Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (13 page)

For the CIA, an internationally connected U.S. company or businessman can be a uniquely valuable resource. They go places and make foreign
contacts that U.S. government representatives—whether diplomats or intelligence personnel operating undercover—cannot. And they offer a wide range of intelligence services, from serving as the CIA’s “eyes and ears” to letting one of our clandestine officers pose as a company employee while stationed abroad—a so-called nonofficial cover officer (NOC).

In 1978, I was dispatched to meet with the CEO of one of those huge businesses. His company was on the brink of closing a lucrative deal to open a facility in a strategically important foreign country in which the U.S. government had virtually no way of operating effectively. My mission was to explain to him the assistance the CIA wanted him to provide us. The assistance was critical, but highly risky for the company if it ever came to light. Just as important, I was to spell out exactly what we thought those risks were so that he knew exactly what he was in for.

It was my maiden high-stakes venture into the lair of such a big-time corporate mogul, and I was nervous. He had agreed to meet alone with a CIA representative, but he didn’t know what we wanted to talk about. For all I knew, he would throw me out, or laugh at me, or both, once he heard the hairy things we wanted him to agree to. I vividly recall walking, as purposefully as my shaking legs would permit, into his top-floor office at the corporate headquarters and having to traverse a carpet about the size of Connecticut to sit in front of his massive desk. And there he was, staring quizzically at me.

Trying not to gape, I dutifully launched headlong into what the Agency wanted his company to do for us, and then pivoted into a laundry list of the risks we thought he could potentially face if things somehow went wrong. He let me ramble on, and then he just raised his hand and spoke for the first time.

“Son,” he drawled laconically, “you folks may think you know me, but you have no idea what a rich sumbitch I am. I can figure out the risks. I’ll do whatever y’all want.”

And the deal was sealed, just like that.

Among businesses in general, the CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, and big-name actors. There are officers assigned to this account full-time, which is not exactly a dangerous assignment but one that occasionally produces its own bizarre moments.

In my early years at the Agency, a veteran CIA liaison with Hollywood first explained it to me this way: These are people who have made a lot of money basically creating make-believe stuff. A lot of them, at least the smarter and more self-aware ones, realize what they do makes them ridiculously rich but is also ephemeral and meaningless in the larger scheme of things. So they’re receptive to helping the CIA in any way they can, probably in equal parts because they are sincerely patriotic and because it gives them a taste of real-life intrigue and excitement. And their power and international celebrity can be valuable—it gives them entrée to people and places abroad. Heads of state want to meet and get cozy with them. Their film crews are given free rein everywhere, even in places where the U.S. government doesn’t normally have it. And they can be the voice of a U.S. message that will have impact with foreign audiences so long as the audience doesn’t know it is coming from the U.S. government.

But things can get complicated, as I discovered a few years later when the head of the Agency’s Hollywood account came to me with news about his newest potential recruit, a major film star at the time (the CIA won’t let me reveal his name). The way our guy explained it, the actor somehow knew that another big star’s production company had an association with the CIA’s clandestine service over the years (something I didn’t know until our guy told me). Now this actor was offering his own name and services to us. Free of charge. Anything he could do. Just out of his patriotic duty.

As our guy related his story, I wondered to myself, why is he telling me this? It all sounded perfectly fine to me. It was kinda cool, actually.

And then he got to the kicker. “There is one little catch,” he said. “The actor refuses to take any money, but he told us that instead all he wants is for us to score him the best fifty-thousand-dollar stash of cocaine we can find. He seems to think we can get the real primo stuff. So that’s why I’m here. Is it okay for us to do it?”

“Uh, no,” I managed to get out of my agape mouth.

“We know a way to get some easily,” our guy added hopefully.

I definitely wasn’t eager to learn how, so I just repeated my response. “No. No way. Forget it.”

“Yeah, well, I thought so, but I thought I’d ask anyway,” he said, looking only slightly crestfallen as he left my office.

I later learned that the actor did provide some assistance to the CIA on a particular project. I was assured that his services were totally gratis.

Adding to my portfolio as a generalist, in the summer of 1978 I was handed my first espionage prosecution of a CIA employee. The three-week trial that fall took place in the unlikely locale of Hammond, Indiana, a gritty, blighted industrial town just across the state line from Illinois. It was in the closest federal court to the hometown of the defendant, a twenty-three-year-old second-generation Greek American named William Kampiles.

Kampiles, a fledgling analyst, was charged with selling a top-secret CIA satellite manual to the Russians for the ridiculously paltry sum of $3,000. The manual was a thick, densely worded document stuffed with technical charts spelling out all the details of a newly developed, state-of-the-art U.S. surveillance satellite that represented years of research and that had cost American taxpayers untold millions of dollars. And now, thanks to Kampiles, the Soviets had it dropped into their laps, for a pittance. It was nothing short of a road map for how the Soviet Union could act to shield itself from the U.S. eyes in the sky.

It was a bizarre and tragic case on a number of levels—the golden child of immigrants, he had joined the Agency out of college the year before, with a hopelessly naïve fantasy of a James Bond–style career, only to find himself assigned clerklike duties in the CIA Command Center (the room that actually does have lots of clocks on the wall and rows of furrowed-browed people staring and muttering at their computer screens). Frustrated and bitter, he resigned from the CIA in November 1977 after less than a year, but before leaving he purloined the manual from the Command Center and a few months later walked into the Soviet embassy in Athens to offer his services and, eventually, the manual.

Being not much older than Kampiles nor with much more CIA experience, I was assigned as the point man in the case—the first high-stakes, high-profile espionage case of my Agency career. It was also an experience filled with daily crises and sprinkled with comic and surreal vignettes. A template of sorts for my entire career.

