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

by Rizzo, John

  “Webster is going to do it today, when these guys are supposed to be celebrating with their staffs?” I asked incredulously.

  “I know,” Russ replied, “but it is a hard thing for him to do, so he wants to get it over with so it won’t be hanging over him during the holidays.”

  What about the employees? I wondered to myself. What about their holidays?

  I happened to be at the Counterterrorist Center Christmas party, having a drink with Dewey Clarridge and a couple of his deputies, when the call came from the seventh floor, summoning him to the DCI’s office. “What do you suppose this is about?” Dewey asked.

  “Dewey,” I said, “if there is anything you need to say to defend yourself, now is the time to go upstairs and say it.”

  By the end of the day, the careers of Dewey Clarridge, Clair George, and several lower-ranking officers were effectively over. For years afterward, the day would be referred to inside the CIA as the Holiday Party Massacre.

  From the day Russ Bruemmer arrived on the scene, rumors became increasingly rampant that Webster was grooming him to replace Dave Doherty as CIA general counsel. Russ himself was studiously mum on the subject, but it made things a bit awkward between him and Dave. With Casey dead and Sporkin off to the federal bench, Dave had lost his base of support. It was unfortunate, but inevitable, that Webster would want his own person in place. And, sure enough, early in 1988, he named Russ to the job.

  Shortly thereafter, Russ asked me to return to the OGC fold. He wanted to create a new position, deputy general counsel for operations, and he wanted me to fill it. Only a decade before, I had been the only lawyer assigned to physically reside in the offices of the Directorate of Operations. Now there were close to ten, scattered in the Counterterrorist Center, the Central America Task Force, and elsewhere. The idea would be for me to oversee and supervise them.

  For a number of reasons, I decided to take the job. First, I liked and respected Russ, and I knew that he would give me a lot of autonomy. I knew far more about the culture and innards of the notoriously secretive DO than Russ ever would, and Russ was smart and secure enough to recognize that. Second, I thought the time was right to leave the Office of Congressional Affairs. I had been there for two years, one of which was consumed with handling the Iran-contra investigation, an exhausting but exhilarating, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Anything else I could possibly do in the OCA would pale by comparison. Finally, and perhaps most important, Webster had wisely decided to relocate the general counsel’s office back to headquarters from its Casey-imposed exile. I would not have returned to the OGC as long as it was mired in a building several miles away. Once the OGC came back, I decided to come back as well.

  The Webster years (mid-1987 through 1991) were shadowed by the aftermath of Iran-contra; the Walsh investigation was relentlessly expanding, consuming an enormous amount of Agency time and resources (the OGC alone had four lawyers working on the case full-time) and having a debilitating effect on CIA morale. But gradually, the CIA saw light at the end of the tunnel. In January 1989, George H. W. Bush became president, the first DCI ever to ascend to the Oval Office. He loved the Agency as much as it loved him. And when he took office, he took Bob Gates with him, making Gates deputy national security advisor and giving him a broad portfolio. Thus, the CIA suddenly had two powerful patrons in the White House.

  The Agency was turning a page in other ways as well. In early 1988, clearly reacting to all the bad blood caused by Iran-contra, Congress cut off all paramilitary assistance to the Nicaraguan contras, effectively ending CIA involvement. It marked the close of a tumultuous, painful chapter in the CIA’s history, but two years later, there was a surprisingly positive coda: In democratic elections there, the Nicaraguan people ousted the Sandinista regime. And across the world, in early 1989, the Soviets threw in a very bloody towel in Afghanistan, withdrawing the last of their troops and ending their decade-long occupation. The Afghan resistance had vanquished the invaders, and even the Agency’s strongest detractors conceded that the victory would not have been possible without the CIA’s massive financial and operational support. All in all, with respect to the Agency’s two largest covert-action programs of the ’80s, not a bad bottom line.

  And all the while, of course, the Soviet Union was crumbling. In 1991, it finally fell apart. The Cold War, the raison d’être for the CIA’s creation, was over. There have been many debates about the extent to which the Agency’s covert efforts on so many fronts around the world, spanning nearly half a century, played a role in the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse. But there can be no argument that the CIA did play a role.

