Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (17 page)

That is, until one day in 1984 when the National Security Council staff forwarded one of the first of those multipage Findings to the Oval Office. If memory serves, the Finding was three pages long. Once President Reagan affixed his requisite signature, it was, per regular procedure, sent back promptly by courier to the CIA for implementation and transmission to the congressional intelligence committees. But when I saw it, I was confronted with a problem I had never encountered before: The president had signed at the bottom of the first page rather than at the end of the text, two pages later. This was not a matter of lawyerly nitpicking—the entire legal rationale for requiring written presidential approval of all Findings is to hold him accountable for
all
the covert-action activities set forth in the text. There had to be a documented record of the presidential imprimatur—no more of those “wink-and-a-nod,” “plausible deniability” shenanigans of the sort practiced by presidents from Eisenhower up through Nixon. For its part, the CIA cannot lawfully undertake any covert action that the president has not authorized. In short, with Reagan’s signature only at the bottom of the first page, there was no record, no critical documentation, that he had approved the activities set forth on pages two and three.

Somebody had to tell Casey, and right away. My first (cowardly) thought was to buck the odious task up to my boss, Stan Sporkin, who was much closer personally to Casey and thus hopefully better suited to soften the blow. But then I realized Stan was out of town. So with considerable trepidation, I called Casey’s secretary and asked for two minutes of his time. I figured it would take me one minute to tell him the problem, so that would leave only one minute for him to yell at me.

In I walked, and there he was slouched behind his desk with the usual stack of papers and books scattered seemingly haphazardly around him. Desperately trying not to let my voice quaver, I blurted out as quickly as I could why, essentially, I had concluded that a document the president of the United States—a man Casey deeply revered—had just signed was not legally worth the paper it was written on.

As was his wont, Casey sat there for a moment, just taking it in, staring back at me through his thick glasses. I started to feel the flop sweat coming on. Then he said, “I’m a lawyer, too, you know.” (Where had I heard that before?) I braced myself for the barrage that I knew was coming.

But then Casey did something of the sort that would make him such a fascinating, enigmatic figure to me. He got mad, all right, but not at me. Instead, he vented against the NSC staff, angrily muttering that their sloppiness had let the president down and left the Agency out on a limb. Casey didn’t once question my conclusion, let alone the presumption of some pissant staff lawyer like me throwing sand in the wheels of an important covert-action initiative just because of a quibble about where the president had signed his name. Casey just grunted that he would take care of it. Then he went back to reading what he was reading.

I got word later that day that Casey had ordered that no action be taken under the Finding and that the few existing copies at the CIA be destroyed, and that he then went to the White House for what I later heard was a reaming of the NSC staff. A new Finding, with President Reagan’s signature duly inscribed on the bottom of the last page, arrived a day or two later. I was told by a friend at the NSC that Casey had insisted on watching Reagan sign it.

By October 1984, I had been the DO lawyer for five years, and at the CIA for nearly nine years. Five very eventful, fascinating years spanning two administrations. But they had been increasingly pressure-packed and frenetic, and I was starting to get worn down by the sheer pace and responsibilities of the job. And five years is too long for anyone to stay in one position at the Agency. You become not only weary, but stale. That’s why it’s always been CIA policy to have its senior career cadre in the DO and the DI rotate into new jobs every two or three years. Also, if you stay in one assignment too long, inevitably you lose your perspective and become too wedded to the policies and programs that you have developed
and overseen. And, of course, above all others, a CIA lawyer overseeing covert-action operations must maintain that sense of perspective.

No one is irreplaceable at the CIA, least of all a lawyer with less than a decade of Agency experience. And John McMahon, the recently appointed CIA deputy director, recognized that better than anyone else. A CIA veteran of over three decades, McMahon was a burly, convivial, and sometimes profane Irishman who had started his Agency career as a file clerk and steadily rose through the ranks to senior positions in each of the four CIA directorates—Administration, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Operations. No other Agency officer in my career was as experienced, and as successful, in so many disciplines. He was known and revered inside the CIA as a tough but fair manager. And by mid-’84, he wanted me out of the DO lawyer job.

It was nothing personal. I had first come to know McMahon well when I came to the job five years earlier, when he was the deputy director for operations. He was enormously supportive and patient as I learned the ropes as a DO lawyer, and he was one of my biggest boosters inside the CIA. We always got on extremely well. But what made him such a successful manager was his ability to see beyond his personal friendships with Agency employees—and he had hundreds of such friendships—and make cold-eyed personnel decisions. He had concluded, by mid-’84, that I had been in my job long enough and needed to move on.

