Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA

by Rizzo, John

  As our guy related his story, I wondered to myself, why is he telling me this? It all sounded perfectly fine to me. It was kinda cool, actually.

  And then he got to the kicker. “There is one little catch,” he said. “The actor refuses to take any money, but he told us that instead all he wants is for us to score him the best fifty-thousand-dollar stash of cocaine we can find. He seems to think we can get the real primo stuff. So that’s why I’m here. Is it okay for us to do it?”

  “Uh, no,” I managed to get out of my agape mouth.

  “We know a way to get some easily,” our guy added hopefully.

  I definitely wasn’t eager to learn how, so I just repeated my response. “No. No way. Forget it.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought so, but I thought I’d ask anyway,” he said, looking only slightly crestfallen as he left my office.

  I later learned that the actor did provide some assistance to the CIA on a particular project. I was assured that his services were totally gratis.

  Adding to my portfolio as a generalist, in the summer of 1978 I was handed my first espionage prosecution of a CIA employee. The three-week trial that fall took place in the unlikely locale of Hammond, Indiana, a gritty, blighted industrial town just across the state line from Illinois. It was in the closest federal court to the hometown of the defendant, a twenty-three-year-old second-generation Greek American named William Kampiles.

  Kampiles, a fledgling analyst, was charged with selling a top-secret CIA satellite manual to the Russians for the ridiculously paltry sum of $3,000. The manual was a thick, densely worded document stuffed with technical charts spelling out all the details of a newly developed, state-of-the-art U.S. surveillance satellite that represented years of research and that had cost American taxpayers untold millions of dollars. And now, thanks to Kampiles, the Soviets had it dropped into their laps, for a pittance. It was nothing short of a road map for how the Soviet Union could act to shield itself from the U.S. eyes in the sky.

  It was a bizarre and tragic case on a number of levels—the golden child of immigrants, he had joined the Agency out of college the year before, with a hopelessly naïve fantasy of a James Bond–style career, only to find himself assigned clerklike duties in the CIA Command Center (the room that actually does have lots of clocks on the wall and rows of furrowed-browed people staring and muttering at their computer screens). Frustrated and bitter, he resigned from the CIA in November 1977 after less than a year, but before leaving he purloined the manual from the Command Center and a few months later walked into the Soviet embassy in Athens to offer his services and, eventually, the manual.

  Being not much older than Kampiles nor with much more CIA experience, I was assigned as the point man in the case—the first high-stakes, high-profile espionage case of my Agency career. It was also an experience filled with daily crises and sprinkled with comic and surreal vignettes. A template of sorts for my entire career.

  An espionage case is always a crapshoot because of its central paradox: The more egregious and damaging the compromise of national security information involved, the more difficult and risky it becomes to prosecute the wrongdoer, because of the fear that the information will be further spread and compromised during the course of the trial. And yet to not prosecute someone who has sold secrets to the enemy is simply an untenable proposition. Several years after the Kampiles case, Congress passed a law called the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), which established a detailed set of mechanisms designed to protect the excessive or unnecessary exposure of classified information in criminal prosecutions involving that sort of information, while at the same time protecting the defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial. But CIPA did not exist in 1978, so the Kampiles prosecution for me was one long, seat-of-the-pants, Perils of Pauline ride.

  The Kampiles case was filled with messy, inconvenient facts. First, there was the 68-page KH-11 satellite manual itself. It was indisputably a sensitive, top-secret document. We knew the Soviets had it—Kampiles himself had admitted to the FBI that he gave it to them (although he tried to recant that at the trial). However, it turned out that for months after Kampiles filched it from the Command Center, no one noticed it was missing, even though it was the only copy there. In fact, the Agency started looking for it only after Kampiles’s admission under quietly relentless FBI questioning. On top of that, when an Agency-wide inventory was belatedly conducted, about a dozen other copies could not be accounted for. What did that say about the supposed sanctity of the information inside it, and the CIA’s competence in keeping track of its secrets? It was left to me to deliver that unpleasant nugget of news to the Justice Department in the run-up to the trial. For the first of what would be far too many times in my career, I was in a room with a bunch of prosecutors giving me a collective eye-roll after I gave them news they did not want to hear.

