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

by Tim Weiner

  President Clinton never came to the CIA to pay his respects to the dead and wounded. He sent his wife instead. It is hard to exaggerate how much fury this created at headquarters. When Fred Woodruff, the acting station chief in Tbilisi, Georgia, was shot and killed in an apparently random murder that summer while on a sightseeing trip, Woolsey made a point of flying halfway around the world to receive his mortal remains.

  On February 26, 1993, one month after the shooting at the agency’s gates, a bomb went off in the subterranean parking garage of the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and more than one thousand injured. The FBI thought at first it was Balkan separatists, but within a week, it became clear that the bombers were the acolytes of a blind Egyptian sheik who lived in Brooklyn—Omar Abdel Rahman. His name rang a very loud bell at CIA headquarters. The blind sheik had recruited many hundreds of Arab fighters for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan under the banner of Al Gama’a al Islamiyya, the Islamic Group. Tried and acquitted in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, he had nonetheless remained under house arrest in Egypt until 1986. As soon as he got out of prison in Egypt, he started trying to get into the United States. He succeeded in 1990. But how? The sheik was a known seditionist—and, as it developed, the spiritual leader of a conspiracy to kill Americans by the thousands.

  His visa had been issued in the capital of Sudan—“by a member of the Central Intelligence Agency in Khartoum,” said Joe O’Neill, the chargé d’affaires at the American embassy. “The Agency knew that he was traveling in the area looking for a visa, and never told us.” It must have been a mistake, O’Neill thought: “That name should have shown up like a shot.” In fact, CIA officers had reviewed seven applications by Abdel Rahman to enter the United States—and said yes six times. “I can’t tell you what a terrible thing it is that that had happened,” O’Neill said. “It was atrocious.”

  On April 14, 1993, George H. W. Bush arrived in Kuwait to commemorate the victory in the Gulf War. His wife, two of his sons, and former secretary of state Jim Baker were among his entourage. On that trip, the Kuwaiti secret police arrested seventeen men and charged them with a plot to kill Bush with a car bomb—close to two hundred pounds of plastic explosives hidden in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Under torture, some of the suspects confessed that Iraq’s intelligence service was behind the assassination attempt. On April 29, the CIA’s technicians reported that the construction of the bomb bore an Iraqi signature. A few days later, the FBI started interrogating the suspects. Two said they had been sent by Iraq. The only part of the puzzle that did not seem to fit was the suspects themselves. Most of them were whisky smugglers, hashish peddlers, and shell-shocked veterans. But the CIA eventually concluded that Saddam Hussein had tried to kill President Bush.

  Over the next month, President Clinton weighed a response. At about 1:30 a.m. on June 26, on the Muslim Sabbath, twenty-three Tomahawk missiles landed in and around Iraqi intelligence headquarters, a complex of seven large buildings inside a walled compound in downtown Baghdad. At least one of the missiles struck an apartment building and killed several innocent civilians, including a prominent Iraqi artist and her husband. General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the bombing was intended to be “proportionate to the attack on President Bush.”

  The director of central intelligence was enraged by the president’s sense of proportion. “Saddam tries to assassinate former President Bush,” Woolsey said years later, “and President Clinton fires a couple of dozen cruise missiles into an empty building in the middle of the night in Baghdad, thereby retaliating quite effectively against Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen, but not especially effectively against Saddam Hussein.” Not long thereafter, he noted, “our helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu and—as in Beirut ten years earlier—we left.”

  With the images of dead Army Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu still fresh in American minds, Clinton set out to restore the power of the elected president of Haiti, the leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He genuinely viewed Aristide as the legitimate ruler of the Haitian people and he wanted to see justice done. This required undoing the military junta that had ousted Aristide. Many of its leaders had been on the CIA’s payroll for years, serving as trusted informants for the clandestine service. This fact was an unpleasant surprise for the White House. So was the revelation that the agency had created a Haitian intelligence service whose military leaders did little but distribute Colombian cocaine, destroy their political enemies, and preserve their power in the capital, Port-au-Prince. The agency was now placed in the awkward position of overthrowing its own agents.

  This put Clinton and the CIA in direct conflict. So did the CIA’s accurate assessment that Aristide was not a pillar of strength or virtue. Woolsey painted the conflict as ideological. The president and his aides “desperately wanted us at the CIA to say that Aristide was effectively going to be the Thomas Jefferson of Haiti,” he recalled. “We somewhat grumpily declined to do that and pointed out both his short side as well as some of the positive things about him. We were not popular because of that.” Woolsey was only partly right. The White House found the CIA’s analysis of Aristide’s weaknesses inconvenient. But it also found the agency’s old allies in Haiti appalling.

  Furious when the CIA crossed swords with him on Haiti, paralyzed by his inability to formulate a foreign policy, shell-shocked by the shootdown in Somalia, the president wanted to withdraw from third-world adventures for a while. But as soon as American soldiers and spies started pulling out of the Horn of Africa, where they had gone on a humanitarian mission and wound up killing and being killed, they were called upon to go save lives in Rwanda, where two tribes were at each other’s throats.

