by Rizzo, John
So there we were in mid-1995, in the midst of all the controversy publicly churning over the wisdom and morality of the CIA’s use of “dirty assets,” suddenly confronted with the quintessential case: a guy who had acknowledged to us years ago that he had American blood on his hands. And, thanks to our screwup, no one outside the CIA knew anything about it. There was only one thing to do: Go to the Justice Department and go to our committees on the Hill and tell all.
Typically, when the Agency learns about a possible violation of U.S. law by one of its employees or assets, or even by someone not affiliated with the CIA, the Office of General Counsel prepares a “crimes report” letter to the head of the DOJ criminal division, setting forth the bare facts of the case. However, when the facts are too sensitive, or if time is of the essence, the OGC instead seeks an urgent meeting with our intelligence focal point in the criminal division. This matter clearly qualified, so I made an appointment to visit the criminal division a day or two later. During my career, I initiated dozens of such meetings, and typically they consisted of a lot of eye-rolling by our DOJ counterparts as they would listen to me spin out some bizarre, tangled tale of crime and intrigue. Over time, I had learned to ignore the eye-rolling and just plow ahead with what I had to say, never sugarcoating anything. I always knew and trusted that the small, select cadre of Justice lawyers with whom we shared our information would treat anything I told them with the utmost professionalism and discretion. I cannot recall a single instance in my career where the criminal division leaked or otherwise compromised any information from a “crimes report” we made, and believe me, we made thousands of them. This occasion would be no exception.
A few days later, the chief of the CIA Counterterrorist Center traveled to Capitol Hill to perform the thankless task of telling the whole messy story surrounding this “dirty asset” to the staffs of the House and Senate intelligence committees. I didn’t attend the briefing, but the chief reported back that the staffers asked all sorts of detailed questions and that he had left behind a “fact sheet” on the case.
Less than twenty-four hours after the staffers had been briefed, the CIA Office of Public Affairs got a phone call from Tim Weiner, the national security correspondent for the New York Times. Weiner reeled off virtually every detail of the CTC chief’s presentation. Weiner said he was going to write a story about it. Did the Agency have any comment to make about the case? he asked.
Who leaked the information to Weiner? The timing strongly suggested it came from someone on the Hill, but an ensuing FBI investigation was inconclusive. The Agency, given its failure to inform law enforcement about the asset on a timely basis, was in no position to push the issue.
In any case, whenever a reporter calls the Agency to ask for an official comment about a CIA story he or she is about to publish, the Agency mostly reacts in one of two ways: It either denies that the story is accurate (and that is done only when it is in fact false) or simply declines to comment.
This time, however, the Agency reacted by imploring Weiner not to run the story. It took a step it takes rarely—it brought Weiner out to Langley for a personal plea from the Counterterrorist Center chief, who told Weiner, in a series of long and tense discussions, why this was literally a matter of life and death. A story “burning” the asset would not only undermine the Agency’s best counterterrorist source, it could get him killed—a gang of ruthless terrorists is the most unforgiving of groups when it comes to an informer in their midst.
A “bug-eyed” Weiner, as the CTC chief later described him, listened to all the pleas. In a desperate effort to appease Weiner and his editors, the Agency agreed to let Jeff Smith be quoted on the record with some general comments about the “asset scrub” and the complexities surrounding the use of intelligence sources with human rights baggage. The idea was to steer the story away from any details about this particular asset. Despite all our entreaties, the Times ran the story on page 1 on August 21, 1995. Some identifying details were omitted, but way too many weren’t.
The case officer handling the asset tracked him down overseas for an emergency meeting. To warn him about the story, to offer him protection and safe haven. The asset, stunned and betrayed, refused. He would have nothing more to do with us, he told the case officer. He promptly went underground and disappeared. No one ever saw him again. No one.