An espionage case is always a crapshoot because of its central paradox: The more egregious and damaging the compromise of national security information involved, the more difficult and risky it becomes to
prosecute the wrongdoer, because of the fear that the information will be further spread and compromised during the course of the trial. And yet to not prosecute someone who has sold secrets to the enemy is simply an untenable proposition. Several years after the Kampiles case, Congress passed a law called the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), which established a detailed set of mechanisms designed to protect the excessive or unnecessary exposure of classified information in criminal prosecutions involving that sort of information, while at the same time protecting the defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial. But CIPA did not exist in 1978, so the Kampiles prosecution for me was one long, seat-of-the-pants,
Perils of Pauline
ride.

The Kampiles case was filled with messy, inconvenient facts. First, there was the 68-page KH-11 satellite manual itself. It was indisputably a sensitive, top-secret document. We knew the Soviets had it—Kampiles himself had admitted to the FBI that he gave it to them (although he tried to recant that at the trial). However, it turned out that for months after Kampiles filched it from the Command Center, no one noticed it was missing, even though it was the only copy there. In fact, the Agency started looking for it only after Kampiles’s admission under quietly relentless FBI questioning. On top of that, when an Agency-wide inventory was belatedly conducted, about a dozen other copies could not be accounted for. What did that say about the supposed sanctity of the information inside it, and the CIA’s competence in keeping track of its secrets? It was left to me to deliver that unpleasant nugget of news to the Justice Department in the run-up to the trial. For the first of what would be far too many times in my career, I was in a room with a bunch of prosecutors giving me a collective eye-roll after I gave them news they did not want to hear.

But the contents of the KH-11 manual weren’t the biggest secret the Agency sought to protect in the prosecution. After all, the Soviets already had it—although none of our other adversaries had it, as far as we could tell, so it was still well worth protecting from public exposure. But that concern paled beside another secret, known to fewer than a dozen people in the government. It was a secret that the CIA told Justice from the outset had to be protected at all costs, up to and including aborting the prosecution if there was any risk of its being exposed. It was the type of secret that the CIA has always kept, as an article of faith, above all others: the identity of a human source. In this case, a penetration—a mole—inside
Soviet intelligence, who gave the CIA the first lead in the investigation that would lead to Kampiles. The lead, as most explosive leads are, was fragmentary: Sometime in the winter of 1978, a young American had met with a Soviet official in Athens and provided a top-secret document on a U.S. spy satellite. And a name, maybe not a true name and maybe garbled: Ruggerio or Ruggeri, something like that. That was it. And that’s how the investigation got under way.

It was the first big secret I learned at the CIA. The kind of secret that gets someone killed if it gets out. And I was the guy ordered to protect it at all costs.

For the government, every espionage prosecution has two focal points. The first is in Washington, where the senior leadership of the various stakeholders—Justice, the FBI, and the intelligence community—resides and makes the strategic and policy decisions for each prosecution. The second focal point is where the prosecution is happening, where staffers from each of the concerned agencies are in the courtroom every day for the pretrial proceedings and throughout the trial. For the Kampiles case, that group consisted of Dave Homer and his boss, John Martin, from the DOJ’s Internal Security Division; Don Stuckey and John Denton from the FBI’s Counterintelligence Section, who were the investigating agents on the case; U.S. Attorney Dave Ready and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Richmond, the local federal prosecutors who were the lead government attorneys in the courtroom; and me, representing the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. Only those in these tight, hermetic groups knew about the big secret in the Kampiles case.

Every espionage case also has the same dynamic. Justice pushes to cross every “t” and dot every “i” to guarantee a conviction and preclude a reversal on appeal, which in turn causes them to instinctively want to use every piece of intelligence information the government has, no matter how sensitive, to ensure a conviction, or at least not screw one up. We on the intelligence side refer to this, perhaps unfairly, as the “kitchen sink” approach to prosecuting a case. The CIA, on the other hand, while equally focused on securing a “clean” conviction, traditionally pushes for a more nuanced approach: We tell the DOJ that we will turn cartwheels to provide our intelligence secrets necessary to get a conviction, but we are going to push back hard if we think the DOJ is going for “overkill” by putting sensitive information into jeopardy when it doesn’t have to.

Shortly after Kampiles’s arrest on August 17, 1978, the CIA’s leadership—in the persons of Director Stansfield Turner and my boss, General Counsel Tony Lapham—laid down a marker with Attorney General Griffin Bell: The existence of our source must be protected at all costs, including abandoning the prosecution, if necessary. Bell’s response was measured: Justice would do “all in its power” to protect the information. And that’s how it was left, with the trial looming three months later.

One favorable factor was that the investigative trail did not lead in a straight line from the source to Kampiles. In fact, Kampiles came onto the screen only when he began bragging to former CIA co-workers that he had recently met with the Soviet intelligence officers in Athens and had “conned” them into paying him $3,000 by just telling them he was a CIA official with access to classified information. An astoundingly stupid and ignorant move on the kid’s part, of course—the first tenet of Cold War Counterintelligence 101 is that the Soviets never, ever paid something for nothing in return. So Kampiles’s story was quickly relayed to the FBI, where it dovetailed with the fragmentary source lead that the Bureau was already chasing. Kampiles voluntarily agreed to an interview with FBI special agents Stuckey and Denton, initially repeated his “something for nothing” story, was challenged on it, agreed to take a polygraph, flunked it, and ultimately confessed to the entire thing. All within a couple of days, and Kampiles never once invoked his Miranda rights to counsel. If his crime hadn’t been so serious, his naïveté would have been comic.