  At the end of January 1994, the White House studiously ignored a CIA study saying half a million people might die in Rwanda. Soon the conflict exploded into one of the great man-made disasters of the twentieth century. “Nobody was really focused on how serious the situation was until things were out of control,” said Mort Halperin, then a member of Clinton’s National Security Council staff. “There weren’t any visuals and there wasn’t a lot of information.” Reluctant to become involved in nations whose sufferings were not televised, the Clinton administration refused to call the one-sided massacres genocide. The president’s response to Rwanda was a decision to narrowly define America’s national interest in the fate of faraway failed states whose collapse would not directly affect the United States—places such as Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

  “BLOW IT UP”

  Woolsey lost almost every fight he picked, and there were plenty. When it became clear that Woolsey could not restore the CIA’s money and power, most of the remaining stars among the cold-war generation began flicking out the lights and going home. The veterans had been the first to vanish. Then the up-and-coming officers in their thirties and early forties bailed out to start new careers. Recruiting new talent, people in their twenties, was harder and harder every year.

  The intellectual and operational powers of the CIA were fading away. Headquarters was run by professional clerks who meted out dwindling funds without any understanding of what worked and what did not work in the field. They had no system of distinguishing programs that succeeded from those that did not. Without a scorecard of successes and failures, they had little understanding of how to field their players. As the number of experienced CIA operators and analysts dwindled, the authority of the director of central intelligence was sapped by his own bloated middle management, an ever-growing cadre of special assistants, staff aides, and task forces that overflowed from headquarters into rented offices in the shopping malls and industrial parks of Virginia.

  Woolsey found himself presiding over a secret bureaucracy increasingly disconnected from the rest of American government. Like a big-city hospital whose poor practices made its patients sick, the CIA was making mistakes as part of its everyday operations. American intelligence had started to res
emble “Frankenstein’s creature,” wrote James Monnier Simon, Jr., the CIA’s chief administrative officer at the turn of the century—“an amalgamation of ill-fitting pieces put together at differing times by different, and sometimes indifferent, workmen,” suffering from “a defective nervous system that cripples its coordination and balance.”

  The problems were too complicated for a quick fix. Like the space shuttle, the agency was a complex system that could explode if a simple component failed. The only person with the power to start to make the pieces fit was the president of the United States. But Clinton did not find the time to understand what the CIA was, how it worked, or where it fit in with the rest of the American government. The president delegated all of that to George Tenet, whom he brought to the White House as the National Security Council’s staff director for intelligence.

  Fourteen months into the Clinton administration, Tenet was musing over a double espresso and a cigar at a sidewalk café two blocks from the White House. What did he think should be done to change the CIA? “Blow it up,” Tenet said. He meant, of course, a creative destruction, a rebuilding from the ground up. But it was a vivid choice of words.

  45. “WHY IN THE

  WORLD DIDN’T WE

  KNOW?”

  Fred Hitz, the CIA’s inspector general, said his job was to walk through the battlefield while the smoke cleared and shoot the wounded. His internal investigations were painstaking and pitiless. He was old-school agency, recruited in his senior year at Princeton after being tapped by the dean of students. As fate would have it, his biggest case concerned his classmate from the CIA’s career-training cadre of 1967, an alcoholic burnout from the old Soviet division by the name of Aldrich Hazen Ames.

  On Presidents’ Day, February 21, 1994, a team of FBI agents hauled Ames out of his Jaguar as he left his suburban home for headquarters, slapped on the handcuffs, and took him away forever. I went to see him in the Alexandria county jail after his arrest. He was a gray man of fifty-three who had been spying for the Soviets for nearly nine years. He would soon be sent to a lifetime of solitary confinement, and he was eager to talk.

  Ames was a malcontent and a malingerer who got a job with the agency because his father had once worked there. He spoke passable Russian and wrote readable reports when sober, but his personnel records were a chronicle of drunkenness and ineptitude. He had failed upward for seventeen years. In 1985, he had reached a pinnacle: chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He was known to be an alcoholic malcontent. Yet the agency gave him access to the files of nearly every important spy working for the United States behind the iron curtain.

  He had become contemptuous of the CIA. He thought it absurd to say that the Soviet threat to the United States was immense and growing. He decided that he knew better. “I know what the Soviet Union is really all about, and I know what’s best for foreign policy and national security,” he remembered thinking. “And I’m going to act on that.”

  Ames obtained permission from his superiors to meet with an officer from the Soviet embassy in Washington, pretending that he could recruit the Russian. In April 1985, in exchange for $50,000, he had handed the Soviet intelligence officer the names of three Soviet citizens who were working with the CIA. Then, a few months later, he named every name he knew. Moscow set $2 million aside for him.

  One by one, America’s spies inside the Soviet Union were arrested, tried, imprisoned, and executed. As they died, Ames said, “bells and whistles” went off inside the clandestine service. “It was as if neon lights and searchlights lit up all over the Kremlin, shone all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, saying, ‘There is a penetration.’” Yet the CIA’s leaders refused to believe that one of their own had betrayed them. Using double agents and deception, the KGB skillfully manipulated the CIA’s perceptions of the case. It had to be a bug. It could not be a mole.

