by Rizzo, John
That wasn’t it.
Instead, one of the white-liveried guys hauled me out of the water a few yards from shore, simultaneously pointing back behind me and excitedly yammering something I couldn’t quite understand. I looked back at the lake, and in the general area in the distance where I had been floating I saw several indistinct bumps on the lake’s tranquil surface. I then understood one of the words the guy was saying: hippopotamus.
Evidently, I had blundered into the part of the lake, and at the time of day, when the hippos go cruising for dinner. Hippos, who knew? Anyway, a worried-looking hotel manager, who had arrived by then, assured me that hippos do not attack humans. Unless, of course, it is some idiot who is screwing up their feeding areas. Suddenly very wobbly, I returned to my room and sprawled on the bed, but not before ordering the stiffest drink the hotel bar had to offer. I lay there, wondering how the poor COS would have crafted a cable to headquarters trying to account for how his OIG visitor had been gnawed to death by hippos; wondering how my obituary would have read, and what my parents and sisters would have thought, how they would explain it to my eight-year-old.
It would have been a hell of an obituary, though. Doubtless, it would have generated a lot of lawyer jokes.
I had seen a few interesting things in the OIG, but as I approached the one-year mark in late 1985 I decided it was time to move on. I missed being a lawyer. Even more, I missed being in the mainstream of the Agency’s day-to-day mission. I was in my late thirties, about to mark a decade at the CIA. Much as I enjoyed the freedom and independence of operating on my own, I realized that the logical next step in my career progression was to assume some sort of supervisory management position. The problem lay in figuring out where to go.
The OGC’s main office, where all the management positions were, was still located in a building miles from headquarters. Residing there had absolutely no appeal, and neither did any of the available positions. There was one job at headquarters, however, that did fill the bill. The number two position in the Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA) was historically held by someone with a law background, in most instances a refugee from the OGC. And the good luck I had enjoyed since entering the Agency continued to hold: The job came vacant at the end of 1985. The ever-loyal and supportive Stan Sporkin endorsed me, as did Deputy Director John McMahon. Director Casey, who I was told was oblivious to the fact that I had moved to the OIG the year before (so much for my indispensability as the DO lawyer), signed off on the appointment, and I started my new job in November 1985.
The OCA director, Dave Gries, was also newly appointed. A longtime CIA veteran whose area of expertise was in Far East affairs, Gries had previously held senior positions in both the DO and DI. Trim, and with thick curly hair and tortoiseshell glasses, he had a professorial look and manner. He could be intense at times, but he was very smart and hardworking, with a dry sense of humor. Dave was a good fit for me. So was the OCA—I had always followed Washington politics, and I was already familiar with many of the personalities on the congressional intelligence committees because of my previous job as the DO lawyer. Moreover, it gave me my first shot at managing others—the OCA had a staff of about two dozen, including a small group of OGC lawyers detailed to the office.
During my year in the OIG, I had been pretty much divorced from the major developments and programs involving the Agency, so in my first couple of weeks in the OCA I tried to catch up. The septuagenarian Casey, now entering his fifth year at the helm, was still operating at his breakneck pace. But he was beginning to show signs of wear—he never was a picture of physical health, but the first time I saw him after my year away, he looked to have aged considerably. And no wonder. His two pet covert-action projects—Afghanistan and Central America—were going in different directions, Afghanistan extraordinarily well and Central America increasingly badly. The former program had huge, bipartisan congressional support, while the latter was drawing increasing fire from prominent Democrats such as Speaker Tip O’Neill, which had culminated in the passage of a law at the end of 1984 essentially barring any U.S. funding of the Nicaraguan contras.
Meanwhile, there was a new, alarming threat growing exponentially. It had begun in 1983, with the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks and the U.S. embassy in Lebanon. Now American civilians abroad were becoming terrorist targets: commercial airline hijackings, commando-style attacks inside airports in Rome and elsewhere, kidnapping of U.S. citizens living and working in the Mideast.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the seeds of what would become the Iran-contra affair were already being sown.
