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

by Rizzo, John

  Chuck had the Afghanistan account and was also responsible for overseeing covert operations against two blossoming bogeymen in the region: Khomeini in Iran and Qaddafi in Libya. These represented three of Casey’s four biggest priorities when he became DCI, and he came to rely on Chuck heavily. I would see them interact frequently, and the chemistry between the two was fascinating. They never seemed to develop a personal closeness—Cogan was too reserved and Casey by nature was not much of a schmoozer—but Chuck was so unflappable, so quietly self-assured, and exuded such a sense of command that Casey could not help being drawn to him.

  And then there was Clarridge. Duane was his given first name, but everyone knew him as Dewey. He was the most swashbuckling, colorful character I ever met at the Agency. If the Reagan White House and Casey were determined to mount a full-scale covert assault on the Sandinista regime—and they were—they couldn’t have found a CIA guy more suited to it. Never mind that in his previous quarter century in the Agency, Dewey had never served anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, let alone Central America. He didn’t know the region, he didn’t know Spanish, and I doubt he ever gave Nicaragua a second thought before he got the job of chief of CIA covert operations for all of Latin America. But he was by nature aggressive, imaginative, and largely uninterested in cushy and career-enhancing assignments. And personally, he had a flair that bordered on the flamboyant. An aficionado of flashy clothes (he especially favored white suits accented with a colorful handkerchief cascading out of his breast pocket), fine Cuban cigars, and expensive Italian wines, he was everything his friend Chuck Cogan was not—exuberant, occasionally bombastic, and flowing with joie de vivre.

  Dewey and I instantly bonded. In his 1997 memoir, A Spy for All Seasons, Dewey gave me my first, albeit brief, mention in the media. “I always liked John Rizzo,” he wrote, “perhaps because he is smart, smokes cigars, has a fine sense of humor, and dresses well.” Years later, I would get far more coverage in the media than I ever expected, but Dewey’s short, tidy description was more accurate—and generous—than any of the coverage I would get elsewhere.

  Casey also quickly came to be smitten with the irrepressible Dewey. Frankly, it was and is almost impossible to dislike Dewey—he is an impish, charmingly roguish guy, with no pretense and, most tellingly, no particular interest in whether you like him or not. And despite the public persona that would develop around him in the Iran-contra investigation as an arrogant, Machiavellian schemer—an image, I think, that did not entirely displease him—I had almost daily contact with Dewey from 1981 through 1987 and found him to be honest and candid in all of his dealings with me. For instance, he came to me promptly one day in 1984 when he first came up with the notion of mining the harbors of Nicaragua. Dewey told me that he had conceived the risky and controversial idea (he always seemed to gravitate toward anything risky and controversial) while sitting alone the night before with a glass of gin on the rocks. I was momentarily disconcerted—is that how he comes up with most of his gung-ho epiphanies?—but I never doubted he was telling me the absolute truth.

  The Casey-Clarridge bond was strengthened by their common contempt for the CIA’s congressional overseers, a lot of it fueled by the skepticism expressed on Capitol Hill about the Reagan administration’s true objectives for the stepped-up covert action in Central America. A couple of months into the administration, Casey passed the word down from the seventh floor that I should write a new, broadly worded Finding for Central America to supplant what he viewed as Jimmy Carter’s equivocal, feckless authorizations of 1979–1980. So I came up with something short—just a few sentences—and as expansive as I could make it: The CIA would be authorized to provide cash and training to the region. The immediate focus was on El Salvador, where a right-wing but pro-U.S. regime was being challenged by a leftist insurgency armed by the Sandinistas and their Soviet sponsors. Reagan signed the Finding less than a week after I finished it and sent it up to Casey, which was in sharp contrast to my experience in the Carter years, when the language of Findings was fretted over and massaged by the White House seemingly forever. Casey told a few of us that he was there when Reagan signed it, and that the new president did it quickly and with a dramatic flourish: “Victory in El Salvador!” Reagan exulted as he affixed his name to the one-page paper.

