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

by Rizzo, John

  I wasn’t just a note-taker, though, as I peered at the screen in a constant state of expectation and dread. I would watch as one of the committee inquisitors would pause midquestion and whisper to one of the array of aides spread out behind them on the sprawling, two-tier dais. Uh-oh, I would think, blanching, as the aide scurried offscreen. Only then would I know what was coming, and I would instinctively put my hand on my phone. Seconds later, it would ring, and there was the aide’s panic-stricken voice: Can my boss ask the witness about this CIA activity? Can he use this CIA spy’s real name? Can he talk about CIA information in this particular document?

  Every day of the hearings, every few minutes, it seemed, the phone calls would come, always different in substance, but with the same urgency: We are on live TV. We need a decision from the CIA. Now.

  I would cringe. There’s nobody else around, and no opportunity to talk to anybody in the building.

  There I was, thrust into making instant judgments on what CIA classified information could be suddenly declassified and broadcast to the world. Everything from a CIA office’s location in the organizational chart to a CIA agent’s machinations in a foreign country. I really had no business making these on-the-spot decisions; they were way above my pay grade and sometimes well beyond my expertise. But they had to be made, and there was no time for anyone else to make them. Holding the phone, I would just take a breath, close my eyes, and make the judgment call. Heads, and I would agree to the disclosure of some sensitive secret. Tails, and I risked having the Agency accused of obstructing a congressional investigation, and the public’s right to know.

  For the first time in my career, I was alone on a high wire without a net.

  Realizing career suicide was at risk, I occasionally would make an after-the-fact effort to cover my ass with my superiors. I recall one such incident that unexpectedly popped up during National Security Advisor John Poindexter’s testimony. Arthur Liman started quoting to Poindexter the transcript of a critical phone conversation between Poindexter and Casey as Iran-contra was coming unstuck. Poindexter was taken aback, saying he had no idea the call had been recorded. A hubbub immediately ensued—had the secretive and wily Casey been wiretapping all his conversations without the other party’s knowledge? Were there any more recordings? It all sounded so sinister, so Nixonian.

  The truth was more banal, but it required disclosing a secret. Casey had been in Central America at the time of his conversation with Poindexter and was speaking on a secure phone in a CIA station, a device installed in all CIA facilities around the world. As a matter of protocol, the CIA Ops Center recorded all such calls it handled—not just those involving the CIA director, but any communications between Washington and the field. The system, which was sophisticated for its time, was called PRT-250. Its existence, and its capabilities, were fairly well known inside the CIA, but it was a zealously guarded secret kept from anyone in the outside world. Even from someone like Poindexter.

  The hearing had recessed shortly after Poindexter’s expression of surprise, and Liman rang me up immediately. He knew about the system, what it was intended for, and understood that the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot. But the teapot was boiling, and Liman implored me to help him turn the heat off. He wanted to make a public statement when the hearing resumed, explaining the PRT-250 along the lines I have described above. Given about thirty seconds to ponder, I told Liman to go ahead. Five minutes later, I watched on TV as Liman read the statement.

  As it happened, the Liman statement came near the end of the day’s hearing, and I was called down to Bob Gates’s office. Here comes the shit storm, I figured, as I trudged down the hall and entered the office, where Gates was surrounded by a number of senior officials. However, the meeting was about something else entirely. As it broke up, Gates asked whether anything of interest had come out in Poindexter’s testimony that day. And then it hit me: Nobody there had seen it yet.

  “Nothing much,” I responded with feigned casualness. I paused, and then murmured quietly, “Except that I declassified the PRT-250 system.”

  Everybody there shrugged.

  And so it came to pass that neither this decision nor any of the other off-the-cuff decisions I made during the course of the Iran-contra hearings ever came back to haunt me. No repercussions either from the Agency for having declassified information, nor from the committee when I would take it upon myself to reject its more extreme demands, like descending on the terminally ill Casey in his hospital room.

  There was one other cliff-hanging element to the Iran-contra hearings that I had to contend with throughout the proceedings: the testimony of Agency witnesses from the Directorate of Operations. These were covert CIA employees, people whose faces were unknown to the general public. Early on, the committee had three particular senior DO officials in its crosshairs: Clair George, Dewey Clarridge, and Alan Fiers. There was a fourth DO operative also in the mix, the Costa Rica station chief, Joe Fernandez. He certainly was deeply and wrongly involved in North’s off-the-book machinations in helping the contras at a time when the Agency was prohibited from doing so. But he was a relatively small fish in the scheme of things, so a month or so into the hearings, the committee agreed to let Joe testify in a “closed” session, meaning no cameras, no media, and no one from the public. I attended that session, and Joe, who was a large and emotional man, broke down a couple of times during his testimony. The committee seemed sympathetic toward him, sensing—correctly—that he had gotten in over his head largely because of North’s bravado. The testimony came off without incident, so I fully expected the same drill would be followed when the time would come for Joe’s superiors to testify.