CHAPTER 5
The Wheels Come Off (1986)
During my yearlong sabbatical in the OIG, I was basically cut off from the CIA’s day-to-day activities. But it was impossible to avoid the media coverage of two of the Agency’s central operational priorities: terrorism and the conflict in Central America. What I didn’t realize was how the two were connected.
The early ’80s saw the rise of an especially violent Middle Eastern terrorist organization named Hezbollah, led by a particularly bloodthirsty thug called Imad Mughniyah. The new Khomeini regime in Iran bankrolled Hezbollah and sheltered Mughniyah, and Americans in Lebanon were promptly put in the crosshairs. In 1983, Hezbollah carried out spectacular mass-casualty bombings at the two most important U.S. government facilities in Lebanon: the U.S. embassy in Beirut, where 63 people died (including 7 employees of the CIA) and U.S. military barracks at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 marines. Hezbollah then switched tactics, targeting individual U.S. citizens living in the country.
By the time I arrived in the OCA at the end of 1985, kidnappings of Americans were becoming depressingly routine, with the grainy hostage videotapes played and relentlessly replayed on the TV networks. I had gotten a first bitter taste of the growing terrorist threat in the final months of my tenure as the DO lawyer in 1984. A gentle, quirky Boston-bred Irishman named William Buckley had been snatched off the streets and disappeared one morning on his way to work in downtown Beirut. He was the local CIA station chief, whom many at the CIA, including Casey and me, knew as a colleague and a friend. And, unlike most of the other Americans—businessmen, clergymen, and journalists—who would be captured in the months ahead, Buckley was tortured for months before finally dying at the hands of his captors, Hezbollah. He was the first CIA employee I knew well who was murdered in the line of duty.
I had first met Bill Buckley in 1980 when he was heading up the counterterrorism “group” at CIA Headquarters, which in those days numbered only a handful of people. Soon after we met, when I was still learning the ropes in the DO, I asked him what his counterterrorist duties entailed. “Pretty simple,” he replied. “I travel around the world giving briefings, and I write up reports, basically blaming Qaddafi for everything, including the weather.” In his own low-key, undemonstrative way, he was a wonderful fellow. When I was selected to join the Agency’s top executive ranks in 1981—called the Senior Intelligence Service—Bill was the first guy to call and congratulate me. Equally surprising and endearing to me, I came to learn that this quiet, nondescript bachelor was actually quite a ladies’ man.
When Buckley disappeared, Casey ordered that all the stops be pulled out to locate him—wiretaps, bribes, satellite surveillance. I gave immediate legal approval for everything Casey wanted. All to no avail. At one point, the CIA got a briefing on the details of his torture. I listened, as did Casey and a few other top CIA officials. It was an indescribably chilling and heartbreaking experience. The memory of it and of Bill Buckley would stay with me for the remaining quarter century of my career.
I was told that, during the time I was at the OIG, Casey was almost obsessively focused on the hostage issue and would frequently hark back to the Buckley case in internal Agency meetings. The word around the senior management ranks at Langley was that President Reagan, not the most inquisitive type when he was getting intelligence briefings, would consistently press in NSC meeti
ngs for the latest information on what was being done to locate the hostages.
In early 1986, shortly after I arrived at the OCA, Casey created a large new component to deal with the escalating terror threat. It was called the Counterterrorist Center (CTC), and it was designed to put everything the CIA was doing in the area—both in operations and analysis—under one roof. Casey picked Dewey Clarridge to head the CTC. He was to report directly to Casey.
It soon became apparent to me that helping manage William Casey’s relationship with Congress was going to be a thankless task. By the beginning of 1986, the relationship was poisonous, a state of affairs largely attributable to the CIA’s covert war in Central America. Things had begun to go downhill in 1984, during my last year as DO lawyer, when Congress barred the Agency from expending any funds whatsoever to support, directly or indirectly, the contras. Casey had taken the action as a personal repudiation, and it seemed intended as such, at least in part.
