Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  While I did not try to recruit the country’s president, I did accomplish the most successful recruitment of my thirty-one-year career during that tour of duty when I met my future wife, Patti.

  A native of Massachusetts, Patti was teaching at the American school. I met her at a party at the Marine house at the Embassy and was instantly struck by her beauty and personal charm and warmth. A year later she left to go to graduate school back in Massachusetts, but I wouldn’t let her escape for long. I went back to visit her and somehow convinced her to marry me just before being sent to my second duty station.

  Patti and I got a house in that Andean country (which I cannot identify), and I soon found myself invited to go riding with yet another Latin American leader.

  The president, who was an excellent equestrian, and his compatriots were engaged in jumping horses one day over some of the most challenging obstacles I had ever encountered. I overheard him say to one of his majors: “Let’s see if the gringo has the cojones to do this jump.” He slyly smiled and encouraged me to approach a particularly difficult fence. I had no choice. Fortunately, my mount did all the work, but, as a result of my horse’s guts, I was soon an accepted confidant of the dictator. On another occasion, the president fell when his horse stumbled jumping over an adobe wall. He moaned and squealed in pain on the ground while one of his assistants rode back to the stables to get a car. I stayed with him until the car came back for him. He was taken to the hospital with a badly broken leg. He appreciated my help during the incident and invited me to join his Thursday afternoon rides, followed by a barbecue at the stables with his closest confidants, all cavalry officers. Because I was a bona fide horseman and spoke native Spanish, the group would often forget that I was an American official and that the U.S. government opposed the regime. They spoke frankly about what was going on and I paid close attention. It was very good for business!

  We had no illusions about my riding companion. When I was back in the office doing my day job, I spent countless hours collecting intelligence about his malfeasance in office.

  After a couple of years, I was surprised to receive a cable from headquarters telling me that I was to become the Agency’s chief of station in a small Latin American country. Surprised, both because I was still a very junior officer and because I had to pull out a reference book to find where it was. (When I was in school, it had been known under a different name.) I was concerned when I read the State Department’s “Post report,” which made the capital sound like a dump. However, it turned out to be one of our favorite postings, due to the wonderful friends we made there, the laid-back lifestyle of the country, and the beauty of the country’s barrier reefs. Patti went back home to Massachusetts to deliver our first son, Nicolas. Not long after he was born I got notice that my tour was being cut short and I was to be posted in El Salvador.

  El Salvador was the most difficult overseas tour that we had. It was a country at war. The violence was pervasive, and many people died during the conflict, including a number of CIA officers, often as a result of airplane and helicopter crashes. We worried daily about our families and our colleagues. We had a stray bullet break the glass of the window in the room where my baby boy slept. We later found the bullet on the floor next to his crib. While I was driving home one day, the passenger window on my truck was shattered by a glancing bullet. We were all armed to the teeth. I always carried a 9mm Browning with me and had a sawed-off shotgun next to me in my truck. When I traveled up country in an H-1H helicopter, I would have an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle by my side.

  I hardly saw my family during this tour because of the abundance of work. Four U.S. Marines had been killed in the Zona Rosa district of San Salvador and I dove right into the work of finding the killers upon my arrival at my post. A few months later the Salvadoran president’s daughter was kidnapped, and we were directed to support the intelligence work in that case. We found her, but the government would not risk a commando operation to liberate her. While I was in El Salvador, a decision had been made to completely change the CIA’s approach to fighting the insurgency. I had the responsibility of carrying out the new plan, something that was all consuming and difficult to do. Earthquakes, disease (Patti contracted hepatitis there), and violence were a way of life in El Salvador in the mideighties.

  While we were in El Salvador, the country experienced a severe earthquake that killed about one thousand people. Patti, who was pregnant with our second son, was working as the Embassy’s mental health coordinator when the earthquake struck. She had to crawl out of the chancery when the Embassy buckled under the force of the quake and was destroyed. Outside, the ambassador would not allow anyone to leave the Embassy compound due to the chaotic situation in the city. Back then there were no cell phones and our secure radio network went down, so there was no way to call in or out of the Embassy. Patti was very worried about our baby sleeping in our home, which was located on the side of a mountain. I was able to get home first and found our maid with the baby in the front yard of the house. A massive iron gate in front of the house had come down and a lot of things were broken inside, but the house suffered no major structural damage, which was not the case with many of our colleagues’ homes in the American community. Patti was shaken by the tragedy and the two thousand aftershocks. She kept the baby by her side in our bedroom along with a packed suitcase and her passport in case she needed to make a quick exit.

  While in El Salvador I had to deal with the death of a young Agency officer who was killed in a helicopter crash. I got a call at 3:00 a.m. that one of our officers was missing and I had to coordinate efforts to send people out to find him. The accident happened around the time Patti was to deliver our second son, Alec, and I couldn’t get back to Massachusetts in time for the birth. Years later when I was getting ready to retire from the CIA, I took Alec into the Agency headquarters lobby and showed him the star in the book of honor denoting agency officers lost in the line of duty. Pointing to a date in the book, I told him that that was why I was not present at his birth.

