by Rizzo, John
I first saw them the day after the president’s TV appearance. Casey had kept the OCA out of the loop about the existence of the Findings, but now they were provided to me for transmission to the Hill. As soon as I read them, my heart sank. In the first place, they contained language, approved by the president, linking the arms sales to Iran to the release of the U.S. hostages. This starkly contradicted the avowed policies of not only Reagan but also presidents going back to the dawn of the terrorism era: no ransom or bargaining for the release of hostages. They also gave the lie, in black and white, to what the president had just told the American people.
Second, the first of the two Findings—signed by Reagan on December 5, 1985—seemed intended to secure presidential approval for activities the CIA had already undertaken. Specifically, it had the following sentence: “All prior actions taken by U.S Government officials in furtherance of this effort are hereby ratified.” The notion of the president giving retroactive approval for covert action flew in the face of the law, not to mention all precedents the Agency had followed since Congress established the Finding process in the mid-’70s. I had drafted dozens of Findings in my time, and it was inconceivable to me that a retroactive Presidential Finding could be considered legally valid. Notwithstanding my enormous admiration for Stan Sporkin, I thought he made a huge mistake here.
But that wasn’t the most politically explosive element of the Findings. Each contained a sentence I had also never seen before: “I direct the Director of Central Intelligence not to brief the Congress of the United States . . . until such time as I may direct otherwise.” In every other Finding I was aware of during my career—before or after this time—Congress was notified of the Finding within forty-eight hours after the president approved it. In the overwhelming number of cases, it was the full membership of the intelligence committees. In a few cases, for extraordinarily sensitive Findings, it was the so-called Gang of 8—the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate.
Does the president have the legal authority to delay congressional notification of a Finding when he concludes that national security considerations require it? Absolutely. Every president since Ford has gone on record in support of that proposition, and Congress has basically—if grudgingly—accepted it.
But can a president withhold notification forever? On that, constitutional scholars have long disagreed. In the real world of intelligence, however, I can tell you it never has been seriously contemplated in an actual case. True, the Findings in question didn’t rule out congressional notification forever, but it did leave the delay open-ended. And Congress found out about the Findings, a year after the president signed them, in the worst possible way: after the program was basically blown in a magazine—a tiny foreign magazine, to boot. If that hadn’t happened, when would the Reagan administration have told Congress? Ever?
If there is one lesson I ruefully learned in my decades of dealing with Congress, it’s that nothing pisses the members off more than learning about a CIA covert operation for the first time by reading about it in the media. Suddenly, as the number two guy in charge of CIA congressional relations, I was plunged into a maelstrom of Capitol Hill fury. The intelligence committees both immediately launched investigations, demanding Agency witnesses, beginning with Casey, whom they despised and distrusted as much as he despised and distrusted them.
By this time, in mid-November 1986, I didn’t think things could get any worse. Less than two weeks later, they did.
On the long Thanksgiving weekend, I was visiting my parents in Massachusetts, a custom I followed on most major holidays. This time it was an especially welcome respite from my work at the Agency. I had spent the previous couple of frantic weeks helping to organize the Agency’s response to the furious congressional reaction to the revelations about the arms sales. I had found there was so much that most of us in the Agency didn’t know, and those who did seemed to know only pieces of the story. Casey, of course, was at the center of the storm, and he already had faced a series of grillings at hearings held by the two intelligence committees. At a number of confused and chaotic preparatory sessions held in his office and conference room, Casey appeared increasingly unfocused and exhausted, looking even older than his seventy-three years. We kept trying to put together a comprehensive “timeline” on who knew what when in the CIA about the arms sales and also about the separate (or so I still thought) controversy over Ollie North’s efforts to aid the contras that had been set off by the downing of the C-123 carrying Hasenfus. And we had to keep changing the chronology as pieces of new facts emerged from the bowels of the building.
On November 25, I learned about the most astonishing new fact of all, and I learned about it by watching TV. First, standing at the podium in a raucous White House pressroom, an atypically flustered Ronald Reagan was announcing the resignations of Ollie North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter. He then hastily departed, leaving the podium to the attorney general of the United States, Ed Meese. Meese blandly announced to the country that his investigators had just discovered a document in North’s files indicating that proceeds from the arms sales to Iran had been diverted to support the contras. There had been no reference to this in the arms-sales Findings. Worse, the diversion of the proceeds seemed to be a blatant violation of the existing congressional prohibition on any U.S. funding, “direct or indirect,” to support the contras. The raucous pressroom turned into total pandemonium.
Right at that moment, my parents’ phone rang. It was the CIA Operations Center, with a message from my boss, Dave Gries. The message was terse: You need to get back here. Now.
When I returned to the office the next morning, Dave looked understandably shaken. “Look,” he said, “this thing now could be a criminal case. The Hill is talking about creating a special committee and hiring a slew of lawyers to investigate it.” I knew what was coming. “I want you to take over the lead in dealing with Congress on it.” Dave said he had to recuse himself from the case. “Some of the Agency people who could be implicated in this are my friends,” he explained.
