by Tim Weiner
To outsiders they looked like members of a Virginia men’s club, a white-shirt southern culture. But they saw themselves as a camouflaged combat battalion, a blood brotherhood. The friction with Webster was white-hot from the start. “We probably could have overcome Webster’s ego, his lack of experience with foreign affairs, his small-town America world perspective, and even his yuppier-than-thou arrogance,” the CIA’s Duane Clarridge complained. “What we couldn’t overcome was that he was a lawyer.
“All of his training as a lawyer and a judge was that you didn’t do illegal things. He could never accept that this is exactly what the CIA does when it operates abroad. We break the laws of their countries. It’s how we collect information. It’s why we’re in business. Webster had an insurmountable problem with the raison d’eˆtre of the organization he was brought in to run.”
Within weeks of Webster’s arrival, the word went out from Clarridge and his colleagues to the White House: the man was a lightweight, a dilettante, a half-bright social butterfly. He recognized the rebellion he faced and tried to beat it back with advice from Richard Helms, who had emerged from his brush with the criminal courts as a respected gray eminence. “A point Dick Helms made with me: because we have to lie and do those things overseas, it is very important that we do not lie to each other and subvert each other,” Webster remembered. “The message I wanted to send was that you can do so much more when people trust you. I don’t know how much difference it made. People listened very carefully. But the question at the agency was: does he mean it? There was always a question in their minds.”
Webster vowed that the agency would keep no secrets from Congress. But the congressional intelligence committees had been burned too often. They decided that the lesson of Iran-contra was that the agency needed to be managed from Capitol Hill. Congress could impose its will because, under the Constitution, it ultimately controlled the checkbook of the government. Webster raised the white flag, and with his surrender, the CIA was no longer an instrument of purely presidential power. It was poised, precariously, between the commander in chief and the Congress.
The clandestine service fought hard against giving Congress a role in running the CIA. It feared that among the 535 elected representatives, there might be 5 who understood the first thing about the agency. So the staffs of the congressional oversight committees were quickly seeded with career CIA officers who could look after their own.
The committees had a knife out for Clair George, still the chief of the clandestine service. He had been Casey’s special liaison to Congress and a master of the art of deception. Casey had loved his charm and his cunning, but these two qualities were not in demand at Webster’s CIA. “Clair had a glibness about him that endeared one to him,” Webster said. “But he thought the way to handle a question from Congress was to dance around it.”
At the end of November 1987, Webster called him on the carpet and said: “The fact is that Congress doesn’t believe you. I’m going to have to have your job.” George considered this for a moment. “He said: ‘I really think I should retire—and maybe I’ll take some people with me who ought to retire too.’” Three weeks later, Duane Clarridge was having a stiff noontime cup of Christmas cheer with George when Webster summoned him upstairs and told him it was time to go. Clarridge briefly considered fighting back, first by blackmailing Webster, and then by using his connections in the White House. He had just received a nice note from his good friend the vice president of the United States. “You have my friendship,” George Bush wrote, “my respect and high esteem. That won’t ever change.” But Clarridge decided that a covenant of loyalty had been broken. He quit.
A cadre of covert operators with two thousand years’ experience among them walked out the door with him.
“AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE WAS GENEROUS”
What haunted Clair George the most in his retirement was not the blown operations or the prospect of indictment, but the shadow of a mole inside the CIA.
On his watch, during 1985 and 1986, the Soviet/Eastern Europe division of the clandestine service had lost every one of its spies. Its dozen Soviet agents-in-place had been arrested and executed, one by one. The small CIA stations in Moscow and East Berlin ceased to function, the officers’ covers blown, their operations destroyed. In 1986 and 1987, the division was collapsing like a dynamited building caught on slow-motion film. The CIA had no idea why. At first it thought a rookie officer named Ed Howard was the traitor within. He had joined the clandestine service in 1981 and was selected to serve on his first tour abroad as a deep-cover officer in Moscow. He had gone through two years of training. A few personal details about Howard had escaped the CIA’s notice until the last possible minute: he was a drunk, a liar, and a thief. The agency let him go, and he had defected to Moscow in April 1985.