Congress’s action was in reaction to a rancorous dispute Casey had with the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Barry Goldwater, over whether Congress was given adequate notice of Clarridge’s efforts to mine the ports of Nicaragua. Goldwater was an influential senior Republican who supported the war, but he and Casey were both stubborn and crusty enough to get into an ugly public dispute.
In the year I had been gone, Casey and Goldwater had slowly repaired their relationship. The two curmudgeons had, deep down, an abiding affection and respect for each other. In fact, in the summer of 1986, Casey insisted on holding a large ceremony in the CIA employee cafeteria to personally award Goldwater the Agency Seal Medallion, the highest honor the CIA bestows on a nonemployee. My boss, Dave Gries, was away on vacation, so I got to be the emcee at the ceremony. Goldwater by that time was in declining health and walked with a cane, so I met him at the front entrance and escorted him—slowly—to the large, packed cafeteria. As we inched along, I nervously tried to make small talk with this venerable, storied figure. “The director is so pleased and honored you could come here today,” I told him deferentially. Goldwater abruptly stopped and glared at me through his trademark horn-rimmed glasses. “Why the hell wouldn’t I come?” he barked. “I love the old bastard!”
But as 1986 unfolded, Casey’s contempt for Capitol Hill only grew. There had been a string of media leaks describing various CIA secret operations against terrorist organizations, and Casey placed the blame squarely on Congress. Inevitably, the word got back to the committees, exacerbating the rancor on both sides.
Despite everything, Casey was savvy and self-aware enough to recognize that he had to try to make some effort to fix his terrible relations with the Hill. A few months after my arrival in the OCA, he asked me to start inviting individual key members of the intelligence committees to Langley for breakfast or lunch with him in his private dining room. The initiative proved to be of limited value, to say the least—in most of the sessions, Casey would mumble incomprehensibly with his mouth full and, after a few minutes, would start to squirm around in his chair, making absolutely no effort to hide his impatience and boredom.
I vividly recall the day when Senator Bill Bradley, New Jersey Democrat and basketball legend, came to lunch. Bradley certainly was no friend of the Reagan administration, yet Casey and others of us at the CIA respected him greatly. He was a conscientious member of the Intelligence Committee, attending all of the hearings (virtually all of them “closed,” meaning there was no opportunity to play to the cameras). He could be a withering, acerbic questioner, but he always did his homework—which, frankly, was not the norm for most of his colleagues.
However, even with Bradley, who shared his disdain for fluffy chitchat, Casey couldn’t contain his fidgeting and ennui for very long. As I escorted Bradley down Casey’s private elevator after the session mercifully ended, the towering senator glanced down at me and wryly observed, “You know, I think I could actually like the guy if I could understand a word he was saying and he didn’t act like he was late for a plane.”
Serving as the conduit between Casey and Congress was a challenge, to put it mildly. But I was happy. I felt like I was back in the loop.
Meanwhile, the controversy over Nicaragua had continued to swirl, even after Congress cut off funding in late 1984. While I was still at the OIG, I had begun reading in the press about White House efforts to encourage private fund-raising efforts to support the contras, said to be led by an obscure and shadowy NSC staffer named Oliver North.
Ah, yes, I thought. I remember Ollie North.
I had first met him in the early ’80s through Dewey Clarridge as the covert-action program in Central America was picking up steam. At that point, the NSC staff had no in-house lawyer to speak of, so Dewey took me to many of his meetings with North, who was his point of contact at the White House. “He’s not your normal NSC bureaucrat,” Dewey told me before our first meeting. Dewey meant that as high praise.
He was right. I had never seen or dealt with anyone quite like Ollie North. Not at the White House, and not at the Agency, for that matter. He would subsequently become hugely famous, but in 1982 very few people at the CIA, let alone anyone else, knew anything about him. He made a startling and vivid impression on me. Ramrod-straight in bearing (he was always in civilian clothes in those days (although Dewey told me he was on loan from the marines), he immediately set out to charm, flatter, and above all influence me in a way that I had never been “worked” before, not even from any of the hardened and cynical DO operatives who were then my clients.
