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

by Rizzo, John

  Writing a Finding was thus a delicate and tricky endeavor, and I had no road map to follow. But orders for covert-action campaigns in Afghanistan and Central America first came out of the chute from the White House in late 1979, and they came quickly, so we at the CIA had to move quickly. Those first Findings were terse—two or three short paragraphs at the most—because the Carter White House was cautious about letting out too much “leash” to the CIA, and because we at the CIA had never really written any of the damn things before, so we erred on the side of brevity. Beginning in the mid-’80s, Findings would expand in length to more than a page, and they would keep getting longer, becoming almost mini–white papers in later years. But at the beginning, they were short and to the point. On one side of the page, the target country or region would be identified. On the opposite side, the actions the CIA would be authorized by the president to undertake.

  Dan Silver and I cobbled together a shorthand vernacular for particular kinds of actions, the idea being that they could be plugged in as appropriate in all future Findings, thereby developing a glossary for covert action. When “political action” is authorized, that means influencing a foreign government’s viewpoint toward the United States and/or U.S. policy objectives. It could include buying the favor of a local politician or creating a political movement abroad (the phrase does not include, however, the CIA effecting an outcome in a foreign election; something that aggressive and risky, we decided, required explicit presidential authorization). Some of the phrases we came up with were admittedly a bit sanitized, largely because we recognized that it was unlikely that any White House, and in particular the Carter White House, would countenance the president signing a directive to the CIA authorizing deception and misinformation campaigns or, in the ultimate case, killing people. No president would affix his signature to a piece of paper that contained the words lie or kill, so the former sort of activity was dubbed “all forms of propaganda,” while the latter was described as “lethal action.” Nonetheless, everyone involved would know what those terms meant, from the president to the congressional intelligence committees that receive copies of Findings.

  Afghanistan was a particular challenge. President Carter ladled out our authorities carefully and incrementally, Finding by Finding. At first, we were not permitted to give arms or ammunition to the Afghan resistance (“lethal equipment” in Finding-speak), only “cash” and “logistical support.” This sort of calibration worked much better for us desk jockeys in Washington than it did for the CIA people in the field. I remember a visit early on from the chief of the CIA’s Afghan Task Force, who had a bewildering question about, of all things, mules. It seemed that the Afghan resistance fighters were in dire need of them to navigate the rugged Afghan topography and, in particular, to carry arms and attack the Soviet-backed forces. So, would the CIA’s providing them constitute “logistical support,” which was permitted, or “lethal equipment,” which was verboten? And the chief said he needed an answer right away—time was of the essence. As for almost every other question I had to confront as the DO lawyer, there was no statute or court precedent to help guide me on the appropriate legal status accorded mules. So I paused briefly, pondering whether or not a mule could be “lethal” in circumstances other than kicking some poor guy in the head. Deciding on pure gut instinct that a mule more properly belongs in the “logistical” category, I told our guy that we could provide the mules.

  Navigating the Carter Findings on Central America, and Nicaragua especially, presented much more significant obstacles. In Afghanistan, at least the objective was clear from the outset: Get the Soviets, and their puppet government, out. In Central America, the objectives were subtler: deterring the Soviets, the Cubans, and their Sandinista acolytes from spreading their influence throughout the region. Our authorities stopped short of overthrowing the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. That meant making a Nicaraguan resistance movement viable—hence, the Carter Findings authorized “political action”—but not strong enough militarily to force a change in government. And that’s what the Nicaraguan resistance (soon to be forever known as the “contras”) wanted and needed from the United States—because otherwise the contras knew they would be crushed by the increasingly despotic and brutal Sandinista regime. Regime change was their objective, but not the U.S. Government’s.

  Another huge factor in the disparate ways the Agency had to treat Afghanistan and Central America—and how I had to interpret the covert-action authorities Carter gave us—was Congress. There was total consensus in Congress that the United States needed to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, so the administration had almost a blank check. Put another way, I could have legally categorized mules as anything I wanted, secure in the knowledge that no member of the congressional intelligence committees would have cared. In Central America, by contrast, there was no congressional consensus—sentiment there toward the Sandinistas ranged from apathy to mild annoyance, up to considering them an existential threat to the Western Hemisphere. And so from the beginning, the intelligence committees were watching closely, scrutinizing our activities piece by piece, dollar by dollar. This congressional ambivalence toward U.S. policies in Central America (which were themselves ambivalent) would haunt the CIA for years. For my part, I would spend far more time over the next several years walking on eggshells in giving legal advice on the Central America program than I ever would on the Afghanistan program, which was exponentially larger in terms of funding and sheer violence.