  I was wrong. The Democrats on the committee, and their staffers, considered George, Clarridge, and Fiers to be the main CIA villains in the Iran-contra saga. They thought that those three had been disingenuous, or even deceptive, in their previous interviews and depositions with committee staff. Casey was dead and thus beyond their reach, but these guys weren’t. And so the committee wanted to put them in front of the cameras. To take them apart.

  I decided to push back hard. For one thing, having them testify on TV in real time would have been a security nightmare. It was hard enough to keep non-Agency witnesses from inadvertently blurting out some stray piece of unrelated classified information. But these CIA guys’ heads were stuffed with all sorts of information accumulated from decades in the intelligence world. The questioning style of many members tended to be haphazard, so there was no way of prepping our guys in advance about the areas they couldn’t get into publicly. I had nightmare visions of having to sit there behind them, constantly jumping up on live TV to object and plead with the committee to go into closed session.

  But my worries extended beyond that. These were active-duty, career veterans of the spy service. The thought of them being paraded and pummeled on national television just seemed unfair and unseemly. To that, the committee staff had a rejoinder: Well, we can have them appear in disguises, or behind screens. Great, I thought. Just like they were Mafia stool pigeons. It was then that I truly realized that what the committee was after was not testimony, but theater.

  And then Dick Cheney came to the rescue.

  Cheney was the ranking House Republican on the committee. He had kept his own counsel during much of the proceedings, but he was no blind apologist for what the Reagan administration had done. Still, he was a serious-minded guy, and he despised theatrics. Fearing we were about to lose the fight, I went first to Cheney’s key aides on the committee, David Addington and Dick Leon. Addington had worked for me as a young CIA lawyer a few years before, and it would be another fifteen years before he would gain notoriety as Cheney’s hard-line alter ego in the George W. Bush administration. But at the time he was just a quiet, anonymous staffer. Even back then, Cheney trusted him completely, and David got Cheney on the case. Cheney raised a ruckus behind the scenes, and the committee Democrats quietly backed off.

  George, Clarridge
, and Fiers were allowed to testify in early August, in closed session, as the final witnesses at the Iran-contra hearings. I sat behind each of them as they testified separately over three days. Each was true to form. George was alternately jocular and sincere, trying to win over the committee with his case officer’s charm. Fiers was earnest and tightly wound, tearing up at points about the “nutcracker” he found himself in. Clarridge was, well, Clarridge. He was straightforward, unapologetic, and barely able to control his contempt for his inquisitors. I remember once looking up and catching a glance from Arthur Liman up on the dais. Listening to Dewey, Liman looked down at me, shaking his head slowly with a small smile.

  And with that, the Iran-contra hearings officially ended.

  The implications of Iran-contra and its aftermath would have a profound impact on the Agency. It was also a turning point in my career, a time that I truly came of age as a CIA lawyer and executive. Operating for the first time on my own in a highly charged political environment, I learned the importance of staying calm and focused, and trusting my instincts to make a decision—any decision—rather than equivocating or obfuscating.

  In addition, it confirmed to me that my Agency career was blessed by astonishingly good luck. If I had still been the DO’s lawyer in 1985, I have no doubt that I would have been brought into the loop when the disastrous Findings were being drafted. Perhaps things might have turned out differently if I had been given a say—for a time I was pleased to believe that—but the truth is they probably wouldn’t have. The arms-for-hostages initiative was conceived and approved at the highest levels of our government, including the CIA director. In all likelihood I would have gone along, whatever my private misgivings might have been. And then I would have been sucked in, tainted, and my career would have never been the same.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Iran-Contra Hangover (1988–1992)

  In November 1987, the Iran-contra committee issued its final report. It was the size of a big-city telephone directory—nearly seven hundred oversized pages of dense print. Just as it had for the ill-fated Senate Intelligence Committee report on the last day of 1986, the White House counsel’s office organized an interagency group to conduct a classification review of the report prior to its public release. Unlike the New Year’s Eve debacle, this was a more studied, deliberative process. The White House team was headed by two very capable and unflappable officials, Alan Raul from the counsel’s office and Brenda Reger from the NSC staff. And the Iran-contra committee did not dump its entire report on the White House doorstep and impose a ridiculously short deadline on the Executive Branch to complete its review. Instead, the committee staff, as it completed a chapter, would send it over to the interagency group for comment, not just on classification issues but also for any possible factual inaccuracies. The committee staff encouraged the input of the Executive Branch, and made numerous adjustments to the text. The Iran-contra committee’s approach was consistent with the way it had mostly operated throughout the investigation—professional, nonpartisan, and courteous.

