Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (28 page)

So there we were in mid-1995, in the midst of all the controversy publicly churning over the wisdom and morality of the CIA’s use of “dirty assets,” suddenly confronted with the quintessential case: a guy who had acknowledged to us years ago that he had American blood on his hands. And, thanks to our screwup, no one outside the CIA knew anything about it. There was only one thing to do: Go to the Justice Department and go to our committees on the Hill and tell all.

Typically, when the Agency learns about a possible violation of U.S. law by one of its employees or assets, or even by someone not affiliated with the CIA, the Office of General Counsel prepares a “crimes report”
letter to the head of the DOJ criminal division, setting forth the bare facts of the case. However, when the facts are too sensitive, or if time is of the essence, the OGC instead seeks an urgent meeting with our intelligence focal point in the criminal division. This matter clearly qualified, so I made an appointment to visit the criminal division a day or two later. During my career, I initiated dozens of such meetings, and typically they consisted of a lot of eye-rolling by our DOJ counterparts as they would listen to me spin out some bizarre, tangled tale of crime and intrigue. Over time, I had learned to ignore the eye-rolling and just plow ahead with what I had to say, never sugarcoating anything. I always knew and trusted that the small, select cadre of Justice lawyers with whom we shared our information would treat anything I told them with the utmost professionalism and discretion. I cannot recall a single instance in my career where the criminal division leaked or otherwise compromised any information from a “crimes report” we made, and believe me, we made thousands of them. This occasion would be no exception.

A few days later, the chief of the CIA Counterterrorist Center traveled to Capitol Hill to perform the thankless task of telling the whole messy story surrounding this “dirty asset” to the staffs of the House and Senate intelligence committees. I didn’t attend the briefing, but the chief reported back that the staffers asked all sorts of detailed questions and that he had left behind a “fact sheet” on the case.

Less than twenty-four hours after the staffers had been briefed, the CIA Office of Public Affairs got a phone call from Tim Weiner, the national security correspondent for the
New York Times
. Weiner reeled off virtually every detail of the CTC chief’s presentation. Weiner said he was going to write a story about it. Did the Agency have any comment to make about the case? he asked.

Who leaked the information to Weiner? The timing strongly suggested it came from someone on the Hill, but an ensuing FBI investigation was inconclusive. The Agency, given its failure to inform law enforcement about the asset on a timely basis, was in no position to push the issue.

In any case, whenever a reporter calls the Agency to ask for an official comment about a CIA story he or she is about to publish, the Agency mostly reacts in one of two ways: It either denies that the story is accurate (and that is done only when it is in fact false) or simply declines to comment.

This time, however, the Agency reacted by imploring Weiner not to run the story. It took a step it takes rarely—it brought Weiner out to Langley for a personal plea from the Counterterrorist Center chief, who told Weiner, in a series of long and tense discussions, why this was literally a matter of life and death. A story “burning” the asset would not only undermine the Agency’s best counterterrorist source, it could get him killed—a gang of ruthless terrorists is the most unforgiving of groups when it comes to an informer in their midst.

A “bug-eyed” Weiner, as the CTC chief later described him, listened to all the pleas. In a desperate effort to appease Weiner and his editors, the Agency agreed to let Jeff Smith be quoted on the record with some general comments about the “asset scrub” and the complexities surrounding the use of intelligence sources with human rights baggage. The idea was to steer the story away from any details about this particular asset. Despite all our entreaties, the
Times
ran the story on page 1 on August 21, 1995. Some identifying details were omitted, but way too many weren’t.

The case officer handling the asset tracked him down overseas for an emergency meeting. To warn him about the story, to offer him protection and safe haven. The asset, stunned and betrayed, refused. He would have nothing more to do with us, he told the case officer. He promptly went underground and disappeared. No one ever saw him again. No one.

In 2007, Tim Weiner’s book
Legacy of Ashes
was published. Running almost eight hundred pages, it was an exhaustively researched chronicle of the sixty-year history of the Agency. It earned rapturous reviews from the critics and became a best seller and National Book Award winner. It was also a relentlessly scathing portrayal of virtually everything the Agency had done in its history, recounting virtually every controversy, every episode, in a way that portrayed the institution as incompetent, untrustworthy, and irresponsible. Nowhere in his massive tome, however, did Weiner mention the front-page article he wrote, more than a decade before, outing our most irreplaceable “dirty” asset.

At the time the Weiner piece was published in the
Times
, it was one more log on the political fires then burning in Washington, D.C., over the morality of the CIA’s historical practice of enlisting the services of individuals with unsavory, violent pasts. After the Guatemala revelations
and the resulting opprobrium directed at the DO officials caught up in them, the Agency’s clandestine service officers in the trenches were quietly deriving what would be a lasting, fateful lesson: It’s too dangerous to recruit nasty characters crawling in the back alleys of the world. To do so meant not only risking your career, but getting your source compromised and killed. Sure, this was probably an overreaction, but under the circumstances, it was an understandable one.