Some of them were my friends, too, I thought to myself. No matter. “It’s all yours,” he told me with finality.
I was not yet forty years old.
In the late morning of Monday, December 15, I sat alone in the reception area in the CIA director’s office suite. It was (and is) a surprisingly modest space as far as offices of Executive Branch bigwigs go, with only a few chairs and a small couch facing a door opening directly into the director’s private office. I was waiting to brief Casey on yet another upcoming appearance he would be making before the Senate Intelligence Committee on what the media was now calling the Iran-contra scandal.
Suddenly, the door from the seventh-floor hallway burst open, and in rushed the doctor in charge of the Agency’s office of medical services, trailed by a couple of the director’s security guards. They barreled directly past me and into the director’s private office, slamming the door behind them. A few seconds later, the hallway door burst open again, bringing a couple of Agency nurses hauling a stretcher on wheels. They, too, disappeared into the director’s office.
What the hell was happening? I was frozen in my chair, bewildered. Should I get out of there and do something, or should I stay there and do something?
No more than a minute after that, the door to Casey’s office opened again and out came the stretcher, with Casey strapped on it, dressed in his familiar, expensive rumpled suit but without his trademark thick eyeglasses. I stole a furtive glance at his face as he was wheeled past me and out the door into the hallway. It was sheet-white and absolutely still.
Suddenly, oddly, I flashed back to the last time I saw my grandmother. I was about thirteen, and she was lying in her open casket. Casey had the same look. He looked dead. I sat there in the reception area, which was quiet and empty again, for about fifteen minutes, not sure where else to go.
But Casey wasn’t dead, at least not then. He was rushed to Georgetown Univ
ersity Hospital, a few miles away from CIA Headquarters, where he was diagnosed as having suffered a seizure caused by a fast-growing brain tumor. He suffered another seizure at the hospital, underwent surgery to remove the tumor, and was subjected to radiation treatments. At first, his doctors issued optimistic statements about his recovery and return to work. No one back at the Agency ever really believed that, though, and six weeks later Casey signed a letter of resignation to the president from his hospital bed. It was said that his wife actually signed it for him.
The intelligence committees plowed forward with their investigations through the Christmas holidays. (This time I made sure to stay in town.) But it was clear that there was no way they could get the entire complex story together anytime soon, not without the testimony of Casey (who was incapacitated in the hospital) and North (who was lawyered up and not talking to anybody). But they were under pressure to produce something, so they hauled in some subordinate officials—for the Agency, it was George, Clarridge, and Fiers, among others. I attended as many of these sessions as I could, but some were happening simultaneously in the House and Senate. It was all very chaotic. Today it is largely a blur to me—just hustling our people in and out of committee rooms, trying to avoid the klieg lights and the hordes of reporters. Meanwhile, squadrons of committee staffers were furiously foraging through CIA operational files, and I had trouble keeping up with what they were looking at.
I spent the last fourteen hours of 1986 in an appropriately unexpected and pressure-filled setting. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which had vowed to complete its investigative report by year’s end, had thrown together a document of about one hundred pages and sent word to the administration late on December 30 that it wanted it reviewed for declassification and that we had until the end of the year to do it. Which was about twenty-four hours away. And the committee refused to let the document out of its possession—it would have to be reviewed on the Senate premises. Finally, only ten representatives from the Executive Branch would be allowed access to it. It was a draconian set of ground rules, but the administration was not in any position to negotiate terms.
So the White House hastily assembled a team of representatives from its counsel’s office, State, the DOD, the Justice Department, and the CIA. We had two slots, and I concluded, regretfully, that I should take one of them. For the other slot, I picked a very smart, very poised, but very junior DO classification-review specialist named Ken Johnson. Ken (who passed away several years later, far too young) proved to be a godsend. No higher in rank than a file clerk at the time, he bore the entire weight and responsibility for the DO in determining which of its secrets could be made public. Unlike much of his chain of command (who had basically “gone to the mattresses” by this point), Ken was unafraid to make the calls he was thrust into making on the spot. Half-jokingly, he told me he expected me to cover his ass. From my standpoint, I was not certain I could cover my own, much less his. I was already beginning to ponder the worst-case scenarios: Either I would miss some nugget of highly classified information contained in the draft report and let it become public to the detriment of national security, or I would insist on taking some critical, relevant nugget of such information out of the report and expose myself to charges of obstructing a congressional investigation. Either way, I would be screwed.
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Ken, I, and our not-so-merry band of brothers entered the sealed and guarded committee room at the Hart Senate Office Building, with the committee staff carefully handing out numbered copies of the report. On one central point the marching orders we had gotten from the White House and the committee were the same: Take as little out of the text (redact is the term of art) as absolutely necessary. Wisely, the Reagan administration’s damage-control strategy was premised on two words: full disclosure. In retrospect, it appears likely the team around the president realized from the start that, whatever else he knew about the arms sales to Iran, there would be no proof that he knew about the proceeds being diverted to the contras (which, after all, was not mentioned in any of the Findings he had signed). And that was the biggest question of all. On everything else related to Iran-contra, the administration would be content to open the Executive Branch up wide and let people such as North, Poindexter, and, most of all, Casey take the hits.
