Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (23 page)

While all of this was happening in early 1987, another CIA drama was playing out publicly on Capitol Hill. As expected, President Reagan in early February nominated Bob Gates to succeed Casey as CIA director. Initially, the word from Congress and the media pundits was that Gates was a shoo-in—after all, in contrast to the freewheeling Casey, Gates was a nonpartisan intelligence professional. But soon the cresting wave of Iran-contra swept over him. As Casey’s second in command, what did he know and when did he know it? The Gates nomination was doomed, and he eventually, reluctantly, recognized that. At Gates’s request, the White House withdrew his nomination.

I watched as it unfolded, feeling profoundly sorry for Gates. I had come to know him a lot better in those months after Casey’s exit, and I saw that beneath his formal exterior was a man of warmth and a whimsical sense of humor. I remember him standing in his office, as the drumbeat of criticism was getting ever louder and he was confronting the inevitable, quietly talking about the toll the whole ordeal of his nomination was taking on his wife and two young children.

Gee, I recall thinking, it’s a hell of a wringer for a career CIA guy to go through, getting caught in such a political firestorm. I couldn’t imagine ever going through something like that, and I was relieved that I would never have to.

It was exactly twenty years before my own confirmation meltdown.

The Iran-contra hearings began on May 6, 1987. By that time, the media hype had reached a fever pitch, and both PBS and CNN (this was in the nascent years of cable TV) televised the proceedings live, gavel to gavel. I believe it was the first time this had been done since the Senate Watergate hearings fourteen years earlier. This time, I was the man in the middle, between the CIA and the Iran-contra committee. Nonetheless, I decided that the best approach was to watch the proceedings on TV. So that’s what I did, for every minute of all forty days of the hearings. Not merely as a spectator, but as an interactive participant of sorts, long before that term entered into the popular lexicon.

This approach was unorthodox, but it proved to be effective and efficient. At the same time, it was an extraordinarily stressful experience.

The committee, created from scratch only a few months before, had established a very ambitious timeline for the completion of its work. In addition, the media kept the pressure on the committee to start the public hearings—parts of the entire tangled story were dribbling out piecemeal, but the key protagonists, such as Poindexter and especially North, had yet to be heard from. As a result, the hearings began before the committee had done a lot of its homework. The staffers were still slogging through massive amounts of highly classified documents, not sure which they wanted declassified so they could be waved around on television. The list of witnesses, and in which order they would appear, were in a constant state of flux. From the first day the TV cameras were turned on, the committee was pretty much winging it. Nonetheless, the committee was determined that the show must go on. And so, back at the Agency, I had to wing it as well.

For forty days, stretching over a period of three months, I was holed up in my office, staring at the TV for anywhere from four to ten hours a day as witness after witness, from the famous to the obscure, was interrogated by the twenty-six committee members and, more frequently, the chief lawyers, Nields and Liman. Their questions were frequently ad hoc, sometimes off-the-wall, and always unpredictable. Chain-smoking cigars, I turned my cramped office into something akin to a smoky fight club.

One of my primary tasks was simply to keep track in real time of everything every witness was saying about the Agency, and to provide comprehensive, daily feedback to senior CIA management. To that end, I prepared memos at the end of every day’s testimony, consisting of bullet points recounting each instance the witness referred to CIA activities or personnel. Every night, I would forward the memos to Gates and others in key management positions, including George, Clarridge, and Fiers, the three Agency officials whose names seemed to come up regularly. If any of them had already left for home, or if they were out of town, I would have a courier deliver the memo to them. I thought it was important for these guys to see this stuff right away, rather than seeing it for the first time in the next morning’s newspapers. The memos would run anywhere from two to five pages, and I produced forty of them—one for each day of the televised hearings. At the end of each day’s installment, I would
append a paragraph or two of commentary (which I archly headed with the title “Analysis”) in which I would sum up what I considered new and significant that had come up that day, as well as my two cents on how the witness, or Nields and Liman, or some committee member generally, came off in front of the cameras.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that my daily reports on the hearings would later complicate the parallel criminal investigations being pursued by Lawrence Walsh. The testimony of some of the key witnesses, including North, was obtained under a grant of immunity that basically meant it could not be used in any later prosecutions of North and others. And here I was, spoon-feeding it to many of the people who would later become prosecution witnesses. Maybe I should have taken that possibility into account, but it honestly did not occur to me. If it had occurred to me, however, I doubt it would have made any difference. I saw it as my responsibility to keep everyone in the building up to date, on a real-time basis, on what was transpiring at the hearings. It was not to make the prosecutors’ jobs easier.