I resisted, of course, for as long as I could. But by October 1984, I was reconciled to moving on. I had no interest in taking another position in the Office of General Counsel, particularly when it would have necessitated me leaving headquarters for the OGC’s digs several miles away. John Stein, then the Agency’s inspector general, came to my rescue. Stein was a career DO officer who rose to the position of DDO after Casey’s abortive fling with the hapless Max Hugel, and thus he became not only my most senior client but a trusted friend. Casey had recently moved Stein to the IG job—the IG is basically an internal watchdog and ombudsman—and Stein invited me to join his staff for a year or two as an investigator/inspector until I figured out what I wanted to do next in my legal career. “It’ll be good for you,” he suggested in his usual casual way. “I’ll give you some interesting cases, you’ll get to travel some, and there’s no heavy lifting.” I knew already he was right at least about the last part. In those days, the Office of Inspector General was a small, low-key place
with a decidedly studied pace—it was well known inside the building that by 5:00 p.m. each day, the OIG was a ghost town. There seemed to be nothing it did—whether it was an inspection or audit of a CIA component, or an investigation of an employee’s personal impropriety—that the OIG management thought couldn’t wait until another day.

As I mulled it over, the notion of retreating to a quiet sinecure was more and more appealing. I had gone through a divorce three years earlier, and my ex-wife and I shared custody of our son, Jamie, who was about to turn seven. Which in my case meant having him stay with me two weeks out of every month, no matter what. Maintaining that regular routine with him was paramount to me, but it did get a bit frantic at times—racing out of meetings at the White House to pick him up at the school car pool, scrambling to find someone to watch him or take him to his soccer or Little League game on a Saturday morning when I would be unexpectedly summoned into work, and so on. The poor little guy had spent most of his young life watching his dad breathlessly picking him up or dropping him off somewhere. Moving to a more predictable, sedate schedule meant more time that I could devote to being a father, and that was very big to me.

At the beginning of 1985, I settled into my new surroundings in the OIG, located on the sixth floor of the headquarters building. It would be several years before Congress would designate the inspector general’s position as a “statutory,” meaning a person nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. In practical terms, the change would turn the incumbent, and the rest of the office, into a much larger, more independent—and adversarial—entity vis-à-vis the rest of the CIA. But in 1985, the OIG was still what it had always been up till then—a sedate, relaxed group of about three dozen people either taking a midcareer break from their regular CIA duties or older Agency veterans who had come to the office essentially to wind down their careers. John Stein, the incumbent IG when I arrived, like all his predecessors, had been appointed to the post by the CIA director.

Casey had put Stein into the job several months earlier. Until then, Stein had served in the Directorate of Operations for his entire CIA career, having entered the organization a quarter century earlier following Yale and a stint in the military. He, Dewey Clarridge, and Chuck Cogan had all arrived at the CIA as young men at about the same time, and the three would remain close friends for their entire careers, notwithstanding their widely disparate personalities. Stein was somewhere in between the flamboyant and voluble Clarridge and the measured and reticent Cogan. A large, bearlike man, Stein dressed mostly in tweeds and cardigans that had a rumpled elegance. He had an impish, sometimes mordant sense of humor, fond of tossing off one-liners in meetings large and small, and had one particular habit that I found curious but endearing:
He always had a TV in his office that was turned on, with the sound off, either showing episodes of
Sesame Street
or cartoons. Before becoming the IG, he had risen to the top of the DO, holding the iconic position of deputy director of operations (DDO, the top career spy in the CIA).

He was, in short, an immensely likable, accomplished man. However, Casey’s decision to move him to the IG job was abrupt and took everyone by surprise, including Stein. In effect, he was pushed aside to make room for his onetime deputy, the equally accomplished but far more irascible Clair George. The word inside the DO was that Casey had decided that Stein was too laid back (for example, Stein had largely stayed out of the burgeoning covert-action program in Central America, leaving Clarridge alone to work directly with Casey), too nice a guy to be Casey’s DDO.

Stein accepted his fate with his usual equanimity, but he was also a realist. When he recruited me to join the OIG, he told me he would probably retire in a year or so, and that in the meantime we could both relax and do some fun and interesting work.

The OIG is made up of three divisions: Audits, Inspections, and Investigations. On the inspections side, the work involved being part of four- or five-person teams, reviewing whether a particular CIA unit was operating in an effective, efficient manner in compliance with the law and Agency regulations. Each inspection would take several months, usually included a number of trips overseas, and culminated in a detailed report containing a list of conclusions and recommendations. I took part in two such inspections while in the OIG. Stein was right: They were interesting, and far from taxing.

Stein handpicked me to work alone (which pleased me, because it was my preferred way of operating) and look into possible malfeasance by a couple of overseas chiefs of station (COS). A COS is the chief U.S. intelligence official in a foreign country, a position of considerable responsibility and sensitivity, since each COS operates undercover, overseeing all sorts of clandestine activities. A COS must exhibit tact and discretion and be above personal reproach. In both cases I was asked to look into were allegations that the COS was lacking in these areas. Each man adamantly denied the allegations.

The first case involved the COS in a middle-sized station in a Western European country. Such an assignment in a nominally friendly environment,
working in cooperation with an allied foreign intelligence service, is usually relatively placid. But not this time. The COS had managed to totally alienate his foreign counterparts, in part because of a botched intelligence operation conducted without the knowledge of the host government. As a result, the COS suffered the ultimate sanction from the host government—he was PNGed (declared “persona non grata”) and ejected from the country. Back in the United States, the COS was bitter and came to the OIG, claiming he had been wronged. However, his ire was not directed against the foreign government. Instead, he blamed Dewey Clarridge.