  Still, while the Finding fell short of authorizing the overthrow of the Sandinista regime, senior House Democrats, notably Speaker Tip O’Neill and the intelligence committee chairman, Edward Boland, were convinced that was the Reagan administration’s hidden agenda. And so in 1982 they engineered a law prohibiting any U.S. efforts toward that end. This infuriated Casey and the newly arrived Clarridge—the fact was, they decided early on that the Sandinistas were the true cancer in Central America, and that they had to be stopped. Not dissuaded or discouraged, because the Sandinistas were committed Marxist revolutionaries who would not be deterred. And Congress, in the Casey-Clarridge view, was too obtuse or gutless to recognize that. In meetings inside the Agency, they would feed off each other on this notion and before long it spilled out in barely disguised contempt in their dealings on the Hill.

  I accompanied Casey and Clarridge, who usually appeared separately, to numerous closed hearings before the congressional intelligence committees. Whereas Casey gave the unmistakable impression of impatience, Dewey seemed to view his appearances as performances, where he would revel in sticking it to his congressional inquisitors, be it through word or gesture. I remember one session before the Senate committee, when Dewey came armed with a series of large charts mounted on an easel. Wielding a pointer like it was a dueling sword, Dewey stood right up close to the dais within inches of the committee members. Speaking loudly in his native New Hampshire accent, he would suddenly punctuate an assertion by smacking his pointer on one of the charts, then flinging it down and going on to the next one. With each loud “thwack,” the senators would instinctively cringe; Bill Cohen of Maine, a Republican, had the misfortune to be sitting closest to the charts, and he visibly jumped at the first “thwack.” It was wonderful guerrilla theater, but I wondered about the impression Dewey was leaving with our congressional overseers. “Who cares?” he said, shrugging, when I asked him about it afterward. “It was fun.”

  On another occasion, Dewey was even less subtle. Daniel Moynihan, the colorful and voluble New York Democrat, once arrived late at a briefing Dewey was giving one afternoon to the Intelligence Committee. Dewey, without a care in the world, casually perched his leg on one of the adjacent witness chairs, causing a red-faced Moynihan to loudly chastise him for his disrespect to the committee. Slowly, very slowly, Dewey brought his leg down. Everyone there was uncomfortable and embarrassed about the awkward scene. Everyone except Dewey. “Moynihan was probably drunk,” he simply said in the car on the way back to the CIA.

  As the early ’80s wore on, my workdays as the DO lawyer were growing increasingly unpredictable and frenetic. Handling the regular stream of questions coming in from officers on the Afghanistan and Central America accounts was more than enough to fill my plate; Chuck Cogan and Dewey Clarridge had passed the word down through their staffs that virtually every proposed operation of any significance had to be run by me first. (Chuck and Dewey, despite their long careers as hard-bitten “street” operatives, seemed to recognize from the start that a lawyer needed to be involved in everything they were now doing.) But my assigned responsibilities were broader than that—I was the legal advisor for all CIA covert-action programs worldwide. And Casey was hell-bent on generating new Findings on places I knew about and other places I had barely heard of.

  I was beginning to get worn down by the sheer number and pace of the programs. One morning in 1983, I was awakened at 3:00 by an emergency call from the White House Situation Room. A young, military-sounding voice crisply advised me that an emergency planning meeting scheduled for 8:00 that morning had been canceled. I had no idea that any such meeting had even been in the offing. The voice then apologized about calling at that h
our, and quickly hung up. About five o’clock, I snapped awake from a fitful sleep, convinced the whole thing had been a bad dream. It hadn’t.

  It didn’t help my workload that by this time I was the only CIA lawyer left in the Agency headquarters building. In 1982, the rest of the Office of General Counsel (about fifty lawyers at that point) was uprooted and dispatched to another Agency-leased building several miles away. The official reason was overcrowding in the headquarters spaces, but there was much speculation in the corridors that Casey had signed off on the move because he wanted to get the lawyers out of his way. I didn’t believe that—if true, then why was I, of all people, left untouched? General Counsel Stan Sporkin, a good soldier and ever loyal to his friend and patron Casey, did not raise much of a fuss, so off all the lawyers went, except for me.