  Still, those last two years of the Carter administration were exhilarating for me professionally. The Afghanistan Findings kept coming, albeit in bologna-slicing style, and I was the guy who was putting them together. The Central America program, meanwhile, was also gradually expanding, and to top it off, the White House ordered up a covert-action program in response to the November 1979 hostage crisis involving the U.S. embassy in Iran. By 1980, the White House counsel, the legendary D.C. superlawyer Lloyd Cutler, became so concerned about the perception of Carter signing so many Findings that he directed my boss, Dan Silver, and me to create a different name for a Finding that simply expands or otherwise changes the scope of a preexisting Finding. We came up with the deceptively innocuous term “Memorandum of Notification”—MON for short. It was purely a cosmetic move, since an MON was the same as a Finding in everything but name. Still, Cutler was happy, because it kept the number of Findings down, and from his perspective, protected his client from being accused by critics, or later by historians, of being a late-blooming, covert-action-addicted president. Never mind that Carter signed all MONs, as well as Findings, so his fingerprints were all over both. Nonetheless, notwithstanding their rather disingenuous provenance, MONs have endured, and have been regularly issued by presidents to this day.

  For me, what the Carter White House preferred to call all these covert-action authorizations didn’t really matter. What did matter to me is that I was the one tasked to draft them. And it was pretty heady stuff, composing documents describing all sorts of derring-do that was classified above top secret and knowing that the president of the United States would be personally reading my words and putting his signature on the bottom of the page (no autopens allowed). Shallow, maybe, but I was still in my early thirties.

  CHAPTER 3

  Enter William Casey and a Whole New Ball Game (1981–1984)

  Following Carter’s loss in November 1980 was a rocky transition from his administration to the incoming Reagan team. Stansfield Turner, the four-year incumbent DCI, was number one on the target list for the Reagan national security team. It was the second transition between a defeated incumbent and a newly elected president from the opposite party that I had witnessed at the CIA, the first following Gerald Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter four years earlier. But that change hadn’t seemed nearly so rancorous.

  I had found Turner to be an impressive and admirable man in many respects. But with his military bearing, he had alienated most everyone in the CIA rank and file early on and never
recovered. And the Reagan national security transition team—composed exclusively of staunch conservative hawks—made no effort to hide their contempt for him (and by extension, Carter) in their visits to the building. Which in turn prompted Turner, a proud and prickly man, to abruptly stomp out of the CIA midtransition.

  Enter William Casey. He would turn out to be the toughest, smartest, most complex, and most enigmatic of the dozen CIA directors I served under.

  Casey arrived as CIA director in early 1981 with eclectic credentials, to say the least. A lawyer by background, he was a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA in World War II. He then made a fortune on Wall Street but in later years would serve as a tough, aggressive enforcer as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager and likely could have had his pick of numerous senior posts in the new administration. But he wanted to be the CIA director. Badly.

  Casey made it immediately clear to the workforce, especially the Directorate of Operations, that the Reagan administration was going to take the gloves off against America’s adversaries around the world. (He made it clear by deed, since his gruff demeanor and mumbled speech pattern hampered communicating anything orally to large CIA audiences.)

  I met Casey for the first time a couple of weeks after he took office. It was not an auspicious beginning to our relationship.

  I was summoned to the director’s suite on the seventh floor for what his secretary cryptically described as a background briefing on covert action. The meeting was scheduled in fifteen minutes, she said. That’s all the notice I was given. I took the elevator from my office in DO on the second floor, a little nervous about meeting Casey for the first time. But I also assumed there would be others attending the meeting—the deputy director for operations, the chief of the DO covert-action staff, perhaps a couple of Casey’s new aides. But when I arrived, his secretary pointed to his closed office door and simply told me he was waiting. In I walked, and there he was sitting alone at his desk, surrounded by boxes, with papers scattered all about him. He simply looked up through very thick eyeglasses, grunted at me to sit down, and kept on reading a stack of documents in front of him. I could see they were copies of all the existing Presidential Findings. I couldn’t help noticing that he was wearing what looked to be an expensive bespoke pinstripe suit, one with buttons on the sleeves that actually could be buttoned. I also couldn’t help noticing that it looked like he had slept in it.

  After a few very long minutes, he addressed me for the first time. He made no pretense of knowing my name. “Did you write these?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.”

  “Why does a lawyer write up covert-action programs?” Casey made it sound like an accusation.

  “Well, sir, the law mandates that the president must issue a directive to CIA—”

  He cut me off. “I know what the law says,” he said impatiently while pulling out of his drawer a maroon book that I recognized as Title 50 of the United States Code, containing all the existing statutes and legislative history relating to the CIA and national security. “I’m a lawyer, too, you know.” I remember thinking, I don’t have a copy of that thing anywhere in my office. I felt the onset of flop sweat. This scowling old guy was twice my age, and I was sure he was about to give me a pop quiz.

  But mercifully, he put Title 50 aside and returned to looking at his stack of Findings.

  “There’s not much in these,” he said dismissively. “Not very tough.”

  I didn’t know quite what to say, if anything. Was he somehow blaming me for that? I wasn’t about to suddenly become an advocate for the Carter administration’s record on covert action, but the thought did occur to me: If this guy thinks these Findings are wimpy, he should have been here two years ago, when we hardly had any at all. And the thought also occurred to me: Why am I the only one here listening to this?