  Ames also gave Moscow the identities of hundreds of his fellow CIA officers and a thorough rundown on their work. “Their names were given to the Soviet intelligence service, as were the details of a number of operations that the United States was engaged in,” Hitz said. “This began in 1985, but continued until one or two years before his arrest, and Ames was an avid gatherer of information to supply to his Soviet case officer. So in strict intelligence terms it was a horror.”

  The agency knew that something had destroyed its Soviet operations. But it took seven years to begin to face the facts. The CIA was unable to investigate itself, and Ames knew it. “You would wind up with people throwing up their hands and saying, ‘We can’t do it,’” he said with a smirk. “You’ve got two or three or four thousand people running around doing espionage. You can’t monitor it. You can’t control it. You can’t check it. And that’s probably the biggest problem with an espionage service. It has to be small. The minute you get big, you get like the KGB, or you get like us.”

  “A VIOLATION OF COMMANDMENT NUMBER ONE”

  It took Hitz more than a year after the arrest to assess the damage Ames had wrought. In the end, he found that the CIA itself had been part of an elaborate deception.

  Among the most highly classified papers that the agency produced during and after the cold war were “blue border” reports, with a blue stripe on the side signifying their importance, assessing the strength of Moscow’s missiles, tanks, jets, bombers, strategy, and tactics. They were signed by the director of central intelligence and sent to the president, the secretary of defense, and the secretary of state. “That is what the intelligence community exists to do,” Hitz said.

  For eight years, from 1986 to 1994, the senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence. The agency knowingly gave the White House information manipulated by Moscow—and deliberately concealed the fact. To reveal that it had been delivering misinformation and disinformation would have been too embarrassing. Ninety-five of these tainted reports warped American perceptions of the major military and political developments in Moscow. Eleven of the reports went directly to Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. They distorted and diminished America’s ability to understand what was going on in Moscow.

  “This was an incredible discovery,” Hitz said. The most senior CIA official responsible for these reports insisted—as Ames had done—that he knew best. He knew what was real and what was not. The fact that the reporting had come from agents of deception meant nothing. “He made that decision himself,” Hitz said. “Well, that was shocking.”

  “What came out of this whole episode was a feeling that the agency couldn’t be trusted,” Hitz said. “In short, it was a violation of Commandment Number One. And that’s why it had such a destructive impact.” By lying to the White House, the CIA had broken “the sacred trust,” Hitz said, “and without that, no espionage agency can do its job.”

  “THE PLACE JUST NEEDS A TOTAL OVERHAUL”

  Woolsey acknowledged that the Ames case revealed an institutional carelessness that bordered on criminal negligence. “One could almost conclude not only that no one was watching, but that no one cared,” he said. But he announced that no one would be dismissed or demoted for the “systemic failure” of the CIA in the Ames case. Instead, he sent letters of reprimand to six former senior officers and five still on duty, including the chief of the clandestine service, Ted Price. He defined the failures as sins of omission and blamed them on a flawed culture within the CIA, a tradition of arrogance and denial.

  Woolsey presented his decision to the House intelligence committee on the afternoon of September 28, 1994. He made a bad impression. “You have to wonder whether the CIA has become no different from any other bureaucracy,” the committee’s chairman, Dan Glickman, a Kansas Democrat, said upon emerging from the meeting. “You have to wonder if it has lost the vibrancy of its unique mission.”

  The Ames case created an attack on the CIA that was unprecedented in its intensity. It came from the right and it came from the left and i
t came from the dwindling center of American politics. Anger mixed with ridicule—a deadly brew—flowed from the White House and Congress. There was a strong sense that the Ames case was not an isolated aberration but evidence of a structural dry rot. Lieutenant General Bill Odom, who had run the National Security Agency under President Reagan, said the solution was radical surgery.

  “I would disembowel the CIA,” he said. “It’s contaminated. And if you take halfhearted measures it will remain contaminated.”

  Striving to defend the agency from without and within, Woolsey promised the American people that they had a right to ask where the CIA was headed. But he had lost his ability to chart that course. So on September 30, 1994, Congress created a commission on the future of the CIA and gave it the power to blaze a new path for the agency in the twenty-first century. The Ames case had created a once-in-a-generation chance for change.

  “The place just needs a total overhaul,” said Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a Republican who had served six years on the Senate intelligence committee.

  What was needed was a push from the president of the United States, which never came. It took three months to select the seventeen members of the commission, four months to draft an agenda, and five months before the panel held its first formal meeting. The commission was dominated by members of Congress, notably Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida, a conservative Florida Republican. Goss had spent an undistinguished stint with the clandestine service in the 1960s, but he was the only member of Congress who could claim hands-on experience at the agency. The commission’s most distinguished outsider was Paul Wolfowitz, who came to the table thinking that the CIA’s ability to gather intelligence through espionage had collapsed, and who would be among the most influential members of the next president’s inner circle.