  Nonetheless, despite all the reasons the Agency should have been able to feel good about itself again, I remember no real sense of happiness or pride in the hallways at Langley. Partly, this could be attributed to the hangover from Iran-contra—Walsh now was clearly aiming his sights beyond just the usual suspects such as Dewey Clarridge and Clair George, as high as Bob Gates. Moreover, with the programs in Nicaragua and Afghanistan shut down and the Cold War over, the Agency was facing significant cuts in funding and personnel. It was also increasingly obvious that Webster, for all his laudable qualities, simply had little clout with the White House, and clout with the White House is the CIA’s coin of the realm.

  Overall, the atmosphere at the CIA from 1988 through 1991 wasn’t awful. It just wasn’t what it was before, during the Reagan years.

  In May 1991, President Bush nominated Bob Gates to succeed the retiring Bill Webster as DCI. We at the Agency were pleased with the announcement that Gates would be returning to Langley. He had two huge attributes that Webster never had—more than two decades of experience as a career officer at the Agency, and a close relationship with the president. Many of us also felt he deserved a second chance at the top job after his brutal, drawn-out confirmation ordeal of four years before, when his nomination for DCI tanked over unresolved questions about his role in the then-exploding Iran-contra scandal. I had seen that debacle close up and the toll it had taken on him, and I was convinced that Gates had been an honorable, decent man who simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  What none of us anticipated, apparently including Gates, was the brutal, drawn-out confirmation ordeal he would face the second time around. Lingering Iran-contra questions played only a relatively small role; instead, Gates had to endure withering attacks—including from some of his longtime friends and subordinates at the CIA—about his alleged failure over the years to accurately gauge the capabilities and ultimate deterioration of the Soviet Union. For a proud man like Gates, who had built his career and reputation as a Soviet specialist, it must have been an even more humiliating experience than what he had gone through four years before.

  Gates persevered, however, and was ultimately confirmed by the Senate in November 1991. The nomination process had taken seven months, and his tenure as DCI would last only about a year. When President Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton in November 1992, Bob Gates was out of a job that he had just barely begun. His departure marked the end of the Reagan-Bush era at the CIA. It had been an eventful, turbulent twelve years, a period that began with the Agency reenergized and ascendant and ended with it being largely adrift and leaderless.

  Alas, the next few years would be even worse.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dealing with Devils (1993–1996)

  The arrival of the Clinton administration in January 1993 marked the third time in my Agency career that there had been a “hostile takeover” of the U.S. Government, by which I mean that an incumbent president had been defeated for reelection by the candidate of the opposition party. In 1976 and 1980, however, the Agency knew pretty well in advance how the new president felt about the CIA: Carter was a wary skeptic, and Reagan was an unabashed cheerleader. And their choices for CIA director reflected these views.

  Clinton was different. With his almost exclusive focus on the domestic economy during the 1992 campaign, Clinton hardly talked about national
security in general, or the CIA in particular. But after the election, and even before taking office, he began sending unmistakable signals. He wasn’t interested in, didn’t care about, the Agency at all. For an organization whose relevance and impact is so utterly dependent on its relationship with the commander in chief, being ignored is even worse than being mistrusted.

  Clinton waited until right before Christmas before getting around to announcing, seemingly as an afterthought, his choice of R. James Woolsey, a man he barely knew, as CIA director. Jim Woolsey was no lightweight. About fifty at the time, he was a successful lawyer who during the Carter administration had served as an arms negotiator and undersecretary of the navy. Although he could be charming and wryly humorous in private settings, Woolsey by nature was an acerbic, blunt-talking guy. Unlike a lot of Washington players I met and observed over the years, Woolsey didn’t engage in self-puffery, boasting of his insider connections. Notably, he never pretended to anyone inside the Agency that he and Clinton were close; indeed, he seemed to be perversely proud of the fact that he was a White House outsider. In some ways, I found that to be a refreshing and admirable trait. The problem was, telling anyone at the Agency who would listen that you have no standing with the White House is no way for a DCI to build in-house morale. On top of that, Woolsey’s pugnacious persona caused him in no time to achieve the considerable feat of alienating the Agency’s congressional overseers on a bipartisan basis. Compared with him, Bill Casey was an unctuous diplomat.

