 others, including 79 Americans. President Reagan retaliated by bombing Tripoli and Benghazi; at least 15 people died and some 2,000 were reported wounded. Qaddafi then sent his spies into Beirut, bought Peter Kilburn from his captors, and had him executed on April 17.
The FBI organized its own counterstrike after learning that Qaddafi sought to avenge the bombing of Libya with an attack on the United States. Libyan intelligence agents tried to join forces with a group of gangsters in Chicago called El Rukn, Arabic for “the Foundation.” El Rukn had started out in the 1960s as the Blackstone Rangers, a politically savvy street gang. Its leaders now posed as pious Islamists while dealing drugs and running guns; the religious motif was a cover for their criminal rackets. The FBI learned through wiretaps on El Rukn that the Libyan leader proposed to pay the Chicago gang to attack political targets in the United States. He had chosen the wrong conspirators. El Rukn knew how to sell cocaine, but it had no idea how to carry out a terrorist conspiracy. The FBI swiftly mounted a sting operation, sending an undercover agent to El Rukn’s leaders. Posing as an arms dealer, the agent sold them a missile launcher. Agents quickly rounded up the group’s leaders on terrorism charges.
A few weeks later, the FBI ran a similar undercover sting on a group of right-wing mercenaries who proposed to overthrow the isolated South American nation of Suriname. Three FBI undercover agents had infiltrated the group of thirteen soldiers of fortune—one posing as a crazed Vietnam veteran, another as a religious zealot, the third as an arms dealer. On July 28, 1986, the group gathered at a private airfield outside New Orleans, with weapons, ammunition, and operational plans for a revolution. The FBI arrested them all.
As these cases surfaced in screaming headlines, Revell was drawn deeper into the secret intrigues within the Reagan administration. The White House was running an international undercover operation all its own.
On July 30, 1986, North told Revell that Attorney General Ed Meese had signed off on a plan, approved by the president, to sell American missiles to the government of Iran in exchange for the release of the hostages. The Reagan administration was going to broker lethal weapons for American lives.
Revell kept a poker face. But he was thinking: is this legal? He wondered why North had shared this explosive information. He surmised it was to keep the FBI from stumbling on something even more secret. His instincts were sound. He took his doubts to Webster; the Judge consulted Meese. “The Attorney General doesn’t seem to have a problem with it—which was amazing,” Revell recounted. Meese had told them—falsely—that all the weapons shipments had been approved in writing by the president.
If the president did it, the FBI director concluded, that meant it was not illegal.
Revell knew that North divided his hundred-hour workweeks between the hostages in Lebanon and the counterrevolutionaries in Central America. The contras were fighting a scattershot war on communism, trying to overthrow the duly elected Marxist government of Nicaragua. North’s devotion to their cause was no secret. The United States Congress had cut off American military and financial support for the contras, whose ranks included soldiers who tortured and executed civilians, including children, captured in combat. The FBI had started an investigation into soldiers of fortune suspected of smuggling weapons into Central America. The Bureau was newly alert to a gun-running operation that involved a Miami company called SAT, short for Southern Air Transport.
“On October 8, I received a call from Oliver North,” Revell recounted. “He was concerned that the FBI might discover … that SAT was, in fact, involved in the Iran hostage situation.” North had hired Southern Air Transport to ship weapons to Iran—and to the contras. Both Webster and Revell got clear signals from Attorney General Meese to back off on the investigation. They complied for a few weeks, until the facts began to leak.
The secrets spilled because the covert operations of the United States were so badly conceived, and so poorly executed, that they began to break down in public. First the crash of a cargo plane maintained by Southern Air Transport exposed the role of the White House in arming the contras in defiance of the law. Then a newspaper in Beirut revealed that the White House was smuggling weapons into Iran.
The president denied it in public. But Revell knew it was true.
On the afternoon of November 13, 1986, the White House asked Revell to review a speech that President Reagan would deliver to the American people that evening. As he pored over the draft of the speech in North’s office, he pointed out five evident falsehoods.
“We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we,” the president’s draft said. The United States would never “strengthen those who support terrorism”; it had only sold “defensive armaments and spare parts” to Iran. It had not violated its stance of neutrality in the scorched-earth war between Iran and Iraq; it had never chartered arms shipments out of Miami.
Revell knew none of this was true. He warned Judge Webster, who alerted Attorney General Meese. He was ignored.
“I was sort of odd man out,” Revell said.
“THE PRESIDENT HAS ASKED US TO SHUT UP”
The president delivered the speech almost precisely as drafted, word for dissembling word.
Colonel North and his superior, the president’s national security adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, began shredding their records and deleting their computer files as fast as they could. But within the White House, one crucial fact emerged: they had skimmed millions of dollars in profits from the weapons sales to Iran and siphoned off the money to support the contras.
“A real bombshell,” Vice President George H. W. Bush recorded in his new diary on November 22, after talking to Attorney General Meese. “It’s going to be a major flap … The president has asked us to shut up, and that is exactly what’s happening.”
The silence lasted three more days. Meese made a short public statement on November 25, revealing that the missiles had been sold and the money skimmed.
Within hours, FBI agents were searching Oliver North’s office. They retrieved a document from North’s burn bag—an elaborately falsified statement about support for the contras, delivered in secret testimony to Congress. They dusted it and found the fingerprints of the chief of the CIA’s clandestine service, Clair George. It was the beginning of a six-year investigation that reached the highest levels of the American military and intelligence establishments, the most politically perilous case the Bureau had confronted since Watergate.
FBI agents quickly questioned Vice President Bush, Attorney General Meese, the president’s closest White House aides, and the chieftains of the CIA. A handful of agents, working in extreme secrecy, rapidly uncovered the most important evidence in the case: five thousand computer messages among Admiral Poindexter, Colonel North, and the National Security Council staff. In a remarkable feat of forensics, FBI agents recovered and restored the backup tapes for the internal White House e-mail system that recorded the arms sales and the diversion of funds.
The FBI’s evidence also compelled
a remarkable confession from the president of the United States.
“For the past three months, I’ve been silent on the revelations about Iran,” Reagan said in a televised address to the nation on March 4, 1987. “And you must have been thinking: ‘Well, why doesn’t he tell us what’s happening? Why doesn’t he just speak to us as he has in the past when we’ve faced troubles or tragedies?’ Others of you, I guess, were thinking: ‘What’s he doing hiding out in the White House?’
“Well, the reason I haven’t spoken to you before now is this: You deserve the truth,” the president said.
“I’ve paid a price for my silence,” he said. “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
The facts and the evidence showed that the highest-ranking officers of the CIA and the National Security Council had collaborated with a remarkable gang of con men and crooks in carrying out Reagan’s orders. They had committed or condoned spectacular acts of folly in the arms-for-hostages deals. The president had broken his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.
Reagan concluded his speech with an announcement that he hoped would restore a measure of trust in his administration: he had nominated the FBI’s William Webster to be the next director of Central Intelligence. Webster was “a man of sterling reputation,” the president said. “He understands the meaning of ‘rule of law.’ ” The choice seemed to make sense: Congress and an independent counsel were investigating the top officers of the CIA, and three dozen FBI agents armed with subpoenas were thumbing through thousands of top secret files seeking evidence of perjury and obstruction of justice. The independent counsel would conclude that President Reagan, the secretary of defense, the director of Central Intelligence, and their aides had skirted or broken the law. But President George H. W. Bush eventually granted pardons to all who faced criminal charges—including the CIA’s covert operations chief, Clair George, and its counterterrorism director, Duane Clarridge.