In 2007, Tim Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes was published. Running almost eight hundred pages, it was an exhaustively researched chronicle of the sixty-year history of the Agency. It earned rapturous reviews from the critics and became a best seller and National Book Award winner. It was also a relentlessly scathing portrayal of virtually everything the Agency had done in its history, recounting virtually every controversy, every episode, in a way that portrayed the institution as incompetent, untrustworthy, and irresponsible. Nowhere in his massive tome, however, did Weiner mention the front-page article he wrote, more than a decade before, outing our most irreplaceable “dirty” asset.
At the time the Weiner piece was published in the Times, it was one more log on the political fires then burning in Washington, D.C., over the morality of the CIA’s historical practice of enlisting the services of individuals with unsavory, violent pasts. After the Guatemala revelations and the resulting opprobrium directed at the DO officials caught up in them, the Agency’s clandestine service officers in the trenches were quietly deriving what would be a lasting, fateful lesson: It’s too dangerous to recruit nasty characters crawling in the back alleys of the world. To do so meant not only risking your career, but getting your source compromised and killed. Sure, this was probably an overreaction, but under the circumstances, it was an understandable one.
A few years later, in the wake of 9/11, Congress and the media would famously, and derisively, call this “risk aversion.” As Exhibit A, they cited the regulations that John Deutch, under intense congressional and media pressure, had directed Jeff Smith, with my help, to put in place in late 1995 in an effort to bring some degree of clarity and order to the complex, no-win dilemma of whether, and how, to use “dirty assets.” The “Deutch Guidelines,” the post-9/11 critics charged without a trace of self-awareness, were all Deutch’s fault.
By then, Deutch was long gone from the Agency. He had lasted less than two years as CIA director, leaving at the end of 1996. Shortly thereafter, he was caught up in an ugly personal scandal of his own making, when it was discovered that he had recklessly used his personal computer at home to write and store classified information. It was an egregious breach of security on his part, and it served to cement his standing as the most maligned CIA director in modern history.
Except with me.
All in all, the years 1993 through 1996 were depressing times for the Agency. From a professional standpoint, I look back at the period as one in which I had to cope with one debacle after another. From a personal standpoint, however, it was a happy juncture, because I became a newly married—remarried, actually—man.
On October 16, 1993, after a whirlwind (?) six-year courtship, I married the former Sharon Breed. The wedding ceremony took place at the stately Jefferson Hotel in downtown Washington, and my former boss Stan Sporkin, now a federal court judge, presided over the vows. Sharon and I, both divorced single parents, first met in the fall of 1987 during a picnic at the Potomac School, a private elementary school just up the road from CIA headquarters. Our respective nine-year-old kids—my son, James, and her daughter, Stephanie—happened to be in the same fourth-grade class together. It was your typical elementary school picnic, a scene of organized chaos with masses of little kids darting between the paper-plate-and-cup-strewn tables. As the festivities were mercifully winding down, Sharon and I struck up a conversation when we found ourselves alone in the parking lot, both attempting to locate and corral our separate offspring among all the tykes careering around the premises. A chance encounter—pure serendipity and, I suppose, fate. We went out on our first date a few days later. I was immediately smitten.
/> As I write this, we are happily closing in on our twentieth year of marriage. To this day, whenever someone at a cocktail party or other social occasion who doesn’t know us asks how we first met, Sharon has a favorite response. “We met in the fourth grade,” she says with a mischievous smile.
CHAPTER 9
Bin Laden Bursts Out (1997–2001)
After Deutch’s departure at the end of 1996, his number two man, George Tenet, became acting CIA director. Clinton had nominated his national security advisor, Anthony Lake, for the CIA director position, but the nomination foundered in the face of obdurate opposition by Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by its incoming chairman, Richard Shelby. Clinton then turned to Tenet. In his 2007 memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet admitted that Clinton scarcely interviewed him before offering him the job, which Tenet said he found “odd.” When I read that, I actually didn’t think it odd, at all; Clinton by then had clearly demonstrated monumental indifference toward the Agency’s work and its people.