  After more than a decade in the field, I was brought back to headquarters for my first Stateside assignment. I was made head of a branch of the Operations Directorate that focused on Panama and the Andean countries. Panama demanded most of my time. General Manuel Noriega was a thorn in America’s side at the time. This was my first brush with Washington bureaucracy. I attended my first major interagency meetings with National Security Council, Department of Defense, and State Department officials and was stunned not only at how hard it was to get a decision made on anything, but also by how quickly anything important would leak to the press.

  Although I was based in Langley, I was personally involved in running some of the more sensitive operations, because Panama was under close scrutiny by Noriega’s security service.

  One event about which I was particularly happy took place when Noriega was running a sham election designed to convince his countrymen that he had been popularly reelected. Using Panamanian expertise, the signals of major Panamanian radio stations were hijacked and accurate results from exit polls were delivered showing that Noriega was losing the election. It was a spectacularly successful operation and by late evening on Election Day Noriega was forced to stop the count and annul the election results. In doing so, he displayed his true colors, and it was the beginning of the end for his regime.

  As the situation grew more tense in Panama, I came up with a plan that I thought was pretty clever—a covert operation that just might get Noriega out of office without bloodshed. Noriega was known to be a big believer in witchcraft, and he had a Brazilian witch doctor who had tremendous influence over him. So I conjured up a plan that made its way to CIA Director William Webster, proposing that we recruit Noriega’s trusted witch doctor and put him on the Agency payroll. With proper handling of the agent, I hoped to be able to create circumstances where our witch doctor would tell the dictator that a nice retirement home in Spain was in his immediate future. Unfortunately, Judge Webster
was not impressed, and he essentially cast me and my witch doctor plan out of his office. Instead, the United States followed a more traditional path: a military invasion that succeeded in removing the dictator but cost the lives of twenty-three U.S. troops and more than two hundred Panamanians. Noriega’s retirement home for the next two decades would be a U.S. prison.

  My next job took me back to the field and back to one of my boyhood homes. My parents were living in Puerto Rico at the time and I was happy to go nearby as chief of station. My tour was rather uneventful, however, with no revolutions or witch doctors to contend with.

  After a couple of years I was plucked out to go to Panama to meet with U.S. Ambassador Dean Hinton, who was tough as nails and had a reputation of chewing up and spitting out advisors. It took me a while to win his confidence, but eventually I did so. The ambassador wanted me to work closely with the head of the military’s U.S. Southern Command—first General George Joulwan and later General Barry McCaffrey. One of the challenges was dealing with the post-Noriega military environment. Members of the Panamanian army were transformed into police. Only the most senior Noriega army loyalists were cashiered. While there continued to be some security problems in Panama, they were manageable. The experience there stood in stark contrast to what was done in Iraq fourteen years later, where a political decision was made to disband the Iraqi army. That decision greatly contributed to the years of violence and unrest that ensued.

  In 1994 I returned to Langley for my second full headquarters tour of duty. At first I was made deputy chief of Human Resources and later became deputy chief of the Agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center (CNC). Working in CNC was an eye-opener for me. The Center was under the direction of the Agency’s Intelligence Directorate, not the Directorate of Operations, under which I had spent virtually my entire career. In CNC, operations officers, also called “case officers,” worked side by side with analysts skilled in targeting drug traffickers and international criminals. The traditional walls that separate the two main branches of the CIA were torn down in CNC, and I experienced the synergy of these disciplines working together. CNC also gave me my first significant experience in working with foreign partners outside Latin America. My duties took me to Thailand, Russia, and Eastern Europe. While on a trip to China, I got a call from my boss, Dave Carey, telling me that the then-DCI, John Deutch, wanted to make me chief of the Directorate of Operations’ Latin America Division. For someone like me, who had spent most of his career in the Latin America Division, normally this would have been a dream come true. But the Agency was going through some extraordinarily turbulent times. Deutch had come into office intent on cleaning house in the Directorate of Operations. At the time there were multiple investigations by the inspector general that eventually led to the firing of two highly respected LA Division officers. A few others were forced to retire and hire lawyers to defend themselves from criminal investigations resulting from the Iran-Contra imbroglio and covert operations relating to the Central American wars. It was my first experience dealing with the fallout from controversial policy decisions that were second-guessed and politicized when, years later, a different political party won the election. I learned some valuable lessons, which I used in the years following 9/11 to try to protect the people who worked for me.

  The way Deutch treated these senior LA Division officers was a blow to morale throughout the Agency. Many Latin America Division officers were openly wearing black armbands around headquarters to visibly express solidarity with the cashiered officers.

  Adding to morale problems in the LA Division was an order Deutch issued throughout the Agency directing a “scrub” of all our assets, the agents working on our behalf in foreign countries. Deutch wanted us to rid ourselves of sources whose hands were unclean and forbade officers in the field to recruit spies in the future who were “dirty” unless there was a special written exemption from headquarters. The net effect was a severe chill on potential recruiting of assets. Few officers in the field wanted to ask headquarters for an exemption and risk earning the disapproval of the politically correct Deutch. In my view, this “dirty assets” order had a negative effect on Agency operations around the world. Deutch’s successor, George Tenet, reversed the order after 9/11.