All of which made Ken’s and my job both easier and harder while we were cooped up inside that locked committee room. Easier because we were less likely to be second-guessed for declassifying lots of operational detail. Harder because we could expect no support from the White House if we felt we had to make a stand against letting particular details into the public domain. And while the draft report had lots of gaps, it was also crammed with details, with direct and lengthy quotes pulled out of CIA cables going back and forth from our stations around the world. Operational traffic like that has always been zealously guarded by the CIA. But Ken and I swallowed hard and let most of it stay in the report, saving our fights with the committee staff for those instances when the names of actual CIA sources were at stake.
The hours ticked on. A couple of times early in the day, when we were at loggerheads with the staff over a sentence or even a word, I was allowed to call back to headquarters to try to get some guidance. All I got back from Langley was, basically, “Do the best you can.” I gave up trying for help around 3:00 p.m., when I heard that most of the senior Agency management had left early for the day. After all, it was New Year’s Eve.
Right before the stroke of midnight, we were done. We beat the Senate committee’s deadline by a few minutes. All of us had been in that room for fourteen hours, exhausted and increasingly feeling sorry for ourselves. But, for better or worse, the report was ready for the committee to release. I drove home in the dark to my home in Georgetown, maneuvering around revelers spilling out of the restaurants, wondering if the report was going to be publicly released with some astonishingly sensitive piece of classified information we had somehow missed.
Except that the report wasn’t released.
In a strange and ironic twist to the Iran-contra saga—which presaged many more in the year to come—the Intelligence Committee narrowly voted not to make the report public, which we all thought was the whole objective of that New Year’s Eve marathon. But the strangest part is that apparently it was the Republicans who voted to release the report, only to be thwarted by the Democrats. As best as any of us could surmise, the Republicans wanted the report out because there was nothing in it implicating Reagan personally in the diversion of funds to the contras, and the Democrats objected to its release for the same reason.
A week or so later, the report was leaked to the media. The top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Senator Pat Leahy, admitted to the incoming chairman, David Boren, that he showed the report to an NBC reporter and quietly resigned from the committee. He didn’t publicly admit his role, however, until months after that, just before CBS was going to air a story about it. Up until then, most everyone supposedly in the know—including me—assumed it was a Republican who leaked it.
The roller-coaster ride that was Iran-contra had only just begun.
CHAPTER 6
Reality TV: The Iran-Contra Hearings (1987)
A week into 1987, the Senate and the House established a new, joint committee to investigate the Iran-contra affair. This was not unexpected—this was a new Congress following the midterm elections, and the House and Senate intelligence committees simply hadn’t the time, the resources, or the access to key witnesses during the previous six weeks to piece together a comprehensive story.
The committee was large and ungainly. There were fifteen members on the House side, eleven on the Senate side. Those twenty-six were each supported by a couple of staffers, sometimes more. With the administrative employees, security officers, investigators, press assistants, and other cats and dogs thrown in, the committee staff approached two hundred. Since Democrats controlled both the House and Senate following the 1986 midterm elections, the ba
lance of the members and staff tipped the Democrats’ way.
On the Agency’s side, those responsible for dealing with the committee numbered just four: me, plus the three OGC lawyers assigned to the OCA working under my supervision. That was partly by design. I thought from the outset that it was critical to keep the “choke point” interfacing with the committee small, focused, and coordinated. But keeping the CIA team small also reflected a new reality facing the Agency. For the first time, the CIA as an institution—and potentially dozens of its personnel—was the subject of a federal criminal investigation.
On December 19, 1986, a retired federal judge named Lawrence Walsh was named as special prosecutor to investigate the entire Iran-contra mess, and Walsh was now hiring a posse of aggressive, experienced criminal litigators. The CIA’s Office of General Counsel was already struggling to cope with it. The OGC was now headed by a relative newcomer to the CIA, David Doherty. Most of his previous legal career had been spent at the Securities and Exchange Commission; he had joined his SEC boss, Stan Sporkin, shortly after Stan had been recruited by Casey to come to the CIA in early 1981. A few months before Iran-contra broke, Stan had left the CIA to join the federal bench as a district court judge (thanks in large part to Casey’s strong backing). So poor Dave Doherty, a fine lawyer and a good and gentle soul, now found himself suddenly responsible for dealing with the rapidly expanding Walsh investigation, and he was already feeling overwhelmed. He needed all his lawyers on hand to deal with the special prosecutor. So Dave and I agreed that I would try to make do with the three attorneys I had to handle Congress. Neither of us knew whether the arrangement would work—the Agency was in uncharted territory.
