Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (20 page)

Serving as the conduit between Casey and Congress was a challenge, to put it mildly. But I was happy. I felt like I was back in the loop.

Meanwhile, the controversy over Nicaragua had continued to swirl, even after Congress cut off funding in late 1984. While I was still at the OIG, I had begun reading in the press about White House efforts to encourage private fund-raising efforts to support the contras, said to be led by an obscure and shadowy NSC staffer named Oliver North.

Ah, yes, I thought. I remember Ollie North.

I had first met him in the early ’80s through Dewey Clarridge as the covert-action program in Central America was picking up steam. At that point, the NSC staff had no in-house lawyer to speak of, so Dewey took me to many of his meetings with North, who was his point of contact at the White House. “He’s not your normal NSC bureaucrat,” Dewey told me before our first meeting. Dewey meant that as high praise.

He was right. I had never seen or dealt with anyone quite like Ollie North. Not at the White House, and not at the Agency, for that matter. He would subsequently become hugely famous, but in 1982 very few people at the CIA, let alone anyone else, knew anything about him. He made a startling and vivid impression on me. Ramrod-straight in bearing (he
was always in civilian clothes in those days (although Dewey told me he was on loan from the marines), he immediately set out to charm, flatter, and above all influence me in a way that I had never been “worked” before, not even from any of the hardened and cynical DO operatives who were then my clients.

At the same time, for all his blather, there was much to admire about Ollie. He was very smart and always willing to listen. His energy level was nothing short of phenomenal; he seemed to be churning out memos or talking on the phone constantly, mostly with Dewey at first, but then with me and, I came to learn, with many other people inside and outside the intelligence community. He seemed to be everywhere, under the radar.

There was another striking thing about being around Ollie North in those days. Every time I went to his cramped office at the Old Executive Office Building, and it could be early in the morning, late at night, or on a weekend, a ubiquitous, hovering presence was his stunningly attractive assistant, a woman named Fawn Hall. Like Ollie, she was destined for fame (or infamy) in later years, but in those days she was anonymous—all I knew at the time was that she was efficient, cheerful, and gorgeous, with her flowing Farrah Fawcett–like mane and long, model-worthy legs. I confess that her evident devotion to Ollie caused me to wonder at first if there was something more than business going on between them. My curiosity (and possibly envy) finally got the best of me, so I asked Dewey about it one night when we were driving back to the CIA from Ollie’s office. He was typically direct and unvarnished in his response: “Believe it or not, no. Never. Neither of them is that type.”

Dewey had left the Latin America Division at the end of 1984, and Ollie’s principal interlocutor at the Agency then became Alan Fiers, chief of operations for Central America. While I was away, OGC had decided—sensibly, given the controversies, the congressional prohibitions, and the increasing complexity of the Agency’s actions in the region—to put a couple of very capable lawyers to work directly with Fiers and his staff. So when I arrived in OCA, I trusted that Ollie North’s activities notwithstanding, the CIA was playing inside the legal lines. Besides, I soon realized that Alan, unlike Dewey, didn’t especially like or trust Ollie very much. It wasn’t all that surprising: Both men were in their early forties, ambitious, with the same driven, intense personality.
I actually found that rather comforting—Ollie wasn’t about to roll Alan on anything dicey.

What I didn’t realize was that Ollie was now a full-fledged protégé, and surrogate, of Casey’s. In fall 1986, less than a year after I joined the OCA, there were lots of things I didn’t know.

On October 5, the Sandinistas shot down an American C-123 cargo plane carrying weapons from El Salvador to the contras. The only survivor in the crash was an American named Eugene Hasenfus, and the Sandinistas promptly displayed Hasenfus, bedraggled and scared, in a chaotic press conference, where he made vague statements about working for the CIA. And so the scramble inside the CIA was on: Who was this Hasenfus guy (a records search turned up nothing), and why was he on that plane? Was anyone in the field aware of any of this? And what was North up to, anyway? At least those were the questions people like me, people who weren’t in the know, were asking. Congress was also demanding answers. The CIA inspector general launched an investigation. Soon enough, the IG started discovering North’s name in the CIA’s Central America cable traffic dating back to 1984–1985. At that time, the Agency was barred by Congress from assisting the contras, but there was North, over at the NSC, apparently in contact with CIA people in Langley and in the field, pulling strings. How long the strings were, and where they would lead, were not yet clear.

Barely a month later, there was another bolt out of the blue. A small weekly magazine in Lebanon, known to be well wired into the Khomeini regime, published what seemed to be an unbelievable story: The United States had for some time been secretly supplying arms to the Khomeini regime in Iran as part of some sort of Faustian bargain to secure release of the U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon. After initially stonewalling, the White House came clean—sort of. President Reagan went on television acknowledging the arms sales but strongly denying they had anything to do with the hostages. And the ensuing uproar intensified when the congressional leadership was called to the White House and informed that the whole thing had been authorized by Presidential Findings. Though drafting them had been my bread and butter from late 1979 through 1984, I knew nothing about the existence of these Findings. They had been drafted, under the supervision of my former boss, Stan Sporkin, by lawyers in the OGC, miles away from headquarters, who had never before been involved in the Finding process.