  But the contents of the KH-11 manual weren’t the biggest secret the Agency sought to protect in the prosecution. After all, the Soviets already had it—although none of our other adversaries had it, as far as we could tell, so it was still well worth protecting from public exposure. But that concern paled beside another secret, known to fewer than a dozen people in the government. It was a secret that the CIA told Justice from the outset had to be protected at all costs, up to and including aborting the prosecution if there was any risk of its being exposed. It was the type of secret that the CIA has always kept, as an article of faith, above all others: the identity of a human source. In this case, a penetration—a mole—inside Soviet intelligence, who gave the CIA the first lead in the investigation that would lead to Kampiles. The lead, as most explosive leads are, was fragmentary: Sometime in the winter of 1978, a young American had met with a Soviet official in Athens and provided a top-secret document on a U.S. spy satellite. And a name, maybe not a true name and maybe garbled: Ruggerio or Ruggeri, something like that. That was it. And that’s how the investigation got under way.

  It was the first big secret I learned at the CIA. The kind of secret that gets someone killed if it gets out. And I was the guy ordered to protect it at all costs.

  For the government, every espionage prosecution has two focal points. The first is in Washington, where the senior leadership of the various stakeholders—Justice, the FBI, and the intelligence community—resides and makes the strategic and policy decisions for each prosecution. The second focal point is where the prosecution is happening, where staffers from each of the concerned agencies are in the courtroom every day for the pretrial proceedings and throughout the trial. For the Kampiles case, that group consisted of Dave Homer and his boss, John Martin, from the DOJ’s Internal Security Division; Don Stuckey and John Denton from the FBI’s Counterintelligence Section, who were the investigating agents on the case; U.S. Attorney Dave Ready and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Richmond, the local federal prosecutors who were the lead government attorneys in the courtroom; and me, representing the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. Only those in these tight, hermetic groups knew about the big secret in the Kampiles case.

  Every espionage case also has the same dynamic. Justice pushes to cross every “t” and dot every “i” to guarantee a conviction and preclude a reversal on appeal, which in turn causes them to instinctively want to use every piece of intelligence information the government has, no matter how sensitive, to ensure a conviction, or at least not screw one up. We on the intelligence side refer to this, perhaps unfairly, as the “kitchen sink” approach to prosecuting a case. The CIA, on the other hand, while equally focused on securing a “clean” conviction, traditionally pushes for a more nuanced approach: We tell the DOJ that we will turn cartwheels to provide our intelligence secrets necessary to get a conviction, but we are going to push back hard if we think the DOJ is going for “overkill” by putting sensitive information into jeopardy when it doesn’t have to.

  Shortly after Kampiles’s arrest on August 17, 1978, the CIA’s leadership—in the persons of Director Stansfield Tu
rner and my boss, General Counsel Tony Lapham—laid down a marker with Attorney General Griffin Bell: The existence of our source must be protected at all costs, including abandoning the prosecution, if necessary. Bell’s response was measured: Justice would do “all in its power” to protect the information. And that’s how it was left, with the trial looming three months later.

  One favorable factor was that the investigative trail did not lead in a straight line from the source to Kampiles. In fact, Kampiles came onto the screen only when he began bragging to former CIA co-workers that he had recently met with the Soviet intelligence officers in Athens and had “conned” them into paying him $3,000 by just telling them he was a CIA official with access to classified information. An astoundingly stupid and ignorant move on the kid’s part, of course—the first tenet of Cold War Counterintelligence 101 is that the Soviets never, ever paid something for nothing in return. So Kampiles’s story was quickly relayed to the FBI, where it dovetailed with the fragmentary source lead that the Bureau was already chasing. Kampiles voluntarily agreed to an interview with FBI special agents Stuckey and Denton, initially repeated his “something for nothing” story, was challenged on it, agreed to take a polygraph, flunked it, and ultimately confessed to the entire thing. All within a couple of days, and Kampiles never once invoked his Miranda rights to counsel. If his crime hadn’t been so serious, his naïveté would have been comic.

