Enemies Within (5 page)

Back in the 1980s, he started an analytical team to investigate terrorism; the first of its kind at the agency. In 1991 he forced the merger of the CIA’s two domestic units, believing that they would operate better as one, with him at the helm. Then in 1996, years before Osama bin
Laden entered the public consciousness, and at a time when many in the CIA regarded the scion to a wealthy Saudi family as little more than a moneyman, Cohen assigned a dozen officers to gather intelligence on him. That unit, known as Alec Station, built the foundation for everything the CIA would come to know about bin Laden.

But while Hollywood often portrayed the CIA as an all-knowing intelligence service capable of sophisticated espionage and cunning, the real CIA could be a bureaucratic morass. It was often reactive, rushing to respond to whatever crisis bubbled up in the world or whatever had upset some senator or congressman. Changing anything on its own meant dealing with micromanagers at the White House and meddling politicians on Capitol Hill. That meant real vision—real change—was seldom realized.

Cohen saw those forces at their worst. He was there for one of the most tumultuous times in the agency’s history, a period that shaped his views on intelligence gathering.

On February 21, 1994, FBI agents arrested veteran CIA officer Aldrich Ames on espionage charges. In a decade of work for the Soviet Union, Ames compromised covert operations against the Russians and revealed the names of more than thirty spies. The betrayal caught the CIA by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. Time and again, there had been signs that Ames was trouble. He failed polygraphs. He slept on the job. He had money and drinking problems. Once, he left a briefcase full of classified information on a New York subway. He walked out of the CIA with shopping bags full of classified documents. Yet his behaviors were explained away and tolerated in the insular, protective club of the nation’s spies.

His arrest and guilty plea triggered a level of scrutiny of the CIA not seen since the 1970s. The case portrayed the agency as cliquish, secretive, and at times borderline incompetent. In December 1994, after enduring scathing reports about the Ames fiasco from Congress and the agency’s inspector general, CIA director R. James Woolsey resigned.
President Bill Clinton replaced him with John Deutch, a senior Pentagon official and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology–educated expert in nuclear proliferation.

As if the Ames case weren’t enough of a headache for Deutch to inherit, shortly before he took office, New Jersey representative Robert Torricelli revealed that a paid CIA asset in Guatemala had been linked to the killings of one American citizen and the husband of another. Worse still, the CIA kept the informant on the payroll even after it learned about his involvement. Congress had been kept in the dark for years about exactly what the CIA was doing in Guatemala, where the agency had been fighting suspected Communists for years.

Right away, Deutch announced that most of the agency’s senior managers would be gone by the end of the year. He formed a committee to find a new deputy director for operations, the formal title for the nation’s top spy. It had to be someone without deep ties to the clandestine service and the culture that led to Ames and Guatemala. The agency needed someone who could handle the rigors of running covert operations but who also represented a break from the past.

David Cohen, a surprising choice to many, was announced as the new deputy director for operations, on July 31, 1995.

Cohen was taking one of the most prized jobs in the CIA: the person overseeing every clandestine officer. But while he’d risen through the ranks during the height of the Cold War, when the agency battled the Soviet KGB in the greatest spy war the world had ever known, Cohen had never been a spy. He’d never worked overseas. He’d never evaded hostile intelligence agents, or tried to turn the tide of a war, or worked to undermine the spread of Communism. He came from a very different CIA.

At its core, the CIA is made of up two groups: spies and analysts. And they jockey fiercely for recognition and influence.

The Directorate of Operations, or DO, is home to the spies. (The section is now formally called the National Clandestine Service but is
still colloquially referred to internally as the DO.) Their careers are the stuff of novels. They are the ones who travel on fake passports, pass coded messages, evade and conduct surveillance, and dress up to attend embassy parties. They encouraged dissent inside the Soviet Union, tried to recruit spies behind the Iron Curtain, and were constantly suspicious that the Russians had turned one of their own against them.

Cohen came from a much more staid, academic section of the CIA known as the Directorate of Intelligence. The DI, as it’s known, is home to the analysts. They take all the information—from the spies, the satellites, the military, the wiretaps, and more—and stitch it together in hopes of making sense of the world. Erudite and patient, they toil quietly in secure rooms, reading what comes in and turning it into what’s called finished intelligence, the reports that land on the president’s desk. Unlike the CIA men of the movies, the analysts do not drive flashy sports cars. They wait in the long line of family sedans, minivans, and SUVs that forms each morning outside the gates of CIA headquarters in Langley. As per stereotype, the spies are the sharp dressers; the analysts less so. Once, one of Cohen’s aides told him that he couldn’t possibly go into an important meeting looking so unkempt. He wasn’t even wearing a belt. Cohen demanded one from a subordinate and marched into the conference.
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The analysts see the spies as cowboys, more interested in the thrill of the mission than the pursuit of facts. The spies deride the analysts as professors who always want more, better information and don’t appreciate how hard it is to operate in the field.

So when Cohen, a career analyst, was tapped to run the world’s premier spying service, the longtime officers were stunned. Like any large office, CIA headquarters was prone to backstabbing and political maneuvering. Unlike your typical company, however, office politics at the CIA were played by people
trained
to lie, cheat, and manipulate. The best covert actions, officers said sardonically, were run inside the building.

The closest that Cohen had ever come to being a spy was in the late
1980s, when he was tapped to run the National Collection Division, the arm of the agency responsible for overt collection of intelligence inside the United States. Much like the NYPD Intelligence Division that he would inherit decades later, National Collection was seen as something of a backwater posting. Officers stationed in major US cities would identify and interview American professors or businessmen whose overseas travels regularly took them to hostile countries.

