Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  “We walked away from it,” Webster said. “We should not have walked away.”

  43. “WHAT ARE WE

  GOING TO DO WHEN THE

  WALL COMES DOWN?”

  The agency celebrated when George H. W. Bush was sworn in as president on January 20, 1989. He was one of them. He loved them. He understood them. He was, in truth, the first and only commander in chief who knew how the CIA worked.

  Bush became his own director of central intelligence. He respected Judge Webster, but he knew the troops did not, and he shut him out of his inner circle. Bush wanted daily briefings from professionals, and if they did not satisfy him, he wanted raw reports. If something was cooking in Peru or Poland, he wanted to hear from the station chief, pronto. His faith in the agency bordered on religious belief.

  It was sorely tested in Panama. On the campaign trail in 1988, Bush denied that he had ever met General Manuel Noriega, that nation’s notorious dictator. But there were pictures that proved it. Noriega had been on the CIA payroll for many years. Bill Casey had welcomed the general at headquarters annually and had flown down to Panama at least once to see him. “Casey saw him as a protégé,” said Arthur H. Davis, Jr., the American ambassador to Panama under Reagan and Bush.

  In February 1988, the general was indicted in Florida as a cocaine kingpin, but he remained in power, sneering at the United States. By then it was public knowledge that Noriega was a murderer as well as a long-standing friend of the CIA. The impasse was excruciating. “The CIA, who had dealt with him for so long, didn’t want to end the relationship,” said the National Security Council staffer Robert Pastorino, who had met for many hours with Noriega as a senior Pentagon civilian during the 1980s.

  After the indictment, the Reagan White House twice ordered the agency to find a way to dislodge Noriega, and shortly after his inauguration, President Bush again instructed the CIA to overthrow the dictator. Each time the agency balked. General Vernon Walters, then the American ambassador to the United Nations, was particularly wary. “As a former deputy director of the CIA—just like some people in the Pentagon who had been at Southcom, the U.S. Forces Southern Command—he was not eager to see Noriega brought to the U.S. and put on trial for anything,” said Stephen Dachi, who knew both General Walters and General Noriega personally and served as the number-two man at the American embassy in Panama during 1989. Noriega’s old friends in the agency and the military did not want him testifying about them under oath in an American courtroom.

  On President Bush’s orders, the agency spent $10 million backing the opposition in a May 1989 election. Noriega outmaneuvered the CIA’s fourth operation against him. President Bush approved a fifth covert action against Noriega, including paramilitary support for a coup. Forget about it, the covert operators said: only a full-scale military invasion could dislodge Noriega. Some of the agency’s most experienced Latin America hands—including the station chief in Panama, Don Winters—were loath to go up against the general.

  Furious, Bush let it be known that he was learning more about events in Panama from CNN than CIA. That was the end of William Webster’s standing as director of central intelligence. From then on, the president made plans to topple Noriega in concert with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, whose skepticism about the agency deepened with every passing day.

  The CIA’s failure to unseat its old ally in secret forced the United States to mount its biggest military operation since the fall of Saigon. During Christmas week of 1989, smart bombs blasted Panama City slums into rubble while Special Forces soldiers fought their way through the capital. Twenty-three Americans and hundreds of innocent Panamanian civilians died in the two weeks it took to arrest Noriega and to bring him in chains to Miami.

  The CIA’s Don Winters testified for the defense at Noriega’s trial, where the United States admitted paying the dictator at least $320,000 through the agency and the American military. Winters described Noriega as the CIA’s trusted liaison between the United States and Fidel Castro, a loyal ally in the war against communism in Central America, and a linchpin for American foreign policy—he had even sheltered the exiled shah of Iran. Noriega was convicted on eight counts of drug trafficking and racketeering. Thanks in great part to posttrial testimony by Winters, Noriega’s sentence as a prisoner of war was reduced by a decade and his parole date was reset to September 2007.

  “I CAN NEVER TRUST CIA AGAIN”

  In 1990, another dictator challenged the United States: Saddam Hussein.

