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

by Rizzo, John

  But I had a more parochial reason for wanting George Tenet to stay in place. A new CIA director almost certainly would mean there would be a new general counsel. As a deputy, I had broken in four new GCs—Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, Jeff Smith, Mike O’Neil, and Bob McNamara—in the space of the previous ten years, and the prospect of having to show someone the ropes yet again was distinctly unappealing to me. I was firmly rooted in the second-in-command position in the office, and I had no expectation of going any higher—no career CIA lawyer had been tapped for the top job since I joined the CIA nearly a quarter century before. In short, I had nothing left to prove, and nothing left to shoot for, in the OGC. I had even started to informally explore the possibility of leaving the office for another senior assignment elsewhere in the organization—there was one posting, to a place I had always wanted to live, that was particularly intriguing. I was quite comfortable with Bob McNamara at the helm as GC and assumed that if George stayed in a Gore administration, Bob would stick around as well, at least for a year or two. After that, I figured, I would make a move to do something else. Something different in the intelligence field, something fun.

  Political prognostication and career planning were never my strong points.

  As everyone knows, George Bush, with assistance from the Supreme Court, belatedly won the 2000 presidential election. Then Bush did what very few of us in the Agency expected: He asked George Tenet to continue serving as director. Not only that, but he immediately showed an avid interest in intelligence matters and welcomed Tenet back into the intelligence briefings held in the Oval Office every morning. Those of us in the senior Agency career ranks were delighted—not only did that mean there would be continuity at the top of the CIA, but we knew that a director with daily, direct access to the president was paramount in our business. We hadn’t had that since Bob Gates was DCI and the new president’s father was in the Oval Office.

  I, for one, thought this happily surprising turn of events was partly due to the quiet influence of Bush’s father, and partly because George Tenet’s affable, frat-boy bonhomie meshed nicely with that of the new president. Mostly, however, I think that Bush’s decision at the outset to keep George and the Agency close by was prompted by the waves of intelligence reporting he was getting from the moment he took office, reports all pointing at an inevitable, likely spectacular, and bloody Al Qaeda attack on American citizens somewhere in the world. The intelligence drumbeat that began in the final two years of the Clinton administration was getting ever more loud, and George Tenet was the drum major.

  Within a month or so of the arrival of the new Bush team, George ordered up a new, more comprehensive and aggressive draft MON against the Al Qaeda target that would supersede the confusing welter of MONs left over from the final Clinton years. The Counterterrorist Center put together a list of covert-action options that went well beyond anything the CIA had been granted previously, including uncovering bin Laden’s massive financial network. With respect to lethal action against bin Laden, I contributed language to the draft MON that was as direct and unambiguous as I could make it: We would be given authority to either capture or kill bin Laden, period. In other words, dead or alive. I thought the Agency might as well tee up the issue right off the bat with the new president and the new attorney general.

  George shipped the MON off to Condoleezza Rice, the incoming national security advisor, and used it as a vehicle for trying to prod the Bush White House to focus on the ever-growing and increasingly dire threat posed by Al Qaeda. I don’t know if he realistically expected that Bush would approve such a dramatic, precedent-shattering expansion of our counterterrorism authorities in his first several months in office. I know that I did not. Again, I drew on the lessons learned from my twenty years of observing how presidents approached covert action. Just as presidents whose terms are winding down are reluctant to launch major new covert-action initiatives, so too are presidents who are just newly arrived in office. I always found this initial reluctance on the part of new presidents totally understandable—covert action is a tempting but potentially scary incendiary device in the government’s national security arsenal, and a new Oval Office occupant (and his advisors around him) rightly tends to approach it warily. Perhaps they all remember that President Kennedy gave his final okay for the Bay of Pigs invasion less than three months after he was sworn in.

  So I don’t share the view expressed by some post-9/11 critics that the Bush White House in its first months in office was either too cavalier or too obtuse to address the growing evidence of Al Qaeda threats against the homeland. A new balls-out MON signed by Bush would have been nice, I suppose, but I doubt it would have changed history. The covert-action authorizations Clinton left behind may have been inconsistent and equivocal, but they were more than sufficient to grant the Agency all the legal authority it would have needed to detect and prevent the 9/11 attacks.

  Despite the best efforts of everyone from George Tenet on down, we just didn’t do it.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Attacks and the Response (September 2001–January 2002)

  When the news first broke on that sunny Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, I and thousands of other employees at the CIA’s Langley headquarters were just settling in for another day at the office. Like the rest of the country, we watched our office TVs with unbelieving shock and horror as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Many of us were aware of the increasingly ominous intelligence reports during the previous two years about a possible attack, but no one had envisioned this particular nightmare scenario. Yet everyone in the building who had been privy to those reports, myself included, immediately realized that this had to be an Al Qaeda operation.

