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

by Rizzo, John

  I resisted, of course, for as long as I could. But by October 1984, I was reconciled to moving on. I had no interest in taking another position in the Office of General Counsel, particularly when it would have necessitated me leaving headquarters for the OGC’s digs several miles away. John Stein, then the Agency’s inspector general, came to my rescue. Stein was a career DO officer who rose to the position of DDO after Casey’s abortive fling with the hapless Max Hugel, and thus he became not only my most senior client but a trusted friend. Casey had recently moved Stein to the IG job—the IG is basically an internal watchdog and ombudsman—and Stein invited me to join his staff for a year or two as an investigator/inspector until I figured out what I wanted to do next in my legal career. “It’ll be good for you,” he suggested in his usual casual way. “I’ll give you some interesting cases, you’ll get to travel some, and there’s no heavy lifting.” I knew already he was right at least about the last part. In those days, the Office of Inspector General was a small, low-key place with a decidedly studied pace—it was well known inside the building that by 5:00 p.m. each day, the OIG was a ghost town. There seemed to be nothing it did—whether it was an inspection or audit of a CIA component, or an investigation of an employee’s personal impropriety—that the OIG management thought couldn’t wait until another day.

  As I mulled it over, the notion of retreating to a quiet sinecure was more and more appealing. I had gone through a divorce three years earlier, and my ex-wife and I shared custody of our son, Jamie, who was about to turn seven. Which in my case meant having him stay with me two weeks out of every month, no matter what. Maintaining that regular routine with him was paramount to me, but it did get a bit frantic at times—racing out of meetings at the White House to pick him up at the school car pool, scrambling to find someone to watch him or take him to his soccer or Little League game on a Saturday morning when I would be unexpectedly summoned into work, and so on. The poor little guy had spent most of his young life watching his dad breathlessly picking him up or dropping him off somewhere. Moving to a more predictable, sedate schedule meant more time that I could devote to being a father, and that was very big to me.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Calm Before the Storm (1985)

  At the beginning of 1985, I settled into my new surroundings in the OIG, located on the sixth floor of the headquarters building. It would be several years before Congress would designate the inspector general’s position as a “statutory,” meaning a person nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. In practical terms, the change would turn the incumbent, and the rest of the office, into a much larger, more independent—and adversarial—entity vis-à-vis the rest of the CIA. But in 1985, the OIG was still what it had always been up till then—a sedate, relaxed group of about three dozen people either taking a midcareer break from their regular CIA duties or older Agency veterans who had come to the office essentially to wind down their careers. John Stein, the incumbent IG when I arrived, like all his predecessors, had been appointed to the post by the CIA director.

  Casey had put Stein into the job several months earlier. Until then, Stein had served in the Directorate of Operations for his entire CIA career, having entered the organization a quarter century earlier following Yale and a stint in the military. He, Dewey Clarridge, and Chuck Cogan had all arrived at the CIA as young men at about the same time, and the three would remain close friends for their entire careers, notwithstanding their widely disparate personalities. Stein was somewhere in between the flamboyant and voluble Clarridge and the measured and reticent Cogan. A large, bearlike man, Stein dressed mostly in tweeds and cardigans that had a rumpled elegance. He had an impish, sometimes mordant sense of humor, fond of tossing off one-liners in meetings large and small, and had one particular habit that I found curious but endearing: He always had a TV in his office that was turned on, with the sound off, either showing episodes of Sesame Street or cartoons. Before becoming the IG, he had risen to the top of the DO, holding the iconic position of deputy director of operations (DDO, the top career spy in the CIA).

  He was, in short, an immensely likable, accomplished man. However, Casey’s decision to move him to the IG job was abrupt and took everyone by surprise, including Stein. In effect, he was pushed aside to make room for his onetime deputy, the equally accomplished but far more irascible Clair George. The word inside the DO was that Casey had decided that Stein was too laid back (for example, Stein had largely stayed out of the burgeoning covert-action program in Central America, leaving Clarridge alone to work directly with Casey), too nice a guy to be Casey’s DDO.

  Stein accepted his fate with his usual equanimity, but he was also a realist. When he recruited me to join the OIG, he told me he would probably retire in a year or so, and that in the meantime we could both relax and do some fun and interesting work.

  The OIG is made up of three divisions: Audits, Inspections, and Investigations. On the inspections side, the work involved being part of four- or five-person teams, reviewing whether a particular CIA unit was operating in an effective, efficient manner in compliance with the law and Agency regulations. Each inspection would take several months, usually included a number of trips overseas, and culminated in a detailed report containing a list of conclusions and recommendations. I took part in two such inspections while in the OIG. Stein was right: They were interesting, and far from taxing.

  Stein handpicked me to work alone (which pleased me, because it was my preferred way of operating) and look into possible malfeasance by a couple of overseas chiefs of station (COS). A COS is the chief U.S. intelligence official in a foreign country, a position of considerable responsibility and sensitivity, since each COS operates undercover, overseeing all sorts of clandestine activities. A COS must exhibit tact and discretion and be above personal reproach. In both cases I was asked to look into were allegations that the COS was lacking in these areas. Each man adamantly denied the allegations.