  During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, President Reagan had dispatched Don Rumsfeld as his personal envoy to Baghdad to shake Saddam’s hand and offer him American support. The agency had given Saddam military intelligence, including battlefield data from spy satellites, and the United States granted him high-technology export licenses, which Iraq used to try to build weapons of mass destruction.

  Skewed intelligence from Bill Casey and the CIA was a decisive factor in these decisions. “Saddam Hussein was known to be a brutal dictator, but many thought he was the lesser of two evils,” said Philip Wilcox, the State Department liaison to the agency. “There were intelligence estimates about the threat from Iran that, in retrospect, exaggerated Iran’s ability to prevail in that war….”

  “We did indeed tilt toward Iraq,” he said. “We provided Iraq with intelligence, took Baghdad off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and viewed positively comments from Saddam Hussein suggesting that he supported an Arab-Israeli peace process. Many began to view Iraq optimistically as a potential factor for stability, and Saddam Hussein as a man with whom we could work.”

  The return on the investment in Iraq was exceedingly slight. No intelligence flowed back. The agency never penetrated the Iraqi police state. It had next to no firsthand knowledge about the regime. Its network of Iraqi agents consisted of a handful of diplomats and trade officials at overseas embassies. These men had little insight on the secret councils of Baghdad. At one point, the CIA was reduced to recruiting an Iraqi hotel clerk in Germany.

  The CIA still maintained a network of more than forty Iranian agents, including midlevel military officers who knew something about the Iraqi army. The CIA’s station in Frankfurt communicated with them through the ancient technique of invisible ink. But in the fall of 1989 a CIA clerk mailed letters to all of the agents, all at the same time, all from the same mailbox, all in the same handwriting, all to the same address. When one of the agents was unmasked, the whole network was exposed. It was a failure of Tradecraft 101. Every one of the CIA’s Iranian spies was imprisoned, and many were executed for treason.

  “The arrested agents were tortured to death,” said Phil Giraldi, then the deputy chief of base in Istanbul. “Nobody in CIA was punished,” he said, “and the chief of the field element responsible was, in fact, promoted.” The collapse of the agent network closed the CIA’s window both on Iraq and on Iran.

  In the spring of 1990, when Saddam began mobilizing his military again, the CIA missed it. The agency sent a special national intelligence estimate to the White House saying that Iraq’s armed forces were exhausted, that they would need years to recover from the war with Iran, and that Saddam was unlikely to embark on any military adventures in the near future. Then, on July 24, 1990, Judge Webster brought spy satellite images to President Bush showing two Republican Guard divisions—tens of thousands of Iraqi troops—massing at the border of Kuwait. The headline on the CIA’s National Intelligence Daily the next day read: “Is Iraq Bluffing?”

  Only one prominent CIA analyst, Charles Allen, the national intelligence officer for warning, judged the chances for war at better than even. “I did sound the warning bell,” Allen said. “Surprisingly, there were very few listeners.”

  On July 31, the CIA called an invasion unlikely; Saddam might make a limited grab for some oil fields or a handful of islands, but no more. Not until the next day—twenty hours before the invasion—did Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Richard J. Kerr warn the White House that an Iraqi att
ack was imminent.

  President Bush did not believe his CIA. He speed-dialed the president of Egypt, the king of Saudi Arabia, and the emir of Kuwait, and they all told him Saddam would never invade. King Hussein of Jordan told the president, “On the Iraqi side, they send their best regards and highest esteem to you, sir.” Bush went to sleep reassured. Hours later, the first wave of 140,000 Iraqi soldiers poured over the border to seize Kuwait.

  The president’s most trusted intelligence adviser, Bob Gates, was having a family picnic outside Washington. A friend of his wife’s joined him. What are you doing here? she asked. What are you talking about? Gates replied. The invasion, she said. What invasion? Gates asked. In short, “there wasn’t much intelligence on what was going on inside Iraq,” noted Secretary of State James Baker.