  And then came the news that another passenger jet had hit the Pentagon, just a few miles away from the Agency. Shortly after that, word came that yet another hijacked plane was still in the air, perhaps headed for the Washington metropolitan area. We watched as TV reporters, just as shaken and bewildered as everyone else, began excitedly speculating about its potential target. Perhaps the White House, they said. Perhaps the Capitol. Or perhaps CIA Headquarters.

  It is an indelible memory, yet impossible to describe adequately, what it was like for us at Langley as we stared out our office windows—in my case, on the top floor of the original headquarters building—toward the skies. From my perch, I could look across the courtyard toward the new headquarters building and see dozens of my colleagues at their windows, looking out.

  A few minutes later, an urgent message appeared on every office computer screen at the Agency: “Immediate Evacuation.” There would be exceptions to that edict, of course. Everyone involved on the counterterrorist account stayed at his post. George Tenet took a handful of his top aides to a separate, small building—the CIA’s printing plant—on the headquarters campus. General Counsel Bob McNamara was included in that small group, but I was not. Still, I decided to stay where I was. It was a decision made on strictly practical grounds. I could see from my office window, and from the windows in the Office of Public Affairs across the hall, that the roads to the main exit gates were already gridlocked. I could also see hundreds of employees spilling out of the two buildings and heading—most walking, some running—toward their cars in the vast parking lots encircling the buildings. It would take me hours to get off the compound and home, I figured. So I decided the hell with it. I closed the door to my office suite, ignored the blaring recorded voice on the hallway intercom repeating the evacuation order, and hunkered down at my desk. I wanted to do something, anything, that might be productive. My first move was to follow any lawyer’s natural instinct. I took out a blank yellow legal pad. Focus, I told myself. Focus.

  I knew that two things were bound to happen to the Agency in the immediate postmortems (for once, in the literal sense of that term) of this catastrophe. There would be investigations and recriminations directed at the CIA, demanding answers on how we could have let this happen. All the previous controversies I h
ad been involved in during my Agency career would pale by comparison. But there was nothing to be done about that. Besides, for now, that was totally beside the point.

  The other thing was that the White House would order the Agency to develop and undertake a full-scale assault on Al Qaeda, to employ all means necessary to prevent any further attacks on the homeland. So I poised my pen on the legal pad and began scribbling a laundry list of potential covert actions the CIA could undertake in the weeks and months ahead. Things we had never done before in my career. On that unimaginable morning, I let my imagination run wild.

  I didn’t keep any personal files on covert-action programs in my office, so I had to rely on memory to establish a baseline on what authority we already had to act against Al Qaeda. The spate of Clinton MONs in 1998 and 1999—which were still on the books—were confusing and contradictory, and in any case were woefully insufficient now. They permitted us to kill bin Laden and his close associates, maybe, but the authorities were honeycombed with conditions and caveats. I tried to remember the terms of the proposed MON that Tenet had ordered up and presented to the new Bush administration in the early months of 2001. It was more aggressive and less ambiguous than the Clinton MONs, giving clear direction to the CIA to take lethal action against bin Laden. Yet even that seemed not to go far enough. Not on the morning of 9/11.

  I scribbled down a new formulation: “Lethal action against members of Al Qaeda and any affiliated groups,” or words to that effect. We would hunt down and kill anyone in Al Qaeda, or acting under its direction or influence, involved in the 9/11 attacks or actively planning attacks on the homeland or on U.S. citizens anywhere.

  But then I wondered, was that all that we could do? Covert-action programs were never conceived to be primarily instruments of national vengeance, at least during my long career. They are supposed to be forward-looking documents, combating ongoing or future threats to the United States. Killing Al Qaeda leaders or operatives was one thing, but a dead man can’t give you his intentions or plans. Even if we had the capacity and capability to kill them all—which I doubted—was that smart? Was that enough? Maybe, I thought, we should retain the option to take terrorists alive, not just to take them out of circulation but to get them to tell us about what their confederates still at large might be plotting.

  I scribbled down the phrase “capture, detain and question” on my legal pad. I was totally winging it now. The CIA, in my experience, never had a program to hold people against their will. I had no idea where we might hold them (although it surely would not be anywhere inside the United States) or what sort of facility they would be held in. The manner in which we would question them did not cross my mind.

  I made a few other notes to myself about what to include in any new program—language authorizing the CIA to call upon the services and personnel of all other federal agencies as well as foreign governments, things like that. It was early afternoon by then, and I decided it was time to go home to be with my wife and family. The unaccounted-for plane, United Flight 93, had just been reported as having crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The carnage, at least for that day, seemed to be over. My trip home to Georgetown didn’t take very long, but it seemed to last forever.

  Over the next few days, John Bellinger, the legal advisor to the National Security Council staff, convened a series of marathon sessions, attended by senior lawyers from the White House and the national security community, to hash out the terms of the new MON. Bob McNamara went to some of the sessions, and I went to others. Less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush signed off on the final version. Multiple pages in length, it was the most comprehensive, most ambitious, most aggressive, and most risky Finding or MON I was ever involved in. One short paragraph authorized the capture and detention of Al Qaeda terrorists, another authorized taking lethal action against them. The language was simple and stark.