  That said, Jim Woolsey was not the problem. Bill Clinton was. Less than a week after his inauguration—and two weeks before Woolsey took the helm—Clinton gave the Agency the most hurtful presidential snub I witnessed in my entire career.

  On the morning of January 25, 1993, I was on my way into work as usual.

  When I was driving alone, my route to the CIA was to go north on Route 123 into McLean and take a right at an exit leading to the headquarters front gate. However, when my son, James, was staying with me at my Georgetown home, I would have to drive a short distance farther and take a left onto a road leading to his school. After dropping him off, I would take a right back onto Route 123, going south, and get into one of the two left lanes leading to the CIA exit, which was controlled by a traffic light.

  As I sat waiting, about two hundred yards from the traffic light, a squadron of police cars raced past me on the median, their sirens screaming. I assumed it was some sort of vehicle accident.

  It wasn’t. It was the first and only terrorist attack ever launched on CIA Headquarters. A young Pakistani immigrant named Mir Aimal Kansi had emerged on foot out of nowhere, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, and begun shooting indiscriminately into the cars of CIA workers waiting for the light to change to enter the compound. He murdered two people and grievously wounded three others. One of the victims, a kindly, bookish sixty-year-old analyst named Nick Starr, was a good friend. If I had dropped my son off at school a few minutes earlier, I could have been a victim too.

  The Agency went into a collective state of shock. It was shaken in a way I had never experienced before, and wouldn’t be again until the morning of 9/11, nearly a decade later. The CIA is a family, and members of the family had been randomly slaughtered, just for trying to get to work on a sunny Virginia morning. We had all considered the headquarters to be an impregnable, inviolate fortress where we were safe and protected. It was understood and accepted that CIA personnel and facilities abroad could be vulnerable and targeted; that was the nature of the intelligence world. But not here, not sitting in commuter passenger lanes in a leafy Washington suburb.

  The Agency scrambled to organize a memorial ceremony in tribute to our fallen colleagues. Former and current dignitaries from the U.S. Government and from foreign governments attended, coming from far and wide. One person was conspicuously absent, however. Bill Clinton, our new president, couldn’t find the time to make the ten-minute trip from the White House to the CIA to pay his respects. He sent his wife instead. It was an unforgivable slight from a man who had famously told the American people during his just-completed campaign, “I feel your pain.”

  The atmosphere at the Agency had turned profoundly sad and dispirited in those early months of 1993. But, at least for me, it wasn’t just because of the lingering trauma from the CIA shootings, or because it was increasingly apparent that President Clinton couldn’t care less about the Agency or the rest of the intelligence community. What I first learned during that period, and what only a handful of people inside the building knew, was that there was a new disaster on the horizon, something that would shake the institution to its core: A longtime, murderous traitor was walking freely in the halls of Langley. And he was one of us.

  Sometime in the winter of 1992–1993—I don’t remember the precise date—an officer from the CIA Counterintelligence Center came to see me in my office. The officer was part of a small, cloistered group of analysts that had been formed a few years earlier to try to solve a haunting mystery that dated back to the Casey era: Who or what was responsible for the relentless and unexplained disappearances and deaths of the U.S. Government’s most valuable human sources inside the Soviet Union?

  The officer, a friend of long standing, came in and closed the door. In a quiet and grave voice, she led off with a volley of specific questions. How can the Agency go about getting lawful access to the records residing in the Northwest Federal Credit Union, the in-house financial institution for current and former CIA employees and their families? Furthermore, the officer asked, who would have to know why we want them, or which records we want? How much would we have to put in writing?

  I knew the officer well enough to know that she was not the alarmist, melodramatic type. I was caught flat-footed by her questions, but I stumbled my way through a reasonably accurate explanation of the laws on financial privacy, an area in which I was no expert. The officer nodded, but remained seated, like she expected me to ask my own questions. I took the opening.