  Casey then looked at me and simply said, “You’re going to be writing Findings that are a lot stronger than this.” And then he mumbled, “Thanks.” And that was it. I was dismissed. The “briefing,” if that’s what it was, was over.

  Taking the elevator back down to my office, I wondered, a bit shell-shocked: What is the Agency in for? What am I in for?

  Casey soon started to assemble his own team. Mostly, he moved and promoted people from within, but he did bring in a couple of newcomers to the CIA to serve atop his management team. One of them directly affected me: He recruited an old friend and colleague from his SEC days in the 1970s, Stanley Sporkin, to be the general counsel. (Stan replaced Dan Silver, who returned to his private law practice, as Dan’s predecessor, Tony Lapham, had done two years before.) It was an unorthodox choice. As the SEC’s head of enforcement, Stan had earned a nationwide reputation for being a tough, relentless antagonist of Wall Street corporate barons. I had read about him and his investigative crusades in recent years and learned even more from one of my best friends from law school, Ed Herlihy, who had joined the SEC after graduation and quickly became one of Stan’s most dedicated young protégés. Ed had spoken to Stan about me, and one of the first things Stan did when he arrived was reach out to me, to seek my help in learning the ropes at the CIA. It was the beginning of a close working relationship, one in which he showed me unstinting kindness and support, and a friendship that has lasted to this day.

  Both Stan and Casey were perpetually rumpled and seemingly oblivious to what they were wearing (although Casey’s clothes were considerably pricier). I would witness both of them carelessly devouring their lunches, crumbs spilling out everywhere. And then there were their conversational traits. Casey was a notorious mumbler, while Stan tended toward a pattern of elliptical, often sports-related metaphors uttered in cadences that could range from guttural to high-pitched. On many occasions, I would attend meetings between them, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, and come away utterly convinced that they were the only two people in the room who could discern what the other was saying—which could be disconcerting when the subject was some highly complex, highly risky covert operation. But they certainly were on the same wavelength, and they clearly trusted each other completely.

  Still, as much as Casey wanted Stan on board, Casey’s first priority was not overhauling the Agency’s legal shop. What Casey really focused on, what really drove him from the start, was shaking up and energizing the CIA’s covert-operations side. First, however, this otherwise brilliant, shrewd man pulled one of those occasional inexplicable boners that would mark his tenure and make him such an intriguing, perplexing figure. For reasons known only to him, Casey recruited one of his gofers from the Reagan campaign, an obscure New Hampshire businessman named Max Hugel, to take over the CIA’s most venerable and sensitive career post—deputy director for operations. In other words, head of the Agency’s clandestine service. Not only was Hugel a novice to the spy world, he was, it turned out, a buffoon. Thankfully, after a couple of articles in the Washington Post (co-written by Bob Woodward, Casey’s future Boswell) exposing the hapless Hugel’s checkered past, Casey quickly jettisoned him and turned the DDO job over to a respected Agency veteran, John McMahon.

  At the next level down at the DO, Casey would make his real mark. Late in his term, Carter had cautiously authorized the first, limited covert-action forays into Afghanistan and Central America. Casey signaled almost from the outset of his tenure that Reagan and he, as their first order of business, were going to up the ante. And to do that, Casey looked to his new chiefs of the DO’s Near East and Latin America divisions: Charles (Chuck) Cogan and Duane (Dewey) Clarridge, respectively. The two had entered the Agency as young officers a quarter-century before, and they had remained close friends over the years. They could not have been more different in personality, but they shared almost a cult-figure status inside the closed world of the DO. They were the two guys I probably worked closest with during the Casey years, and I came to respect and like both of them immensely.

  Of all the Agency ope
ratives I dealt with in the course of my career, Chuck Cogan most looked the part. That is to say, he looked the way people on the outside imagine a CIA spook to look. (In reality, most of them look like insurance salesmen.) Veil, Bob Woodward’s chronicle of the Casey years, captured Cogan perfectly: He could have been the model for the “Hathaway Man” from those vintage shirt-maker advertisements. A native New Englander with a patrician air, Chuck was tall, ramrod-straight in bearing, impeccably yet conservatively dressed, with slicked-back graying hair and an elegant mustache. And then there was his voice—clipped, soft, almost gentle, yet with an unmistakable (if misleading, once you got to know him) trace of quiet menace. Chuck had spent most of his career in and around the Arab world, where words are chosen carefully and often with seemingly hidden meaning. He had picked up that tendency, which, along with his New England reserve, made him a distinctive, intimidating communicator. I remember once accompanying a senior career Justice Department prosecutor to meet with Chuck about an investigation he was working on against two shady Iranian American businessmen. The DOJ guy, who prided himself on his toughness, came out of the meeting shaken. “That is the scariest guy I have ever met,” he muttered. Chuck had been unfailingly polite, but he hadn’t uttered more than a few sentences and otherwise stared impassively at the cowed DOJ prosecutor.