  The confession stood on its own, but the worries we in the CIA had were nagging and persistent. At the time that the hapless, dumb Kampiles wandered into the crosshairs, the FBI had focused on another suspect. Someone who was living in a midwestern city whose name was quite close to “Ruggeri/Ruggerio,” that tantalizing shard of a clue passed along by our source. The Bureau was, in fact, about to get a court order to wiretap the poor guy and secretly search his house. Once Kampiles confessed, the FBI dropped its plans. To this day the anonymous, law-abiding Mr. Ruggeri/Ruggerio doubtless has no clue how close he came to being sucked into an international espionage case.

  But the mysterious Ruggeri/Ruggerio bell could not be unrung. In all of his otherwise self-incriminating statements, Kampiles insisted he never gave his Russian handler any name, real or bogus. What made the Russians think that was what his name was?

  It was much more than a curiously loose end to the case against Kampiles. It was potentially Brady material—Brady being a landmark Supreme Court case compelling the government in any criminal case to turn over to the defense any information in its files potentially exculpatory to the defendant. And surely we were in that territory here—the FBI not only had that lead, but had been chasing it down right up to the moment Kampiles obligingly popped up. And it seemed to point to someone other than Kampiles as the culprit.

  The thought of providing to the defense any information that could conceivably be tied back to our source was, well, inconceivable to the CIA. Director Turner would have gone to President Carter—and that’s what it would have taken—to get him to order the attorney general to abort the prosecution. And a confessed traitor—a CIA employee, no less—would get away with what he did, courtesy of the CIA’s intercession. It would have ignited a huge, unprecedented firestorm. But it was conceivable.

  The sense of dread and impending doom haunted me for weeks. The defense was filing a blizzard of motions asking all sorts of open-ended questions, and every week or so my boss, Tony Lapham, and I—the only CIA lawyers knowledgeable about the source—would agonize over a particular query that seemed to come close to the verboten area. Meanwhile, those cleared at the DOJ—the “kitchen sink” boys—were warily watching, too, seemingly all too ready to say “Okay, guys, that’s it. We gotta tell the defense.” Kampiles’s defense counsel sensed something was up, even if he didn’t know what, and kept probing. We kept dodging every bullet, but I thought it was only a matter of time.

  But then, a few days before the trial was to begin, with CIA and FBI agents knowledgeable about the source slated to testify, a miracle happened.

  Someone in the small circle of government officials clued in to the source—I’d like to say it was me, but it wasn’t—remembered seeing something at some point in the thousands of pages that made up the Kampiles investigative file. It was only a sentence or two, buried in the huge pile. Kampiles happened to mention to somebody, either his FBI interrogators or the people in the CIA to whom he confided, what clothes he was wearing when he met with his Soviet handler in Athens. He purposely dressed like a tourist, he said. Khaki pants and a rugby shirt. Not just any rugby shirt, he added, but one made by Rugger. With “Rugger” stitched on the left breast.

  The nagging mystery was finally, suddenly solved. Kampiles’s Soviet handler must have figured the thing was a damn monogram. And no doubt proudly so reported it up his chain of command. With a little bit of mangled spelling.

  Well, I thought for the first but far from the last time in my career, everybody in the spy trade screws up once in a while. And then I thought, also for the first but not the last time in my career, this is the kind of stuff I could never make up.

  After that, the trial was almost an afterthought. With the Justice Department’s prodding, we grudgingly agreed to let the presiding judge, a no-nonsense midwesterner named Phil McNagny, look at the “Ruggeri/Ruggerio” information alone inside his chambers. I hand-carried the documents to him myself and waited outside to retrieve them when he was done. He confirmed what we knew already: The information was extremely sensitive, and extremely inculpatory to Kampiles. The defense would not see it, and nothing in the trial would get anywhere near it.

  The trial lasted a week, and the jury came back after ten hours. Kampiles was found guilty of espionage and subsequently sentenced to forty years.