  When the MON was delivered to the intelligence committees a day later, Republicans and Democrats alike had the same reaction: Is this enough? Is this everything you guys need to protect the country? As far as I was concerned, there was nothing else we possibly could have included; we had filled the entire covert-action tool kit, including tools we had never before used.

  As far as I know, the MON remains in effect to this day.

  In mid-October, Bob McNamara told me he was stepping down from his position as general counsel to accept a position in the private sector. It was not entirely a surprise to me, since Bob had been signaling for several months that he was exploring outside opportunities. Once 9/11 happened, however, I assumed he would postpone his plans for a while. Still, I understood Bob’s decision—he had been in office for nearly four grueling years, and the pace and pressure were surely going to become even more relentless for years to come.

  And so, when Bob departed in mid-November 2001, I became acting general counsel. It was not an unfamiliar position for me, having filled in for a few weeks at a time during the previous several years when the incumbent GC was out of town or in the interregnum between outgoing and incoming GCs. This would be no ordinary interregnum, of course. Workers were still sifting through rubble at Ground Zero and the Pentagon. The attempted “Shoe Bomber” attack on another U.S. passenger jet, as well as the murderous, unsolved “anthrax letter” incidents in D.C. and Florida, were keeping the nation in the grip of dread and fear. Meanwhile, the most high-stakes, high-risk covert-action program in CIA history was just getting under way. So, yes, I had been “acting” on previous occasions, but never in circumstances remotely resembling these. To be the chief legal advisor at the CIA at that point of history was at once intoxicating and frightening.

  What’s more, I had the distinct impression that this time I could be in the hot seat for a while. In the months before 9/11, when Bob McNamara was making no secret of his plans to leave, I discerned no move by the White House to identify a replacement. Once Bob was gone, I still didn’t. One day early on, I asked John Moseman, Tenet’s chief of staff and by now my close friend, if he knew of any talk about a new general counsel. Based on past experience, I knew that the process could take months—a candidate would have to be interviewed by the director, cleared by the White House political office, undergo a thorough background security investigation, be formally nominated by the president, and confirmed by the Senate.

  “The White House hasn’t said anything about it to George, and George hasn’t said anything about it to the White House,” John replied. “So just sit tight. No one’s in any hurry.”

  “Have fun,” he added with a mordant chuckle.

  In 1996, shortly after he became deputy CIA director, George Tenet had begun convening biweekly meetings with the CTC so that he could be kept personally abreast of world terrorism developments. In the wake of the 1998 African embassy bombings, George had started holding these sessions on a weekly basis. A few days after 9/11, they morphed into a daily ritual that was officially called “the CTC Update” but soon came to be known around the building as “the five o’clock.” It was no longer a mere briefing forum—it became the command bunker in the CIA’s war on Al Qaeda, with George wielding the marshal’s baton.

  Each day at the appointed hour, a group of about thirty-five of us would gather around the oblong polished oak table in the director’s conference room to review and discuss the daily developments in the Agency’s full-throttle campaign against Al Qaeda. On one side of the table sat George, along with his deputy, John McLaughlin, Executive Director Buzzy Krongard (a spectacularly successful and colorful investment banker whom George had recruited a couple of years before), Deputy Director for Operations Jim Pavitt, and Deputy Director of Intelligence Jami Miscik. Several other senior officials—the directors of public and congressional affairs, the CIA comptroller, the acting general counsel, and a few other high-level straphangers—filled out that side of the table.

  Across the table were arrayed the CIA’s true warriors in this new, post-9/11 war. Each day about twenty officer
s from the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) and the Near East (NE) and Special Activities (SAD) divisions would troop in, sit down, and, for about an hour or so, basically scare the bejesus out of the rest of us with up-to-the-minute updates on the latest intelligence coming in on Al Qaeda plans, capabilities, and threats. Their presentation also included descriptions of what our people were doing, or proposed to do, in response.

  The maestro of the group was the CTC chief, Cofer Black. An imposing presence with the physique of a retired NFL tight end, Cofer had a face and slicked-back, receding hairline that together reminded some of us of a late-career Jack Nicholson. Also, like most of Nicholson’s screen characters, he spoke in a staccato, world-weary cadence liberally sprinkled with dark, cynical humor. But the dramatic image he presented was not an affectation—Cofer was a bona fide, hard-bitten product of the CIA’s clandestine world, having spent years in hotspots and hellholes where he consistently performed with bravery and verve. In 1994, for instance, he had been the key CIA operative in orchestrating the capture in Sudan and rendition to France of the legendary terrorist fugitive Carlos the Jackal. In the post-9/11 literature, Cofer has been famously cited as having supposedly exhorted his troops to bring him “bin Laden’s head in a box.” I never heard him say that, either at the five o’clock meeting or elsewhere, but having gotten to know him well over the years, it rings true to me as the quintessential Cofer quote.