  The interagency group was made up of representatives from six agencies—the DOD, State, Justice, Treasury, the CIA, and the National Security Agency. The White House limited each agency to two representatives and mandated that these officials have the authority to make final decisions on classification. I could have let someone else represent the CIA, but at that point, having lived and breathed the investigation for nearly a year to the exclusion of everything else, I wanted to personally see it through to the end. So I nominated myself and Ken Johnson, the DO’s declassification expert, to represent the Agency. For two weeks straight in late October, we and other representatives were cooped up in a conference room in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, slogging line by line through the report, fed to us in bite-size chunks by the committee. Personally, I found the process liberating—after a yearlong investigation, virtually the entire Iran-contra saga was now untangled and out in the open. There were not many secrets left, making the declassification process relatively straightforward. And going through the committee’s report chapter by chapter, with all of its exhaustive detail, was an oddly cathartic way to decompress from the maelstrom I had been through.

  Not that I’m complaining about any of it. The fact is, the Iran-contra scandal was the best thing that happened to me in my career. That might sound perverse, given that it wrecked the careers of a number of my friends and severely damaged the CIA as an institution, but it’s true. I was a key player in the biggest and most dramatic Washington investigation since Watergate. The scandal put me on the map inside the Agency, giving me a visibility I did not have before. Lord help me for saying this, but the Iran-contra experience was fun as hell for me.

  Now all I had to do was figure out what to do next.

  After Bob Gates’s nomination for DCI imploded back in February 1987, the White House moved quickly to come up with a new nominee. The choice was William Webster, a onetime federal appeals court judge who was wrapping up a nine-year tenure as FBI director. Judge Webster (as he preferred to be addressed) was a respected pillar of the Washington establishment, a dignified, nonpartisan figure. He was sworn in on May 26, in the midst of the Iran-contra hearings, with a mandate from Congress to clean up the mess at Langley.

  Webster’s stint at the Agency, which would last four years, has received decidedly mixed reviews from Agency alumni in the years since. Bob Gates, in his 1996 memoir, called Webster a “godsend” to the CIA. On the other hand, Dewey Clarridge, in his memoir published the next year, directed withering criticism at Webster. With his typical rhetorical flourish, Dewey presented Webster as an effete, social-climbing, empty Brooks Brothers suit. In Dewey’s eyes, Webster’s greatest fault was that he was a lawyer, a profession Dewey asserted was antithetical to heading up a spy service (never mind that his mentor Bill Casey was also a lawyer).

  Notwithstanding my affection and respect for Dewey, I think he gave Webster a bum rap. True, Webster had no prior discernible experience or interest in intelligence, was not exactly a workaholic during his tenure at Langley, and never had much clout with the White House. In short, he was not at all like Casey. But that was the point—at that traumatic juncture in the Agency’s history, he was precisely what we needed. What I respected most about him is the fact that he agreed to come to the CIA at all; as Bob Gates correctly observed, stepping in to take over the CIA at a time when it was being consumed by the fires of Iran-contra “was a job no one else seemed to want.” Webster certainly didn’t need the job—his career and reputation were unblemished, and he was winding down his long tenure at the FBI, with a quiet and doubtless lucrative career in the private sector awaiting him, when the call from the White House came. I did not know Webster before he came to the CIA, but I came to like him immensely. He restored stability and credibility to a badly shaken institution.

  Webster’s first order of business when he took over was to initiate an internal review of the CIA’s conduct during the course of the Iran-contra affair, and in particular whether individual Agency officers should be disciplined for their actions. He enlisted Russ Bruemmer, a partner in a prominent D.C. law firm, to lead it. Several years younger than I, Russ was a protégé of Webster’s, having served some years before as his law clerk. Affable and low-key, he had an unpleasant task to perform. For one thing, the Iran-contra hearings were then still unfolding, with revelations about the Agency spilling out every day on TV. Meanwhile, the criminal investigation under Lawrence Walsh was gearing up, with his hard-charging prosecutors churning out subpoenas for reams of CIA documents. The Agency felt under siege from all directions. The last thing anyone wanted or needed was still another probe by an unknown outsider viewed, fairly or not, as the new DCI’s grim reaper.

  Yet Russ and I hit it off right away, and I agreed to help him to the extent that I could. One major obstacle he had was that two of the chief Iran-contra figures—Dewey Clarridge and Clair George—refused to talk to him. Since I
was friends with both of them, Russ asked me to intervene on his behalf to get them to change their minds. I declined—these were proud, stubborn men who probably couldn’t be swayed, and besides, I knew deep down that, careerwise, their gooses were cooked anyway and anything they might say would be subject to attack, and possible criminal exposure, by the congressional and Walsh investigators.

  The Bruemmer review ground forward as 1987 was coming to an end, with the final report and recommendations for disciplinary actions going to Webster a few weeks before Christmas. Russ shared the report in advance with me, on the condition that I divulge his findings to no one else. So I knew that Clarridge, George, Alan Fiers, and a few other officials were being singled out for tough criticism and disciplinary sanctions. Knowing the fate in store for them, I found it extremely hard to continue to interact with these people—guys who had devoted decades of brave and dedicated service to the Agency—as if nothing were amiss. But Christmas was around the corner, and I figured they would find out soon enough, once the holidays were out of the way.

  I figured wrong. The day the office Christmas parties throughout the CIA were designated to take place, Russ told me that Webster was ready to call the employees in to mete out their punishments.