At the same time, for all his blather, there was much to admire about Ollie. He was very smart and always willing to listen. His energy level was nothing short of phenomenal; he seemed to be churning out memos or talking on the phone constantly, mostly with Dewey at first, but then with me and, I came to learn, with many other people inside and outside the intelligence community. He seemed to be everywhere, under the radar.
There was another striking thing about being around Ollie North in those days. Every time I went to his cramped office at the Old Executive Office Building, and it could be early in the morning, late at night, or on a weekend, a ubiquitous, hovering presence was his stunningly attractive assistant, a woman named Fawn Hall. Like Ollie, she was destined for fame (or infamy) in later years, but in those days she was anonymous—all I knew at the time was that she was efficient, cheerful, and gorgeous, with her flowing Farrah Fawcett–like mane and long, model-worthy legs. I confess that her evident devotion to Ollie caused me to wonder at first if there was something more than business going on between them. My curiosity (and possibly envy) finally got the best of me, so I asked Dewey about it one night when we were driving back to the CIA from Ollie’s office. He was typically direct and unvarnished in his response: “Believe it or not, no. Never. Neither of them is that type.”
Dewey had left the Latin America Division at the end of 1984, and Ollie’s principal interlocutor at the Agency then became Alan Fiers, chief of operations for Central America. While I was away, OGC had decided—sensibly, given the controversies, the congressional prohibitions, and the increasing complexity of the Agency’s actions in the region—to put a couple of very capable lawyers to work directly with Fiers and his staff. So when I arrived in OCA, I trusted that Ollie North’s activities notwithstanding, the CIA was playing inside the legal lines. Besides, I soon realized that Alan, unlike Dewey, didn’t especially like or trust Ollie very much. It wasn’t all that surprising: Both men were in their early forties, ambitious, with the same driven, intense personality. I actually found that rather comforting—Ollie wasn’t about to roll Alan on anything dicey.
What I didn’t realize was that Ollie was now a full-fledged protégé, and surrogate, of Casey’s. In fall 1986, less than a year after I joined the OCA, there were lots of things I didn’t know.
On October 5, the Sandinistas shot down an American C-123 cargo plane carrying weapons from El Salvador to the contras. The only survivor in the crash was an American named Eug
ene Hasenfus, and the Sandinistas promptly displayed Hasenfus, bedraggled and scared, in a chaotic press conference, where he made vague statements about working for the CIA. And so the scramble inside the CIA was on: Who was this Hasenfus guy (a records search turned up nothing), and why was he on that plane? Was anyone in the field aware of any of this? And what was North up to, anyway? At least those were the questions people like me, people who weren’t in the know, were asking. Congress was also demanding answers. The CIA inspector general launched an investigation. Soon enough, the IG started discovering North’s name in the CIA’s Central America cable traffic dating back to 1984–1985. At that time, the Agency was barred by Congress from assisting the contras, but there was North, over at the NSC, apparently in contact with CIA people in Langley and in the field, pulling strings. How long the strings were, and where they would lead, were not yet clear.
Barely a month later, there was another bolt out of the blue. A small weekly magazine in Lebanon, known to be well wired into the Khomeini regime, published what seemed to be an unbelievable story: The United States had for some time been secretly supplying arms to the Khomeini regime in Iran as part of some sort of Faustian bargain to secure release of the U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon. After initially stonewalling, the White House came clean—sort of. President Reagan went on television acknowledging the arms sales but strongly denying they had anything to do with the hostages. And the ensuing uproar intensified when the congressional leadership was called to the White House and informed that the whole thing had been authorized by Presidential Findings. Though drafting them had been my bread and butter from late 1979 through 1984, I knew nothing about the existence of these Findings. They had been drafted, under the supervision of my former boss, Stan Sporkin, by lawyers in the OGC, miles away from headquarters, who had never before been involved in the Finding process.