As part of his training, Howard had read the files on some of the best spies the CIA had in Moscow, among them Adolf Tolkachev, a military scientist who had for four years delivered documents on cutting-edge Soviet weapons research. Tolkachev was regarded as the CIA’s greatest Soviet source in twenty years.
When the Politburo met in the Kremlin on September 28, 1986, the KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, proudly informed Mikhail Gorbachev that Tolkachev had been executed for treason the day before. “American intelligence was generous with him,” Gorbachev remarked. “They found two million rubles on him.” That was more than half a million dollars. The KGB now knew the going rate for world-class spies.
The agency believed that Howard might well have betrayed Tolkachev. But he could not possibly have been responsible for more than three of the dozen deaths that had wiped out the CIA’s roster of Soviet spies. Something or someone else was to blame. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board looked into the case and reported “a fundamental inability of anyone in the Soviet division to think the unthinkable”—that a traitor might be hiding inside the clandestine service. Casey had read the report and reprimanded Clair George. “I am appalled,” he had written, at the “astonishing complacency” in the face of “this catastrophe.” But in private, Casey shrugged it off. He placed three people—one of them part-time—on the investigation of the deaths of the CIA’s most prized foreign agents.
It was a measure of the trust placed in Webster by the senior officers of the clandestine service that they never told him the whole truth about the case. He never knew that it constituted the worst penetration in the agency’s history. He knew there was a low-level investigation—“an exercise, nothing more. If they found something, fine,” he said. “If they didn’t find a sinister reason, maybe they’d find another reason, or no reason at all,” he said. “That’s all I ever heard about it.”
The investigation collapsed and the counterintelligence nightmare confronting the CIA grew under Webster.
In June 1987, Major Florentino Aspillaga Lombard, the chief of Cuban intelligence in Czechoslovakia, drove across the border to Vienna, walked into the American embassy, and defected to Jim Olson, the CIA chief of station. He revealed that every Cuban agent recruited by the agency over the past twenty years was a double—pretending to be loyal to the United States while working in secret for Havana. It was a genuine shock, and hard to believe. But CIA analysts glumly concluded after a long and painful review that the major was telling the truth. That same summer, a trickle of fresh intelligence about the deaths of the CIA’s agents began coming in from a new set of Soviet and Soviet-bloc military and intelligence officers. It grew to a stream, and then a flowing river, and seven years passed before the terrible realization that it was disinformation delivered to mystify and mislead the CIA.
“THEY ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING RIGHT”
Webster turned to Bob Gates shortly after his swearing-in and asked, Well, Bob, what’s going on in Moscow? What’s Gorbachev up to? He never was satisfied with the answers. “I had my glass half-full guys and my glass half-empty guys,” Webster sighed. “On the one hand this, on the other hand that.”
The C
IA did not know that Gorbachev had told the Warsaw Pact meeting in May 1987 that the Soviets would never invade Eastern Europe to shore up their empire. The CIA did not know that Gorbachev had told the leader of Afghanistan in July 1987 that the Soviets were going to start pulling their occupying troops out soon. And the agency was flabbergasted in December 1987, when throngs of adoring American citizens hailed Gorbachev as a hero on the streets of Washington. The man in the street seemed to understand that the leader of the communist world wanted to end the cold war. The CIA did not grasp the concept. Bob Gates spent the next year asking his underlings why Gorbachev consistently surprised them.
Over the course of more than thirty years, the United States had spent close to a quarter of a trillion dollars on spy satellites and electronic-eavesdropping equipment built to monitor the Soviet military. These programs were on paper the responsibility of the director of central intelligence but in reality run by the Pentagon. They provided the data for the endless Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty negotiations with the Soviets, and it could be argued that those talks helped keep the cold war cold. But Washington and Moscow never gave up a single weapons system that they had wanted to build. Their arsenals remained capable of blowing up the world a hundred times over. And in the end the United States abrogated the very idea of arms control.