With the exception of Bob Gates (who had been a career CIA official), George Tenet was the first and only nominee for CIA director that I personally knew before he was tapped for the position. He was also the first and last nominee younger than I was at the time of nomination, something that I remember as finding vaguely disconcerting. I first met Tenet in 1987, when Senator David Boren, the Intelligence Committee chairman at that time, plucked him out of nowhere to be the committee’s staff director. George was only in his early thirties at the time, and other committee staffers openly grumbled to us at the Agency, for he was considerably younger and less experienced in intelligence issues than most of his staff colleagues.
George and I hit it off right away. His personality in the mid-’80s was the same as it would always be—open, informal, friendly, and utterly without pretension or any sense of self-importance (the latter two traits uncharacteristic among Hill staffers). He also had a charming, playful side in the way he carried out his serious responsibilities for intelligence oversight.
For example, I recall an episode in the late ’80s when I was sent down to the intelligence committees to deliver some bad news that we had discovered only days before: One of the leaders of the Nicaraguan contras, Adolfo Calero, was implicated in the possible misuse of Agency (and thus U.S. taxpayer) funds. I spilled out the whole story in all its embarrassing and gory detail in a closed briefing at the Senate Intelligence Committee as the phalanx of committee Democrats sitting there listening to me got more and more incensed. At one point, the normally genial and supportive Boren demanded to know who in the Agency was going to be punished for allowing Calero’s transgression to happen.
“Well,” I responded wanly, “so far the only person being punished is me, because I’m the guy who was sent down to tell you this story.”
A few of the Democrats managed a sympathetic laugh, but not Boren. He then ordered that I be placed under oath, which was an unusual and hostile step for the committee to take. Typically, it’s an indication that the committee doesn’t necessarily believe what the witness is saying. (Which I thought was odd—if I were going to make something up, it would have been a hell of a less incriminating story than the one I was telling.) But in any event, as I dutifully rose to take the oath, I spotted George Tenet, sitting in his usual place against the wall behind his boss, Boren. There he was, unseen by Boren but in my direct line of sight, grinning broadly and aping me raising my arm taking the oath, only in his pantomime he kept tugging his arm up and down. With Boren staring balefully down at me from the dais, I had to stifle my own grin, which wasn’t easy. But George did effectively convey an implicit, welcome message: This is theater, Rizzo, so just relax and go with it.
Damn, I thought as I drove back to the Agency after finally escaping the briefing, this guy Tenet is a piece of work. Looking back now, if there was one day that sealed my enduring affection for him in the years to come, it was that day at the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Our paths would continue to cross when George joined the Clinton administration in 1993 to serve as Lake’s focal point with the Agency at the NSC. In the weeks leading up to the arrest of Rick Ames in 1994, George eagerly played a role in a ruse intended to get Ames out of his office so that investigators could do another search of it. Under a pretext, Ames’s boss told him and a couple of his Agency colleagues that they needed to brief Tenet on a matter in Tenet’s NSC office. Details of the Ames investigation were then still known to very few people inside the government, so George was told about the case but was not told which of the three CIA guys he would be meeting with was the Russian mole. The sham meeting came off without a hitch, and I was told that George played his part convincingly. Later, after the arrest finally went down, I asked Tenet if he had any inkling during the meeting about which of the Agency guys he met with was the traitor.
“Sure,” he replied jovially. “I knew it had to be Ames. He was the only one of the three of them who was wearing expensive Italian shoes.”
And so, for all sorts of reasons, I was happy when John Deutch picked George to be his deputy in 1995, and I was even happier when George was confirmed as CIA director on July 11, 1997. He knew and loved the Agency, and, unlike Deutch, actually wanted the job and made it clear that he hoped to stay in office for a long time. For a workforce that had seen three CIA directors come and go in the previous five years, hearing that was music to our ears.