  Meanwhile, I had more and more opportunities to see Casey up close, and the old man was a wonder to behold. He worked endlessly, tirelessly, firing off short memos in every direction to all parts of the building. His range of contacts was eclectic—his invited guests would include not only corporate titans from his Wall Street days but also such unlikely visitors as Ralph Nader. (“Only in America,” Nader said as he was escorted into Casey’s office.) The Agency careerists he nurtured and promoted from the inside ranged from legendary, risk-taking operatives such as Clarridge and Clair George (a blunt, wisecracking, but brave overseas veteran whom Casey named to be his congressional liaison, of all things) to more buttoned-down, cautious types such as John McMahon and Bob Gates (a particular Casey favorite, he was then in his thirties, and Casey leapfrogged the precociously self-assured Gates over more senior analysts to the post of deputy director of intelligence in 1982).

  As Casey kept ordering up new covert-action Findings, every one of them, from the most portentous to the least seemingly significant, had to be written up right away. His operating style tended to be ad hoc, to put it mildly. The Reagan White House, like every administration I worked in before and since, set up a layer of review entities to discuss and approve proposed Findings on their way up to the president. The most senior layer—a group consisting of the national security advisor, the secretaries of state and defense, the attorney general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—has been called different things over the years; under Reagan, it was called the National Security Planning Group (NSPG). Sometimes Casey would adhere to the process, but sometimes he would blithely ignore it, up to and including the NSPG.

  On one occasion in the early ’80s, the word came down to me from a Casey aide: The director wants you to write a proposed Finding regarding a country in the Mideast. I was given details about the aims, and he needed it in an hour. So off I sped to NE Division to huddle with Chuck Cogan and his people. I emerged with some hastily crafted language, which I hoped reflected the operational realities yet satisfied Casey’s dictates, and hightailed it up to Casey’s office, where he was waiting. He looked at it, grumbled something that sounded like assent, stuck it in his briefcase, and got into his private elevator down to the garage, where his car was waiting to take him to the White House. An hour after that, he returned to headquarters with the president’s signature on the thing. “Send this to the people who need to see it,” said the cryptic note he sent me, as best I remember. Turns out Casey had just marched into the Oval Office and stuck it in front of the president. The entire thing had unfolded between lunch and dinner. I have never seen anything like it, before or since.

  Another time, Casey’s unique sense of what constituted collegiality with his colleagues presented me with an unusual, and uncomfortable, legal dilemma. By the beginning of 1984, the texts of Presidential Findings were becoming longer. Two or three short paragraphs, the norm in the late Carter and early Reagan administrations, were now morphing into a dozen or so paragraphs that would extend the length of the Finding to two or even three pages. Over time, the Reagan White House began to view Findings not just as operational directives—a laundry list of the sorts of activities the CIA was to undertake—but as presidential policy documents. So more and more, staffers on the National Security Council would stick in sentences as the Finding wound its way through channels up to the president. Second, the scope of the Findings began to expand. Instead of being limited to a particular targeted country or region such as Afghanistan or Central America, some of the Findings were now “worldwide” in scope, meaning that the objective was to counter and combat an international threat, such as terrorism or narcotics trafficking, that transcended national boundaries and continents. Casey, a man who liked the Findings to be terse and unadorned of verbiage, was not happy about this increasing word creep, but mostly he would just grumble about it and go along.

  That is, until one day in 1984 when the National Security Council staff forwarded one of the first of those multipage Findings to the Oval Office. If memory serves, the Finding was three pages long. Once President Reagan affixed his requisite signature, it was, per regular procedure, sent back promptly by courier to the CIA for implementation and transmission to the congressional intelligence committees. But when I saw it, I was confronted with a problem I had never encountered before: The president had signed at the bottom of the first page rather than at the end of the text, two pages later. This was not a matter of lawyerly nitpicking—the entire legal rationale for requiring written presidential approval of all Findings is to hold him accountable for all the covert-action activities set forth in the text. There had to be a documented record of the presidential imprimatur—no more of those “wink-and-a-nod,” “plausible deniability” shenanigans of the sort practiced by presidents from Eisenhower up through Nixon. For its part, the CIA cannot lawfully undertake any covert action that the president has not authorized. In short, with Reagan’s signature only at the bottom of the first page, there was no record, no critical documentation, that he had approved the activities set forth on pages two and three.

