Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (29 page)

A few of the Democrats managed a sympathetic laugh, but not Boren. He then ordered that I be placed under oath, which was an unusual and hostile step for the committee to take. Typically, it’s an indication that the committee doesn’t necessarily believe what the witness is saying. (Which I thought was odd—if I were going to make something up, it would have been a hell of a less incriminating story than the one I was telling.) But in any event, as I dutifully rose to take the oath, I spotted George Tenet, sitting in his usual place against the wall behind his boss, Boren. There he was, unseen by Boren but in my direct line of sight, grinning broadly and aping me raising my arm taking the oath, only in his pantomime he kept tugging his arm up and down. With Boren staring balefully down at me from the dais, I had to stifle my own grin, which wasn’t easy. But George did effectively convey an implicit, welcome message: This is theater, Rizzo, so just relax and go with it.

Damn, I thought as I drove back to the Agency after finally escaping the briefing, this guy Tenet is a piece of work. Looking back now, if there was one day that sealed my enduring affection for him in the years to come, it was that day at the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Our paths would continue to cross when George joined the Clinton administration in 1993 to serve as Lake’s focal point with the Agency at the NSC. In the weeks leading up to the arrest of Rick Ames in 1994,
George eagerly played a role in a ruse intended to get Ames out of his office so that investigators could do another search of it. Under a pretext, Ames’s boss told him and a couple of his Agency colleagues that they needed to brief Tenet on a matter in Tenet’s NSC office. Details of the Ames investigation were then still known to very few people inside the government, so George was told about the case but was not told which of the three CIA guys he would be meeting with was the Russian mole. The sham meeting came off without a hitch, and I was told that George played his part convincingly. Later, after the arrest finally went down, I asked Tenet if he had any inkling during the meeting about which of the Agency guys he met with was the traitor.

“Sure,” he replied jovially. “I knew it had to be Ames. He was the only one of the three of them who was wearing expensive Italian shoes.”

And so, for all sorts of reasons, I was happy when John Deutch picked George to be his deputy in 1995, and I was even happier when George was confirmed as CIA director on July 11, 1997. He knew and loved the Agency, and, unlike Deutch, actually wanted the job and made it clear that he hoped to stay in office for a long time. For a workforce that had seen three CIA directors come and go in the previous five years, hearing that was music to our ears.

From the start, he fit right in. In terms of personal demeanor, George was the most “regular guy” DCI I ever worked for. Only in his midforties when he took office, George was a contemporary of much of the CIA’s population and bonded easily with everyone he met, whether in meetings or waiting in the cashier’s line in the employee cafeteria. He often shambled into meetings in the hallowed director’s conference room with tie askew, sometimes in his stocking feet, gnawing away on an unlit Cuban cigar from the stash he had accumulated courtesy of visiting heads of foreign intelligence services. (Forbidden from smoking after having suffered a heart attack, he had a habit of reducing these primo cigars to a lumpen, saliva-soaked mass, which always drove me—a devoted cigar smoker dating back to college—quietly nuts.) Whether the meetings were small or large, George also displayed a virtuoso skill in managing to drop the “f-bomb” liberally into the conversation, variously employing it as a noun, adjective, verb, and occasional prepositional phrase (in my experience with DCIs, only Leon Panetta years later would rival George in f-bomb dexterity).

With George, somehow none of these habits ever came off as vulgar or offensive. Rather, they seemed genuine coming from a first-generation Greek American from Queens who exuded an earthy, Zorba-like warmth. For me, it was crystallized best in the way he dealt with his ever-present security detail. In my observations over the years, other DCIs treated their personal CIA bodyguards as either invisible furniture or intrusive nuisances. George, by contrast, seemed to view his bodyguards as hale companions; sometimes I would spot him striding around the building with his arms draped around their shoulders, like they were all a bunch of carefree fraternity buddies on their way to a party.

I know of no one at the CIA who ever dealt with George who did not like him. It was impossible not to like him.