But in August 1988 a payoff came in a moment of perfect irony. Frank Carlucci, now Reagan’s secretary of defense, went to Moscow for meetings with his counterpart, Soviet defense minister Dmitri Yazov, and he lectured generals and admirals at the Voroshilov military academy. “How is it you know so much about us?” one of them asked Carlucci. “We have to do it from satellites,” he replied. “It would make it a lot easier for us if you’d just do what we do and publish your military budget.” The room exploded in laughter, and afterward Carlucci asked his Russian escort officer what was so funny. “You don’t understand,” the Russian said. “You attacked the heart of their system”—secrecy. The face-to-face contacts between American and Soviet military chiefs made the Russians realize two things. First, the Americans did not want to kill them. Second, they might be every bit as strong as the Americans in nuclear missiles, but it made no difference whatsoever. They were far weaker in every other regard. They knew then that their closed system, built on secrecy and lies, could never defeat an open society.
They saw that the game was up. The agency did not.
The CIA still managed to achieve three stirring successes that year. The first came after Colonel Chang Hsien-yi, the deputy director of Taiwan’s nuclear energy research institute, defected to the United States. For twenty years, he had worked in secret for the United States, ever since the CIA recruited him as a military cadet. His institute, ostensibly established for civilian research, had been built with the aid of American plutonium, South African uranium, and international expertise. Taiwan’s leaders had created a cell within it to build a nuclear bomb. That weapon had only one conceivable target: the Chinese mainland. China’s communist leaders had vowed to attack if Taiwan deployed a nuclear weapon. The United States demanded a halt to the program. Taiwan lied about it and continued apace. Among the few Americans who knew about Colonel Chang’s long service was the CIA’s Jim Lilley, who had served as station chief in China and Taiwan and was soon to become the U.S. ambassador to China. “You pick a comer, put the right case officer on him, and recruit him carefully on an ideological basis—although money was involved—and keep in touch,” Lilley said. Colonel Chang sent out an alert to his case officer, defected, and delivered proof positive of the nuclear weapons program’s progress. A CIA spy of twenty years’ standing had helped stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. “This was a case where they actually did something right,” Lilley said. “They got the guy out. They got the documentation. And they confronted the Taiwanese.” Armed with the evidence, the State Department leaned hard on the government of Taiwan, which finally announced that it had the ability to build nuclear weapons but no intent to do so. This was arms control at its best.
Then came a brilliant plot against the Abu Nidal Organization, a gang that had been killing, hijacking, and terrorizing Westerners across Europe and the Middle East for a dozen years. It involved three foreign governments and a former president of the United States. It grew out of the new counterterrorism center at the CIA, and it began after Jimmy Carter delivered a package of intelligence on Abu Nidal to the president of Syria, Hafiz al-Assad, in a March 1987 meeting. Assad expelled the terrorist. Over the next two years, with the help of the PLO and the Jordanian and Israeli intelligence services, the agency waged psychological warfare against Abu Nidal. A strong and steady flow of disinformation convinced him that his top lieutenants were traitors. He killed seven of them and dozens of their underlings over the next year, crippling his organization. The campaign peaked when two of Abu Nidal’s men defected and mounted an attack on his headquarters in Lebanon, killing eighty of his men. The organization was shattered, a stirring victory for the CIA’s counterterrorism center and the Near East division under Tom Twetten, who would be promoted to chief of the clandestine service.
The third great success—so it seemed to everyone at the time—was the triumph of the Afghan rebels.