  For the next two months, the CIA “behaved in an unfortunately quite typical pattern,” said Chas W. Freeman, Jr., the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia. It swung to the opposite extreme. On August 5, it reported that Saddam would attack Saudi Arabia. He never did. It assured the president that Iraq did not have chemical warheads for its short-range and medium-range missiles. Then it asserted with increasing confidence that Iraq did have chemical warheads—and Saddam was likely to use them. There was no hard evidence behind the warnings. Saddam never came close to using chemical weapons during the Gulf War. But there was great fear when Iraqi Scud missiles started falling on Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

  In the weeks before the seven-week air war on Iraq began on January 17, 1991, the Pentagon invited the CIA to pick bombing targets. The agency selected, among many other sites, an underground military bunker in Baghdad. On February 13, the air force blew it up, but the bunker was being used as a civilian air raid shelter. Hundreds of women and children died. The agency was not called upon to pick targets after that.

  Then a brutal argument broke out between the CIA and the American commander of Operation Desert Storm, General Norman Schwarzkopf. The fight was over the battle-damage assessment—the daily reports on the military and political impact of the bombing. It was imperative for the Pentagon to assure the White House that American bombers had destroyed enough Iraqi missile launchers to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, and enough Iraqi tanks and armor to protect American ground forces. The general assured the president and the public that the job was well done. The CIA’s analysts told the president that he was exaggerating the damage done to Iraqi forces—and they were right. But the agency broke its sword when it challenged Schwarzkopf. The agency was banned from conducting battle-damage assessments. The Pentagon took away the job of interpreting spy-satellite photos. Congress forced the agency to assume a subservient role in its relations with the American military. After the war it was compelled to create a new office of military affairs to serve solely as second-echelon support for the Pentagon. The CIA spent the next decade answering thousands of questions from military men: How wide is that road? How strong is that bridge? What’s over that hill? For forty-five years, the CIA had answered to civilian leaders, not uniformed officers. It had lost its independence from the military chain of command.

  The war ended with Saddam still in power but the CIA weakened. The agency, taking the word of Iraqi exiles, reported the potential for a rebellion against the dictator. President Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow him. The Shiites of the south and the Kurds in the north took Bush at his word. The agency used every means at its disposal—chiefly propaganda and psychological warfare—to promote an uprising. Over the next seven weeks, Saddam crushed the Kurds and Shiites mercilessly, murdering thousands and sending thousands more fleeing into exile. The CIA began working with the leaders of those exiles in London and Amman and Washington, building networks for the next coup, and the next.

  After the war, a United Nations Special Commission went into Iraq looking for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Its investigators included CIA officers carrying the United Nations flag. Richard Clarke, an unusually intense National Security Council staffer, remembered their raid on the Iraqi agricultural ministry, where they discovered the core of Saddam’s nuclear weapons directorate. “We went there, broke down doors, blew off locks, got into the sanctum sanctorum,” Clarke recalled fifteen years later for a Frontline television documentary. “The Iraqis immediately reacted, surrounded the facility and prevented the U.N. inspectors from getting out. We thought that might happen, too, so we had given them satellite telephones. They translated the nuclear reports on-site into English from the Arabic and read them to us over the satellite telephones.” They determined that Iraq was probably nine to eighteen months away from having its first nuclear weapon detonation.

  “CIA had totally missed it,” Clarke said. “We had bombed everything we could bomb in Iraq, but missed an enormous nuclear-weapons development facility. Didn’t know it was there, never dropped one bomb on it. Dick Cheney looked at that report and said, ‘Here’s what the Iraqis themselves are saying: that there’s this huge facility that was never hit during the war; that they were very close to making a nuclear bomb, and CIA didn’t know it.’”

  Clarke concluded: “I’m sure he said to himself, ‘I can never trust CIA again to tell me when a country is about to make a nuclear bomb.’ There’s no doubt that the Dick Cheney who comes back into office nine years later has that as one of the things burnt into his memory: ‘Iraq wants a nuclear weapon. Iraq was that close to getting a nuclear weapon. And CIA hadn’t a clue.’”