  Somebody had to tell Casey, and right away. My first (cowardly) thought was to buck the odious task up to my boss, Stan Sporkin, who was much closer personally to Casey and thus hopefully better suited to soften the blow. But then I realized Stan was out of town. So with considerable trepidation, I called Casey’s secretary and asked for two minutes of his time. I figured it would take me one minute to tell him the problem, so that would leave only one minute for him to yell at me.

  In I walked, and there he was slouched behind his desk with the usual stack of papers and books scattered seemingly haphazardly around him. Desperately trying not to let my voice quaver, I blurted out as quickly as I could why, essentially, I had concluded that a document the president of the United States—a man Casey deeply revered—had just signed was not legally worth the paper it was written on.

  As was his wont, Casey sat there for a moment, just taking it in, staring back at me through his thick glasses. I started to feel the flop sweat coming on. Then he said, “I’m a lawyer, too, you know.” (Where had I heard that before?) I braced myself for the barrage that I knew was coming.

  But then Casey did something of the sort that would make him such a fascinating, enigmatic figure to me. He got mad, all right, but not at me. Instead, he vented against the NSC staff, angrily muttering that their sloppiness had let the president down and left the Agency out on a limb. Casey didn’t once question my conclusion, let alone the presumption of some pissant staff lawyer like me throwing sand in the wheels of an important covert-action initiative just because of a quibble about where the president had signed his name. Casey just grunted that he would take care of it. Then he went back to reading what he was reading.

  I got word later that day that Casey had ordered that no action be taken under the Finding and that the few existing copies at the CIA be destroyed, and that he then went to the White House for what I later heard was a reaming of the NSC staff. A new Finding, with President Reagan’s signature duly inscribed on the bottom of the last page, arrived a day or two later. I was told by a friend at the NSC that Casey had insisted on watching R
eagan sign it.

  By October 1984, I had been the DO lawyer for five years, and at the CIA for nearly nine years. Five very eventful, fascinating years spanning two administrations. But they had been increasingly pressure-packed and frenetic, and I was starting to get worn down by the sheer pace and responsibilities of the job. And five years is too long for anyone to stay in one position at the Agency. You become not only weary, but stale. That’s why it’s always been CIA policy to have its senior career cadre in the DO and the DI rotate into new jobs every two or three years. Also, if you stay in one assignment too long, inevitably you lose your perspective and become too wedded to the policies and programs that you have developed and overseen. And, of course, above all others, a CIA lawyer overseeing covert-action operations must maintain that sense of perspective.

  No one is irreplaceable at the CIA, least of all a lawyer with less than a decade of Agency experience. And John McMahon, the recently appointed CIA deputy director, recognized that better than anyone else. A CIA veteran of over three decades, McMahon was a burly, convivial, and sometimes profane Irishman who had started his Agency career as a file clerk and steadily rose through the ranks to senior positions in each of the four CIA directorates—Administration, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Operations. No other Agency officer in my career was as experienced, and as successful, in so many disciplines. He was known and revered inside the CIA as a tough but fair manager. And by mid-’84, he wanted me out of the DO lawyer job.

  It was nothing personal. I had first come to know McMahon well when I came to the job five years earlier, when he was the deputy director for operations. He was enormously supportive and patient as I learned the ropes as a DO lawyer, and he was one of my biggest boosters inside the CIA. We always got on extremely well. But what made him such a successful manager was his ability to see beyond his personal friendships with Agency employees—and he had hundreds of such friendships—and make cold-eyed personnel decisions. He had concluded, by mid-’84, that I had been in my job long enough and needed to move on.