Every other force among the CIA’s freedom fighters was falling apart. The contras signed a cease-fire days after the agency’s secret support was cut off for the last time. Ballots replaced bullets in Nicaragua. A lost patrol of anti-Qaddafi warriors was wandering around in the Sudan. The CIA had to demobilize this half-baked insurgency and extract its troops from North Africa, taking them first to the Congo, then to California. Diplomacy supplanted covert action in southern Africa, and the flow of arms from Washington and Moscow ran dry. Casey’s program to back a Cambodian rebel army fighting Hanoi’s forces—a grudge match against the winners of the Vietnam War—was badly mismanaged, with money and guns winding up in the hands of corrupt Thai generals. And it placed the CIA’s allies in alignment with the butchers of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge. Colin Powell, serving as Reagan’s deputy national security adviser after the Iran-contra housecleaning, cautioned that the White House should think twice about the operation. In time, it was shut down.
Only the mujahideen, the Afghan holy warriors, were drawing blood and scenting victory. The CIA’s Afghan operation was now a $700-million-a-year program. It represented about 80 percent of the overseas budget of the clandestine service. Armed with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, the Afghan rebels were killing Soviet soldiers, downing Soviet helicopter gunships, and inflicting deep wounds on the Soviet self-image. The CIA had done what it set out to do: to give the Soviets their Vietnam. “One by one we killed them,” said Howard Hart, who had run the mission to arm the Afghans from 1981 to 1984. “And they went home. And that was a terrorist campaign.”
“WE WALKED AWAY”
The Soviets announced that they would pull out for good as soon as the Reagan administration left office. The CIA’s briefing books never answered the question of what would happen when a militant Islamic army defeated the godless invaders of Afghanistan. Tom Twetten, the number-two man in the clandestine service in the summer of 1988, had the task of figuring out what would become of the Afghan rebels. He said it quickly became clear to him that “we don’t have any plan.” The CIA simply decided: “There’ll be ‘Afghan democracy.’ And it won’t be pretty.”
The Soviet war was over. But the CIA’s Afghan jihad was not. Robert Oakley, the American ambassador to Pakistan from 1988 to 1991, argued that the United States and Pakistan should “drastically reduce our assistance to the real radicals” in Afghanistan, and work to make the mujahideen more moderate. “But the CIA couldn’t or wouldn’t get its Pakistani partners in line,” he said. “So we continued to support some of the radicals.” Chief among them was the Afghan rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had received hundreds of millions of dollars in arms from the CIA and hoarded much of them. He was about to turn those weapons against the people of Afghanistan in a driv
e for total power.
“I had another problem with the Agency,” Ambassador Oakley said. “The same people who were fighting the Soviets were also profiting from the narcotics trade.” Afghanistan was, and remains, the world’s single greatest source of heroin, with endless acres of opium poppies harvested twice a year. “I suspect that the Pakistani intelligence services may have been involved and that CIA was not going to rock their relationships over this issue,” Oakley said.
“I kept asking the Station to obtain information on this traffic from its sources inside Afghanistan,” he said. “They denied that they had any sources capable of doing so. They could not deny that they had sources, since we were getting information on weapons and other matters.
“I even raised the matter with Bill Webster,” Oakley said. “Never got a satisfactory answer. Nothing ever happened.”
Webster invited the leaders of the Afghan rebels to lunch in Washington. “This was not an easy crowd,” he remembered. Hekmatyar was among the honored guests. When I met Hekmatyar in Afghanistan a few years later, he vowed to create a new Islamic society, and if it took a million more deaths, he said, so be it. At this writing, the CIA is still hunting for him in Afghanistan, where he and his forces are killing American soldiers and their allies.
The last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989. The CIA’s weapons kept flowing. “None of us really foresaw the major consequence,” Ambassador Oakley said. Within a year, white-robed Saudis began to appear in the provincial capitals and ruined villages of Afghanistan. They proclaimed themselves emirs. They bought the loyalties of village leaders and they began to build little empires. They were emissaries of a new force abroad in the world that came to be called al Qaeda.