A few years later, in the wake of 9/11, Congress and the media would famously, and derisively, call this “risk aversion.” As Exhibit A, they cited the regulations that John Deutch, under intense congressional and media pressure, had directed Jeff Smith, with my help, to put in place in late 1995 in an effort to bring some degree of clarity and order to the complex, no-win dilemma of whether, and how, to use “dirty assets.” The “Deutch Guidelines,” the post-9/11 critics charged without a trace of self-awareness, were all Deutch’s fault.

By then, Deutch was long gone from the Agency. He had lasted less than two years as CIA director, leaving at the end of 1996. Shortly thereafter, he was caught up in an ugly personal scandal of his own making, when it was discovered that he had recklessly used his personal computer at home to write and store classified information. It was an egregious breach of security on his part, and it served to cement his standing as the most maligned CIA director in modern history.

Except with me.

All in all, the years 1993 through 1996 were depressing times for the Agency. From a professional standpoint, I look back at the period as one in which I had to cope with one debacle after another. From a personal standpoint, however, it was a happy juncture, because I became a newly married—remarried, actually—man.

On October 16, 1993, after a whirlwind (?) six-year courtship, I married the former Sharon Breed. The wedding ceremony took place at the stately Jefferson Hotel in downtown Washington, and my former boss Stan Sporkin, now a federal court judge, presided over the vows. Sharon and I, both divorced single parents, first met in the fall of 1987 during a picnic at the Potomac School, a private elementary school just up the road from CIA headquarters. Our respective nine-year-old kids—my son, James, and her daughter, Stephanie—happened to be in the same
fourth-grade class together. It was your typical elementary school picnic, a scene of organized chaos with masses of little kids darting between the paper-plate-and-cup-strewn tables. As the festivities were mercifully winding down, Sharon and I struck up a conversation when we found ourselves alone in the parking lot, both attempting to locate and corral our separate offspring among all the tykes careering around the premises. A chance encounter—pure serendipity and, I suppose, fate. We went out on our first date a few days later. I was immediately smitten.

As I write this, we are happily closing in on our twentieth year of marriage. To this day, whenever someone at a cocktail party or other social occasion who doesn’t know us asks how we first met, Sharon has a favorite response. “We met in the fourth grade,” she says with a mischievous smile.

After Deutch’s departure at the end of 1996, his number two man, George Tenet, became acting CIA director. Clinton had nominated his national security advisor, Anthony Lake, for the CIA director position, but the nomination foundered in the face of obdurate opposition by Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by its incoming chairman, Richard Shelby. Clinton then turned to Tenet. In his 2007 memoir,
At the Center of the Storm
, Tenet admitted that Clinton scarcely interviewed him before offering him the job, which Tenet said he found “odd.” When I read that, I actually didn’t think it odd, at all; Clinton by then had clearly demonstrated monumental indifference toward the Agency’s work and its people.

With the exception of Bob Gates (who had been a career CIA official), George Tenet was the first and only nominee for CIA director that I personally knew before he was tapped for the position. He was also the first and last nominee younger than I was at the time of nomination, something that I remember as finding vaguely disconcerting. I first met Tenet in 1987, when Senator David Boren, the Intelligence Committee chairman at that time, plucked him out of nowhere to be the committee’s staff director. George was only in his early thirties at the time, and other committee staffers openly grumbled to us at the Agency, for he was considerably younger and less experienced in intelligence issues than most of his staff colleagues.

George and I hit it off right away. His personality in the mid-’80s was the same as it would always be—open, informal, friendly, and utterly without pretension or any sense of self-importance (the latter two traits
uncharacteristic among Hill staffers). He also had a charming, playful side in the way he carried out his serious responsibilities for intelligence oversight.

For example, I recall an episode in the late ’80s when I was sent down to the intelligence committees to deliver some bad news that we had discovered only days before: One of the leaders of the Nicaraguan contras, Adolfo Calero, was implicated in the possible misuse of Agency (and thus U.S. taxpayer) funds. I spilled out the whole story in all its embarrassing and gory detail in a closed briefing at the Senate Intelligence Committee as the phalanx of committee Democrats sitting there listening to me got more and more incensed. At one point, the normally genial and supportive Boren demanded to know who in the Agency was going to be punished for allowing Calero’s transgression to happen.

“Well,” I responded wanly, “so far the only person being punished is me, because I’m the guy who was sent down to tell you this story.”