At the same time, there was another CIA division operating inside the United States. The Foreign Resources Division was considered the A team of domestic operations. These officers were in America as part of their normal rotation, meaning that they arrived from overseas postings, often in trouble spots. They knew how to spy, and they looked down on National Collection. In the United States, the Foreign Resources officers recruited foreigners to become paid informants, or assets. They excelled at a trade known as “spotting and assessing.” They’d identify graduate students from, say, China or the Soviet Union, figure out if they were likely candidates to work for the agency, and then slowly develop them as assets. Eventually they’d return home, and the CIA stations overseas would pick up where Foreign Resources left off, managing the assets and giving them assignments to spy for America.

Cohen looked at these two CIA teams and came to the conclusion that the organization needed to be changed. Why were his officers politely asking for information or waiting for a helpful walk-in to show up while the Foreign Resources officers were out recruiting real spies? As an analyst, he understood the value of what the agency was learning from these professors and experts, but he believed there shouldn’t be a wall between their work and that of Foreign Resources. The CIA could save money and streamline operations if the two divisions were consolidated. Cohen, with a bit of charm and often by force of will, began to merge and take charge of both divisions.

It helped that his deputy was Gustav Avrakotos, the legendary CIA case officer whose exploits arming Afghan Muslims in the fight against occupying Russian forces formed the basis of the book and movie
Charlie
Wilson’s War
. Avrakotos had run his generation’s most successful covert operation; Cohen had never been part of one. His first operation of any kind came on Veterans Day 1987, when an officer took Cohen along for an informant meeting in a Washington-area hotel room. As an unexpected storm dumped a foot of snow on the region, the CIA men turned up the television to prevent anyone from eavesdropping or taping their conversation. Cohen was hooked.
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But as far as the career spies were concerned, Cohen’s stint at National Collection hardly qualified him to take the top job in American spy craft. CIA veterans swiftly delivered their verdict—anonymously—in the pages of America’s newspapers and magazines. One retired officer told
U.S. News & World Report
in 1995 that Cohen had a “management by fear” philosophy. Another described him as “a company man from the word go” who will “find out which way the wind is blowing and then go with it.” In the
Washington Times
, a former officer said Cohen was a hard-nosed outsider who wasn’t very well liked.

It didn’t help that Cohen had a reputation for an acerbic leadership style and an abrasive personality. He liked to swear, and, in the words of one longtime colleague, “If he thought you were an idiot, he’d say so.” That was one of his favorite words. For subordinates, it wasn’t clear what was worse, being called an idiot in the middle of a meeting or wondering whether Cohen was calling them an idiot after they’d left the room.

He’d call subordinates at any hour to talk through whatever had popped up in his head. It kept people constantly wondering what issue they would be pulled onto next. But while Cohen could be intimidating and aggressive, he was also prescient. He had been one of the first people in the agency, well before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, to talk seriously about globalization. Cohen envisioned a world where economies became intertwined, where multinational corporations blurred the political boundaries between nations, and where terrorists and criminals operated across borders.
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Colleagues called him a fast talker, a reference both to the speed with which he spoke and to the fact that some saw him as a confidence
man, always playing the angles. Melvin Goodman, an expert on the Soviet Union who worked with Cohen in the 1980s, regarded him as a quick study and a hard worker but believed he was cooking the intelligence to curry favor with his hard-line anti-Communist bosses. “He’s the kind of guy who, after you deal with him, you feel like you should wash your hands,” Goodman would remark years later.
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John Deutch and Cohen got along well, however. Deutch, a native of Brussels, Belgium, who, like Cohen, was educated in Massachusetts, saw his new deputy as direct and plainspoken. As far as he was concerned, the fact that Cohen had never run a covert operation overseas and had spent most of his career as an analyst in no way disqualified him from overseeing the agency’s worldwide spying efforts.

“Who the fuck cares” where someone comes from as long as he’s qualified? Deutch said. “I think that’s silly.”
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Still, longtime operatives looked for any reason to dislike Cohen. Early in his tenure, he held a meeting with the senior leaders overseeing Middle East operations. As he talked, he referred to the citizens of Jordan—the Jordanians—as “the Jordans.” The room was filled with the agency’s foremost experts on the Middle East, who looked at one another with blank stares that reflected a shared thought: “What is this guy doing running operations?”
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Cohen’s tenure could have been an opportunity to remake the clandestine service for a post–Cold War world. Ames and Guatemala forced an unusual level of introspection onto an agency that was institutionally averse to it. And Cohen was undoubtedly capable of anticipating the next big thing. But any interest that Cohen had in long-term planning was overrun by Congress and the White House.

•  •  •

Bill Clinton had come to office in 1993 promising to cut the roughly $30 billion annual intelligence budget. On Capitol Hill, the mood was even worse. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dennis
DeConcini, thought the CIA’s reports were too unreliable to justify such a hefty price tag. New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced a bill to abolish the CIA. The Guatemala scandal had revealed that the agency was doing business with people who had awful human rights records. Congress demanded a reckoning.

In response, Deutch fired two longtime and well-liked agency veterans and ordered a top-to-bottom review of the CIA’s books. Cohen and his team began examining the backgrounds of every asset on the CIA’s payroll. Those with too much baggage, whose unsavory histories outweighed their value to the United States, were cut loose. The “asset scrub,” as it was known, was tantamount to heresy. CIA officers made their reputations by recruiting informants. Now headquarters was opening the books on their careers’ work and dismissing their accomplishments. The fact that Cohen, an analyst, was running it made it even worse.

Deutch, Cohen, and the agency’s lawyers came up with new rules for recruiting. If you wanted to recruit someone with blood on his hands, you needed approval from headquarters. It was never intended to be an outright prohibition; it was supposed to provide some review before the CIA put a torturer or a terrorist on the payroll. But in the field, coming on the heels of Guatemala, the message was clear: Don’t bother recruiting anyone with a distasteful history.