I wasn’t just a note-taker, though, as I peered at the screen in a constant state of expectation and dread. I would watch as one of the committee inquisitors would pause midquestion and whisper to one of the array of aides spread out behind them on the sprawling, two-tier dais. Uh-oh, I would think, blanching, as the aide scurried offscreen. Only then would I know what was coming, and I would instinctively put my hand on my phone. Seconds later, it would ring, and there was the aide’s panic-stricken voice: Can my boss ask the witness about this CIA activity? Can he use this CIA spy’s real name? Can he talk about CIA information in this particular document?

Every day of the hearings, every few minutes, it seemed, the phone calls would come, always different in substance, but with the same urgency: We are on live TV. We need a decision from the CIA. Now.

I would cringe. There’s nobody else around, and no opportunity to talk to anybody in the building.

There I was, thrust into making instant judgments on what CIA classified information could be suddenly declassified and broadcast to the world. Everything from a CIA office’s location in the organizational chart to a CIA agent’s machinations in a foreign country. I really had no business making these on-the-spot decisions; they were way above my
pay grade and sometimes well beyond my expertise. But they had to be made, and there was no time for anyone else to make them. Holding the phone, I would just take a breath, close my eyes, and make the judgment call. Heads, and I would agree to the disclosure of some sensitive secret. Tails, and I risked having the Agency accused of obstructing a congressional investigation, and the public’s right to know.

For the first time in my career, I was alone on a high wire without a net.

Realizing career suicide was at risk, I occasionally would make an after-the-fact effort to cover my ass with my superiors. I recall one such incident that unexpectedly popped up during National Security Advisor John Poindexter’s testimony. Arthur Liman started quoting to Poindexter the transcript of a critical phone conversation between Poindexter and Casey as Iran-contra was coming unstuck. Poindexter was taken aback, saying he had no idea the call had been recorded. A hubbub immediately ensued—had the secretive and wily Casey been wiretapping all his conversations without the other party’s knowledge? Were there any more recordings? It all sounded so sinister, so Nixonian.

The truth was more banal, but it required disclosing a secret. Casey had been in Central America at the time of his conversation with Poindexter and was speaking on a secure phone in a CIA station, a device installed in all CIA facilities around the world. As a matter of protocol, the CIA Ops Center recorded all such calls it handled—not just those involving the CIA director, but any communications between Washington and the field. The system, which was sophisticated for its time, was called PRT-250. Its existence, and its capabilities, were fairly well known inside the CIA, but it was a zealously guarded secret kept from anyone in the outside world. Even from someone like Poindexter.

The hearing had recessed shortly after Poindexter’s expression of surprise, and Liman rang me up immediately. He knew about the system, what it was intended for, and understood that the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot. But the teapot was boiling, and Liman implored me to help him turn the heat off. He wanted to make a public statement when the hearing resumed, explaining the PRT-250 along the lines I have described above. Given about thirty seconds to ponder, I told Liman to go ahead. Five minutes later, I watched on TV as Liman read the statement.

As it happened, the Liman statement came near the end of the day’s
hearing, and I was called down to Bob Gates’s office. Here comes the shit storm, I figured, as I trudged down the hall and entered the office, where Gates was surrounded by a number of senior officials. However, the meeting was about something else entirely. As it broke up, Gates asked whether anything of interest had come out in Poindexter’s testimony that day. And then it hit me: Nobody there had seen it yet.

“Nothing much,” I responded with feigned casualness. I paused, and then murmured quietly, “Except that I declassified the PRT-250 system.”

Everybody there shrugged.

And so it came to pass that neither this decision nor any of the other off-the-cuff decisions I made during the course of the Iran-contra hearings ever came back to haunt me. No repercussions either from the Agency for having declassified information, nor from the committee when I would take it upon myself to reject its more extreme demands, like descending on the terminally ill Casey in his hospital room.

There was one other cliff-hanging element to the Iran-contra hearings that I had to contend with throughout the proceedings: the testimony of Agency witnesses from the Directorate of Operations. These were covert CIA employees, people whose faces were unknown to the general public. Early on, the committee had three particular senior DO officials in its crosshairs: Clair George, Dewey Clarridge, and Alan Fiers. There was a fourth DO operative also in the mix, the Costa Rica station chief, Joe Fernandez. He certainly was deeply and wrongly involved in North’s off-the-book machinations in helping the contras at a time when the Agency was prohibited from doing so. But he was a relatively small fish in the scheme of things, so a month or so into the hearings, the committee agreed to let Joe testify in a “closed” session, meaning no cameras, no media, and no one from the public. I attended that session, and Joe, who was a large and emotional man, broke down a couple of times during his testimony. The committee seemed sympathetic toward him, sensing—correctly—that he had gotten in over his head largely because of North’s bravado. The testimony came off without incident, so I fully expected the same drill would be followed when the time would come for Joe’s superiors to testify.