From the start, he fit right in. In terms of personal demeanor, George was the most “regular guy” DCI I ever worked for. Only in his midforties when he took office, George was a contemporary of much of the CIA’s population and bonded easily with everyone he met, whether in meetings or waiting in the cashier’s line in the employee cafeteria. He often shambled into meetings in the hallowed director’s conference room with tie askew, sometimes in his stocking feet, gnawing away on an unlit Cuban cigar from the stash he had accumulated courtesy of visiting heads of foreign intelligence services. (Forbidden from smoking after having suffered a heart attack, he had a habit of reducing these primo cigars to a lumpen, saliva-soaked mass, which always drove me—a devoted cigar smoker dating back to college—quietly nuts.) Whether the meetings were small or large, George also displayed a virtuoso skill in managing to drop the “f-bomb” liberally into the conversation, variously employing it as a noun, adjective, verb, and occasional prepositional phrase (in my experience with DCIs, only Leon Panetta years later would rival George in f-bomb dexterity).
With George, somehow none of these habits ever came off as vulgar or offensive. Rather, they seemed genuine coming from a first-generation Greek American from Queens who exuded an earthy, Zorba-like warmth. For me, it was crystallized best in the way he dealt with his ever-present security detail. In my observations over the years, other DCIs treated their personal CIA bodyguards as either invisible furniture or intrusive nuisances. George, by contrast, seemed to view his bodyguards as hale companions; sometimes I would spot him striding around the building with his arms draped around their shoulders, like they were all a bunch of carefree fraternity buddies on their way to a party.
I know of no one at the CIA who ever dealt with George who did not like him. It was impossible not to like him.
George’s ascension to the DCI job gave the Agency a jolt of energy and optimism that had been largely absent in the decade that had passed since Iran-contra. And, relatively speaking, he seemed to have Clinton’s trust and confidence; while Deutch’s deputy, he had been assigned delicate (and unusual) duties as a presidential diplomatic emissary in the thorny Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Plus, like Deutch, he was given cabinet status. Nevertheless, Clinton was Clinton, after all, so he kept his DCI at arm’s length. George was not allowed to attend the morning intelligence briefing Clinton received each day from his national security aides. In his 2007 memoir, George described his face-to-face meetings with Clinton as “sporadic” and wistfully remarked that “[b]eing in regular, direct contact with the pr
esident is an incredible boon to a CIA director’s ability to do his job.” With Clinton, George admitted in his memoir, if he had an important message to deliver or plea to make—such as for significant increases for the CIA counterterrorism budget—he would sit down and write the commander in chief a letter. Those letters in which he rattled a tin cup had scant effect: “For the most part I succeeded in annoying the administration for which I worked but did not loosen any significant purse strings.”
And all the while during the late ’90s, the threat posed by a Saudi-born man named Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network was inexorably growing. Correspondingly, my focus and responsibilities on legal issues related to bin Laden were also growing. They would dominate, and eventually consume, the balance of my CIA career.
By 1997, the Office of General Counsel had grown to about eighty lawyers, and I had become second in command, which was historically the highest position a career CIA lawyer could hope to attain. When he became DCI, George arranged for the White House to tap Bob McNamara (no relation to the former secretary of defense) for the general counsel position. Congress had recently passed a law mandating that the GC be a presidential appointment subject to Senate confirmation (one of the leftover “reforms” recommended by the Iran-contra committee). McNamara was the first GC candidate to come under this new statutory regime, and only in retrospect does it seem astonishing that the Senate quickly confirmed him without bothering with the formality of a confirmation hearing. As it happened, McNamara and I had been friends for a long time, dating back to his years as a senior lawyer in the Treasury Department. Bob could be intense and uptight at times, but overall he was a smart, honorable guy I knew I could get along with. I also knew that he trusted me enough to give me considerable sway in handling the “covert operations” account, which is all that really mattered to me at that point.