I first saw them the day after the president’s TV appearance. Casey had kept the OCA out of the loop about the existence of the Findings, but now they were provided to me for transmission to the Hill. As soon as I read them, my heart sank. In the first place, they contained language, approved by the president, linking the arms sales to Iran to the release of the U.S. hostages. This starkly contradicted the avowed policies of not only Reagan but also presidents going back to the dawn of the terrorism era: no ransom or bargaining for the release of hostages. They also gave the lie, in black and white, to what the president had just told the American people.

Second, the first of the two Findings—signed by Reagan on December 5, 1985—seemed intended to secure presidential approval for activities the CIA had already undertaken. Specifically, it had the following sentence: “All prior actions taken by U.S Government officials in furtherance of this effort are hereby ratified.” The notion of the president giving retroactive approval for covert action flew in the face of the law, not to mention all precedents the Agency had followed since Congress established the Finding process in the mid-’70s. I had drafted dozens of Findings in my time, and it was inconceivable to me that a retroactive Presidential Finding could be considered legally valid. Notwithstanding my enormous admiration for Stan Sporkin, I thought he made a huge mistake here.

But that wasn’t the most politically explosive element of the Findings. Each contained a sentence I had also never seen before: “I direct the Director of Central Intelligence not to brief the Congress of the United States . . . until such time as I may direct otherwise.” In every other Finding I was aware of during my career—before or after this time—Congress was notified of the Finding within forty-eight hours after the president approved it. In the overwhelming number of cases, it was the full membership of the intelligence committees. In a few cases, for extraordinarily sensitive Findings, it was the so-called Gang of 8—the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate.

Does the president have the legal authority to delay congressional notification of a Finding when he concludes that national security considerations require it? Absolutely. Every president since Ford has gone on record in support of that proposition, and Congress has basically—if grudgingly—accepted it.

But can a president withhold notification forever? On that, constitutional scholars have long disagreed. In the real world of intelligence, however, I can tell you it never has been seriously contemplated in an actual case. True, the Findings in question didn’t rule out congressional notification forever, but it did leave the delay open-ended. And Congress found out about the Findings, a year after the president signed them, in the worst possible way: after the program was basically blown in a magazine—a tiny foreign magazine, to boot. If that hadn’t happened, when would the Reagan administration have told Congress? Ever?

If there is one lesson I ruefully learned in my decades of dealing with Congress, it’s that nothing pisses the members off more than learning about a CIA covert operation for the first time by reading about it in the media. Suddenly, as the number two guy in charge of CIA congressional relations, I was plunged into a maelstrom of Capitol Hill fury. The intelligence committees both immediately launched investigations, demanding Agency witnesses, beginning with Casey, whom they despised and distrusted as much as he despised and distrusted them.

By this time, in mid-November 1986, I didn’t think things could get any worse. Less than two weeks later, they did.

On the long Thanksgiving weekend, I was visiting my parents in Massachusetts, a custom I followed on most major holidays. This time it was an especially welcome respite from my work at the Agency. I had spent the previous couple of frantic weeks helping to organize the Agency’s response to the furious congressional reaction to the revelations about the arms sales. I had found there was so much that most of us in the Agency didn’t know, and those who did seemed to know only pieces of the story. Casey, of course, was at the center of the storm, and he already had faced a series of grillings at hearings held by the two intelligence committees. At a number of confused and chaotic preparatory sessions held in his office and conference room, Casey appeared increasingly unfocused and exhausted, looking even older than his seventy-three years. We kept trying to put together a comprehensive “timeline” on who knew what when in the CIA about the arms sales and also about the separate (or so I still thought) controversy over Ollie North’s efforts to aid the contras that had been set off by the downing of the C-123 carrying
Hasenfus. And we had to keep changing the chronology as pieces of new facts emerged from the bowels of the building.

On November 25, I learned about the most astonishing new fact of all, and I learned about it by watching TV. First, standing at the podium in a raucous White House pressroom, an atypically flustered Ronald Reagan was announcing the resignations of Ollie North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter. He then hastily departed, leaving the podium to the attorney general of the United States, Ed Meese. Meese blandly announced to the country that his investigators had just discovered a document in North’s files indicating that proceeds from the arms sales to Iran had been diverted to support the contras. There had been no reference to this in the arms-sales Findings. Worse, the diversion of the proceeds seemed to be a blatant violation of the existing congressional prohibition on any U.S. funding, “direct or indirect,” to support the contras. The raucous pressroom turned into total pandemonium.

Right at that moment, my parents’ phone rang. It was the CIA Operations Center, with a message from my boss, Dave Gries. The message was terse: You need to get back here. Now.

When I returned to the office the next morning, Dave looked understandably shaken. “Look,” he said, “this thing now could be a criminal case. The Hill is talking about creating a special committee and hiring a slew of lawyers to investigate it.” I knew what was coming. “I want you to take over the lead in dealing with Congress on it.” Dave said he had to recuse himself from the case. “Some of the Agency people who could be implicated in this are my friends,” he explained.