  “How serious is this?”

  “We think we’ve found the reason our Soviet assets have been disappearing. Do you know an employee named Rick Ames?”

  I knew Rick Ames only vaguely. He was the sort of bland, anonymous, mid-level functionary that populates any large federal bureaucracy, and the CIA, for all its legend and mystique, is at bottom a large federal bureaucracy. He and I had had a few interactions, and to the extent I gave any thought to him at all, he didn’t seem all that smart or all that dumb. In the weeks and months ahead, I would learn far more about him. Namely, that he was an irredeemable drunken lout who for years had been pocketing millions from the Soviets in return for reams of highly classified information. That his boorish and brazen behavior, his absurdly lavish lifestyle, had long been either tolerated or systematically overlooked by his various superiors. That he had the blood of at least nine CIA sources on his hands.

  By early 1993, I had been in the Agency long enough to have witnessed more than my share of the CIA’s mistakes, missteps, and follies. But Rick Ames represented the ultimate nightmare—a turncoat imbedded for years in the ranks.

  After that visit by the officer from the Counterintelligence Center, I was brought into the very small loop of people who were privy to the investigation. The loop had to be kept small. Rick Ames was still walking the halls, unaware of the noose tightening around his neck. Meanwhile, the FBI bugged his office, his home, his Jaguar sedan.

  During the course of my long Agency career, it usually wasn’t very hard to keep a secret. It’s part of the compact you make when you enter the organization. You can’t tell secrets to your family, your friends, anyone who doesn’t hold the necessary security clearances, and, even if someone has the clearances, you don’t unless they need to know a particular secret. It doesn’t matter how exciting the secret is (and there were thousands of that category I came to know), or how much you trust the person to whom you might tell the secret. You just don’t do it.

  The secret about Rick Ames and his treacher
y was the most difficult one I ever had to keep. I had to do so for a year, until the day he was arrested outside his home, on his way to work, on February 4, 1994. (A handful of people who were in on the investigation from the beginning had to keep the secret even longer. The Ames case, like most espionage investigations, required several years of discreet, painstaking work before there was enough evidence to make an arrest.) The reason it was so hard was that after the day the Counterintelligence Center officer came to see me, after not having seen Rick Ames for years, I suddenly could not seem to avoid the SOB’s dull, clueless presence. I went to several meetings where Ames mysteriously and unaccountably appeared. I couldn’t bear to look at him, but I didn’t dare look away. On most of those occasions, the other Agency people attending knew nothing about the investigation, so it was easy for them to act as normal. Once in a while, however, there would be a meeting where Ames would be sitting there along with his boss at the time, the chief of the Counternarcotics Center. I knew that the chief knew about the investigation, and I knew that he also knew that I knew. A longtime officer in the clandestine service, he was well schooled in keeping up a false front, effortlessly engaging in friendly banter with me and the unsuspecting Ames. He seemed so much more at ease than I was about carrying on the charade.

  And then there would be the times I would spot Ames chatting up other Agency employees in casual settings. His office was on the ground floor of what is referred to inside the CIA as the New Headquarters Office Building (NHB), a six-story structure erected in the late ’80s adjacent to the Original Headquarters Office Building (OHB). The two buildings are separated by a courtyard, and employees can go from one building to the other via a glassed-in walkway that looks out on the courtyard. In the months after I first learned about the Ames investigation, I would go through the walkway, on my way from one meeting to another, and frequently observe Ames standing in the courtyard, taking a cigarette break, and schmoozing with fellow employees who, of course, had no idea they were talking to a Russian mole. What is he asking them? I would wonder to myself. What are they telling him? I remember one time in particular when I spotted Ames in the courtyard having an animated, one-on-one conversation with a guy who was in charge of one of the Agency’s most massive, successful, and sensitive technical intelligence-collection programs. It was an appalling thing to behold, and I felt an overwhelming urge to sprint into the courtyard and pull the guy away from Ames, to stop him from perhaps innocently mentioning something in passing—something significant—that Ames could pass back to his Russian handlers. But I was powerless to do anything but keep on walking.