  The first case involved the COS in a middle-sized station in a Western European country. Such an assignment in a nominally friendly environment, working in cooperation with an allied foreign intelligence service, is usually relatively placid. But not this time. The COS had managed to totally alienate his foreign counterparts, in part because of a botched intelligence operation conducted without the knowledge of the host government. As a result, the COS suffered the ultimate sanction from the host government—he was PNGed (declared “persona non grata”) and ejected from the country. Back in the United States, the COS was bitter and came to the OIG, claiming he had been wronged. However, his ire was not directed against the foreign government. Instead, he blamed Dewey Clarridge.

  Yes, there was Dewey again. Several months before, Clarridge had been moved from his position as chief of the Latin America Division to take over DO’s Europe Division and thus was now the COS’s superior in the chain of demand. Casey had made the change because he had come grudgingly to the realization that Clarridge had become a lightning rod for Congress’s growing opposition to the expanding covert war in Central America. It was a role that Dewey rather enjoyed, but he understood the realities and accepted the move to the Europe Division—basically, a lateral assignment—without complaint.

  According to the COS, Clarridge had begun to undermine his authority as soon as Clarridge took over the division and had done nothing to defend him when he came under attack from his foreign counterparts, who the COS claimed were almost impossible to deal with in the first place (in this latter regard, the COS had a point—despite this being a putatively friendly Western European government, the COS’s two predecessors encountered rocky if not outright hostile relations in dealing with the government). Clarridge, he basically claimed, had a vendetta against him because he wasn’t one of “Dewey’s boys.”

  I went to get Clarridge’s side of the story, and in the process saw another aspect to his complex, fascinating personality. I fully expected Clarridge to trash the COS for attacking his motives and actions. But he d
idn’t. He not only denied any personal animus toward the COS, he expressed what I considered genuine regret about the COS’s expulsion and praised him as a hardworking, dedicated officer. It wasn’t personal, Clarridge said, it was strictly business—he realized that the people the COS had to deal with were a pain in the ass, but the fact was that if you are a COS in a country and the country wants you out, you have to leave. Your continued effectiveness, your continued viability, is irredeemably undermined. Simple as that.

  I then interviewed about a dozen Agency officers and found no substance for the COS’s charges against Clarridge. In fact, the COS’s former subordinates in the station talked about his abrasive personality and management style and said it served to make his relations with his admittedly difficult foreign counterparts even worse.

  Case closed. And after I interviewed Clarridge, he never asked me about it again.

  The second case was trickier. The COS in question was serving in a small country, and it was his first time heading up a station, which is a critical test for any up-and-coming, ambitious DO officer. He was in his late thirties and had done well in his previous assignments, most of which were at headquarters. He was also a racial minority, and racial minorities were then in woefully short supply in the DO management ranks. Everyone wanted him to succeed in his new posting.

  After about a year, however, some reports began to trickle in from his subordinates. There were questionable accountings for meals and travel he had incurred ostensibly for official purposes. The expenses claimed were massive—far more, on their face, than would be expected for a station that small. What’s more, a large portion of the expenses was spent on local women, some of whom were well known in the community. In and of itself, not necessarily verboten—case officers in a foreign country are supposed to “develop” for possible recruitment local citizens who may be valuable sources of intelligence. But the initial reports vaguely intimated that the meetings were not about business, but rather romance. The COS was a married man, and he was on an “unaccompanied” tour, meaning his wife had stayed behind in the States. Again, not an unusual occurrence in the DO, especially when the COS is serving in a remote area.

  I first plowed into the COS’s accountings. It indeed showed a number of trips out of country and lots of meals in-country with a slew of people, mostly the same lineup of local women. There should have been accompanying reports, recounting what the expenses were for, the potential intelligence value of the women, how the “development” was progressing. I found little of anything in the records on that score. I tracked down the COS’s subordinates, not just the ones who had flagged possible improprieties, but others who hadn’t said anything up to then and were now scattered around the world. It was awkward for all of them. But the reaction was unanimous: the COS had been financing his love life with foreign women—about whom the CIA knew nothing—with Agency funds, and had been rather brazen about it.

  For his part, the COS denied everything, but the evidence was overwhelming. With absolutely no enthusiasm, I dutifully wrote up the report and sent it forward to his management. He was reprimanded and demoted, effectively derailing his once-promising career. He resigned shortly thereafter.

  My time in the OIG was not without its surreal moments.

  On one occasion, I was transferring through a major European capital on my way to another destination and, as my usual custom, I had alerted the station in advance that I would be in town and would be happy to make a courtesy call. The COS sent word that he would welcome my coming by the office.