  I reluctantly accepted the offer to become chief of the LA Division. While I disapproved of many of the politically inspired decisions from higher management, I rationalized that if good people refuse to take on these kinds of assignments during times of struggle, the entire institution is only further weakened.

  I wish I could tell you that I went to the LA Division and restored its morale and effectiveness, but the truth is my tenure there was cut short. I was essentially fired from the position because of a very biased and unfair inspector general investigation, which I will write more about later. The IG’s office is an important institution, but in my experience, both in the late nineties and after 9/11, it can have a damaging and corrosive impact on the Agency.

  I didn’t stay fired long. First I was temporarily placed in the security office, helping sort out a major personnel problem. In the wake of the scandal involving Aldrich Ames, a senior Agency officer belatedly discovered to have been spying for the Russians, there was a major effort at the CIA to step up reinvestigation of our officers. Many Agency personnel had trouble passing their polygraph exams. Whether they had done anything wrong was unclear, but they could not get over the polygraph hurdle. Under newly installed regulations, if an officer’s case was unresolved after three attempts to pass the “poly,” the case was automatically passed to the FBI for a criminal investigation. The FBI was in no hurry to resolve the cases, and the Agency felt unable to give the officers under scrutiny meaningful work. So we had scores of good officers who became what were known as “hall walkers,” wandering around headquarters in limbo, never knowing if or when they would be cleared, or worse, accused of a crime they did not commit and frog-marched out of the headquarters in handcuffs.

  George Tenet, who had just become DCI, brought in with him Ray Mislock, a former FBI special agent, to deal with security matters. I worked with Ray to try to bring some sanity to the security reinvestigation process. Eventually we were able to force the Bureau to bring some closure to the lives of unfortunate hall walkers.

  My time in limbo, too, was about to come to an end. The IG hadn’t hurt my reputation within the Directorate of Operations, and I was offered a chance to go to Mexico City as chief of station. It would be the fourth station that I had led and possibly a nice way to top off my career.

  Our stay in Mexico was an enjoyable one both professionally and personally. I had the opportunity to work with the local security services to try to combat the growing drug threat and to enjoy life outside the Washington bubble. The assignment was not without some challenges. In April 1999, Milenio, a Mexican equivalent of Time magazine, came out with a four-page story all about me. The cover of the magazine had the CIA seal in the background, with the title “The New CIA Chief in Mexico is Jose Rodriguez.”

  For my entire CIA career, I had lived a life undercover. Those without a need to know (which included most people on the planet) were told that I worked for some other part of the U.S. government. Seeing your name and true occupation splashed across a major news magazine can be quite bracing for someone in my profession. Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, however, there is life and an intelligence career is possible after having your cover blown. My biggest concern was for the safety of my family. Mexico’s narco traffickers would have liked nothing better than to exact revenge against the CIA’s senior officer in their country. The Agency dispatched a surveillance team to keep watch on Patti and the boys. Essentially they would try to clandestinely follow them to make sure no bad guys were doing the same. The boys took great pleasure in trying to “spot the spooks” as Patti drove them to and from soccer practice. A short while later, after the surveillance was dropped, when I was out of the country on business, Patti and the boys returned from church
one Sunday and discovered intruders in our home. It turned out they were burglars and not terrorists, but the experience was terrifying for them nonetheless.

  But most of our family memories of Mexico City were positive ones. Both Nic and Alec discovered they shared my love of riding, and we enjoyed taking our horses, Azabache, Pancho, and Igotis, out on weekends and holidays. We stabled the horses near La Marquesa National Park on the outskirts of Mexico City, where we rode them with reckless abandon, jumping natural obstacles like fallen trees and ditches and galloping up and down the many beautiful valleys. By the time we left Mexico City, the boys were expert riders. It was very difficult to leave behind our beloved horses, but our memories of riding in Mexico City will be lasting ones.

  After three years in Mexico City, I returned to headquarters to an uncertain future. When I got back to Langley I paid a visit to Jim Pavitt, the deputy director for Operations (known as the DDO). At the time he was the most senior officer in the clandestine service. I had known Jim for many years and enjoyed a solid personal and working relationship with him. Jim was complimentary about my performance in Mexico but was uncertain what they might do with me in the future. “Go home and take some of that leave you have built up,” he said. “We’ll find something for you to do,” he added, somewhat unconvincingly. The date was early September 2001.

  Patti and I were at home on September 11 unpacking some of the household goods that had just arrived after our move back to Virginia from Mexico. Sherry, a longtime friend and former neighbor of ours, called us distraught. “Put the television on! Put the television on!” she screamed. “The country is being attacked!” We immediately did as she instructed and sat transfixed as we watched the awful events in New York City and at the nearby Pentagon play out. As the awful scene unfolded before our eyes, I felt the outrage and the horror that all Americans felt that morning. Watching the burning towers and the heart-wrenching scene of some of their occupants leaping to their deaths, I shared the desire held by all my countrymen that the dastardly attacks be avenged. But unlike most Americans, I had a chance to do something directly about it.