  “AND NOW THE MISSION IS OVER”

  The CIA “had no idea in January 1989 that a tidal wave of history was about to break upon us,” said Bob Gates, who had left headquarters that month—for good, he thought—to become President Bush’s deputy national security adviser.

  The agency had pronounced the dictatorship of the Soviet Union untouched and untouchable at the hour it was starting to vanish. On December 1, 1988, the month before Bush came to office, the CIA issued a formal report confidently stating that “the basic elements of Soviet defense policy and practice thus far have not been changed by Gorbachev’s reform campaign.” Six days later, Mikhail Gorbachev stood at the podium of the United Nations and offered a unilateral cut of 500,000 troops in the Soviet military. It was unthinkable, Doug MacEachin, then the CIA’s chief of Soviet analysis, told Congress the next week: even if the CIA had concluded that such earthshaking changes were about to sweep the Soviet Union, “we never would have been able to publish it, quite frankly,” he said. “Had we done so, people would have been calling for my head.”

  While the Soviet state withered away, the CIA was “constantly reporting that the Soviet economy was growing,” said Mark Palmer, one of the Bush administration’s most experienced Kremlinologists. “They used to simply take what the Soviets officially announced, discount it a percent, and put it out. And it was just wrong, and anybody who had spent time in the Soviet Union, in the villages and towns, could look around and see that this was just crazy.” This was the work of the CIA’s best thinkers—like Bob Gates, for years the chief Soviet analyst—and Palmer found that fact infuriating. “He’d never actually been to the Soviet Union! He’d never once been there, and he was the top so-called expert in the CIA!”

  The agency had somehow missed the fact that its main enemy was dying. “They talked about the Soviet Union as if they weren’t reading the newspapers, much less developed clandestine intelligence,” said Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush. When the first deep cracks in the Soviet republics started to develop in the spring of 1989, the CIA did indeed get its information from reading the local papers. They were three weeks old when they arrived.

  No one at the agency asked the question that Vernon Walters, Bush’s newly appointed ambassador to Germany, put to his officers in May 1989: “What are we going to do when the Wall comes down?”

  The Berlin Wall had stood for nearly thirty years, the greatest symbol of the cold war. When it began to crack one night in November 1989, the chief
of the Soviet division of the clandestine service, Milt Bearden, sat speechless at headquarters, staring at CNN. The upstart network had become a huge problem for the agency. In a crisis, it provided what passed for real-time intelligence. How could the CIA top that? Now the White House was on the line: What’s happening in Moscow? What are our spies telling us? It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn—they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the CIA knew why.

  The agency wanted to drive eastward like conquering heroes and capture the intelligence services of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany, but the White House advised caution. The best the CIA could do at first was to train the security staffs of new leaders such as the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, and to bid the highest dollar for the purloined files of the Stasi, which started floating out a window in East Berlin one fine day, tossed into the streets by a ransacking crowd overthrowing the secret police.

  The intelligence services of Soviet communism were enormous and precise instruments of repression. They had served above all to spy on their own citizens, to terrify them, to try to control them. Bigger and more ruthless than the CIA, they had beaten their enemies in many battles overseas, but they lost the war, undone by the brutality and the banality of the Soviet state.

  The loss of the Soviets tore out the CIA’s heart. How could the agency live without its enemy? “It was easy, once upon a time, for the CIA to be unique and mystical,” Milt Bearden said. “It was not an institution. It was a mission. And the mission was a crusade. Then you took the Soviet Union away from us and there wasn’t anything else. We don’t have a history. We don’t have a hero. Even our medals are secret. And now the mission is over. Fini.”

  Hundreds of veterans of the clandestine service declared victory and pulled out. One among many was Phil Giraldi, who had started out as a field officer in Rome and ended up sixteen years later as chief of base in Barcelona. His partner in the Rome station had been a Ph.D. in Italian politics. In Barcelona, she was an English major who spoke no Spanish.