  I expected a brief visit, a little gossip about what was going on at headquarters. When I arrived, we did all that, but then the COS asked me if I would be willing to do him an unofficial favor, totally informal and off the record. The station had been meeting with a well-placed foreigner—it wasn’t a local, but a third-country national—whom it was “developing” for recruitment as a source. Among the enticements being offered was eventual resettlement in the United States, and the guy was apparently asking questions about his legal status here, how he could safely and legally acquire a driver’s license and professional credentials, what his new name would be, things like that. The COS asked if I would be willing to meet with the target in a quiet, out-of-the-way spot in the city to answer some of his questions. It was an irregular thing to ask me to do—I was no longer working as a CIA lawyer and was certainly not a trained DO officer—but it just sounded too intriguing, so I said okay.

  The meeting was held in a small, somewhat seedy bar on a backstreet in a part of the city I didn’t even know existed. I will not describe the guy I was meeting, other than to say he was furtive and understandably nervous, his eyes constantly darting around the near-empty bar. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a couple walked in and sat at a table a few feet away. They were Americans, and they looked to be about my age. I was taken aback, but tried my best to ignore them, and, more important, to get the target to ignore them.

  That amateurish facade of indifference to their presence crumbled into a heap a couple of minutes later when the guy suddenly called out to me. “John Rizzo? Hey, is that you? I can’t believe it!” Neither could I. Who was this character? I desperately wondered as he ambled over and stuck his hand out.

  “So, what are you doing here?” he asked jovially. I was momentarily frozen. I couldn’t bear to look at my target sitting next to me, but I could sense the panic-stricken vibe emanating from him.

  And then it hit me. The boisterous American was a guy I had gone to college with at Brown, where the class population was small enough that everyone pretty much knew everyone else by sight. This guy and I had attended a few classes together and had a nodding acquaintance, but that was it. I hadn’t seen him since my graduation fifteen years before. Of all the gin joints in all the world, he had to walk into this one.

  He waved his female companion over and introduced her as his wife. I jumped up from my chair, not out of politeness but to try to forestall them from plopping down at the table. I rattled off something about being amazed (true) and delighted (untrue) to see him after so long and in such unlikely surroundings, all the while stealing glances at my target to see if he was about to bolt. The target, however, seemed paralyzed, simply staring down at his drink.

  “Yup,” he responded, “we wanted to find some place without all the usual tourists, and there you were sitting there.” He glanced at my catatonic tablemate with obvious curiosity and then asked, “Are you here on business?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “So, remind me what you’re doing now.” Mercifully, few of my college friends knew I was at the Agency, and this guy was most certainly not one of them.

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Great. Where?”

  “D.C.,” I responded, doing my best not to stammer. I figured that if I made up a phony hometown, my luck would be such that it would have been where this guy was living.

  “You with the government?”

  Jeez, I thought.

  “Private practice. Solo practitioner. Real estate law.” Thankfully, this had the intended effect—I had made my job sound so boring the guy stopped peppering me with questions. And I wasn’t about to start asking him about his life after Brown.

  I seized the awkward pause that followed to blurt out something like, “My friend and I”—gesturing at the target, who was still staring into his glass—“are late for an appointment across the city,” or some such lame story. I then hustled him out of the bar.

  “I am so, so sorry,” I finally told him when we were safely a couple of blocks away. The target just stared balefully at me, gave me a perfunctory handshake, and disappeared into the gathering evening crowds.

  I learned much later that the target rejected the Agency’s “pitch” the following week. I never wanted to know why. And I have never seen that old classmate again.

  A few months after that fiasco, I had IG business that took me on several stops to stations in central and southern Africa. I had never been
there before, so I was looking forward to what I hoped would be a memorable experience. It was that, and then some.

  At one of the stops, the COS booked me into a hotel right on the shores of a tranquil lake. The hotel was a sprawling, stately, white-columned structure, in the middle of nowhere, that dated back to the colonial era, with exotic tropical plants and fauna all around and staffed by what seemed like dozens of white-liveried locals constantly scurrying about on the polished stone floors in the vast lobby. The whole scene was just spectacular and unreal, especially since, from what I could tell, I was the only guest there.

  I had checked in at midafternoon, and I had a few hours to kill before meeting the COS for dinner. With the hotel literally carved out of a jungle, the only place to safely walk was on the small white sand beach behind the hotel. At that hour, the lake looked ethereal—still deep-blue water as far as I could see. I stuck my hand in, and the water was bathtub-warm. Looking around, totally alone, I suddenly thought: Here I am, by myself in this mysterious, magical setting thousands of miles from home, someplace I will never come to again. By God, I impulsively concluded, I am going to take a swim.

  So I went back to my room, changed into some Bermuda shorts, returned to the beach, and waded in. There was still no one around anywhere, not in the lobby and not on the beach. I had to walk out about thirty yards before the water was chest-deep, and then I began a leisurely backstroke, gazing up at the cloudless sky, still not quite believing I was where I was.

  My reverie was soon interrupted, however, by the distant sound of an excited voice coming from the beach. I flipped over and saw a couple of the white-liveried hotel attendants running down to the water’s edge, waving frantically in my direction. My first thought, as I swam back toward them, was that I had gotten some sort of phone call, probably from the COS.