  As for our source, I heard nothing more about him until a number of years later, when I learned that the Agency had just safely brought him in from the cold and resettled him in the United States. Which made me happy.

  By 1979, Carter—despite his earlier stance, and like all presidents of all political stripes before and after him—was turning to the CIA as a uniquely valuable tool when unpredictable and ominous events in the world forced his hand. The Soviet Union had not only invaded Afghanistan but encouraged and supported, via weapons and advisors, proxy regimes there as well as in Africa and, especially, Central America, where the Sandinistas seized control in Nicaragua and fomented leftist insurgencies in its neighboring countries. Meanwhile, the shah of Iran was overthrown by the virulently anti-American forces of Ayatollah Khomeini, culminating in their November 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy, with 52 U.S. Government employees (including CIA personnel) held hostage.

  As it happened, this was also about the time when I received what turned out to be my career-making job assignment: I was named to the post of legal advisor to the Directorate of Operations (DO). The DO was shorthand for the CIA’s clandestine service, the entity responsible for all undercover activities. For someone with less than four years of Agency experience, it was a plum position. I was given an office situated inside the spaces of the DO, working literally in the midst of the covert or “dark” side of CIA. At the time, it was the only legal assignment in the CIA located outside the physical confines of the OGC. (Today, there are about sixty such “on-site” lawyers scattered throughout virtually every component of the Agency.) I was never really told by my boss, Dan Silver (who had succeeded Tony Lapham as general counsel the year before), why he chose me for the job, but one reason quickly became apparent as soon as I settled into my new digs. My predecessor in the position was seen by many as brusque and condescending, and the word had been passed through the DO “rat line” (these guys were spies, after all) to avoid dealing with the DO lawyer if at all possible. So for the first few weeks after I arrived, I was the proverbial Maytag repairman from those old TV commercials—sitting in my office waiting in vain for my phone to ring.

  Gradually, as I doggedly engaged in a sort of missionary work inside the cloistered environment of the DO,
the tide began to turn, and I started to get phone calls and “walk-in” office visits by the clandestine service officers. I did my best to put them at ease and be responsive to all comers, whether junior or senior in rank. (I was told that my predecessor in his final months had taken to demanding to know the salary level of every DO caller before consenting to take the call.) In those early weeks I learned a lasting lesson about the psyche of CIA covert operatives, at least as far as how they relate to lawyers: They are totally focused on the mission but completely un-Machiavellian when seeking legal advice (otherwise, they wouldn’t be coming in the first place). They ask only that their lawyer not look or act like he thinks they are idiots, lunatics, or criminals.

  And as 1979 turned into 1980, with the Carter administration finally rebooting the moribund CIA covert-action capabilities, my job as the DO legal advisor began to have booming business. I had to engage in crash, on-the-job training as the architect of another arcane CIA legal art form: Presidential Findings. These are the instruments, mandated by Congress in the mid-’70s, by which the president is required to personally approve in writing all covert-action programs. Congress created this process to end forever the practice of undocumented, “wink and a nod” marching orders that presidents issued to the CIA in the halcyon years of the ’50s through the early ’70s, leading to everything from foreign coups to assassination plots.

  From the time the congressional requirement legally kicked in, in the mid-’70s, up to 1979, covert action was virtually nonexistent, so I was operating on a largely blank page in trying to figure out how to write a Finding. The process would always begin the same way: A directive would come from the National Security Council (NSC), or sometimes the president himself, to draw up a covert-action proposal (defined as an activity designed to influence conditions abroad so that our government’s hand is not acknowledged or apparent) involving a particular objective. The CIA would then come up with a menu of options—it could run the gamut from a propaganda campaign to organizing an armed insurgency. The White House would pick and choose the options it was prepared to endorse, and that’s where I would come in. I would draft the Finding for the president’s signature, incorporating the White House’s wishes in language specific enough to accurately convey the mandate but broad enough not to require going back to the president for a new imprimatur for every new “wrinkle” after the program was launched.