George’s ascension to the DCI job gave the Agency a jolt of energy and optimism that had been largely absent in the decade that had passed since Iran-contra. And, relatively speaking, he seemed to have Clinton’s trust and confidence; while Deutch’s deputy, he had been assigned delicate (and unusual) duties as a presidential diplomatic emissary in the thorny Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Plus, like Deutch, he was given cabinet status. Nevertheless, Clinton was Clinton, after all, so he kept his DCI at arm’s length. George was not allowed to attend the morning intelligence briefing Clinton received each day from his national security aides. In his 2007 memoir, George described his face-to-face meetings with Clinton as “sporadic” and wistfully remarked that “[b]eing in regular, direct contact with the president is an incredible boon to a CIA director’s ability to do his job.” With Clinton, George admitted in his memoir, if he had an important message to deliver or plea to make—such as for significant increases for the CIA counterterrorism budget—he would sit down and write the commander in chief a letter. Those letters in which he rattled a tin cup had scant effect: “For the most part I succeeded in annoying the administration for which I worked but did not loosen any significant purse strings.”

And all the while during the late ’90s, the threat posed by a Saudi-born man named Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network was inexorably growing. Correspondingly, my focus and responsibilities on legal issues related to bin Laden were also growing. They would dominate, and eventually consume, the balance of my CIA career.

By 1997, the Office of General Counsel had grown to about eighty lawyers, and I had become second in command, which was historically the highest position a career CIA lawyer could hope to attain. When he became DCI, George arranged for the White House to tap Bob McNamara (no relation to the former secretary of defense) for the general counsel position. Congress had recently passed a law mandating that the GC be a presidential appointment subject to Senate confirmation (one of the leftover “reforms” recommended by the Iran-contra committee). McNamara was the first GC candidate to come under this new statutory regime, and only in retrospect does it seem astonishing that the Senate quickly confirmed him without bothering with the formality of a confirmation hearing. As it happened, McNamara and I had been friends for a long time, dating back to his years as a senior lawyer in the Treasury Department. Bob could be intense and uptight at times, but overall he was a smart, honorable guy I knew I could get along with. I also knew that he trusted me enough to give me considerable sway in handling the “covert operations” account, which is all that really mattered to me at that point.

The first World Trade Center (WTC) bombing had occurred in early 1993, but the CIA had not been a major player in the government’s reaction afterward. For one thing, the new Clinton administration, partly out of wariness and partly out of apathy, had no inclination to plunge headfirst into the murky waters of covert action in the counterterrorist arena. Moreover, in early 1993, Al Qaeda was still largely an unknown entity inside the intelligence community, and its connection to the 1993 bombing was not discovered until much later.

The unanimous view inside the government in the wake of the 1993 WTC attack was that the law-enforcement community would have the lead for combating terrorists: They were to be indicted, arrested, and prosecuted in U.S. courts, which in effect meant after an attack had been carried out. If the CIA could provide leads on where these criminals might have fled or be hiding overseas, great, but that was it in terms of our role. I may be oversimplifying a bit here—the Agency also was responsible for trying to discover possible plots against the homeland coming from abroad—but I believe my essential point is valid: the CIA in the early ’90s was assigned a third-fiddle role, behind the Justice Department and FBI criminal investigators, in dealing with the global terrorist threat.

And no one at the CIA, including me, saw anything wrong about that approach. Certainly, it never crossed our minds to suggest that hey, these rabid, martyr-wannabe jihadists are not going to be exactly cowed by the threat of a criminal prosecution, especially when the hammer would most likely come down after they achieved their goal of killing as many people as they could. In 1993, I spent months as the CIA’s focal point on a high-level intergovernmental task force convened in the wake of the first WTC attack. Our assigned objective was to identify new, out-of-the-box ways for the intelligence community to “support” law-enforcement efforts. It never occurred to me to question the premise. Or to even muse to myself that maybe the government should be focused on killing terrorists, not indicting them.